Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  Jude had never fired his weapon on the job, didn’t know a man outside a war zone who had. It was a commonplace in the trade: If you have time to draw your piece, you have time to shield and remove the client. Your responsibility is not to win gun battles but elude them. Even so, the pistols were more than props. Jude practiced often, different times of day, at least once every two weeks from a moving car. More prosaically, in his valise he carried his maps and daily log, his roll call of contacts, a list of hotels and restaurants deemed safe. The only visible clues of his profession would be his build, his vigilance, and the close proximity of his principal.

  The drivers arrived at eight. Carlos, Axel’s chauffeur, had washed and waxed the black Mercedes and it glimmered in the morning sun. The car wasn’t armored—the client wouldn’t pay for that, which was pound foolish since the immense sedan, insanely caudillo, presented a conspicuous target for kidnappers, but all Jude’s protests in that regard had fallen on deaf ears.

  Carlos stood beside the thing like a proud uncle. He was stocky but solid, gray flecking his mustache and temples, with strangely delicate hands, more suitable to a schoolteacher than a former paratrooper. He greeted them in a raspy voice with clipped businesslike English: “We’re off for the capital, no?”

  They set out on the coastal road for La Libertad. In accordance with Axel’s wishes, Carlos had a Haydn symphony, the “Trauer,” playing softly; it provided a stately if incongruous sound track for the curving tree-lined Carretera del Litoral. Upscale ranchos sprawling behind high walls and guarded gates stood within calling distance from wretched tugurios and smoldering trash fires along the highway, while every hundred yards or so a glimpse to the south revealed the sunny palm-crowned beach.

  Children walked along the roadbed on their way to school, some of the girls in blue uniforms, white socks sagging down their calves in the heat, books teetering atop their heads in imitation of the women carrying water jugs called canteros to and from their villages.

  At La Libertad, Carlos turned north toward the central plateau, and soon they were passing sugarcane fields sprawling for miles to either side of the road, some stubbled from the harvest, others thick with green ratoons, a few bordered with small groves of banana trees.

  A tractor chugged smokily along the berm, a wizened old man naked from the waist up bouncing in the iron seat. A few shabby houses of mud and thatch hid in the shade of sprawling ceiba trees. A mother and daughter, both barefoot, lifted their damp laundry from a stone pila and hung it out to dry on the rusted wire fence along the curving highway.

  Carlos hit the brake.

  Beyond the turn, the PNC had set up a roadblock—three officers in dark blue drill and high-laced boots were stopping traffic between the airport and the capital. In the backseat, Axel glanced up from the geological chart blanketing his lap. “Is there some kind of trouble?”

  A battered pickup loaded with campesinos had been pulled over, and the workers shambled in a line along the roadside ditch, staring at the ground as their driver negotiated with one of the officers. An old obrero fanned himself with a straw hat as he waited on his perch atop an oxcart piled high with woven corn husks called tusas. Carlos slowed the Mercedes but the cop directing traffic waved them on after barely a glance.

  As the Mercedes gained speed again, Axel said, “I’ve heard the officers get a percentage on the tickets they write. Is that really true?”

  Carlos smiled in the rearview mirror. “So one’s told.”

  Axel returned to his chart. “Screwy system, you ask me.”

  “It keeps people in line.”

  “Poor people, you mean. I notice they didn’t even think of pulling us over.”

  Carlos was spared further defense of his stance by the sudden trilling of Jude’s cell phone. It was Fitz. “You’ve got a change of plans,” he said coolly, forsaking a greeting. “I just got word of a protest march blocking the Alameda Juan Pablo II from the soccer stadium to the Centro de Gobierno. I’ve relocated Axel’s meeting with Rubén Manrique at ANDA. Head for the other side of town, the Hotel Elena José, it’s in the Zona Rosa. They’ve got a nice little restaurant and bar there. I think you guys can make do.” With that, he hung up.

  As they neared the capital, the landscape changed to rolling hills. A roadcut of tierra blanca rose like a monument of chalk a hundred feet above the highway. Beyond it, a new development of small, stark concrete houses defiled beneath the brutal sun. A billboard outside the project read: “Las Casas: Tipo Americano.” American-style houses. They were human storage sheds really, selling for twenty thousand a pop. No surprise, most stood empty.

  Carlos switched off Haydn and turned on the radio to get news of the demonstration. The protest Fitz had reported was an anti-CAFTA march sponsored by the unions and swelled by church groups, even a contingent of farmers from Iowa. They were protesting ARENA’s unexpected introduction of the agreement to the assembly for ratification at three in the morning, when only its supporters knew it was coming up for a vote.

  The demonstration was being met by counter-protests from the right. ARENA was staging a march to celebrate its presidential victory, show support for the troops in Iraq, and rally solidarity in the face of the recent threats from al Qaeda. Already clashes had broken out between the opposing factions, and other protests were flaring up downtown in the Plaza Barrios between the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace, even in the Santa Elena neighborhood outside the U.S. embassy. A couple dozen people had been injured. Two cars had been set afire.

  Carlos kept the radio on as San Salvador came into view. Even without the political tensions, Jude always experienced an odd frisson, half expectation, half disappointment, whenever he saw the hazy, uninspiring skyline against the hills. Even as third world capitals went, it was lackluster, a sprawling, decaying stepsister to East Los Angeles, unworthy of its people—its monuments neglected, its churches sad, its museums wanting, and its nightlife tame or hidden while its commerce metastasized without any sense of prosperity, despite the perpetually crowded streets.

  They arrived well before noon at the Hotel Elena José in the tony Colonia San Benito, near the incongruously located Monumento de la Revolución; there they waited on the patio over coffee, then lingered over lunch until half past two. A well-heeled crowd came and went for the midday meal, indifferent to the disorder across town. The next table over, a portly woman lingered, draped in pearls and clutching a Chihuahua that bared its fangs with a wheezy snarl when Axel leaned over to pet it.

  No one from ANDA appeared or even sent word. Jude called Fitz but he said he’d tried and failed to get through to the agency since he’d rescheduled their meeting. “Just sit tight. God only knows what’s happening over there.”

  Finally, as Jude was about to propose they head for the hotel, a secretary appeared, arriving by cab. She was pretty but flustered, wearing stylish eyeglasses and Italian heels, her hair in a prim bun. She made no apologies for the delay, not even to blame the demonstrations. Rather, she explained that Señor Manrique and a half dozen others had been placed under house arrest that morning on charges of embezzling three million dollars from the water agency.

  Axel sat dumbstruck. After a moment he gathered his wits and managed to ask who he could contact to schedule a follow-up appointment. The secretary pleaded ignorance, said she had no further news, then fled.

  Axel stared after her, watching as she climbed back into her taxi and rode off. When he turned back to the table, he said, “I feel like I’ve finally run off and joined the circus.”

  The driftwood littering the beach had been scrubbed clean by the sea and blanched by the sun till it resembled bone. A lone pelican soared low across the whitecaps, plunging suddenly, disappearing between waves, its wings splashing furiously till it rose again, a silver mackerel convulsing in its beak. On the shore, tiny sandpipers called chillos hopped and skittered across the wet sand, dodging the surf as they fed on the even tinier hermit crabs scuttering about.

 
Malvasio watched the tableau, nature feeding on itself, from just outside the wall of the rancho. He sipped from a mug of Clara’s coffee, and that, with the knife-tip of Sleeper’s crank he’d stirred into it like sugar, had him crackling and ready and would keep him that way, he hoped, through the day.

  Not that ragged edges didn’t remain, no small thanks to being shot at. Overall, though, he had few complaints. The headiness of having stared down the barrel and survived helped focus his mind. He’d managed not just to get Strock on board but to instill a sense of mission. We gotta rescue Pop Gun’s son. Malvasio smiled. Never sell short the average drunk’s obsession with heroics. And yet, who knew—maybe they would, in the end, turn out to be the heroes in this, at least to themselves.

  He’d yet to settle on a clear-cut plan, just its elements. He’d always known he’d have to improvise once things started moving—too much remained in flux—but he hadn’t expected it to start so soon or take such a wild turn. He still felt a little in shock. He’d heard it in his voice when he’d called Ovidio earlier to tell him he wouldn’t be needed now to collect Strock. “I’ve got it under control.” Things had strangely, mystically worked out.

  Odd, he thought, how sometimes chance, in its random blindness, can put things together better than any plan, no matter how long and hard you think it through. There was something for the bumper stickers, he thought. Not: Let Go. Let God. Rather: Give Chance a Chance.

  Down the beach he saw the outline of the old safe house, destroyed by Hurricane Mitch. During the war, the colonel’s intelligence unit brought suspected insurgents or their sympathizers there—students, reporters, aid workers—interrogated them, tortured them, murdered them, then dropped their naked remains into the ever convenient sea. The Final Campaign of the Cold War, they called it. The time before that, in the thirties, they kept it simple: La Matanza. The Massacre. Anybody’s guess, Malvasio thought, what they’ll call it next time.

  After the war, the colonel continued using the place as a safe house, for his and the judge’s underground railroad of orphans and runaways. Twenty of them died when the hurricane hit, crushed by the roof and other debris, more bodies to dispose of. Clara had been working at the safe house then, looking after the children passing through; she’d lived here at the rancho, which had been transformed into servants’ quarters. She’d survived because of that—strange how the one had collapsed, the other remaining intact, but every disaster left behind stories of that sort. Random chance, again. Clara remained in the colonel’s employ—a steady, dependable, even cheerful worker, smart enough to keep her mouth shut, too desperate for work to beg off. She was a gift, Malvasio thought. Right now he had no clue what he’d do without her.

  He poured the dregs of his coffee into the sand, then rang the bell at the gate. Shortly Clara answered, cradling the little girl—that point, the child’s sex, was now settled. Malvasio hadn’t been curious or perverse enough to poke around, but Clara had bathed the tyke straight off and: bingo. As she slept in Clara’s arms, her tiny brown face puckered into fleshy creases.

  Strock sat at the dining room table, finishing a lunch of soup and tortillas washed down with cold beer. Malvasio had arranged with the women of the pueblito on the estuary that there be a six-pack on hand every day. More than that, Strock could get sloppy. Less, he might get the shakes.

  The AR-15 sat atop the table like a killer’s centerpiece, several boxes of ammunition stacked beside it. Spotting Malvasio, Strock downed the last of his beer and rose, gathered his cane, and hefted the rifle over his shoulder. Malvasio collected ammunition boxes, stowing them in his rucksack. Neither man spoke. They’d had the morning to discuss particulars.

  They headed out and hiked away from the beach, wind at their backs, following the path beneath the palms and shaggy eucalyptus trees through the thorny scrub brush toward the estuary. The thick-bodied women of the pueblito were serving rabbits and crab to a table of workmen with machetes who’d been gathering thatch. Everyone pretended not to notice as the two Americans, one of them armed, walked past.

  Malvasio had anchored his lancha in the sandy mud at the bottom of the log steps. Strock plopped down in the bow, sitting backward so he could face Malvasio. With Strock watching his every move, Malvasio pushed off, cranked the outboard, then steered toward a branch of the estuary leading deep into the mangrove swamp.

  In time, Malvasio called out above the growl of the outboard, “Mind if I play tour guide? This place is pretty interesting, if you know what’s what.”

  Strock worked up a grin, adjusting the AR-15 across his lap. “Suit yourself.” He thought back to earlier, aiming for Malvasio’s skull, then firing, pulling off-target at the last instant. Doing it a second time, a third time. It had felt far more delicious than killing him could have. Once he was dead, that was it. What was there to look forward to? To have that chance again, here, now, but to forbear once more—yeah, that was the word exactly. Delicious. And listen to him, how humble he is, how palsy. Strock felt like luck’s new buddy. He felt like God.

  The way Malvasio had told it, saving Jude would require some precision shooting, and none of the snipers to be found down here could be trusted—they’d turn their allegiance to the men in charge. Malvasio realized he was in a bind and had to come up with a plan of his own. He depended on these men for his safekeeping—they’d turn on him in a heartbeat if he voiced any objections. He had to follow through, make the thing look okay. But it couldn’t succeed. And all that depended on the Candyman, which Strock found appealing. He could see Laugh Master Bill getting cornered like this and needing an old pal he’d screwed to bail him out. It had a certain moral symmetry to it. And yet Bill hadn’t begged. If he had, Strock would have grown suspicious. He just laid it out, let Strock think it through, ask his questions and decide. And the longer Strock had the weapon in his hands, the more certain he became.

  He put these musings aside as Malvasio began pointing and naming. In a dark tangle of mangrove roots, a pale blue garza stood sentry, resembling a flamingo with its slender body and long curved neck, but smaller, delicate. Schools of sardine-size cuatro ojos, four-eyed fish, darted to and fro—two eyes below water, trained for food, the other two pointed skyward, looking for predators—and the flickering mass of bodies created silvery green trails in the shallows. An eagle—stark white head and body, pitch black wings—perched high above the impenetrable mangroves in a stately conacaste tree.

  Malvasio steered the lancha into a narrow inlet on a thickly forested sand spit. Wild parakeets darted branch to branch in the thick foliage overhead. The deep, humid shade smelled of moss and rot. Fifty yards in, he cut the outboard, drifted the last few feet, then tied up to a mangrove root.

  “This is the spot,” he told Strock.

  They scrambled out and headed for a clearing just beyond a rim of trees. Once they broke through the tree line, Strock slipped the rifle off his shoulder.

  “What the hell …?”

  The clearing was maybe sixty-by-forty yards, obviously manmade, but to what end? As though reading Strock’s mind, Malvasio said, “Used to be a soccer field here. A group of zacateros from La Herradura on the other end of the estuary built it, cleared away the trees, put up goals, painted boundary lines. But after Hurricane Mitch and the earthquakes the thing just got forgotten. The swamp’s already reclaimed most of it.” He pointed to the mangrove roots sprouting everywhere in the loosening sand. “And the goalposts got pilfered for lumber or firewood.”

  Sixty yards created a shorter zero point than Strock would have liked. The Redfield scope was three to nine, so he cranked the power down to four to get some background in his field of vision. Malvasio had shooting range targets, a human silhouette circled with white rings, that he tacked up to a tree. He didn’t mention where he got the targets and Strock chose not to ask.

  That wasn’t all Malvasio had brought along. From his rucksack he withdrew a Larand sound suppressor and handed it to Strock, saying, “An ounce of precaution. So we don
’t make what we’re doing out here any more obvious than it needs to be.”

  Strock took the device from him, studied it briefly. He’d used one before, target work, never in a SWAT situation. It wasn’t the kind of thing cops needed normally. A combat sniper, maybe. Or an assassin. It was made of copper mesh discs, perhaps two hundred, packed tight inside the black steel cylinder, decent enough though hardly state of the art. He screwed the silencer onto the end of the rifle barrel, saying, “I’ve heard some guys say you’re more accurate with one of these on your piece than you are without.”

  Malvasio said, “You think that’s true?”

  Strock shrugged, eyeing the target sixty yards away. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  He spent the next hour acquainting himself with the weapon. They were deep enough within the swamp that the wind wasn’t a factor, so he didn’t have to dope the scope. He did have to fuss with eye relief, though, until he could sight through cleanly the instant he had the stock shouldered, the target jumping to life in the crosshairs. The trigger pad felt natural, the action was a standard two-and-a-half pounds, smooth and clean—he could hold a dime on the barrel on dry fires. The rounds were light—fifty-five-grain boattails—tapered to minimize wind drag. Recoil was negligible. By midafternoon he was shooting half-inch groups of five, sitting, standing, prone. His chops were rusty, not lost; it all came back like an old habit—a little like sex, actually, a rhythm you never have to learn and never really forget. Just need practice. The pain in his knee flared up every now and then, but he could focus through it if he just relaxed. His cold shots—first rounds fired before the barrel heated up—were high right a quarter inch. Normal. As for whether he was more or less accurate with the silencer, it seemed a moot point—Strock had a pretty good idea the thing was staying on regardless.