Blood of Paradise (2 page)

“It's okay. I'll just grab some lunch and a cold one.” She shot him another mischievous smile. “Let you deal with the captains of industry.”

It's a wrong number, he wanted to say, but she was already ambling off. Jude stared at her back, exposed by her halter and crisscrossed with its misfit tan lines, and doubted he'd ever hated his cell phone more—at which point the ringer chirped again, the same numerals reappeared. He picked up simply to cut short the bother:
“¿Quién es?”

It took a second for the voice on the other end to emerge from the static. “Hello? Yeah. Hello, Jude? … My name's Bill. I was a friend of your dad's.”

Ten years collapsed at the sound of the voice. And yet, in a way, Jude had been expecting this call. There were rumors.

The voice said: “Bill Malvasio. Not sure you remember me.”

“Of course I remember.”

“Kinda outta the blue, I realize.”

“No. I mean, yeah, but it's not that. I was just …” His voice trailed away. The static of the phone connection swelled then ebbed, a sound like sandpaper against skin. “I was just talking to somebody else. The shift, from that to this. To you, I mean. I dunno. Just sudden.”

Jude had spent a good part of his boyhood watching his dad and Bill Malvasio head off together—cop weddings, cop funerals, drinking parties, poker marathons, or just another shift in the Eighteenth District. To call them best friends missed the thing by half. Malvasio was like family, but not the kind the women wanted around—more like a black sheep uncle, the fun uncle, the one with the wily mean streak. Jude hated admitting it, but he'd competed most of his life against Wild Bill, vying for his father's respect. And despised not Malvasio but himself for that.

“Listen, Jude. I realize this is a little late but, about your dad's passing, I'm sorry. Ray was still young.”

Jude wrestled with a number of things to say, none of them particularly astute. His dad had drowned on Rend Lake—accident or suicide, no one knew for sure. A bad end to a lot of bad business.

“Proud man, your father. None of us were what they made us out to be. Certainly not Ray. I've got some stories in that regard, if you'd like to hear them.”

Jude sat up in the hammock finally. Planting his feet in the rocky sand, he checked the incoming number again. Sure enough, Malvasio was in-country. “Run that by me again.”

“We could get together. I mean, if you're up for it.”

“When do you mean?”

“Now, you want.”

Jude felt stunned by the offer, but refusing was out of the question. Hear a few stories about my dad? Sure. Add a few more collectibles to the museum of bullshit. But it wasn't just that. There were about a thousand questions he wanted to ask, starting with: “If you don't mind my asking, how'd you get my cell number?”

“I've got friends down here,” Malvasio said. “If I didn't, I couldn't survive.”

Jude was still sitting there, holding his phone, when Eileen walked back, a plate of chicken with
pupusas
and
curtido de repollo
in one hand, two cold beers in the other.

“Get whatever it was sorted out?” She sat down in the same spot as before, handing him one of the beers. Wiggling her hips to settle in, she set her plate in her lap and picked up a chicken thigh.

“I have to go,” he told her.

Almost imperceptibly, her face fell. Then, recovering: “Anything wrong?”

“No, no. Just … an old family friend.” Not knowing what to do with the beer, he just sat there, holding it like he was trying to figure it out. “He's over on the Costa del Sol. Wants to get together.” It seemed unwise to say more.

“He's down here on vacation?”

She bit into the greasy crackling skin of the chicken. He caught himself staring at her mouth.

“Not exactly,” he said.

2

Every kid grows up knowing there's a line between the life he wants and the life he gets. Jude walked that line as long as he could, then crossed over for good one August afternoon before his senior year in high school.

He was sitting on his bed in the basement, icing an ankle he'd torn up during tackling drills the day before, when he heard a sudden clamor of men and cars just outside. The front door had a buzzer, not a bell, and someone jabbed the button hard three times. Jude listened as his mother droned “I'll get it” and clopped in her flats down the wood-floored hall. Then he heard her voice turn shrill and afraid as she argued with a man in the doorway.

It was just the two of them in the house. His sister, Colleen, had trundled off to her flute lesson. His dad had reported for duty.

He rose from the bed, tested his ankle, and hobbled upstairs. Turning the corner at the top, he came up behind his mother and found a half dozen FBI agents in their blue raid jackets clustered on the sunlit porch, with backup from Chicago PD. The lead agent loomed in the doorway, so eerily tall he had to stoop to make eye contact. The eyes were a milky green.

Holding out an envelope, he said, “We didn't come here to talk it over, Mrs. McManus. Here's your copy of the warrant. Now step aside, please.”

They planted Jude and his mother in the living room and turned on the TV. There was breaking news, reported by a chesty moonfaced Asian woman in a bright red summer suit who'd chosen the Cabrini Green projects for her backdrop. Behind her, the skels were mobbing tall, draped in bling and pimped out in skullies or hats kicked right, Gangster Disciples, some of them throwing signs, stacking the Cobra Stones in contempt, the whole hand business, others crowing out, “All in one,” or just bellowing names—Raymont, Stocker, Girl Dog, D.T.—like everybody was missing the show.

Jude noticed how the Asian newscaster pursed her lipsticked mouth around her vowels and cagily moved her microphone first to expose, then conceal, her cleavage. Looking back on it now, all these years later, he realized he'd focused on such things as a way to divert his attention from what she was saying. Regardless, whenever he dredged up the scene from memory, that's how he pictured it: sitting there next to his tight-lipped mother in the muggy August heat, watching as the plump Asian woman in her brassy red suit unmasked Sergeant Ray McManus as a rogue cop, complete with footage of him taken off in handcuffs from the Eighteenth District station house.

Jude's dad wasn't the only one named. His two best friends on the force, Bill Malvasio and Phil Strock, faced the same charges: jacking drug dealers, basically. Jude remembered thinking at the time (and on and off in the years since) that thousands if not millions in the greater Chicago area would shrug off such behavior as proof of a go-getter attitude, not guilt. And the accused seemed to know that only too well. According to the reports, they'd nicknamed themselves the Laugh Masters, mimicking rappers—Laugh Master Ray, Laugh Master Phil—to make it all sound like some crazy prank. Except the stories of street dealers dragged off, pummeled with batons, boot-stomped till they lay unconscious in their own blood—then robbed of cash, drugs, jewelry, weapons—didn't seem like such a stitch to the powers-that-be.

Strock, on disability leave, got arrested at his north-side flat. Malvasio, the reputed ringleader, was never found. He'd fled, rumors went, to El Salvador, where he had contacts from taking part in a police training program. And that, for those who cared, added the final ironic twist to the whole business: The man who got away vanished down a path paved with good intentions.

Jude drove in his pickup to San Marcelino, a fishing village at the western, shabbier limits of the Costa del Sol, barreling down the long dusty lane from the highway as he headed for the restaurant on the beach where Malvasio said he'd be waiting.

It was late afternoon, Jude delayed by a herd of intractable oxen on the road between La Libertad and Comalapa. He parked his truck in an alley beside the restaurant, hoisted his spare from the truck bed, and checked it with the bartender to make sure thieves didn't walk away with it. Finding only staff downstairs, gathered around a boom box playing a jaunty two-beat
cumbia
, he climbed to the second floor. No one was there except a lone American sitting at a wood-plank table along the outer wall. Beyond him, the beach extended eastward for miles, rimmed with Miami palms and broad-leaf almond trees. Fishing boats—
lanchas
—dotted the surf, heading out for a night of work as a hazy red sun perched low above the horizon.

Seeing Jude approach, the lone man rose and stuck out his hand. “My God. For a moment there I would've sworn it was Ray.”

It wasn't the wisest opening but Jude let it go. Besides, Malvasio wasn't the only one startled by appearances. He was much thinner, still fit but wiry. The heat could do that. His once-handsome face looked drawn and weathered, rimmed with hair cut short and patched with gray, his skin tanned to the point he could pass for a local. Be a trick to match him with an old picture, Jude thought, wondering if that wasn't the point. Mostly, though, the change was in the eyes. They had a lifeless density to them now, like he'd walked back the long way from the worst imaginable.

“Sit,” Malvasio said. “You want something to eat? Drink?”

Jude noticed that Malvasio was working on a bowl of
crema de camarones
, a cream chowder made with shrimp, and washing it down with Pilsener, the local lager.
Pilsener
, the ads went,
Es Cosa de Cheros
. It's a guy thing.

“Beer'd be nice,” Jude said, taking a seat.

Malvasio turned his head and cupped a hand to his mouth, yelling to be heard over the boom box:
“¡Paulo, otra fría por favor!”
Turning back, he said, “Ironic, our both being here. In El Salvador, I mean.”

Isn't it though, Jude thought. “You found out I was down here how exactly?”

Malvasio ducked behind a smile, picked up his spoon, and trailed it lazily through his soup. “Get right to the point.”

“It's a fair question.”

“Of course it is. But it came out sounding like you're sorry you came.” Malvasio glanced up. “Are you?”

“Not yet.”

That earned a laugh. “Well, long story short, like I told you, I've got friends down here.”

“We talking about the guys you helped train, the ones who supposedly tucked you away?”

Their eyes met, and for an instant Jude saw the man he'd known growing up looking back at him. It felt gratifying. And unnerving.

Malvasio said, “Wasn't sure how much you knew.”

“I'm just repeating what they said on the news,” Jude said. “That a problem?”

“I don't know. You tell me.”

Suddenly the waiter was there, prompting a truce as he set a small wet glass and another bottle of Pilsener on the table. Jude pushed the glass aside and wiped the tin taste off the lip of the beer bottle with his shirttail, waiting for the waiter to vanish downstairs again.

“I'd like to hear your side of it,” Jude said, wincing a little at how earnest he sounded.

Malvasio tilted his bowl and spooned up the last portion of milky soup. “You're right. I met a guy down here through the training program, and when I needed a place to run I thought of him. He did me a good turn, stuck his neck out. And the FBI sent a fugitive team down here, they grilled my guy good but he held his mud—not that they could do anything to him, but still, I owe him for that. I've done what I can to keep my nose clean, not embarrass him, and he's referred me on to people he knows, a job here, job there. I've done okay.”

“You work for who now?”

“I'd rather not get into names, if that's all right. Not yet. Let's just say I work for some people in business here.”

That means less than nothing, Jude thought. “Doing?”

“Private security, same as you, though mostly I train. A lot of the guys down here are ex-military, which means their major talent is waiting to get paid.”

He made a little snort at his own joke. Jude was still back at
same as you
.

“Any event, that's the long way around to how I found out you were down here. You're working for some guy who's involved in water issues, am I right?”

Jude's current principal was Axel Odelberg, a hydrologist working with Horizon Project Management, an American company lending expertise on aquifer drawdown and recharge rates for a soft drink company called Estrella. It had a bottling plant it hoped to expand near the town of San Bartolo Oriente.

Jude said, “How do you know that?”

“Saw your name and his on the checkout sheet at the archives at ANDA's headquarters in San Salvador.”

ANDA was the national water agency, on the block to be privatized. Jude had accompanied Axel there more times than he could count.

“My people have land use and water rights stuff to arrange,” Malvasio said. “That means they deal with ANDA all the time. Just luck of the draw, one day when I was on the travel squad, we showed up the same day as you, maybe couple hours after. I'd pick out McManus regardless, but with a first name Jude, I figured if it was just coincidence it earned some kind of prize. I asked my buddy—again, I'd like to leave out names for now, don't take that wrong—and he asked around and finally got back to me, gave me the bead on what you were doing here and how I might get in touch. I hope that's okay.”