Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  “And again,” Jude said, “she knows this how?”

  “She doesn’t know,” Axel said wearily. “She suspects.”

  “Because?”

  “Because of this Sola character!” Axel threw up his hands. “She was married to a cousin of his. A disaster of a marriage, apparently, but it gave her an inside glimpse at the clan. Wenceslao is the family scapegrace, spends money like a whore on holiday, is rumored to have a thing for little girls, and is generally just one of those louche, pampered little deviants who couldn’t make his own way in life, let alone earn an honest buck, if his soul hung in the balance.”

  “Axel, I don’t mean to sound harsh, but that’s the way the sewer runs down here.”

  “During the war, Sola joined a group called Los Patrióticos, a kind of bourgeois brotherhood cum weekend death squad—I know, I know, death squads, the great bogeyman of Latin America. But hear me out, all right? He also has ties to Judge Regalado, the owner of the sugar operation upstream from the bottling plant. He’s practically an institution when it comes to venality.” Axel scratched his head and sighed. “I’m sorry this is so complicated. I’m doing my best to crib it, believe me. Consuela, for all her virtues, can be a tad scrambled in her tale telling, and her delivery is, shall we say, a bit on the breathless side.”

  Jude said, “Axel?”

  “Yes, yes. I’m coming to the denouement. Despite all the disavowals Estrella tries to make, it’s unthinkable it doesn’t get at least some of its sugar from Judge Regalado’s plantations, given not just their proximity but the links between families, his and Sola’s. And it’s one of the worst-kept secrets in El Salvador, apparently, that the judge has no compunction about children working in his fields. Christ, he almost insists on it—builds character, helps support families, all that rot.” He let out a long, shuddering sigh, looking spent. “There. That’s what I was trying to get out.”

  A cluster of golondrinas suddenly scattered in frantic wing bursts from among the swaying branches overhead. Another gorrobo, or maybe the same one, scurried down the stone wall and burrowed in the sand.

  Jude locked his hands behind his neck. “Well, that’s quite a yarn.”

  “Yes. And I’ve only told you half.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “My mention of death squads wasn’t for the sake of drama. Whenever Sola visits the bottling plant in San Bartolo Oriente, he stops for lunch at a restaurant owned by a man named Hector Torres. Consuela may have little kind to say about Sola, but he’s a mere pest compared to Torres. Consuela’s terrified of him.”

  Jude considered that for a moment, taking full account of the gravity in Axel’s eyes and voice. Then he said, “Sola, he has lunch. At this guy’s restaurant.” He didn’t mean to spoil the party, but really. “That’s it?”

  “Torres has long played the role of pivot man for the death squads operating in the eastern departments. Not just during the war but after. He’s the godfather of Los Soldados de San Miguel, and you’ve heard of them, I’m sure. They’re particularly fond of snatching uncooperative prostitutes, gutting or beheading them, leaving the bodies on the steps of local churches, to flaunt their impunity. He’s made all the right friends and people fear him. Consuela hears he runs a protection racket now, muscling theft rings, kidnap rings, drug dealers—prostitutes, naturally—even street vendors. He’s ruthless, has a little army of veteranos and mareros he uses for henchlings. People pay.”

  Of course they do, Jude thought. He recalled what Strock had said. We taxed them, sure. And suddenly Torres the respectable gangster got conflated with the Candyman and Malvasio, the Laugh Masters. Jude’s father. Overhead, the golondrinas resettled in the palm branches.

  “Axel, correct me if I’m wrong, but none of this involves you unless—”

  “The day before you got back from the States—and shortly after the last time Wenceslao Sola paid his respects to Hector Torres—a woman named Marta Valdez disappeared from a tiny village outside San Bartolo Oriente. She’d complained to people—in particular, to Consuela, who works with a few citizen committees in the area—about the pozos, the wells, below her village. The wells, they’ve become brackish with mineral deposits because the water table’s dropped so low, partially because of the bottling plant—or so everyone suspects, including me, but I’ve still not been able to confirm it satisfactorily. Regardless, Consuela went up to the village when this woman, Marta, didn’t appear for a follow-up interview. No one there would so much as talk to her. Except, as she was leaving, a boy came up. His name is Oscar. He’s all of eight years old.

  “He says he heard a car drive up the hill and park outside Marta’s house. Four men were in the car. Two went inside the house and stayed for a while. When they came back out, they were carrying what looked like a body wrapped in a blanket. Then they drove down the hill again. No one’s seen Marta since.”

  A light came on in the window of a nearby house, then almost instantly went out again. Jude gestured for Axel to start walking with him downhill. Once they’d moved on a ways, Jude said, “This boy, he’s told all this to your friend Consuela. Anybody else?”

  “He’s too terrified to tell the authorities. I don’t know, I can’t help wondering if this prostitute-to-be-named-later from Usulután, who’s now been found beheaded—”

  “And you didn’t mention any of this to McGuire why?”

  “Once I heard the way they were going at you, I didn’t trust them. You didn’t either, obviously. And then this Lazarek character. ODIC doesn’t have an ongoing presence at the embassy. People come and go, and beyond the pencil pushers it’s always a bit of a game, figuring out which consultants are spies and vice versa. But Lazarek was a different story altogether—a name people whispered. I was looking forward to meeting him face-to-face, actually, just to see if he really existed. Well, now I have. All that crap about stable government and gangs. Spare me. If the gangs were pro-ARENA, we’d pay for their weddings.”

  “But if ODIC is Lazarek’s cover—”

  “That could mean they’re not turning a blind eye just to Sola and the other trough-feeders on the Estrella board, but to this crooked judge and Torres and whoever killed this woman.” Axel sighed at the strangeness of it all. “As for the FBI, I haven’t a clue why they’re involved.”

  “My guess is they’re not.” Jude wouldn’t be sending McGuire or Sanborn any valentines, but their contempt for Lazarek now seemed reassuring.

  “One last thing,” Axel said. “Excuse me if this seems intrusive, but what might your father or this man you flew back with or the other one they were harping about—”

  “Malvasio.”

  “What have they to do with any of this?”

  “Nothing.” Jude tried for nonchalance. “Cop tricks. Trying to put me off guard.” Nothing had changed his mind about that. Yet. And if anything, Malvasio now seemed less a menace than a seer: For all you know, the people involved in your hydrologist’s project could be the worst of the worst down here. “Back to Lazarek for a minute—any chance he or somebody else at ODIC would know about your thing with—”

  “Consuela? Possibly.” Axel cringed. “Thing, please. God. But Bauserman knows, yes. Fitz knows. I’ve no idea whom they may have told in turn.”

  “And the fact she knows that this Sola character, the judge, Torres are all connected?”

  “I’ve shared that with no one but you.”

  26

  Malvasio reached the San Bartolo Oriente city limits just before midnight—hours late, delayed by his detour into the mangrove swamp. He was driving the van with its telltale dark-tinted glass, pistol in his lap, doors locked, his eyes always trained not at the cobbled tunnel-like street twisting before him in his headlights but at the mercurial shadows melting into the doorways to either side.

  By day you’d see the streets jammed with women shopping at the mercado central, boys making bread deliveries on their basketed bikes, and schoolgirls in blue pleated skirts and white blouses walking a
rm in arm, while horn-honking traffic squeezed through the crowds beneath the blistering sun. But the night belonged to the mareros. The city was too poor for after-hour police patrols. People shuttered their homes come nightfall and waited for dawn.

  He slowed at the cathedral plaza, dodging stray dogs rooting through trash. On the plaster wall of the cathedral itself, a recent inscription in loopy spray paint read: Por mi madre nací y por mi barrio muero. By my mother I was born and for my brothers I will die. It was punctuated with the customary MS 13 in Gothic lettering, marking the area for Mara Salvatrucha, and surrounded by a bilingual roll call: Poison, Travieso, Snorky, Choca …

  Malvasio turned uphill again, another narrow, snaking road. Near the top, a smaller church named El Niño de Atoche stood in a grove of amate trees with their ghostly white bark. Malvasio spotted the tip of Sleeper’s cigarette glowing on the vestibule steps. On seeing the van, the boy flipped his butt into the street, the red ash arcing like a rocket through the darkness.

  Sleeper was bare-chested, his long-sleeved shirt knotted around his waist, the better to show off his ink. His chest was adorned with prayer hands and rosary beads, a pachuco cross. On his back, two long-haired women in clown face appeared, one happy, one sad—the traditional Smile Now, Cry Later. Variations on MS and the number thirteen sleeved up and down his arms, while the back of each hand bore the inscription “C/S” for Con safos: untouchable.

  Climbing into the van’s passenger seat, Sleeper said, “The fuck you been, Duende?”

  His English came softly inflected with an incongruous drawl, the result of six years spent in rural Virginia. He’d landed there at age twelve with his mother, who’d fled Soyapongo and her abusive drunk of a husband to seek a better future for herself and her son in the Shenandoah Valley, a growing haven for Salvadoran émigrés. Things didn’t turn out as she’d hoped. Armando, as she knew him, was a bored and restless sort, lousy at school, prone to fights, and he fell in with a Salvatrucho clica. He got banged in at fourteen and, in accordance with the irony of gang handles, was rechristened Sleeper because he was constantly wired. By age eighteen he was honing his flair with a blade by logging sixty-hour weeks at a poultry processing plant carving up chickens, then working on his entrepreneurial skills by driving down to the Carolinas each weekend to score meth for sale back in the valley. He and his pals were out-hustling the biker outfits who’d once dominated the local trade, and crank was taking the rural backwaters by storm. Not that the Salvatruchos were the only ones testing the darker edges of American ambition: Some of their biggest buyers were the hayseed managers at the poultry plant, who offered free rails to anyone willing to work a second shift. Then, six months ago, a multi-agency sweep came down: The homegrown managers lawyered up and pointed the finger at their immigrant suppliers, who got rounded up by the DEA, deported by the ICE. Shortly thereafter, Malvasio came upon Sleeper trying to hustle up a connection at a bar here in San Bartolo Oriente, and saw possibilities.

  As for “Duende,” it was the name Malvasio used with his hirelings. It referred locally to a kind of spirit, not unlike a faerie or leprechaun, who could be charming or devious or even malevolent depending on his mood. Behind his back, he’d learned, they sometimes called him Dundo instead: Stupid. Such were the indignities suffered by middle-management everywhere.

  In defense of his tardiness, Malvasio said, “A situation came up.”

  “Yeah, well, a situation almost came up here. I was ready to book my ass on down the road.”

  Malvasio didn’t respond. He was looking past Sleeper at the thin, dark, rawboned youth emerging from the shadows of the church steps.

  “Who’s Buster?”

  Sleeper did a little sheepish dance with one hand while the other stuffed his Marlboros into the back pocket of his sagging jeans. “Thought a posse of two with your particular business in mind just wouldn’t cut it, know what I’m saying?”

  The youth lingered on the sidewalk. He was somewhere between thirteen and sixteen, with dull, fathomless eyes. He wore a Raiders jersey and baggy Dickies, both counterfeit no doubt, a black bandana wrapped tight around his head, a machete tucked into his belt.

  “He old enough to have a name?”

  “Chucho.”

  Malvasio nodded. It came from chuco chucho, Nahuatl for “dirty dog.”

  “Open the door. Tell him to get in.”

  Sleeper reached behind his seat and undid the lock on the van’s sliding door, gesturing for Chucho to climb aboard. Before sitting down, the boy turned the machete so the blade rested upward and wouldn’t damage the seat vinyl. The perfect passenger, Malvasio thought.

  “Put your shirt on,” he told Sleeper, putting the van in gear again and pulling away from the curb. “Just give people one more thing to ID you by.”

  Sleeper unknotted the sleeves around his waist and pulled his shirt on. Buttoning the cuffs, he said, “You don’t look so hot, Duende. Like you could use a rail, get you through this thing.” He reached into his front pant pocket and removed a short straw and a bindle of crank wrapped in tinfoil. Methamphetamine had made its way down here, along with Ecstasy. They were the latest drugs of choice, pushed by the Mexican cartels, sometimes used as payment if the mareros helped move product—which Sleeper, given his pedigree, was more than happy to do. “Chucho and me could use a bump our own selves.”

  He laid out a line for Malvasio in his palm. Malvasio braked, slipped the tranny in neutral, and leaned over, then took the straw and horned the line of yellowish chalky powder off Sleeper’s skin. It flooded his nostril with an odor like gun metal wrapped in dirty sock and soured the phlegm trickling down the back of his throat. As the first little kick quivered through his neck muscles, he thought: forty-five years old, look at you. Sleeper tapped two dots of powder into his palm, took the straw from Malvasio, and passed it to Chucho, holding out his hand. The boy leaned forward and hoovered his bump, fussed with his nostrils. Sleeper knocked back his own recharge as Malvasio put the van in gear again and headed downhill.

  “I thought about you today, Duende, know that?” Sleeper grinned like he knew a fabulous secret. “Heard on the news about this cat in Afghanistan—you know the one I’m talking about? This guy pretending to be some kind of freelance special forces hotshot. Says he was a Green Beret down here in the eighties, no lie. The local angle. Any event, he’s over there now, hoping to cash in on the twenty-five-fucking-million-dollar bounty on Osama bin Laden’s head. He’s taking guys prisoner, says the U.S. government knows all about him, they love what he’s doing, on and on and on like this till he gets arrested by the afghanilistas for torturing guys in this house he’s, like, renting? Got ’em tied to the toilet or hanging upside down from the ceiling and shit. And the guys he’s capturing, he says they’re al Qaeda and Taliban, but the cops or whoever look into it, and his prisoners, they’re just, you know, guys. Meanwhile, the real special forces, State Department, who-the-fuck-ever—they can’t scrape this guy off their shoes fast enough, man. They say he’s crackers, totally messed up and shit, so—”

  Malvasio cut him short. Crank talk. “And why, exactly, did this remind you of me?”

  Sleeper’s eyes narrowed to slivers. The grin lingered. “He’s like you, man. Doing el mero mero’s bidding. But if you’re ever caught—you hear what I’m saying? They’ll back off you like a fucking leper. Call you nuts. Do it so fast, make your head spin. Then they’ll let you hang.”

  They drove slowly without headlights down a side street lined with dark market stalls two blocks from the cathedral, the beginning of the barrio bajo. Sleeper leaned forward in his seat, peering through the windshield at the dark doorways of the decrepit shops and shabby walk-ups lining the sidewalk. Behind him, Chucho hunched forward, one hand on the handle of the sliding door, the other on his machete, ready to bolt into the street when Sleeper gave the word.

  They were searching for a small-time dealer named Ziro who understood imperfectly the proprieties of hustling in San Bartolo Oriente. Anyone
with a dose of smarts knew that Hector Torres, el mero mero, got paid for such privileges. His reputation as the godfather of the local death squads instilled the required level of fear, but he was also a businessman, and he’d come around to the perfectly reasonable position that it made better sense to extort the mareros than to slaughter them. The point was maintaining a certain level of order, not eliminating vice, especially when there was money to be made. And so the mareros were permitted their minor scams—hand-to-hand drug sales, stickups, muscling street vendors and small businesses—but they kicked back to Hector for protection, which kept the mayhem reasonably in check. Those who didn’t play along suffered—that was where Malvasio came in.

  The work reminded him of his Chicago days, not in the good sense but in the gone-to-hell sense. Not that he regretted what he and Ray and Phil had done, jackrolling fools—they’d deserved worse, and he’d pocketed a tidy bonus from the Gangster Disciples for harassing the competition. It was the grim sense of déjà vu that weighed on him, as though he were trapped in a bad dream—pulling the same tricks as ten years ago but for shabbier reasons in an even drearier place, and having to soil his hands with hopeless little deviants like this Ziro creature who’d not only skipped on his taxes three collections running but was bragging about it now. Finding him, getting his account in balance, teaching him some manners—that was the new bit of business Hector had brought up the night before in the bar at El Arriero, when all Malvasio had wanted was sleep.