23
Malvasio stood in a dirt-floored hut on the edge of the mangrove swamp, watching a bruja stir her decoction of espino ruco and tolu balsa in a tin pot over a wood fire. The grimy cowboy with his broken nose and the fork in his throat sat on a stool, awaiting her care.
The bruja wore a T-shirt and jeans and a Red Sox cap over short black hair that looked like she cut it with a pocketknife, her skin the color of tree bark and her face gnarled up and sunken from age and long-lost teeth. Her limbs were as thin and knobby as kindling. She claimed to be from Izalco—to Salvadoran witches what Paris is to chefs—but Malvasio suspected that was just marketing. Waving one skeletal hand dreamily in the air, she stirred her repulsive goop with the other and murmured a chant in a language Malvasio presumed to be a dialect of Nahuatl. Her eyes rolled back in her head at times, a great trick. She was laying it on.
People called her La Ciguanaba, which meant “river woman” and referred to a folklore creature similar to Medusa—a woman who seems beautiful from a distance, washing her hair by the side of a stream, until you venture too close, at which point she lifts her head and exposes a face so unspeakably hideous it unhinges your mind. Malvasio simply called her señora and she seemed okay with that.
As for the cowboy, the fork in his throat was held fast with a swath of cellophane Malvasio had applied at the restaurant in San Marcelino. By some bizarre chance he’d missed the carotid artery—otherwise the guy would be dead already—and the cellophane wrap had stopped the external bleeding and had helped seal the cowboy’s trachea so he could breathe, which he did through his mouth, his nose being flat as a sponge. The internal bleeding, though, remained unchecked and there was no telling what the damage was there—not without getting the guy to a proper clinic, which wasn’t going to happen.
The cowboy coughed a lot, not just from the smoke of the bruja’s fire and the woody, putrid stench of her folksy medicinal stew but from the blood bubbling in his throat and trickling down his windpipe into his lungs. His eyes still flared with panic but he was woozy, fighting unconsciousness, so his terror had a helpless, soulful quality and it almost made Malvasio pity him.
The cowboy’s sidekick hunched in the doorway, clutching a bottle of La Tenzuda and murmuring prayers and incantations and assurances that it would all be fine, all of it: “Todo, chero, todo.” He had fifty dollars in his pocket, his payoff from Malvasio, with promise of another fifty on the back end. He could afford to be nice.
The levels we sink to, Malvasio thought, meaning not just the sidekick but himself.
When he replayed the scene at the restaurant in his head, he could pinpoint the spot when he should have said: Whoa, horsey. But something about Ray’s kid, the backwash of feeling that sludged up from nowhere and the righteous Tom Sawyer indignation the kid gave off like a smell, it just galled him. You think you know yourself, you’ve got your weaknesses cataloged, you’re in charge of your own mind—but then something sneaks under the skin and you’re watching yourself like it’s somebody else and by the time you get a grip, the thing is done. The guy’s stabbed—by you—with a fork. Because you wanted to say: I’ll tell you a real story now about your old man, you snotty little prick, about the time he slammed his nightstick into his whore girlfriend’s throat because she mocked his meat, called him Sergeant McMannish. That was the subtext, as they say, but you kept that to yourself and resorted to a little show-and-tell instead. And the next thing you know, you’re wrapping the guy’s neck in cellophane and telling the cook and the waiters to stay cool, pretend nothing happened, then you’re paying off the cowboy’s pal to keep him quiet and so he’ll help you get the guy out of there and into the van, and then you’re on the edge of a swamp full of pelicans and four-eyed fish, standing in the foul, airless hut of some goofball Indian witch and you’re thinking: This is why your old man handed you a hundred bucks when you graduated from high school, saying, I’m tired of your mouth. Tired of your stealing from your mother and me. Pack up and get out.
It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough to worry about already. The woman found dead beneath the Río Jiboa bridge, for example. She was the campesina who’d been crowing to anyone who’d listen about how the wells south of San Bartolo Oriente had gone bad. The authorities didn’t know that as yet, and if all went well, they never would, but Malvasio had confirmed it in a flurry of cell phone calls while waiting for Jude at the restaurant in San Marcelino. The veteranos he’d hired to deal with the woman had lied about where and how they’d disposed of the body. In a drunken, lazy bit of improvisation, they’d driven not all the way to the western hinterlands but had stopped midway at the Río Jiboa bridge. There, using an old bayonet, they’d cut off the woman’s head, tossed it over in one direction, and heaved her naked body another.
Why did they lie? The same reasons anybody lies, he thought: To cover their sloppy, indifferent hides. To mock me, show me up, maintain a little ass-backward dignity. For the sheer hell of it. Someday they’d pay for their insolence, of course, but that wasn’t topping his list of concerns right this minute.
The fact the body’d been found was a problem. Hector had to line up a ringer to misidentify it now, claim it belonged to a streetwalker from Usulután who’d gone missing last week (and who in truth had returned home to Nicaragua, where she’d stay if she was smart). A plan to have the dead woman’s remains cremated as soon as possible had to be put in place, and Ovidio would track the investigation inside the PNC, let the colonel know if anything went screwy. It wasn’t effort anyone had expected, and the resentment ran high. The job was Malvasio’s and he was expected to do it well, without this need for cleanup on the back end. So okay, he thought, I’ll take the heat for that. But given where things stood, it would still, more likely than not, work out just dandy. Only a matter of time before the whole thing blew over, right? The way killings do here.
But there was another complication. It wasn’t just the PNC at the scene. The military had shown up at the bridge for some reason, even taking the lead in the hunt for the woman’s remains. Malvasio had no idea as yet what to make of that. He tried to tell himself it was no big thing, the army barged into everything now, whether they were welcome or not. It could be dealt with, let the colonel earn his cut. But he still had a bad feeling. Wherever the army showed up, the Americans tended to follow. And it was the Americans he had to worry about.
The bruja stopped her murmurings and reached up to the cowboy’s throat, picking at the cellophane so she could unravel it. The cowboy’s eyes swelled from terror but she cooed to him in soothing, toothless whispers. Malvasio hated to think what her breath smelled like.
The cowboy sat still while she finally peeled away the first layer of cellophane, tugging hard now and then, her arm circling his head as the stuff unraveled. Once she had it all stripped away, she balled it up and tossed it on the fire. The filmy strand, laced with blood, flamed blue and yellow and hissed as it burned.
She spooned a little of her pulpy concoction onto a square of cloth, puckered her lips, and blew to cool it off, then reached up and without warning grabbed the fork and yanked it from the cowboy’s throat. Quickly, she squeezed the rank poultice against the wound and counted in a whisper to three, then nine, then thirteen—magical numbers. The cowboy’s eyes ballooned and he made to scream, but only a hissing, gargley rasp came out, followed by coughing sobs. Malvasio supposed the man finally realized he was going to die and there were no prayers or magic tricks or witchy goo that would change that.
Malvasio made for the door of the hut and gestured for the cowboy’s sidekick to follow.
Outside, the air was just as thick and hot but it felt like a godsend to be out of the smoke. His clothes felt tacky against his skin, soaked through with sweat.
The clearing outside the bruja’s hut was lit by a kerosene lamp hung from a pole. In its hazy, flickering light the sidekick threw back another mouthful of La Tenzuda, his face a mask of shadows. Staring up at the night sky briefly, then closing his
eyes, he wailed, as though the words were lyrics to a tuneless song, “Lo siento, chero. Lo siento.”
I’m sorry, my friend. I’m sorry.
He lowered his head and put his face in his hands and wept miserably and dishonestly, and Malvasio decided right then not to wait. He’d planned to pay the guy the other fifty bucks first and let him at least count it—it seemed right, letting him feel happy—but there’d be no better chance than this, so he reached inside his shirt, pulled the .380 from under his belt, placed it in the hollow where spine meets skull, and fired. The bullet snapped the man’s spinal cord and he dropped like an empty coat.
Malvasio returned to the hut, where the bruja was drinking from a warm bottle of beer, already aware from the sound of the shot that her party was over. The cowboy had stopped weeping. He just stared, like he’d see them all again in hell, as Malvasio pressed the pistol barrel to the bridge of his shapeless nose and pulled the trigger. The cowboy’s head lurched back in a thin cloud of blood and he crumpled off the stool, flailing, twitching. Malvasio fired an insurance round into the base of the skull, same spot as for the first guy, then put the gun away and turned to the bruja, saying he needed her help.
He’d done the old woman a favor once, scaring off one of the young, snotty doctors from the rural clínica popular who’d wanted to shut her down. None of his kind came out here anymore. The old woman’s assistance with the cowboy had been payback for that service. She didn’t bat an eye when the price ticked up a bit. As for the violence, Malvasio assumed that, like a lot of indígenas, she interpreted the cruelty of life as God’s way of reminding you He existed.
They rowed out into the estuary in an aluminum cayuca, the body of the cowboy huddled between them under a tarp. It would take two trips to get rid of the bodies; the tiny boat would get swamped if they tried to carry both at once.
Malvasio let the bruja guide them in the darkness into a narrow inlet carving a path through the mangrove forest. About fifty yards in she stopped rowing and gestured for Malvasio to hold up as well. She was smoking a Marlboro and her ash glowed red as she inhaled, burnishing her shrunken face. The cayuca thudded against the slick tangled roots and she turned around, drew the tarp off the cowboy’s body, and clambered out of the boat.
She perched on the tree root and held the gunnel with her feet, to keep the boat from tipping over as Malvasio reached under the cowboy’s body, hefted him up, and dropped him into the black water. The cowboy sank with a ploosh then bobbed back up again and half floated beside the cayuca, air pockets ballooning his shirt. Malvasio shoved the drifting body away with his oar as the bruja clambered back into the boat. They paddled it backward into the estuary, then retraced their way to the old woman’s hut.
The procedure got repeated with the sidekick but he got dumped in a different part of the swamp. Sooner or later the bodies, in whatever stage of decay by then, would get found by fishermen but the fishermen were Indians. They knew better than to get involved with the law, even with the best of intentions.
Back again at the bruja’s hut, Malvasio counted out the hundred dollars he’d promised to the sidekick, having retrieved the first fifty from the dead man’s clothes. One thing he’d learned in this place, the desperately poor were no different from the miserly rich in one way at least—only money got trusted. The old woman rolled up hers and stuck it in her pocket, then lit up another Marlboro and said in Spanish, not Nahuatl, “El camarón que se duerme, se lo lleva corriente.” It was a local saying, meant to chide the lazy: The shrimp that sleeps gets carried away by the current. She dropped her chin and cackled, the sound clenched and wheezy, a toothless smoker’s hack, reminding Malvasio he was dealing with the woman they called La Ciguanaba. He looked away.
24
Jude trudged down the winding path of sand from Horizon House to the beach, the hint of an unseasonal storm carrying a humid, metallic scent inland. The cloud front was shallow and narrow, only the Costa del Bálsamo would get hit, if the storm landed at all. To the east, toward the Costa del Sol and the Estero de Jaltepeque beyond, the sky remained clear.
He considered phoning the beach house just to check in, ask the servienta, Clara, how Strock was holding up—maybe speak to the Candyman himself. It might be a good idea to get our stories straight, he thought. Almost instantly he talked himself out of it. He remained convinced that McGuire and Sanborn’s interest in Malvasio was nothing but a ploy, which meant Strock was unlikely to face scrutiny himself. Besides, there was no way they’d find him, not out where he was. And by tomorrow he’d get picked up by whomever and mosey along to the coffee plantation to begin work—assuming, of course, Malvasio hadn’t lied about that. Which brought up the real reason Jude didn’t call: He wanted nothing to do with either man anymore, wanted the whole sorry episode behind him. If down the road Strock wound up in a bind, got slammed into a chair and told to talk and then handed up Jude’s name on whatever pretext, Jude would deny it all and trust his credibility would win out. Strock just tagged along, after I found him on his knees outside a strip club in East Chicago. I’d tracked him down to check in on him as a favor to my mother. Ask her if you don’t believe me, assuming she’ll give you the time of day.
In the meantime he wanted to get off alone, swim a little, think. He seemed to be the only one at Horizon House, especially after dark, willing to forgo the pool and brave the rocky beach, the notorious undertow, the occasional slithery critter—not that he was complaining. Tonight in particular he wanted solitude.
As he broke into the clearing he found dark-skinned Erika closing up her comedor for the night. Using a damp towel, she wiped a sheen of sweat from her face, then lifted the braided rope of her hair and did her neck. Her ten-year-old daughter sat on a rock feeding leftover rice to a famished pup, while a lone customer lingered inside the thatched glorieta, lit up like a prisoner by the single bare bulb.
It was Waxman.
Jude felt his pulse quicken, and he wondered where the others might be. The thought Eileen might be with them sent a little shock of longing through him, followed instantly by regret, then finally shame, as he tried to figure out what Waxman was doing there. The efemelenista professor, he supposed, the one who had a house here at El Dorado Mar, he must have made some calls, contacted some friends with clout, and asked them to step in, make noise. Maybe they just paid somebody off. Regardless, there Waxman sat, impossible to avoid.
The reporter had bathed and changed, his russet hair darkly wet as he hunched over a Pilsener that seemed more an object of contemplation than last call. Jude walked up quietly and took a seat. Lifting his glance to see who it was, Waxman froze.
Jude said, “I was afraid you …” That was as far as he could get.
Waxman glanced away. In a tone that managed to be both snide and forgiving, he said, “It’s all right. Captain Dominguez conducted himself with exemplary decorum.”
“He let me go because he knew I was going to be questioned here. A little while ago, the FBI and some guy from ODIC.”
That piqued Waxman’s curiosity. “They questioned you here?”
“We keep the embassy informed about where our people are at. It’s never hard to find us. Did they come see you?”
Waxman smiled abstractedly and finger-combed his hair. Shadows played across his face as the wind blew the bare bulb overhead. “Let’s just say I’m not as fastidious about keeping the embassy informed of my whereabouts. Besides, I’ve nothing to tell them I haven’t already told the locals, and only an idiot answers the same questions twice.”
Jude could almost hear the doubts crawling around inside the reporter’s head. About me, he thought. “They wanted to know where Truco was. I told them I had no clue. They have a serious hard-on for that guy.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that. Truco Valdez, secret terrorist. Secret even to himself.” Waxman thumbed a grain of sand from the lip of his beer bottle. “They scream about the evils of gangs, then make it impossible for anyone to leave. You have to give the old boys
credit—they are the most ingenious psychotics on the block.”
“They were interested in your photographer, too. Abatangelo.”
“If they have any questions for Dan, they’d better hurry. He’s on his way to the airport this minute. Has a pair of soldiers for company, to make sure he doesn’t tarry. Same with Aleris. They’re letting me stay, for now, a friend at El Diario de Hoy intervened. Never plays well, kicking journalists out of the country.” With that, Waxman finally took a sip of his beer.
“They wondered what I knew about him. Abatangelo. Which is nothing. I told them that. They didn’t ask me about Aleris.”
Waxman perched his chin atop the bottle and blinked his eyes, bringing to mind a sunning lizard.
Jude said, “Why do they have to leave?”
“Their kind are unwelcome here.” Waxman shook off his pose. “Like the contingent of Lutherans the government held at the airport last week and accused of coming down to influence the elections.” He grinned mordantly then took another, lustier swig. “Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep.”
“The FBI agents, they said they’d been told the woman whose body was found along the Río Jiboa was a prostitute from Usulután. Somebody reported her missing a few days ago.”
Waxman uttered a sad, breathy little laugh. “Interesting.”
“That’s not true?”
“I didn’t say it was untrue. I said it was interesting.”
Blood of Paradise Page 19