Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  “Let’s get this straight. What happened between us, as you put it, has nothing to do with how I go about my job.”

  Cooly, she met his eyes. “Convince me.”

  “If Axel decides to go ahead, it’s his choice. I’m going to argue against it—out of concern for keeping him in one piece, and nothing else—but it’s his call.”

  “I’ll make you a bet. The minute I saw the two of them together, I had this much figured out—he sticks with her. Even if you refuse to protect him.”

  “Refuse—that’s what you think of me?” He wagged the poem at her. “That and this?”

  She finally took it from him. Scanning her words, she smiled ruefully. “This isn’t the only note I left behind—you know that, right?” She looked off, as though bringing a memory to bear, then pulled a few damp strands of hair off her neck as she tilted her head and began to sing in that raspy voice of hers: “Hey, Jude. Don’t be afraid.”

  It took a second for him to place it.

  “That’s right. The little note stuck with gum under the hood of your truck?” A half shrug, and she bit her lip. “A day or two after that night you came out to my place, one of the women in La Perla, Alma’s her name, needed somebody to drive her to Comalapa. Her brother was coming back from the States. Everyone there’s been great to me, of course I said yes.

  “As I was parking at he airport I noticed your truck. I don’t know, something just came over me. I got this idea. I told Alma to go on ahead, I’d wait in the car. I needed to tell you something, speak my mind, and yet I didn’t want to come across like some mad bitch stalker, either. So it just came to me, that line from the song, and it seemed perfect somehow. A little anonymous observation from out of the blue. Because yeah, I think you’re afraid, Jude. We all are, I realize, and I don’t just mean you’re afraid of me, or what you feel for me, though I think that’s true. I feel like I know you—not just that you’re afraid, but the good things about you, too. The fact that you’re kind, for example. You understand the people here. You want to do the right thing. I see all that and more, but you’re scared to death you’re going to screw it up somehow. You’ve got two modes: kinda okay and complete disaster. Happy? Forget about it, too much to lose. Better hold back, wait the thing out. Because sooner or later it’s bound to head south.” She closed her eyes and let out a long, burdened sigh. “That’s sad, Jude. I don’t mean it’s weird, and God knows it’s not uncommon. I don’t think it’s set in stone though, either, or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it.”

  He felt stunned by what she was saying, but oddly relieved as well. Wasn’t this what he’d really wanted, especially from her? To be seen for who he was: good, bad, indifferent. She was right, he’d spent much of his life waiting things out, watching from a slight remove. Did that mean he was scared? He’d always thought of it simply as a way to fend off his joyless mother’s relentless disapproval, a way to bury the embarrassment of never quite living up to his jaded dad’s expectations, a way to keep his impatient needs and pointless wants in check. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had happened, but the strategy had become as effortless as breathing. Nothing insidious in that, he realized, it was human nature: The truest person you met had a practiced air. Character is habit, after all. And everybody falls for his own act in the end. Eileen, as far as he could tell, used a disarming mix of tomboy smarts, feminine charm, and an oddly brassy lack of guile to face the world. It made her terribly convincing. But he wanted more than anything to be convinced, so he was a poor judge.

  “Given what a rust bucket that truck is, I figured sooner rather than later you’d be sticking your head under the hood. Well, hey. Now you know the whole story.” She shrugged dramatically. “I was hurt. And when I’m hurt I get royally pissed and I don’t always make a lot of sense. That’s me.”

  He wanted to say something, tell her what he was thinking, that she was right, about everything, but the words he wanted, as always, got lost in a muzzy incoherence. Only then did he notice he was chewing his lip.

  Finally, he managed, “That’s … interesting.”

  Subtly but unmistakably, the light in her eyes dimmed. “Okay. I get it. Look, I’ve got brothers so I know the routine. Quicker’s easier, easier’s better.” She tore the poem into shreds. “Stupid to make too much of this anyway, given what that woman in the next room has to decide.”

  “I told you I was leaving the next day. The trip back home, it was … a job. I just—”

  “Sure.” She crushed the shreds of paper in her hands. “It feels obscene, talking about this now.”

  Jude closed the door behind him again as he returned to the other room. Axel, looking lost, sat with his arm locked around Consuela’s shoulder, clumsy, stiff. Her eyes were desolate. The manila envelope had been rifled, the pictures gone through. They’d looked at them all. Beyond them on the balcony, set against the empty sky, a pujillo perched on the iron railing and fluttered its blue-black wings.

  Axel turned to Jude, unhinged his arm from around Consuela’s shoulder, and said, “Join me out in the corridor, will you?” He murmured something brief to Consuela, she nodded blankly in return, then he led Jude out.

  The hallway was decorated with the same powderpuff beige as the rooms, and to Jude the lifeless fleshy color seemed to speak of the futility of desire, the mockery of death. It whispered: You’re afraid. You’re obscene. Axel, meanwhile, merely crossed his arms and stared off blankly, taking a moment to frame his thought. Down the way, a hefty man in a terry-cloth robe, an unlit cigar in his teeth, helped himself to extra towels from the maid’s cart.

  “I’m reminded,” Axel said, once the stranger disappeared, “of something you told me once, something to the effect that I assume the threat level—I believe that’s the phrase—of the person I’m with. Well, it occurs to me that works both ways. The person I’m with assumes my safety level, if you will. That sounds tautological, I realize, but the point is she’s not safer because of me. She’s safer because of you.”

  It wasn’t a compliment. “I’m not sure where you’re heading with this.”

  “There’s another thing you once said, Jude, that keeps running through my mind. Something about how my security is not intended to be my enslavement.”

  “That’s not how I put it.” The axiom was: Don’t constrain the principal to the point he becomes a victim of protection instead of a victim of attack. “And the point is, I shouldn’t limit your normal day-to-day life.”

  “Well, my point is there’s a moral dimension to that as well as a physical one. I’m not going to let the fact that I owe someone else for my protection prevent me from doing what I think is right. And I’m not leaving Consuela to fend for herself.”

  “Axel, I wouldn’t ask that.”

  “There’s a lot of blather these days about personal responsibility, more times than not from people who can’t blame someone else fast enough when things go wrong. Well, I’m the one responsible here. I have what they want.”

  “You’ve lost me. Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The men who’ve done this. One way or another it all gets back to that damn bottling plant. The water. I sign off on the usage rates, everything moves forward.”

  “But you can’t sign off. You’ve been saying that for a while now.”

  “I said nearly everything I’ve seen indicates the drawdown on the aquifer is most likely unsustainable, but the thing’s a goddamn puzzle.” He ran his hands through his hair absently, eyes hazed. “From a distance, sure, the geology suggests you’ve got high-yield aquifers throughout the region. The bedrock’s composed of younger volcanics that are highly porous, with excellent recharge, and the groundwater flow rate reaches four hundred thousand gallons per minute in places. That’s more than enough to support industrial wells. But up close, you find out the story’s different. The further downstream along the river you get—the closer to the bottling plant, that is—the more rhyolite and basalt you find, volcanic slag, with minimal fracture z
ones. That means it’s a poor source for groundwater. The only aquifers you’ve got there are shallow, and given the pollution levels—the DDT’s three times the lethal limit for fish, never mind the fecal chloriform bacteria and other waste—that means any wells you drill around there could prove worthless. But even further upriver you’ve got the same problem: Drill too shallow, you get contamination. Drill too deep, you risk mineral intrusion. The records for well abandonment in the area tell you that much—I mean, the ones you can get your hands on.

  “Then, to the south, you’ve got the Laguna de San Juan and the river running from it to the Río Grande de San Miguel. It’s fed by a thermal spring that’s so heavily mineralized the water’s useless. Any wells you drill too far out in that direction risk hydrothermal intrusion, which is what I suspect happened to the domestic wells this woman, Marta Valdez, complained about. The drawdown from the existing well field probably caused those shallower, southerly wells to go bad, though I can’t prove that.

  “On top of that, the aquifers are largely composed of uncompacted pyroclastics, a sort of volcanic gravel. The good news is, that means excellent hydraulic conductivity: The aquifer can transmit considerable water. But that’s also the bad news. High hydraulic conductivity means poor retention. Why do you think the river runs dry when the rains stop? Plus, with the deforestation from the cane fields, you’ve got a serious runoff problem. That means insufficient ground saturation and poor recharge levels. Add to that the serious drawdown caused by the cane field irrigation and the sugar processing plant, you’ve got more than enough to suggest that expanding that bottling plant is foolish. Hell, the plant as it is may not be viable for long.

  “But none of that means squat without the numbers. From June to October you’ve got tropical rains, which as you know are exceedingly generous here. Who knows, maybe it turns out recharge and retention are higher than you’d think, and everything squares. But that’s where things go completely haywire. The company’s records become funny right around the time of the 2002 drought. The weekly static water level and pumping records look fudged, to be honest. They’re too consistent to be genuine, nature’s not like that. My guess? Somebody’s trying to hide the drop in head across the well field, not that anybody at Estrella’s going to tell me that—the process manager out there’s a born genius at agreeable stalling. I’ve had to stand right there with him like we were on a date whenever he ran well tests—at least, if I wanted to trust the numbers. And what I got for available drawdown for each of the wells doesn’t jibe with what the company claims it’s been getting the past two years, which everybody dismisses as a one-year anomaly, of course. That’s why I needed the government’s data, to crosscheck. I thought I’d begun to get a handle on that, even with the crazy, confusing, contradictory information I found. Every trip I made down here, I spent most of my time trying to pull all that together. But I needed one last shot at those documents to finalize my conclusions. You know what happened this past week—suddenly, nobody’s home, and the data I got was slaw. With so many gaps in the record, even if I ventured an educated guess at what’s happening out there, I can’t be confident anyone else could confirm my findings, no matter how hard they tried. I could end up looking like a fool.”

  The same heavyset stranger they’d seen earlier re-emerged from his room, dressed now in a garish floral shirt and tan slacks, his unlit cigar still firmly wedged between his teeth. Watching him lumber away toward the elevators, Jude waited until the man was well out of earshot before turning back to Axel. “So what you’re saying is, you can’t say anything.”

  “I’m saying I can’t reliably conclude the drawdown’s unsustainable. But if that’s true, why not take it a step further? Make everybody happy. I’ll say the evidence as it now exists doesn’t rule out that recharge levels will keep the aquifer viable for the foreseeable future.”

  From some of the men Jude had protected, such a comment would have seemed all too typical—facts are marketable. You want the truth? Make an offer. But he’d never heard such things from Axel. “Why would you do that?”

  Axel uncrossed his arms and reached for the doorknob, ready to go back in. “It gives us something to offer in exchange for getting that little girl back to her mother.”

  34

  While Axel helped Consuela pack, Jude returned to his room. Eileen waited on the sunlit balcony, gazing out at the sprawling capital’s bustle and haze. Coming up behind her, he felt a momentary impulse to wrap her in his arms.

  “Consuela wants to drive back with you to San Bartolo Oriente right away, if that’s all right.”

  She turned her head at his voice, the sun bearing down on her face and arms, which were milky with sweat, the perfume on her skin fragrant from the heat. “That’s fine,” she said quietly.

  His mind rattled through an inventory of untimely, inappropriate things to say—not that he would’ve had the wherewithal to put them into words even if they were timely or appropriate. He settled on, “I wish I could travel with you, to make sure you get there safe. But—”

  “I understand.” She shook off her reflective mood and offered a gallant smile. Mimicking the prettiest girl in the wagon train, she drawled: “Your work is here, sheriff.”

  It felt good, he thought, joking. “You’ll be careful?”

  “I’ll do my best.” Her eyes betrayed a dozen emotions. “Cross my heart.”

  Feeling a need to prolong the encounter, if only for a moment, he said, “I’m going to give you my cell number. I want you to put it on speed dial, in case anything happens. Your phone has a GPS, they can pinpoint where you’re at if—”

  She reached up with her fingers to touch his lips, silence him. “I know.” Peeking over her glasses, she smiled. The warmth in her eyes helped disguise her fear. “And another thing I know? You wouldn’t have kept that damn poem if I didn’t mean something to you.”

  Once Consuela and Eileen left for San Bartolo Oriente, Jude and Axel put their heads together to devise a strategy for arguing their change of plans to Fitz. Figuring simple was best, they kept the story lean: Consuela had invited Axel to stay at her home in San Bartolo Oriente rather than the hotel, and that was the kind of request a gentleman obliges—read between the lines, et cetera. They refined it a little, adding detail, shoring up the weak spots, then dialed the phone. Axel, it was decided, would take the lead. Harder to deny the man in love. Fitz, predictably, dug in his heels.

  “There’s no time to work up a proper risk assessment, a thousand things I can’t predict.”

  “In a neighborhood,” Axel sighed, “enclosed by a high wall with guards at the gate.”

  “Do you have their names?”

  “We’ll get them. Or perhaps the local police—”

  “Don’t know dick. Sit around all day waiting for trouble to come to them.”

  “Michael,” Axel said, dredging up Fitz’s given name, “really, I’m tired of flogging this.”

  “Just a reminder, you’re the principal, Axel, not the client. I have to call back to Torkland to get this okayed. If they say no—”

  “Then I’ll hire Jude myself, either through Trenton or, if that’s not acceptable to you or whomever, on an individual basis. I’m quite serious. And on that note, I’ll hand you over.”

  He passed the receiver, looking just a little smug at his improvised ultimatum—now it was Jude’s turn to keep the ruse alive. Fitz launched on in the same vein, adding that he’d done some extra background on Señora Rojas. “I made a call. There’s some serious bad blood in the Sola family, meaning she could have an ax to grind. I didn’t get the sense she was dangerous, just a flake, but—”

  “If she’s not a danger,” Jude said, “why are we discussing it?” Secretly, he felt glad Fitz had uncovered nothing more recent than the divorce—Consuela’s work on the local citizen committees, for instance, her contacts with Marta Valdez.

  “All I’m saying is, I think it’s unwise, Axel spending so much time alone with that woman.”
>
  Jude could only wonder at the lewd scenarios tripping through Fitz’s mind. “Honestly, I haven’t seen anything much to worry over. She’s a nice lady. They’re sweethearts. That’s it.”

  “She could be filling his head with God knows what.”

  “So? We’re here to protect Axel, not his ideas. Or his results, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s a professional. And an adult.”

  Fitz wouldn’t let it go, and when Jude could take no more, he broke in and recited a list of extra weapons and equipment he wanted for his own peace of mind, figuring they’d mollify Fitz’s paranoia in the bargain. He ended with, “I think at that point we can say we’ve taken all necessary precautions and then some, don’t you?”

  He understood the cost of this deceit. If the truth leaked out—as it almost certainly would if things went badly—the industry would shun him like bad luck. You can’t trust his word, they’d say, let alone his judgment. No one would care that Axel had made up his mind and intended to proceed with or without protection, which meant Jude’s commitment to stand by him showed real spine. And yet, he reminded himself, he’d been planning a change after all this was done, mixed with a little travel: Rio, Buenos Aires, Patagonia. The end of the earth.

  Suddenly, Fitz threw in a trick pitch. “By the way, while we’re on the subject of extra background, I followed up with McGuire about the two guys he was asking you about—those friends of your father’s? He admitted he had nothing that wasn’t ten years old on the guy you flew back with, Strock. But the other guy, Malvasio—if you told me you’d had anything to do with him, I’d have you committed. Or arrested.”

  Jude went cold—He’s doing background on me? “What’s this about, Fitz?”

  “About two years ago the FBI sent a fugie unit down here to find the guy because of something he pulled in California. They couldn’t track him down, though. Nobody knows where he is, McGuire confirmed that. He would’ve brought all this up the day he paid his visit but he hadn’t had time to catch up on all the details. Then, when you said you hadn’t seen the guy in ten years, he just decided it was all a dead end and moved on.”