The Laughing Falcon (19 page)

Her boyfriend, Perezoso, had enlisted in Madrigal’s
movimiento
by a different route. While canvassing as a Jehovah’s Witness, he had been invited into his house, where Quetzal was staying. “For him and me, was love at first sight.” Abandoning religion, blinded by his passion for Quetzal, Perezoso joined the revolution. His parents were middle class, but Quetzal was an orphan raised by the church.

In the near darkness, Maggie worked her way through the campsite to fetch Glo to dinner. Halcón was in his tent — she could hear his short-wave, the news in Spanish, too muffled to be made out. She had a vision of her family gathered at the farm around the radio, listening for hopeful news. If only she could get word to them …

Below, illumined under the stars at the edge of the stream, she glimpsed a bare rising leg, Glo’s contorted torso. Maggie descended from the ledge.

“Haven’t you been getting enough exercise?”

Glo carried on, twisting, bending. “You’ll never have a problem, you’re so naturally wiry. This is where the muscles start to waste.” As her hand caressed her inner thigh it was caught in the beam of a flashlight aimed from the ledge above. Maggie heard a thick-throated gasp.

“Shut that off!” Glo shouted.

The flashlight continued to play on Glo’s legs, and she picked up a stone and sent it spinning at the beam. The flashlight fell; a shout of pain:
“Puta!” –
the high-pitched voice of Zorro. And now he was scrambling down toward them.

In the glow of the fallen flashlight, Maggie made out his unmasked face: narrow-jawed, his moustache so thin it seemed stencilled on. He shoved his way past Maggie and made a futile grab for Glo’s shirt. She sidestepped him, swung her fist, and struck him in the face. He stumbled backward and fell into the creek.

Now others were arriving: more flashlights, exclamations. Glo was yelling at the fallen Zorro: “You touch me again I’ll knock your teeth out, you Tico trash, you peeping Tom!”

“Ya basta!”
Halcón shouted, and the gabble around them ceased. He was the only one wearing a kerchief — even at night he rarely removed it. He spoke to Glo, “What happened?”

“That little toad tried to attack me.”

“Zorro,
qué pasó?”

Zorro seemed dazed, still sitting in the water as he offered his version – Maggie gathered he was explaining he had been assigned to guard her, and was struck by a stone for doing his duty.
“No la molesté!”
he cried.

Halcón turned to Maggie. “What is the truth?”

She said bluntly,
“Molesté, si
. That’s exactly what he tried to do to her.”

Buho and Coyote helped Zorro from the water, and in the crossing light beams, Maggie could make them out: Buho with a long, pitted face, protruding upper teeth; Coyote with the tired, lined expression of a man constantly burdened. Also nearby was Tayra; her features seemed more American aboriginal than African: sharp nose, high cheekbones. She was holding a frying pan in one hand, a soapy cloth in the other. Gordo, also standing by, had the nondescript look of an overweight clerk.

Halcón insisted on hearing the details. When Maggie told him how Zorro had trained a light on Glo during an innocent but intimate moment, Tayra glared at Zorro and said something sharp. When he was brought dripping into their circle, Tayra hefted the frying pan. He cursed and stalked away.

Halcón turned to Maggie and simply nodded, as if to say that the matter had been satisfactorily concluded: the offender’s spouse would mete out appropriate punishment. His dark eyes remained on her, and she felt her pulse quicken; those eyes were magnetic. He disappeared into the gloom, and Maggie sat and tucked into her
pinto
and allowed her thoughts to tempt her into the realm of the forbidden.

A whisper in her ear disturbed her from her sleep: “Go in freedom, Maggie, you have won my heart.”
But the image was a fleeting one. Where was Jacques when Fiona needed him?
He was the only man who knew the Savegre …

After dinner, Halcón — as if to make up for Zorro’s rudeness — personally delivered a stewing pot filled with warm water, along with a bar of soap and two towels.

“Aren’t you such a gentleman,” Glo said, still snide and imperious. “Now, how about building us a fire so we can dry some of these wet things.”

“A small fire,” Halcón said. His acquiescence surprised Maggie: fires were forbidden under clear skies; they could be seen from the air.

“And I need a tampon, okay?”

This reference to women’s needs seemed to fluster Halcón. He hesitated, put out his cigarette, and pocketed the butt: even such minor items of litter were packed out with the garbage. Quetzal soon came by with a tampon for Glo, and by then Maggie could hear machetes hacking at branches for kindling.

After their sponge bath, Maggie and Glo sat near their tents, wrapped in their sleeping bags. A few metres away, a bonfire crackled and clothing had been spread to dry. The men huddled there, weary, grimy, each with a week’s growth of whiskers. Halcón was by the fire, too, his hands gesturing relentlessly as he talked to his compatriots. Buho was strumming his guitar and humming sad Latin tunes. Near him Quetzal and Perezoso cuddled. Glo had taken to calling them Romeo and Juliet.

The ambience was eerily romantic, calming, further dissuading Maggie from the harrowing notion of escape — her present peril seemed far less frightening than the dark offerings of the jungle. But danger could come from anywhere: a botched rescue attempt, a gun battle, a stray bullet from an itchy-fingered gunslinger on a SWAT squad. Or Glo might engineer a dangerous escapade that could result in them being injured, even killed.

Glo swatted a mosquito. “I’m going in. Buenas nachos.”

Left alone, Maggie watched a blur of moths dancing near the flames, listened to the guitar and the gurgle of the creek — and to a haunting repeated sound: a night bird or insect. “Plink,” came the one-note liquid tune, “plink, plink.” She was reminded of water dripping on tin.

She felt regret that she was without tools to write. But how could she compose romantic escapism when life at its rawest was in her face? And what a sad tale her novel seemed in comparison to this harrowing adventure. Fiona Wardell was little more than a blur for her now. Maggie could not decide if her heroine, faced with this plight, would allow herself to be as co-opted as her creator – or would she be tough and spunky like
Maggie’s real-life companion? Gloria-May constantly amazed her: the lack of fear, the tartness. An interesting past, the loose fast life of Las Vegas, had emboldened her.

Lost in contemplation, she was only dimly aware of the fire flickering out, the guerrillas gathering their packs, retreating to their tents. After Buho departed with his guitar, there came just the sounds of night crickets, and that mysterious plink, plink. Mesmerized by the night, she failed to notice Halcón standing next to her, and she started when he spoke.

“I saw you were alone.”

“I was thinking about a book I’m writing. Please sit down.” Maggie had long waited for this chance to know him better. She had a sense of him as driven by forces he might not understand — but nevertheless urbane, even charming when he put his mind to it.

He continued to hover above her. “And what kind of book is this?”

“It is about love and adventure in Costa Rica.”

“Will you tell the truth of our country? How we are all peons to the pirates of Wall Street. Or am I the bad guy?” His voice had lost much of its flatness, was more mellifluous.

“Maybe not.”

“Or a fool. A romantic fool — do you have room for this person in your fiction?”

“If he is also a handsome hero.” As blatant as that sounded, she had decided to play to his ego.

He finally sat, pulling out a cigarette. They were alone but for Perezoso strolling about the sphere on night watch.

By the light of the match he struck, she could see his dark Spanish eyes above his bandit’s mask; they seemed to dance to the rhythm of the flame. Watching him insert and light the cigarette through the hole of his kerchief, she could not suppress a smile. “Tell me about this romantic fool,” she said.

He took a deep pull on the cigarette. “I can tell you a story; it might sell many books. A life outside the law in a struggle
always for justice for my country. Romance, yes, I have known that, and much adventure, too.”

My contry
. The way he said that, the way his hands darted as he talked … A powerful sense of déjà vu overcame her. She recalled words spoken only a week ago:
Maybe you will find room in your book for a lonely history professor
. Her mouth formed a wide oval of shock, and for a few moments she was unable to speak.

“Is the story also about a thief?”

Her words were met with silence.

Anger welled in Maggie, despite her consternation. She wanted to slap his face, and could barely stop herself from doing so. She sputtered: “You … you two-faced lying
snake!”

“Qué?
Snake? I do not understand.”

“This is too
bizarre
. You …
you puta!”
She didn’t know what the word meant, but it was obviously a Tico curse. She tried to settle herself, make reason of this. The pickpocket professor, Pablo Esquivel, had metamorphosed as captain of the Comando Cinco de Mayo.

Now she remembered his mimicry of the Laughing Falcon at the restaurant — he had called this bird, this
halcón
, the masked bandit of the skies. She had missed that clue and been treated to the full
guaco
once again.

She fought to compose herself and spoke resentfully. “I guess you thought I had come straight from the cornfields. You left me nearly broke. I was mortified when you abandoned me in that restaurant with all the people staring.”

He pulled off his blue kerchief. In the glow of cigarette and distant dying embers, she could make out his finely sculpted face, his wide handsome moustache, his easy Latin smile. “We needed your donation for a last-minute budget crisis. The caretaker at Outward Bound demanded more than our agreement called for.”

Maggie took several deep breaths to calm herself, and tried making sense of why a man she had banished to daydreams
and fiction had returned to haunt her reality. If she wrote this in a book, no reader would believe it. It was too far-fetched, too
coincidental
.

“Maybe the plot goes like this. The villain sees a pretty señorita walk from her hotel and follows her to the university.”

A pretty señorita: still the thieving gigolo, still utterly attractive despite the recent cropping of his collar-length hair. This pseudo-professor with all his savoir faire and cool audacity was nothing more than a common rogue, a thief, and a kidnapper. Did he have credentials as a revolutionary or was he posturing at that as well? She spoke sharply: “And why would you be hanging around my hotel? You wanted to check me out – you knew I had signed on for the lodge.” Had he sloughed off her denial of being rich and famous? Had he thought a large ransom could be earned?

“This is a clever thought, but I think it belongs in the world of detective fiction.”

His evasiveness persuaded Maggie not to pursue the matter, but she was confounded — how would he have known she was staying at the Pension Paraíso?

“Let me tell you something, Maggie. It is not easy to speak of this. Perhaps you will think it is, how do you say, a line, a come-on, but you have won a place in my heart. You are, to me, a woman not merely of outer beauty but of great inner beauty, not like your companion, with all her peevish vanity. You are also a woman of courage,
valiente
. So compassionate in offering yourself in place of another. That I will never forget, when you said, ‘Take me instead.’ And it is my hope that maybe one day I will bring you to understand me, and to forgive me, and to know that this difficult time is a means to a great humanitarian end.”

During this speech, his voice, no longer disguised, regained its full range of tone. Though still stunned, perplexed by his return engagement in her life, her wrath had much abated. She would be better able to forgive his crimes if she could believe
he had acted with benign motives. Then came an inner voice of warning: He is a master of the glib phrase, he is merely seeking to disarm you, to make sure you cooperate.

“A
puta
, by the way, is a prostitute. The phrase you hear,
‘hijueputa,’
was corrupted by common use from
‘hijo de puta,’
son of a whore. I think that is what you meant to call me.”

She was still trying to settle her mind, bring herself back to the harsh reality of her plight. What was the soundest course of action here? She decided she must hold to her plan to befriend and disarm him.

Perezoso, the night guard, hearing their low conversation, came to investigate. Halcón sent him retreating with a few sharp words.

“They have to understand, I am their captain – that was the arrangement. One must be firm with these people; they are amateurs, lacking experience in the hard life of a revolutionary”

“But you will lead them to the promised land.”

“Sí Dios quiere
. But you must not think that we seek personal profit. It is not a crime that we commit — that is an empty word. Ours is a political act. The true criminals, the true terrorists, are those who sit at the tables of power, and the warmonger Senator Walker wants to sit at the head.”

“So why didn’t you take
him?”

“Who would want him back?” That seemed flip, unresponsive.

“The real reason is that you think women are easier to control.”

“I wish I had found that so.”

“This is how you make a political statement, kidnapping women.” Maggie remained skeptical. “You don’t hope to get rich from it?”

“Only the poor will be rewarded.”

“With what? How much money are you demanding?”

“Fifteen million.”

Maggie was staggered by the sum. “That’s impossible.”

“Walker has wealthy friends.”

“You picked the worst possible target. He’ll never negotiate.”

Halcón shrugged. “If we win freedom for Benito Madrigal, that may be profit enough.”