Night of the Jaguar (15 page)

A self-satisfied titter flitted through the journalists, and when Carrot Head made her move for the microphones, El Gordo Sangroso made his.

“A…” was all Ajax heard from Gladys before the fat fuck flattened her against the wall and barreled over him. It was unlike any sensation Ajax had ever had. He'd been knocked down plenty. But this sweaty, swollen man running him over was like God's tortilla maker dropping a gob of batter on him. He was flattened, but it was all gooey and sticky.

“HELP!!! Help me, America! Help me! Communists want to kill me! I am kidnap!! HELP!!!”

Son of a bitch!
Ajax had a millisecond to notice the cocksucker could run like the water buffalo that had birthed him, before he chose Gladys's baton instead of the Python. Amazingly, by then El Gordo had legged it halfway to the podium.

“Help me, America. I want free from kidnap! Help me, America!”

El Gordo slammed into the cameramen at the back of the crowd, bowling over their gear. Video cameras smashed to the floor, lights toppled and popped like pistol shots.

“He's got a gun!”

Ajax would never know who shouted that, but it was like a pop heard 'round the world.

Panic was unleashed like a pack of dogs, like a flood. Like an attack of diarrhea. People fled blindly, ran over each other, and hurled others in the way of imagined gunfire. Bodyguards from both delegations pulled their service revolvers. But Ajax stayed focused. He launched himself on El Gordo, knowing immediately he'd gone too high, would only be carried along like an alley cat attacking an ox. He let himself slip down and with a prayer on his lips tripped Gordo and actually felt the vibrations as he bounced like the DC-10 that'd brought him home for retribution.

His peripheral vision took in the terror of the stampeded crowd. Wild-eyed like steers, they scrambled out of the way. He saw the backside of Gio and her foreign minister being hustled away. Journalists lunged onto the small stage and toppled dignitaries in an undignified heap. Carrot Head, Ajax noticed, held onto her senator, so at least he didn't go down until his bodyguards hustled him off as well. Yet she remained. Ajax saw her mouth working, something like, “Help that man!”

Camera flashes popped the whole time. Still photographers, like bodyguards, were trained to turn toward the sound of gunfire and “shoot back.”

Ajax flailed with the baton looking for an opening in the balls or throat. But his prisoner crawled toward the stage on his knees, hands still manacled behind him, shouting, screaming. Ajax slowed him with a hard smash to the back of his head, but when El Gordo tried to get up he knew there was only one way to go. He reached for the Python—that one bullet was all he needed. But then his mind flashed on the corpse he'd helped Marta pump out—the carotid artery. “It'll drain the brain.” He laid the baton against El Gordo's neck, where he'd seen Marta slice the other open. Then he pulled with all his might to choke off whatever heated, infected blood flowed to that sick mind. Ajax conjured the morgue pictures of the dead girls and with all the strength he could muster he tried to choke the life out of Nicaragua's only serial killer. As the evil fuck slowed and gasped, Ajax laid his mouth against his sweaty little ear and whispered, mantra-like—“
Humo de leña. Humo de leña.”
—as he choked him into unconsciousness.

The body went limp, Ajax let it go and the fleshy face smacked the floor. He stood one end of the baton on the bluberous back, and rested his chin on the other, panting for breath. Blood pounded in his ears, but he was certain he heard Gladys calling, “
Policía Sandinista!
Holster your weapons!
Policía
.”

Ajax caught his breath and surveyed the wreckage of the international press conference he'd toppled like Jericho. Some of the dignitaries had slowed their retreat, others still loped away. He was surrounded by a scrum of bodyguards and photographers. But, small miracle, only the photographers were “shooting.” He looked at the stage into the green eyes of Carrot Head, her mouth hanging open and body frozen like a wax figure. As he pushed himself to his feet, her eyes followed him, but nothing else moved.

He couldn't resist. “Welcome to Nicaragua!”

Then she slapped him.

4.

Ajax looked at it.

And it looked back.

He was sure of that now. There were no eyes in the silhouette beyond his darkened window, no face to hold eyes. But he knew when he was being watched. He realized now that this was where these visitations—hallucinations?—were going.

Growing, evolving from a sheet rustling in the breeze, like the other night, to this: a presence watching him. Either he was sleepwalking and hallucinating, or … What?

The Needle was in his hand again, too. He could feel its heft—not brawny like a boxer, but lean like a ballerina. This time he wasn't thinking about how it got there, nor chasing the
why
. It was in his right hand, blocked by his body from the watcher's gaze. He slid the blade out and curled his fingers loosely around it. He hadn't thrown it in years, but hoped he remembered how.

If he could hit it, then maybe he wasn't crazy, because he'd know there was an “it” to be hit. If he missed, well, he was tired of being stared at. He tightened his fingers on the blade when the night was shattered by a shrill scream. In the millisecond it took to realize it was his phone ringing, he knew he'd missed his chance but launched the blade through the window anyway. And himself after it.

His garden was empty, as he'd known it would be. There was no solace in finding the blade buried in one of the posts that bore his hammock up.

And still the goddamn phone rang. He answered the one in his sala.

“What.”

“Ajax.”

“Marta?”

“Everything all right?”

He could feel his naked feet on the cool floor, sweat rose on his temples and back in the hot night.

“All right?” He could feel the ache in his arms from choking out El Gordo. “Have you been in a cave all day?”

“No, I heard about it, it's all everyone is talking about.”

Ajax actually managed a kind of strangled chuckle. “Then my damnation is complete.”

“I need to see you, now.”

“Please don't. I don't need comforting.”

“This won't comfort you.”

*   *   *

Ajax and Marta were in his garden. He studied the black-and-white photographs she'd brought.
It's like death has set up a waiting room in my life.

“What's this?”

He looked over to see Marta trying to wiggle The Needle free of the post where he'd sunk it.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? This is The Needle; I haven't seen this in years. You kept it?”

Ajax held up one of the morgue photos. “Was he blind?”

“Which one?” She walked over and took a seat at the small table in his garden. Spread out before Ajax were six photographs of two dead men; he touched one.

“This one?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so. He styled himself a blind gypsy fortune-teller.”

“You knew him?”

“Both of them.” Ajax touched another photo. “That's the Hunchback.”

“He wasn't a hunchback. He had spinal encephalitis, a crooked spine. Painful, too, I'll bet.”

“Maybe that's why he was always mad.”

“At you?”

“Marta, you're sure?”

She looked down at her photos. “Both of them. Once in the throat, twice in the heart. Just like the first one.”

The first one.
Damn, he hadn't expected that. Enrique Cuadra, okay. But now these two, and the same MO? He traced a finger around the Hunchback's head. “When and where?”

“Both found today. Crooked Spine floating in the lake, the not-blind gypsy in a garbage heap at the Oriental.” She studied his face a moment. “How did you know these two?”

“I might be the last one to have seen them alive.”

Marta lay down in his hammock, used her ass to swing it gently. “You can't be your own suspect.”

“No. Maybe just suspect.”

She rocked for a while. “Joaquin's funeral is tomorrow,” she said.

“I know.”

“You're going.”

“Am I? After the spectacle I put on at the airport? Can you imagine what the papers will make of that?”

“Don't have to.
La Prensa
put out a special edition already. You made the front page. But you have to attend, Ajax. All the old comrades will be there. Friends.”

“Not the burial, too many grandees. But afterward, maybe. I don't know.”

“Come on.” She got out of the hammock. “Let's go see what detritus you've got in the kitchen. We'll make a camp mash out of it.”

“You gonna cook for me?”

“Hell no. But I'll slice some mangos.”

They stood around Ajax's stove and slowly made a serviceable meal out of whatever was at hand. They ate together, sitting on stools in the kitchen, trading remembrances of Joaquin and the old days.

In the garden, the black-and-white photos curled in the humid night.

 

8

Ajax and Horacio silently drove south out of Managua on the Inter-American Highway. Ajax daydreamed of not stopping until he awoke drowning in the Panama Canal. Strangely, the seasonal torrential rain had skipped a day yesterday. He slalomed easily around the potholes on the dry road under the burning sun on his way to Gioconda's house to mourn the passing of Joaquin Tinoco. The Soviet tanker had finally brought the gas, so the carretera was again busy with overstuffed Bulgarian buses, big Russian IFA trucks, Lada taxis, Toyotas, Jeeps, hawkers, and walkers.

As the sprawl of the city thinned out, Ajax took in smaller details. He passed the city's first and only McDonald's, which gamely limped on even though it'd been excommunicated from the parent company for serving tacos and yucca instead of burgers and fries. The foreign aid groups and UN missions had offices here, flags flying over them. Long stretches of ugly concrete walls enclosing military barracks were covered in the graffiti of Sandinista and opposition youth groups trading insults. A long stretch of revolutionary murals and slogans was painted just north of his destination. He grunted his approval as they drove by his favorite—Que se rinda tu madre! Your mama surrenders. It was the kind of slogan Ajax like best: streetwise and not fit for polite company.

“What?”

Horacio was watching with a sly smile, which meant he'd been watching for some time. He had a habit of watching, which made Ajax feel both esteemed and spied on.

Ajax nodded at the slogan-covered walls: “Leonel.”

Leonel Rugama had been a young poet and guerrillero when he'd been caught in a safe house right here in Managua in 1970. Surrounded by two hundred National Guardsmen, he'd held them off with one Thompson submachine gun and a few grenades. The Ogre had been so thrilled to have caught an actual Sandinista he'd ordered the siege broadcast live on TV and radio. Leonel had held them off for hours as the entire nation watched, transfixed. No one, literally, had ever seen such a thing!

Leonel would pop up in one window, fire a burst, and then weather a shit storm of lead from the Ogre's best troops. Then the rascally bastard would pop up in another window and toss a grenade. It was during this siege that an officer had broadcast a demand for his surrender, and Leonel had shouted for the entire world to hear live on TV,
“Que se rinda tu madre!”

The Guard finally had had to call up a tank to blast the house. Still, the country watched the Guard hesitate for an hour before making the final assault. And when they did, a broken, bloody Leonel got off one final burst before dying.

“Que se rinda tu madre.” Horacio smiled. “That brother was more than a compa. I think he was a nuclear physicist. Or an alchemist!”

Ajax cut his eyes at the old man, wondering how he would bring
that
together.

“Do you know what E
=
mc
2
means?”

Ajax paused to light a Marlboro. “Ah, it's Latin for ‘your mama surrenders'?”

“Always the vulgarian. It means that from a small thing comes a great energy. Leonel understood that. He understood in his revolutionary consciousness that holding the Guard off like that he was the smallest grain of plutonium, but he would unleash a firestorm that would make him immortal.”

Ajax exhaled a cloud of doubt. “You think he died knowing that?”

“None of us die knowing the good we did. But the real tragedy is that he died not knowing that as a poet he gets to be remembered for his shortest verse. It was the beginning of the end for Somoza.”

“You think?”

“Of course. No amount of Somoza propaganda or intimidation could ever overcome the unifying, collective grief—the sigh heard 'round the world!—when they dragged Leonel's body from the rubble.
Your mamma surrenders
instantly became a cultural touchstone. College students graffitied the country with it. Children shouted it at rivals in the schoolyard. Workers whispered it behind their bosses' backs. Henpecked husbands and neglected wives prayed it into their pillows. Farmers spelled it out in their cornfields. And all of them, every one of them, muttered it under their breath as they passed the Guardia.”

They arrived at a windbreak of trees, and Ajax turned off the carretera into Las Colinas and Gio's house.

After a long pause, Horacio simply said, “It was a slogan worth fighting for.”

And that it had been, Ajax agreed. But it was no longer the slogan they fought for.

He had joined the war, and so he had done what the logic of war dictated. Ajax had learned early on that he had a facility for night fighting, and yes, for throat cutting. And he'd told himself, believed, that every life he took with The Needle—whether of a sleepy sentry or a lost soldier—had needed taking. He had never complained. And when it had begun to feel that each time he stuck The Needle into a man's neck he was shaving off a bit of his own soul, he'd accepted the price. He'd had faith that if his motives were pure, then his soul would be restored, either in victory or in death. That faith had been slowly replaced with rum. Now that the rum had ceased to flow, he was waking in his bed with The Needle in his hand, and something staring in his window. It only just now occurred to Ajax that the specter outside his window might be connected to The Needle's well-worn blade.