Night of the Jaguar (14 page)

“Amelia!”

The delegations were finally making their way inside to what Amelia prayed was an air-conditioned terminal. Five minutes on the ground and she was at the melting point. Targa looped her arm through Amelia's like they were sorority sisters.

“Your Excellency.”

“Oh please, Amelia, this is Nicaragua. Call me Gio. I was thinking of you this morning and I brought you a gift. I made it myself.”

She slipped something into Amelia's hand. Instinctively, Amelia checked to see if they were being photographed. They'd been warned in their CIA briefing: “You are nothing but a propaganda opportunity to the Communists. Thus the first commandment is: thou shalt assume you are being recorded and photographed at all times, except in the embassy itself. Thus the second commandment: accept no items, gifts, nothing, from a Nicaraguan national that you take into the embassy. Their holy grail is to penetrate our walls with listening devices.”

And while Amelia would rule out nothing, she was surprised to see a spritzer of hair spray in her hand.

“Brazil-nut oil in seltzer water. All the women with hair like ours use it down here.”

2.

Ajax twirled the handcuffs on his index finger like an asymmetrical propeller. The smooth, repetitive twirling stirred the only breeze in the otherwise darkened terminal of Augusto César Sandino International Airport. The monotony of it soothed him as he watched the lean Aeronica DC-10 touch down. It gently hopped three times, each feathery bounce detonating a puff of white like a spray of water. Ajax admired that something so massive could appear so nimble. He most definitely did not admire the man who would soon get off the plane.

A man he'd given up hope of ever seeing again.

He still keenly felt the shock when Horacio had called to tip him off.

“The Costa Ricans are sending him back. You'll pick him up at the airport.”

Horacio hadn't said who, hadn't needed to.

And now his plane has just touched down. Almost right on time. A nervous-looking official had informed Ajax a half hour ago that the plane would have to circle while the tubby TWA 737 carrying the American senator landed first. Ajax had watched the half-dozen gringo busybodies disgorge from the plane in their absurd business suits and ties in the grinding Managua heat. The sight had made his trigger finger itch. Then a sudden poetic wind had gusted in, blowing their ties straight up over their heads, like God might hang them right then and there.

A welcoming committee of professionally blank-faced government officials and childishly enraptured opposition leaders had waited on the tarmac. He'd scanned the assembly on the ground for signs of his ex-wife's russet ringlets. He'd spotted the elegant white hair of doña Violeta, publisher of
La Prensa
. That was easy, she stood a dancer's head and shoulders above the dwarves in her cabal, several of whom were so unable to contain their glee that Goliath might shit corn kernels for them to peck that they almost seemed to flap their hands like chickens.

The Buddha-like rotundity of the foreign minister had been unmistakable. But this Buddha was a Dominican priest, which Ajax always thought appropriate. The Dominicans had been invented by the pope to fire up the Inquisition, and the dinner parties at the father's house had been about as much fun as dining with Torquemada. But that was a lifetime ago, when Ajax had moved in those circles.

Then he'd spotted his ex—dashing out to the plane, late, as usual. Trailed, like pearls slipping from a broken necklace, by journalists and TV cameras.
As usual.
Still, his traitor's heart had skipped and the handcuffs had gone flying like a small moon ricocheting out of orbit. He caught them, barely.

“Ajax.”

Gladys pointed her chin through the window. The DC-10 taxied to a stop. A couple of workers languidly pushed a set of stairs out to meet it.

“We going out?”

“No. Let them come in. Technically, they're not on Nicaraguan soil until they're in the terminal.”

“Big day for you, huh? El Gordo Sangroso. Man, I remember reading about this case at school. Even
La Prensa
gave you good coverage. ‘The Sherlock…'”

“Shut up.”

Her mouth dropped open, and then dutifully snapped shut. “Yes,
Captain,
” she hissed.

Damn, she could milk that word for every bit of meaning short of his rank. He let the handcuffs fly up and off his finger with just enough spin that they twirled in perfect symmetry, and he caught them easily in his cupped hands. Gladys took no notice.

She was right, that case had been his greatest moment since the Triumph. Real police work—interrogations, forensics, and stakeouts. The first time he'd laid eyes on El Gordo, he knew he had his man, and the six days it took to break him were as great a battle as any he'd ever fought. And then, the fat fuck had escaped! Inexplicably to Ajax, as Gordo had no friends or money to buy his way out with. He'd gotten as far as the Costa Rican border, where they'd picked him up and plopped him in jail for the last three years.

He eyed the long black baton hung at her hip and slipped it out from the leather loop and handed it to her.

“He gets uppity, you go for his balls, his throat, or his kneecaps. Don't bother wailing on all that blubber.”

“Yes, Captain.”

She was going to shut him out all day. Maybe Marta was right, maybe Gladys was okay. He took a breath.

“Gladys, when you upend the world the way we did in '79, things, people, and all kinds of shit gets shaken loose. Even if by turning the world upside down you were setting it back aright like the Revo did, when you do it, people get knocked loose, fly out of their orbits.”

He smacked the baton into his palm, then pointed it at the plane.

“The ones he killed were like that. They'd been the girlfriends and concubines of the Guardia, living it up right to the very end, even while their boyfriends were dropping bombs on the barrios. When the Guard fled, they got kicked to the curb, became streetwalkers. Maybe that was justice.” He hung the cuffs on his belt. “That's where
he
found them. Walking the streets.”

“You pitied them?”

Ajax frowned, trying to remember if he had felt much at all back then, the early days of his drunken fall. It had been El Gordo Sangroso's escape which had pushed him over the edge, right into the bottle.

“
Humo de leña,”
he muttered.

“Huh?”

“
Humo de leña.
Wood smoke. They smelled of wood smoke. The three I saw in the morgue, his last three, their hair smelled of wood smoke. I don't know why.…”

“That him?”

Ajax smiled for the first time that day. El Gordo Sangroso, The Bloody Fat Man, put the O in obese. From a distance he looked like a mammoth sack of sorghum with a little melon stuck on top—his too-small head with its too-small eyes. If he'd weighed a hundred-fifty pounds his head would fit his body, but even then his eyes would be too small. The moment Ajax had looked into those little gray eyes he'd known he had his man.

“He's lost some weight.”

Six uniformed Costa Rican cops led the handcuffed prisoner down the stairs, which, Ajax noted, the fugitive walked like they led to a gallows. And they might as well. Twenty-five years was the longest stretch the worst scumbag could pull in Nicaragua. But the prisons here were like most prisons everywhere, and rapists were the lowest of the low, the outcasts. Fair game. Each day of each year would be a torment for this evil fuck.

“I never understood how he got away.” Gladys put her baton back on her hip.

“Me neither, really. Three compas took him in a van from the prison. The court is ten minutes away. The next we heard the Ticos had caught him crossing the border.”

“He's back now. He'll get his due.”

“Don't think this is justice either, Gladys.” Ajax spoke but never took his eyes off El Gordo. “This is all politics.”

“What politics?”

Ajax made a gun out of his right hand, pointed it at the senator's entourage filing into the terminal, and pulled the trigger. As he did, he noticed Gio walking next to a gringa with the orangest hair he'd ever seen on someone not dressed as a clown.

“The Ticos are honoring the extradition treaty today as a signal. This is all timed to coincide with the gringos and their fact-fucking mission.”

“I don't get it.”

“The Ticos are a timid bunch, but they know the senator is only here for a look around before he goes back and votes another hundred million to the Contra. They send El Gordo back the same day to signal they'd prefer normalizing relations to escalating the war to a new level.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read the papers?”

“That wasn't in the papers.”

“Newspapers are clues, Gladys, and only one set of clues. You find them like ones and twos and then you add them up, or subtract. That's what makes a good detective, knowing when to multiply or divide the data you've collected. You got to do the math, constantly.”

The Tico cops walked El Gordo into the terminal.

“Listen, Gladys. We sign the paperwork. They sign the paperwork. They take their cuffs off, we put ours on.” He took his truncheon out. “Remember…”

“Balls, knees, or neck. Think he'll remember you?”

Ajax smiled.

3.

“Please, Captain Montoya, I need my medication. You remember, don't you?”

Ajax remembered nothing about The Bloody Fat Man except the pictures filed in his head: the color “before” photos El Gordo took and the black-and-white “after” ones Marta snapped at the morgue. But he was pleased that the shit-eater remembered him after three years. The exchange with the Tico cops had been quick and efficient. He and Gladys had had to use both sets of cuffs to get the fugitive's hands behind his colossal girth—Ajax reckoned that he must be topping out at three hundred pounds. All of it packed into a two-hundred-fifty-pound gray prison jumpsuit quickly going dark with sweat. Ajax remembered that. El Gordo sweated more than some clouds rained.

“Captain, you remember about my medications, don't you? They wouldn't give it to me on the plane.”

“There's a team of physicians at the prison who'll sort you out. Shut up and walk.”

He and Gladys took El Gordo, still muttering about his meds, the long way out, to steer clear of the crowd of journalists and photographers now surrounding the senator on a small podium behind a sprawling bouquet of microphones. Ajax hesitated only briefly when he spotted Gioconda in the back, smiling and waving girlishly to reporters between questions. The pretty gringa with that crazy orange hair was pointing at a reporter. Ajax stopped when Matthew Connelly rose to speak.

“Senator Teal,” Connelly began, “in a couple of weeks the Senate will vote on a hundred-million-dollar arms package for the Contra, twice as much as the Reagan Administration has given them so far, and it will spin the war up to a new level; given that you're known as a rising star in the Republican party, is it fair to ask if you are really here to ‘fact find' or have you already made up your mind about the Contra?”

Ajax wasn't sure, but it seemed that the senator glanced at Carrot Head, who gave him a signal before he spoke, like a pitcher checking the sign from his catcher.

“Well, let me just stop you right there and talk about this word
Contra
.”

Teal smiled a quick sly smile, but it seemed to Ajax Carrot Head did a double take, as if the pitcher had shaken off her sign for a curve ball.

“You use the word ‘Contra' as if it was a bad word, but what does it mean? Contra-rebolushonaireo in Spanish is counterrevolutionary in English. But what is a revolution? Revolution means to go all the way around and finish where you start, like on a clock you start at twelve and when you finish you're right back at twelve, right?”

Connelly consulted his watch. “Even if you started at midnight and end up at noon?”

Teal seemed not to notice that Connelly had hit one up the middle, and he shook off another sign from Carrot Head. “So Nicaragua started with the Somoza dictatorship and the
revolution
brought it all the way around and now it's back at a Communist dictatorship. See? Twelve to twelve. The counterrevolutionaries just want to turn the clock back.”

“To what time, Senator?”

Teal blinked, Ajax thought, the way a pitcher might when he watches the ball sail deep into the bleachers. Teal seemed to check the sign from Carrot Head, and nodded agreement.

“You may not realize this, my friend, but San José, Costa Rica is closer to Washington, D.C., than San Jose, California.”

Ajax joined in the brief, puzzled pause.

“Not sure I take your point, Senator.”

“The internal affairs of Nicaragua are a matter of grave concern to US national security. We don't want another Cuban missile crisis, for example, and, with all due respect to our hosts, if the Sandinista army decided to invade us, there is only Mexico between them and Brownsville, Texas.”

“You mean, sir, with the exception of Honduras, Guatemala, and possibly El Salvador if they hooked left a little?”

The senator seemed not to get the correction.

“Senator, you're saying the US is in danger of being invaded by Nicaragua? A country in which there are only five elevators and one escalator. And the escalator doesn't work.”

Ajax noticed a sudden stiffness in Carrot Head's spine. What he didn't notice was that El Gordo had stopped murmuring about his meds.

Teal checked the sign again, and seemed to wind up to his fastball. “The Sandinista government has chosen to align itself with the Communist International. Nicaragua is a beachhead for the Comintern on the Central American Land Bridge. A threat to our national security is a threat. It doesn't matter the
size
. After all, great packages can come in small presents.”