Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  Malvasio glanced down, read the message, then lifted his eyes again, his face imbued with an almost pitying impatience. “What are you going on about now?”

  Jude felt his defiance melt away as easily as that. Telling himself to give it up, he fluttered his hand, like he was shooing away a bad idea. “Never mind. Stupid. Sorry.” He gathered up the paper slip and stuffed it back in his pocket.

  Across the room, the girl and her two johns were drinking hard; the talk was heating up. The one in the cowboy hat had his arm around the young woman and he leered at her, pinching her nipple through her halter, his fingers black. Jude guessed he’d been digging by hand through cold trash fires for scrap metal. And he’d found enough to cash in, pay for a party—which meant five bucks for the girl, two more for the beers.

  Malvasio produced an envelope and slid it across the table. “This is for you.”

  Jude stared at it. “No need. Really.”

  “What I gave you before was for out-of-pocket costs. This is to say thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Thing’s done. Hope it got done well and everybody ends up happy.” Standing, Jude left the envelope where it was. “I’d best get back to what I do down here.”

  Malvasio looked up at him with an expression that said, So that’s what you think of me. He nodded toward the envelope. “You’re sure you won’t take this? I don’t want you feeling taken advantage of.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “I didn’t say it was a problem. I just want you to have it.”

  Across the room the grimy cowboy reared back his head and roared, laughing, reaching with his beer bottle to clink it against his friend’s. A toast. May the best man win. Loser gets sloppy seconds.

  “You want me to handle that?” Malvasio said.

  Jude blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “You want me to take care of it?”

  “Take care of what?”

  Malvasio took the envelope with the cash inside, stood up, and ambled over to the table where both men were pawing at the young woman now. He let the envelope drop onto the table.

  “¿Cuánto te pagan? Yo te pago más. Mucho más.”

  How much are they paying you? I’ll pay you more. Much more.

  The man in the cowboy hat cleared his throat and glared while the other one blinked. The young woman eyed the envelope. Malvasio gestured for her to stand up and go. It took a second but, smiling nervously, she turned sideways on the bench to get out. The cowboy stopped her. To Malvasio, he said, “A la chingada, baboso, y—”

  Malvasio snatched the beer bottle from the cowboy’s grip and slammed it so hard against his nose his face exploded in blood. His friend jumped back with a sick little shriek. That much Jude had half expected. It was the next move that stunned him—Malvasio picking a fork up off the table, gripping it like a knife, then plunging it into the cowboy’s throat.

  The man sat there, face bloody, white eyes gaping while a faint, bubbly hiss leaked out from his punctured windpipe.

  Malvasio lifted the envelope, dotted with blood now, handed it to the girl, and told her to leave. She kicked off her sandals, the better to run, grabbed them from the floor, and vanished down the stairs. Malvasio turned away from the two men and walked slowly back to Jude.

  He said, “I had to do that or he’d have come back sooner or later and taken it out on the girl. You understand that, right?”

  The cowboy’s drunk friend finally overcame his shock and inched to his companion’s side. He reached tentatively for the fork but the cowboy shook his head in whimpering panic and swatted the hand away.

  Malvasio said. “You should go. I’ll wrap this up. Thanks again for all your help.”

  PART III

  SINCE I MET

  THE DEVIL

  The true purpose of masks, as any actor will tell you, is not concealment, but transformation.

  —Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile

  20

  Want me to handle that? Jude tore west in his pickup from San Marcelino, trying to convince himself nothing he could have done would have mattered. By the time he’d caught on to what was happening, it was too late—but everything had that sense to it now. What other little reckonings were in store? It dawned on him that for someone whose job was protecting people, he’d done a piss-poor job looking after himself, and no doubt there was a moral to be had in that, but for now it just brought to mind the way his father died, with a whole new take on just how fitting it was: a miscalculation, a thoughtless slip. Then tangled up underwater. Trapped.

  He told himself to calm down. Again, there was no way to tell who was lying and how much or whether it mattered—besides, that had nothing to do with this last bit of theater. That was just what it was, a bar fight, settled the old-fashioned way, except for Malvasio’s novel use of flatware. He hadn’t even seemed angry, though. The man you found so humbled, so convincing, in a snap there’s a casual menace to him, the kind of thing you wondered about but told yourself no, he’s different, more complex. Have you been paying attention to what’s in front of your face all along, or just trying to talk yourself into what you wanted to believe?

  Oh for fuck’s sake, lighten up, he thought. Even if the worst imaginable were true—and you’ve got nothing but your fear to convince you it is—what could you do about it? Realistically, your options are pretty limited. The man’s got friends down here, remember? The kind of friends who can make problems disappear, make people disappear maybe, no matter what a slow learner like you tries to do to make it all right. Forget about it. Like the man said, not your problem anymore. Chances are you can’t find out more about him or his business without exposing your own role, and what does that solve? Don’t blunder your way in deeper.

  As he reached the bridge spanning the Río Jiboa, traffic suddenly slowed to a crawl. Up ahead, beyond the knot of cars and trucks and the grainy shimmer of heat they created, three PNC Nissans had pulled to the dusty roadside, plus a pair of military jeeps and a seven-ton truck, the kind called a Dragon Wagon. Something was going on beneath the bridge.

  The river was almost dry, just a trickling stream of oily brown muck, one foot deep at best, threading down a chalky quebrada lined with tuff beds and cluttered with struggling almond trees. Beneath the punishing sun, PNC officers scoured the underbrush. Soldiers joined them, poking with their bayonets into snarly thickets of thorned iscanal. From the lip of the quebrada, a trio of women grape pickers from the nearby vineyards pointed, trying to help, while overhead a circle of buzzards—zopes, they were called—drifted in lazy flight.

  Jude got waved forward through a choking cloud of exhaust by a pair of women officers trying to keep traffic moving. When he finally reached the far side of the low-walled concrete bridge, he passed a cluster of onlookers parked along the road. He recognized a face in the crowd—Waxman, the reporter—then spotted Aleris and Truco, the marero, and wondered if Eileen was with them. That’s all it took. He eased to the berm with her husky voice spiriting up from memory, pulled to a stop about fifty yards farther on, then locked up the truck and hurried back toward the bridge.

  People gathered along the road or stood on the hoods of their cars, craning to look while from somewhere a radio blared a thumping, incongruous reggaeton—like someone in the crowd might want to dance. A group of campesinos dressed in sweat-streaked work clothes crowded the back of a flatbed truck, clinging to the guardrails as they peered toward the riverbed. Farther on, a family looked dressed for the beach: the father—chubby, ruffled, bespectacled—wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan be all you used to be. It wasn’t the only English on display nearby. Emblazoned on the side of the Dragon Wagon, the local brigade’s slogan read: honor, valor, loyalty. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where things are headed, Jude thought, if even the military no longer bothers with Spanish.

  Near the edge of the quebrada, Waxman argued with a soldier. Aleris stood beside him while Truco hung back, dressed in long sleeves despite the heat—to hide his bange
r tats, Jude supposed. He looked around for Eileen, but the only other person he recognized was Waxman’s photographer, standing twenty feet down the dusty slope toward the riverbed, fending off two soldiers trying to grab his camera. He held it high, rattling away with a mollifying patois of smiling Spanglish, and Jude remembered his odd name suddenly: Abatangelo.

  The soldier going at it with Waxman was a corporal, dark and knobby and fierce. He rested one hand on his hip, the other gesturing wildly in the air.

  “¡No! ¡No fotografías!”

  “Soy un reportero.” Waxman’s accent belabored the words, robbing them of all conviction. “Las fotografías están para—”

  “¡Oíme, tripudo—no fotografías!”

  Taking the corporal’s insult as a cue—he’d basically called Waxman fatso—Aleris waded in, peppering the corporal with machine-gun Spanish, half pleading, half badgering, as Jude ambled closer to Waxman and tapped his shoulder.

  “What’s going on?”

  Waxman turned, shading his eyes with his plump freckled hand. “Well … hello.”

  Jude detected no conspicuous disdain in the greeting. An omen, he hoped. Maybe the bridge back to Eileen hadn’t burned down completely. Nodding toward the corporal now being browbeaten by Aleris, he asked, “There some kind of problem?”

  Waxman drifted a few steps till he stood behind Truco and gestured for Jude to follow. “That remains to be seen, I suppose.” He folded his arms across his chest, casting a sidelong glance toward Abatangelo as he added uneasily, “For the moment, I’m still hopeful.”

  He wants a favor, Jude thought, like I’ve got pull with the troops. “What’s everybody looking for?”

  Waxman nodded toward the riverbed. “A boy working in the vineyard saw a bunch of buzzards feeding on something in the underbrush this morning.” He squinted upward at the eerie black zopes circling overhead in the ash white sky. “When the boy went down and shooed the birds away, a pair of eyes stared back at him.”

  “A body.”

  “Just a head.” The reporter winced. “They’re trying to see if there’s anything else to find.”

  Jude scanned the length of the quebrada. Soldiers maundered about, seeming as keen on avoiding something as finding it. “Why not just let the zopes do the work? They did it once.”

  Waxman smiled wanly. “Then everyone would have to find another way to look busy.”

  Truco quivered like a fighter, rolling his shoulders. “The head, we saw it, got a snapshot. It had long black hair. Guy who bagged it lifted it up for his buddies to see.” He licked his teeth and spat. “Long hair, I say that means a puta or mariposón. Fuckers can scream all they want about gang jobs but the maras don’t go hunting for hookers and fags to wax. Leave that to Los Soldados de San Miguel.”

  It was the name of a recently active death squad, plying its trade in the east. Waxman raised his palm: Keep the volume down. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  Truco grimaced at the corporal. “Why you think flaco here’s so jacked about pictures? They’re in on it. They wanna grab all the evidence, make it go poof.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  Jude turned back to Waxman. “I get the feeling you’d like me to help out somehow.”

  A schemey hope flashed in Waxman’s eye. “Could you?”

  “You seriously overestimate my clout here. No offense.”

  That fast, Waxman slumped. “You lack our political baggage. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  It didn’t sound like an insult but it felt like one, and Jude had to make an effort to hold his tongue, thinking: Why should I mind? I’ll just sneak these fellas the secret sign. We’ll go off arm in arm, singing the himno nacional. “I may have baggage all my own, you know.”

  “My point is, I think they might see you a little less as an outsider.”

  “On the basis of what—honestly, who do you think I am?”

  Before Waxman could answer, Truco muttered under his breath, “Couple old ladies, you two,” and strode toward the edge of the quebrada, clapping his hands, trying for Abatangelo’s attention. Sticking two fingers in his mouth, he let rip a quick knifing whistle, then called out, “¡Oye, chele!” Hey, whitey.

  Truco gestured for the camera and Abatangelo, still fending off the two soldiers, lobbed it uphill. Truco lunged, genuflected, and cupped his hands, catching the camera before it hit the ground. Then he turned on his heels and ran.

  The corporal who’d been arguing with Aleris shouted “¡Pare!” and took a dozen listless steps in pursuit, then just stood there and watched as Truco darted down the line of cars, skirting the crowd. He slid down the roadbed as it sloped toward a vast concrete slab dotted with sand piles and scattered with rebar and cinder blocks, then skated across the drifting sand, ducked behind a storage building, and raced toward a cluster of champas at the edge of a sparse wood.

  Waxman collected Aleris by the arm. “I think we’d best be going.”

  Abatangelo broke free of the two dumbstruck soldiers who’d been hassling him and clambered toward the road. The soldiers scurried behind him, calling for others nearby who soon followed, including the lieutenant in charge, all of them struggling uphill from the dusty riverbed. The corporal circled back as well. Shortly Waxman, Aleris, and Abatangelo were surrounded. Jude stepped up to intervene, sensing that any sway he might actually have with the soldiers better be used now. He barely got the first word out before a shove landed in his chest that sent him tumbling toward the others.

  The lieutenant—a bug-eyed man with a feral grimace and no hat—drew his pistol and raised it toward Waxman. Then, from beneath the bridge, one of his men shouted, “¡Teniente!”

  The soldier who’d called out pointed to something hidden in a dense thorn thicket of iscanal. An almost comical look of horror crept across his face, then he turned, dropped to one knee in the chalky mud, and vomited into the shallow river.

  Two other soldiers rushed toward him, pulling up when they came upon what he’d found. One just stared. The other put his hands to his head. On the far side of the quebrada, the three women from the vineyard lowered their hands. They didn’t have to point anymore.

  The soldiers lined the four of them up along the road in the choking heat, their legs spread wide and their hands held up above their heads, each of them forming a human X. The pain gradually built from a dull ache to a knifing throb, but whenever Jude lowered his arms, even for an instant, just to wipe the sweat from his eyes, a soldier came up and screamed insults laced with obscenities—jodido (fucker), mamón (cocksucker), hijo de la verga (son of a prick). It was the same for the others, Waxman earning panzón and gorda cerote (both variants, again, on “fatso”), Aleris zorra (slut) or hembrita (a barnyard term for anything female). Abatangelo largely escaped the abuse; he was better than everyone else at keeping his arms up.

  Soon enough the name-calling stopped being scary, so the soldier tore off a switch from a eucalyptus in the roadside windbreak and used it to thrash the bare flesh of their arms: all of them, punishing the group as a whole for any slacking off from just one. Meanwhile, overhead, the zopes continued circling in the parched thermals, sensing something worth sticking around for even after the soldiers slopped the dead woman’s dusty, butchered remains into a body bag.

  It took two hours before the questioning began. Apparently, that was the province of the BESM—Brigada Especial de Seguridad Militar—specifically a captain named Dominguez who arrived by jeep from the capital. Odd, Jude thought, they could wait for him but not a morgue unit from the forensics lab.

  Captain Dominguez reviewed everyone’s passports, listened as the bug-eyed lieutenant reported his fevered understanding of who was who, what had happened. Dominguez said little except to interject curt, clipped questions now and again, pointing to this person or that. He returned to his jeep, made a long-winded call on his field radio, then came back and paced along the roadbed in front of them, studying faces. Finally, he said, “You can put your arms down.�
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  A shudder shot through Jude’s whole body. Waxman groaned and shook out his arms, and Aleris uttered a soft little gasp, wringing her hands and massaging the fingers, trying to get the blood back. All of them checked the welts on their arms too, except for Abatangelo, who just tucked his hands in his armpits, making no sound whatsoever.

  Reading one of the passports, Captain Dominguez said, “Stay where you are for just a moment more, if you would, please.” His English was too accomplished and free of accent, Jude thought, to be the result of just a few training forays to Fort Benning. More likely he’d matriculated up through the British or American academies in San Salvador, which meant a sound middle-class background or better. He was short but muscular with an easygoing grace, more like a cop than a soldier, which wasn’t surprising since he was both.

  He stepped up to Jude, held out his passport, and said, “You can go.”

  Jude knew better than to think this was luck. He’d been expecting questions—where had he come from, where was he headed—and had prepared the lies he’d need to avoid any mention of Malvasio. Given the fork episode at the restaurant, that troubled him far more than explaining why he’d stopped here. But somehow the captain already knew enough to single him out from the others. And who was it, exactly, that had put in the good word?

  Jude took his passport and started for his truck, then checked himself. I’ll just sneak these fellas the secret sign. The quip felt slimy now, and though relieved he’d not said it out loud, he still knew how this looked.

  Captain Dominguez stood there reading the next passport. Finally, sensing Jude’s continued presence, he glanced up. “I told you. You can go.”

  Jude checked the man’s face and decided to trust him. “I was wondering if—”

  “Please.” The voice possessed a soldierly tact but the eyes turned to stone. “You’ll only make this more difficult for everyone.”

  “I can vouch for these people.”

  “Can you?” The captain shifted his weight to inch his face a little closer to Jude’s. “If that’s the case—and it’s not my understanding that it is—you’ll do them no favors. Now, I’m not in the habit of repeating myself.”