Night of the Jaguar (7 page)

He paces the ten feet, turns, and ten back, and his head while he paces is full of figures. He is the numbers guy in the group. Calderón had the Colombian contacts, Garza generated the seed money, and Ibanez has the machinery to turn the timber into cash, for there are still plenty of people whose hunger for prime mahogany precludes asking any questions about where it came from. It would be good if they had a
survey of the area, how many trees they could expect per hectare and so on, to get a clearer picture. Using averages was fine, but they had heard rumors about the incredible density of growth in the Puxto, was it possible it was as high as four trees per? He does some mental calculation on that basis: the mesa was twelve hundred square miles, convert to hectares at 259 per square mile, and say it
was
four trees per, that would be a million trees, figure average radius of a meter and a half, thirty tall, that would be, say, two hundred cubic meters of usable wood from each and…and in the midst of these ruminations he hears again that noise above him, a scraping on the tiles.

He raises his eyes to the roof, sees nothing, and resumes his pacing and his thought: two hundred million cubic meters of prime old-growth mahogany, Jesus! Although they’d have to play a little with the market because they wouldn’t want the price to drop much below the going fifteen hundred dollars per cube…but another sound interrupts his figures, like a cat’s purr but much louder.

Ararah. Ararararh.

Fuentes looks up again. No, not a raccoon.

Jimmy Paz walked into the kitchen of Guantanamera, his restaurant (actually his mother’s restaurant), and cast a practiced eye across the room. It was Wednesday, so the specials were seafood salad and
ajiaco criollo,
a beef stew whose recipe had been in his mother’s family for generations, and which was famous among local aficionados of down-home Cuban cooking. Cesar, the chef, was accordingly prepping all the marine life-forms that would go into the salad—lobster, stone crab, shrimp, squid—and Rafael, the prep cook, was cutting and peeling the fruits and roots—malanga amarilla, yuca, green plantain, boniato, malanga blanca, calabaza, and ñame yam—that would go into the stew. Also at the prep table, to Paz’s surprise, was Amelia, who was carving flowers out of pickled mushrooms and radishes and also slicing lemons in half and giving them a scalloped edge, all for the seafood salad garniture. She was standing on a stool, and the apron she was wearing came down to cover her pink sneakers, as she was only three foot four.

“How come you’re not in school?” asked Paz.

“It’s a teacher’s work day. I told you, Daddy. And we’re supposed to go to Matheson after lunch. You forgot.”

“I did forget,” said Paz. “Do you think I’m the worst daddy in the world?”

The child considered this seriously for a moment. “Not in the
whole
world. But you shouldn’t forget stuff. Abuela says you would forget your head if it wasn’t tied to your neck.” This last phrase was quoted in Cuban Spanish, with the Guantanamero accent Paz knew so well. The child was perfectly bilingual.

“I remember where you’re ticklish, and if you didn’t have that knife in your hands I would tickle you
so
much,” said Paz, and was rewarded with a giggle. “I’m busy, Daddy,” she then said, now imitating the mother, Doctor Mom, an extremely busy person at all times. Paz watched his daughter cut vegetables for a moment. She was slow but accurate, and respected the blade without fearing it. Her grandmother had let her peel carrots at four, and now, nearly three years later, she had many small paring tasks well in hand. The blade she was using was sharp as a scalpel, but Paz didn’t worry about it at all, because if she cut herself it would be a clean one, and getting sliced was part of the education of a chef. This was, however, an appraisal he had never put into so many words to the child’s mother. He put on his own apron and started cutting up meat for the
ajiaco
: short ribs, flank steak, and
tasajo,
salt-dried beef.

Four hours later, Paz stood in seeming chaos as the lunch rush crested; seeming only, for the three men and the woman who made up the kitchen crew at the restaurant Guantanamera were like trained athletes or soldiers working on the edge of catastrophe amid flashing blades, boiling cauldrons, burners shooting out gouts of flame, pans spitting fat. The waiters shouted, the cooks shouted back, the dishwasher rumbled, and Jimmy Paz worked the grill station within a self-created egg of calm. The dozen or so pieces of expensive protein in front of him—marinated steaks, pork chops, snapper fillets, lobster tails, giant prawns—all cooking at different rates toward different degrees of doneness, on a grill whose temperature varied every couple of inches and that was gradually getting hotter overall as the hours went by—were all present as little clocks and calculations in his head,
all perfectly unconscious but crowding any unwanted thoughts from his grateful mind. It was what Paz did instead of religion or meditation. Thus, now, thoughtlessly as a fish swims, Paz produced a meal for a party of four—a lobster, a steak, some pork chops, a handful of tiger prawns, all cooked to perfection and all ready at exactly the same instant. He loaded each entrée onto a warm plate and shoved them down to Yolanda, the line cook, to be garnished, sauced, veggied, and shipped out the service port. And another and another, until, and this was about two-thirty, there was a subtle slackening in the pace, and then the noise faded, there were only two or three things on the grill, and it was over. Paz went to the sink, splashed some water on his face, and drank an icy Hatuey beer down in two long swallows.

“Daddy?”

Paz looked up to see his daughter dressed for the dining room in a floor-length black skirt, a lavishly pleated white blouse (with a name tag that read
AMELIA
), shiny Mary Janes, and a red hibiscus stuck in her mass of pale brown curls: the world’s smallest hostess. This was her
abuela
’s idea and confection, and so cute that people waiting for tables were often brought to their knees through excess of delight. She was very good at it, too, and it took a nasty customer indeed to bitch to this one about seating.

“Uncle Tito says he needs to talk to you,” said the child, “table eight.” She departed, and after buttoning his tunic and telling Yolanda to mind the grill, so did Paz.

The dining room at Guantanamera was high, cool, white, and gold, with rattan fans moving the air-conditioned air around; many-armed chandeliers cast the bright light characteristic of Cuban restaurants. It was in every respect except size a replica of the dining room at the great tobacco
finca
where Paz’s mother had worked as a child before the revolution, and her mother before her, and back to slavery days, all helping to invent the cuisine of Cuba. Paz didn’t know how much of this pastiche was irony and how much was clever marketing. The original custom of the place had consisted of exiles nostalgic for the kind of
comidas criollas
that white Cubans believed only black people could authentically produce. That was one of the problems Paz had with his mother’s operation. The oldsters were running thin, the
tourists were seasonal, and the yuppies did not much fancy sitting down in a room lit like a stadium to a meal rich in carbs and spicy greases. Paz was always trying to darken the room and lighten the menu, hence that seafood salad, but it was hard to tell anything to Margarita Paz.

Tito Morales waved him over. As always when he saw Morales, Paz experienced a stab of regret, tinctured with envy and some resentment. The man was a detective on the Miami PD, as Paz had been, before he discovered that shooting people was an experience he could not ever repeat and had resigned from the force. He himself had put Morales in the detectives, brought him in off patrol as his partner, and although Morales had his own partner now (significantly absent at present), he occasionally came by to have a meal and pick Paz’s brain.

Paz sat. “What’d you have?”

“The
ajiaco
.”

“How was it?”

“Incredible. I got Mina to make it a time or two at home, but it wasn’t anything like yours.”

“Just as well. You’re getting fat, Morales. You should’ve gone with the salad.”

Morales laughed comfortably. He liked having a man who sold food tell him he was fat. In the seven years Paz had known him, Morales had turned from a baby-faced kid into a solidly built man of thirty, wife-and-two-kids, and a competent, if not particularly brilliant, detective. If he required brilliance, he had Jimmy Paz for the price of a meal.

They bantered for a while about family, sports, the department and its discontents, the latest cop scandal, one of a seemingly infinite series of stupid Miami cop tricks. Then, the reason for the visit, besides Morales’s taste for Cuban stewed beef.

“We caught a weird one last night. Tony Fuentes got killed. You heard about it?”

“I saw it in the
Herald
. Struggle with a burglar and he fell off his balcony. The perp got away.”

“That’s what we’re giving out,” said Morales darkly.

“And what are you not?”

“The perp ate him. And we doubt it was a burglary.”

“That’s good police work, Tito. Your average burglar usually goes for the jewels rather than the liver.”

An odd look appeared on Morales’s face, and Paz thought that this was one reason why the man would never be an absolutely first-class police detective—he was far too transparent; basically, he was a nice, regular guy, unlike Paz. “How did you know it was the liver?” the detective asked.

“It’s the tastiest part, if you want to snack off a corpse in a hurry. I speak as a food service professional here. What else did he eat? Or
it
eat?”

“The heart and some thigh muscles. It was quite a scene, my friend. Fuentes was opened up like a can of beans in his garden. Somebody yanked him off his balcony a little past one-thirty this morning. They ripped his throat out first. He was probably dead before he hit the croton bushes. I sure as shit hope so, anyway. The wife got up at seven and found him. Aside from
that,
Mrs. Fuentes, how was your day?”

“You probably don’t like the Mrs. for it.”

“No, we’re stupid, Jimmy, but we’re not total morons. No sign of trouble in the family. Business rivals, the usual shit. The only unusual thing that happened to Antonio in the twenty-four hours prior was a couple of guys turned up at his office and yelled at him about how he was ruining some nature preserve down in South America somewhere.”

“These were Latino types?”

“No, one was a white-bread gringo. A hippie, the secretary said. Do we still have hippies?”

“He probably thought of himself as an anarchist.”

“Whatever. He was the one who yelled. Long blond dreadlock hair, in a black T-shirt with a logo on it, but she couldn’t ID it. They had to call security, and the guy was violent, wouldn’t leave. We drew a blank with the security guards on the logo, too. I don’t understand why nobody ever sees anything.”

“They’re mainly not trained observers like you, is why. Who was the other guy?”

“He was an Indian. At least that’s what they all agreed on. A little Indian.”

“Tomahawk or dot-head?”

“Tomahawk, but I got the feeling from the description he wasn’t a local type, more like one of those from south of the border. He had these tattoos on his face.” Morales drew lines with his finger on his cheeks and chin. “That’s what they do down in, like, the Amazon, right?”

“If you say so.”

“The other thing is, there was a cat there.”

“A cat? You mean at the crime scene?”

“Yeah. Or so it appears. A big one, like a cougar or a leopard. We took casts of the prints, and we’re waiting on the zoo guys to ID them. It sounds weird, but from the look of the wounds, the forensic people say that maybe the cat did them, you know? I mean, can you train a cat to kill someone? There was a weird story I remember reading in school about a guy trained an ape to kill for him….”

“‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ by Poe. He made that up in his head, though.”

“So how do you figure this?”

“It’s open and shut, in my view. Guy owns a tiger, he’s feeding him Friskies tuna out of those little tiny cans, and one day he says, ‘Fuck this, why should I keep opening these little tiny cans, two for a dollar twenty-nine, when I can feed Lucille here on Cuban businessmen for free.’ And there you have it.”

Morales laughed, but briefly. “No, seriously.”

“Seriously? You see this outfit I got on? The white color clues you in that I’m in the food service industry and not the weird crime detection industry.”

“The Major asked me to ask you, Jimmy,” said Morales with an appropriately serious change of mien.

“Oh, the
Major
. Well, let me drop everything, then, and really focus on it.” Paz said this as sarcastically as he could manage, and as he did he felt an unpleasant pang of self-contempt. Major Douglas Oliphant had been pretty decent to Paz when Paz had been a detective under him, and did not deserve that. And was Paz getting more bitchy recently? He took a breath, released it. “I don’t see what I could do to help,” he said in a milder tone. “I mean, you’re going to do the obvious,
check out the people who own big cats, follow up on the tree hugger and his Indian….”

“Yeah, of course, but what the Major wanted me to ask you about is the possibility that there could be some kind of ritual involved.”

“And I’m the expert on cannibalistic ritual?”

“You know more than me,” said Morales bluntly.

“Guilty. But I thought we agreed the perp fed him to the pussycat. Where’s the ritual?”

“Okay, not ritual, as such.” Morales paused, and Paz saw an expression appear on his face that he had often felt appear on his own: that half smile we put on when we are about to say something that will make us appear stupid, something unbelievable or absurd. “So there’s no, like, cult that, say, worships animals and feeds people to them?”

“In the movies, maybe. Why go fancy on it? A guy with a trained tiger is bad enough. Or a maniac who for some reason wants the murder to look like it was done by a tiger.”