Night of the Jaguar (9 page)

“Jenny,” said the Indian.

“Good! Terrific! Now, what’s
your
name? Is it Juan? I’m Jenny, you are…” She pointed. The Indian made a little chin-raising gesture she had seen earlier and which she now understood was a kind of nod. But now he seemed to hesitate, and he stared at her, into her eyes, for what seemed like a long time, as if trying to make up his mind about something. Finally, he placed his hand flat against his chest and tapped it twice.

“Moie,” he said.

She pronounced the name as he had,
Mou-ee-eh.
“Great! You Moie, me Jenny, this”—touching the interior, pointing broadly—“is car. Say
car
!” And so on, with objects and parts of the body. Jenny could
not figure out how to show verbs very well, but she had a fine notion of how to teach a dull child, having been on the receiving end for many years, and they made good progress, she thought. After an hour or so of this, she brought out a vacuum bottle of iced tea she had brought along and a crumpled joint. She lit up, turned the music louder, took a hit, and passed the smoldering number to Moie, who placed the coal-end in his mouth and sucked.

She watched, amazed, and after a while said, “You’re supposed to give it back, man.” This idea having been conveyed, in word and gesture, they filled the interior of the Mercedes with hypnotic fumes, after which Jenny opened the door and rolled down the windows. Moie pointed to the fading smoke.
“Chaikora,”
he said.

“Yeah, we call it pot, or ganja, or marijuana. A lot of names. Dope. This is pretty good dope. We grow it ourselves. You like?” She mimed goodness, rubbing her stomach, smiling broadly, kissing her hand, to which he responded in his own tongue, “You dead people are very strange. You know
chaikora,
but you take it without chanting, and also you don’t mix it with its brothers and sisters, so that it can speak to you properly. We say that
assua
is the brother and
uassinai
is the sister of
chaikora
. Together they are one of the small holy families that help you listen to the animal spirits. Now, without the rest of the holy family, we can’t hear the animal spirits very well, but only the spirits in our own heads. What’s the good of that?”

She giggled. “Yeah, I hear you, man. It’s dynamite boo. Oh, wait, this is a great song.” She leaned back and closed her eyes and listened to Toby Keith sing “I Love This Bar.” Time passed.

The sound of a car door opening. Professor Cooksey slid into the backseat.

“Well, Jennifer, I see you found our friend. You never cease to mystify and amaze me.”

“Yeah, he was in the Gardens, stealing pieces of plants. He almost got busted, but I got him out of there. I’m trying to teach him English.”

“Are you, indeed? Well, good for you.” Jenny saw that the Professor was staring at the Indian in a strange way, really hard, like he was trying to see into his head, and the Indian was staring back, like he
was trying to do the same. She had a familiar and sad feeling that stuff was going to happen that she wouldn’t be able to understand.

“My dear, could you turn that music down a bit? I’d like to see what this gentleman has to say for himself.”

“He can speak Spanish,” she said. “Geli was talking to—”

“Yes, but I doubt he speaks it very well,” said Cooksey, and then he began to speak in a language she had never heard before, and she was about to feel kind of crummy about being shut out and all until she saw Moie’s face light up with sheer pleasure; a flood of the same speech issued from his mouth.

“I’m amazed,
Tayit,
to hear Runisi in the land of the dead. Are you a priest?”

“Not I, but I spent a lot of time in the Jimori country. Do you know them?”

“I have heard of them, of course. They are vile and steal wives and eat babies.”

“They say the same about the Runiya people. Also that you kill all foreigners in your country.”

“They are liars, then, as well,” said Moie, and after a pause, added, “but we do kill foreigners. Or most foreigners. Did you know Father Tim? He was a dead person like yourself.”

“Well, you know there are very many of us, too many to allow us to know all the others, as you can. Why do you call us dead people?”

“Because we Runiya are alive in this world. We are inside it, and the plants and animals, stones and sky and stars, sun and moon, are our friends and relatives. That’s what it means to be alive. A fish is alive and a bird, too. But you are outside the world, looking in on it as the ghosts do, and making mischief and destruction, like ghosts do. Therefore we say you are dead like they are. Also, when a person is alive, they carry their death behind them, there”—and here the Indian pointed over Cooksey’s left shoulder—“and this is one way we tell a live person from a ghost. But you carry your deaths inside you all the time, so you can have the power of death over all things. So we call you dead people.”

“I see,” said Cooksey, “and very good sense it makes, too. Now tell me this: you came a long way from your home to stop us dead people
from killing your forest. So I have heard from my friends. Tell me, how do you think you will stop them?”

So Moie told the story of what he had learned from Father Perrin after he was killed, and as for how he would stop it, he knew he could not. Just one man could not stop such a thing, and he was not a fool to think it. But Jaguar had promised him that if he brought him to the land of the dead, then Jaguar would stop it.

“And how will he do that?”

Moie made a peculiar gesture using his hands and his head that was easily interpretable as a shrug. “We say: we can ask Jaguar what will happen, and ask him what we should do, but we never ask him how he will do what he does. And if he told us we would not understand.”

“That’s probably wise,” said Cooksey, and then they spoke of many things, Cooksey answering many of the questions Moie had about the land of the dead, until, observing an increasingly impatient Jenny, he added in English, “Well, I think the thing to do is return to the property for a bite of lunch, and then we might venture to discuss how we can help our friend here. Drive on, Jennifer.”

At about this time, some miles to the north, three men were seated at a white-clothed and silver-set table in a small executive dining room on the thirtieth floor of the Panamerica Bancorp Building. All three were of the same background, Cubans and the sons of the families who had ruled that island for generations before the revolution of 1959. They had left Cuba as young men (and not floating on rafts either) and had prospered in the United States. In purely financial terms, they were vastly richer than their forebears, yet they harbored, along with most of the rest of their class and generation, a sense of grievance. Their American contemporaries, with whom they did business and played golf, were men of power, but they had never owned a country absolutely and owned all the people in it. Their power was not of that sweetest kind. These Cubans had been able, with the acquiescence of America, to transfer much of their culture to South Florida, which they ran as a kind of fief, the unalterable principle of which was that no one could ever become president of the United States who would normalize relations with the Monster across the Straits of Florida. They were confident,
sensual, intelligent, unimaginative, industrious gentlemen, and if they shared a fear, it was that they would never get to dance on Fidel’s grave.

And now another more instant fear: the man who had called this meeting, Antonio Fuentes, had been murdered the previous night, for they had contacts in the police and knew the truth about the full horror of the crime. Cayo Delgado Garza, the host of the luncheon meeting, and the chairman of the eponymous Bancorp, had wanted to cancel it, out of respect, but the other two had insisted that it go forward. These were Juan X. Fernandez Calderón, called Yoiyo, the most vigorous of the three, a developer and financier, and Felipe Guerra Ibanez, who owned a large trading concern. They were all dressed in expensive dark-colored suits and quiet ties; Garza and Ibanez had pins of fraternal organizations in their lapels, in place of which Calderón wore an enamel American flag. They all had immaculately trimmed heads of hair, light brown in the case of Calderón, silver on the other two. They had soft manicured hands, on the wrists of which hung inherited gold watches. Garza was paunchy, Ibanez thin, Calderón still trim and athletic. He played tennis and golf frequently and kept a yacht; unlike the others, he had blue eyes.

A silent brown waiter in a white jacket with shiny buttons served drinks and vanished. They drank the liquor in grateful drafts and spoke feelingly of the dead Fuentes. The waiter returned. Another round of drinks and the lunch ordered, and now they turned to business. Garza asked Calderón, “So…Yoiyo: what do we make of this?”

An eloquent shrug. “I’m just as baffled as you. Who would kill Tony? As far as I know he didn’t have an enemy in the world. And to tear him up like that! It makes no sense.”

“It does if someone is trying to frighten us,” said Garza quietly. Calderón stared at him for a second and then shot a look at Ibanez, who indicated by the subtlest possible expression that this was something worth considering. It was clear to Calderón that they had discussed the matter without him, and he felt a jab of anger. But the three men had been doing business together profitably for years. They knew one another well, at least in the way of business.

“What, you’re suggesting that this had something to do with Consuela?”

“He was the chairman, the public face, to the extent it has a public face,” replied Garza. “And there was that incident the other afternoon, the reason why Tony wanted to meet.”

“That’s insane, Cayo. Some little bird-watcher is not going to chop up a man to make a point.”

“He had a South American Indian with him,” said Ibanez.

“So he had an Indian, for which, by the way we only have the evidence of that dumb secretary and the dumber security guards. How many South American Indians have they seen? I mean, think about it for a minute! A man bursts into a business office, yells a lot of propaganda, gets tossed out, and then what? He goes to the businessman’s home and murders him and chops him into pieces and tries to make it look like some kind of tiger did it? It’s preposterous.”

“They knew about Consuela and the Puxto,” said Garza. “Maybe that makes it a shade less preposterous.”

This appeared to take some of the bluster out of Calderón. He nodded and drank his Laphroaig. “Yes,” he said, “that’s troubling. They shouldn’t have known about the Puxto. But it’s still stupid to connect the two events without more information. The two things may be unrelated.”

“Do you think that’s likely, Yoiyo?” asked Ibanez gently. Calderón looked straight into the seamed turtle face and said, “Why not? Look, what was it, eight or nine years ago? That nigger maniac chopped Teresa Vargas into pieces, and that was connected to nothing at all. Some insane cult, whatever…so this could be the same, the cat prints. It’s Miami, these things happen. You never think it’s going to happen to someone you know, but now it does. It happened to the Vargas girl, and now it happened to Fuentes. That’s one possibility. The next possibility is it was political. Tony gave money to the resistance, he was quiet about it but it wasn’t a secret. We all do, yes? So maybe it was that.”

“You think Fidel sent an agent to kill Antonio Fuentes?” asked Garza, incredulous.

“Of course not. I’m just laying out the logical possibilities. So, next, we have, yes, something connected with the Consuela deal. Something out of Colombia. Why? Everything is arranged at that end and has been for months. So we don’t know, and frankly, I’d find it hard
to believe. As a matter of fact, it feels like a maniac again to me. Maybe that nigger left disciples, only this time he’s going after men and not pregnant girls.”

“But you’ll check out the Colombian angle, won’t you?” said Ibanez. Again Calderón saw that look between the two of them. Consuela had been his deal, and the message here was that if there was any mess associated with it, it was his to clean up. He got a quarter, no, now a third, of the profits but had all the work to do. A certain resentment here, but if things had to be done he would rather do them himself than leave it to this pair of
viejos
. He took, however, a considerable time before responding, to show he was not their errand boy. “Of course,” he said then, “I’ll be glad to, Felipe.”

The rest of the lunch passed pleasantly enough, in discussions of other matters of business, local politics, and their various interests. After lunch, Calderón called his driver on the cell phone and found his white Lincoln waiting for him when he reached the street. He was driven back to his firm’s headquarters, housed in a new mirrored glass cube on Andalusia in Coral Gables. His private office was furnished in mahogany, leather, and worn old Persian carpets, all expensive, understated, and chosen by an interior decorator not often employed by Cuban businessmen. Calderón did not want to be associated with that sort of Cuban at all, the people who had run little shops in Havana and were now magnates in America.
Cursilería
was the word for the style of such people, vulgar and ostentatious.

He was efficiently rude to his staff, and after some scurrying and scraping, he conducted a meeting about a golf course and resort condo development he had begun near Naples, on the west coast of the state. It was the largest thing he had ever attempted, and he had financed it with an unstable structure of rolling credit, in addition to nearly all his own liquid capital. The profits would be colossal, but he was now somewhat overextended, which was the main reason why he had organized Consuela Holdings LLC. The timber money should start coming on line just in time to cover the first series of notes on Consuela Coast Resort and Condominiums. Provided everything went off on schedule.

When he was alone again, he dialed a number in Cali, Colombia, and after a few brief conversations in Spanish with underlings, he was
connected to a man with a low, quiet voice. Calderón understood that Gabriel Hurtado was what the U.S. media called a drug lord, but he was quite capable of cloaking this knowledge from his ordinary consciousness. He was a man of aristocratic pretension and habit, and the ability to ignore the ultimate sources of one’s wealth is a commonplace talent among such men. The Kennedys and the Bronfmans spent bootlegging dollars with clear consciences, and the fortunes of his own family and those of most of his Cuban friends derived at a couple of removes from slave labor. Money washes, as the saying goes, and in any case Hurtado was not a mere thug. He was well connected with the government of his nation and was at least as well insulated from drug cartel massacres as Joe Kennedy had been from the machine guns of Al Capone. There is an immense flood of Latin American money swimming around Miami seeking safe investment, whose provenance does not bear too much inspection, and many such dollars under the control of Hurtado had over the years swum into the projects of JXF Calderón Associates, Inc., to the mutual profit of both men.