Night of the Jaguar (20 page)

“You, too? A tree stump?”

“Somebody had to keep watch.”

“The privilege of command.”

“Or the price.”

Matthew put away his camera and tape recorder.

“You know, I always assumed that you weren't in command that night here.”

Ajax blew a cloud of smoke into the reporter's face, but Matthew just lolled his head back and the smoke was sucked out the window.

“The papers said you were.”

Ajax smiled. “You say that, ‘the papers said you were,' like you were saying, ‘God wrote on a tablet.'”

“Do I?”

“You ever wipe your ass on
The New York Times
?”

“It's my absolute favorite. There's something about the texture that…”

“Shut up about it. Okay.”

“Look, Ajax. I'm not judging you here. I think it could've been a beautiful operation.”

“What?”

Matthew spread his hands to encompass the ruined gas station, invisible behind the curtain of rain that beat on the roof like hands demanding shelter. “The Salazar Operation.”

Ajax turned on Matthew, and for once his innate hatred of all that was gringo gave way to an actual curiosity.

“What the fuck, exactly, could some fucking clown like you know about
any
of that?”

“More than you might think. It's about mid-1981, the Revo's not even eighteen months old, but America's got a new president and Reagan wants to cowboy-up something bad. He's called out the Russians, the Evil Empire, and he needs to beat up on them a little, but not head on, and here is a nice little country, just down the road, piss-poor in everything but Marxist-Leninist rhetoric.”

Matthew paused for confirmation of his accuracy. “Tablet or toilet paper?”

Ajax smiled. “So far, tablet.”

“So all the black-ops guys have hard-ons like no tomorrow and they come up with Jorge Salazar. I knew him. Before the Revo he was a nothing cotton farmer under Somoza. Afterward, he sets up his own cotton-growers union and he's a big cheese.”

Matthew paused.

“Tablet.” Ajax said.

“Then someone gets word he's sniffing around the Americans for backing and that same someone gets the idea to feed Salazar some rope to see if he'd not only hang himself, but the CIA, too.”

“Tablet.”

“So someone from the Revo, they get the word to ole Jorge, or, better, he overhears a ‘private' conversation about discontent in the Estado Mayor. Rumors of mutiny in the Army High Command! Salazar thinks it's a thread he can pull to unravel the Revo, but I think it was the first inch of that hangman's rope someone was feeding him.”

Ajax took a drag on his butt. Matthew tilted his head back to let the smoke cloud escape out his window. Instead, Ajax blew it out his own window and rolled it up so that the storm outside receded. “Tablet.”

Matthew smiled, actually pleased to receive the man's approval.

“But it's a misinformation campaign, so no one feeds Salazar any more info. They make him go sniffing around. Make him pull the next thread. He reports it back to his CIA contacts and they, duped by their own propaganda about the Evil Empire, think they're onto something and give him the green light to spread some cash around, lots of cash to what they think are a bunch of unhappy colonels ready to stage a coup.”

“Tablet. Very tablet.”

“You were a colonel in State Security then, and I think you were in charge of that operation.”

“Toilet paper.”

“Toilet paper? Or no comment?”

“Okay. No comment.”

“Okay. But then it must have gotten tricky. Salazar is pulling in that hangman's rope as fast as he can. But, what to do? What should Salazar's puppet masters do with him? How would the lesson best be learned? Catch him, try him, convict him, and let the whole world see the CIA had been duped, suckered like country bumpkins right off the bus in the big city, or…”

“Or?”

“Kill him and be done with it.”

Ajax looked out the window. The storm was weakening, some light in the western sky forecast its end. “Rain's going, we should get going.” He turned the engine over.

“I think you were in charge of that first operation, the capture one.” Matthew reached over and turned the engine off. “But someone changed the orders, they made it an execution. And they didn't tell you. Which means they knew you would not carry out such orders. And it means they knew that before you did.”

Ajax had his fingers on the keys; the lightest pressure would turn the engine over. Put it in gear and drive, he thought.
Drive, push, propel!
But Matthew had so touched the needle, had counted every angel squatting on the rusted pinhead of Ajax's life.

“How do you figure that?”

“Files, my friend. I keep files on everyone. Before
l'affaire Salazar
you were popular, you show up in my files regularly—hero of the Revo, travels with your beautiful wife, on the American news shows, the
Gringo Sandinista
they called you. Then, that night here, at this gas station in Los Nubes. After that you disappear from my files for three years, when you turn up a lowly police
captain
. Admittedly, you had caught El Gordo Sangroso, so you were back to the hero stage.”

The rain had stopped and Matthew rolled the window down.

“I meant it when I spoke of your ghosts. I think that night here haunted…”

Ajax turned the engine over, gestured to the army trucks just doing the same.

“Let's follow them, in case the road's washed out.”

“Okay. They'll go as far as Pantasma. That's the Seventeenth Light Hunter Battalion.”

Ajax turned off the engine. The Seventeenth was the suicide soldier's unit. He grabbed a pack of Marlboros and dashed to catch the trucks.

“Oyen! Compañeros!” He held up the Marlboro pack and jogged after one of the trucks. “Any of you know Fortunado Gavilan? Fortunado Gavilan!”

One soldier leaned forward when he heard Ajax call the name of the boy Ajax could not save.

“Did you know him?”

The soldier leaned out the back of the truck; Ajax broke into a run to hand off the smokes to him.

“Did you know Fortunado Gavilan?”

The soldier stared at Ajax a moment, stared hard, and then shook his head, no. He crumpled the pack and lobbed it at Ajax's feet like a grenade. The trucks growled in low gear as they climbed the foothills into the mountains from which more than a few of them would not return.

Ajax studied the crushed smokes. He kicked them just in case they might go off. The road to Matagalpa was proving a strange one.

It would only get weirder.

*   *   *

They hadn't gone more than ten miles, Ajax flooring it like he might catch something, when they rounded another curve and had to swerve to avoid a white Toyota half sunk into a pothole the size of a moon crater. There was already a yoke of oxen trying to drag the broken vehicle out. Ajax slowed as he swerved but pushed the pedal to the metal as soon as he was clear of it. But watching the wreck in his rearview as they sped away, he noticed a very familiar head of carrot-colored hair appear, and a milky white arm signal the oxen to pull.

 

11

1.

Ajax didn't notice Amelia Peck until it was too late. He should have seen her right off because he'd stationed himself in the patio restaurant of Matagalpa's Hotel Ideal to do just that. He'd spent no little time thinking about her the night before as he tossed and turned in a bed in the casita Connelly kept near the center of town. What the hell would someone like her be doing so far from Managua, and without handlers? At least the visible kind, which would mean she either was trained to elude handlers, or, worse, had unseen handlers tracking her, which could mean agents from State Security who might recognize Ajax.

But she didn't seem the spook type, so he'd come to the one place someone traveling in the open would come to in Matagalpa—the Ideal's restaurant.

But he'd been distracted by the Hula Hoop Queen doing her morning workout on the patio.

He and Connelly had passed the one-ring Soviet circus tent set up in Matagalpa's main park yesterday as they'd cruised into town just before sunset. Indeed, the vision now before him, with her implausible white gold hair, and cobalt eyes, was prominently depicted on the socialist-realist mural advertising the show.
The Hula Hoop Queen!
He and Connelly had wondered what kind of main event that was. But Ajax could see now that every male over thirteen and every female under thirteen would line up to see this wonder. More than once.

He counted again the hula hoops spinning before him like so many hypnotists' pendants. Six on each arm, eight around her waist, and three around her neck, all on a figure clothed in a form-fitting second skin like a gymnast might wear. The hoops spun harmoniously, the left side clockwise, the right side counterclockwise. All of them kept in perfect, perpetual motion by the most subtle flick of her hips. The energy from that undulation flowed through her torso and limbs like the tremors of some benign earthquake, which, rather than topple buildings and kill people, turns down your bed linens, or picks the mangoes from your trees.

This was the kind of fraternal socialist exchange his country needed.

The Hula Hoop Queen slowly stripped the hoops off, one at a time, until there was just the one left, dizzyingly spinning around her waist. Her rhythm changed, morphed, and she moved that one hoop up and down her body like a snake slithering over her skin. Ajax thought what he had been watching was the kiddy matinee, but this was a belly dance for the grownups.

“The greatest show on earth.”

Amelia stood over him dressed in hiking boots, khaki pants, and a floral print T-shirt under the kind of many-pocketed safari vest photographers often wore to hold rolls of film. She held a wide-brimmed sun hat in her freckled hand, and had her mad tangle of orange hair tied down like the sails of a schooner. Her freckles seemed to climb up out of her shirt like tiny footprints, track along her white neck, across her ears, and disappear in her scalp.

Ajax thought she seemed dressed for gardening, or a lion hunt. He chose gardening. It made him smile.

She sat down opposite him, pointed at a waiter, then at Ajax's coffee.

“Café con leche, por favor.”

She gave the Hula Hoop Queen the once-over, and smiled into Ajax's face.

“Breakfast and a floor show, quite a hotel.”

“Circus is in town.”

“So I saw. You seemed engrossed.”

“Engrossed?”

“It means to be held in the grip of…”

“I know what it means. I espeaky Englishy berry goodee.”

She nodded to the doorway. “I was standing there watching you watch her. You seemed held in a grip of…”

The waiter set a menu in front of Amelia.

Ajax looked over at the Hula Hoop Queen, who let the ring fall to her feet, grasped it with the toes of her left foot, flipped it into the air, and caught it with her right index finger. Ajax applauded quietly and she rewarded him with a bow before sashaying off to her room, chamber, boudoir.

The waiter set Amelia's coffee down.

“To eat, señorita?”

“What do you recommend,
Martin
?”

Ajax snapped his head around. No, he realized, it was a lion hunt.

Amelia leaned over the table, whispered like a conspirator. “I met Matthew outside, he said his ‘driver Martin' was in here. I'd thought I'd play along.”

Fucking Connelly, Ajax thought. Stupid goddamn gringo. Ajax could've covered Captain Montoya's presence in Matagalpa with the thinnest of lies. But not the subterfuge of Martin Garcia. Ajax shot the waiter a look.

“Okay, I come back.” The waiter disappeared.

“Where is Connelly?” he asked her.

“He went to the gas station to see if he could get them to expedite repairs on my Toyota. I hit a pothole.…”

“I saw.”

“You saw? Thanks for the lift.”

“You seemed to be doing fine with the oxen. You asked me what I recommend. I recommend you get back to Managua unless you have valid, written permission to be outside the capital.”

“Permission? I don't need permission. There are no restrictions on my visa.”

“But there are. You can't go traipsing around our country dressed in your safari outfit like you're on the Serengeti. You're an agent for an enemy state.”

As he'd hoped, the color rose in her face, darkening it like a cloud over the sun.

“Our countries are not at war.”

“Really? We have been at war for years, and once Senator Teal makes his report and you vote another hundred million to the Contra, we will still be, only more so.”

The fire in her face cooled, her skin went from red to white. The freckles now looked more like rose petals on white marble, or maybe alabaster.

“When Senator Teal's mission is complete, he will make a report.…”

“Miss Peck, spare me your fact-finding mission bullshit. You're here to air the senator out, get him some experience in the field; maybe he'll bag a lion for the newspapers back home, that's why you dress like you're on safari isn't it?”

He'd hoped she'd take the bait. He needed to distract her from
his
mission in Matagalpa and why he was traveling incognito. But she didn't. Ajax watched her spoon hover between two bowls on the table. She dipped it into one and dropped two dollops of white granules into her coffee. Ajax waited as she stirred thoroughly and sipped it. The bitterness made her spit it back out, but she seemed aware of his gaze, so she tried to reverse the action, like a batter's checked swing. Some of it dribbled down her chin.

Ajax smiled. “Well, at least you didn't spit it on me.”

Amelia dabbed a napkin to her chin. “Or slap you.”