Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  He logged his shot placements and the atmospheric variables in his notepad, already bored.

  Given he was using the silencer, the parakeets in the branches overhead seldom scattered when he fired, and when they did, they settled down again quickly. The humid air was thick with their chirps and trills. Hitting one square would prove an interesting challenge, he thought.

  Following his glance, Malvasio said, “You want to shoot birds, go for the big black jobs. They’re called zanates. They raid other birds’ nests and eat their eggs, which is why you see them damn near everywhere.”

  “Yeah, but they’re bigger and slower. I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of pest control.”

  “Whatever. I’m just saying—killing them would be God’s work.”

  “Then let God do it.” He handed the gun out to Malvasio. “You want to take a few swings at the bat?”

  Malvasio considered it, looked at his watch, then said, “We’ve got a while. Sure.” He took the gun and lay down on the sand and settled in, not rushing as he fired off his first group of five. Watching him, Strock spotted several errors in technique right off.

  “You tend to look up after every shot, know that? Stay married to the weapon. Keep your eye trained through the scope.”

  “I tried that. Things go in and out. Sometimes I can see, other times it’s all black.”

  “That’s because I’ve adjusted it to my eye relief, not yours. We can fix that easy. After that it’s just practice.”

  A devilish glint rose in Malvasio’s eye. “What’ll I need you for, then?”

  “To hit something that moves.” Strock took the rifle from him and ejected the magazine for reload. “Or that’s more than sixty yards away.”

  29

  In the capital, men Axel had arranged to meet during the week found themselves unexpectedly engaged. Follow-up meetings would have to be scheduled at an always unspecified later date. Various excuses were made, each less credible than the one before, though it seemed apparent the embezzlement scandal was at least partially to blame. Few officials, it soon became clear, welcomed the prospect of outsiders asking questions in the charged climate the criminal inquiry created, no matter how far afield those questions might be. Even men unaffiliated with ANDA seemed hopelessly elusive, not that gathering information hadn’t been a challenge before. An alphabet soup of twenty-five disconnected but stubbornly territorial and ultimately toothless agencies oversaw water issues around the country, ANDA being the dominant player but other outfits possessing critical data of their own, data they guarded jealously: You had hydrologists at ASPAGUA, social workers with FIS, environmentalists from SALUD, engineers on behalf of EYCO, businessmen representing CEDES, and so on. They coordinated poorly even during the best of times, and arranging meetings typically resembled herding cats. Getting even four men together at a single time and place bordered on the miraculous, and Axel had wasted the better part of numerous visits during the past year trying to correlate data obtained from competing authorities. Now, just as he was trying to finalize his analysis, the flow of information virtually stopped.

  Compounding the problem was the strange tendency of agency lackeys to abscond with government files when they left their jobs, doing so with the hope of launching second careers as consultants. The rumors of ANDA’s imminent privatization only accelerated that trend—and no one was ever punished for the thefts—meaning Axel all too often had to chase down these freelancers and pay a fee for the privilege of reviewing documents that should have been public record. Now, with the embezzlement scandal a daily headline, these characters apparently decided it was unwise to push their luck, and most refused to so much as return calls.

  But not even that was the worst of it. Charts and data Axel knew to be on hand not just at ANDA but at other entities in the capital—materials he’d reviewed cursorily only weeks before, and needed for his final follow-up—now could not be found or were delivered to him ridiculously piecemeal. Streamflow records for the Río Conacastal—data already frustratingly spotty due to destruction of river gauges during the twelve-year civil war—were suddenly missing or in suspicious disarray. The only recharge and groundwater yield analyses now available for the alluvial plain bordering the river had puzzling gaps, most notably the drought of 2002. Geological maps of the fractured basalt formations running through the area, suggestive of large-yield aquifers, were maddeningly incomplete. It made the task of confirming his prior analyses all but impossible.

  Meanwhile, traveling about the city became more problematic as the protests in the streets escalated. Archbishop Saenz, a member of Opus Dei, the right-wing Catholic brotherhood, addressed a crowd of areneros in the cathedral plaza, exhorting them to stand firm against terrorists and to support the heroic troops in Iraq. Unfortunately for the archbishop, a jury in Fresno, California, had just awarded a multimillion-dollar verdict against Álvaro Saravia, a former air force colonel responsible for hiring the gunman who’d martyred the much-loved Archbishop Romero in 1980. When efemelenistas at the rally waved placards accusing Archbishop Saenz of complicity with his predecessor’s assassins, the predictable melee broke out. Dozens were injured, one woman blinded. Revenge assaults flared up throughout the city.

  Intent on keeping order around the cathedral, the police cracked down on street vendors in the nearby Mercado Central. The vendors responded by throwing rocks, but the PNC claimed shots were fired too. The police answered with bullets of their own, then tear gas, killing one man and sending two dozen others to intensive care.

  As though that weren’t bad enough, a riot broke out in La Esperanza, the hellish overcrowded penitentiary in Mariona near the capital. Homemade grenades exploded in fireballs along one wing of the prison, creating a stampede as inmates fled for their lives to escape the fires and blinding smoke. Battles in the yard broke out almost instantly between members of Mara Salvatrucha and Mara Dieciocho. They went at each other with homemade pipe guns called chimbas as well as shanks fashioned from broken chapel benches and steel bed frames. Thirty-one inmates were dead, some scalped, some burned to scorched meat in the fires. Dozens of others were wounded. Rumors of retaliatory atrocities were already circulating as prison guards fought to reassert control of the prison.

  Word of the riot scarcely leaked out before a patrol car was bombed in Ilopango. Police patrols in Zacatecoluca and Sonsonate took fire. Gang-on-gang violence erupted in the capital and smaller cities in the countryside, compounded by a sudden surge in gunpoint robberies and carjackings. Curfews were enforced nationwide.

  The Mercedes seemed too easy a target in that environment; Jude imposed a house arrest of his own, restricting Axel to his room at the Hotel Camino Real unless travel outside was absolutely necessary. Not that it mattered. Only two of the dozen contacts Axel had arranged to meet that week followed through, joining him for lunch at the hotel. They responded to all his inquiries with vague assurances that the information he needed would be available once all the disruptions died down—the civil unrest, the embezzlement inquiry. “But that could take ages,” Axel protested, to which his luncheon companions could only shrug.

  Then, late in the week, an American was killed. A Teamster of Salvadoran descent named Gilberto Soto had come back to visit family and meet with cargo drivers in Acajutla to discuss unionizing. While having dinner at his mother’s house in a working-class barrio in Usulután, he stepped outside to take a call on his cell phone. Alerted by an accomplice on bicycle, three men walked up and opened fire, then ran off.

  The union called it a death squad hit, but the port authorities and truck companies were parroting uncredited accounts that the crime was drug related. Some, given the recent mayhem in the wake of the riots at La Esperanza, blamed the gangs. Back in the States, the Teamsters were burning up phone lines, pressuring everyone from trade representatives to congressmen to the ambassador, demanding a credible inquiry from the PNC. But the police said only that the investigation was in progress. They had, as yet, no suspects.

/>   As Jude passed this news along, Axel gazed from his balcony down the Boulevard de los Héroes, his hands folded, fingertips tapping against his chin. “They’re not going to beef up your protection detail,” Jude said, “since this killing looks like an isolated incident. That means we just have to take even greater precautions than we have already until things settle down. That may happen overnight or it could take a week. Maybe longer.”

  Axel seemed distracted, his gaze unfocused. “Consuela called this morning,” he said finally. “She’s coming here tomorrow, to the hotel, to stay with me.” Almost imperceptibly, he blushed, despite the sobriety in his voice. “I trust she’ll be safe. All things being relative, I realize.”

  Thursday evening, working by candlelight, Strock lashed two pieces of driftwood into a cross and dressed it in a spare shirt and trousers, stuffed the clothes with palm fronds, cinched the cuffs with twine, then fashioned a head from an empty coconut, drawing in googly eyes and a knucklehead smile with burnt cork.

  He showed his creation to Clara who sat hunched on the floor of her room beside the mattress, watching the little girl sleep. Clara, glancing up, indulged Strock with a shy, puzzled smile, and it warmed him. He’d grown increasingly, protectively fond of the woman the past few days—her kindness, her gentleness, her uncomplaining decency. Those things defined her in a way he’d once thought only a woman’s looks could.

  Not so long ago his worldview could have been summed up in the old joke: Why do women have vaginas? So men will talk to them. Now he would have liked nothing more than to just talk, reach through the language barrier and let Clara know how much he admired the way she cherished that child, carrying her everywhere, cooing to her, caressing her. Watching her sleep, for chrissake. He hoped, once this business with Malvasio and Ray’s kid was done, to live up to that example. He ached to see his own little girl, make things right by her and her mother, drop the anger and self-pity and step up. He wanted Chelsea and Peg to know they could rely on him. If he could manage just that, he’d feel like a millionaire.

  And yet he couldn’t keep the pretty picture in focus for long. He was down here to keep Jude from getting killed, but that just meant other men would have to die. That was the plan as it stood so far. And he couldn’t tell which was worse—the fact he knew that was wrong or that he didn’t care. He had a talent. Didn’t the nuns always say it’s a sin to bury your talents?

  When Malvasio arrived the next morning for their daily trip into the mangrove swamp, Strock collected the rifle, his cane, and a coil of rope he’d found in a closet. Then he handed Malvasio the scarecrow, saying, “Meet Sparky. Another day of just shooting at targets, I’ll go batshit. Let’s have some fun.”

  Out at the abandoned soccer field, they hung Sparky from a mangrove limb and Strock told Malvasio to let him swing. The scope’s optics gathered illumination from the shafts of sunlight spearing down through the tree cover as Strock tracked the swaying target. Before long he was drilling the head and chest consistently. To make it harder, Malvasio went one better, twisted the rope tight, stepped behind the tree, then swung Sparky out like a tetherball. Strock fired five rounds and connected only once. To himself, he whispered, “Yee-haw,” then called out to Malvasio: “Okay, collect the ornery fucker and let’s do it again. Round two, the Sparky Challenge.”

  Strock slaughtered three different lengths of rope and made a hash of the shirt and trousers before finally managing to reliably nail a head shot. By noon he’d nicked the coconut into a garish little sculpture, at which point boredom settled in again. He traded places with Malvasio and let him shoot for a while, just letting Sparky swing back and forth, which was challenging enough. Strock was a natural, but he’d been on a gun range often enough to know that with a good scope, a good weapon, a little composure, and enough practice, anybody could hit just about anything. Not to say Malvasio was merely average. He’d become a good, steady shot over the week, a little slow on the trigger but deadly accurate, even when they placed the target farther away, a hundred yards, one fifty, threading their shots through the mangrove forest. Malvasio compensated for his lack of native skill by being patient, not chasing the target. As Strock watched him wait out Sparky, drill the dummy square five times running, an idea came.

  While Malvasio was collecting his spent casings and reloading the rifle’s magazine, Strock broke off a branch from a ceiba tree, cut Sparky down, and lashed the thick branch to the dummy’s vertical axis, more than doubling the upward length of the pole. Malvasio, noticing finally, called out from the far end of the field, “What the hell are you up to now?”

  “You can hold him up in the air this way.” Strock demonstrated, limping forward, hoisting Sparky overhead like a bullet-riddled effigy. Finally, once he reached normal talking distance, he let the thing drop. “We used to do this on the target range, use a wig head on a broomstick—or two, make like it was a guy with a hostage.”

  Malvasio, sensing he’d be the first one on walkabout duty, said, “Yeah, but I’d guess the man holding the broom was down in the spotter’s trench.”

  “When did you turn into such a pussy? Hell, if I was gonna kill you out here, I’d have done it Monday.”

  “That’s comforting.” Malvasio gathered up his rucksack. “We gotta cut things short today, anyway. Got some people to meet out east. After that, hopefully, I’ll have a better idea where things go from here.”

  Three hours later, Malvasio shouldered through the crowd at the street market in San Bartolo Oriente, then turned up a cramped, meandering alley. The buildings on either side provided welcome shade but scant relief from the heat. On a balcony above a beauty parlor, a chunky prostitute in red spandex with a helmet of canary yellow hair vamped for him, fanning herself with a postcard, smiling through a yawn. Fatima, Malvasio thought, recognizing her. A good taxpayer. She was, if he remembered right, sixteen.

  Continuing on, he swam through a heady stench of dog piss, rotting trash, frying grease, and spilled beer, passing a man in a filthy apron hawking slices from a massive block of cheese, waving flies away with the blade of his cleaver. At a shoe shine stand, an old campesino watched stoically from his chair as, for some inscrutable reason, his sneakers got lathered with shoe black. Finally, Malvasio spotted Sleeper and Chucho perched on wood stools at a comedor, chowing down. Tiny fuís hopped about, pecking at crumbs beneath the tables.

  Sleeper, dabbing fingers on a napkin, said, “Quiubo, Duende,” through a mouthful of fried plantain. Despite the sweaty heat the kid wore his long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the collar and cuffs, a wise strategy given the recent police sweeps. Beside him, Chucho hunched over his steaming paper plate as he shoveled cheesy pork rind into his mouth. Unlike Sleeper, the kid was shirtless, his shiny dark skin immaculate. The ones coming up got it: Skip the ink.

  Malvasio took a slip of paper from his pocket while batucada, a Brazilian drum music based on samba, tripped along rhythmically from a nearby sound system, lending an air of Carneval.

  “So,” he said, “the vampires brave the light of day.”

  Sleeper did a little shoulder shirk as his eyes darted side to side, scanning the crowded, twisting alleyway in both directions. “Man’s gotta eat.”

  Malvasio laid the slip of paper on the table. “I’m assuming if you’d heard anything yet about what we talked about, you’d have told me.” He’d instructed Sleeper to spread word town to town—he wanted to know if anyone had brought in a roll of film to be developed concerning the beheaded woman found along the Río Jiboa. Sleeper had sent out chamacos he could trust, from here to the capital, making it known. Word would be rewarded. Silence wouldn’t.

  Sleeper licked his teeth. “I told you. Truco Valdez ain’t a dope. He gets that developed, it’ll be in San Salvador, and there’s damn near no way to track that.”

  “Speaking of Mr. Valdez. You know his organization, La Tregua.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Sleeper spat. “Punks give up the flag? Fuck ’em.”

  Malvasio turned the s
lip of paper so Sleeper could read it. It contained an address. “You’re going to pretend you want to join.”

  Sleeper’s eyes hardened. “No way.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You can’t. This is wrong. This is … This is evil, man, you can’t do this.”

  “I said ‘pretend.’”

  “I’ll get the mark on me, understand? They’ll say I’m tricked up.”

  In the background, Chucho licked his fingers, paying a bit more attention now. Nervy little bastard, Malvasio thought. It was a talent.

  “Your friend here can vouch for you. Besides, the group has a rep as a front. Mareros try to make it look like they’re boning out when they’re really not. Run with that.”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “No, I get it.” Malvasio turned to leave. “I just don’t care.”

  “I do this,” Sleeper said to his back, “you’re gonna do like you promised, right? Get me to the laser clinic.” He meant one of the newer tattoo removal salons, run by the Catholic church with funding assistance from, of all places, the U.S. embassy. It would spare him having them burned off.

  “Your own mother won’t recognize you,” Malvasio assured him, speaking over his shoulder, then walked away. It was time, finally, for him to suffer a little kiss-up-kick-down of his own. At the hands of el mero mero.

  30

  Hector Torres waited in a private room at El Arriero with the colonel and the judge and Wenceslao Sola. The occasion for the gathering was the completion of a new chapel for the local orphanage, which the judge had generously financed. Fresh from the christening ceremony—at which, Malvasio imagined, the nuns had prostrated themselves in gratitude—the four men dined on grilled goat, basted with mango and lime, served with rice, chunks of yucca fried to a golden brown, and glasses of ice-cold beer.