Blood of Paradise (49 page)

He hoisted himself onto the same table in the corner the kid had used as a firing stand and waved for everyone to come toward him. “We'll get out this way,” he said, gesturing to the neighbor's house. Consuela managed to get Oscar's mother to her feet and lead her to the garden wall. With tortured eyes, she handed up her son's body to Jude. It felt like nothing, the bones so slight, skin like paper, but blood came away on Jude's hands as he set the boy down gently in the grass. He climbed back up onto the table, wiped his hands clean, then held them out and the woman grabbed on and climbed over, quickly scrambling down to pick up her son again and wrap him in her arms.

Next, Consuela and Axel helped Eileen. She couldn't put weight on her left leg so they had to hoist her up to where Jude could wrap both arms around her. She bit down to fight the pain, puling in his ear as she kicked herself over with her one good leg. Jude eased her down slowly but her whole left side collapsed. Her eyes were dull, she was panting, her breath smelled like tin. They needed to get her to a hospital before she went into shock. Jude turned back to help Consuela then, and finally Axel.

Everyone eyed the wounded young gunman but no one approached. His stare seemed fixed on something else—far away or deep within, Jude didn't know or much care. Axel, wearing a look of anguished desperation, trained his pistol on the boy and nodded that he had the situation under control as Jude drew his own gun and lifted it close to his chest in a ready position, venturing inside the strange house.

He'd seen only four men charge out of the van, but there could be others, maybe one of them hidden here, a trap. But when Jude got beyond the doorway, he found only the owners, an aging couple, the Chilean missionaries, crouched in terror behind an armchair in the corner of the living room, the man's arms wrapped around his tiny wife. Jude asked if there was anyone else in the house and they said no, just the one who had run through to the garden. Still, Jude checked every room. Once he knew the place was clear, he went back out and collected everyone, telling them to move on inside. Everyone did except Oscar's mother, who remained kneeling in the garden, clutching her dead son and staring at the young man, not much older than Oscar, who had killed him.

The old woman in the house saw Eileen's blood and ran to her kitchen to fetch clean towels and soap. Her husband said he'd called
emergencia
—he'd been told the police were on their way, but that felt like ages ago. Jude looked at his watch, realizing only then that barely fifteen minutes had passed since he'd first looked out Consuela's window and seen the strange van parked down the street.

The old man's wife returned from the kitchen and, using sewing shears, cut away the bloody cotton of Eileen's dress and underwear and gently washed the wound. Once the blood was wiped away, Jude could see the bullet, lodged within the puncture it had made in the muscle of her hip. Eileen shook and gritted her teeth, looking up at Jude. “It's gonna be okay, I know it, I can feel it, it's gonna be fine. You gotta help Oscar.”

The old woman glanced at Jude to suggest he leave Eileen alone for now, so she wouldn't exhaust herself with further talk. Jude leaned down, squeezed Eileen's hand, and kissed her hair, not knowing what to tell her, then went to the front door, pulled it open, and stepped outside.

His pistol still at the ready, he checked the street and found the shooter who'd hidden near the van lying where he'd fallen, dead. Nearby, another lay crushed in his own blood where the van had run over him, his back corkscrewed. Up the street, the large one lay facedown. That, plus the kid in the back garden, made four. Jude checked inside the van, ready to shoot, but found no one else. Then he remembered the van had been parked outside a house up the block, the old gossip's place. Osorio. That'd bear checking.

He turned to head that way and found Axel wandering ahead of him, toward the black Mercedes.

Jude hurried to catch up, snagged Axel's arm. “I need you to stay inside.”

Axel shook him off. “I have to see Carlos.”

Jude planted himself in Axel's way. “It's not safe out here, you're not wearing a vest, I need—”

“I'm not much concerned about your needs, frankly.” Axel stared into Jude's eyes with a vacant, hateful intensity. “Isn't safe? Out here? Well, isn't that refreshing? In contrast to all the perfectly secure and docile places I've been of late. Why, didn't you know, just a few moments ago, I was sitting inside the home of a dear friend. We had a little fire going and—”

The bullet came silently and from nowhere and hit the side of Axel's head near the ear, the impact creating a tiny halo of blood. His expression froze, the eyes suddenly glassy and wrong. He tottered. Then a second round hit him in the throat and he buckled into Jude's arms.

PART V

FACELESS

There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.

—Don DeLillo,
Libra

American Business Consultant

Murdered in El Salvador

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (Inter-American Media Agency)—An American hydrologist was slain early today in what authorities believe was a failed kidnap attempt.

Axel Odelberg, working on behalf of Horizon Project Management, was shot dead shortly after seven o'clock this morning in the eastern town of San Bartolo Oriente. A second American, anthropologist Eileen Browning, was critically wounded in the attack. Her condition has stabilized, but she is scheduled for evacuation to the United States shortly for further treatment.

Seven Salvadorans were also slain: Odelberg's driver, an eight-year-old boy, a seventy-nine-year-old neighbor, and the four would-be kidnappers. The four attackers were killed as Odelberg and Browning defended themselves with the assistance of Odelberg's bodyguard. The alleged kidnappers were identified by their tattoos as members of Mara Salvatrucha, a notoriously violent Salvadoran street gang with roots in Los Angeles and a rapidly expanding membership throughout the United States and Central America.

A regional spokesmen for ARENA, El Salvador's ruling party, stated: “This attack underscores the terrorist ambitions of these gangs and the need for La Mano Dura and even tougher laws. The voters in the recent election spoke loud and clear on this, and we will give the people the security they demand.”

Odelberg's killing sent particularly severe shock waves through the American business community, since it took place in the aftermath of Teamster Gilberto Soto's murder just last week.

“Mr. Odelberg was a gifted man whose death hits all of us hard,” said Robert Strickland, an executive with Torkland Overby Enterprises. Strickland was in El Salvador to confer with Odelberg regarding the expansion of a soft drink bottling facility operated by Estrella, C.A., in which Torkland has a significant equity position. “Axel believed deeply in the need for sound development throughout the region. It was his life's work.” Asked if Odelberg's death would cause Torkland to rethink its commitment to Estrella, Strickland responded, “If anything, we're more committed than ever. We can't back down now. That would be a victory for the terrorists and an insult to Axel.”

41

It took a second for Jude to place the man. The context was all wrong and he'd changed in ten years, a weariness of spirit, hair fading, the body still neck-bending tall but thicker from middle age. There was no mistaking the eyes, though.

The man pulled up a chair across the metal table from Jude and rested his briefcase on the floor. “You may not remember me.”

“I can't place your name at the moment,” Jude said. “But I remember you.”

The man took out a card and slid it across the table. Special Agent John Pitney, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Chicago. “I've come a long way, obviously, and if it's all right with you I'd like to jump right in.”

Jude stared into Pitney's singular green eyes. “Sure.”

Jude had spent most of the previous day watching lizards scurry across the walls of the cramped, sweltering PNC garrison in San Bartolo Oriente where he was questioned by members of the infamous Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime. It had been clear almost immediately that the men working the case had bought into the botched kidnap angle—for all Jude knew, they were its masterminds. Or answered to higher-ups who were.

He elected to play along without committing himself to their interpretation, reviewing their pictures—they had hundreds, a numbing testament to the thoroughness of the cover-up—and he identified as best he could who was who and what was where. They asked nothing about the timing of the shots that killed Axel, or of the situation involving Estrella, or the abducted little girl, or why Oscar and his mother were at the house. Jude didn't volunteer, either, or even ask if Consuela was saying anything of the sort, reminding himself of the farce the investigation into the murder of Gilberto Soto had become.

He'd accepted a change of clothes at the garrison, surrendering what he'd been wearing—more pointless evidence. He ignored the food he was brought; the intense smells nearly made him retch. Then, quite late, he was driven all the way to the capital by two silent men and encamped in this small, windowless room, tucked deep within the bowels of the embassy. He'd lain awake on his cot all night, fending off the nightmares he knew sleep would bring.

Wakefulness proved just as punishing. Nothing he would hear from anyone over the coming days, regardless how damning, would approach in viciousness his own self-laceration. His epiphany of two days earlier, when he'd discerned the little machine cranking out so many of his missteps—the blind swings in temperament back and forth between shrewish self-hatred and stubborn numbness—it seemed a kind of fantasy, a moralistic fable delivered up quaintly to a wholly different person. Here and now, the guilt felt right, it felt necessary, the more eviscerating the better.

Over and over, he replayed the entire sorry history in his mind, from that first call from Malvasio to watching Axel die in his arms, getting played like somebody's fat kid brother, then all the buck-up bromides he'd fed himself to do the thing, the moral qualms he'd swept aside, the plain common sense he'd ignored, the conniving knack for covering his ass he'd developed, blinding himself to the obvious to pursue the convenient, all for the sake of what? Telling himself he could look men like Malvasio and Strock in the eye, play their game and walk away, prove himself their equal but not their kind.

Gee. That turned out well.

He realized it sounded squirrelly and not a little chickenshit, but he'd developed an almost eerie fascination with the unseen impulses at play. He envisioned himself a sleepwalker who suddenly wakes up in a strange room, finds himself before a mirror, and has the ridiculous audacity to say, “I know that guy,” before laughing in his own face. Wasn't that what he'd been after—some dark, grand adventure that would tell him, finally, who he was? Well, embrace your success, he thought. You're the fool who got sucked in deeper than he could handle and then couldn't step up, come clean, the spitting image of your father—how's that for unseen impulses?

Meanwhile, he thought, Axel is dead. And given how it happened, he may as well have been killed by you. Figure out how you intend to live with that.

Come morning, Lazarek had barged in, joined by a nameless sidekick who also clearly had a military past: leathery face, savagely blond hair, big ropy hands. They spent two hours going at him, mocking him for his farcical stab at a kidnap swap that made no sense. A baffled Hector Torres had passed word on to an equally puzzled Wenceslao Sola, Sola had contacted Lazarek, and everyone concerned was still scratching his head. They'd be laughing, he added, if it hadn't ended so badly.

Lazarek tried to badger Jude into admitting he knew nothing about any involvement between Malvasio and Torres, let alone Sola or anyone else connected with Estrella. “And don't expect Waxman, the reporter, to bail you out. That pudgy fuck prints anything resembling the hoax you've been peddling, he'll walk into a buzz saw.” Jude just sat there in silence through all of that, and it galled the man. The mockery escalated—What kind of loser would indulge such nitwit fantasies in the first place?—culminating with outright blame for Axel's death on Jude's getting sucked into such crap instead of focusing on his job: his real job, the one he got paid for.

Fair enough, Jude thought, for all the wrong reasons. And yet he wondered what they really knew. You tell your secrets, he thought, I'll tell mine, though it was far too late for that. Besides, why waste the truth on these two?

His next visitor followed up on the same theme, minus the venom. It was Jim Leonhard, Trenton's regional supervisor and the man who'd originally recruited Jude at Los Rinconcitos in the Zona Rosa. “You let the principal dictate the terms of his own protection,” Leonhard said, explaining why Jude was fired. “I know you were fond of each other. I can only imagine the regret you must feel. But we're not in the regret business.”

Lucky you, Jude thought.

Back in the present, Pitney fumbled with the clasp to his briefcase. “The bureau has an unfortunate reputation for taking more than it gives,” he said. “Well, I'm here to give a little. And I'm going to start by telling you about someone named Lolly Turpin.”

Finally getting his briefcase open, he rummaged inside and produced a photograph of a woman in her late thirties, seated at a long table in an institutional dining room, wearing a faded denim shirt with fox valley atc stenciled above the pocket. She had a pretty but dead face, spent blue eyes, ash-colored hair cut short with a center part. Her chest was generous but sliding downhill and a little lopsided, suggesting a bad silicon job, just as her clenched lips suggested meth use, her teeth rotting black or gone altogether.