Coyote expertly gutted the dead peccary, but Zorro was made to sling the carcass on his back and endure Tayra’s continuing nagging as they made quickly for the path. Here it was darker, the twilight barely filtering through the thorn trees. Occasionally, Coyote used a flashlight as he led them another mile uphill, a ridge trail. Maggie could now make out the occasional clearing on either side, ragtag patches of corn or beans, a tumbledown shack or two.
There remained barely a crack of light in the sky, but Coyote seemed more confident, showing a familiarity with the trail. It was becoming apparent he had once inhabited this little part of the world. He may have had the kind of hardscrabble life that turns peons into revolutionaries.
An owl hooted. The path dipped to a tiny stream at which fireflies danced and bats darted. Beyond a cornfield glowed a light, a dwelling, clapboard siding and tin roof, a lamp or candle burning inside. From an open window came urgent human sounds, a man and woman making love: his ascending wail, an orgasmic yelp, then his partner softly teasing him. Buho, despite his limp, increased his pace, as if embarrassed at being in the vicinity of such intimate goings-on. Maggie was ruefully reminded of her quest, so harshly suspended, for the holy grail of love.
A few hundred metres away, from another hutch, came a woman’s voice, sweet and haunting, singing a lullaby. Maggie was entranced by the simple beauty of the song, by the perfectly pitched notes of her voice. She pictured a mother at the bedside of her children, beans simmering on the stove for a husband who has toiled all day in the fields. No one knew Juanita Sanchez had a voice of molten silver. She remained all her life undiscovered, serenading the wilderness.
Though weary, wet, and cold, Maggie was feeling less dispirited, more optimistic now that the initial, arduous stage of this ordeal had to be nearing an end. One of these tiny farms must be Coyote’s; they could warm up by his fire, dry their boots and clothes.
The trail ended at an area where the forest had recently been burned. There had been an attempt to plant beans in the scorched earth, but the jungle was coming back. Maggie could make out the blackened remnants of a shack and wondered if the fire had raced out of control. Coyote paused to contemplate it, then led them down a foot-wide passage through the beans, over the brow of a rise to a gully where two small fires glowed: an encampment, tents sloppily strung up, forming a circle.
“Viva Benito Madrigal,” Halcón called. The password was returned first by a male voice, then a woman’s. Maggie saw them now: each stirring a pot on a propane camping stove, now dropping their spoons and hurrying forward. Both were slight and youthfully attractive; neither could be twenty years old. On Halcón’s sharp command, they hurriedly pulled kerchiefs over their faces. Maggie looked quickly away, pretended she had not seen their faces.
As the other guerrillas embraced, Zorro laid down the pig carcass, talking spiritedly, the hunter returned — he had recovered from Halcón’s rebuke. While Coyote began butchering, Maggie and Glo were led to the faint warmth of the stoves, where Tayra took over stirring the rice and beans simmering in aluminum pots.
She extended a spoon to Glo, saying, “Make yourself useful, my lady.” Glo turned her back and made an angry muffled sound.
“I’ll help,” Maggie said, “but please let me take her gag off; she has to eat.”
Tayra looked at Halcón, who nodded. Maggie undid the knot behind Glo’s neck. Upon being unmuzzled, she mimicked, “ ‘I’ll help.’ Shit, Maggie, you are altogether too friendly with these creeps.”
Maggie said nothing. She had won their respect by volunteering to be a hostage; she was determined to keep it.
Zorro dumped some strips of pork into the rice pot. “You help cook,” he told Glo. “This is a cooperativo. Ev’ryboddy shares in work.”
She answered, “Take a flush, you lump of shit. Y’all aren’t fit to roll with a sow.”
“Gloria-May!” Maggie exclaimed. “You’re just making it worse for us. Use your head.” Then she took Buho by the wrist and led him to the haphazardly erected dome tents. The young guardians of this campsite had not grasped how to set them up; they had used tall sticks as centre posts. A tarpaulin had been rigged to shelter several backpacks and small burlap sacks of rice and beans.
Maggie knew her dome tents (“Hike over to Harvey’s Camp Capital: your store for the great outdoors”) and showed Buho the simple art of fitting the stays together. The tents, she noticed, bore labels of a wilderness trekking firm: Outward Bound. Similar insignias were on the sleeping bags inside them, so it appeared all this gear had been stolen.
While assembling the last tent, she stumbled and brought Buho down with her, their feet tangling. This prompted laughter from the others gathered around, but her tent-craft was appreciated; even the testy Zorro muttered a “gracias.”
Halcón said nothing for a moment, studying her hard. Finally, he issued some brief instructions to Buho, who undid her leash. “You are to go about freely, señorita, until it is time to sleep,” Buho said, “but you must stay within the circle of tents.”
Maggie turned to Gloria-May with an expression of triumph, but received only a irritated look in return.
The young female guerrilla offered Glo and Maggie fresh clothes: ill-fitting but dry jungle fatigues. In the tent in which Maggie peeled off her wet outfit were a pair of sleeping bags and thin slabs of foam. Maggie would be sharing this tent with the girl: Quetzal, she was called, for the flamboyant bird. Glo would stay tied to Tayra in another. The others would also be two to a tent, leaving one of the eight guerrillas outside as a night guard.
As they waited for the food to cook, Halcón called a meeting of, to use his term, the “colectivo.” The phrase was intended as a salve to the others, Maggie assumed: there were seven followers and one leader, at least in the absence of the revered Benito Madrigal. They listened solemnly to Halcón, nodded, too weary to demur.
Halcón then went off to listen to his radio, and Maggie joined Buho, who was tuning a small guitar. They would be staying here only the night, he said, no enthusiasm in his voice, his body bent with weariness. “Tomorrow we begin before dawn; we must travel far.” Maggie had suspected as much after counting the backpacks: one for each of the guerrillas and hostages. She had followed coverage of an abduction in Colombia of mining engineers: five months it lasted. An ordeal that long would see Maggie turn thirty, in April. She felt herself aging.
They lined up at the stoves to fill their tin plates, then gathered to eat in dry shelter under the tarp. Masks were removed, but Maggie could not see faces in the darkness. She picked the meat away, filled up on rice and beans, more ravenous than she could ever recall. After the camp stoves were extinguished, when figures showed as faint ghosts, the kidnappers, using flashlights, washed the dishes and assembled equipment to be stowed in the backpacks.
Wearily, she crawled into the tent with Quetzal and into the warmth of a light sleeping bag. From outside came the sad notes of Buho’s guitar, and it serenaded her to sleep.
DEAD MICE IN THE BEER
– 1 –
Slack Cardinal, already into his fourth beer of the morning, tuned in listlessly to the hubbub of complaint in Hector’s Bar, where the Quepos expats had gathered – a Christmas promotion, an oferta, Bavaria going for two hundred colones a bottle. The narrow dark space was loud with talk and filled with smoke and beer’s stale odours and the peculiar smells of Quepos itself, the sewers backing up in the heavy rains.
His compatriots were depressed entrepreneurs like himself, afraid to go back to their businesses, unwilling to face the truth that nothing was going to happen this tourist season. There was no point hanging around the shop waiting for customers, he’d go home, set flame to the fires of creation, a Homeric ode of tribulation and despair. He ordered another Bavaria, held it up to the light. No dead mice.
“Viva la libertad,” someone said wearily. “Viva Benito Madrigal.”
Benito Madrigal, for Christ’s sake. He was back on the front page, and Slack couldn’t understa
nd why any serious revolutionary would prize him enough to engineer a hostage-taking. A failed politician of the lunatic fringe, he was now doing time in Pavas, in the mental hospital.
Don Benito had been a public servant, twenty years of rising through the Byzantine structures of government to become deputy minister of public works. His decline and fall were as swift as his ascent had been slow. Several years ago, out of the blue, he quit his job, formed a political party, the People’s Popular Vanguard, and ran a hapless campaign for the presidency, garnering all of a hundred and twelve votes. He was a spirited orator, though, and reckless, accusing the minister of public works of taking bribes from a highway contractor. The minister was cleared and Madrigal was jailed for criminal slander, six months.
No one could understand how the poor schmuck got sucked into the maws of the justice system for accusing a cabinet minister of doing business in the traditional way, bribery was a cherished custom here. Civil rights groups spoke out. Committees formed. Madrigal did his time with constant loud complaint, and walked out of jail a hero.
He did not long remain one. Soon after his release, he strode into the Palacio de Justicia in San José with an AK-47 and single-handedly held five judges at gunpoint, a sleepless three-day standoff. Muddled with fatigue, he was jumped, his weapon wrestled from him. He went to La Reforma, sixteen years, ranting about lies and conspiracies. This all happened on a fifth of May, thus spawning Comando Cinco de Mayo.
Soon he became a victim of the nation’s short attention span, the media writing him off as a crackpot. He was transferred to the Hospital Nacional Psiquiatrico, delusional, people were plotting against him. He had Slack’s sympathy, he often felt the same way.
He wondered how the terrorism expert from South Dakota was processing this. Would the free world collapse, senator, if some delusional wanker got traded for your wife? Or would that be giving in to terrorism, thereby requiring an assessment of new warfare options?
In addition to freedom for the martyr Madrigal, the kidnappers’ shopping list included a countrywide fifty-per-cent reduction in the price of beans and the deportation of all gringo criminal elements, their land to be distributed to the pobres. Their motives seemed not all noble, their wish list also included fifteen million U.S. dollars. The note hadn’t said where the drop should be, further contact would be made by mail addressed to the U.S. Embassy.
The good news was that the junior senator from South Dakota had put his presidential campaign on hold. He announced that during a terse unsmiling speech on CNN, on location in Quepos.
“Another five cancellations today,” someone complained. On top of everything, there’d been a U.S. tourist advisory, just before the Christmas holiday rush. The warning was in fine American imperialist tradition, a gun to the country’s head, tourism was its main industry. To get the advisory lifted, the Tico government had practically given carte blanche to the Americans to run Operación Libertad, as they called it.
The raid had been well staged, according to the AP reporter who got the scoop. Halcón, their leader, was said to have been coolly in control. Slack suspected the kidnappers had vehicles, a safe house in San José. Or maybe they were heading north, up through the jungle and montane, to the Pan-American Highway. If they got across that, they’d be in the Talamanca, thousands of acres of national parkland.
It would be typical of Slack’s wayward fortunes if he found himself somehow suspected, perhaps seriously implicated. He had a history of being scapegoated by the CIA for the various crimes of the century, no wonder he was paranoid — suspicion would fall on him because of his liaison with Gloria-May, the not-so-secret sunset kayak tour. But maybe this was the kind of quirky fear that four beer inspired.
He tried to form an image of her tramping blindfolded through the jungle in her Armani wedding anniversary dress. He truly felt sorry for her, but she was a spirited woman, she might survive. About the other, the Canadian, he didn’t know.
When he was driven outside by the smoke, his eyes watering, he chanced to see Juan Camacho pass by in his truck, glaring at him. El Chorizo had filed a denuncia against Slack over that minor episode in Billy Balboa’s restaurant, he was suing for a million colones. Slack figured he’d done him a favour, the nose looked better now, blunter, not as rat-like.
The skies were gathering in, another pour coming today, the rainy season showing no interest in packing it in. Wettest invierno on record, it was the accelerating global warming, man altering weather patterns, Niños and Niñas, the reefs dying, sea life starving, deserts encroaching. When the coastal plains were gone, when only buildings rising from the sea were left, maybe the experts would figure out what went wrong.
A helicopter howled overhead, low, descending toward La Compañía, the old company town nestled in the hills south of Quepos, headquarters of Operación Libertad. Choppers had been swarming around like bees for the last three days, Bells and Kawasakis clogging the tiny Quepos airport.
A Nissan utility van was prowling slowly down the street, a suit behind the wheel, checking faces. He braked in front of Hector’s, leaned over the passenger seat, and rolled down the window a crack, trying not to lose his air-conditioned air. Thirty or so, a shaved head, crisply trimmed law-enforcement moustache.
“You Jacques Cardinal?”
“Name is Wilder, Harry Wilder. I sell dog food.” Slack contemplated making a run for it, into the Ramus Hotel, out the back entrance.
The agent studied a photo in his hand, comparing likenesses. “Looks like you’ve gained a couple of pounds. Hop in.”
A low functionary, Latin-Am section. Slack had hoped they might leave him in peace. “Make an appointment.”
“You have one. With Mr. Hamilton Bakerfield.”
“I thought he retired.” Slack slid into the passenger seat and rolled his window down, he preferred normal air. He would see Ham for old times, he’d be pleasant, that’s all.
The company man was Theodore, all three syllables, not Ted. He remained mostly silent, the kind of guy who can’t talk and drive at the same time, respectful of government property, slowing for the breaks in the pavement, swerving from the potholes, the roads around here like an obstacle course, a maze for Mensa members.
They went not to La Compañía but up Cardiac Hill, in first gear, the local bus coming down at them, air brakes screaming, the wheezing Manuel Antonio Bluebird. A few months ago it lost those brakes on this hill, the driver yanking the emergency all the way, white-faced passengers at the windows. As Slack recounted this episode, Theodore took the shoulder, giving the bus ample room. From the hilltop they could see the ocean, the storm coming from that direction, pinpricks of lightning.
“They’re going to be out there in the rain,” Theodore said. “Those two women.” He shook his head. “Rough.”
Slack said nothing. It was beyond remotest human possibility that he would get involved, it was laughable that they would even ask him.
They pulled into the driveway of the Mariposa, Ham had picked one of the swankier hotels, of course. As they took the steps down to a chalet clinging to the hillside, a panorama of Manuel Antonio expanded before them, Playa Espadilla, Punta Quepos, Cathedral Point. The beauty of it was ratcheted away by the sound of helicopters, three in formation, heading for the high Savegre.
In the chalet, Hamilton Bakerfield was sitting behind a table, growling on the phone, sucking on a Löewenbräu. He sent Theodore packing with a flick of his hand.
“Listen, this is my show, I’ve got no room for fucking amateurs. Tell your people to get back in line.” He was a bull, grizzled now, kind of bent over, as if – however unlikely – life had somehow humbled him. But that was age, he must be nearing seventy. Fifteen years on, and he was just as crusty and foul of mouth. Hamilton Bakerfield, he’d trained Slack, run him, nearly killed him several times.
Bakerfield nudged the phone back onto its cradle. “The Secret Service is comprised essentially of assholes. You want a beer or are you drunk already?” He extended
his hand but didn’t bother to rise. His grip hadn’t lost its firmness.
“That was another of your lies, the story you’d retired?”
“Special assignment. The president himself called. He likes this, it’s diverting attention from his bad polls. Yeah, I’m retired. I got a place in Minnesota, on a lake, you get northern pike and pickerel. Small world, I forgot you’d gone off to live in this little shithole. How’re you doing?”
“Can’t get it up nine days out of ten. Thanks for the disability pension.”
“You got looked after. Told you not to take it in a lump.”
Slack went to the fridge, where Bakerfield had German beer, Holstens, umlauts, the real stuff. He snapped open a Löewenbräu, settled into a chair, facing Bakerfield, who was lounging, his bare feet up on a low wicker table.
“This a CIA op?” Slack asked.
“State Department. Combined federal task force. CIA, FBI, Pentagon, Secret Service. All we’re short of is local knowledge.”
“Don’t get any funny ideas,” Slack said. “I’m out of it.”
“Naw, I just wanted a chinwag. Heard you had a little set-to the other night, Sawchuk.”
“Cardinal.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.”
“All I did was take out a couple of thieves. One was the jefe of the municipality.”
“And what went on later between you and Walker’s wife?”
“She was coming on like a dive bomber.”
“She likes real men, what the fuck would she see in you?”
“Told her I was a poet, melted her heart.”
“You make it with her?”
“I spared myself the humiliation of trying.”
“Well, the senator wants her back, used or otherwise. What kind of shape do you figure she’s in? From your experience.”
“Shape? She’s a traffic-stopper.”
The Laughing Falcon Page 11