Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  “The first time I met Lazarek,” he said, picking up on Pitney’s cue, “I got the feeling he and McGuire had no use for each other.”

  Pitney chuckled under his breath. “Ed has a very low tolerance for being lied to, not the best trait for a cop. In any event, back to Malvasio—there’s always a gap between knowledge and proof, but down here it’s a farce. Fish rots from the head down, as the saying goes, and Hector Torres has influential friends. Malvasio chose wisely.” He paused, regarding Jude with an odd mix of pity and bewilderment. “Whatever possessed you to get involved with him, knowing what happened to your father?”

  How much time do you have, Jude thought. “He came across like he’d taken a good hard look at himself and wanted to make amends. And he made it sound like I was doing Strock a good turn. He would have helped my dad if he could.”

  Pitney considered that, or pretended to. “There will be those who find that hopelessly naïve. And that’s the kindest thing I can imagine them saying.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jude said, “they didn’t grow up with Malvasio showing up at the house damn near every day. They didn’t see the sides to him I did. It’s hard to explain.”

  They veered onto the Avenida Olímpica, heading toward the Fuente Beethoven. “He’s as close to a true sociopath,” Pitney said, “as anyone I’ve encountered in almost twenty-five years with the bureau.”

  Jude turned and waited till Pitney met his eye. “Gee. And I always thought he was just a kick in the pants.”

  The house was located a block from the Argentine embassy on a serene tree-lined street in the Colonia Escalón. Like every other home in the area, it lay barricaded beyond a high wall topped with barbed wire and fitted with video cameras.

  They found McGuire sitting in the dining room across from Consuela. She’d been secreted here for her own protection. Oscar’s mother had refused the same offer, choosing instead to remain in San Bartolo Oriente to bury her son and await the unlikely return of her daughter.

  The house was opulent and sprawling, and Jude wondered who the sympathetic patrón might be. Ironically, the place seemed far more Consuela’s element than the sad, spare house in Villas de Miramonte: burnished parquet floors, tapestries, and tasteful watercolors. Beyond sliding glass doors sat a garden rimmed with pito trees and filled with bird-of-paradise and flowering izote. Butterflies skittered about in the blinding sun.

  Seeing Jude enter, Consuela rose from her seat and walked toward him. As she drew close, an ugliness gathered in her eyes and without a word she slapped him viciously.

  Jude resisted the urge to reach up and touch his face. “I don’t know what you’ve been told,” he said. “But you have no idea how sorry I am.”

  She slapped him again, harder this time, then McGuire pulled her off. Her eyes were pitched with a grief so unforgiving Jude would have looked away if he could. Pitney hustled him into a small sitting room off the entry and closed the door.

  “Didn’t see that coming. Sorry.”

  “What did you tell her—that I set Axel up to get murdered?”

  Pitney gathered himself. He seemed comically tall against the closed door. “We’ll straighten it out. I promise.” He gestured to a writing table near the window. Sunlight flared along the edges of the drawn blinds. “I’d like to explain where we hope to go from here.”

  McGuire joined them shortly. Unlike Pitney, he saw no need to apologize for any misunderstandings. He sat down, staring at Jude with principled revulsion. God only knows how he’d act, Jude thought, if he realized I still haven’t told them everything.

  “Where’s your partner?” Jude asked. “Sanborn.”

  Pitney stepped in to answer. “Jimmy doesn’t see the problem letting this thing sit where it is. Four salvatruchos in a kidnap scheme involving an American, it’s what he’s down here for.” Catching a glance from McGuire, he added, “Don’t get me wrong, Jimmy’s a solid cop. He just thinks that if Malvasio’s in with the people we think he is, trying to nail him’s a waste of time. Could just end up slamming doors Jimmy’ll need open if he’s going to get anything done here.”

  “He’s got a point.” McGuire chafed his hands in thought. “But—”

  “Malvasio’s a one-man crime wave,” Pitney finished. “In particular he killed a cop in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy and we’ve finally got an eyewitness. True, she’s damaged goods. But you don’t get to pick your evidence. Regardless, we’ve got a green light from Quantico.”

  “Jimmy won’t get in the way,” McGuire said, more for Pitney’s benefit than Jude’s.

  Pitney rocked on his heels. To Jude he said, “I’d like to tell you we’ve devised an uncanny and foolproof plan for bringing Malvasio in.”

  McGuire, with a cold smile, added, “But that would be lying.”

  “Basically,” Pitney said, “it comes to this. The way you’ve described the attack tells me there weren’t supposed to be survivors. Apparently, they underestimated you. In fact, if there hadn’t been a fifth gunman, you’d have come out all right.”

  All right as in Oscar, Jude thought. As in Eileen. A testament to my skill.

  “The fact you weren’t killed with everyone else tells us something,” Pitney continued.

  “Assuming you weren’t in on it,” McGuire said.

  Pitney shot him a look. Turning back to Jude: “If the point was to silence everybody, they failed, obviously. You’re still a risk. As is Señora Rojas. Which leads me to think Malvasio will get in touch. Once things settle down a little. He’ll need to know what you’ve said.”

  “He already knows what I’ve said to the PNC. And Lazarek. I’d bet on that.”

  “But not to us. Or that reporter you and Axel met with, Waxman.”

  “I haven’t had time—”

  “Malvasio’s gonna buddy up,” McGuire said, still skeptical but coaching now. “Play along. You’re the grieving bodyguard, use that.”

  “Then what?” Jude felt his pulse quicken. The thought of seeing Malvasio again, face-to-face. “You don’t have jurisdiction here.”

  “It’s not like the entire PNC’s corrupt,” Pitney offered.

  McGuire said, “The hard part will be keeping a lid on it. We can’t wait long. You talk to Malvasio, gain his confidence, get him to sit down somewhere. The guys we trust grab him, then bring him to us at the embassy, not the local garrison. Before anybody who’s been bought off even knows what’s up, we stick him on a plane.”

  “And what if one of these guys you trust, when he realizes the stakes, changes sides? Or what if somebody at the embassy—okay, not Sanborn, but somebody—leaks the plan to Lazarek, he tips off Sola, Sola calls Torres …”

  Pitney worked up another mirthless smile. “As I said, the plan’s not foolproof.”

  Jude sat back, looked at the two of them. “And these other guys, the ones who actually call the shots—Torres, Sola, Judge Regalado, Colonel Vides—they just walk away.”

  Pitney said, “You go with what you can prove. And, as you pointed out, there are limits to what we can do here.”

  “You don’t like it,” McGuire added, “write your congressman.”

  Jude nodded out toward the dining room, where Consuela sat alone. “That what you’re going to tell her?”

  The agents holed him up in a modest hotel in the capital near the Plaza de las Américas, spreading word far and wide—the embassy, the PNC—where he could be found.

  From the patio where breakfast was served he could see the statue of El Salvador del Mundo, the Savior of the World, encircled by fast-food restaurants and airline offices. Asian businessmen predominated among the hotel guests: Taiwanese bankers, Japanese engineers. They wore business suits despite the heat, patted their brows with dazzling white handkerchiefs, and clamored in their native dialects at each other or into cell phones until Spanish was required, at which point they displayed a patient, lilting fluency. Once breakfast was over, they trooped out en masse, awaited by their drivers and bodyguards, leaving Jude alone
in the quiet hotel except for the staff, who kept a courteous distance.

  Sitting on his bed, he watched TV for updates concerning the investigation into Axel’s killing, but they became increasingly brief and repetitious, in the end seeming almost like ads for Estrella. By local standards, the crime was solved.

  He worked off his frustration with blistering calisthenics in his room or by practicing Krav Maga—hammer-fist punches, roundhouse kicks, combinations, counterattacks. Exercise became the only thing keeping him sane, and when the room grew too claustrophobic, he launched off on long runs, all the way down the Alameda Roosevelt with its choking traffic and garish billboards to the Mercado Ex-Cuartel.

  His second day out—Holy Thursday—as he skirted the edges of the market, three mareros swaggered out from within the catacomb of vendor stalls, one wagging a gun. Jude’s only valuables were his watch and cell phone, but handing them up never crossed his mind. Nothing much at all crossed his mind, actually. He deflected the pistol with a quick hand strike, drove a kick into the gunman’s groin, moved in, elbowed him across the jaw, kneed him in the stomach, and twisted the gun from his hand, taking him to the ground and finishing him off with fierce stomp kicks, driving his heel down into the man’s throat and solar plexus.

  The punishment induced a kind of clarity. For the first time in a long while, Jude felt awake.

  The other two mareros fled, leaving their disarmed pal curled up in the street, sucking air through blood. Jude left the scene before a crowd could form, jogging back the way he’d come, now the dubious owner of a Walther 9mm that, back in his room, he tucked deep beneath the mattress.

  The week concluded with Easter Sunday and its nationwide orgy of candlelight desfiles, with glass coffins containing wood-carved Christs held aloft by the devout in traditional robes, urged on by devils with whips. Still, no contact from Malvasio. Jude considered slipping out on his own, taking the initiative, tracking the man down. He knew him well enough, though, to stay put. Let him come to you, he thought. He’s too smart and too connected not to see you coming.

  It was why Jude had lied to Pitney and McGuire about where he’d actually met with Malvasio. He figured they’d respond by putting the restaurant in San Marcelino or the rancho on the beach under surveillance. Malvasio would make their guys or get tipped off by his own contacts within the PNC and that would be it, game over. Jude couldn’t abide that. One way or another, he intended to hook up one last time, and if that meant wait, he’d wait. If it meant move, he’d know when the time was right.

  The Wednesday after Easter the first of the scattered rains presaging invierno hit the capital, the muggy sheet of rain falling straight down and flooding the streets while thunder rumbled over the hills surrounding the city. Jude was standing at the window screen, watching the overflow tumble from the hotel’s clogged rain gutters, when a knock came at his door. He expected it was maintenance, checking for leaks. Or maybe someone from the front desk letting him know the bed of his pickup had turned into a dog bath.

  When he opened the door, though, he found a boy about Oscar’s age. It took him aback. The boy had sunken cheeks and ghostly eyes and he stood there drenched, holding a knotted plastic bag. Wordlessly, he handed the bag to Jude, then turned away and disappeared down the hallway to the stair, his footfalls leaving puddles on the smooth brown tiles.

  Jude tore the bag open and found a cell phone inside. He set it on the bedside table. Ten minutes later the call came in.

  “I know you think I had something to do with what happened in San Bartolo Oriente,” Malvasio said. “But I didn’t. I think Strock—”

  “Whoa, back the fuck up. Don’t even—”

  “The guy I told you about, Ovidio, the PNC cop who was supposed to connect with Strock? Well, he did. He came by the rancho, the day after you dropped Strock off. Clara told me they both trekked off with the rifle and ammo and haven’t come back since. These people—”

  Jude cut him off. “You abducted a little girl. For Hector Torres. You were seen.”

  “I didn’t do it for him. Christ. He wasn’t even supposed to know. You almost got me killed, going to Torres with that.”

  “Poor you. Okay, I’ll bite—why’d you snatch the girl, then?”

  “I fucked up. I thought … Christ, I don’t know what I thought. Look, I made no bones about the kind of people I work for down here. I was totally up front about that. Doesn’t mean I had any idea they were planning to waste your guy. Or all those other people.”

  Jude felt as though his head were turning inside out. “You have the gall to talk to me like this?”

  “Listen to me, damn it, I didn’t—”

  “You insult me?”

  The static crackled. Interference from the storm.

  “Look, Jude—believe what you want. That’s not why I called. You told Torres you wanted the little girl returned to her mother. Am I right?”

  Jude tasted a faint trace of copper. Blood—he’d bitten his lip open. “Tell me where.”

  “You can’t fuck me on this, Jude. I’m already behind the eight ball with Torres because I lied to him and you can’t fuck me on this. You’ve seen how these people operate. You’ve got to come alone. I’ll tell you where but you come alone and no one knows but you. Otherwise I can’t make promises about this girl.”

  Jude walked outside, looked up and down the block, and spotted the car parked near the corner bus stop. It contained a bureau underling, the same man who’d driven Jude to the house in the Colonia Escalón. He’d been stationed there by McGuire and Pitney. Jude had seen him around all last week—the same face each day, keep the number of people in the loop to a minimum. He’d been embarrassingly easy to lose on Jude’s runs downtown.

  The guy seemed more the junior foreign service type than an agent—wonky, trim, neat but not too. He dropped his copy of El Diario de Hoy as Jude gestured for him to crank down his window.

  “I’m going batty cooped up inside. Think I’ll take a drive up to Puerta del Diablo.” The Devil’s Gate: a volcanic rock formation above the city. “See what the world looks like after the rain. Figured it’d be a good idea to give you a heads-up.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.” The guy started up the car, cleared the windshield with his wipers. He looked relieved.

  “I’m Jude, by the way.”

  “I know. Tony Lamm.”

  They shook hands. Jude said, “I didn’t mean to make you look bad the times I’ve gone running.” He cracked a smile. “Well, okay, maybe I did.”

  “It’s all right. This wasn’t supposed to be …” He couldn’t find a way to finish.

  “We’re on the same side,” Jude guessed.

  The guy had to think about it. “Exactly.”

  “Great. I’ll drive out the Paseo General Escalón, just follow me up the mountain.”

  “Sure thing. By the way—you know why they call it Puerta del Diablo, right?”

  Be nice, Jude thought. Humor him. “No. Tell me.”

  “It used to be called Puerta de los Angeles. But then the locals discovered tourists preferred something named after the devil. Weird, huh.”

  Jude smiled. “Human nature. Go figure.” He turned to head back toward the hotel.

  Lamm called out after him. “Wait. Forgot. There’s something else. It showed up at the embassy.” He rummaged around, came up with an envelope. “Got it yesterday. Private courier. Maybe the day before.”

  Jude recognized the handwriting. “You waited to give me this why?”

  Lamm shrugged, frowned, did a little I-dunno bob and weave with his head and shoulders, the whole fuck-if-I-know-don’t-get-mad routine. Jude sighed his disgust and walked back to his truck. Once he was behind the wheel, he cracked open the envelope and found a greeting card inside, the kind you found in any hospital gift shop.

  Dear Jude:

  I don’t have a lot of energy and I’m woozy from meds so I’ll keep this short.

  I’m okay. Seriously.

  I know
you. I know how you think. Don’t blame yourself for what happened. Every person in that house chose to be there. We all knew there were risks. Don’t do anything stupid or put this on yourself. Please.

  I still feel terrible about Oscar, so I know the deal. Strange, how both my brother and I now have a dead boy on our consciences, but I’ll tell you what—if you forgive me, I’ll forgive you. How’s that?

  I only hear the network news about what’s going on down there. My God, it’s maddening, the lies. If you get the chance, write, tell me what’s happening. Better yet, come see me. My old man would like to meet you. I mean, he’d like to kill you too, but I think I talked him out of that. And in a weaker moment he told me a story about when he was in Vietnam. A wrong turn, they got lost on patrol, four of his men died. So he may understand better than anybody.

  Come see me, I mean it. If you don’t, once I’m up and around again, I’ll come down hunting for you. That’s a promise.

  I have to stop now. I miss you.

  Eileen

  He read it through twice, took heart from “I’m okay” and “I miss you,” her devotion to reconnecting, her gutsy attempt to absolve him. But she’d left out the key thing: Nobody who’d chosen to be there, as she put it, owed quite the explanation he did. He could imagine what she’d say: You couldn’t have foreseen what those men would do, can’t be blamed for it. But he doubted even she’d settle for that in the long run. And who could blame her? Besides, there was this other thing to deal with now, the “anything stupid” Eileen so wisely foretold. If that turned out okay, if he pulled this off, maybe then he could visit that hospital, sit by her bedside, and not secretly wish her ex-marine old man would put his own buried guilt to good use.

  And yet what if she really could forgive him? She said it herself: I know you. The girl who was raised by wolves. If anyone could redeem him, she was the one. Could he live with that?