The Laughing Falcon (16 page)

He parked, unlocked his shed, and brought out a heavy sledgehammer. As he advanced toward the shacks, several of Camacho’s minions scurried from them like weasels. He recognized a couple of them, clerks in the municipal office, Camacho’s hirelings. Finding strength through anger, he
knocked all the tin structures down, taking out their wooden support beams with powerful swipes of the sledge.

Then he marched in the pouring rain down a muddy road into the squatters’ village, stopping when he got to Camacho’s truck. With one majestic swing, he pulverized the windshield. He waited for Camacho to come out of the house he was hiding in, his brother-in-law’s. He could see him at the window now, with his bandaged reconstructed nose. When he showed no signs of desiring confrontation, Slack smashed the headlights and went back home. Next time he’d use a gun.

As the rain pummelled his tiled roof, he stood hesitantly before his fridge, wanting a drink, fighting it. Though his anger hadn’t drained, he found his mind drifting elsewhere, being pulled up the Savegre.

A writer of insipid romances had more guts, that galled. He wondered how quickly she churned them out. His own muse, that unyielding bitch, had found him barren, impotent, had flounced from his life. Maybe just one last cold beer, then he’d quit. He examined a bottle of Imperial against the light. No dead mice.

Slack had brought the big raft for this morning’s excursion, the eight-seater, and he had almost a full complement, six wet customers. They’d dropped maybe a hundred feet over half a mile, a simple run for beginners, and were now in the coastal valley, the Río Naranjo curling languidly between pastures and fruit groves.

Thanks to the Fifth of May Commando, an influx of reporters had caused an uptick in the local economy, even the small hotels filling up, Mono Titi Tours getting a booking a day, media people mostly, jungle ingénues.

“Not much wildlife to point out here. They spray these fields with poisonous chemicals so you lose the birds, their
eggshells become thin as paper. Doesn’t affect the snakes, though. Fer-de-lances, corals, rattlers, we got ’em all. There’s one here they call the silent rattler, two-inch fangs, aggressive, it’ll chase you. And watch when you walk under trees, that’s where the eyelash viper lurks. Eighty per cent mortality rate.”

His customers nervously searched the overhanging boughs for this latest in Slack’s compendium of jungle menaces. He was feeling desperate – the world’s attention was focused on little Manuel Antonio, it would become a Cancún, an Acapulco, vast rows of time-shares, BMWs and Jaguars in the parking lots. The little national park would be trampled in the rush.

“We come out on Playa Rey, that’s the other side of the park, and you can swim there, but watch out for the sharks, they like to hang around the river outlets.”

The guy in front of him turned, frowning. “Man, you’ve got to be the most depressing guide in the world.” This fellow was a photographer, one of the newsmagazines, a complainer. “Isn’t anything right with this place?”

Yeah, you’re not right, I’m not right, nobody is. Slack was suffering his regular morning hangover and terminally sore back. He had been in a funk since his session with Ham Bakerfield, those digs about his lack of balls. He’d given them eight years. He’d been captured, beaten, tortured, he’d suffered electric shocks to his groin, and it was a special occasion when he could satisfy a woman, the desire there, the apparatus working inconsistently. Fifty thousand bucks they gave him, and a one-way ticket to Costa Rica.

So a couple of women were in peril, so what? The planet had greater crises. Greenhouse emissions, a birth rate climbing exponentially, the decimation of species. Soon there would be nothing. Just wall-to-wall pet food salesmen.

At Playa Rey, a couple of his clients went into the water, struggling out to the distant waves. A long straight ribbon of sand, big curls beyond that, but it wasn’t a popular beach,
usually deserted, a few surfers on weekends. Not far away, near the jungled cliffs of the national park, the Río Naranjo flowed gently into the sea past a mangrove swamp. The Savegre was bigger and wilder, a few miles down the coast.

Slack led his patrons under the shade of a palm, passed out cartons of juices, then tried to find a spot away from them to sit, but a woman joined him.

“Doesn’t seem much like Christmas around here,” she said. Middle-aged, heavily oiled with sunblock, a print journalist from Chicago. “So where’re you from, Slack?”

“Uzbekistan.”

“Seriously.”

“Philadelphia. I was in pet food.”

“How did you end up down here?”

A reporter, answers must be appropriately vague. “Just looking for something different.”

“So can I ask you a sort of man-in-the-street question? What do you think of this hostage crisis?”

Slack didn’t want to get into it. “I couldn’t care less.”

She looked startled. “You’re not concerned?”

“A fifty-per-cent reduction in the price of beans seems like a good idea.”

“You
approve
of what they’re doing?”

Slack had been only half-serious, but she didn’t twig to the sarcasm.

“Look, no one wants to see those women harmed, but I wish they’d taken Walker instead. That guy, the last four years, he voted for every anti-environment bill that came across his desk, and every pro-poverty bill as well. Too bad the kidnappers didn’t take him, they could keep him.”

“Do I sense that your politics are a little to the left?”

“Yeah, I’m a Bolshevik.” Maybe that wasn’t funny. She started writing notes.

He escaped to the ocean, hoping to catch a wave.

Dear Rocky,

    First of all, let me respond to your derisory comments about Harry Wilder. I am sorry he depresses you, but I find offensive your characterization of him as an anxiety-ridden pantywaist who can’t find his own pecker. Is it not obvious that he is an archetype for today, a hero suited to this age of angst? The world cries out for losers to love.

But the peddler of Bow Wow Chow is not in fear of physical danger, oddly that’s not on his inventory of potholes to avoid along life’s haphazard journey. No, Rocky, what carps at him is an obsessive dread of failure, of flubbing, screwing up, events going tragically wrong. The fuckup blows another operation, get the body bags ready, Dr. Zork succeeds in his plan to destroy the world.

Your number two gripe: Where have I hidden the bodies, where’s the blood? Your advice that I begin the first chapter by shooting Harry Wilder is under advisement, but I intend to give him a period of grace.

You whine that my draft chapters lack even the prospect of, as you basely put it, nooky. “A hot box lunch was draping herself all over his kayak, and the reader doesn’t even get any heavy breathing out of this schnorrer.” Sorry, Rock, the guy was practically neutered during the war against the evil empire, remember?

The real bitch is that I still can’t come up with an opening line, that perfect smooth takeoff still lurking somewhere in the blank pages of my mind. (I tried this:
Hardly a day passed when Harry Wilder did not give thanks that his surname wasn’t Dick.)
Obsessive, you say? I suffer an anal-retentive need to do something right for a change? Not right, Rocky, perfect, totally unfucked-up. I fear writing a pulp thriller can never satisfy that need.

Okay, maybe I
am
trying to sabotage this project. Frankly, it sucks air.

I am a
poet!

Yours,

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Slack fought his way to the bar at Billy Balboa’s, the place was crowded, it had been discovered by Operación Libertad — many of its agents were here, some press, too. At one of the tables a reporter was interviewing a middle-aged couple who looked out of place, not wearing the latest Tilley fashions, the guy thin with callused workman’s hands, the woman matronly, both looking strained and exhausted.

Billy poured Slack a double Centenario and lifted his own glass.
“Pura vida, maje,”
he said.

“Who are those two people?”

Billy looked at his reservation list. “These people are called Schneiders.”

The Schneiders from Saskatchewan, the parents of the romance writer. A broken marriage, he’d heard, but they were guileless good-hearted prairie folk.

Now the woman started weeping. Slack stared hard into his glass, then tilted it back.

By ten o’clock most of the customers had departed, and Slack was alone at the bar, clutching it for support. Others swam in and out of the haze, Billy cashing out, the Schneiders finally getting to their feet. Slack couldn’t look at them, he tried to drown them in his rum, make them disappear.

He waited until their interviewer led them out before heading to the men’s facility. He was doing all right, able to walk, but then he stalled, because there was motion in front of him, three men approaching, or maybe it was four, all with determined expressions.

He knew a couple of these faces. One was a cop – with the OIJota, the judicial police — and this starched-looking android, where had he seen him before? Theodore, Bakerfield’s gofer.

“Señor Cardinal,” said the OIJota, “you are under arrest.”

He tried to charge past and was tackled. He wasn’t much of a match in his condition, and after about four minutes of huffing and swearing they had him down, pinned to the floor.

He wasn’t conscious of much after that except being dragged into a vehicle, thrown onto a cot in the roach-infested jail, then roused from sleep, Ham Bakerfield and some of his lackeys staring down at him.

“No point trying to deal with him now. Take him home.”

Slack woke to African drums pounding in his head. Then he noticed the smell, a mix of stale booze and rum farts, his own putrid armpits, and — however unlikely – cigar fumes. He was covered with bites. He was lying on his kitchen floor. Because he was near the stairs, he deduced that at some point he’d made a failed effort to get up to the bedroom.

The cigar smoke was coming from the hammock, where Ham Bakerfield was stretched out.

“Wish I had a camera, former double agent depicted here as a lump of shit. You got a wheelbarrow or a forklift so we can get you to the shower?”

Slack struggled to his feet, followed Ham down the stairs to the outdoor shower, holding his back, he must have strained it in the fight.

“What was that all about, that mugging?”

“A story from the
Chicago Tribune
went over the wires, offering, quote, an unusual perspective from a local tour operator. It’s got your picture and everything.” Ham read from a printout: “ ‘Cardinal, a self-styled Bolshevik, claimed he supports the cause of the kidnappers.’ We had to take you in for questioning as a possible accessory.”

“Yeah, right, I’m colluding with the enemy. Christ, I was just joking with her.”

Ham grunted. “Nobody got the joke, including the senator. He thinks you staged it.”

“I staged
it?”

“It’s a damn good cover. I straightened him out.”

Slack couldn’t even guess what he was talking about. “Put out that cigar, it’s making me sick.”

He peeled off his clothes and stood under the spout, feeling the cold shock of his piped mountain water. Ham flipped him a bar of soap. “Take a shampoo and a shave, too. I want you looking vaguely human when you meet with Walker. He said to me, ‘Bring me that soldier, he has the right stuff.’ He wants to make sure you can lay off the gargle, though, you were fricasseed when he last saw you. You look like a dartboard, pal.”

The bugs liked the taste of Slack, his blood sweet with alcohol. Mosquitoes,
purrujas
, mites, spiders, they must have all dined on him last night. A towel wrapped around his midriff, he went to the propane refrigerator for a cold straightener. But the beer compartment was empty.

“It’s down the sink, Slack.”

Slack snarled at him. “I thought you stopped running my life.”

“You don’t have a fucking life. Get one.” Ham softened his voice, opted for a conciliatory approach. “You’ve got to start believing in yourself again, Slack. You can do this, you’ve got the training, you’ve got the local knowledge, and suddenly you’ve got the perfect cover. I only admit this to myself in the privacy of my bathroom, but you’re not as dumb as people think. So you can get straight and try to be a hero or you can just fucking decay. There’s money, Slack. The senator’s friends have put together a private fund. A hundred grand for trying, triple that if you get her back into the loving arms of her husband.”

Slack was tempted. Three hundred large — if he got lucky — could buy a little chunk of peace, away from the squatters, a new start. Even the hundred was good, the consolation prize if he screwed up. “Employed or on contract?”

“A contract, but we do everything as a team, you’re not going off on one of your side trips to outer space …” Ham reined himself in. “Sure, any way you want it.”

Slack stared out the window at the tin roofs across the road. A vehicle was waiting, the Nissan, Theodore at the wheel. He couldn’t shake the memory of the sad faces of those two down-home folks from Saskatchewan, Margaret Schneider’s mom and dad. He kept seeing the strained white knuckles, the tears. Suddenly he hated himself, his cowardice, his obsessive fear of failure.

“All right, I’m in.”

“How long’s it going to take you to get into some kind of shape?”

“I’ve been running.” Except maybe the last three mornings. But he did have his wind. There was a pot-belly that had never been there before, it didn’t seem permanent. In what kind of shape was his head?

“But you give up the sauce. As of now. You see this guy over here?”

Leaning against a wall, a dark-skinned man in khaki shorts, short but wiry, legs like thick cables. Where had he come from? Had he been here all along? Yeah, he was a shadow, one of those guys who click in and out of view. Joe Borbón was his name, a Cuban from Miami, mid-thirties. He didn’t offer to shake hands, just sat there looking Slack over, as if assessing him for the killing points.

“Joe here’s a black belt, fourth dan. You aren’t going anywhere near the suds unless you kill him first. Or he kills you.”