Blood of Paradise
Page 2
Strock, on disability leave, got arrested at his north-side flat. Malvasio, the reputed ringleader, was never found. He’d fled, rumors went, to El Salvador, where he had contacts from taking part in a police training program. And that, for those who cared, added the final ironic twist to the whole business: The man who got away vanished down a path paved with good intentions.
Jude drove in his pickup to San Marcelino, a fishing village at the western, shabbier limits of the Costa del Sol, barreling down the long dusty lane from the highway as he headed for the restaurant on the beach where Malvasio said he’d be waiting.
It was late afternoon, Jude delayed by a herd of intractable oxen on the road between La Libertad and Comalapa. He parked his truck in an alley beside the restaurant, hoisted his spare from the truck bed, and checked it with the bartender to make sure thieves didn’t walk away with it. Finding only staff downstairs, gathered around a boom box playing a jaunty two-beat cumbia, he climbed to the second floor. No one was there except a lone American sitting at a wood-plank table along the outer wall. Beyond him, the beach extended eastward for miles, rimmed with Miami palms and broad-leaf almond trees. Fishing boats—lanchas—dotted the surf, heading out for a night of work as a hazy red sun perched low above the horizon.
Seeing Jude approach, the lone man rose and stuck out his hand. “My God. For a moment there I would’ve sworn it was Ray.”
It wasn’t the wisest opening but Jude let it go. Besides, Malvasio wasn’t the only one startled by appearances. He was much thinner, still fit but wiry. The heat could do that. His once-handsome face looked drawn and weathered, rimmed with hair cut short and patched with gray, his skin tanned to the point he could pass for a local. Be a trick to match him with an old picture, Jude thought, wondering if that wasn’t the point. Mostly, though, the change was in the eyes. They had a lifeless density to them now, like he’d walked back the long way from the worst imaginable.
“Sit,” Malvasio said. “You want something to eat? Drink?”
Jude noticed that Malvasio was working on a bowl of crema de camarones, a cream chowder made with shrimp, and washing it down with Pilsener, the local lager. Pilsener, the ads went, Es Cosa de Cheros. It’s a guy thing.
“Beer’d be nice,” Jude said, taking a seat.
Malvasio turned his head and cupped a hand to his mouth, yelling to be heard over the boom box: “¡Paulo, otra fría por favor!” Turning back, he said, “Ironic, our both being here. In El Salvador, I mean.”
Isn’t it though, Jude thought. “You found out I was down here how exactly?”
Malvasio ducked behind a smile, picked up his spoon, and trailed it lazily through his soup. “Get right to the point.”
“It’s a fair question.”
“Of course it is. But it came out sounding like you’re sorry you came.” Malvasio glanced up. “Are you?”
“Not yet.”
That earned a laugh. “Well, long story short, like I told you, I’ve got friends down here.”
“We talking about the guys you helped train, the ones who supposedly tucked you away?”
Their eyes met, and for an instant Jude saw the man he’d known growing up looking back at him. It felt gratifying. And unnerving.
Malvasio said, “Wasn’t sure how much you knew.”
“I’m just repeating what they said on the news,” Jude said. “That a problem?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Suddenly the waiter was there, prompting a truce as he set a small wet glass and another bottle of Pilsener on the table. Jude pushed the glass aside and wiped the tin taste off the lip of the beer bottle with his shirttail, waiting for the waiter to vanish downstairs again.
“I’d like to hear your side of it,” Jude said, wincing a little at how earnest he sounded.
Malvasio tilted his bowl and spooned up the last portion of milky soup. “You’re right. I met a guy down here through the training program, and when I needed a place to run I thought of him. He did me a good turn, stuck his neck out. And the FBI sent a fugitive team down here, they grilled my guy good but he held his mud—not that they could do anything to him, but still, I owe him for that. I’ve done what I can to keep my nose clean, not embarrass him, and he’s referred me on to people he knows, a job here, job there. I’ve done okay.”
“You work for who now?”
“I’d rather not get into names, if that’s all right. Not yet. Let’s just say I work for some people in business here.”
That means less than nothing, Jude thought. “Doing?”
“Private security, same as you, though mostly I train. A lot of the guys down here are ex-military, which means their major talent is waiting to get paid.”
He made a little snort at his own joke. Jude was still back at same as you.
“Any event, that’s the long way around to how I found out you were down here. You’re working for some guy who’s involved in water issues, am I right?”
Jude’s current principal was Axel Odelberg, a hydrologist working with Horizon Project Management, an American company lending expertise on aquifer drawdown and recharge rates for a soft drink company called Estrella. It had a bottling plant it hoped to expand near the town of San Bartolo Oriente.
Jude said, “How do you know that?”
“Saw your name and his on the checkout sheet at the archives at ANDA’s headquarters in San Salvador.”
ANDA was the national water agency, on the block to be privatized. Jude had accompanied Axel there more times than he could count.
“My people have land use and water rights stuff to arrange,” Malvasio said. “That means they deal with ANDA all the time. Just luck of the draw, one day when I was on the travel squad, we showed up the same day as you, maybe couple hours after. I’d pick out McManus regardless, but with a first name Jude, I figured if it was just coincidence it earned some kind of prize. I asked my buddy—again, I’d like to leave out names for now, don’t take that wrong—and he asked around and finally got back to me, gave me the bead on what you were doing here and how I might get in touch. I hope that’s okay.”
Too late if it isn’t, Jude thought. It must have shown on his face, because Malvasio jumped right back in with, “Believe me, it’s not like my guy’s handing out your name and cell to the highest bidder. It’s not like that.”
“I’d like his name,” Jude said, thinking: It’s only fair. His information for mine.
“I’d really rather not do that.”
“I’m not asking,” Jude said. “I want his name.”
Malvasio seemed taken aback by Jude’s tone. He’d known a boy.
“Listen, Jude, this guy, he can’t afford trouble.”
“How much did you pay him?”
“Nothing, it was a favor. Look—you know how things work here. The important stuff gets done on a handshake—people you know, people you trust. My buddy trusted me. The folks I work for would make things right if I crossed any lines, but I wasn’t going to do that. I owe too many people and, really, all I wanted was to sit here, like this, with you. Ten years is a long time away from everything you ever knew. I saw a name I recognized, one that meant a lot to me once. Still does. It felt like a gift, I wanted to connect. If there’s any blame to be had in that, it’s mine.”
Jude wasn’t quite sure what to make of all that, but he felt moved. Again, the story was in the eyes. Malvasio could talk all he wanted about his “buddy”—that wasn’t comradery, that was barter. Laugh Master Bill was a friendless man. Maybe he’d escaped his due in the States, but the past ten years had taken something out of him, like he’d served a kind of free-range solitary confinement. Not that lonesome excused anything. But if Jude really wanted to press the issue of the local cop digging up his private number, sneaking it to Malvasio, he’d also have to explain to somebody in officialdom that when a suspected felon, a fugitive—and, rumor had it, a killer—had used Jude’s number to get in touch, the upright American, young McManus, hadn’t contacted th
e embassy, the FBI, the Policía Nacional Civil, or anyone else. On the contrary, he’d jumped in his truck and hustled right over. There were reasons for that, of course, but they wouldn’t matter to anyone but him.
A pair of wispy spiders scurried across the tabletop. Watching them, Malvasio said, “Tell me what you’d like to do.”
Jude made a show of his discontent but then just shrugged. “Nothing. Let’s drop it.”
Malvasio’s smile started small, then grew. “Thank you, sir.”
“These people you work for,” Jude said, “what kind of business are we talking about?”
“They’re old money,” Malvasio said, “which down here means land. They grow sugar, bananas. Even found a way to expand their coffee production—no small trick, the way the Vietnamese have glutted the market the past couple years. There’s a tale. You want a racket, try the international banks that funded that disaster.”
“Your employers know what happened? Back in Chicago, I mean.”
“It’s a bit of an open secret and, well, it’s interesting. What we did, me and your dad and Phil, I mean—it’s a shrug and a wink down here. Somebody thinks you’re out of line, he cuts out your heart and feeds it to the dogs. You find bodies along the road without heads or hands, they call it a haircut and a manicure. But hell, you know all that. You work here.”
Jude owed his job to the explosion in gang violence since the end of the civil war, a circumstance that had prompted a resurgence of the death squads. Even the Policía Nacional Civil—the new, supposedly incorruptible national police force that Malvasio and other American cops had helped train—were implicated. No surprise, the few officers charged were always acquitted. What jury would convict them? The escuadrones went out at night in vans and SUVs with the windows tinted black, trolling for prey: gang members and garden variety criminals mostly, but prostitutes, too. Homosexuals. Transvestites. They called it limpieza social. Social cleansing.
“These people you work for,” Jude said, “you get any read on where they stand on things like that?”
“Things like what?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
Malvasio waved him off. “I’m just the help. They don’t share their politics with me.”
“What about your politics?”
“My what?”
“Your politics. Loyalties. Whatever.”
Malvasio shooed a fly from his empty soup bowl. “Look, the point I was making was just that the people who run things down here are hard-core. To them, guy like me, I’m a prom princess.”
“You may be selling yourself short there. I’m sure I’m not the only one who might draw a parallel between what you and my dad did back in Chicago and what happens here. Or have I got something wrong?”
The trilling of chiquirines, the local variety of cricket, crescendoed suddenly to such a pitch it nearly drowned out the cumbia music. Malvasio waited it out. “Is that really what you think?”
Jude began chewing his lip, a nervous tic he’d had for years and seemed helpless to master. “You left behind some serious wreckage. I’m sure you know that.”
“Whoa. Whoa. Listen to me.” For the first time, Malvasio’s composure gave way. “Those stories that came out about slangers capped by me or your dad? That’s all crap. We killed nobody. Period.”
“More from luck than intention. At least that’s the way some of the stories seemed to me.”
“Whose stories, your dad’s?”
“No.” Jude and his father had talked about none of this before he’d died.
“The news then,” Malvasio said.
“Yeah.”
“You believe the news?” Like it was the stupidest thing imaginable. “Look, we were wrong. What we did was wrong. Absolutely. But I’m gonna say this again—we smoked nobody. The body count they tried to lay on us was gang action, moes and hooks, doing what they do. Not us. You gotta believe that. For your father’s sake.”
Jude was of various minds as to what he should or shouldn’t believe for his father’s sake. “What about that guy they fished out of the Chicago River?”
It was one of the stories recounted on TV the night of his dad’s arrest—some north-side banger claimed three men in coveralls and ski masks dragged him off his corner in a sleet storm, drove him down to the wharves, robbed him, stripped him naked, then gave him an impromptu back-flip lesson into the cold greasy river. Luckily, he’d found a ledge before going under one last time, and he’d stood there, screaming for help, till a warehouseman heard him.
Malvasio said, “You talking about Small Mickens?”
“I can’t recall the name.”
“I don’t mean to sound glib, Jude, but if memory serves, he survived.”
“He almost drowned.”
“Small? Yeah. Water so deep he had to walk out.”
“People die from exposure, too.”
“It was a warm spell between cold fronts and he came out okay—I know, I was standing there. Besides which, Small had quite a little curb service, used eight-year-olds for touts—the news tell you that? A mouthy little wannabe always crowing about how he was in the mix with the Insane Vice Lord Killers, but he was from nowhere, a fat little freak who let any hubba pigeon with a wet spot between her legs work twists for rock.” Malvasio sighed, dropped his head, and ran his hands across his cropped hair in a kind of private torment. After a few long seconds, he said quietly, “No. Cancel that. You’re right. I said it before but it bears repeating: What we did was wrong. All of it.” He looked up, eyes filled with: How many times do you want me to say it? “But we didn’t kill people. We just … didn’t.”
Jude felt meager. It was, perhaps, a cheap shot, dragging in the death squad business. There’d been all sorts of rumors floating around back then, but nothing was ever proved. And yet: “Can I ask you a question?”
Malvasio chuckled. “There some way I could stop you?”
“That vice cop who was killed right before you disappeared. Winters?”
The mirth drained from Malvasio’s face. “That.”
“Yeah. That.”
In the early morning hours before the Laugh Master arrests, a vice detective named Hank Winters was found on his back in an alley off Milwaukee Avenue, half his face ripped open from a point-blank gun blast. In the TV statements regarding Malvasio’s disappearance, the police spokesmen took pains not to say too much about possible links between the two events. Malvasio wasn’t a suspect, they said. They just wanted him to come in, surrender on the Laugh Master charges, help them sort out the Winters slaying if he could.
Malvasio looked off toward the darkening ocean, his eye twitching. Finally, in a soft, measured voice: “Lotta stuff got said about your dad and Phil and me. About how corrupt we were. Maybe so. But I’ve never, never known a cop more bent than Hank Winters. Guy had the conscience of a tapeworm. And plenty of enemies. Same deal with the other killings they tried to pin on us. You could fill a freight train with suspects for every single one. But when in doubt, blame the badge, right?”
“You saying you didn’t do it?”
With his fingers, Malvasio pounded out a little rat-a-tat on the tabletop. “Okay. Fair enough. Let’s deal with this.” He took a longer pull from his beer this time, then settled in. The sadness in his eyes hardened into something else. “There was a pimp Winters was working as a CI and the guy needed a little arm-twisting. So Hank had a bench warrant issued on some failure-to-appear, just to drag the skank in, teach him a lesson. Thing he forgot to tell the two uniforms serving the warrant? This pimp was on a crack binge like the world was gonna end. Guys knocked on the door, the bag of crap opened up and shot the first cop in the head. Boom. That was it. Twenty-six years old, the cop who got bagged—your age, basically. With a wife and a kid and one on the way. I knew him, liked him. Thought he had, I dunno, promise. Winters got called in by IAD but he danced his way around the whole thing and that just got to me.”
Good God, Jude thought. He’s confessing.
Malvasio’s last few words, for all their import, sounded strangely far away. Jude found himself hung up on that one phrase: She’d had a two-year thing with your old man. The things you don’t know, he thought. The things you should’ve been wise to all along.
“If it hadn’t been for the Winters thing,” Malvasio went on, “I’d have stuck around. Taken the heat like your dad. Like Phil. But there was no way I’d ever get an honest break on that, not with everything else. People want a hanging, they don’t fuss much over details. And I figured, with me gone, your dad and Phil could point the blame my direction, say it was all my doing. And from what I heard about the deals they struck, I’d say that’s pretty much what went down.”