Blood of Paradise (11 page)

Before he could say any of that, his mother reached out, grabbed his knee hard, and squeezed. “He's a minor. He's not answering questions till we speak to a lawyer.”

Jude shot her a look but obeyed, saying nothing. The agent glanced from one to the other, waiting them out. Finally, he gave it up, collected the money, and said, “Very well,” then returned downstairs.

Jude whispered, “He hid his—”

“Shut up!” In her lap she strangled one hand with the other. “For God's sake don't make things any worse than they are.”

He waited but she wouldn't look at him. He wondered what she knew, what she was hiding. Or if she was simply trying to keep what remained of her life in one piece.

He sank into his own reckoning then, looking at the thing from every angle he could. He felt betrayed, the old man hiding all that money where it might be considered not his but his son's—
Cash ain't a crime
, he'd say,
and you're a juvie
. And yet Jude caught a backhanded compliment in it, too, a show of trust.
You'll know how to handle yourself
, his father seemed to be saying,
if it comes to that
. Did he ever intend to tell Jude about it? How did he think his son would react? Jude never learned the answers to those questions. By the time he got up the nerve to ask, the old man was dead.

It wasn't till some time later that he saw the other thing, the one that troubled him even more. There was an eerie parallel between what happened to the two of them separately, one day apart: proud and suited up one minute, humbled and taken away the next. Like it was meant to be, a lesson from on high to them both: Don't get cocky. The things you take for granted, rely on—the things that make you who you are—can vanish in a heartbeat.

And that's how you find out, Jude thought, what it feels like to be faceless.

10

Malvasio sat up and rolled the stiffness from his neck. Beside him, the girl fidgeted beneath the sheets and drew away, sensing he'd woken. An unconscious impulse, her withdrawal, and unearned since he'd never touched her, not that way. He had his standards, after all. Some of these kids showed up already boiling with disease.

Her name was Anabella. She looked about twelve, scrawny and dark with a broad face and a slubby little nose. She had long straight hair that he foresaw getting cut short, molded into the pin-curled helmet the trashier local streetwalkers were famous for.

She was a reward, a bone tossed to him by the judge and the colonel, and only a fool would deny them their displays of macho largesse. She'd arrived last week from Honduras, one of thirty or so orphans and street kids on the
finca
at the moment, most of them due to move on today. Many had arrived with first degree malnutrition, endemic in the region—they didn't scream out at you with fly-coated eyes and bloated bellies like the haunting kids of Africa, they just withered away from diarrhea or slowly starved to death. Here on the
finca
, though, they'd been fed and treated for intestinal parasites to the point they were fit enough for work—proof, Malvasio supposed, that mercy took many forms.

Of the group, a precious few would get handed over to the nuns at a local orphanage, to see if they possessed a talent for obedient suffering indicative of a religious vocation. A few more, the most rugged and unappealing of the bunch, would get sent to the judge's cane fields. Others, boys and girls alike, would get shipped to brothels in Acajutla or the capital, where they would have the only encounters they would ever know with the rich and powerful. The rest—and this, Malvasio guessed, would be Anabella's fate—would get sent to Guatemala and then on to a ratty little suburb outside Mexico City. There, stashed in a guarded house run by
mamacitas
who would console them and beat them and tutor them in the tricks of survival, they would wait until the colonel's contacts arrived, pimps from a family of pimps who would dress them up in skimpy, hookerish things, pink and black, then parade them one by one in front of a crowd of nameless men until it was time to walk back into the catacomb of filthy rooms, armed with a condom and two sheets of toilet paper, where behind a drawn sheet they'd launch their new lives—fifty pesos for straight sex, clothes left on; fifty more pesos, the skirt comes up; fifty more, the bra comes off; fifty more on top of that for a blow job, with twenty more shelled out for every exotic position requested. Soon enough a wholesaler would step forward and pay for their transport to the border, and once across they'd get handed over to men waiting in vans that would carry them to the major hubs—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta—or anywhere else they could pay off their passage. For the next few years, maybe longer, they'd be at the mercy of men with wants that would make those days in the Mexican catacomb feel like Christmas, until they ran away or were killed for trying or died from an overdose or disease, the few survivors managing to soldier on with a steely, blank-eyed numbness that would be, from that point on, a lifelong companion—especially for those who graduated to the status of
mamacita
themselves.

For the past week the girls had helped clean the judge's hacienda, the boys joining the colonel's squad of
zacateros
clearing brush. It might well prove the last honest work many of them would ever know, just as they would look back at the
finca
itself as a sort of paradise.

Malvasio got up and drew the curtains open for the sake of a little air. He felt desperate for the rains, mosquitoes be damned. When he turned back around he found the girl watching him, the sheet pulled up to her chin, eyes dull as shirt buttons. Knowing what she wanted, he went to the room's one chair, dug inside his pant pocket, removed his cell phone, and tossed it onto the bed. It was one of five he owned, all bought from hustlers at the
mercado central
. The country was swimming with black-market cells and he made it a point never to use the same phone for longer than a week.

The girl gathered the thing up happily, instantly scrolling to the screen settings, holding the gizmo to her face like a tiny TV. Soon she'd be playing the various ringers over and over, fascinated by the dinky bing-bong melodies that, when loud enough, reminded Malvasio of Vegas slots. Bizet's “Toreador Song” seemed to hold a particular fascination for her.

When Malvasio fled the States, the man he sought out for help, Ovidio Morales, was a lieutenant in the national anti-narcotics squad, famous for breaking up a Colombian smuggling ring (while secretly shielding the local military officers involved). A man who understood loyalty and gratitude and the subtler nuances of the law, Ovidio proved an exceptional guardian angel, introducing Malvasio to men who could help him.

In time, with proper precautions, Malvasio ventured back to the States, stealing across the border with a new name each time—Richard Ferry his most recent incarnation. Up north he picked up odd jobs from men who could pay to see their seamier wants realized: landlords who had a gang or squatter problem, businessmen being shaken down by a poor choice in out-of-town company, drug dealers with runaway wives or accountants. It had worked out well for almost a decade, the work increasingly remunerative and complex, but the last job had backfired: A whole neighborhood had burned to the ground and a federal informant was among the casualties—through no fault of mine, Malvasio thought. Regardless, his situation in El Salvador went to hell. The U.S. embassy cranked up the heat, deploying an FBI fugitive unit in-country, just as they had when Malvasio first arrived. Fortunately, they enjoyed no more success this time than the last, but Ovidio couldn't risk protecting him anymore. And so Malvasio had to root around for another angel.

The man he found was Hector Torres, one of Ovidio's introductions. He owned the restaurant in San Marcelino where Malvasio met with Jude, plus other nightclubs and restaurants both around the capital and out east, in San Miguel, even one in San Bartolo Oriente named El Arriero. Great conduits for laundering money, restaurants, which was how Torres had insinuated his way into the graces of the powerful.

His uncle, the original owner of El Arriero, had been kidnapped by the guerrillas early in the war and then shot dead during an escape attempt. The body got dumped off in the restaurant's trash, at which point Hector stepped into his uncle's shoes and let it be known he would get his revenge. Soon members of the White Warriors Union came to call, and money started flowing from a group of exiled oligarchs in Miami and Guatemala City. The money arrived as investment capital for his expanding business interests, except those interests weren't expanding quite as much as the sums in question suggested. Instead he skimmed his take, then funneled the rest of the cash to the
especiales
from the National Guard or Treasury Police, who kidnapped suspected dissidents and handed them over to the Fuerza Aérea's infamous A-II unit.

That was how Hector came to know the colonel—Colonel Narciso Vides, a former intelligence officer with A-II, linked to the “night free-fall training” that consisted of dumping live, bound guerrillas from C-47s over the Pacific Ocean. A-II also had a knack for executing common criminals just so the bodies could get pitched from helicopters over the FMLN stronghold at Guazapa volcano.

With the Peace Accords in 1992, the colonel quietly surrendered his commission. He already had his future charted, thanks to Judge Saturnino Regalado.

The colonel and judge had forged their bond during the war, when the colonel introduced the judge to an Argentine military advisor who had a plan concerning the ever-expanding number of insurgent orphans in the countryside. The Argentines were old hands at this, the colonel said, and in short order the children were being collected and shipped off to other countries throughout Latin America for work or adoption, depending on their age, skills, or beauty. The scheme was originally conceived as a way to demoralize the resistance, but soon a method became a métier, even after the Argentine advisor slithered back to Buenos Aires in the wake of the Falklands disaster. And there was never a lack of children. The poor bred like cattle, the colonel was known to say—in a country the size of Massachusetts with a population density equal to India's, no problem loomed so large as the sexual liberality of the penniless. Who but themselves did they have to blame if their children became livestock, a point underscored by how freely some of them sold their kids outright—or, currying favor, handed them up for nothing—to the colonel's touts traveling village to village.

The blanket amnesty provided as part of the Peace Accords shielded the judge and colonel from prosecution for crimes committed during the war, while simple corruption had protected them since. Civil suits filed in the States had begun to blink on their litigation radars, but locally the two men still had sheer political clout and family connections to carry the day. The judge in particular was untouchable, enjoying a social station having roots centuries deep in colonial patronage and the
cafetero
system, a generous donor to the church and its many orphanages. The man had powerful friends everywhere—one might as well try to indict God's sidekick. And the colonel had his
tanda
, military academy classmates, watching his back, the ones still in uniform as well as those who'd already parlayed their war service into private sector profit. He also took considerable care to champion war veterans, to the point many ex-soldiers and their families saw him as a personal benefactor.

But the nexus of influence to which Malvasio was currently beholden remained incomplete without mention of Wenceslao Sola.

Sola, connected by marriage to one of the
catorce familias
, the infamous fourteen families, served as a secret
patrón
for several brothels about the country, which was how he went from being a mere member of the colonel's and judge's social circle—everyone of a certain station knew everyone else in El Salvador—to the role of partner in their operation. In time, with contacts made during his travels, Sola began not merely buying children for his bordellos but helping to move them north.

There were other aspects of Sola's pedigree, though, that recommended him to the colonel and judge. He'd come of age during the last years of the war as a member of Los Patrióticos, a gang of ARENA-linked professionals who matriculated through the First Brigade's civil defense training program. Los Patrióticos embraced the counterrevolutionary ethos with rabid gusto, forsaking firearms (military ammunition might be traced) and preferring instead strangulation, throat-slashing, and poisoning—but not before the captive had been tortured, disfigured, and, if a woman, repeatedly raped. The Grand Guignol sadism surprised some observers since, in the words of one atypically candid U.S. Department of Defense analyst, they were really nothing but “rich momma's boys and potbellied patriots.”

This observation did not, of course, dissuade the U.S. Military Group from funding and training Los Patrióticos and others of their ilk. As one U.S. military commander on the ground confessed, “We're already a little pregnant.”

After the war Sola did what everyone else in his circle did—milk his connections for plum business deals, aided by the privatization schemes of the American-sponsored neoliberal economic program, which basically handed back to the wealthy everything the Peace Accords had tried to redistribute. One such windfall was a seat on the board of Estrella in San Bartolo Oriente, which bought its sugar from cane fields owned by Judge Regalado, and which had Colonel Vides to vet its workforce for unionists and other
subversivos
.

In truth, the bottling plant's recent expansion concealed a hidden purpose: It was step one in the company's bid to move in as the regional water authority when the national water agency, ANDA, was privatized, something said to be in the works if ARENA could hold on to power in the upcoming election, a virtual lock given recent polls. And that scheme was green-lighted by the powers that be, both here and in Washington, as a way to pay back Estrella's board and executive committee for their help in furthering “hemispheric security.” But then ODIC—the Overseas Development Insurance Corporation, an export credit agency based in Washington—butted in because an American conglomerate named Torkland Overby, tapped by the Estrella board to “invest,” agreed to do so but didn't want to risk anything. Who could blame them? And even though the ODIC flacks were sympathetic—the bank was a way station for spooks, basically—their involvement triggered the bureaucracy and that meant scrutiny. So now you had pencil pushers kicking the tires and checking under the hood and sooner rather than later it dawned on somebody the thing was a loser. With the judge's irrigated cane fields and his sugar processing plant upstream already draining away over a thousand gallons a minute, the bottling plant, drawing off hundreds more, was sucking the aquifer dry.