Jude waited for Waxman to elaborate but he didn’t. It seemed time for the question he’d been itching to ask all along. “I went to Eileen’s place in La Perla. She’s packed up and gone. Any idea where she went?”
Waxman faced Jude fully then, regarding him like he was hopelessly thick-headed. “You might wish to consider the general mood here. The election results have caused considerable bad feeling.”
“And that’s got what to do with where Eileen is?”
Waxman’s smile suggested he knew something he wasn’t ready to share. “Jude, you seem like a reasonably decent guy. And Axel, the man you’re working for, is the kind of American I’d like to see more of down here, all things considered, though I’m not sure the people who hired him feel the same way. I mean, ODIC’s involved, what does that tell you?”
It had been a long, wretched day. Jude was losing track of where all this was going. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
“ODIC steps in when the social or environmental costs of a project make it unpalatable to the World Bank or U.S. Ex-Im—and God knows they’ve hardly been squeamish when it comes to screwing the third world. That’s changing, some say. We’ll see. I’m not holding my breath. But ODIC remains in a class by itself. It provides the back channel the government wants in the event something really, truly, conspicuously stinks. The suits can claim the World Bank’s guidelines are being followed, it isn’t involved and neither is U.S. Ex-Im, which will appease most of the know-nothings and go-alongs who work that beat. Then Mister Whiskers’ll slip the money through ODIC and life goes on. Axel stands out for that reason. It doesn’t fit, his being mixed up with Estrella.”
Jude realized finally that Waxman might be fishing. That seemed to present an opportunity—a little give-and-take, with Eileen’s whereabouts up for trade. “Axel had some words for the guy from ODIC who showed up. Tonight, I mean. His name was Lazarek.”
“Al Lazarek,” Waxman said.
“You know him?”
Waxman shrugged. “His connections with the world of international finance strike me as, how shall I put this, a bit improvisational.”
“He looked like a spook.”
“Imagine that.”
“Meaning?”
“Just the usual rumors: He worked black ops for the crazies in the basement during the Reagan years, he’s with Joint Special Operations Command.” Waxman shrugged. “Could be rubbish. Those kinds of things are almost impossible to fact-check.”
“What would a guy like that be doing working for ODIC?”
Waxman chuckled. “Surely, Jude, you’ve heard of economic hit men and the military-industrial circle jerk. They’re among our favorite folktales.” He downed the last of his beer.
That kills tit-for-tat, Jude thought. Time for flattery. “I appreciate what you said about Axel. I feel lucky to work for him.”
Waxman lifted his eyes to the wind-racked palms, withdrawing behind an indulgent smile. “Yes, Jude, but really. If Estrella or its American investors or ODIC weary of Axel’s contrarian instincts, they’ll cut him loose and hire someone who knows how to toe the company line. That isn’t true of you. You’ll protect the next man the same as the last. Or am I missing something?”
Jude remembered Eileen saying much the same thing. It stung a little more, hearing it rewarmed through Waxman. He wondered if they’d talked about it. “I’m still not getting—”
“Eileen doesn’t want to see you, Jude. She doesn’t want you to know where she is.”
Jude recalled the crumpled sheet of paper, the poem he’d found on the floor of her house. “And you know this how?”
“She told me.”
Jude decided to bluff. “I don’t believe that.”
A slight twitch quirked Waxman’s eye. “Well, that’s neither surprising nor terribly relevant.”
The overhead light went out. Erika called out apologetically, “Lo siento, señores. Buenas noches.” As their eyes adjusted to the cloud-patched moonlight, they watched the long-skirted indígena gather her daughter’s hand and lead her beneath the swaying palms, up the sand path toward the highway, where they’d walk along the roadbed toward their village. The little dog trailed behind.
Jude said, “I want you to give Eileen my number. Tell her I’d like to talk to her.” He opened his cell for the sake of its light, hoping Waxman had brought something to write with. But the reporter made no move for his pockets.
“This ardor of yours, Jude. It’s touching. Really.”
Jude had to control an impulse to shove the pompous fat-ass off his seat. “You’ve got no reason to talk to me like that.”
“I don’t mean to insult you, Jude. I’m just commenting. It’s so typical, this attitude you have. I suffer from it myself. Why is it so hard for us—Americans I mean, American men in particular—why is it so hard for us to conceive that we might not be wanted?”
25
Jude climbed back up the hill to Horizon House thinking it was classic—boy meets girl he has no business wanting and learns the hard way: Reach for the moon, you fall off the roof. He turned from the road and was halfway to the front door when someone whispered his name. He pulled up short—only then noticing the solitary figure lingering among the shadows of the short, broad-leafed marañón trees beside the porch.
“Don’t go in just yet. I’d like to talk with you alone for a moment.”
Axel stepped out into the moonlight. His face, deeply shadowed, seemed masklike, an effect intensified by the fixation in his eyes. And yet his shoulders sagged, he seemed weary. He reached for Jude’s arm.
“I was beginning to wonder if you’d come back at all tonight.” His smile was listless but warm; he turned toward the road. “Let’s just head up the hill a ways. It’s a pleasant night. A walk might feel good before we turn in.”
It was a hopelessly transparent lie, but Jude left it alone. It hadn’t been said for his sake, but in case anyone inside, sitting in the dark just beyond the window screens, might be listening.
The two men returned to the road in silence, then walked together uphill. Axel set a restive pace, glancing behind or to either side every few steps. Houses sat dark in lush ravines off the road, nestled into gardens thick with orchids, flowering tulla, chichipince vines.
They rounded a bend at the crest of the hill and Axel gestured for Jude to stop. As though looking for some way to begin, he said, “Interesting, all the intrigue about your father. It sounds, if you’ll excuse my saying so, like he must have been a grandly imperfect man.”
It didn’t sound catty or insulting, Jude thought, just inquisitive. “My father was a lot of things, none of them much worth talking about.”
“I’m willing to accept that, particularly since it has nothing to do with your work for me. And that, by the way, is what I brought you up here to discuss.”
A sudden, stormy wind whipped the tree cover. Axel waited for the rustling to subside.
“You’ve always told me to let you know of anything I become aware of that might affect my safety. Or your ability to protect me. Well, in keeping with that spirit I think I have a few things to share with you.” His eyes darted down the road behind them, checking one last time to see if they’d been followed. “I’ve kept all this to myself so far. That Bauserman fellow, your replacement these past ten days—I wouldn’t tell him my shoe size unless someone got me drunk first. But even Fitz has been odd of late. You saw a little of that. I don’t know, perhaps I’m overreacting, but the only person I feel comfortable discussing this with is you.”
Axel was not a man of many moods, which made this one, with its odd mix of wounded loneliness and fear, all the more exceptional.
“I’ve been putting on the rakish façade for Fitz and the others whenever I discuss this woman I’ve met. Consuela, is her name. Consuela Rojas—daughter of an outcast colonel, a socialist, how’s that for drama?” He looked up into the sky at a flock of shimmering moonlit clouds. “I’m not sure exactly what I’ve gotten myself into.�
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I’ve met someone, Jude thought, recalling Axel’s first mention of her. He’d said it like he was bowled over and proud of it. Jude hadn’t realized what a nifty liar the man could be.
“You know how I feel about my work down here,” Axel said. “For all the faults of the people who run things in this country—and those faults are insidious—I still believe it’s possible to get this economy kick-started with some wise investment and good, solid development. I’m not one to wring my hands overly much about how rough life can be or how corrupt its machinations are. When in doubt, build—with the caveat, yes, build wisely. The Salvadorans are nothing if not resilient and hardworking. Give them opportunities, they’ll deliver. The key is crafting the opportunities. That doesn’t come from mere good intentions. As for corruption, think of it as a cost of doing business and forge ahead. That’s how I’ve always seen it, at any rate.”
With his foot, Axel poked at a green coconut that had fallen to the ground, nudging it to the roadside.
“That said, I’ve been receiving e-mails the past few months from Consuela. That’s how we met, I guess you’d say. She started writing when she learned I’d been retained to look into the Estrella plant expansion. She was never entirely frank, afraid her messages might fall into the wrong hands. She wouldn’t say who, exactly, scared her. But I gathered soon enough from what she did say that she had a story to tell.
“She’s incensed by Estrella for a variety of reasons, not merely because of the water issues. She also thinks there’s some kind of shell game going on, to protect Torkland Overby from charges that they’re helping exploit children down here.”
Jude had heard before from Axel that Torkland Overby, the American conglomerate retaining him to review Estrella’s water usage, had reason to be skittish about public relations disasters. Slave labor charges linked to a maquila that Torkland partially controlled, operating in the capital’s free trade zone, had depressed the corporation’s stock nearly 16 percent over three quarters the year before. Then, for good measure, the factory shut down and the local owners vanished, stranding both workers and creditors to the tune of ten million dollars. News of that fiasco had barely died down before hints of a water problem in San Bartolo Oriente hit the Internet—by which time Torkland had already supplied not just working capital for the soft drink plant’s expansion but new assembly line conveyors, filler machines, mixing tanks and cap sealers, even a fleet of trucks. ODIC could insure the capital transfers but not stock value. If Estrella had any more skeletons in the closet, Torkland might have to fend off a shareholder revolt, especially from its institutional investors.
“Consuela says she has proof there are eight-year-olds working some of the cane fields that supply Estrella with its sugar. Say what you will about the harpies of feel-goodism, she has pictures of kids with these awful wounds from the machetes they use to cut the cane. She gave up getting Estrella to care long ago, so she’s moved on to Torkland, but they’ve given her nothing but double-talk. Everyone’s bound by their contracts, they say, and ‘by contract’ Estrella doesn’t purchase directly from suppliers who use anyone younger than fourteen in the fields. I mean, that’s bad enough, I suppose, but it could just mean Estrella slips in a local factor or some other kind of middleman so Torkland can claim ignorance about kids younger than that. Consuela was hoping I’d step up and say something, denounce the pussyfooting. I told her it wasn’t my area of expertise and I didn’t have enough hard evidence to say much of anything, regardless. But she pressed the issue so relentlessly I decided to meet her, at least.
“That was last week, while you were away. We got together for supper. It became obvious immediately that with Bauserman present she wouldn’t speak freely. I mean, it’s hard to describe how ghastly he was. He just sat there, eyeing her. It was beneath sexual. Like he’d already had his way with her just thinking about it. I told him to show some manners but he just ignored me. That’s when I invited her up to my room.”
Axel wandered over to the roadside. A morro tree lay just inside a low stone wall surrounding the nearest garden. He reached for a cluster of the tiny leaves, rubbed them together between his fingers and thumb, then smelled the nutty fragrance on his skin.
“I’m not saying it was a brilliant move. And I’m sure it had something to do with showing up Bauserman. I’m not proud of that. But there we were, Consuela and I, in my room, alone together.” He smiled winsomely. “Interesting turn of phrase. Alone. Together. You’re still quite young, Jude, I’m not sure I can make this intelligible to you. But I’m sixty-two. My wife divorced me when I was fifty—she was forty-five—because she feared the rest of her life would be as sexless as it had been for twenty years.” His blue eyes rose to meet Jude’s. They seemed ashamed. “I realize that’s overly personal, but I need you to understand. I’ve spent my life on the job, the kind of projects people crow about—many in the wrong place, most at the wrong time, and nearly all for the benefit of the wrong people. And whenever I felt dismayed by that, I just told myself that was life. ‘I mistook disenchantment for the truth,’ I think is how it’s said. And for ten years after my wife left I just went on working—like it was all that mattered. Life was an exercise in dealing with one’s bitterness and the rest was inane, self-involved rubbish. Then one day I woke up from a bad sleep and felt a terror like none I’ve ever known. I saw everything decaying before my eyes and thought if I put my feet to the floor, my skin would come away contaminated with rot. Sounds silly when I say it out loud. Believe me, it was quite real. So real that for three days I didn’t leave the bed.
“I didn’t overcome it or figure it out. I just decided to pretend it hadn’t happened. As you can imagine, that didn’t work. The dread was still there, always. In the background.” He waved vaguely toward the windblown palms, as though they were examples, the things we ignore. “And gradually I came to realize the terror had nothing to do with disease, it was because my wife had genuinely loved me and seen me for who I am, then left in disgust. Long-suffering woman, she was. In any event, I’ve reached that point in life when death seems to be getting nearer, faster. This pitiless blank slate coming at me, and what do I have to show for it? A revolted ex-wife, no children, and a life of dubious work—including this odious business with Estrella, for which I was hired only because three other hydrologists Torkland would have preferred were unavailable.
“Then suddenly this woman is with me in my room. She’s lovely, but more than that she’s simply, ineffably feminine—all that amplified by her intensity, this ferocious commitment to these children. That’s when she told me what was truly bothering her about Estrella. Not what so much, actually, as who. But I wasn’t listening, not yet. I was smelling her perfume and trying not to stare at her breasts the way Bauserman had. And either I sensed a return interest on her part or I invented it. In any event, I heard her out as best I could, paid just enough attention to be able to say honestly I’d do what I could, and then she sat there, not getting up, looking at me. She wanted something more. Something stronger. And I took that to mean what I wanted it to mean.”
Axel’s eyes clouded over. A dove cooed somewhere in a nearby garden.
“Looking back on it now, I realize she must have felt trapped. Maybe she wanted to trap me in return. Regardless, she stayed. Till morning. And I ignored everything except the way she made me feel young and worth something and unafraid for at least a little while.”
He looked straight into Jude’s eyes as though he might find forgiveness there. But all Jude could think of was that line of Waxman’s: Why is it so hard to believe we’re not wanted? Axel had gone one better: How hard we pretend we’re wanted regardless.
“This woman’s going to extort you.”
Axel recoiled a little. “I hadn’t considered it along those lines, to be honest.” He reached up absently to scratch behind his ear. An odd gesture, it made him look old. “I mean, what I figured might happen is she’d use our liaison as leverage, to get me to press her concern
s.”
“Use it how?”
“Guilt, I suppose.”
“You mean, what, nag?”
Axel lifted his chin in defiance, but the rest of him sagged. “Basically. Yes.”
“And if that didn’t work, expose you.”
“Of what—having a libido at sixty-two? Welcome to Viagra. Besides, I’m a divorcé. Where’s the scandal?”
“Axel, the woman came to you for a sympathetic ear, not a revitalized dick. And she’ll get first shot at setting the scene as to what happened in your room.”
A sudden shadow darted along the moonlit wall behind Axel. Jude turned toward it just as the gorrobo, a small brown lizard, vanished up a low-hanging tree branch.
Axel let out a brooding sigh. “I’ve been foolish, I suppose.”
“There’s nothing here that can’t be handled. We keep her away from you.”
“That’s not possible.”
That caught Jude off guard. “Why not?”
“I’m quite fond of her.” The words came out with sapped strength, as though Axel were their victim. Then he added, even more abashed, “I’m in love with her, actually.”
Jude felt like he was talking to three different people. “You’re making this too hard.”
“I’m going to ask that you try to understand.”
“You realize what this exposes you to?”
Axel scoffed, “Now you’re sounding paranoid.”
“I get paid to be paranoid. Why drag me up here if there’s nothing—”
“Look, I’ve put all this in its worst light. Let’s get things back on track.” Axel closed his eyes to regain his focus, his hands scrubbing together worriedly—another aging, enfeebling gesture. “I told you, Consuela’s issues with Estrella go beyond what it’s doing, to who’s involved. Does the name Wenceslao Sola mean anything to you?”
Jude could put the name to a face but little more. “He’s on the Estrella board.”
“Hasn’t a whiff of business sense, let alone experience, but he’s connected by family to some influential people. I’m not sure there’s a scam going on, exactly, but it’s damn odd how miserly the well-to-do down here can be when it comes to investing in anything local. The money sails offshore to banks in Miami, the Caymans, Luxembourg, wherever. Nobody’s going to risk anything of his own to see this place improved. So development capital comes through loans—the World Bank or IMF or export-import banks like U.S. Ex-Im or export credit agencies like ODIC—and as often as not gets skimmed or paid out to cronies in kickback schemes, some quite clever, or just stolen outright. That’s what Consuela suspects is going on here. The bottling plant’s expansion is just an elaborate reward to Sola and his cronies for their continuing support of U.S. plans down here. That’s why ODIC’s involved. To ensure that Torkland Overby isn’t on the hook for plowing money and equipment into a white elephant being used principally for payoffs.”
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