by Joe Gannon
“We are gambling in our house, God’s House is next door in the chapel.”
Silence.
“Celina!” The guitarist mouthed Elba’s daughter. “Would you please bring some refreshments?”
There was no reply, but Ajax heard the sound of glasses and cups being laid on a counter. The six all sighed with relief.
Ajax and Gladys made a circle around the long dining room table—which would have held half a dozen more guests—shaking hands. By the time they were done a very plain girl, about sixteen, brought a tray of coffee and pupusas. Celina looked happy to do so, wearing none of her mother’s opprobrium. She paused to serve Gladys first, seemingly delighted at another woman’s presence. Then she served Ajax.
“What do you think, Celina? Are the fathers wicked?”
She smiled, Ajax thought, with a forbearance beyond her years. “It’s a poor enough sin, they play for pennies.”
“Ten centavos ante,” Ellacuría objected. “There’s almost five colones in that pot.” About two dollars. Ellacuría took a sip of coffee, looked at his cards, tossed them onto the table—a busted flush.
“Do you play poker, Martin?” He’d switched to English.
“God understands English!” Elba eavesdropped.
“Yes, my darling, but you do not!”
Smiles darted around the room, linking the faces in the same conspiracy.
“Poker, Martin?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a gambler?”
“No. But I like cards.”
The guitarist leaned forward. “And what is the first rule of poker?”
Ajax paused. “Never open on your own, never lead, always raise someone else’s bet.”
The guitarist threw his palms up at the two beards, as if to say, See?
“And why is that, Martin?”
“Because poker is a game of misinformation. The winning hand should always appear to be following someone else, the leader, until the final raise when the leader realizes he’s not been leading, but being led.”
“And then it is too late.”
“Too late.”
A silence fell over the Seis Padres, they all seemed to quietly confirm something.
“You’ve been on the streets?” This from the padre in his boxers and wife-beater.
“Yes.” Ajax nodded, as if reviewing all that he had seen.
“What’s it like?”
“Deadly.” Gladys jumped in. “Lots of combat, though we didn’t run into any, or not head-on. Firefights, explosions, those gunships flying low over everywhere. The whole city seems locked down.”
“What’s that tell you?” boxer shorts asked.
“The battle’s not lost nor won yet.”
“And who does that benefit?”
Gladys paused, and Ajax was sure she didn’t know she was being raised by the winning hand.
“The rebels. They don’t have to win, not yet, just not lose.”
Another round of glances wended its way through the padres’ eyes.
“Any army around us, the university?”
“You’re pretty much locked down too.”
“See any civilians?”
“Civilians? On the street…”
“He means paramilitaries,” the guitarist added.
“Oh, well, ah…” Gladys cut her eyes at Ajax. Do I tell them?
“Call or fold, Gladys” was all Ajax had to offer.
“We did spot one guy, we saw him at Jasmine’s, Max’s house. He’s with D’Aubuisson.”
“Well, El Mayor needs his own intelligence.” Ellacuría seemed almost sympathetic. “Jasmine speaks highly of you.” He addressed Ajax.
“And of you, all of you.”
“So, you want to know about Jimmy Peck?”
“We do,” Ajax said.
“But you come here in disguise?”
“Not really.” Gladys just couldn’t be left out of the conversation, the poker game, Ajax thought. He studied the walls, the books, art, mementos of their lives and time in each Central American country.
“We know Peck’s parents.” Gladys unfolded their cover story. “They asked us to ask around while we were here. As guests of the government they thought we might find some answers…” She trailed off, her story stopped by the impish expression of the priests.
A not unfriendly silence followed, until the priests’ eyes were on Ajax.
“We fold, Fathers.” He smiled at Gladys. “They know who we are.”
“We know who you are,” boxer shorts said.
“Jasmine,” Gladys hissed.
“No.” Ajax pointed at the walls, naming the Nicaraguan artifacts arrayed there. “That painting is from Solentiname. Three volumes of poetry by Cuadra, Belli, and Cardenal. And those heads”—he pointed to three very antique but crude clay heads—“I’d bet are from Isla Muerta in the big lake.” He surveyed the priests. “Who’s lived in Nicaragua?”
The guitarist and both beards raised their hands.
“Before or after the Triumph?”
“After.”
“Before.”
“Both.”
“Oh,” Gladys said.
“Poker,” Ajax replied.
“I was actually in Managua when you captured that serial killer,” said the guitarist. “I remember he escaped. Didn’t he? Did you ever recapture him?”
Ajax cut a quick glance at Gladys. “I got him eventually.”
Ellacuría poured his guests more coffee. “We will not speak your names,” he nodded dramatically to the kitchen, “but of course we know them. So, you want to know about Jimmy?”
“Yes!” Gladys set her cup down with more force than dexterity. She seemed nervous to Ajax—maybe the priests as college professors reminded her of her own school days.
“Why?” boxer shorts asked.
“I knew Jimmy’s sister in Nicaragua a few years ago,” Ajax said. “She was murdered, it was my fault. Jimmy’s parents came to me. To us. They want us to find him or at least bring his body back, something to bury.”
“Do you think he’s dead?” the guitarist asked.
“Do you think he’s alive?”
Another glance went round the table, like some Jesuitical telepathy, and agreement was had.
“Jimmy was…” Ellacuría paused, inviting adjectives.
“Innocent.”
“Naïve.”
“Reckless.”
“All of the above.”
“You know he worked for the Democratic Party back in Washington, gathering information for the certification,” Ellacuría said.
“Counterfactual information,” Ajax said.
“Yes. But he was playing a dangerous game. There are many people here, groups of people who risk their lives chronicling the depravations of the army and death squads.” Ellacuría lifted his hands to take in the whole country. “There is no secret to what happens here! Disappearances, the murders. That the Americans continue to ‘certify’ this monster’s progress on improving human rights is not a lack of information…”
“It’s an abomination.”
“Yes, it is, my friend. Jimmy was naïve, innocent, and reckless, because he thought he could uncover other information, that he could infiltrate the death squads and provide some truth that would sway the American Congress to cut off aid.”
“The Lone Ranger,” the guitarist said.
“Batman,” suggested boxer shorts.
“Tubbs and Crockett,” said the padre in black slacks and white shirt, the first time he’d spoken.
“Who?” Gladys jumped in.
“Miami Vice,” Ajax explained.
“You know it!” Black and white seemed delighted.
“Caught a few episodes.”
“Except those are all television shows,” Ellacuría reminded them. “Some good, mind you, I wanted to be Batman until I went to the seminary. But…”
“But playacting can get you killed,” Gladys concluded.
“In El Salvad
or many things can get you killed; being too loud…” Ellacuría seemed to pass a ball around the table:
“… being too quiet…”
“… demanding too much…”
“… wanting too little…”
“… knowing the wrong people…”
“… knowing the right people.”
There was a long silence around the table.
“What about Jasmine?” Ajax said. “She work with Jimmy?”
“Work?” Ellacuría was baffled. “Jasmine has no side in this war, she is one of the few. Why would you ask that?”
“She and Jimmy partied with some death squad Charlie types, Max too—discos, drink, coke. Could she have been helping him? Robin to his Batman?”
A round of head shaking passed through the padres.
Ajax looked each man in the eye—they were the honest, decent, bighearted types that often were found in some of the world’s worst places. The exalted of the earth.
And they were lying.
“Who killed Peck?” he asked, feeling more cop now than shy guest.
“The escuadrones, there are no other suspects.”
“There are always other suspects,” he corrected. “But how is it possible there is no body? We know there were morgue pictures. Where’s his body?”
“There is no lack of bodies here.” The guitarist sat forward, showing some anger. “There is not even a lack of disappeared Americans. You’re the second ones to come looking for a gringo who fell off the edge of the earth.”
“Another?”
“A college student from Notre Dame, it’s a Jesuit school, we’re Jesuits. His family contacted us, asked our help.”
“That’s in Indiana,” Gladys jumped in.
“Why, yes,” Ellacuría said. “You know it?”
“Missing person poster at the embassy, had an Indiana phone number. Liam Donaldson.”
“That’s him. His father called. He was backpacking through Central America. Can you imagine? Does no one in America read a newspaper?”
“You have any luck?” Ajax asked.
“No. We are not actually equipped for that sort of thing.”
Ajax and Gladys shared a look. She flicked her eyes to the far side of the room, to the phone and the big beige fax machine sitting next to it.
“You’re saying you don’t know Liam Donaldson is the spitting image of Jimmy Peck? Tall, pasty white skin, red-orange hair? His family contacted you but didn’t send any photos over that fax machine?”
“They did,” Ellacuría admitted. “We put some pictures up around campus, but they’re in black-and-white. What are you suggesting?”
“Liam Donaldson is dead. Jimmy Peck is alive. I saw him today, in the confessional of the Metropolitan Cathedral.”
Ellacuría seemed genuinely surprised. He turned his palms up and again went around the table. All the padres signaled they were equally clueless. That, at least, Ajax thought, was the truth.
“I will not look upon your sins!” Doña Elba interrupted and entered with a big tray of victuals and her eyes closed. “But if you need food to sustain you in your prayers, I will not be the one who denied you it!”
There was a round of Gracias a Dios! as the Seis Padres switched back to Spanish and ladled out the carnitas, pupusas, and beans in cream. For a half hour or so the eight of them feasted on Elba’s cuisine, teasing her lovingly as she condemned them for their sins like the house mother she had become to these garrulous bachelors.
Food was followed by beers, snuck in from the guitarist’s room. The table talk shifted from Peck, death, and disappearances to poetry, anthropology, and the pros and cons of Jheri Curl like Detective Tubbs used. They were all Spaniards, the priests, but had been so long in Central America, their Spanish was utterly colloquial. Ajax felt at home for the first time in years, and he was pleased to see Gladys relax into the conversation too.
The sun had begun to tilt dangerously low by the time he and Gladys gave their thanks and made their good-byes; the dusk-to-dawn curfew in the city was enforced to deadly effect by both sides. They found the padres’ phone was working and called doña Estela. She relayed a message from Jasmine to meet them at Max’s. She assured them Jasmine had said it was safe.
The padres escorted them to the door. Ajax found the ghost standing there, like a bottle of wine he’d forgotten to bring in. Or a mangy junkyard dog who’d followed him and stayed. Ajax scanned the eyes of the others to see if they too saw, but none did, only wondered at his wavering.
“You’ve got to go back to Jasmine’s before curfew.”
Ajax hesitated again. “Fathers, what do you do for your security?”
“You mean are we pistol-packing padres?” Black and white made finger pistols.
“I mean, do you have any security? Just a lookout?”
Ellacuría took his arm and led Ajax to the lawn surrounding their rectory, lavish as it was in bougainvillea and honeysuckle. He pointed up. Ajax followed his gaze to the bronze cross atop the chapel.
“Best lookout in the universe.”
Ajax had a quick look at the ghost; the boy rarely had proven wrong as a herald of trouble. “You’d do better with a pair of eyes up there.”
“The army has us locked down and locked up. This, too, will pass. Go with God, my son.”
Blessings and handshakes were passed from one to another and they left.
* * *
“What do you think?” Gladys spoke once they were back on the street.
“They’re lying about something.”
“Yeah, but what?”
“Not Donaldson.”
“No. They seemed straight about Peck too. So who?”
“Jasmine.”
“She’s the only one left.”
They made their way more quickly down the hill than they had coming up. Night was coming and they needed to get off the streets. Ajax kept looking back. They soon outpaced the boy with the long eyelashes.
28
“Why is there evil in the world? I don’t know. If God created evil, then is evil good or bad? Why would He create it? Maybe He made evil as a measure, to measure how much good we can create? So it’s a test, right?”
Krill turned from the portrait of the generalissimo to see why Jasmine was not answering him. Did she think he was asking the general? He meant these questions, damn it! They vexed him. He was sincere. Fucking ricos! So much fancy schooling, so much time to ponder these uncertainties and what did it get them? Did they know more than Krill? Did they care more? No one had ever taken his search for answers seriously. Not his father, that broken-down donkey working the harvests of other men for centavos. The land is our life was all the answer he’d ever had while running his machete over a stone to cut cane or maize on someone else’s land. And the day he’d brought a machete home for Krill? For his only son. Not even a new one, but one his father had found in a field. Krill’d known that day that his family, his life would not be in service to the ricos. He’d taken that machete and walked fifteen miles to the nearest army post, sat outside until the sentry finally took him to see the commanding officer. Krill had buried the machete into the captain’s desk and demanded a gun to fight the Sandinistas. After the captain had almost shot him, but hadn’t, they shaved Krill’s head and gave him a uniform. He had become his own man then. But even his comrades found Krill’s questions laughable. Or had until they learned the price for laughing at him. All those peasants had wanted were three meals, a bed, and a little pay at the end of the month.
Krill wanted answers. What was evil and how did one serve God doing good? Communism, capitalism, nationalism, faggotism. What were these things? Who made them? His questioning had made for a lonely youth—his barrack-mates had scorned him as social climber; his officers had condescended to the uneducated peasant. But once he had become Krill, Comandante Krill, his search only intensified, even if command had made him lonelier still.
There was no answer from Jasmine. It should make him angry, her s
ilence. But maybe being rich gave you nothing but things, no knowledge.
Krill gazed at the generalissimo and ran the machete over the whetstone. The blade passed lightly, smoothly, and fast over it. The timbre of the sound told all. A dull blade made a scratchy sound. The more honed the blade the smoother the sound. This machete made barely a whisper. When the feel of the steel on stone was right, when the sound of the blade told him there was no more edge to be gotten, he turned to Jasmine to make her answer.
“I’m so sorry, señorita.” He’d left the gag in her mouth. Idiota! “Apologies.”
29
Ajax told Gladys to turn the engine and headlights off, and roll Estela’s car downhill until a few houses from Max’s. Night had come on fast and they’d just made it back as the last of the light died. They got out without making a sound, quietly clicked the doors shut, and made their way to the iron gate, pocked with bullet holes like zits on a dead teenager’s face.
They peered through a couple of zits to case the house. No lights in front, maybe one in the back. He signaled Gladys to chamber a round in her pistol and go around the side and check the servants’ entrance.
He put an eye to a zit. If there’d been danger, if Max or Monkey Man were waiting for them, he’d felt sure Jasmine would’ve let them know. And the padres had given him no reason to think their secret was not safe.
Ajax had found the priests charming, had felt at home in their company far quicker than most—not that his choice of company over the past three years had been much to brag on. But young Peck was an enigma whose mystery only deepened every time they spoke to someone. His sister, Amelia, had been an open book—direct, honest, and naïve like most gringos. He knew now he’d expected her brother to be the same. But young Peck was fooling someone—either the priests had him all wrong, or Max and Monkey Man did.
He had a feeling it was the latter. Young Peck as a cowboy, trying to play at spy, working Max and the escuadrones for information he thought might tip the balance in the war between good and evil.
“What is it with Americans?” He looked around, startled, until he realized he’d spoken out loud. Then Gladys reappeared, shook her head.
“Locked. What do we do?”
“Ring the bell.”