by Joe Gannon
That was life in a rebel camp at peace.
Ajax strung the hammock down by the river where the rushing water gave them some privacy. He watched Nora step into the river. It was a cool night and he heard her shiver as she slowly submerged herself, like a baptism, he thought. When she came back to him her nipples stood at attention in the night air. She stripped Ajax of his shirt and used it to dry herself while he undressed. When she straddled him her cold skin sent a shiver through his body.
She poked his wound with professional curiosity.
“Nice job. One of ours?” She put his hands on her breasts. His breath came quick and shallow.
“No, an old woman, a doctor.”
“You’re lucky. Gladys your woman?” She moved her hands from the pink scar over his chest and arms.
“She’s no man’s woman.”
“Too bad.”
But he never got to ask why. Nora was a woman who knew what she wanted, knew what she needed, and how to get both. Nora made love to him like it was a military operation—carefully planned but the execution always gets sloppy once combat commences. Their combat got sloppy, but it didn’t matter so long as it all came out well.
It all came out very well, indeed.
* * *
In the morning he awoke in the hammock, alone, but feeling utterly alive. He had himself a wash in the river, his own baptism, and made his way back to camp. There were no catcalls, nor knowing winks. It was another day and the camp was busy with its chores, hewing life out of the jungle.
He found Gladys with a weeping Claribel in her arms.
“What will I do? What will I do?”
She threw herself into Ajax’s arms. He hugged her but shot Gladys a look, What? She pointed her index finger into her palm, and then drew the back of her hand over the palm: Today. We leave.
“It’s okay, Claribel.” He patted her head, but he’d never been very good at comforting others, nor himself. “Tend to your wounded. You’re a good nurse. The war is over, your country’s gonna need nursing. You’ll be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
It was a cold-blooded lie. Their war was over, but Ajax knew that no matter the nobility of the fight—and few wars were ever as justified as the FMLN’s battle against the oligarchs and the death squads—war in a poor country was an industry, like a town with one factory. And when this was over—when the factory shut down—the foot soldiers would become unemployed workers. Some would make the transition to the new economy, but most would be left only with the sound of vanished machines in their heads.
It had been different in Nicaragua, with his war. They had won, complete military victory. And when the Ogre’s regime crumpled, there were plenty of jobs to go around. The revolution became the new factory. But that wouldn’t happen here.
* * *
Two canoes were packed for their journey downstream to the coast, where a fishing boat would take them across the Gulf of Fonseca to Nicaragua. They’d make landfall near the port of Corinto on the north coast. Ajax was excited, not about going home, but just to be going. There was little for either of them to pack. They were given civilian clothes, a sack of food, and two pistols. Ajax strapped the Needle to his belt. Not for the first time he was certain he’d never need it again, but he would not abandon it, or the boy who came with it.
“You ready?” Gladys slung a pack over her shoulder and clipped a holster to her belt.
“Yep. You? I mean, Gladys, you can stay if you want.”
Gladys looked over the camp, over to the aid station on the far side. She shook her head. “It’s time to go home.”
“Home? Where’s that?”
She smiled. “I really don’t know. But what do we do when we get to Corinto?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, yet. We certainly don’t have any money.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and felt something. He pulled out a ten-dollar bill. The one young Peck had given to Ernesto.
“Where’d you get that?”
Ajax smiled. “Nora.”
“She paid you?”
He shrugged. “I gave her a discount.”
A platoon of well-wishers came to see them off. But not Claribel, she was back in the aid tent. El Ocho arrived and handed Ajax a wallet—Salvadoran colones, Nicaraguan cordobas, and about two hundred American. Ajax gave it to Gladys.
El Ocho shook their hands, wished them well, and returned to his camp and his new world. The canoes set off and in seconds, it seemed to Ajax, the camp was lost in the jungle.
42
The current took them downstream. Ajax did the steering, taking them past downed trees, over sand bars, and through a series of small rapids. It was nearly night when he smelled the sea.
As planned they pulled over until well past dark, then paddled their way into the port. They were looking for a fishing boat, El Caballero, the gentleman. They were on it just after midnight, and by the time dawn came they were in the open sea. The endless horizon got Ajax thinking. Brave new world? Maybe not even a new one. But his old one was long gone.
“What are you thinking?”
Gladys was a little green from the voyage.
“You know Krill traveled this same route, in reverse. Ten years ago he hijacked a boat, came across the gulf.” Ajax indicated the water. “Landed in El Salvador. He was the only one to survive the trip.”
“Well, he’s dead now.”
“I didn’t want to ask before…”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
“I’m talking about you.” He turned to her. “You’ve never killed before.”
“I’m good with it.”
“When you kill up close like that, it’s different than a firefight. You see the last thought in their mind. It stays with you, over the years. A piece of them stays with you.”
“You mean like a ghost?”
Ajax looked at the boy sitting in the bow, looking toward home. “Exactly like a ghost. Mine is sitting up there in the bow, looking toward home.”
Gladys turned her head and scanned the deck. They were alone.
Ajax shrugged. “Or not. He was a boy, I looked right into his eyes as he bled out.”
“Guardia?”
He shrugged again. “He had a uniform on. Don’t know if that’s why I killed him. It was late in the war. But I watched him as he died. He had these beautiful eyes, long eyelashes. And he just looked sad. Not scared, not angry. He was just … sad.”
“Krill looked confused.” She spoke very rapidly. “Like, like he didn’t understand why I was killing him. Like he wanted to ask, Why? Why! Like there was a reason? Or an explanation?”
“He needed killing.”
“Yes he did. But…”
The “but” came out like a burp.
“But somehow you wish you hadn’t.”
“I do. God help me, I do.”
“Well,” he put his hand on her back, “you’re a soldier now. All soldiers know only two things: the killing’s got to be done, and they’ll regret it for the rest of their lives.”
They stood there by the gunwale for a long time. Gladys puked once, and Ajax patted her back and fed her water as the Gentleman carried them across the sea.
* * *
It was well after dark when they approached the Nicaraguan coast. Don Cholo, the skipper, held them about a mile out as Ajax had asked while he scanned the port with binoculars. The docks were lit up. Boats were tied up. He counted four lights he could not account for and kept the field glass trained on them. They blinked off and on at erratic moments—men walking in front of car headlights.
“Capitán, how far out are we?”
“About a mile.”
“The tides?”
“Going in. I’m fighting them to stay out here and we’re low on gas.”
“Give me one second.”
Ajax dashed belowdecks where Gladys was still queasy.
“Gladys! Gladys! Get up, get up, we gotta go!”
“What?”
He dragged her topside and fitted a life jacket over her head, snapped it around her waist. Pulled one over his own head.
“There’s men on the docks waiting. We gotta get in the water. Tide’s going in so it won’t be hard to get to the beach, but you’ve got to paddle in.”
“What are you talking about?”
He slung a rectangular pack over her head.
“This is a little life raft, when you hit the water, pull this string.” He put her hand on the string. “Got it?”
“Okay, okay, let’s go.”
“Wait.” Ajax went to his belt and slid the Needle off. Weighed it for a moment, and then hooked it onto Gladys’s belt.
“What’re you doing?”
Ajax took her face in his hands, held her for a moment, looked into her eyes, and lightly kissed her on the mouth. “You’re a good man, sister.” Then he shoved her over the side.
She came up coughing and spluttering and immediately began to drift away from the boat toward the beach. Ajax took off his life jacket and dropped it on the deck.
“Capitán! Hit it!”
The engines roared and Ajax swayed as the boat moved forward.
“Ajax! Ajax! What’re you doing?”
Gladys sounded pissed. He turned back to her.
“Pull the string, Gladys! Pull the string!”
43
Managua, Nicaragua, February 1990
El Chipote prison had held many guests over the years. The Ogre had filled it with Sandinistas during his dictatorship. The current president had spent several years here. Even before the Sandinistas in the sixties and seventies the Ogre had filled it with troublemakers. One of its most prestigious prisoners had been a famed newspaper editor whose widow would now be the next president of the republic.
Ajax had dropped off his fair share of men and women back when he’d worked State Security in the early days of the Revo. As he himself had been dropped off almost a week ago, which somehow seemed only fair. The policemen on the dock in Corinto had seemed to be waiting for him, but he wasn’t sure. And no one had spoken to him since. A slot slid open twice a day, and food was pushed in. He’d had worse, but he sure did miss the fare in El Ocho’s camp.
He worried about Gladys. He was pretty sure he’d seen the life raft inflate, and so long as she’d gotten to rowing the tide would’ve carried her in. He’d heard nothing about her and that should be good news. He’d heard very little at all, in fact, but the radio. After the second day he’d figured out that if he lay on his belly near the food slot, he could just pick out a radio playing somewhere, and a draft or something would occasionally carry bits of news to him.
The revolution was over! For the first time in recorded history a revolution won by force of arms had let itself be voted out; and for the first time in Nicaraguan history the party in power had accepted an electoral defeat and agreed to go.
Well, that was something, wasn’t it? Something for the history books? Some comfort? He wasn’t sure if the dead would agree, though. All those who’d died to bring the Revo about, or died to prevent it, who’d died to overthrow or to defend it. The new order would go hard on Horacio, his ex Gio. They had thought the Revo would last forever.
They were wrong.
As for himself, he’d arrived in Nicaragua twenty years ago, driving a motor home stuffed with smuggled weapons that Horacio had packed for him in Mexico City. A young gringo with his gringo passport, passing through on his way to Panama, had been waved across the border for only a ten-dollar bribe. They’d only wanted five, but he’d told them to keep the change. Horacio had chewed his ass for that.
Twenty years. He’d been a frightened recruit, the great hero, disgraced drunk, loose cannon, international embarrassment. And now, if he calculated right, he’d serve twenty-five years for murdering a serial killer. Would the ironies never cease?
It seemed not.
That night a key went into his door. He stood, expecting the worst and accepting it.
It’d be a cop, a prosecutor, maybe that young Spanish doctor to ID him.
Instead, when the iron door swung open, in stepped Horacio de la Vega Cárdenas—mentor, teacher, father figure, master manipulator, fiend. And friend.
“Hello, Ajax.”
“You come to skin me or pluck me?”
“Neither, mijo.”
Ajax unrolled the thin mattress on the other bed. “Coffee tray will be around soon. Stay a while.”
Horacio held up his gnarled hands—they were manacled.
“I will be.”
Then the devil stepped into view.
Vladimir Malhora.
Now here was a ghost for you. A demon. A vengeful spirit back from the dead. Malhora was the former head of State Security, murderer of Amelia Peck and so many others. At first Ajax almost didn’t recognize him—instead of a uniform Malhora wore a gray business suit with a blue tie, he’d shaved his Stalin mustache, and shed at least thirty pounds of portly.
Worst of all, he was smiling. He was real!
Ajax would curse himself later for telegraphing both his astonishment and his intentions. Before he moved a muscle Malhora tripped Horacio and shoved him into the cell. The old man fell forward and Ajax instinctively reached to catch him and break his fall. He’d curse himself for that too.
The door slammed shut and clanged like a death knell. But Ajax had seen the fear on Malhora’s face—fleeting, but there. The peephole slid open.
“Now, my dear friends, look at us, all together. At last.”
Horacio grabbed Ajax’s shirt. “Don’t let him see,” he whispered.
Ajax went to the peephole, as big as a saucer, where Malhora’s beaming face was framed like a cheap porn star in the money shot. Ajax kicked the door—Malhora recoiled and his triumphalist smirk slipped.
“You’re still a chicken-shit, look at you!”
“And you’re still an animal. But now I have caged you, so yes, look at me. Here I am on the right side of this door, the free side, the new regime side. Back. Back in Casa Cincuenta.” House Fifty, the headquarters of State Security where Malhora had reigned for years. “Not yet back in my old office, true. But only two doors away. And once I’ve made myself indispensable to the new president? Well, it’s a brave new world, isn’t it?”
His confidence stoked Ajax’s rage until he was mad enough to spit. So he did. Gobbed a good one right on the motherfucker’s face. Malhora recoiled and drew a pistol, a .38 Smith and Wesson, no more Soviet Makarovs.
“Do it! Kill me now, cocksucker, or die by my hand! Do it!”
Malhora’s hand shook with the desire to do it, but Ajax knew he hadn’t the balls. Not now, not ever. Not himself.
Malhora wiped the spittle off. Reapplied his smile. “I don’t love you enough to kill you. But I hate you enough to come visit you, the two of you, right here, every week for the next twenty-five years. I’m going to convict you both of murder. Yes, you see I found the secret files, or will find them as soon as I manufacture them, proving you and that degenerate old man killed three Americans. Yes! Can you guess who? Amelia Peck, the journalist Matthew Connelly, and Father Jerome Westerly.”
He shut the peephole. Ajax pounded and kicked on the steel door. “Motherfucker! Motherfucker! MOTHERFUCKER!”
“Ajax, control yourself, please.”
Ajax turned on him. “You!” The blood rage had to be loosed on someone. He took a step, murder in his heart.
“Ajax, you’re not going to hurt me.”
“Really? Because after him I hate you the most.”
Horacio held up his manacled hands. “If that were true you wouldn’t have caught me when he tripped me.”
Ajax hesitated a step, and his rage, like a balloon, popped, to be replaced by despair. He sat heavily on his cot. The wound ached and he rubbed the scar under his shirt. “Gladys shot me.”
“I heard.”
“She killed me.”
“Y
et here you are.”
Ajax looked around the cell. “Malhora’s my jailer and you’re my cell mate. Gladys killed me. And this is Hell.”
Horacio hid a sly smile.
“And what are you doing here? What the fuck is he doing here?”
“Ajax, we have much to discuss. But you have been here a week and surely you’ve got something to get these off with.” He held up the cuffs.
He did. The shit mattresses were made to be rolled up like dough for storage and they held their shape because of a thin wire running down the side. He pulled out about a foot, bent it until it broke, doubled it over, twisted it for strength, and then fashioned a small hook at the end. He knelt in front of Horacio and began working the lock. Horacio smiled down at him.
“I am very glad to see you.”
“Fuck you.”
Ajax tricked one of the cuffs open. He noticed Horacio’s knotted knuckles.
“What happened to your hands?”
“It’s how I bear my sins.”
“Bullshit. If it were your sins you’d be covered with sores and tumors like the Elephant Man.”
“Do you really think me so evil?”
Ajax looked into the old bastard’s eyes and flipped his anger to full auto. But he couldn’t pull the trigger. He just couldn’t.
“Answer my question: you, him, how?”
Ajax popped the other cuff off. Horacio rubbed his hands, the pain visible under his white goatee. Then he took a deep breath and submerged the pain.
“You will recall, my son, that the world is divided into…”
“The civilized and the barbarian!” He’d heard this worldview before, the last time Horacio had justified his schemes that had left nearly everyone dead—except Malhora. “We back to that again?”
“Why don’t you ask, ‘Gravity? Are we back to that again?’ A universal law is a universal law. Even the opposition, which is now the new government, has its civilized and its barbarians. You are not surprised to learn their barbarians feel our barbarians mistreated them when we were in power. They seek retribution against the Sandinista Front. Who better than a disgraced former Sandinista to persecute Sandinistas?”