by Joe Gannon
“I don’t understand.” Big Jim sighed.
“El Salvador is a nation in a full-blown psychosis, not a civil war. It is a very small place, much smaller than Nicaragua. As big as your Massachusetts, I have read. In ten years over seventy thousand have been murdered. For perspective’s sake that would be some three million dead in your America. I wonder if you can imagine such carnage?”
Horacio gave them a moment to try, but he could see such numbers could not be grasped by these Middle Americans with their social studies’ view of the world and their nation’s role in it.
“We have heard that before,” Margaret Mary said. “Jimmy often mentioned it.”
“On the phone?” Horacio leaned forward too quickly—hoped Gladys hadn’t noticed. “He spoke to you that way on the phone?”
“No. He seemed more, I don’t know, circumspect on the phone? But his letters were full of diatribes against the government, the death squads…” Her voice trailed off as her mind turned, like a camera lens zooming the faraway up close. She began to see her son in the country he had chosen to live in, and maybe die in.
“When was the last time you spoke to him?”
“A few weeks ago, October twelfth. He said he was going to…” Margaret Mary’s voice trailed off.
“Gazpacho?” Big Jim said.
“Guazapa,” Horacio corrected. “It’s a volcano, not that far from the capital San Salvador. A major base for our rebel brethren.”
“But he was abducted from his home,” she said.
“He lived in a hotel?”
“No. He called the hotels ‘whorehouses full of journalists and day trippers.’ He had an apartment.”
“Pity. There’d have been more witnesses had he stayed in an actual whorehouse.”
Horacio looked up from the anguished gringos to Gladys. She’d heard all this before, on the flight down. He wanted to read her opinion about this impossible mission. But Gladys read his mind and veiled her face. Still, he knew what she wanted.
Satisfied he knew her mind, Horacio studied his own hands. Gnarled was the word, a cliché but accurate. The arthritis eating his knuckles had been sown from all those years in the wet mountains—when he’d been the ragged-ass rebel. Or at least that’s what he told himself. Otherwise, what? Karma? He didn’t believe in karma any more than he did the Risen Carpenter. But the first debilitating pain—hands frozen like stone, but feeling on fire—had struck not long after Ajax had disappeared into that Honduran prison. The pain was constant, but he’d been taking treatments for it in Mexico City. Bee stings, of all things. What a sight! Fingers and joints covered in delicate honey bees stabbing him with their minuscule darts. But it brought some relief, and it gave him good cover for the other tasks he had in Mexico—and elsewhere. The long wars of Central America were winding down. Certainly the Contra war in his own country was, but wars were as messy, and as dangerous, at their demise as at their inception. And the shadow world in which Horacio had established his fiefdom was still as full of schemes and plots as any modern-day Machiavelli could conjure.
He leaned into the Pecks, placed his knotted hands on theirs.
“My friends, I can assure you that the Farabundos of FMLN did not kill your son. But that doesn’t mean he is alive. Now, what do you want to happen?”
Big Jim cleared his throat. “We want our boy back.”
“Or at least his body,” his wife wailed.
“No, Margaret.”
“But if he’s dead, Jim!”
Horacio saw the fire in her blue eyes.
“We want his body, Horacio. I want his body, please! Wouldn’t they do just that, let us have the body?”
Gladys stepped forward and touched Margaret Mary’s back. The mother instantly sat up and ceased her blubbering. Now Horacio knew how close they’d become.
“You know what they want,” Gladys said. “They want Ajax and me to go in undercover, find their son, and get him out. Can you do that? Can you spring Ajax from prison?”
Horacio sat up. “He’s not in prison.”
7
“You shit-eating sons-of-bitches are the worst, most ungrateful…” Gladys had run out of curses on the drive from the airport. Horacio, she knew, had let her drive his Jeep Cherokee to give her something to do besides cursing. “… shit-eating sons-of-bitches in the goddamn world!”
She pulled Horacio’s Jeep to a stop in front of Kilometro Cinco, which was unremarkable during the day; at night, like now, it looked abandoned. The electricity must be out in this barrio. “A fucking nuthouse?”
“Cállate, Gladys!” Horacio switched to Spanish to give them some privacy. “Shut up! How dare you? This is the best psychiatric hospital we have. It is not a prison, nor a ‘nuthouse.’”
Gladys climbed out of the Jeep, making sure to accidentally lay on the horn as she did. Shut up? She wasn’t going to be quiet.
“Ajax Montoya! He’s a goddamn hero and you’ve got him penned up like some goddamn Soviet dissident!”
The Soviet Union had been the Revo’s best friend for ten years, if you counted barrels of oil or lightbulbs. But, like the Americans, their friendship came with suffocating hugs meant to shape a thing more like them, and less like itself.
“Gladys, please.” Horacio seemed actually embarrassed by her outburst.
“Ajax! Ajax Montoya!” Gladys was ready to raise the dead—but also to give him a heads-up.
A black-haired woman, Spanish, Gladys guessed, came hurrying outside swinging a Coleman lantern like a train conductor.
“This is not a hospital if you need emergency help,” she said.
Gladys was satisfied her racket had been misinterpreted.
“It’s an emergency, and you’re the right hospital, compa.”
“Doctora.”
* * *
Margaret Mary Peck’s heart sank as slowly as Ajax Montoya walked. She had known from the tone of Gladys’s furious conversation in Spanish that something had gone awry, but she was unprepared for the sight of the man—upon whom all of her remaining hope had rested. But his robotic shuffle, his focused but empty eyes had been the end of her faith that she would see her son again.
When Ajax had sat opposite her, his rigid arms holding his entire weight off the chair, not a tremor of strain in his muscles, the final light she’d left burning in the window was snuffed out.
Gladys, she noticed, had gone as silent and as still as Ajax, but when she’d tried to blink away her tears, they instead rolled down her cheeks. Horacio had declined even to come into the hospital. The Spanish doctor, Ana, her name was, had looked over whatever papers Horacio showed her outside and had sent for Ajax and even reviewed his file with them: his arrival, attempted escapes, assaults on staff, and a long course of Thorazine to “neutralize” his aggression.
There was no need for words, no need to explain anything. It was clear to both her and Big Jim that Horacio had known their mission was doomed before they’d even arrived. It wasn’t them Horacio had brought here so Ajax might rescue their only remaining child, but Gladys, so she might rescue what remained of Ajax. The doctor had gone off to find some paperwork for Gladys to sign, and the silence left in her wake was unbearable to Margaret—for in it there was nothing to do but contemplate the grassy plot next to their murdered daughter that would now be taken up by their disappeared son.
So Margaret did what she’d planned to do.
“Captain Montoya, I have a letter from Amelia.”
No movement, no flicker as she unfolded the blue airmail stationery from Managua’s Intercontinental Hotel—Amelia had sent it via the local post so Big Jim could collect the canceled stamp with Sandino’s picture. The American embargo against all things Nicaraguan had kept the letter bouncing a circuitous route via Panama and Mexico. It had taken nine weeks to arrive—almost two months after they’d buried her it had arrived like a ghost.
“‘Dear Mom. The stationery says The Intercontinental, but I am in the Hotel Ideal in Matagalpa, which is fun
ny as the hotel is anything but ideal! I leave tomorrow to pick up the Nicas Tony and I will bring home to Cleveland. What fun I am having! But don’t let on to anyone that I am anything other than a Republican warrior battling the Evil Empire.’”
Margaret paused to smile. “That was a kind of code word she used, ‘Evil Empire.’ She didn’t think of you all as evil, but it was the buzzword of the day, so we used it too.…” She realized no one was listening. Her husband was staring out a darkened window. Gladys was staring open-mouthed at Ajax, who was staring, it seemed, at nothing at all.
But there was nothing else to do until the doctor got back.
“‘You remember the policeman I mentioned, the one who ruined Tony’s press conference?’”
Now Margaret managed an actual smile. Amelia had been very proud of that moment, all the publicity she’d gotten for slapping Ajax after a prisoner he was escorting through the airport had escaped and turned her boss Senator Teal’s press conference into chaos. “Do you remember that, Ajax? She slapped you, and said she was so embarrassed by it, but she had me collect every newspaper clip about it. It made her kind of a hero back home, at least to the Republicans.”
But there was nothing in Ajax’s eyes but an empty vista.
She read on. “‘Well, he’s here in Matagalpa. Ajax Montoya. When Tony first heard the name he thought they’d named him after a toilet cleaner! He’s going to escort me and Father Jerome along with the American journalist I met in Managua. I wouldn’t tell him, but I am glad to have his company. He is as abrasive as the cleanser, but there is something strangely, even sadly heroic about him too. When he’s not an arrogant gringo-hater there is in his eyes the years and trouble of getting to Troy and home again. And despite my U.S. passport and letters, I am a little nervous about heading into the “wilds” of Nicaragua’s mountains. They have swallowed more expeditions over the centuries than the Gobi Desert, but this cop seems to know his stuff. He is as bigheaded as any frat-boy jock at Ohio State, but there is a calm, a steadiness at his core that gives me confidence. I wish Jimmy could meet him, he’d find his ideal socialist man behind those brown eyes.’”
Margaret paused. Maybe the letter was not such a good idea. Ajax registered not a flicker of anything, and Margaret felt she’d just read a roll of the honored dead. They were all dead, weren’t they? Certainly Amelia, Father Jerome, and the journalist Matthew Connelly had all been gunned down. And that poor Nicaraguan family, wiped out. Now Jimmy was as gone as their daughter, as gone as Ajax’s mind.
The Spanish doctor returned with a thin file folder from which she drew a single piece of paper. She seemed a little embarrassed, not sure whom to address.
“You understand he will need constant care? This,” she gestured to the empty shell slowly swaying over his chair, arms locked, muscles rigid like steel cords, “this condition does not just go away.”
“You’re talking to me.” Gladys sat forward, took the paper the doctor had brought. “This is the release form?”
“Yes. But how will you get him out of the country, he has no papers.”
“That dried-up piece of shit outside too cowardly to even come in will take care of that.” She signed the paper several times, initialed it as well. “What about his belongings?”
“Well, he actually has no belongings. Not even the clothes he’s wearing. But…” The doctor looked over her shoulder as if expecting someone. “I thought there’d be at least one person to say good-bye.” She passed the folder to Gladys. “Take this, for whoever’s care he comes under.”
Gladys took up the folder like a pallbearer would a casket. She put a hand on Ajax’s arm, his muscles like bowstrings. “Ajax? Ajax, it’s Gladys. I’m going to take you HOME WITH ME!” Her voice rose almost to a shout.
“It’s okay.” The doctor took his other arm. “He’s very pliable. Ajax, stand up.”
The catatonic stood.
“Ajax, walk.”
And the catatonic walked out of Kilometro Cinco. But the psychopath did not come to say good-bye.
8
Chepe Huembes had fled to the spartan room as soon as the visitors had arrived. He’d fallen to his knees and prayed. Bless me, Ometepe, for I have sinned, it has been fourteen months since You last chastised me and these must be my sins, because why else would You send these creatures to interrupt Your servant?
He’d been ready, was still ready, to cleanse the doctora and the other whores working an overnight, but now the god of hate, the god of blood had sent these … these … interlopers!… to turn Chepe’s course against him. Those two otherworldly, white-skinned, redheaded gringos? My god, Chepe had shivered, what a frightening sight they were. And that old man, Chepe was sure he’d remembered him, some face from an old newspaper. And then that fucking dark-haired lesbiana whore—he knew her from the airport three years ago when he was dragged back from Costa Rica to be paraded, all over again, as El Gordo Sangroso. A queen of clubs that one. She was a friend of Montoya’s, and now here she is yelling for him? Was she going to take the only friend Chepe had?
He’d turned toward the altar he had made to Ometepe. It was only in his mind, true; they would never allow him the actual holy relics he needed for a proper altar to his god, but he turned toward it nevertheless and prayed as he had not prayed since he was a child.
“God of hatred, god of blood, please, please, please let me make this offering to you, let me lay these cleansed whores at your feet. Please, please, please, god of all things, do not let them take my friend, not the one living trophy you have bestowed on me.…”
Chepe had heard a sound, a muffled shuffle behind him. He knew it could not be his roommates, they would not dare enter without his permission. He’d turned, and to his delight there stood his friend, the catatonic. He must have felt Chepe’s alarm at the invasion of their friendship, why else would he have come to the altar of the god of blood?
“Come, come, my friend.” He’d grabbed Ajax’s arm and pulled him to his knees. “Pray with me. Pray!”
Chepe had helped Ajax make the inverted cross, under his corpulent fingers the catatonic’s limbs seemed more pliable, as if he, too, sensed the urgency of their plight. Chepe grasped his own hands and bent at the waist, rocking back and forth and praying as if for the last time. “God of blood, god of hate. God of blood, god of hate. God of blood, god of hate…”
El Gordo Sangroso had been so engrossed in prayer he did not recognize that it was Ajax’s arm that went over his shoulders as if to comfort him. That it was Ajax’s arm that hugged his neck as if to reassure him. By the time the catatonic’s muscles had coiled around Chepe Huembes’s neck it was too late.
“Wait…”
Suffocation was, and should be, a slow process, like drowning. Not like in a movie where it was over in seconds. Suffocation takes minutes of conscientious effort—the air supply must be choked off long after unconsciousness falls. But Ajax’s arm was long enough to clamp shut the carotid artery as well as crush the larynx. All those months balancing his weight on his hands had made his arms like steel bands. Killing the blood to Chepe’s brain and the air to his lungs had quickened the process, true. But when Ajax got to his feet, Chepe had dangled like a sack of maize. It was a simple enough thing for Ajax to use his free hand, the one with the puckered scar, to snap the neck of the Son of Ometepe.
9
Gladys looked at her watch: 9:45 p.m. She’d not been in the country for more than four hours as she walked Ajax up the stairs to the TACA jet out of Costa Rica that would have them in Miami just after midnight—the witching hour.
The ride back out to the airport had been a lot quieter than the ride in. Gladys had held Ajax’s hand in the dark as Horacio sped through the streets. Horacio had not said a word upon seeing his somnambulant protégé led to the car like a scarecrow. She’d refused to weep or bitch or do anything other than execute the small details of getting Ajax out of the country that had betrayed them both.
Now they were seated in the 727. H
eld until last and then escorted aboard quickly and quietly to their first-class seats. Horacio had disappeared without a word. Cowardly motherfucker. Gladys could not now believe how in thrall she had once been to that treacherous old man.
The Pecks were almost as quiet as Ajax as they fastened their seat belts—it was clear their mission had failed and there was little to do but bury an empty casket for their undoubtedly dead son next to the plot of their murdered daughter.
A stewardess helped Gladys get Ajax strapped in. She was a tall ladina, probably Guatemalan, Gladys thought, with her Indian cheekbones and jet-black hair but pale, white skin.
“Can I get you anything? Either of you,” she asked.
“Just the hell out of here.” Gladys hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She certainly hadn’t meant it as a jinx. But no sooner had she said it than there was a commotion outside the closed door of the aircraft. A scrum of flight crew and then the captain peered out the tiny window. The captain looked back at his passengers before giving the order to open up.
Uniformed men entered. Six cops, led by a bantam cock of a man with a colonel’s insignia. The cock had a brief word with the captain, and before they made a move Gladys knew they’d come for Ajax. But why? They strode the few steps and stopped right at her row. The cock slapped Ajax across the face, like he was waking a drunk.
“What the fuck! Leave him alone! Can’t you see he’s catatonic?”
Gladys was out of her seat on the second try, having forgotten her seat belt the first time. But she had the colonel’s slapping hand painfully bent back. The others swarmed over her and forced her down.
“He’s under arrest.” The cock shook Ajax as if from a drunken stupor. “You’re under arrest. Wake up!”
Gladys caught sight of the Pecks three rows behind. Those poor people, she thought. They looked adrift somewhere between horror and astonishment. The man on whom they’d placed their last best hopes to return their only remaining child was incapable of speech or thought, but could be arrested for leaving the country?