Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  Jude let the curtain fall back into place and turned to go. The woman was staring at him now, her eyes narrowed as though she were trying to place him. Jude apologized for intruding, slid past the boy, and left, closing the door behind.

  He checked the front bedroom as well, staring out the window at the silent neighborhood for a moment, then went back downstairs and out the door, studying the street in both directions one last time. Satisfied it was safe, he gestured for Carlos to lift the locks. Opening the rear passenger door, he said, “Axel, you go on. Carlos and I will bring things in.”

  They unloaded Jude’s and Axel’s luggage, plus the weapons and hardware brought along for the house. Consuela was upstairs, keeping Oscar and his mother out of sight. Carlos had made it clear he intended to stay in town at the Hotel Gavidia, and grew more sullen as he worked, barely disguising his disdain, to the point Jude had to hide his relief once the man finally got back behind the wheel and drove off. It might be wise to find another driver, Jude thought. Or a car of our own.

  He mounted a perimeter sensor in the backyard so anyone coming over the walls would set off the alarm, then did a quick sweep with a radio frequency detector, waving it across the electric outlets like a stud finder, searching for transmitters, finding none. He told Axel and Consuela they could head off to bed then, suggesting they stand clear of the windows just to be on the safe side, and giving Axel a second Sig Sauer that Carlos had brought, as well as two protective vests. Axel held his up like he was being asked to wear a dress.

  “You do realize it’s terribly hot. And you’re not going to tell me we should wear these to bed, I hope.”

  “I’d be happy,” Jude said, “if you wore them just about everywhere else. Not the shower, obviously, but—”

  “Is there really any indication I’m in danger at this point?”

  Jude nodded upward toward the rear bedroom. “Indication enough.”

  “But that’s my point,” Axel said. “They’re the ones in danger. When they see we have these”—he shook his vest—“and they don’t, what do we say?”

  “I’ll tell them to stay away from the windows,” Jude said helplessly. “And not to go outside.”

  Axel sighed with an air of uneasy forbearance, then slipped the vest on and gestured for Consuela to do the same. Once they were upstairs, Jude checked his pistols, chambering a round in each, then loaded nine-shot into the Remington 870 he’d asked for. He hoped to God none of the weapons would be necessary. Tucking the shotgun and his own vest under the couch in the living room where he’d be sleeping, he glanced up and noticed only then that Oscar sat crouched at the top of the stair, staring at the guns with that same numb ferocity in his eye.

  Jude slept lightly, rousting himself every hour to check the doors, look things over, inside and out, listening for flaws in the silence. The night passed uneventfully, though, and he felt himself calming down.

  He rose for good at six when the bells of a local church tower pealed, reminding him it was Palm Sunday. Consuela came downstairs and made a pot of thin scalding coffee that he and Axel shared until Carlos appeared for their trip out to the Río Conacastal.

  Another gratefully uneventful drive ensued, and an hour later, the three of them—Axel, Jude, and Carlos—pulled up to a parched field along the trickling river. Almost as soon as he got out, Axel noticed something wrong. Jude, sensing his agitation, kept close. As they drew closer to the series of test wells Axel had ordered drilled along a jointing line of shrubbery, they saw that they’d been all but ruined by an errant herd of cattle that remained grazing only a hundred yards away.

  Axel had ordered that the wells be drilled after surveying aerial photos of the region, hoping the ragged green line descending from the foothills traced a significant water-bearing fracture the bottling plant could tap into. Analyzing the rock formations, he’d guessed that a valley once lay here. At some point basalt flows from volcanic activity had covered the valley over, and then been overlaid by finegrained sediments deposited later, then basalt again from subsequent eruptions, and so on. A hydraulic transition between basalt layers could prove fruitful. Maybe there were several.

  They’d drilled on both sides of the river, to determine what if any percentage of the underground streamflow was siphoning off there, both during the rains and during the dry season. Axel had performed both step tests and seventy-two-hour pump tests over the past ten months, logging drawdown and recharge readouts back to the previous May, then loading the numbers into a modeling program on his laptop and watching the simulator replicate visually the movement of water through the aquifer before, during, and after the tests. The good news: There was a decent supply of water. Bad news: not decent enough to sustain industrial usage or even irrigation—about two hundred gallons a minute at peak flow during the rains, a fraction of that now. It was enough, perhaps, for domestic wells, if anybody bothered to drill them. Axel had hoped to make several more dry-season readings, with the faint promise that retention was better than he’d expected, but now all he saw was wreckage.

  Jude spotted, at the far end of the field, two men on horseback collecting stragglers amid lazy clouds of dust. Gesturing that direction, he said, “We should ask them what happened.”

  Axel gazed down one of his wells, its casing torn away, its borehole choked with debris—not just dirt but brush, dung, scrap metal, garbage. The monitor had been shattered, its pieces strewn about the ground. He knelt to pick up the ruined flow gauge from the dirt. “You know what they’ll say. The cows did it. The evil, stupid cows.”

  “We can at least try.”

  Axel dropped the gauge and dusted his hands on his pant legs. “Don’t get me wrong, I intend to speak to them.” He headed off across the hoof-marked dirt toward the two riders. “Because I know who owns the land around here. I know who had this done.”

  Jude gestured for Carlos to stay with the car, then hurried to catch up with Axel. He snagged the older man’s arm. “I said let’s ask what happened, not start something we can’t finish.”

  Axel shook off his grip. “You know what this means, right? Just as I’m trying to phony up what these mobsters want to hear, they’ve made it all but impossible for me to say anything at all and still come across as credible. It would be comical if a little girl’s life weren’t involved.”

  The two horsemen watched from their mounts as Axel strode toward them, Jude following behind. The younger of the two was in his twenties, wearing a grimy bandana around his neck, a sweat-blackened ball cap flattening his black curls. As Jude got closer, he saw the young man’s hand lacked its ring finger and pinkie. The other rider was older, perhaps the father, a dark and leathery vaquero wearing no hat despite the punishing sun, staring at the approaching Americans with wooden eyes.

  In Spanish, Axel asked, “What happened here?”

  The younger one deferred to his elder, who said, “We lost control of the herd, moving from pasture to pasture yesterday. We had permission to use the road along the river. Then some fool, wanting to get through, took out a gun and fired it in the air. There were only four of us, we couldn’t manage them all.” He waited for a moment, as though to see how that sat, then added, “I am sorry for the damage to your wells.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The young one shot a disapproving look, but the older man said, “Humilde Lopez. I will pay you for what the cows ruined.”

  Axel turned to Jude, saying in English, “Oh, they’ll pay. Doesn’t that just make everything swell.”

  Jude, returning to Spanish, asked the father, “Who gave you permission to use the road?”

  He might as well have asked the circumference of the moon. Neither man spoke. The horses swished their tails, and beyond them a cow let out a moaning bleat.

  “You said you had permission.”

  “We always take the road,” the father said finally.

  Axel barked, “Which one of your cows stuck rubbish down my wells?”

  Father and son glanced a
t each other, feigning incomprehension, despite Axel’s use of Spanish.

  “Your cattle didn’t do this damage. Men did. You did. Who put you up to it?”

  The son flicked his reins and turned his horse about. The father reached into his shirt pocket, took out a greasy pencil stub and a small notepad, and began to write. “I told you I would pay,” he said, then tore off the page and handed it out for Jude to take.

  Jude stepped forward for the slip of paper. Humilde Lopez had written his name and a phone number in blocky script. The man turned his own horse about then and followed his son.

  “How Gary Cooper.” Axel watched their horses move lazily away, swaying their hindquarters and trailing dust. “I wonder how strong and silent they’d feel if they realized what they’ve actually done.”

  Jude folded the slip of paper over and stuck it in his pocket. “Axel, how smart are you?”

  The engineer blinked in the dusty sunlight. “I beg your pardon?”

  “All the problems gathering data, that made things difficult. But the fact they’ve gone so far as to ruin your wells, that makes things impossible—that’s what you’re thinking, right?”

  “If I make any projections about the possible yield along this fracture, yes, they’ll know I’m bluffing.”

  “Who are you to judge that?”

  Axel swatted away a fly with one hand, wiping at the grime on his neck with the other. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to insult me.”

  “If they understood everything they needed to about water, Axel, why hire you?” Jude took one final look at Humilde Lopez and his disfigured son as they slowly gathered their scattered herd. “You know things they don’t. Now, down the road, sure, you’re right. If Torkland Overby’s investors hire experts to review your work, you’ll get found out. But that’s way, way down the road. There’s time to prepare for that. For now, don’t underestimate how much people want to hear what they want to hear. Even if they know you’re lying.”

  I speak from ample personal experience, Jude thought of adding.

  36

  The call came in while Malvasio sat perched on a wood folding chair at a tented café in San Bartolo Oriente’s mercado central, sipping guava nectar over ice. Across the street in the cathedral plaza, the faithful poured out of church and milled among the parishioners sculpting devil piñatas from papier-mâché for the upcoming celebrations of Semana Santa: Holy Week. Malvasio took out his cell, checked the number, saw it was Sleeper, and flipped open the phone.

  “I got good news and I got bad news, Duende.” Sleeper’s voice was lilting, cautious. “Bad news is, Truco Valdez ain’t where we thought he was. You’re gonna have to drive a ways.”

  Malvasio shot up straight in his chair. “You found him?”

  “Damn. Beat me to the good news.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing you wouldn’t.” In the background, a voice broke in. Sleeper said, “Hold on.” The sound grew muffled, a hand pressed over the mouthpiece, as the background voice said something else, longer, more elaborate. Sleeper laughed. Back on the line, he said, “Chucho wants me to tell you don’t worry, no animals were harmed in the making of this movie.”

  Smoke rose from the lip of Volcán Usulután as Malvasio turned south off the Coastal Highway. The road all but petered out in a shabby little town of dirt streets, crumbling stucco, and rampant weeds, with gang graffiti everywhere. Suddenly, on the south side of town, the pavement returned and Malvasio headed on to Puerto El Triunfo.

  The tiny fishing village sat on the Bahía de Jiquilisco, which the government was pimping as the future site of tourist hotels, golf courses, a convention center—if they could just convince well-off emigrants living in the States to part with some money. The village houses were modest but well kept, the brick streets lined with shady maquilishuat trees. Malvasio drove all the way to the water and parked outside the terminal turística, a two-story open-air market built by Canadians. The vast blue bay spread west and south along heavily forested shores where out-of-work fishermen illegally scavenged for firewood. A sailor with an M16 slung from his shoulder lazily patrolled the dock, nudging a stray pig out of his way with his boot. Streams feeding the bay shimmered with pollution while tiny one-clawed crabs struggled in the tarry foul-smelling mud.

  Malvasio searched the food stalls in the terminal turística till he found Sleeper in the farthest corner, drinking a cold champán, a sort of fruity cream soda. He was wearing long sleeves again, the shirt crisply pressed and buttoned to the neck.

  “Gonna find you a pill,” Sleeper said, slipping off his stool, “take care of this bad case of late you got.” He gestured for Malvasio to tag along, then walked with his distinctive forward lean out to a battered brown Datsun. “Show you the way.”

  Malvasio tailed Sleeper to an isolated road outside town, rimmed with bare fields, where a small clapboard church faced a funeral parlor that resembled a bunker, with a stamped-tin door and windows fortified with wrought iron grating, as though someone might come to rob the dead. Beyond it lay a rustic cemetery lined with tottering sun-bleached headstones. Malvasio pulled up behind the Datsun and parked, then followed Sleeper along an overgrown path past the church to a remote, isolated house of concrete block surrounded by a high, sagging tin fence.

  “Is it just me,” Malvasio said, “or don’t you find it odd—an empty church on Palm Sunday?”

  “There was a desfile this morning,” Sleeper replied. “Everybody in this church headed over to some other church back in town. They had a guy dressed like Jesus on a donkey and people wore robes and shit, everybody waving palms. It was freaky, specially with the party we were throwing inside here.”

  He gestured Malvasio through a scrap wood gate in the listing fence. Inside, Chucho sat on the stoop, reading a comic titled Violencia en la Jungla, the front door open behind him. “Buenas, señor,” he said, getting up to let Malvasio by.

  A third man waited just beyond the door, introduced by Sleeper as Magui. He rose from his perch on a tiny wood stool and just kept going, six-foot-four at least and three hundred pounds easy, most of it muscle, none of it hair. Well, eyebrows. He could have worked in the circus, the ink on his skin—face, neck, throat, arms, chest, back. He glowered till Malvasio shook his hand, at which point he broke into a sunny, job-hunting smile.

  Meanwhile, the uptick in heat indoors was instantaneous, the stench of an abattoir. Something very bad had happened here. It took passage through only one room to find it.

  A heavily tattooed but otherwise clean-cut Latino lay bound with duct tape on the floor, half his face burned away. Dead. To his right, another Latino sat bound to a chair, duct tape again. Naked, like his pal, burned too but alive. Truco, Malvasio guessed. Hoped.

  Malvasio realized now why Sleeper wore a crisp clean shirt—to remove the taint, because he’d worn something else to work in. Malvasio wondered where it was, the laundry bag. Meanwhile: “Who’s the stiff?”

  “His name’s Jaime Lacayo,” Sleeper said. “Bible-thumping boned-out motherfucker.”

  The room was a shambles; they’d searched everywhere for the film. Among the debris lay Christ and his cross, prayer cards, a rosary, votive candles. A bible lay facedown on the floor. Malvasio stooped to pick it up. A passage from the Book of Ezekiel was marked with a paperclip: They shall loathe themselves because of their evil deeds.

  “You said they had a procession today,” Malvasio said, dropping the book back where he’d found it. “I’m guessing this Jaime is the kind of guy they’ll miss?” Everybody looked at everybody else: a riddle. “My point is, somebody may come nosing around, wondering where he’s at.” He turned to Truco. “But maybe I should be asking you about all that.”

  The bound man drifted in and out of a twitching stupor and his skin was crawling with flies. He’d been worked on, his face almost black from burns and bruising, cuts on both cheeks, and his arms were deeply scored from a razor or knife, the wounds gluey with blood.
The skin was clean, though, and from the smell Malvasio guessed they’d used chicha, corn liquor, to wipe him down, knowing it would burn.

  Malvasio waved the flies away and picked at the edge of the tape gagging Truco’s mouth, then ripped it away in one rough pull. Someone had forced a rag into his mouth too, and Malvasio pulled that out next. It stank of piss. He grimaced and wiped his hand on his pant leg as Truco gasped for breath, eyes rolling in their sockets.

  Malvasio asked Sleeper, “What’s he told you so far?”

  “Not much.” Sleeper cocked his head to the side and spat. “Puta jodido.”

  Malvasio turned back to Truco and bowed down, till their faces all but touched. “I’m going to get you to a hospital,” he whispered. “You have my word. It should never have gone this far.” He touched Truco’s face, his fingers cool against the scalded skin. “All we want is the film. You know what I mean. I’m going to help you. I promise. Now, please, help me.”

  Truco looked down at the body of his companion. Flies were gathering there as well, dotting the gray skin.

  “Your friend doesn’t need help now. You do. I can help you. Look at him. You don’t have to end up like that.”

  Truco shuddered and Malvasio thought for a moment he was ready to talk, but instead he merely reared back his head and let out a gasping howl. Blood gathered on his tongue and he spat, spraying more on himself than Malvasio.

  Sleeper, standing nearby, shrank back. “¡Hijueputa pendejo!”

  Stepping to the side, Malvasio gripped Truco by the hair. “I’ll try it this way, then. By the time thirty seconds is up, you will either tell me what I want to know,” he shoved Truco’s head down, “or you will be as dead as he is. Look at it. There’s nothing noble about it, nothing heavenly about it, no kind old man at the top of the big white stair telling you to come on home. Just that. Meat. A dead fucking fool.” He shook Truco’s head back and forth hard. “I can help you or kill you. Talk.”