9
As Jude drove back through the tunnels and along the shoreline cliffs, headlights spraying the deserted two-lane highway, any lingering qualms he might have had about returning to Chicago vanished. Getting away now, however dubious the reason, felt welcome. He could use the trip to turn his mind away from what had just happened—how could something take off so brilliantly, he wondered, and crash to the ground so fast? Because you can’t get the words out, he told himself, not the way you want. And then, when the thing starts turning to crap before your eyes, you act before you think. On the job it can be a plus, react fast, don’t ponder the options. But not with women. Act on impulse, who knew what baggage you were dragging along? How many times had he done that? Whatever the number, add one.
He tried to muster a little hope that maybe, with his going away, they could gain some perspective. They’d get back on track when he returned, laugh it off, call it a misunderstanding—and yet it seemed cowardly to leave it like that. I should phone her now, he thought, straighten it out. He reached for the glove box to collect his cell, only then realizing he’d neglected to get her number. Though he knew where she lived now, he still had no clue how to reach her by phone. And she was in the same boat—she hadn’t gotten his info, either. The international complications were irrelevant. There’d be nothing but silence between them the whole time he was gone. And maybe that’s for the best, he thought. Even if it isn’t, you’re stuck.
He arrived at El Dorado Mar as dawn was hazing the sky a grayish blue, and rousted the guard with a horn toot. Once the gate was drawn back, he drove down the winding tree-shaded lane to Horizon House, parked, punched in his code at the pass switch panel, and snuck inside.
Only Fitz was up—shorts and T-shirt, mussed hair, bloodshot eyes—sitting in the kitchen. He was the crew’s early riser, a frequent insomniac, something he blamed on his demining work in Kuwait after the first Gulf War. It also explained the constant tremor in his hands: eighteen months of ten-hour days, spent beneath a brutal sun holding his breath, sticking carpenter nails into firing mechanisms and unscrewing detonators on Bouncing Bettys and Chinese T-72s. He said he’d seen other guys slip up—one second they’re there, the next there’s just a bloody spray of dust and that percussive whoomph you never forget. It was why he didn’t take field assignments, just did the advance work for everyone else. He couldn’t trust his body under stress anymore.
Even with Fitz’s quirks, Jude felt relieved at having no one else to deal with. He didn’t want his private life common knowledge, especially now.
Fitz had made the day’s first pot of coffee and Jude poured himself a quick cup, needing a jolt to clear his mind before heading to his room to pack. He was taking his first sip when Fitz said quietly from behind, “Must feel good, get it out of your system.”
Jude turned around. Fitz sat there, smiling. It didn’t seem exactly a friendly smile.
“Excuse me?”
“The bone dance,” Fitz said. “Poon platoon. Horizontal mambo.” Something cold and a little vile slid around in his eyes, then stopped—that was the scary part—then slid around again. “No offense,” he said, “but I kinda figured you as overdue. This job makes it hard. Hard to connect, I mean, with the ladies. Unless you pay for it.”
Jude realized further silence at this point might seem overly fussy. “I guess you could say that.”
“Word to the wise? Put it behind you.” Fitz’s eyes did their trick again. “Some fuckhead slips up through a crowd with a gun or a knife, your brain’s wrapped around your dick? Don’t think it can’t happen.”
Chances are good it’s not an issue, Jude thought, thinking of where things stood with Eileen, but he’d be damned if he’d share that with Fitz. “Thanks for the advice.” He managed a smile. Then, seeing a way to change the subject: “Mind if I ask you a question?”
Fitz dropped an unsteady hand into his lap. “Sure. Go ahead.”
“I was shooting the breeze with some people down at the beach, and somebody mentioned a worker dormitory being built for a coffee plantation up around the Tecapa volcano. You heard anything about that?”
He’d had no time to do any independent digging into Malvasio’s story. Not that he’d felt a pressing need, he’d resigned himself to the risk. Maybe that was rash but it was how he felt—and nothing that had happened since he’d agreed to go had changed that. He didn’t want to call any more attention to his trip than he already had, but as long as he had Fitz at his disposal, why not one quick question? Just be careful, he told himself.
Fitz mulled it over. “Why do you think I’d hear about it?”
“No reason. I was just curious. It seemed odd, given the way coffee prices have been, that somebody’d be expanding.”
“There’s a whole lotta odd in the economy down here.” Fitz drained the last of his coffee and it seemed a chore—closing his eyes to concentrate, holding the cup steady, putting it down slowly, like it might explode. “But if it’s not a threat to anybody, I’m not going to pay much attention. I’ve got plenty to focus on as it is.”
“Sure,” Jude said. “Understood.”
“You were thinking what—they were building an airfield? Drug labs?”
“I wasn’t thinking anything, really. Like I said, I just wasn’t sure it made sense.”
“Some of the coffee producers have figured out how to turn a profit by growing a lower-grade bean, the robusta variety instead of arabica. I know that much.”
“Okay. That explains it.”
“I mean, I don’t know for sure.”
“But it makes sense.” Come on, Jude thought. Let it go.
“If only making sense were the better part of normal down here.” Fitz pushed out his chair and rose from the table to rinse his cup in the sink. “But I guess that’s why guys like you and me have work.” He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. “Have a safe trip home, by the way.”
Two hours later, as Jude sat aboard the TACA airliner at Comalapa preparing for takeoff, that one word came back to him again and again: home. And as the moments ticked past, the things around him began to melt away—the other passengers gaggling about, the stewardesses slamming shut the overhead bins, the baggage handlers loading the hold below—and he found himself back on the living room couch beside his mother, listening as the FBI agents tore the old abode apart like it was a crack house.
He remembered the sound, like carpentry in reverse, the havoc punctuated with snide repartee and occasional laughter. The tall agent with the milky green eyes circled back from time to time, retaining an air of stoic calm, almost sympathy, but Jude saw through that. And the local cops, the ones who knew his dad, they just lumped around, unable to meet his eyes.
His mother sat there in a fierce stillness as the ransacking of her home dragged on. Jude, sitting beside her, made a show of complaining twice on her behalf, but all he earned for the bother was a phony promise the first time, a threat the next. He joined her in tight-lipped rage after that, feeling useless, and his torn-up ankle just made that worse.
The injury to his ankle, that was a story in itself, a kind of morality tale in miniature.
It was the day before, and right up to the moment he got hurt, things had been edging toward perfect: summer two-a-days, not too hot, first practice in full pads. Jude responded to the coaches’ constant goad to punish that man by pasting some faceless sophomore on the hamburger squad during one-on-ones. Getting low and square, he drilled the kid so hard it turned heads—even the coaches flinched a little at the sound of the hit. But he wasn’t done. He hoisted the kid clear off the ground, carried him back five yards, and, driving with his shoulder, planted him in the dirt with one of those fierce snot-gurgling thuds you dream about.
The showboating cost him. His ankle buckled under and almost snapped. He bolted up like it hadn’t happened but he’d felt it, heard it even—the way you do, the loud clicking thunk in the joint, the echo up the bone. He tried to jog back to the tackling line but the thi
ng turned to muck under his weight. Two managers had to help him off the field. Meanwhile, Mr. Faceless Sophomore Hamburger finally sat up and took a neck-snapping whiff of smelling salts.
And so, the day after, there Jude sat in the living room, next to his brooding mother, his ankle a fat, blue throbbing thing at the end of his leg, a testament to anybody who cared to notice what a hopeless case he was.
Finally, a cry went up from the basement, a sound so lusty you’d have thought they’d discovered Jimmy Hoffa mummified in the crawl space. The tall lead agent excused himself and followed the sound downstairs. Ten minutes passed before he came back, a clump of money in each hand, wrapped in cellophane like sandwiches—to contain the smell, Jude guessed. It looked ragged and soiled, street cash. The agent laid one stack beside the other on the coffee table, then stared right at Jude with those odd green eyes.
“Found these and more like them downstairs, behind a false wall panel, a matter of feet from where your bed is. About twenty thousand, we think. Just a rough guess. Mind telling me who it belongs to?”
Not a false panel, Jude thought, a loose one. He’d installed them all himself—he was good that way, working with his hands—knew the spot the agent meant, difficult to seal flush because of a bulging joint in a water pipe. He’d shown it to his dad once, asking advice. “Forget about it,” the old man had said. “Hide it with something. A chair, some shelves.” And Jude had done that: Hidden it. Forgotten.
Before he could say any of that, his mother reached out, grabbed his knee hard, and squeezed. “He’s a minor. He’s not answering questions till we speak to a lawyer.”
Jude shot her a look but obeyed, saying nothing. The agent glanced from one to the other, waiting them out. Finally, he gave it up, collected the money, and said, “Very well,” then returned downstairs.
Jude whispered, “He hid his—”
“Shut up!” In her lap she strangled one hand with the other. “For God’s sake don’t make things any worse than they are.”
He waited but she wouldn’t look at him. He wondered what she knew, what she was hiding. Or if she was simply trying to keep what remained of her life in one piece.
He sank into his own reckoning then, looking at the thing from every angle he could. He felt betrayed, the old man hiding all that money where it might be considered not his but his son’s—Cash ain’t a crime, he’d say, and you’re a juvie. And yet Jude caught a backhanded compliment in it, too, a show of trust. You’ll know how to handle yourself, his father seemed to be saying, if it comes to that. Did he ever intend to tell Jude about it? How did he think his son would react? Jude never learned the answers to those questions. By the time he got up the nerve to ask, the old man was dead.
It wasn’t till some time later that he saw the other thing, the one that troubled him even more. There was an eerie parallel between what happened to the two of them separately, one day apart: proud and suited up one minute, humbled and taken away the next. Like it was meant to be, a lesson from on high to them both: Don’t get cocky. The things you take for granted, rely on—the things that make you who you are—can vanish in a heartbeat.
And that’s how you find out, Jude thought, what it feels like to be faceless.
10
Malvasio sat up and rolled the stiffness from his neck. Beside him, the girl fidgeted beneath the sheets and drew away, sensing he’d woken. An unconscious impulse, her withdrawal, and unearned since he’d never touched her, not that way. He had his standards, after all. Some of these kids showed up already boiling with disease.
Her name was Anabella. She looked about twelve, scrawny and dark with a broad face and a slubby little nose. She had long straight hair that he foresaw getting cut short, molded into the pin-curled helmet the trashier local streetwalkers were famous for.
She was a reward, a bone tossed to him by the judge and the colonel, and only a fool would deny them their displays of macho largesse. She’d arrived last week from Honduras, one of thirty or so orphans and street kids on the finca at the moment, most of them due to move on today. Many had arrived with first degree malnutrition, endemic in the region—they didn’t scream out at you with fly-coated eyes and bloated bellies like the haunting kids of Africa, they just withered away from diarrhea or slowly starved to death. Here on the finca, though, they’d been fed and treated for intestinal parasites to the point they were fit enough for work—proof, Malvasio supposed, that mercy took many forms.
Of the group, a precious few would get handed over to the nuns at a local orphanage, to see if they possessed a talent for obedient suffering indicative of a religious vocation. A few more, the most rugged and unappealing of the bunch, would get sent to the judge’s cane fields. Others, boys and girls alike, would get shipped to brothels in Acajutla or the capital, where they would have the only encounters they would ever know with the rich and powerful. The rest—and this, Malvasio guessed, would be Anabella’s fate—would get sent to Guatemala and then on to a ratty little suburb outside Mexico City. There, stashed in a guarded house run by mamacitas who would console them and beat them and tutor them in the tricks of survival, they would wait until the colonel’s contacts arrived, pimps from a family of pimps who would dress them up in skimpy, hookerish things, pink and black, then parade them one by one in front of a crowd of nameless men until it was time to walk back into the catacomb of filthy rooms, armed with a condom and two sheets of toilet paper, where behind a drawn sheet they’d launch their new lives—fifty pesos for straight sex, clothes left on; fifty more pesos, the skirt comes up; fifty more, the bra comes off; fifty more on top of that for a blow job, with twenty more shelled out for every exotic position requested. Soon enough a wholesaler would step forward and pay for their transport to the border, and once across they’d get handed over to men waiting in vans that would carry them to the major hubs—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta—or anywhere else they could pay off their passage. For the next few years, maybe longer, they’d be at the mercy of men with wants that would make those days in the Mexican catacomb feel like Christmas, until they ran away or were killed for trying or died from an overdose or disease, the few survivors managing to soldier on with a steely, blank-eyed numbness that would be, from that point on, a lifelong companion—especially for those who graduated to the status of mamacita themselves.
For the past week the girls had helped clean the judge’s hacienda, the boys joining the colonel’s squad of zacateros clearing brush. It might well prove the last honest work many of them would ever know, just as they would look back at the finca itself as a sort of paradise.
Malvasio got up and drew the curtains open for the sake of a little air. He felt desperate for the rains, mosquitoes be damned. When he turned back around he found the girl watching him, the sheet pulled up to her chin, eyes dull as shirt buttons. Knowing what she wanted, he went to the room’s one chair, dug inside his pant pocket, removed his cell phone, and tossed it onto the bed. It was one of five he owned, all bought from hustlers at the mercado central. The country was swimming with black-market cells and he made it a point never to use the same phone for longer than a week.
The girl gathered the thing up happily, instantly scrolling to the screen settings, holding the gizmo to her face like a tiny TV. Soon she’d be playing the various ringers over and over, fascinated by the dinky bing-bong melodies that, when loud enough, reminded Malvasio of Vegas slots. Bizet’s “Toreador Song” seemed to hold a particular fascination for her.
When Malvasio fled the States, the man he sought out for help, Ovidio Morales, was a lieutenant in the national anti-narcotics squad, famous for breaking up a Colombian smuggling ring (while secretly shielding the local military officers involved). A man who understood loyalty and gratitude and the subtler nuances of the law, Ovidio proved an exceptional guardian angel, introducing Malvasio to men who could help him.
In time, with proper precautions, Malvasio ventured back to the States, stealing across the border with a new name each time�
�Richard Ferry his most recent incarnation. Up north he picked up odd jobs from men who could pay to see their seamier wants realized: landlords who had a gang or squatter problem, businessmen being shaken down by a poor choice in out-of-town company, drug dealers with runaway wives or accountants. It had worked out well for almost a decade, the work increasingly remunerative and complex, but the last job had backfired: A whole neighborhood had burned to the ground and a federal informant was among the casualties—through no fault of mine, Malvasio thought. Regardless, his situation in El Salvador went to hell. The U.S. embassy cranked up the heat, deploying an FBI fugitive unit in-country, just as they had when Malvasio first arrived. Fortunately, they enjoyed no more success this time than the last, but Ovidio couldn’t risk protecting him anymore. And so Malvasio had to root around for another angel.
The man he found was Hector Torres, one of Ovidio’s introductions. He owned the restaurant in San Marcelino where Malvasio met with Jude, plus other nightclubs and restaurants both around the capital and out east, in San Miguel, even one in San Bartolo Oriente named El Arriero. Great conduits for laundering money, restaurants, which was how Torres had insinuated his way into the graces of the powerful.
His uncle, the original owner of El Arriero, had been kidnapped by the guerrillas early in the war and then shot dead during an escape attempt. The body got dumped off in the restaurant’s trash, at which point Hector stepped into his uncle’s shoes and let it be known he would get his revenge. Soon members of the White Warriors Union came to call, and money started flowing from a group of exiled oligarchs in Miami and Guatemala City. The money arrived as investment capital for his expanding business interests, except those interests weren’t expanding quite as much as the sums in question suggested. Instead he skimmed his take, then funneled the rest of the cash to the especiales from the National Guard or Treasury Police, who kidnapped suspected dissidents and handed them over to the Fuerza Aérea’s infamous A-II unit.
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