Had she been tailing Winthrop, saw the two of them meet, and assumed their meeting was regarding Esquinaldo? Why would she have been tailing Winthrop? Was the DEA agent’s name in the murdered journalist’s notes?
These and a hundred other questions he wished he had asked, but didn’t, tumbled through his brain such that the very next day, he again left the estate and retraced his steps, stopping in the lobby of Hotel Prado to drink and commune with the Rivera mural, and returning to that hole in the wall bar. But this time, there were no clandestine meetings or mysterious notes being passed. Yet by coincidence, those excursions from the house did add some other elements to what he was starting to think of as his very own mystery.
That first day when he arrived home, while walking down the long drive, he spotted a Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates parked at the end. Though the vehicle had no markings, when passing by the front steps, he saw another humorless looking man with an earpiece standing sentry. Dan sent him a friendly wave but got nothing in return. However, the yarmulke the man wore made Dan wonder if perhaps it wasn’t someone from the Israeli embassy that had come to visit Esquinaldo. The guy certainly had friends in high places. Dan would say at least that much for him.
The second time he returned, there was yet another vehicle with diplomat plates, this one a long black limousine. Dan hadn’t recognized the miniature flag waving from its front fender, but did make note of what he had seen for future investigation. While writing that down, he also jotted what he could remember about the uniform Esquinaldo had worn in the photo. Again, the foul mood he was in clouded his recollection, but he remembered the Iron Cross, and he recalled an eagle on the left arm. The left collar contained three angled square tabs that ran diagonally left to right. The profile view the photographer had chosen precluded Dan from seeing his right side. Useless, he knew. All useless. But it would have to do.
While he was at it, he scribbled down some other random observations and impressions of the past few days, if only to take his mind off Scott. He was dismayed that his nephew hadn’t returned yet. Richards had said it could take as little as three days, well, three days had come and gone. He then went on to say it wouldn’t take more than a week. Well. Only time would tell.
Anyway, if Dan was going to be cooped up in this golden cage waiting for his nephew to return, he may as well put his mind to something, and whatever the hell Esquinaldo and Richards were up to (and he had no doubt both were involved, his host dismissing himself as a mere ‘middleman’ notwithstanding) was as good a mystery as any to try to decipher. Plus, he wouldn’t mind spending some time in the American Bookstore. He had spent a wonderful few hours there on his previous trip, wandering its three stories of dusty bookshelves. He had driven past it a number of times in his recent travels, and inside that bookstore, he was certain, were at least a couple of the answers he was looking for. He planned to seek out some of those answers today.
3
Pruitt awoke drenched in clammy wetness, and so knew he’d again been dreaming. He hazily recollected through the dimness of his memory that at some distant time in his past, waking up with a cold sweat was his daily ritual. But it was somehow different now than it was then. The sweat that had swaddled him then had smelled putrid, toxic, as if his steadily declining body was leaching his inner ugliness to the surface; as if the stench of the sweat was his true self.
It was different now. The mornings of the past few months he had awoken in that state, his sweat was just that. Sweat. He was cognizant too that the wet mornings were coming less frequently. For example, of the nights he had spent in this house minding the girl, this was only the second time he had awakened to find himself in this condition. Perhaps the dreams were coming less frequently. More probably, he knew, it was somehow connected with the boy.
Whatever it was, aside from being forced into another change of clothes, he felt good this morning, refreshed, in fact, and better than he had in a good long while. Sitting up in the recliner he had dozed off in, he glanced out the window to see the sun was up, though not very high. He guessed it was sometime before seven in the morning. Margarite would be arriving soon from the guest apartment to start breakfast. Given his habits, Carlos might already be up and out of the house, tending the gardens or mowing the lawn or trimming the hedges, any one of a thousand things. It was time for Pruitt to get up as well.
Before using the bathroom, he wandered down the short hallway, hearing through the closed door at the end the shower running, Margarite preparing to greet the new day. That same moment, as he’d predicted, he began to hear the harsh grinding noise of metal meeting stone somewhere alongside the house, as Carlos sharpened his hedge trimmers.
Smiling, he stopped at a closed door on the left and knocked softly. Hearing nothing from within, he reached for the knob and pushed open the door, popping his head into the master suite.
Across the room, Ana was asleep in the bed, her untamed hair on the soft white pillow springing from her head like Medusa’s snakes. He heard her snoring lightly and understood she might awaken very soon. Glancing to the opposite side of the room, he noted the door to the patio had been left half open, no doubt to provide a gentle nighttime breeze. With soft footsteps that had no place coming from a man so large, he padded across the tile and closed and locked the sliding door. Afterward, he peered left and right through the sheer curtain but saw nothing and no one either there, or on the small strand of beach just down the bluff.
Taking one last glance toward the sleeping girl, he felt anew the sense that had dogged him since the two were first introduced, that even in her tranquil and untroubled sleep, her demons were darker and far more disturbing than his. He listened one more moment to her light snores before he gracefully tiptoed his way across the floor and let himself out.
Part III
“I don’t think it was wrong. I think it was a neat idea . . .”
– Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North
Chapter Seven
1
With the last of the sun’s rays receding behind the vastness of the Pacific, Dugan swam up through the miasma of death and gradually returned to sentience. When ready, he emerged from beneath his canvas shroud and reached beside him for his bag. He had resolved to do without any of his standard totems during his time spent in this befouled resting place. He could only imagine the snide remarks Larry would make about his situation, and though he might deserve them all, he just didn’t want to hear it. Anyway, Lord willing, he had spent his last day amid the foul stench of the fish box. He would talk to Larry soon enough. And so, on that morning, before he surrendered himself again unto death, he held in his hands the journal that Richards had given him.
Though he still did possess some of his early journals, this was the one he had kept in the year or so leading up to the nightmare that had claimed both his best friend and much of his hometown, not to mention himself. It was his very last journal. Given that, he was surprised and delighted to discover that most all his friends had touched it at one time or another. The object was alive with mostly happy memories.
However, along with those were some odd, muted ones that acted as dead spots, memories clinging to the thing that could not be extracted. He ran into those occasionally, so it didn’t come as a total surprise. He had experienced them most recently while touching various objects in Esquinaldo’s office, his picture frames and pen and cigar humidor. But then, Esquinaldo wore gloves, so perhaps that explained some of it.
With an odd amalgam of emotions, at the very threshold of death, he discovered that a doomed boy named Michael Harris had once leafed through it. Dugan hadn’t thought about Harris in years, but suddenly, there he was, in the school library, on a day the two had been working together on a school project. Dugan had excused himself to use the bathroom. While he was gone, Harris had surreptitiously snatched the book from Dugan’s bag and started reading his song lyrics and bad poetry, his newspaper earnings and brief descriptive snapshots of time spent with friends. A
deep stab of empathy passed through him to feel Harris’s envy at Dugan’s life, a life that at the time, Dugan himself didn’t think was all that great. But since then, he had learned a small something about the life that Harris had lived, and the whole sorry episode just ended up making him feel sad. When he awoke, he shoved the journal into his bag and suspected it was the last time he’d be using that as his wake-up balm.
Climbing out, he at once sensed changes to both the atmosphere and the surrounding environment, changes both subtle and conspicuous. One glaring example was that the river was now far wider than the one they had spent their last days trekking down, leading him to think they had finally transited the narrow, snakelike, seemingly unending tributary, to merge with the larger river that would take them to the sea. In the air, he tasted just a hint of what, for him, was the mildly unpleasant tang of salt. Dugan wasn’t a fan of salt. His metabolism was sensitive to it. Too much burned his skin.
The terrain along the shore had changed as well. Gone were the old growth jungle woodlands and coffee plantations, the riverside now comprising dense mangrove swamps and low forested outcrops. At higher elevations visible beyond the shores were vast parcels of fertile grassland and wild savanna. Looming ahead in the far distance along the lefthand shore was a collection of rugged low hills adjacent to a single towering mountain. The land seemed more populous too, with houses dotting the shoreline here and there, some hosting solid looking wharves that jetted out into the river.
At the stern, Richards had his radio beside him along with that black, toggle switched device. When he went there to join him, Richards raised his head in acknowledgment.
Returning a nod, Dugan asked, “Get anything on that yet?” referencing the radio.
Richards shook his head. “Not yet. Think we’ll be okay though.”
“What’s that other thing?”
“That, my friend, is a geopositional transponder. Supposed to be able to pinpoint our exact location anywhere on the globe. Of course, it’s an older model. They have ones now as small as a watch battery. But I suspect it will do the trick.”
Dugan raised his head toward the still seemingly endless river ahead. “How much longer, do you think?” he asked.
“Won’t be long now. We should reach the coast by midnight.”
Dugan thought a moment. “What happens then?”
Richards considered it before replying, “We wait,” in all the answer that Dugan knew he would get.
2
Approaching midnight, Dan sat in semi-gloom in the quiet backroom of the guest cottage lost in thought. Open in his lap was the now forgotten notebook he had purchased on his trek into the city earlier in the day. Its lined pages were host to an ever expanding list of disordered scrawlings and notations and connections that probably added up to nothing. Still, it gave him something to do.
After making his way to the American Bookstore, he spent a few hours in the history section, thumbing through thick tomes on World War II, rapidly skimming the black and white photos often found in the middle. It was in a recently published compendium of Nazi atrocities that he first spotted another German soldier wearing the same collar insignia as Esquinaldo. The caption identified this officer’s rank as Hauptsturmfuhrer, a captain of the SS. A shiver crawled up his spine to see that this one wore on his other collar the two lightning bolts that Dan knew were symbolic of service in the SS. Though his were hidden due to the angle of the photo, he had no doubt Esquinaldo wore the same.
The bold iron cross his host wore tightly around his neck was relatively easy to identify, found quickly in the index to one of the books. It was the highest award for battlefield valor that the Nazi’s bestowed. And though he had seen enough World War II movies to have a surface understanding, he went on to read what a swell bunch of guys the SS were, wreaking havoc all across Europe, from Poland to France to the Netherlands and beyond. Not technically part of the army, the Waffen SS were the armed wing of the Nazi party, and hardcore believers all.
After reading they played a particularly grisly role in the Balkans, Dan wondered idly if that was where Esquinaldo suffered his own frightful wound. While scanning the last few paragraphs in one book, the following caught his eye:
“. . . the Waffen SS were distinguishable in another way: it was mandatory that each member have their blood type tattooed beneath their upper left arm.”
Having read enough to have his principal questions answered, Dan went to set that book aside. Before doing so, he again scanned the black and white photographs in the center, these mostly of scarcely alive, starving scarecrow figures taken just after the liberation of one of the death camps.
Shelving the book, Dan unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants before heading to the reference shelves, where he soon found a child’s atlas featuring flags of the world. The one he was looking for was a horizontal tricolor of green, white, and red, with a stylized and vaguely Islamic circular symbol in the center. He found it in the upper half of the alphabet, twin to the flag he had seen waving from the diplomatic vehicle in Esquinaldo’s driveway. It was the flag of Iran.
Before departing, he stopped by the fiction section and browsed the W’s. He had finished the Herman Wouk novel and with it, all the English language reading available in the cottage. Having enjoyed that one, he figured he’d seek out another. To his astonishment, he saw a thick paperback that appeared to be sequel to the one he had been reading. This one was called, War and Remembrance.
Squatting down to take it from the bottom shelf (where despite himself, Dan smiled to wonder if that weren’t the bane of authors whose last name ends in W) he picked up the book and skimmed the back, learning that this one took up right where the last one left off. He was delighted. His delight wouldn’t last long, though, because his day would get only stranger.
3
It was sometime after midnight when the Lucky Strike pulled up alongside a commercial wharf near the mouth of the Pacific, just outside what Richards’ map said was the Gulf of Fonseca. As they sailed nearer the coast, Dugan saw what he had first taken for a towering mountain in the distance was actually a mammoth volcano that jutted out on a long peninsula into the Gulf. Though apparently now dormant, reflecting on their excursion thus far, it wouldn’t have surprised Dugan in the least should the volcano take that moment to erupt. Mercifully, the volcano slept on.
Miguel was effusive and overtly emotional when Richards said he could keep the boat. He offered Richards his money back, but the agent would have none of it. Thanking Miguel, he praised his seamanship and shook his hand before once again bending low to say an individual goodbye to Arturo. Dugan too thanked Miguel and bade him a fond farewell. Before leaving, he sent Arturo a special wink of his wolf’s eye. Arturo returned a gap-toothed smile. The abiding image they had of father and son was of the two waving goodbye from the prow of the boat as Richards and Dugan headed off into the mangrove swamp.
After about a half mile jaunt through mostly soft, wet brush and low sea grasses, a blessing given their still bare feet, they found themselves on the silky smooth sand of a broad and empty beach. Volcanic islands of varying heights sprouted up here and there throughout the bay, with the wide immensity of the Pacific Ocean beyond. They had gone as far as they could.
And yet, Richards kept right on walking. Dugan followed in his footsteps, pulling up short when he realized that Richards, like Sherman before him, intended to continue his march toward the sea. From behind he saw the agent drop his bag and then lift the torn bottoms of his trousers before wading knee high into the surf, no doubt an effort to salve his battered feet and cut leg. Dugan plopped down on the dry white sand next to Richards’ bag and observed him while waiting for his return. Apparently not content with getting just his feet wet, Richards soon immersed himself completely in the healing waters.
The agent rejoined him a few minutes later. Collapsing to the sand beside him, Dugan watched as he unzipped his bag and reached in to retrieve his radio and the transponder device.<
br />
Lifting the radio to his mouth, Richards said, “Home base, this is Golden Boy. Do you copy?” Receiving nothing but shrill static in response, he tried again. “Home base, this is Golden Boy. Do you copy?”
There came a few seconds more of crackling static, this time followed by a tinny: “Golden Boy, this is Home base. What are your requirements?”
Richards sent a glance Dugan’s way and smiled widely. “Require immediate evac. Repeat, require immediate evac.”
“Copy that, Golden Boy. Hang tight. We’re on our way.”
As if remembering something, Richards lifted the radio once again.
“And bring some shoes, goddamnit. Size 11s and size . . .” He lifted his eyebrows toward Dugan.
“Eight,” Dugan responded.
“Eight,” Richards barked.
The long stretch of static that followed was broken by a somewhat mirthful voice saying, “We copy shoes, Golden Boy. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right along.”
Chucking the radio aside, Richards lay down in the sand and let go a heavy sigh. Within moments, he was snoring deeply.
4
Chief Torres was once again parked outside the beachfront villa. It was well after midnight. All the lights in the house were off. He was there to make certain that all was as it should be, and there would be no surprises. He hated surprises. Predictably, all was as it should be.
He noted that as on his previous visits, there were three cars parked in the driveway. All had been there since Senor Proctor and his nephew left the premises. The first was an aging Dodge Dart that he knew belonged to Proctor. As now, it was typically parked beneath the carport to protect it from the rays of the sun. Behind that was a Ford Sedan with tinted windows that he had seen the nephew arrive in a few times. Though the boy was old enough, for some reason he did not drive himself, but instead used a driver. Given his extended absence, it would make sense that the boy had given the driver the time off. In any case, Torres had seen neither hide nor hair of him.
Applewood (Book 3): The Space of Life Between Page 13