Night of the Jaguar (32 page)

“Then let me arrest him and your problem is solved.”

Horacio smiled, but Ajax could see there was no mirth in his eyes.

“No, it is not. It will be infinitely worse. We—you and I and Gioconda—are among the civilized; we want peace and prosperity through coexistence and we have our counterparts in America. We need to make peace with them, through them. If you arrest Malhora, if one more goddamned person knows about that goddamned airstrip, it will explode! If word of this gets out, the civilized in both countries will be defeated, utterly, and the barbarians will get their war. Do you know what that will mean?”

Ajax got that falling feeling again. “Of course I know.” He looked at Gio. “Better than most.” He had to throw that line in, had to push back on something, someone.

Gio ignored the barb. She stood in front of Ajax. Close to him. Her hands behind her back. “Then what will you do?”

“He murdered Enrique Cuadra. Isn't that enough to keep him off the Directorate?”

“No.” Horacio moved subtly so that he and Gio were now side by side facing Ajax. “He no more killed Cuadra on his own than he dug the airstrip with his own hands. He's close to the Directorate, but there is still a chance to have someone else take his place. Malhora's masters are a minority; they are reeling from the near disaster of Cuadra's death revealing the cocaine plot. Meaning they are frightened that instead of botching this case, you have uncovered the truth. You may have wanted to move away from politics, but you are now the fulcrum on which all is balanced. How it tips is up to you.”

Ajax smiled; now the big picture was getting clearer. “I see. So Horacio de la Vega will finally mount the steps of destiny to the National Directorate. Or maybe Gio is to be the first woman to join the boys' club.”

Gio shook her head, it seemed to Ajax, with genuine regret.

“No, Ajax, not Gio. Gio is not eligible. You have to be a comandante guerrillero to be nominated for the post.”

“And you are one, Horacio.”

“And so are you.”

“Is that what this is? You've come to bribe me? Let Malhora go and you'll nominate me for the Directorate?”

Gio shook her head, but Ajax could not tell if it was in disgust or defeat. “I would move to Washington and become a Republican blow-job queen before
that
would ever happen.”

So it was in disgust. “You don't think I'd make a good comandante?”

“No. I mean before I would
bribe
you. You will do what is right, what is necessary because you have to do it! We will not offer you anything. We are not asking for your kind consideration or indulgence. You will do it, Ajax, because it is the right thing to do, because we have come here to tell you what to do!”

“Ajax.” Horacio slid his body between them. “We need to replace Joaquin with someone popular with the masses. Someone with credibility from the old days. And you
are
Spooky, el Terrorifico. The Prince of Peace. And your name
has
come up. Not everyone is…”

“Is?”

“Apprised of your … unorthodoxies. You're a long shot, Ajax, but I am not here to bribe or pander to you.”

“So Malhora goes free? That piece of rotten shit will just walk, or get promoted?”

“It is not about Malhora. It's not about you. It's not about Enrique Cuadra. It's about more war or less war. And you have to decide right now. You, right this moment.”

Ajax knew he had lost. The knot in his stomach told him that. Every opposing idea he could not reconcile was tied there. How had it come to this?

“How has it come to this, Horacio? Is this what we fought for? If you kill someone, you go down for taking that life. We aren't supposed to measure lives for their value. Listen to yourselves: Knight takes Rook, Bishop takes Queen, Queen takes King.”

“Yes. And you want to ask about the Pawns.”

“I didn't fight all those years just to be a pawn, anyone's pawn in some Cold War chess game.”

“Then what did you fight for Ajax?”

“Flu shots and flush toilets.” He picked up the handcuffs. “Equality before the law.”

Gio sat down again. “Well, what you got was superpower Cold War chess games. You still haven't said what you're going to do.”

Ajax knew what he was going to do. Knew the moment these two had come in.

Esposos
.

He turned his gaze away from the tawdry scene in Malhora's office and out the big picture window. He looked at the piss-poor, crazy ass city filled with a million pawns and knew he would not sacrifice a one of them—not to take a bishop, a queen, or even a king. But he also knew he could not win by playing defense. He could only delay the inevitable—eventually the other side would take the pawns first.

He strode across the room and threw open the door. The outer office was empty.

As he knew it would be.

He reached into his pocket and clicked off Connelly's tape recorder.

 

17

1.

Ajax drove the pickup to Matthew's house in Barrio Bolonia. There was a light on, but he left the keys under the seat and decided to walk home. He headed south until he passed the Ministry of Culture and reached the Pista de la Resistencia which he could follow home to barrio Bello Horizonte. He had passed the Plaza 19 de Julio when the smell of food cooking stirred his belly to life. He stopped at the China Palace for a plate of chop suey and mystery meat. As he wolfed down what tasted more like chop suet, he tried to recall the last time he'd eaten. It must've been with Krill, whom he was now certain he also hadn't managed to get rid of. When was that? It seemed ages ago now. He knew that during combat time seemed to slow down because the mind sped up, as in a movie. To create the illusion of slow motion you increased the camera speed. But now time seemed to be coming to an end. The camera of his mind was not speeding up nor slowing down. It was running out of film.

He trudged homeward, when his legs, following a body memory, turned right and stopped in front of a beer joint, Jardín Central. A beer. A cold beer.
Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme just the one
.

“You're back.” He said it out loud like he'd bumped into someone.

A cold beer. The local brew, called Victoria, was made without hops, which Nicaragua did not grow and could not import because of the American embargo. It had a shelf life of only three days before it turned to piss. Beer without hops. Bricks without straw. Victoria.

By the time he stood at his own front door the sun was going down. There were newspapers strewn in front of it, and he realized he could calculate time that way. He got three newspapers a day, so he counted them. Eighteen newspapers. He'd been gone six days, not five. He scooped them up and locked the door behind him.

He went to his office, sat in his chair, and pulled the dead drawer open. In it was the photo of him from July 20, 1979, Gio's small makeup bag, the suicide soldier's Makarov, and the bottle of Flor de Caña Extra Seco. The Needle was still strapped to his calf. He sat staring into the dead drawer until all the light crept away and night skulked in.

2.

Taking a drink was like lighting a homemade rocket. There was, Ajax thought as he lay on his back in his tiny garden looking up at the stars, that moment of anticipation when the hand holding the match hovered near the fuse. Will it go off in your face? Or burn nice and smooth before it explodes into the sky? There was no way to know but to touch flame to fuse, step back, and await the wonder, the release of detonation. When he'd finally cracked the seal on the bottle of rum, it was like pointing a rocket at the sky. Pouring himself three fingers of the liquid sulfur was like striking the match. Then tossing all of it into his mouth and holding it there for a moment was like that very first spark on the fuse. Holding it there just long enough for the taste buds to communicate to his stomach, to his body, to his entire being: Stand by for lift-off!

Ten, nine, eight … Then—and this had always been his favorite part—the slow burn of the fuse as the rum ran slowly, dreamily, languorously down his esophagus to his belly. Three, two one …

BANG!

Of course, it was not so much an explosion as an implosion. And he did not so much watch the rocket go as ride it. With the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other, Captain Ajax Montoya pushed himself off the damp earth.

“We have lift-off!”

He stumbled over the low table on which he had assembled the contents of the dead drawer and sent them and himself tumbling back to earth.

“Houston, second stage not complete.”

He sorted the items he'd knocked off the table into a little pile of his heart's detritus. He had added Horacio's poetry manuscript, his thesaurus, the Python, and The Needle, its blade cleaned and oiled since its last use.

“Too much ballast, Houston.”

“Copy that, Captain Montoya, lighten your load.”

He tore Horacio's manuscript,
Poems from the Volcano
, apart, piled the pages into a vague cone shape, and soaked them with rum. Ripped a few pages out of the thesaurus.

“Ballast, weight, counterbalance…”

And added them to the pyre. Next he picked up the photo, looked at it one last time, and smashed his fist into it. He was drunk enough not to feel the glass shards go into his knuckles, but not so drunk he didn't notice the blood trickle down his fingers. He watched a few drops make their slow progress until one slid off his fingernail onto the photo, obliterating his face there.

“Bonfire, flare, beacon…”

He ripped the photo from the frame, flicked his Zippo to life, and set it alight. When the flames had consumed half the picture he dropped it onto the manuscript pages. They burst into flame so quickly that he had to roll away. He poured himself three more fingers of rocket fuel and knocked it back. Then he fed a little more onto the fire.

“Second stage is complete!”

He fumbled for the small makeup bag, spilled the four items onto the ground, then fed the bag into the fire. He held the hairbrush over the flames until the acrid smell of burning hair roused his dulled nostrils. Then he fed the brush to the flames. The nail file he drove into the ground like a spike, using the butt of the Python to hammer it into oblivion. The lipstick tube, he rolled open. He ripped another page from the thesaurus and smeared on it in his bloody hand.
Judas Cain.
He held the page over the fire, and as it caught, some of the lipstick melted and rolled down the paper like the blood down his fingers.

“Now the secret ingredient.”

He lifted the petite, cut-glass perfume bottle, tore the top off as he had done the rum bottle, and dribbled what was left into the fire. The alcohol in it flared and singed the hair on his hand.

“A la gran puta! Gotta have the last word, don't you, bitch!”

He hurled the vial over the back wall and heard it shatter in the darkness. Ajax stirred the fire to keep the manuscript pages burning. Then he stared at the flames with the unfocused countenance of the drunkard. His mind was not blank so much as adrift, like a satellite out of orbit, drawn into the void of space. He waited—as the flames got smaller, as the fire died—for something, anything to come into his mind. Nothing did. That was when he noticed he had the Python in his hand. He rolled the cylinder back and forth across his palm.

Back.

And forth.

Then he stopped. He held the weapon in both hands. Looking at it. The last of the flames glinting off the chrome. He felt he was trying to remember something.

And then he did.

He flicked open the pistol—all six cylinders held a bullet.

“Eighty-eight. That's the lucky number.”

He spun the cylinder as he had eighty-seven times before.

“Loaded dice. Yeah.”

Ajax screwed his eyes shut and began to rock, back and forth. He gripped the Python in his left hand and cupped his right on the pistol butt, to steady it. His face twisted into a grimace, he grunted aloud as if in pain, and rocked, rocked back and forth. He touched the Python's barrel just beneath his chin. He rocked and grunted as he tilted it from one angle to another, tracing in his mind's eye the path of the bullet. Ninety degrees was too vertical: he saw himself alive but chinless. Forty-five degrees was too low, and he conjured an image of a quadriplegic with a diaper full of shit. About sixty-five degrees should send it through the roof of the mouth and into the brain. And all the time he rocked and grunted and grimaced.

He squatted on his haunches. “Come on! You goddamned chicken-shit little puto! Okay, okay. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme just one more drink.”

He held the Python under his chin with one hand and poured with the other until his cup overflowed. He swallowed most of it and threw the rest into the dying fire, which flared into flame.

And in the fleeting illumination he saw eyes.

The boy with the long eyelashes crouched in the corner of his garden, watching him.

“You!”

The ghost, he saw, squatted with his hands cupped under his chin. It took Ajax a moment to realize he was posed just as Ajax was, his index finger pointed like the pistol barrel. Ajax lowered the pistol from his chin, and the ghost did the same. Ajax rolled from a squat to his knees, and the ghost did, too, like a child imitating an adult.

“Is this what you wanted? By my own hand? Is that it?”

Suddenly Ajax could see himself as the ghost must have. A wretch. A wreck, squatting upon the ground. Bestial. A gun to his head.

“Then come with me.”

Ajax fired into the boy, and fired again and again as if he could kill him again. Then he leapt to his feet and lobbed the almost empty bottle at the ghost-boy and kept firing. Somewhere in the darkness he heard a crash, wood splintering. He thought he heard his name shouted.

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”