Blood of Paradise (24 page)

“He was a crooked cop?”

“Fitz, whoa. This is wrong.”

“That's a material omission. Plus this new thing with his old pals, accomplices, cellies for all I know. Not to mention these people your girlfriend bangs around with—”

“Excuse me—bangs?”

“Girlfriend?” Axel's first contribution. He seemed oddly pleased.

“I haven't seen her, Fitz, since the night you gave me crap about it. I've been gone, right? Just got back, right? What's this about?”

Fitz looked off, thinking. Behind him, the screen saver on his laptop showed a pixilated sunrise morphing into a fetus dissolving into the Milky Way. “You've made some interesting acquaintances.”

“Well, Fitz, your company, it's riveting, no argument there. But variety, the spice of life—you following me here?”

“You think this is all some kind of joke, it'll all blow over. But I've gotta call Jim.”

He meant Jim Leonhard, the man who'd first recruited Jude at Los Rinconcitos in the Zona Rosa. He supervised the region now.

“Look, Fitz, the gas pressure on this is kinda needling into the red for no good reason, don't you think?”

Axel reached out and touched Fitz's arm. “I have to agree with Jude on this, Michael. Your reaction seems a little out of proportion for such small beer. He hasn't done anything to jeopardize me, that's for sure, and that's the only consideration I can see meaning much of anything.”

“It's not about that.”

“Yes, I realize.” Axel's blue eyes warmed. “That's the troubling part. Whatever it's ‘about' seems oddly personal, if I may be so blunt, and I think you should stop for a moment and consider that.” He let go of Fitz's arm. “Beyond which, I've just spent ten days with Jude's replacement and God save me from another stretch of time outside an alligator farm in such company.”

It was astonishing, the transformation—like that, Fitz was groveling. “Look, I realize Bauserman's got some rough edges—”

Axel turned to Jude. “Do you know what this imbecile who replaced you did? We have, in Jolanda, quite possibly the best cook I've ever known outside my Swedish grandmother. Then this moron shows up with a ten-pound bag of grits. He tells her he wants a bowl for breakfast every day, plus three eggs over easy—‘runny as cum,' he says. I wish I was making that up. Of course, Jolanda indulged the idiot, and you should have seen her, mixing that slop. She said it looked like something she'd feed her parrot.” Axel turned back to Fitz. “The man doesn't know the difference between an honest-to-God thought and raw mental sewage. Nor does he know when—or perhaps even how—to shut up. He ought to be running a Ferris wheel. So he can die a happy man, peering up girls' skirts.”

Fitz was backpedaling mentally, looking for something to say but apparently finding only empty space where the words should have been.

“I have been looking forward to Jude's return,” Axel continued, “because he's conscientious and smart. I feel safe with him and, when we get the opportunity to drop our guard at day's end, he's a pleasure to visit with. And, since I'd say my opinion on this matter should carry some weight, I'm going to ask that you let go of whatever it is that's got you feeling so shirty and we'll all get back to our day-to-day routines. Jude, welcome back. Michael, I appreciate your hearing me out.” Axel reached out for the shoulders of both younger men and gave them a fatherly squeeze, then a glint of mischief twinkled in his eye. He smiled like the best part had finally come. “Now, Jude, let's hear a little more about this anthropologist of yours.”

Jude blushed before he could catch himself.

“I mean,” Axel prompted, “I'm assuming from the way you looked when you talked about her that you're somewhat fond of her?”

Fitz cut in. “Maybe you guys can double-date. How swell.”

The scorn in Fitz's voice caught Jude off guard, then something occurred to him, a sudden insight long overdue—about Fitz, his work in the Kuwaiti minefields. All that carnage, not just humans but animals, too—dogs, camels, sheep, ripped into pieces alongside the Iraqi war dead, rotting black under the desert sun. The flies, the stench, the sweaty tedium—then a coworker blown to screaming meat before your eyes. All that lying in wait whenever you touched someone. And Fitz resented it, resented the world's indifference and his pitiless, disgusting thoughts, resented the women he'd never love and the men who would love them instead.

Beyond that, though, Jude was lost. “I'm not following.”

“No, of course you're not,” Axel said, avoiding Fitz's gaze and apparently immune to his derision. “There's been no time to tell you. It happened while you were away.” He looked suddenly years younger. “I've met someone.”

Strock had discovered there was, indeed, beer in the fridge. A mere six-pack, though—he'd rationed himself. With sundown, he popped open his third. It was a brand called Bahía, bright and yeasty with a gassy head. One must make do, he thought, hobbling into the dining room.

A soft light lingered along the dingy walls, shadows swelling in the corners. Clara sat in one of the rough wood chairs, wearing a distant smile. Shoes on the floor, hands in her lap—she looked like a daydreaming nun.

Turning her glance toward Strock in the doorway, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Hola, Señor Feel.”

She'd made him two meals so far, a lunch of thick pancake-like tortillas filled with cheese that she called
pupusas
, served with warm salsa and a kind of pickled slaw, and a dinner of grilled shrimp with peppers and fresh-squeezed lime, followed by slices of a tart pinkmeated fruit she called
guanabana
. A man could get used to this, he thought, except the isolation was taking a toll. He was used to solitude—how often had he holed up alone in his apartment, days at a time, ignoring Dixie's knock?—but this was different. So far from anything familiar to anchor him, no one to talk to beyond the clumsiest Spanglish, no TV to fake companionship, only three more beers. If somebody didn't show up first thing the next morning, he'd get on the horn to Jude just to milk him for conversation.

He ventured outside to flex his knee. It throbbed a little but the milky heat had limbered it up some, good news on that front at least. Overhead, the blue of the sky had mellowed with dusk. The wind rustled through the palm fronds, the sun-salt tang of the ocean riding the heat, and the surf thundered gently beyond the wall, modulating strong and soft in endless random surges. It made him think of Florida. Like anybody who'd endured a Chicago winter, he'd often dreamed of retiring near a beach.

Suddenly, he felt Clara at his side. In that soft, birdlike voice of hers, she said,
“Camino contigo.”

What's it going to take for her to realize I haven't a clue what she's saying, Strock wondered, but she gestured for him to follow her toward the gate. We're walking somewhere, he realized. Well, fine. Something to do.

They headed toward the windswept beach and turned east, walking with the surf to their right. Crimson swirls of feathery cloud lingered above the glassy ocean. Clara kept a modest gait, pausing so Strock could catch up every now and then, their progress slow, the sand deep and soft. She walked with her arms folded, her chin high, the wind fanning her black hair in every direction at once. She looked less homely in the fading light.

Suddenly, it dawned on him that this was a trap. She was leading him out of the house, away from where he had a weapon. She'd step away suddenly, the men would appear from beyond the trees.

He stopped, to see if she stopped with him or just kept walking. That would tell him, he thought, just as she paused and turned back. Her eyes in the blustery twilight seemed so guileless and free of menace he felt ashamed—and yet he'd suffered morbid fantasies all day. It was hard, alone in a strange place, not to feel the paranoia worming away. I'm sorry, he thought, smiling apologetically. She smiled back. They resumed walking.

Finally, about a hundred yards along, she stopped and faced a break in the line of palms. In the dimness, Strock saw within a clearing the ruins of a large, plain house—the roof gone now, walls crumbling, windows shattered. Clara stared at it for several seconds, gripping her hair in a fist, then began to speak. Her words came out in a soft plaintive drone and she gestured along with her story, so Strock could try to follow. From what he could tell, the house had been full of people once, children perhaps, a lot of activity, coming and going, good and bad—opposites, of some kind, or turmoil. No. A storm—Strock remembered Jude mentioning Hurricane Mitch, pointing out the destruction as they'd boated deeper into the mangroves. The winds tore the big house to shreds, Clara seemed to be saying, miraculously leaving the smaller house down the beach untouched. Many of the children had died. That, at least, was what Strock made of the pantomime. He realized she could just as readily be telling him that one night a horde of banshees had howled down from the sky to ransack the house and drive out the merry band of circus midgets who'd taken shelter there. He liked that version, actually.

Clara turned away from the house, finally, with a shy look of heartbreak, and silently headed back the way they'd come. Strock took one last look at the ruins, gripped his cane, and followed behind.

By the time they were back inside, he was wringing wet from the exertion. Strange, he thought, how even sunset and the ocean wind didn't cool things much. He thumped back to his room, gripped by a sudden need to lie down. His thoughts squalled, he felt dizzy and weak and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he saw Clara's silhouette in the doorway. At last, he thought, here comes that good thing. She was holding a bowl, though, and from clear across the room he could smell the rough tang of wood alcohol. She padded forward and knelt beside his bed. First soaking a cloth in the spiked water, then wringing it out, she began a sponge bath—gently mopping his brow, wiping his face and neck and throat, his arms and hands, his feet. Her touch was intimate but not erotic and she avoided his glance, removing any hint of seduction—on top of which the smell of the alcohol gave the procedure a distinctly medicinal taint. More peculiar than that, though, was his own lack of arousal. The heat, maybe, or his spinning head. He considered testing it, removing his shirt to see where that might lead. When he reached for the first button, though, she rose, whispered something that sounded prim, and turned to go, leaving the bowl and cloth behind so he could finish by himself.

23

Malvasio stood in a dirt-floored hut on the edge of the mangrove swamp, watching a
bruja
stir her decoction of
espino ruco
and
tolu balsa
in a tin pot over a wood fire. The grimy cowboy with his broken nose and the fork in his throat sat on a stool, awaiting her care.

The
bruja
wore a T-shirt and jeans and a Red Sox cap over short black hair that looked like she cut it with a pocketknife, her skin the color of tree bark and her face gnarled up and sunken from age and long-lost teeth. Her limbs were as thin and knobby as kindling. She claimed to be from Izalco—to Salvadoran witches what Paris is to chefs—but Malvasio suspected that was just marketing. Waving one skeletal hand dreamily in the air, she stirred her repulsive goop with the other and murmured a chant in a language Malvasio presumed to be a dialect of Nahuatl. Her eyes rolled back in her head at times, a great trick. She was laying it on.

People called her La Ciguanaba, which meant “river woman” and referred to a folklore creature similar to Medusa—a woman who seems beautiful from a distance, washing her hair by the side of a stream, until you venture too close, at which point she lifts her head and exposes a face so unspeakably hideous it unhinges your mind. Malvasio simply called her
señora
and she seemed okay with that.

As for the cowboy, the fork in his throat was held fast with a swath of cellophane Malvasio had applied at the restaurant in San Marcelino. By some bizarre chance he'd missed the carotid artery—otherwise the guy would be dead already—and the cellophane wrap had stopped the external bleeding and had helped seal the cowboy's trachea so he could breathe, which he did through his mouth, his nose being flat as a sponge. The internal bleeding, though, remained unchecked and there was no telling what the damage was there—not without getting the guy to a proper clinic, which wasn't going to happen.

The cowboy coughed a lot, not just from the smoke of the
bruja's
fire and the woody, putrid stench of her folksy medicinal stew but from the blood bubbling in his throat and trickling down his windpipe into his lungs. His eyes still flared with panic but he was woozy, fighting unconsciousness, so his terror had a helpless, soulful quality and it almost made Malvasio pity him.

The cowboy's sidekick hunched in the doorway, clutching a bottle of La Tenzuda and murmuring prayers and incantations and assurances that it would all be fine, all of it:
“Todo, chero, todo.”
He had fifty dollars in his pocket, his payoff from Malvasio, with promise of another fifty on the back end. He could afford to be nice.

The levels we sink to, Malvasio thought, meaning not just the sidekick but himself.

When he replayed the scene at the restaurant in his head, he could pinpoint the spot when he should have said:
Whoa, horsey
. But something about Ray's kid, the backwash of feeling that sludged up from nowhere and the righteous Tom Sawyer indignation the kid gave off like a smell, it just galled him. You think you know yourself, you've got your weaknesses cataloged, you're in charge of your own mind—but then something sneaks under the skin and you're watching yourself like it's somebody else and by the time you get a grip, the thing is done. The guy's stabbed—by you—with a fork. Because you wanted to say:
I'll tell you a real story now about your old man, you snotty little prick, about the time he slammed his nightstick into his whore girlfriend's throat because she mocked his meat, called him Sergeant McMannish
. That was the subtext, as they say, but you kept that to yourself and resorted to a little show-and-tell instead. And the next thing you know, you're wrapping the guy's neck in cellophane and telling the cook and the waiters to stay cool, pretend nothing happened, then you're paying off the cowboy's pal to keep him quiet and so he'll help you get the guy out of there and into the van, and then you're on the edge of a swamp full of pelicans and four-eyed fish, standing in the foul, airless hut of some goofball Indian witch and you're thinking: This is why your old man handed you a hundred bucks when you graduated from high school, saying,
I'm tired of your mouth. Tired of your stealing from your mother and me. Pack up and get out
.