Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  He ventured as far west as Punta Remedios and Playa Los Cabanos—hanging out with the off-season tourists and Eurotrash vagabonds, scouring the near-empty beaches, waiting—then back east to check in at Playa El Tunco, Playa Conchalio, plus all the places they’d bumped into each other before: Santa María Mizata, Playa El Sunzal, the pier at La Libertad. He practiced the nonchalant greeting he’d use if he actually did find her, even as he chided himself for not finding out where she was staying, getting a number where he could reach her. Ask questions, he thought. You want to hook up with someone, ask questions. Idiot.

  He kept his hope alive by remembering the way she’d looked when he’d seen her last, the polka-dot halter and broad-rimmed hat, her tan-lined back, that moment of unwitting nakedness when she’d slipped off her glasses, while his thoughts became haunted by that smoky bedroom voice of hers. If she wasn’t the love of his life, she’d at least become the focus of an ardent obsession. The harder he looked, the more intense the need to see her became and the worse it felt when he didn’t, until the only solace he could muster was the irony that now he was the one with a devotion to vanishing things.

  His newfound connection with Malvasio proved less problematic, logistically anyway. They met twice more over those same nine days, always in San Marcelino. Jude told no one about the meetings, and Malvasio came and went with a nonchalance that underscored how well-connected he’d become. Jude surmised it was likely they even knew some of the same people, the country being what it was, but they shied away from discussing that, preferring to reminisce, Malvasio increasingly open about his days as a street cop in Chicago. Jude couldn’t help wondering at times what life might have been like had his father sat with him like this, opened up, but quickly he’d shoo the notion away, thinking it was as pointless as wishing he’d been born on a different planet.

  At the end of his furlough Jude returned to work and the tunnel vision it required, shepherding his hydrologist, Axel Odelberg, from place to place: ANDA headquarters in the capital, the bottling plant out east near San Bartolo Oriente, the test wells along the Río Conacastal. Secretly, he prepared for an unforeseen encounter with Malvasio, wanting to make sure neither of them drew attention to the other, not wanting to have to come up with an explanation on the spot. But they never crossed paths, not until his twenty days were up, when his time was once again his own and he returned to the restaurant in San Marcelino for another get-together.

  They dined on shrimp creole with casamiento, a rice and bean dish spiced with hot peppers, washing it down with cold Pilsener. The sunset drained its reds and golds into the ocean as they ate, the trilling of chiquirines and the muffled roar of the surf a steady background. After the waiter cleared their plates, Malvasio reached into his back pocket and withdrew a worn plastic envelope that he shook open. A dozen or so photographs tumbled out and he shuffled them into a stack. “Time for a little show-and-tell,” he said.

  He selected one from the group, spun it across the table. Picking it up, Jude saw Malvasio and Jude’s father in waders with their fishing gear, standing to each side of a Latino man holding a pole of his own. They stood at the end of a dock somewhere, all sunglasses and smiles.

  “That was up at Lake Darling,” Malvasio said. “Fourth of July, year before the arrests. The man in the middle—his name is Ovidio Morales.”

  Jude caught the import instantly: a name. He studied the stranger’s face more intently. “He’s the man who helped you out when you ran down here.” He felt puzzled—Malvasio had made such a point of protecting the man’s identity before. He handed the picture back. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I feel I can trust you now.” Malvasio gave Jude a disarming smile, then slipped the photo back into the stack. He took out another and handed it across the table. “I keep bringing up Candyman. You remember him, right? Phil Strock.”

  The picture was much the same as the first, three amigos, except the lineup was different and Soldier Field provided the backdrop. Jude’s dad was in the middle this time, Strock to his left, Malvasio his right. All three in their blues, happy as coots, some kind of game-day duty. Three strapping cops. The Laugh Masters.

  “I remember all you guys,” Jude said. He tried to hand the picture back.

  Malvasio didn’t reach for it. “I’ve still got friends back in Chicago. Well, ‘friends’ might be a stretch. Guys who don’t automatically slam down the phone when I call, which isn’t often, I admit. Any event, I hear Candyman’s dropped out of sight. And if somebody actually does cross his path, they say he looks awful.”

  Jude set the picture down, finally, on the table. “That surprise you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He got booted off the force and it’s not like that was a secret. Who’s gonna hire him? And he had that problem with his leg, the torn-up knee. Hear he’s almost crippled. He gave up any claim to disability in the deal he struck with IAD. My guess is he’s been on welfare or SSI or what-have-you for ten years, and the prospects there are pretty slim these days.”

  “Yeah.” Malvasio nodded, staring at the picture. “You got a point.” He seemed distracted. “But that kinda brings me around to something I was thinking about. Something that’s come up. I’ve got a line on some work for Phil, if he’s up for it.”

  Jude heard a commotion outside. Looking down, he saw an old man drawing a handcart with an oil drum lashed to its bed. Two stray dogs were nipping at his pant legs, and Jude watched as the old man fended the dogs off with a switch. Turning back to Malvasio, he shrugged. “That sounds good. Work, I mean.”

  Malvasio laughed. “Not that simple. If Phil ever got wind I so much as had a hand in doing him a favor, he’d hunt me down and set me on fire just so he could put me out with his piss.”

  “You think he blames you for what happened.”

  “Not think. Know.”

  “Lot of time’s gone by. Maybe he’s mellowed out.”

  “Mellow and the Candyman don’t mix. The man knows how to milk a grudge. That ain’t changed from what I hear. If anything, it’s gotten worse if he’s drinking the way they say.”

  Jude glanced down at the snapshot again. Strock wasn’t the most handsome of the three, Malvasio was, Jude’s dad a close second, but Strock had something about him. The slack smile, the sleepy eyelids. Lady-killer. “Why bother helping him then?”

  “Because I owe him. I’d do the same for your dad if I could.” Malvasio let that sink in for a moment, then: “Any event, that’s why I need your help.”

  Jude glanced up. “Excuse me?”

  “When’s your next trip home?”

  “I’m on the front end of ten days off. I wasn’t planning—”

  “I’ll pay for your plane fare. I’m serious. Plus pocket money.” He took a roll of bills from his pocket and started peeling off hundreds. He didn’t stop till he reached fifty. Five thousand dollars.

  “I’d like you to try and find him for me. Talk him into coming down, if you can. Ovidio has a friend with a construction company that needs to hire a man with Candyman’s skills—he was one of the best snipers SWAT had, I don’t know if you knew that. The work site’s kinda remote and it’s huge, hard to walk the perimeter. Thieves’ll walk off with the barbed wire if you’re not looking, let alone what’s inside. The company wants to put a gunman with a scope in a tower, which is perfect for Phil. But like I said, no mention of me.”

  Jude eyed the money. “Tell me we’re not talking about an airstrip.”

  Malvasio’s expression went from puzzled to bemused. Then he laughed. “You serious?”

  The U.S. Navy had one of the best radar installations in the hemisphere at Comalapa, but it did no good to track a plane and even pinpoint its landing coordinates if the local police couldn’t get judicial authority to raid the property. Corruption being what it was here, that kind of authority was virtually unheard of if the location was owned by a prominent landholder. It raised the question, again, of who exactly Malvasio worked for. />
  “The way you described it—”

  “It’s a series of dormitories for the workers on a coffee plantation up in the highlands, near the Tecapa volcano.”

  The region, near the city of Berlín, was called the Valle Agua Caliente. It was known for its coffee production.

  “Bill—”

  “Here, I’ll show you.”

  Malvasio flipped through the thin stack of pictures again and pulled out another for Jude to see. With the volcano looming darkly in the background, tidy rows of coffee trees, both pacamara and the smaller bourbon varieties, thick with berries, crosshatched a sun-swept valley. Only 2 percent of the rain forest remained, due to clear-cutting for plantations like this—coffee, sugar, cotton, rubber, bananas. But that didn’t make it criminal. A sprawling array of concrete slabs—for housing, Jude supposed—lay in the foreground acreage, surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

  Jude felt sheepish. “Okay. Sorry.” He handed the photo back.

  “No problem. I’d be skeptical too. I mean, I realize it’s a lot to ask. Given the history, let’s call it. You don’t owe me a thing.”

  “I just—”

  “There aren’t many second chances in life, okay? Not when you’ve done what we did. I’ve been lucky. I’d like to share a little of that luck with Phil. If I can just get him down here.”

  Jude realized someone standing outside the situation might think saying no should be easy. He didn’t have to be drastic about it, call the embassy, turn Malvasio in. Still, it took him several seconds to manage, “No hard feelings. But I think I’ll pass.”

  Malvasio studied him a moment, as though his gaze might change Jude’s mind. When that didn’t happen, he collected his money and shuffled it back into a tidy stack. “Fair enough.”

  “I don’t mean to be—”

  Malvasio held up his hand. “No need to explain. Just an idea. Maybe I can work it out some other way.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Malvasio sipped his beer and looked off. The silence, to Jude, felt excruciating. He wasn’t sure why. “It’s possible,” he said, “I could call around next time I’m up in Chicago, ask around, let you know if—”

  “Can I ask you something?” Malvasio’s tone was cool but not hostile. “Your principal, you told me he’s working on water usage for a soft drink plant out east somewhere?”

  “San Bartolo Oriente. The plant’s on the Río Conacastal.”

  “Do you know who the investors in that operation are?”

  “Specifically?”

  “Do you know,” Malvasio repeated, “who they are?”

  “That’s not really my area,” Jude said.

  “So for all you know, the people involved in your hydrologist’s project could be the worst of the worst down here. The oligarch goons who funded the death squads and all that hairy horseshit. Correct? Or am I missing something?”

  Jude didn’t care for the direction this was headed. “No,” he said. “Probably not.”

  “It’s the price you pay. Doing what we do. Here. You want innocent, move on.”

  “Yeah,” Jude said. “There’s always that chance.”

  Malvasio laced his fingers together, then tapped his thumbs against his chin. “You said you came down here while you were in the army. Built things—schools, clinics, bridges. Seem real proud of that. But the salvadoreños you worked with, helped train, who knows? If things take a turn down here, as they almost certainly will, those guys you helped train may end up building some things you want no part of. Places where people disappear, for instance.”

  “Bill—”

  “What I’m saying is, the people who run the show have one thing on their minds and it ain’t playing nice. They may wave the flag, talk democracy, pimp prosperity or whatever, but the bottom line’s the bottom line: me first and money talks. Just how it is, how it’s always been, always will be. And guys like you and me don’t have a say in the matter. We just do what we can the best we can, stick up for the people we care about, and if we fuck up, as we invariably do, we try to make good for the people we’ve screwed, which is the best we can offer. Life in a nutshell. Same for cops and soldiers everywhere—you, me, everybody.” Malvasio gathered up his money and put it away. He took a deep breath. “Look, sorry. I don’t mean to put you on the spot.”

  Jude said, “It’s okay.”

  “But let’s say you—not me, you—had work for Phil. You brought him down here, lined it all up, got him something that paid him back for all he’s gone through. In the final analysis, given who’s who down here, you couldn’t guarantee that whatever he did—or you did to help him—wouldn’t have a taint to it, could you?”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Would that stop you?”

  Malvasio stared long and hard. Jude found himself wanting to look away.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Maybe it would. And there’s no blame in that.” Malvasio stood up. “Look, let’s drop it. I’m gonna go down, get another beer. Want one?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Malvasio vanished and, in his absence, the excruciating silence returned. It felt worse than before, a punishment. And, in a way, a dare. For whatever reason, Jude flashed on something his father once said, near the end, during a particularly fierce bout of pre-shift drinking: “Guts and loyalty, that’s what divides the great from the not-so-great.” He threw back a shot for drama, then: “Which pretty much explains why nine tenths of humanity ain’t so great.”

  Malvasio came back carrying two bottles of Pilsener and a greasy basket of papas fritas. “Still hungry, I guess.” He dropped the fries onto the table and sat back down.

  Jude glanced out again at the glassy ink-blue ocean, veins of amber and scarlet marbling the darkened sky. “Look, Bill. This thing with Strock. I can’t make any promises. But let me see what I can do.”

  5

  By the time Jude reached La Libertad and turned east toward the Costa del Bálsamo, night had fallen. He decreased speed, anticipating the switchbacks along the steep cliffs above the shoreline, Malvasio’s five thousand dollars stuffed in his pocket. It wasn’t the only thing he’d carried away. The people who run the show have one thing on their minds.… The phrase kept tracking in his brain, resonating in a way Malvasio couldn’t have predicted.

  In a perfect world, Jude supposed, everyone would be kind and selfless, abundance would be abundant, the snotty would share their toys, and the shepherd would lie down with the lamb or whatever. But in the here and now it was just a rule of the cosmos that more often than not the people who made things happen, the kind he was hired to protect, were rip-roaring assholes.

  It was something that had been building over time. He’d taken the job on a lark, figuring if it didn’t suit him he could always walk. But he’d liked the work, the demands on his mind, the calm required, the focus, the breadth of knowledge. And every now and then he got assigned a man like Axel, some hard-nosed pragmatist with not just his head on straight but a conscience in tow, which made things seem okay. But other times he felt like he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and bungled his way into a kind of maze where around every corner there waited another prancing, self-infatuated gasbag who didn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone but himself—and came factory-equipped with a million excuses for why his smug little schemes were in fact the cornerstone of his virtue.

  So tidy, the belief that everyone made out best if you slit their throats and raped their wives and sold their children into slavery on your way to the top. They’d do the same to you, or would if they had the spine, which made it all fair.

  And stand back if some unthinking soul dared mention the tenant farmers evicted from their homes at gunpoint, their villages flooded by the latest pointless dam; the fisheries wiped out by a tourist haven slapped up on the beach; the teenagers hired for a maquila at a couple dollars a day, going home to their brothers and sisters in dirt-floor shacks for a dinner of cornmeal and bean paste and putrid water, while the me
n in charge made off like, well, bandits. You want the brass ring, you have to take risks, they’d tell you, though he’d never seen any of them risk so much as a bad tan. Poverty’s a state of mind, they said, a victim mentality, a culture of blame—it’s your own fucking fault if you’re penniless, uneducated, screwed. Get some initiative. In the end, over time, beyond the rainbow, the system works. Look at me.

  How many times had Jude sat in a car or at a restaurant table, listening to crap like that? And boy, those characters liked to talk. But over time, as he endured more and more monologues, he began to detect something else, something he felt sure they wanted kept hidden, if they even knew it was there. Basically, he saw a put-upon boy lingering behind the eyes, the kind of snot whose favorite phrase was “I don’t care.” Who grew up wanting nothing more than what he could get away with. Who only felt his manhood come to life when the one thing on his mind was himself.

  And in the end, Jude knew, that’s what it got down to—what kind of man you meant to be. Despite Malvasio’s excellent point that anything you do, regardless how pure the motive, can be messed with, stolen from you, Jude had to admit he’d been happy in the army, building clinics and schools and bridges in the mountains, digging wells through granite and volcanic rock for people who had nothing. Not because he was making a bundle doing it, obviously, and not because he didn’t recognize the military for what it was: a bureaucracy of roughnecks and good ol’ boys beholden to men in suits. He’d just felt insanely gratified, even lucky, when at the end of each day the nearest villagers would gather around, offer gifts and food, then step back and applaud him and the other filthy, sweaty Americans like they were movie stars.

  Not that it wasn’t tricky, feeding off the thanks of others. That, too, was a kind of self-congratulation. Like money.