Blood of Paradise (32 page)

He showed his creation to Clara who sat hunched on the floor of her room beside the mattress, watching the little girl sleep. Clara, glancing up, indulged Strock with a shy, puzzled smile, and it warmed him. He'd grown increasingly, protectively fond of the woman the past few days—her kindness, her gentleness, her uncomplaining decency. Those things defined her in a way he'd once thought only a woman's looks could.

Not so long ago his worldview could have been summed up in the old joke:
Why do women have vaginas? So men will talk to them
. Now he would have liked nothing more than to just talk, reach through the language barrier and let Clara know how much he admired the way she cherished that child, carrying her everywhere, cooing to her, caressing her. Watching her sleep, for chrissake. He hoped, once this business with Malvasio and Ray's kid was done, to live up to that example. He ached to see his own little girl, make things right by her and her mother, drop the anger and self-pity and step up. He wanted Chelsea and Peg to know they could rely on him. If he could manage just that, he'd feel like a millionaire.

And yet he couldn't keep the pretty picture in focus for long. He was down here to keep Jude from getting killed, but that just meant other men would have to die. That was the plan as it stood so far. And he couldn't tell which was worse—the fact he knew that was wrong or that he didn't care. He had a talent. Didn't the nuns always say it's a sin to bury your talents?

When Malvasio arrived the next morning for their daily trip into the mangrove swamp, Strock collected the rifle, his cane, and a coil of rope he'd found in a closet. Then he handed Malvasio the scarecrow, saying, “Meet Sparky. Another day of just shooting at targets, I'll go batshit. Let's have some fun.”

Out at the abandoned soccer field, they hung Sparky from a mangrove limb and Strock told Malvasio to let him swing. The scope's optics gathered illumination from the shafts of sunlight spearing down through the tree cover as Strock tracked the swaying target. Before long he was drilling the head and chest consistently. To make it harder, Malvasio went one better, twisted the rope tight, stepped behind the tree, then swung Sparky out like a tetherball. Strock fired five rounds and connected only once. To himself, he whispered, “Yee-haw,” then called out to Malvasio: “Okay, collect the ornery fucker and let's do it again. Round two, the Sparky Challenge.”

Strock slaughtered three different lengths of rope and made a hash of the shirt and trousers before finally managing to reliably nail a head shot. By noon he'd nicked the coconut into a garish little sculpture, at which point boredom settled in again. He traded places with Malvasio and let him shoot for a while, just letting Sparky swing back and forth, which was challenging enough. Strock was a natural, but he'd been on a gun range often enough to know that with a good scope, a good weapon, a little composure, and enough practice, anybody could hit just about anything. Not to say Malvasio was merely average. He'd become a good, steady shot over the week, a little slow on the trigger but deadly accurate, even when they placed the target farther away, a hundred yards, one fifty, threading their shots through the mangrove forest. Malvasio compensated for his lack of native skill by being patient, not chasing the target. As Strock watched him wait out Sparky, drill the dummy square five times running, an idea came.

While Malvasio was collecting his spent casings and reloading the rifle's magazine, Strock broke off a branch from a
ceiba
tree, cut Sparky down, and lashed the thick branch to the dummy's vertical axis, more than doubling the upward length of the pole. Malvasio, noticing finally, called out from the far end of the field, “What the hell are you up to now?”

“You can hold him up in the air this way.” Strock demonstrated, limping forward, hoisting Sparky overhead like a bullet-riddled effigy. Finally, once he reached normal talking distance, he let the thing drop. “We used to do this on the target range, use a wig head on a broomstick—or two, make like it was a guy with a hostage.”

Malvasio, sensing he'd be the first one on walkabout duty, said, “Yeah, but I'd guess the man holding the broom was down in the spotter's trench.”

“When did you turn into such a pussy? Hell, if I was gonna kill you out here, I'd have done it Monday.”

“That's comforting.” Malvasio gathered up his rucksack. “We gotta cut things short today, anyway. Got some people to meet out east. After that, hopefully, I'll have a better idea where things go from here.”

Three hours later, Malvasio shouldered through the crowd at the street market in San Bartolo Oriente, then turned up a cramped, meandering alley. The buildings on either side provided welcome shade but scant relief from the heat. On a balcony above a beauty parlor, a chunky prostitute in red spandex with a helmet of canary yellow hair vamped for him, fanning herself with a postcard, smiling through a yawn. Fatima, Malvasio thought, recognizing her. A good taxpayer. She was, if he remembered right, sixteen.

Continuing on, he swam through a heady stench of dog piss, rotting trash, frying grease, and spilled beer, passing a man in a filthy apron hawking slices from a massive block of cheese, waving flies away with the blade of his cleaver. At a shoe shine stand, an old
campesino
watched stoically from his chair as, for some inscrutable reason, his sneakers got lathered with shoe black. Finally, Malvasio spotted Sleeper and Chucho perched on wood stools at a
comedor
, chowing down. Tiny
fuís
hopped about, pecking at crumbs beneath the tables.

Sleeper, dabbing fingers on a napkin, said,
“Quiubo
, Duende,” through a mouthful of fried plantain. Despite the sweaty heat the kid wore his long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the collar and cuffs, a wise strategy given the recent police sweeps. Beside him, Chucho hunched over his steaming paper plate as he shoveled cheesy pork rind into his mouth. Unlike Sleeper, the kid was shirtless, his shiny dark skin immaculate. The ones coming up got it: Skip the ink.

Malvasio took a slip of paper from his pocket while
batucada
, a Brazilian drum music based on samba, tripped along rhythmically from a nearby sound system, lending an air of Carneval.

“So,” he said, “the vampires brave the light of day.”

Sleeper did a little shoulder shirk as his eyes darted side to side, scanning the crowded, twisting alleyway in both directions. “Man's gotta eat.”

Malvasio laid the slip of paper on the table. “I'm assuming if you'd heard anything yet about what we talked about, you'd have told me.” He'd instructed Sleeper to spread word town to town—he wanted to know if anyone had brought in a roll of film to be developed concerning the beheaded woman found along the Río Jiboa. Sleeper had sent out
chamacos
he could trust, from here to the capital, making it known. Word would be rewarded. Silence wouldn't.

Sleeper licked his teeth. “I told you. Truco Valdez ain't a dope. He gets that developed, it'll be in San Salvador, and there's damn near no way to track that.”

“Speaking of Mr. Valdez. You know his organization, La Tregua.”

“Yeah, I know.” Sleeper spat. “Punks give up the flag? Fuck 'em.”

Malvasio turned the slip of paper so Sleeper could read it. It contained an address. “You're going to pretend you want to join.”

Sleeper's eyes hardened. “No way.”

“Excuse me?”

“You can't. This is wrong. This is … This is evil, man, you can't do this.”

“I said ‘pretend.'”

“I'll get the mark on me, understand? They'll say I'm tricked up.”

In the background, Chucho licked his fingers, paying a bit more attention now. Nervy little bastard, Malvasio thought. It was a talent.

“Your friend here can vouch for you. Besides, the group has a rep as a front.
Mareros
try to make it look like they're boning out when they're really not. Run with that.”

“You don't get it.”

“No, I get it.” Malvasio turned to leave. “I just don't care.”

“I do this,” Sleeper said to his back, “you're gonna do like you promised, right? Get me to the laser clinic.” He meant one of the newer tattoo removal salons, run by the Catholic church with funding assistance from, of all places, the U.S. embassy. It would spare him having them burned off.

“Your own mother won't recognize you,” Malvasio assured him, speaking over his shoulder, then walked away. It was time, finally, for him to suffer a little kiss-up-kick-down of his own. At the hands of
el mero mero
.

30

Hector Torres waited in a private room at El Arriero with the colonel and the judge and Wenceslao Sola. The occasion for the gathering was the completion of a new chapel for the local orphanage, which the judge had generously financed. Fresh from the christening ceremony—at which, Malvasio imagined, the nuns had prostrated themselves in gratitude—the four men dined on grilled goat, basted with mango and lime, served with rice, chunks of yucca fried to a golden brown, and glasses of ice-cold beer.

Glancing up as Malvasio entered, Hector said, “I was beginning to wonder if you'd withered up in the heat, like a spider.” The others smiled darkly or ignored the remark, and Malvasio figured that was as good as it was going to get. Meanwhile, Hector gestured for him to take a chair against the wall and wait.

Malvasio had received a serious dressing down earlier in the week for the screwup with his
veteranos
—and he had every intention of passing the abuse along tenfold when the time was right—but for now, it was his understanding a second flogging wasn't in store. He was there to provide a progress report that would make everybody happy, to show a suitable level of contrite resolve, and then he'd grovel his way out the door. The last two wouldn't be a problem, he thought. It was an act he'd mastered long ago. As for making anyone happy, though, a glance around the table convinced him that would take some doing. These were men who equated happiness with perfection—in particular, perfection from others.

Sitting next to Hector, Judge Regalado seemed almost ethereal—a thin, waxy man with a sharp nose, cold pale eyes, and wisps of white hair curling out from a narrow head that tapered to a point at the chin. He could pass for a Spaniard, and it took an effort, sometimes, to remember that a man of such Gothic delicacy could be so roundly feared.

The source of that fear, of course, was in many ways the man across the table from him: Colonel Vides. He was as dark as Hector but taller and better-looking, despite a beak of a nose and a tiny, pinched mouth. He carried himself with the clipped grace of a man who had commanded other men and earned their respect. But his eyes, if studied carefully, revealed something else—a base and strangely volatile pride. He was, after all, a country boy at heart, raised above his station by his military career, and his newfound status as a civilian among influential men seemed to encourage a certain venal bravura, tinged with an almost operatic mean streak. Even so, Malvasio had to concede the colonel a grudging respect. He was the only one, other than Hector, with the remotest clue how to actually accomplish anything.

Lastly, Wenceslao Sola hunkered over his plate, pudgy, self-conscious, ill-tempered, seldom glancing up as he chewed his food. He inspired neither fear nor love as far as Malvasio could tell, except from the ratty terrier of garbled breed that sat at his feet, waiting for scraps.

While Malvasio waited, the colonel inquired after one of the judge's grandchildren, a girl named Rosa. Apparently, she was thirteen but looked seven, and for the past year she'd suffered terrible pain in her joints. After ruling out lupus, her doctors sent her to an endocrinologist in Miami who uncovered a rare thyroid disorder. Rosa was now on a regimen of pills and nightly injections of human growth hormone, plus monthly shots to suppress puberty—bone growth stops, the judge explained, when a girl has her first period. Meanwhile, her hair had begun falling out, and the family had pulled her from school to spare her the ridicule. Though the pain was better, the medications had side effects: She was sluggish and dull-witted, with no interest in things she'd once loved, even her pets; she'd grown fat and slept sixteen hours a day. Everyone murmured their sympathies and invoked the help of God and family, then Hector at last turned to Malvasio.

“So, you have news,” he said. It was a command, not an invitation.

Malvasio nodded. “I'll know the whereabouts of Truco Valdez in a day or two. Latest, beginning of next week.” A godawful promise, practically a lie.

The colonel screwed up his withered mouth; his lips all but vanished. “He's had a week already with the pictures.” He tilted his head back when he talked, as though to look down on you. His voice was reedy. “Long enough to pass them along to whomever he pleases.”

“There are only so many places between here and the capital where he can get film developed,” Malvasio said. “I've put out word. If anything like those pictures shows up, I'll know.”

The judge, holding aloft a morsel of goat impaled on his fork, said: “But soon enough? I believe that is Narciso's point.”

“I can't control that.”

The judge shook his head in disgust, then inserted the sliver of meat into his mouth, eyes rolling back behind fluttering lashes as he chewed.

Hector sat forward, hands clenched over his plate. “It is what it is. We don't even know if there's anything in those pictures to bother over.” Malvasio, though gratified by the show of backhanded support, knew it was motivated by self-interest. Hector was, after all, the one ultimately responsible for these recent mistakes, such was the chain of command. “What about this boy, the one who says he saw the woman abducted?”

“He hasn't been found yet, but I received some good news right before I came here. We're close.” Another lie. Malvasio had yet to tell anyone about the boy's baby sister, now in Clara's care at the
rancho
. He was keeping that to himself for now, among other things. He still held out hope the mother would choose her innocent little girl over her rash, mouthy son. No news till good news, he thought. That's my motto.