Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  Glancing up as Malvasio entered, Hector said, “I was beginning to wonder if you’d withered up in the heat, like a spider.” The others smiled darkly or ignored the remark, and Malvasio figured that was as good as it was going to get. Meanwhile, Hector gestured for him to take a chair against the wall and wait.

  Malvasio had received a serious dressing down earlier in the week for the screwup with his veteranos—and he had every intention of passing the abuse along tenfold when the time was right—but for now, it was his understanding a second flogging wasn’t in store. He was there to provide a progress report that would make everybody happy, to show a suitable level of contrite resolve, and then he’d grovel his way out the door. The last two wouldn’t be a problem, he thought. It was an act he’d mastered long ago. As for making anyone happy, though, a glance around the table convinced him that would take some doing. These were men who equated happiness with perfection—in particular, perfection from others.

  Sitting next to Hector, Judge Regalado seemed almost ethereal—a thin, waxy man with a sharp nose, cold pale eyes, and wisps of white hair curling out from a narrow head that tapered to a point at the chin. He could pass for a Spaniard, and it took an effort, sometimes, to remember that a man of such Gothic delicacy could be so roundly feared.

  The source of that fear, of course, was in many ways the man across the table from him: Colonel Vides. He was as dark as Hector but taller and better-looking, despite a beak of a nose and a tiny, pinched mouth. He carried himself with the clipped grace of a man who had commanded other men and earned their respect. But his eyes, if studied carefully, revealed something else—a base and strangely volatile pride. He was, after all, a country boy at heart, raised above his station by his military career, and his newfound status as a civilian among influential men seemed to encourage a certain venal bravura, tinged with an almost operatic mean streak. Even so, Malvasio had to concede the colonel a grudging respect. He was the only one, other than Hector, with the remotest clue how to actually accomplish anything.

  Lastly, Wenceslao Sola hunkered over his plate, pudgy, self-conscious, ill-tempered, seldom glancing up as he chewed his food. He inspired neither fear nor love as far as Malvasio could tell, except from the ratty terrier of garbled breed that sat at his feet, waiting for scraps.

  While Malvasio waited, the colonel inquired after one of the judge’s grandchildren, a girl named Rosa. Apparently, she was thirteen but looked seven, and for the past year she’d suffered terrible pain in her joints. After ruling out lupus, her doctors sent her to an endocrinologist in Miami who uncovered a rare thyroid disorder. Rosa was now on a regimen of pills and nightly injections of human growth hormone, plus monthly shots to suppress puberty—bone growth stops, the judge explained, when a girl has her first period. Meanwhile, her hair had begun falling out, and the family had pulled her from school to spare her the ridicule. Though the pain was better, the medications had side effects: She was sluggish and dull-witted, with no interest in things she’d once loved, even her pets; she’d grown fat and slept sixteen hours a day. Everyone murmured their sympathies and invoked the help of God and family, then Hector at last turned to Malvasio.

  “So, you have news,” he said. It was a command, not an invitation.

  Malvasio nodded. “I’ll know the whereabouts of Truco Valdez in a day or two. Latest, beginning of next week.” A godawful promise, practically a lie.

  The colonel screwed up his withered mouth; his lips all but vanished. “He’s had a week already with the pictures.” He tilted his head back when he talked, as though to look down on you. His voice was reedy. “Long enough to pass them along to whomever he pleases.”

  “There are only so many places between here and the capital where he can get film developed,” Malvasio said. “I’ve put out word. If anything like those pictures shows up, I’ll know.”

  The judge, holding aloft a morsel of goat impaled on his fork, said: “But soon enough? I believe that is Narciso’s point.”

  “I can’t control that.”

  The judge shook his head in disgust, then inserted the sliver of meat into his mouth, eyes rolling back behind fluttering lashes as he chewed.

  Hector sat forward, hands clenched over his plate. “It is what it is. We don’t even know if there’s anything in those pictures to bother over.” Malvasio, though gratified by the show of backhanded support, knew it was motivated by self-interest. Hector was, after all, the one ultimately responsible for these recent mistakes, such was the chain of command. “What about this boy, the one who says he saw the woman abducted?”

  “He hasn’t been found yet, but I received some good news right before I came here. We’re close.” Another lie. Malvasio had yet to tell anyone about the boy’s baby sister, now in Clara’s care at the rancho. He was keeping that to himself for now, among other things. He still held out hope the mother would choose her innocent little girl over her rash, mouthy son. No news till good news, he thought. That’s my motto.

  “You’re not very good at finding people,” the colonel remarked.

  “It’s not a big country.” This was Sola, his first contribution, made between mouthfuls. He tried to look menacing, then slipped a bit of gristle from his mouth to the dog.

  “With seven million people in it,” Malvasio said. “And it was my understanding I wasn’t the only one looking.” He glanced the colonel’s direction, wondering: What, your guys took the week off? He knew better than to say it out loud. “Regardless, the boy knows, he opens his mouth, his mother suffers. Plus, the rigged ID worked out, the dead woman and her runaway head got cremated. She is who you say she is, and nobody’s the wiser.”

  Everyone glanced up, stunned by his impertinence. How dare he hide behind what everyone else had been obliged to do to bail him out. Hector, sensing a need to move things along, said, “For now, you’re right. Let’s hope it stays that way.” He shooed a fly from his plate. “What about this other thing, regarding the hydrologist?”

  “That’s all in place. But given the killing of the American, the Teamster—”

  “We had no part in that,” Hector said. A smile: “Not to say we don’t know who did.”

  “Or that we object,” the judge added, carving another portion of goat.

  “No one’s heard?” It was the colonel. Everyone turned. “There’s been a break in the case. It should be on the news later.” He puckered up a smile. “I won’t spoil the surprise.”

  “My point,” Malvasio said, trying to get things back on track so he could wrap up and leave, “is that it’s not like some tramp from the hills you can claim is a hooker and get believed. You’ve got a dead American. Perks people up. Following suit on the hydrologist right now—”

  “It is, perhaps, a moot point.” This was Sola again, asserting himself—an odd move for him, among these men at least. He glanced around the table, wiggling his knife and fork, then focused on Malvasio. “As I was saying before you arrived—the Teamster, good result, bad timing, granted. But we caught some luck earlier in the week with the ANDA fiasco. Ironic, actually. I had a friend in the administration contact the acting head of that department, tell him to slow things down to a crawl. I couldn’t do that with Manrique in the picture. He couldn’t be bribed because he was stealing.” He laughed, tipping his chin down to keep from spitting food. The little mutt tensed at his feet, waiting. “Word has gone out to a number of others too. Let this Odelberg beg all he wants, he won’t get the information he needs. Better no answer than an answer that fucks us—at least till Strickland, from Torkland Overby, visits next week. He’ll ask for a report on this Odelberg’s findings—it’s been almost a year, after all. If nothing’s final, the hydrologist bags up and goes home. I have that on good authority from Lazarek, our friend at ODIC. The company will say his work was inconclusive. That suits everyone’s purpose for now, and life goes on. Simple.” He looked from face to face, wearing a bent little smile, then resumed the attack on his plate.

  Malvasio had to res
train himself from reaching across the table and strangling him. I have to arrange to kill a man for you, an American, pin it on the mareros; I have to find a way to avoid taking out my dead best friend’s son in the bargain; then, just for a kicker, I have to stand there while an old sidekick, who not so long ago vowed to see me dead, takes a few potshots at pointblank range—you couldn’t come up with this before? But of course that was crazy thinking. Who needs to plan ahead when nothing costs you?

  “So I can stand down,” he said, “from getting my guys into place.”

  All of them glanced up as one, like before, their eyes even more disapproving than earlier—his initiative was impudent, reckless—but once again only Hector spoke. “No, continue with that for now. One never knows.”

  Sola saw this as an opening to say something else. He spoke to Malvasio without looking at him. “Incidentally, I got a call from someone who works with the hydrologist’s bodyguard. He apparently found out the puta socialista that the old goat is screwing was married to one of my cousins. He wanted to know if I thought there was anything he should know about her, anything that might raise concerns—I mean, beyond the fact she’s disgracing herself and her children. Revenge against me or my interests, that sort of thing. I told him nothing specific, just that we considered her a little crazy, moody, unrealistic. I didn’t want him getting any ideas he should take some kind of action that might complicate what you’ve been planning.”

  “I appreciate that,” Malvasio said. It took everything he had to give the man credit for so much as a viable impulse, but he knew his place. Then, feigning upbeat: “This keeps up, I won’t have anything to do.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that just yet,” Hector said, sitting back as a waiter cleared his plate. “And following up on what Wenceslao said earlier, about making the hydrologist’s work difficult—confusion is good, more is better.” He smiled wickedly, leaning forward on his elbows, licking his teeth. His odd good humor seemed to echo around the table; shrewd grins appeared all around. He said, “Have you ever worked with animals?”

  The cattle grazed in a pasture rimmed with parched tiguilote trees on a rise above the Río Conacastal. To the north, beyond a misty haze, the volcano known as Chaparrastique loomed darkly over the scorched plain.

  The herd consisted of several hundred scrawny piebald shorthorns with goatish ears and primitive brand markings. They belonged to a cattleman named Humilde Lopez who with his sons tended them on land owned by Judge Regalado.

  Malvasio parked his van and stared down for a moment at the river lazing muddily at its dry season low. The water was largely untreated runoff from the judge’s sugar processing plant, an undrinkable brew of plant matter and sludge. For all he knew, it was poisonous to the cows.

  Have you ever worked with animals?

  Even with the sun dipping toward the horizon, the open air felt like a furnace. Lopez and one of his sons were shoeing a horse in the lengthening shade of a lone ceiba tree in the center of the pasture. Malvasio got out of his van and called out his greeting as he approached. The father handed the hammer to his son, and Malvasio, as he came closer, noticed that the young man lacked two fingers on his right hand. Malvasio gestured for the older man to follow him, a little ways toward the dusty riverbed, so they could talk alone.

  “I just left the judge and Señor Torres,” Malvasio told him. “I was asked to tell you that they want you to move your herd from this pasture to the one across the river this weekend.”

  Humilde listened as though receiving penance for someone else’s sins. He was a dark, reserved, bony man. A milky cataract hazed one eye. “There is hardly any water here, except for the river, which is no good. There is none over there.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The judge said he would send water trucks so I could fill the cisterns for the cows to drink. None have come in over two weeks. And the wells. Believe me, I do not want to complain”—something in his voice suggested he was thinking, Everyone knows about the woman who complained—“but the wells are going bad. They need to be re-drilled.” Gesturing with his hand for emphasis, he added, “Deeper.”

  “I can pass that along,” Malvasio said. “I’m just supposed to let you know you’re to move the herd. And the judge wants you to follow the quebrada to where the line of shrubs heads off uphill. Cross over there, pick up the shrub line again on the far side, and follow it through those fields to the lower pasture.”

  The cattleman seemed puzzled. The shrubs were believed to follow the path of an underground stream. “But the American has his instruments there. He dug wells.”

  “It’s my understanding none of that matters anymore. In fact, everyone will be much obliged if you and your herd make short work of all that.”

  Humilde Lopez realized finally what he was being told to do. “There is still the problem with water.”

  You’re talking to the wrong man, Malvasio thought. Not that there’s a right man. He reached into his pocket and withdrew his cash. “I’m to pay you for your trouble.”

  Hector had said to continue with the other plan as well, and so Malvasio headed back into San Bartolo Oriente to where the hydrologist’s woman lived. The development was called, somewhat extravagantly, Villas de Miramonte and was located on the outskirts of town behind a high graffiti-tagged wall.

  Shortly after the hydrologist’s interest in Consuela Rojas became known, Malvasio learned where she lived and discussed with Hector and the colonel the best way to proceed. Though she was known to Sola and his relatives, it seemed best to avoid further involvement of the family. It turned out that one of the bartenders at El Arriero had an uncle whose mechanic knew someone who knew someone else, the daisy chain of acquaintance ending finally with a retired bank teller with the appropriate inclinations who rented a house across the street and three doors down from the Rojas woman in Villas de Miramonte.

  The old man, whose name was Osorio, had been one of the government’s orejas during the war, informing on bank customers who deposited suspicious amounts of cash or whose transactions hinted at allegiances with the popular front. He was a wizened, shambling, cheerful man who wore white socks and glistening shoes and crooked bifocals.

  Malvasio had introduced himself to Osorio last week. He’d dropped the appropriate names and mentioned that the object of his interest was one of Osorio’s neighbors. The old man cagily guessed which one right off, saying he’d had his doubts about the Rojas woman for some time. Her father had been a socialista: not a Marxist exactly but close enough, especially for a military man. And the woman herself was a divorcée, which meant she’d fallen away from the church. Visitors appeared at her house whom Osorio recognized from their faces alone as the complaining kind, the sort who use pity for the poor as an excuse to shun work and mock God.

  Malvasio had asked that Osorio provide his house as an occasional surveillance post, with the possibility that some of Malvasio’s assistants, posing as workmen, might also appear, conducting their observations from a van parked just outside. Osorio had responded that he was only too glad to help.

  “Criminals run free like dogs these days,” he’d said. “They should be dealt with like dogs.”

  Night had fallen by the time Malvasio drove up to the tall iron gate at the entrance to Villas de Miramonte and provided Osorio’s name to the two men manning the guard station. They wore no uniforms and carried no weapons, though an ancient M1 stood ready in the wood shack where they sat playing cards by lamplight, listening to the radio.

  Inside the gate, a hundred homes stood packed one against the other along several long culs-de-sac. The houses were the standard cinder block structures, a little better than average in craftsmanship but still limited to propane in their kitchens plus no hot water. Despite those drawbacks the average price ran eighty to a hundred thousand dollars. It was something of a miracle anyone but the rich could afford property. If she hadn’t had a decent lawyer and a wealthy ex-husband, Consuela Rojas wouldn’t have been able to affo
rd her home either.

  Given it was after dark, people hid inside their homes, content to be barricaded with their families. Malvasio parked in front of Osorio’s house, but rather than heading to his door, he made his way across the street to the home of Consuela Rojas, carrying a cloth kit bag.

  The woman was gone, Osorio had reported, having traveled to the capital to be with her American marinovio. The house stood empty and dark.

  Using the shadows for concealment, Malvasio removed his rake gun and torsion pick from his bag. The lock had a five-pin tumbler but it was old and loose and he worked all five pins up to their shear lines without much bother. The lock cleared within ninety seconds. He pushed the door open, took out his flashlight, and stepped inside.

  The decor, though immaculate, almost out-humbled the neighborhood. The woman had once lived with her wealthy doctor husband in a colonial era mansion in San Miguel. She’d had a personal chef, servientas. Now this.

  A rough cedar table, covered with a simple linen tablecloth, consumed the small dining room. The living room had a couch, one chair, a lamp, and a simple cabinet containing memorabilia and photographs. From the pictures he learned she had two children, boy and girl, both in their twenties now, off studying somewhere. An elfin mother with saintly eyes. And the socialist colonel father, a handsome man, wearing a suit, not his uniform. No evidence of Dr. Ex.

  There were two bedrooms upstairs, both barely big enough to hold a bed and a dresser. He searched cabinets and closets and drawers for anything the hydrologist might have left behind, something that indicated what he was thinking, planning, but found nothing beyond the tidy little things of a woman with flawed luck. He even searched her lingerie, taking in the flowery scent of her perfume, fingering the lace. The underthings were surprisingly chic. He went to the closet and saw that she’d kept some of her clothes from her marriage, too, relics of her former station.