Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  That was how Hector came to know the colonel—Colonel Narciso Vides, a former intelligence officer with A-II, linked to the “night free-fall training” that consisted of dumping live, bound guerrillas from C-47s over the Pacific Ocean. A-II also had a knack for executing common criminals just so the bodies could get pitched from helicopters over the FMLN stronghold at Guazapa volcano.

  With the Peace Accords in 1992, the colonel quietly surrendered his commission. He already had his future charted, thanks to Judge Saturnino Regalado.

  The colonel and judge had forged their bond during the war, when the colonel introduced the judge to an Argentine military advisor who had a plan concerning the ever-expanding number of insurgent orphans in the countryside. The Argentines were old hands at this, the colonel said, and in short order the children were being collected and shipped off to other countries throughout Latin America for work or adoption, depending on their age, skills, or beauty. The scheme was originally conceived as a way to demoralize the resistance, but soon a method became a métier, even after the Argentine advisor slithered back to Buenos Aires in the wake of the Falklands disaster. And there was never a lack of children. The poor bred like cattle, the colonel was known to say—in a country the size of Massachusetts with a population density equal to India’s, no problem loomed so large as the sexual liberality of the penniless. Who but themselves did they have to blame if their children became livestock, a point underscored by how freely some of them sold their kids outright—or, currying favor, handed them up for nothing—to the colonel’s touts traveling village to village.

  The blanket amnesty provided as part of the Peace Accords shielded the judge and colonel from prosecution for crimes committed during the war, while simple corruption had protected them since. Civil suits filed in the States had begun to blink on their litigation radars, but locally the two men still had sheer political clout and family connections to carry the day. The judge in particular was untouchable, enjoying a social station having roots centuries deep in colonial patronage and the cafetero system, a generous donor to the church and its many orphanages. The man had powerful friends everywhere—one might as well try to indict God’s sidekick. And the colonel had his tanda, military academy classmates, watching his back, the ones still in uniform as well as those who’d already parlayed their war service into private sector profit. He also took considerable care to champion war veterans, to the point many ex-soldiers and their families saw him as a personal benefactor.

  But the nexus of influence to which Malvasio was currently beholden remained incomplete without mention of Wenceslao Sola.

  Sola, connected by marriage to one of the catorce familias, the infamous fourteen families, served as a secret patrón for several brothels about the country, which was how he went from being a mere member of the colonel’s and judge’s social circle—everyone of a certain station knew everyone else in El Salvador—to the role of partner in their operation. In time, with contacts made during his travels, Sola began not merely buying children for his bordellos but helping to move them north.

  There were other aspects of Sola’s pedigree, though, that recommended him to the colonel and judge. He’d come of age during the last years of the war as a member of Los Patrióticos, a gang of ARENA-linked professionals who matriculated through the First Brigade’s civil defense training program. Los Patrióticos embraced the counterrevolutionary ethos with rabid gusto, forsaking firearms (military ammunition might be traced) and preferring instead strangulation, throat-slashing, and poisoning—but not before the captive had been tortured, disfigured, and, if a woman, repeatedly raped. The Grand Guignol sadism surprised some observers since, in the words of one atypically candid U.S. Department of Defense analyst, they were really nothing but “rich momma’s boys and potbellied patriots.”

  This observation did not, of course, dissuade the U.S. Military Group from funding and training Los Patrióticos and others of their ilk. As one U.S. military commander on the ground confessed, “We’re already a little pregnant.”

  After the war Sola did what everyone else in his circle did—milk his connections for plum business deals, aided by the privatization schemes of the American-sponsored neoliberal economic program, which basically handed back to the wealthy everything the Peace Accords had tried to redistribute. One such windfall was a seat on the board of Estrella in San Bartolo Oriente, which bought its sugar from cane fields owned by Judge Regalado, and which had Colonel Vides to vet its workforce for unionists and other subversivos.

  In truth, the bottling plant’s recent expansion concealed a hidden purpose: It was step one in the company’s bid to move in as the regional water authority when the national water agency, ANDA, was privatized, something said to be in the works if ARENA could hold on to power in the upcoming election, a virtual lock given recent polls. And that scheme was green-lighted by the powers that be, both here and in Washington, as a way to pay back Estrella’s board and executive committee for their help in furthering “hemispheric security.” But then ODIC—the Overseas Development Insurance Corporation, an export credit agency based in Washington—butted in because an American conglomerate named Torkland Overby, tapped by the Estrella board to “invest,” agreed to do so but didn’t want to risk anything. Who could blame them? And even though the ODIC flacks were sympathetic—the bank was a way station for spooks, basically—their involvement triggered the bureaucracy and that meant scrutiny. So now you had pencil pushers kicking the tires and checking under the hood and sooner rather than later it dawned on somebody the thing was a loser. With the judge’s irrigated cane fields and his sugar processing plant upstream already draining away over a thousand gallons a minute, the bottling plant, drawing off hundreds more, was sucking the aquifer dry.

  But that wasn’t the punch line. In the near term, the plant’s expansion was geared toward increasing its production of bottled water, which Estrella intended to sell to all the poor schmucks whose domestic wells dried up or turned brackish from mineral intrusion because of the aquifer depletion. And if that wasn’t cynical enough, they had a backup plan if the expansion proved unviable long-term: They’d close up shop, cadge another load of cash off whoever was willing, and build an even bigger plant in a better locale, claiming they wanted to conform to the new laws concerning wastewater treatment, which older plants like the one in place were allowed to ignore.

  To their credit, the Torkland Overby wonks weren’t entirely gullible, but they didn’t want to sabotage the project either. In the long run, even if the old plant had to be shut down a few years out and this whole dog-and-pony show had to be repeated, Estrella was a major regional player with strong upside potential, and Torkland knew that. So what do they do? They hire a hydrologist to look into the matter, hoping to somehow confirm the aquifer drawdown is viable, or at least stumble onto some new, untapped groundwater sources in the area. But they don’t have the good sense to retain a guy they can buy off. Instead, they bring on board somebody with a spine connected to his brain and guess what? The whole thing’s about to go south, with upward of half a million dollars per director at stake, and you don’t do that to someone connected by marriage to one of the fourteen families, especially when he has pull with the likes of Judge Saturnino Regalado and Colonel Narciso Vides. The calls will start and sooner or later the phone on the desk of Hector Torres is going to ring, and he’ll turn to Malvasio and say, “This is why I pay you.”

  The hydrologist’s name was Axel Odelberg—Jude’s principal, imagine that. The whole thing felt haunted when Malvasio learned that. He started second-guessing himself, wondering if finally he’d managed to dig the hole he couldn’t crawl out of. Then he shook off the hobgoblins and saw the possibilities. Take the initiative, he told himself, get in touch with Ray’s kid and see what there is to see.

  As things turned out it was a case of like father like son: The kid was the stalwart type, a little inward, more a follower than a leader, and almost embarrassingly easy to play. The trick was
getting him to move fast, and Jude had obliged on that front like the good soldier he’d no doubt been. There are just some people who bite at sincerity and never see the next thing coming. The wounded ones—tell them you’re sorry, sound like you mean it, then stand back and watch the miracles unfold.

  The pictures had been a particularly inspired touch. Ovidio Morales certainly did exist, and thank his unlucky mother for that, but he bore no resemblance to the man in the photo Malvasio had shown Jude—that had been a deputy from the Cook County Sheriff’s Department named Ike Ramona. And Ovidio had no connections to anyone working on the Tecapa volcano coffee plantation. Malvasio had taken that snapshot while driving through the region and had no idea who the land belonged to. So if things went sideways down the line and Jude tried to implicate Ovidio, all he’d have is a story concocted by that insufferable, elusive degenerate Bill Malvasio, who had been a plague to poor Lieutenant Morales for years, concocting self-serving tales of collusion and secret support that the good lieutenant had repeatedly and credibly denied to every law enforcement agency who’d ever questioned him on the matter, including the FBI.

  There was a sad twist to the business, though. Malvasio felt for Jude, always had. He’d been raised in a family of bats—fussy wretch of a mother; headstrong old man who turned out, in the end, to be weak; a four-eyed frizzy-haired egghead sister. Malvasio figured Jude had been through enough and didn’t want to see him disgraced. Or dead. And it was when he was racking his brain over that, trying to find a way out, that the thing had come together in his mind. Bring the Candyman down, let him be the final puzzle piece. It was beautiful, really, and almost felt like old times—in the good sense, not the gone-to-hell sense. And, for now, the powers-that-be still held out hope Mr. Odelberg might somehow prove a useful fool. As long as that held true—and as long as Malvasio kept thinking several moves ahead—everybody was safe.

  A knock came from outside the two-room hut. Anabella folded up the cell phone, padded into the bathroom, and shut the door. Malvasio called out, “¡Momentito!” and slipped on pants.

  Opening the door, he found a gaunt, unsmiling man in a sweat-stained uniform with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. His head was shaved clean and he wore aviator sunglasses, resembling a giant bug. Beyond him, an old school bus—the kind called a chicken bus here—waited in the vast shade of several sprawling mango trees. Children filed out from the other huts under the watchful eye of the colonel’s security squad.

  Malvasio knocked on the bathroom door and told Anabella to come out. She opened up and stepped timidly into the main room, wearing the pale blue dress with the white collar and belt the judge’s house staff had given her. She looked like a maid, except for the bare feet. Malvasio nudged her into the doorway, not intending to be rough but wanting it over with.

  The bald guard gripped her arm and Anabella turned back, eyes flashing. Malvasio could imagine what she’d been thinking—that he was her guarantee. That’s what Americans were for, it was how they ran the world—he’d taken her into his bed, hadn’t he? And even though he’d proved unwilling or incapable of performing, it hadn’t been her fault. But she caught on quick, none of that mattered. And it seemed to surprise her little.

  Wordlessly, she shook off the guard’s hand and tromped barefoot beneath the gaze of the judge’s dragoons across the hard-packed dirt toward the shade of the mango trees. She glanced back just once with that same seething hatred in her eye, to let Malvasio know she thought he was pathetic. He couldn’t help but smile; her rage seemed almost romantic. And what was romance without betrayal?

  He consoled himself with the knowledge he had no more choice in the matter than she did. Neither of them was free. And without freedom there’s no responsibility. Without responsibility, no guilt. He turned away and closed the door.

  In the bathroom he threw water on his face and neck. He wanted some coffee but realized he didn’t have the girl to send up to the house to fetch it for him. She’d been around for a mere three days but as rapidly as that he’d grown dependent. It conjured thoughts of family, of all things, a notion he shrank from normally. Now it brought back all his heebie-jeebies about reconnecting with Ray’s son, Jude. I watched that kid grow up, he thought, believed in him more than his own old man. Now Ray was dead but his faithless blood lived on. Malvasio wondered at that, how even the dreariest nobody, knocking a woman up, can achieve the only immortality we know.

  He returned to the door and opened it just as the chicken bus, in an oily plume of black exhaust, departed for the Pan-American Highway. The windows glared from the sun so he couldn’t see any faces, couldn’t tell if the girl was looking back with that same impressive loathing in her eyes.

  He remembered hearing from one of his sources in Chicago that even Strock, despite his other failings, had a child now. A daughter. Figure that one out, Malvasio thought. The Candyman, who chased skirt the way dogs chase cars, has a little girl—meaning, he supposed, that karma has a sense of humor.

  He closed the door and sat on the bed. On the sheet, his cell phone lay open where the girl had tossed it aside. He picked it up and permitted himself one last rendition of the “Toreador Song.”

  PART II

  CANDYMAN

  It is always said that aggression begins in denial and that violence originates in guilt.

  —Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging

  11

  Strock hadn’t come to hurt anybody, least of all Peg. But the impulse started curdling up from someplace almost as soon as he parked at the bar.

  The dancers came and went, prinked out in high heels and teddies, drifting through the murky radiance with bored eyes and forced smiles. They left behind clouds of soupy perfume while Trip Hop or whatever it was throbbed at bone-rattling levels like the sound track to a beating.

  There were three bouncers.

  They lazed in rumpled suits up near the private booths where the luckier girls sat with customers willing to pay for a little one-on-one. The largest of the bouncers stood six-six easy, with skillet-size hands and a shaved head. The next one seemed a poor imitation of the first, same shaved head but fleshy. The wild card was the third guy—a short, bony, long-haired hick with a fey cockiness about him, like he was some kind of hillbilly martial arts queen.

  Strock picked at the wet gummy label on his beer bottle, trying to think through how he should handle this. All he wanted was a few words with Peg. She owed him that. She went by the name Celesta here and was taking her own good time in the dressing room.

  Finally, in a pot-addled brogue meant to conjure Jamaica, the DJ boomed: “Takin’ yo peeks, mons, will ya now, so slam those hands toge-thah for Stay-cee … and Cee-lest-aaaaah.”

  The two girls pranced through the tinsel curtain at the back of the stage, untying their tops as they walked and dropping them to the floor. Excess cargo. Meanwhile, the DJ cued up an eighties tune, remixed for dance: the Pet Shop Boys, “Yesterday, When I Was Mad.” Strock chuckled, it was all too perfect. You got him playin’ our song, Peggers.

  She grabbed the nearer pole and did a few routine swings, shaking out her long red hair. Her eyes were rimmed with eyeliner so thick she looked Egyptian, and glitter sparkled across her chest. She’d lipsticked her nipples too, an old trick.

  As though on cue, the Pet Shop Boys chimed in:

  Admitting, I don’t believe

  In anyone’s sincerity, and that’s what’s really got to me

  Strock collected his cane from the back of his bar stool, slipped down and began his limping approach toward the stage.

  The crowd was scant, it was early. Men sat by themselves or in small clusters around the dim red room—frats, salesmen, off-duty cops. How many times, Strock wondered, when he’d still had his badge, had he sat there just like them? Every girl needs a pal in blue sometime. Not that he was bitter. He’d learned most of what he knew about music, food, and sex from strippers.

  About fifteen feet from the stage he pulled up, still obscured by the da
rk, waiting as some frat in a Notre Dame sweatshirt tucked a bill into the elasticized crotch of Peg’s bikini bottom. The guy got to rub his face against her sparkly chest for that and Strock hated him instantly. A whiff away from fall-down drunk, the boy spun around, cheeks dotted with glitter now, and pumped the air with his fists while his Greek buddies hooted or barked out goading obscenities.

  Strock eased out of the dark toward the stage. He caught Peg’s eye. “Seen a little girl around here?” He waved a bill at her, beckoning her closer. Come on, he thought. Play along. I’ll say what I came to say and it’ll all be over in no time.

  Tottering backward out of the spotlight, Peg stared at him with those Egyptian eyes as though he were the one standing there naked. Even the lipsticked nipples looked stunned.

  “You don’t tell me where you moved, don’t answer my calls, what did you think I’d do, huh? You know me better than that, Peg.”

  His voice had an edge to it. Scattered boos came from behind and a wadded-up napkin pelted his neck. From a nearby table a hand reached out and clutched his jacket. Unthinking, Strock spun around, whipped the cane high, then slammed it down so hard he heard bone give way beneath the wood. He pushed another hand away as the first man howled.

  Strock turned back to the stage and hefted one knee onto the skirt. The DJ, dropping the Rastaman bit, growled through the PA: “Security—up front.”

  Strock got his balance, fended off the last of the grasping hands, then faced off with Peg. She backed up a little more but didn’t run. The other dancer, Stacy, turned away and kept nodding to the beat, like it was no big deal. Just another night at the nude girl nuthouse.