by Joe Gannon
“Or maybe Claribel got it wrong.” Gladys seemed to sense where his mind had gone, and wanted to draw him back. “She said young Peck brought Jasmine to the club. Maybe Jasmine brought him—you know, bored rich girl likes a bit of rough trade, but needs a proper escort.”
The boy lifted Ajax’s other boot onto the stand, hands flying again.
“Could be. Plausible. It’s just…”
“Someone’s lying?”
“No, not that. Jasmine and Claribel told the truth.” He watched the boy’s hands at work. “It feels like … misdirection. You’ve been to a magic show. Magicians don’t lie, they misdirect: ‘Look over here’ while they make the switch over there. Misdirection.”
“So who’s the magician?”
“All done, jefe!”
The kid patted Ajax’s leg, touched the Needle strapped to his calf. Ajax snatched his foot away, shot the kid an evil look.
“Hey, it’s okay, boss.” The kid held up his hands. “In these times we all need protection.” He lifted his shirt to reveal an old paring knife with a taped handle. “I even sell it.” He lifted the top off his shoe-shine box. Inside were a couple dozen condoms, all of which looked older than the kid himself.
Ajax smiled and winked. “Me and my girl brought our own.”
The kid eyeballed Gladys and sniffed. “Yeah, right.”
“What’s that mean, you little shit?” Gladys gave his box a kick.
“Watch it! You need to go to the confessional.”
“I might confess to kicking your barrio-rat ass.”
The kid gathered up his box and leaned in close to Gladys, all this hustler bonhomie replaced by a quiet menace beyond his years. “I didn’t’ say ‘confession’ you dyke bitch.” He looked right at Ajax. “I said confessional.”
And he was gone. Ajax and Gladys looked at each other. What the hell?
Ajax looked over this shoulder, through the tall doors of the cathedral to the far side of the church. The confessional was there. Two draped entries for the penitents, between them a solid wood door for the priest. Above the door a small amber light was on.
The padre was in.
24
Ajax drew the heavy curtain in the confessional and knelt at the wooden lattice screen that separated the sinners from the ordained. He could hear a faint murmuring. The confessional smelled of old wood, the wool drapes in the too-humid air, and the sins of the thousands who had knelt here before him.
The divider behind the lattice screen slid back. Ajax peered into the darkness. Only a few inches separated them. There was a shape on the other side, the vaguest of outlines, a chin, a nose. There was a long pause.
“Have you forgotten how to begin, my son?”
The Spanish was not local, but then many priests were foreigners. Still, Ajax was confused, had the shoe-shine boy been messing with him? Sins? Where to begin? Why bother? What was the ruse here?
“My son?”
“Ahh. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned?”
“Yes, go on.”
“It has been, ahh…” He could not actually make out an image of him on his knees confessing. That boy was as lost in the darkened past as Ajax was in this hot confessional. “… maybe thirty years since my last confession and these are my sins.”
Ajax waited.
“What are your sins, my son?”
“I think there’s been a mistake, Father.”
“But you have sinned, haven’t you? You have walked in the sun and so cast a shadow, haven’t you? Have you lied, for example? Deceived?”
“Not so that you’d notice.”
“Pride is a deadly sin. You were showing off to the people, provoking those soldiers. You have magical papers that protect you, but you endangered these people with your spectacle.”
At first Ajax had thought the padre was helping, offering items off a sin menu, the day’s specials to get him started. But he was sounding more like a prosecutor.
“Hubris is excessive pride. It is an affront to God. Do you know why?”
“Tell me, Father.”
“Because pride is a function of human ego; it inverts God’s natural order and places the individual over Creation. That is what the Serpent gave to Eve in the apple, not knowledge, but self-awareness, which led to ego, vanity, hubris.”
“I’ve not eaten an apple, though I’ve seen a serpent or two.”
“Listen, Martin Garcia…”
“How do you know…”
“Silence! You have come to a forsaken land. Evil stands on two legs here, has hands and a mouth. Your mission was one of kindness, but do not let pride overcome you. Do not further endanger those who already walk in the shadow of the Valley of Death. Do not place your mission, yourself, over them.”
“I haven’t…”
“You have come searching for a corpse. In disguise, deceiving people. Some of those people know who you are. How many of the living must die for a corpse?”
“Wait, Father, do you mean Jimmy Peck? Do you know where he is?”
“Get out. I have sinners to confess.”
“What about my sins?”
“Bear them yourself.”
The divider slid shut and Ajax knelt alone, in the dark. He contemplated his sins for a moment. He laid a hand on the lattice divider, it gave a little. Knowing it was a sin he nevertheless gave in to anger and shoved his hand through the divider. It came off its wooden rail and tumbled into the priest’s lap. Ajax reached for him, thought to pull his head right through the hole he’d made. But the darkened confessional flooded with light as the padre fled.
Ajax dashed through the drapes and straight into the arms of a tiny woman who hugged him around the waist in a vise of gratitude.
“Thank you, señor. God bless you. God bless you.”
“Yes, yes.” He dragged her along with him, wanting to catch that smarmy priest but not wanting to shove the little woman to the ground. He broke her grip and ran after Father Smartass. He turned a corner in the nave to a side chapel and caught a glimpse of a tall man and flash of a cassock legging it around the corner. And for one millisecond, he was almost certain, a lock of red hair, almost orange. Son-of-a-bitch!
Then two arms encircled, the grateful mamacita was back.
“Oh, señor!”
“Okay, okay!”
Ajax broke her grip and pursued. But at that moment, like in a zombie movie, every mamacita and her kids in the chapel turned to him, their arms out as if to embrace him—but Ajax knew it was to entrap him, delay him. The whole goddamn thing was a setup. He ran to the side exit, dodging the zombie grateful. He ran up the alley over uneven cobblestones and caught the toe of his newly shined boot on a drainage grate and took a tumble, skinning his knees as he went down, but thinking, That fucking shoe-shine boy. He rolled haphazardly and got back to his feet.
He spilled out of the alley doing a running limp into the street along the plaza across from the cathedral. It was full of soldiers and civilians, but no priests he could see. He slowed to a walk and scanned the crowd as he made his way back to Gladys. She spotted him the same time he spotted the boy. Ajax gave her the high sign—get a grip on that kid. Gladys walked over and set her shoe on the boy’s little stand. Ajax could see the surprise on his face, and when the boy scanned the crowd he looked right into Ajax’s eyes, grabbed his box, and took off. Gladys and Ajax were right behind him.
But all three of them were aware of the soldiers and none would break into a run that would draw their attention. It became a kind of slow-motion pursuit, the boy walking as fast as his legs would go. Gladys doing the same, a few steps behind him, doing a kind of walk-skip to catch up as Ajax did the same to gain on the two of them.
The shoe-shine boy turned a corner just a few steps ahead of Gladys, but once out of sight he’d break into a run and Gladys might not catch him. He saw her go around the same corner and it was excruciating to walk the final half-block until he, too, made the corner.
And the street was empty.
A city under siege could be like that. A plaza crowded with people could be surrounded by empty blocks. A city’s streets were its veins, its boulevards arteries, and people moved through them like corpuscles. Combat cut off the blood vessels and pooled people into precincts or neighborhoods. Ajax jogged down the empty street as fast as his bruised knee would carry him. As he passed one long alley he saw Gladys at the other end, peering around the corner. He legged it up to her, but tripped over another drain and another searing pain went through his knee.
Gladys turned when he cursed.
“Lost him.” She indicated the empty street. “He came up here, thought I had him for sure.” She looked at Ajax. “What’s up with the barrio rat?”
“The priest, in the confessional. It was Peck.”
“No.”
“Yes. Smarmy son-of-a-bitch lectured me.”
They turned and walked back down the alley.
“Watch that drain…” Then it hit him. Two drains, two alleys. There are no coincidences. He grabbed Gladys’s arm and pointed down.
“No.”
“Got to be, how else did he give you the slip?”
“No, I mean, no, I’m not going down there.”
But Ajax had the heavy grate off. It occurred to him that had he been in Nicaragua the job would’ve been much easier or more difficult. In Managua, things were so tight that the heavy metal drains or manhole covers had to be removed or welded down so people wouldn’t steal them for the iron. He would just about fit.
“Come on, it’s the dry season.”
He dropped down into the darkness. It was the dry season so the sewers were not flooded, but the stench was correspondingly overwhelming. Ajax felt distinctly like someone had shit in his mouth. He gagged several times and heard Gladys scrape the drain back into place. She gagged and pulled a hanky of some kind from her pocket and doused it in perfume. Perfume?
“Claribel,” she muttered. Ajax held out his hand and she sprinkled some on his palm which he clapped over his face.
It was a coin toss, so Ajax decided to head in what seemed downhill. The sewer had a small ledge on either side, about six inches off the ground, by putting a foot on each ledge they were able to waddle without actually walking in the bilge of the city’s effluvium. After what Ajax reckoned was about six blocks, they came to a tunnel, at the end of which was a light. But a light shining down from above. This was the worst part—they had to crawl so Ajax could not cover his nose. Gladys, he noticed, tied the hanky around her nose, and not for the first time Ajax realized that, in general, a woman was always better prepared for such happenstances than a man.
He crawled along the tunnel, got right under the grate, and could hear soft voices, the sound of many people it seemed. He lifted the grate as quietly as possible, when it was yanked out of his hands and replaced by a flashlight in his eyes.
“You fucked up my shine, didn’t you?”
25
The sewer had led them into a warehouse that was a staging ground for over a hundred Farabundos, by Ajax’s count. And they were not militia: AKs, M16s, Belgian FALs, RPGs, and hand grenades both manufactured and homemade. These were the core of the FMLN, brought in from all over the country, and he and Gladys had walked right into them. They’d passed a few tough minutes bound and gagged while a vigorous, if near silent, argument had broken out, not so much what to do with them but how to kill them. Ajax had quickly told them their true identities and purpose. The shoe-shine boy had pointedly not vouched for them, and their American passports, ORDEN ID cards, and the Needle strapped to his calf had landed them in a world of shit much deeper than the sewers.
After a while they were taken to a room sealed with plastic where a young woman sat with a field radio that looked fifty years old. She was introduced as the commander, but Ajax noticed she had an M40 grenade launcher strapped to her back—more something a soldier would use.
“Kneel,” she said.
They did. She drew a pistol and put it to Gladys’s head.
“You have American passports and ORDEN identity cards but say you are Nicaraguans.”
“We do, and we are. I was a comandante guerrillero for the FSLN. I led the Northern Front.” Ajax did his best to sound calm and hoped the young woman knew a little about her brother revolutionaries in Nicaragua.
She pushed the gun into Gladys’s temple. “You?”
“I was a lieutenant in the Policia Sandinista. Graduated the Academia Policia de Havana. Class of 1985.”
The woman looked at a crib card in her hand, then at Ajax. “Where and when was Sandino born?” Augusto César Sandino, the George Washington of Nicaragua who’d given his name to the Sandinista Front. The FSLN.
Ajax wasn’t sure he’d heard it right. “What?”
She cocked the pistol at Gladys’s head.
“Okay. Okay. May eighteenth, 1895. In Niquinohomo, Nicaragua.”
She checked his answer. “When did he die?”
“He was assassinated. February twenty-first, 1934, in Managua.”
She went back to her crib. “What was your nom de guerre?”
“Spooky.”
There were two sharp knocks on the adjoining wall. The young guerrillera holstered her pistol and went back to monitoring the radio. An older woman slid through the plastic wall and Ajax thought he could’ve immediately fallen in love. She was as tall as he, far from beautiful but handsome in the way careworn women were. She had two .45s in shoulder holsters over her fatigue jumper. God, but he still loved a woman in a uniform.
“Nora.” She held out a hand as muscular as her pistols.
“Ajax Montoya.”
“Gladys Darío.”
“You can imagine the inconvenience you have caused coming here at this time.”
“We can, compañera,” Ajax said. “And we are sorry for it. We’re looking for an American, James Peck. He’s here with you. I’d like to talk to him.”
The commander seemed to do a mental roll call. “No. Not here. I’ve got two Swedes and a Frenchman. No gringos. Except maybe you two.”
“The shoe-shine boy. He sent me to him.”
“Who?”
“Ernesto,” the radio operator said.
“Get him.” She turned to Ajax. “Ernesto told us what you did, in the cathedral. Why did you interfere with the soldiers?”
He shrugged. “They spit in the beans. I was hungry.”
Nora nodded. “That hunger saved your life.”
“Fuck! You two, again!” Ernesto was none too pleased.
“Report” was all Nora said.
“I was at the cathedral. Some guy gave me ten dollars, American, to send him,” he shot a thumb at Ajax, “to the confessional.”
“You were on duty, Ernesto.”
“Yes, compa. Undercover. What kind of shoe-shine boy passes up ten bucks?!”
Nora shook her head. But a snort escaped the radio operator. Nora held out her hand, and the shoe-shine boy, after appealing to heaven, handed over the ten-dollar bill.
“He have red hair?” Ajax asked.
“Didn’t see him, he was already in the confessional. I thought he was a priest.”
“A gringo?”
“Don’t know. He sounded foreign, lots of priests are.”
“Ever seen him before?”
“Didn’t see him at all, genius, I told you.”
The radio operator silenced them with a hiss and held her hand to the earpiece. “They’re moving.”
Nora gave a low whistle and a Mount up! hand signal. In a disciplined silence Ajax watched the hundred or so Gs line up at three drains and drop rapidly into the sewers. A smaller column headed out a side door. In less than a minute the crowded warehouse was empty.
Nora and the radio operator packed up her gear. Nora handed one of her .45s to the boy. “They try to leave before it begins, kill them.”
“And if I don’t have to?”
“Let them go when it’s over.” She pointed her finger at Glady
s. “Don’t underestimate short pants, he’ll do it.”
She was about to duck out when she turned back to Ajax. “Aren’t you married to Gioconda Targa?”
The mention of his ex-wife’s name was so unexpected Ajax almost choked, and stammered. “I … I was.”
“I met her once. In Managua. She’s good people.”
“I’ll give her your regards.”
Nora snorted. “You got about as much chance of seeing her as I do.”
* * *
Five minutes later all hell broke loose about three blocks away. Ajax could make out small arms, RPGs, and the M40 he’d seen. At the moment of contact he’d thought he’d heard the squeal of brakes and assumed Nora and her men had hit a convoy. Maybe the one he’d seen back at the cathedral.
Ernesto seemed anxious, but maybe not so disappointed to have been left behind.
“They hit a convoy?”
He pointed the pistol at Ajax. “Shut up.”
“They don’t tell you much.”
“Shut up!”
“It’s alright, kid.” Gladys smiled. “I know the feeling.”
Ernesto was going to turn the gun on her when the first helicopter gunship arrived.
The deep bass grind of a gunship was not a noise forgotten once heard—in peace or war. It was like the engine of an enormous truck trying to turn over. GRNNNNNNNNNNNNNN! GRNNNNNNNNNNNNNN! Ajax counted each time. About a three-second burst.
“He’s good.” Ajax pointed to the sky.
“How would you know?” Ernesto’s teeth were clenched tight.
“Listen.”
GRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
“About three seconds each. Controlled bursts.” Ajax pointed a finger gun at the kid. “Means he’s aiming at what he’s shooting at. Three seconds is about six hundred rounds each burst.”
GRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
Ernesto blessed himself and kissed his scapular.
“Don’t worry, mijito. If you can hear it they’ve already gone by you.”