Blood of Paradise (4 page)

Like I couldn't tell my parents' marriage was a disaster, Jude thought. “But a hooker?”

“Would it feel any less insulting if he'd taken up with a woman he could've actually started over with? Think about it.”

Jude didn't need to. Besides, it wasn't really the who or the how bad of the infidelity troubling him. It just underscored how much, after all these years, he still didn't know, and how naked he felt having to rely on Malvasio to tell him—at which point he suffered one last twinge of distrust. It dawned on him that what he'd just sat through, all of it, might be nothing more than some kind of elaborate windup. He prepared himself for the pitch.

It didn't come. Instead, Malvasio stood up and, noticing Jude's beer was only half-gone, said, “I'm going down to kick the kidneys. You want to trade that for a cold one?”

Jude looked at his bottle. “I guess I'll finish this.”

“Meaning no?”

“No. I mean, yeah, I'll take one. Thanks.”

Jude watched Malvasio walk away, thinking: Sure. It must've been easy, blaming him for everything. And have I done anything much different? The meagerness came back, it felt wrong, and so, as Malvasio reached the stairway down, Jude called out, “Bill. I'm sorry if this … I'm sorry if I've made this here, between you and me, edgier than it needed to be. But you gotta understand, things went to hell for me and my sister and, yeah, even my mother, because of all this. And nobody, not one person, ever sat down and talked about what happened. Not so it ever made sense. So if I've come off a little half-cocked, whatever—like I said, I'm sorry.”

Malvasio glanced over his shoulder with a look of puzzlement that softened into a pained smile. “You've got nothing to be sorry about,” he said, then headed downstairs.

3

With sunset, shadows grew fat in the open-air dining room. Outside, the palm fronds and almond leaves whispered in a languid wind. Jude, sitting alone as he waited for Malvasio to return from downstairs, watched Paulo the waiter reappear, carrying a box of wood matches. Shortly the room was dotted with reddish pools of candlelight, shadows trembling up the whitewashed pillars, across the ceiling. It made Jude think of church and that just labored his mood all the more, until memory served up the ten-year-old recollection he'd been trying to keep at bay ever since he'd first heard Malvasio's voice on his cell phone.

It was the day before Thanksgiving and he was living with his aunt and uncle by then, to keep the family peace. His mother called, not to wish him well but to inform him that Fish and Game had telephoned to report they'd found his father's boat drifting out on Rend Lake—casting rod and tackle box aboard, a couple bass in the ice chest, plus two drained fifths of Early Times tossed under the seat. Mother opted out of further involvement—she'd hired a lawyer and filed for divorce by that point—so it was left to Jude and his uncle to respond when, four days later, a floater washed up. The body had gotten snarled, somehow, underwater.

They drove downstate for the identification. The morgue was in the basement of the county hospital, and the folksy staffer on duty led them to the fridge unit, slid the tray out, and unzipped the bag. The stench buckled Jude over and it took willpower to move closer. A faceless maw of waterlogged meat, scummy bone, and oddly pristine hair looked back. He knew if he retched he'd cry and vice versa so he battened down. In the end it was the personal effects, the wedding band and wristwatch in particular, that sealed the ID.

That night, back at his aunt and uncle's, Jude went to his room, unable to eat or even talk to anyone, until the exhaustion of the day took its toll and he drifted off into an edgy sleep. Around midnight, a nightmare woke him in which he was the one drowning and he shot up in bed, thinking: No. I am not my father. That thought stayed with him the rest of the night as the hours crawled past. And as he lay there, he realized he wasn't grieving just for the life lost but for the life that would never be, the day when his father stepped up, came clean, about all of it. Because you don't dive—or totter or slip or whatever—blind drunk into frigid water without a vest when all that's bothering your conscience is inflated overtime and some creative writing on incident reports. But the rest of the story disappeared with the old man himself, and that would never change, never get clearer, never come whole, and that drumbeat of
never
haunted everything.

Until tonight.

Jude still felt a little stunned at what he'd just sat through. There'd been enough admissions against self-interest and sufficient acceptance of guilt, as a lawyer might put it, to make Malvasio's story feel credible. Not that every detail could be taken to the bank, Jude supposed, but he had to admit he felt more convinced than not. Regardless, the man earned points for being willing to come here, square off across the table, and talk about it. It was something Jude's father had never done.

But something else was going on too. For lack of a better way to put it, Jude felt gratified. Some sort of psychological shift was taking place, the old rancor yielding to a new relief. The things that had happened all those years ago weren't, as it turned out, as unforgivable as he'd feared. It was the silence that had blown them out of all proportion, creating a darkness onto which every manner of sick deed and vicious impulse could be projected.

The thing about the call girl, even though it had come out of the blue, seemed not so startling with a little reflection. The old man had checked out of his marriage years before, going through the motions at best—at worst, tearing into his wife, and she ripping right back into him. Malvasio was right: a little company, a little affection, who didn't crave that? And where else would the old man meet somebody but on the job, and given he was a cop, who was he most likely to meet? He didn't walk out on his family, not until everything else came crashing down, at which point he was doing everybody a favor.

As for the Winters deal, even that seemed justified. Jude could imagine himself doing the exact same thing Malvasio had done—kill or be killed—knowing full well the self-defense was tinged with more than a little vengeful satisfaction. How could it not be? That didn't make it evil, just human. And why stick around if you knew it meant taking the fall for more than you'd actually done? Why martyr yourself for someone else's agenda?

All of which meant Jude had spent ten years indulging a righteous, bitchy monologue of grievance that now seemed largely beside the point. And now that the Laugh Masters seemed brought down to size, his resentments felt small as well.

As for the possible ramifications if anyone—his employer, for example, or the authorities—found out he'd agreed to meet like this? It would take some thinking, but there were ways around that. He knew it was dubious judgment, being there, but hardly illegal. He had a right to his private life, they couldn't begrudge him that. Nothing Malvasio had said suggested he was into anything wrong (though the line got blurry down here), and all the old stuff was exactly that: old. If push came to shove, he could always cook up a story, tell whoever was curious that Malvasio told him all the old charges against him were taken care of, a deal with the government. How am I supposed to know otherwise? There, Jude thought. Simple. Always a way to work things out if you just take time to think things through.

Malvasio returned with two cold Pilseners and sat back down, glancing around at the empty room dotted with shuddering candlelight. “Looks like somebody died.” Before Jude could comment, Malvasio added, “I may not have said this yet, but even if I have, it bears repeating—I appreciate your being here. I can only imagine what's going through your skull, sitting with me like this. It takes some nerve and, I dunno, grace maybe. I just want you to know I'm grateful.”

Jude could feel his face warming. Good Lord, he thought, don't blush. “Thanks,” he said.

“Not a problem.” Malvasio sipped his beer. His eyes warmed. “If you don't mind, I'm bored with me. What say we talk about you for a while?”

“Like how?”

“Like tell me how you ended up here.”

Penetrating question, Jude thought. And it just stirred up other questions, like: Where to start? What to leave out?

After his father died, things went wrong in a way Jude couldn't make right. Skidding between numbness and blistering rage, he made it past the holidays through sheer force of will and a knack for hiding, but he could feel it, the ticking bomb inside. It drove him a little nuts—he lost sleep, lost weight. Even little things became torture. Every time he walked away from one more botched conversation, he could feel the eyes boring into his back.

But he saw no point telling Malvasio any of that.

“I came down here when I was in the army,” he said.

“Army. Really. When'd you join up?”

“Senior year.”

“You mean after graduation.”

“No. I dropped out.”

Malvasio looked at him as though he hadn't heard right. “Dropped out?”

“It's a long story.”

“So bore me.”

“No, I just—”

“You were scholarship material last I heard, full ride, Notre Dame, Big Ten.”

“I didn't play football senior year.”

He might as well have said he'd run away to be a dancer.

“Okay, stop the car.” Malvasio sat back, looking like he was mentally counting to ten. “Tell me what happened.”

Go ahead, Jude thought. But all the words he might have used to explain things felt just out of reach. He hid behind a shrug. “I don't know what to tell you.”

Malvasio reached out suddenly and gripped Jude's arm. The touch was manly but not weird. And strangely welcome. Their glances met.

“I mean, if you don't want to, I understand. But I'd like to hear about it.”

Another layer of resistance gave way, Jude felt it, but he still couldn't quite unscramble his words. He felt like he was handing up a puzzle.

“It was about two weeks after New Year's, I guess. Yeah. Freezing cold, I remember that. Walked into the recruitment center in Joliet and said, ‘I'm ready. Sign me up.' The sergeant on duty smelled something wrong. I was a little bottled up, I guess. After I left he called the house, the sergeant I mean, found out what had happened, with Dad and all. I came back with my application all filled out the next day and he just put it aside. ‘Son,' he says, ‘you seem wound a little tight to me. I don't want to hear back in a few months that something happened in BCT and there's two guys involved, one's in irons, the other's dead, and I get to guess which one is you.'”

Malvasio lifted one eyebrow a notch. “And you said?”

“I told him, ‘I'm not a hothead. I'm not a fool. And I can take anything you or anybody else can dish out. Watch me.'”

The curiosity in Malvasio's expression dimmed a little, replaced by an odd regret. He shook his head, repeating, “You dropped out.” Then: “Wait—why Joliet?”

“I was living with my aunt and uncle then.”

Malvasio's face softened. “Why?”

Jude wondered, again, if there was much point getting into all that. “I was the only one left. Dad moved out right after the arrests, Colleen went off to Madison with her scholarship. And I didn't get along with my mom too well.”

“Nobody did,” Malvasio said.

“Yeah. That seems to be the consensus.”

“The original Midwestern shrew, that woman—unhappy in marriage, indifferent in motherhood, with a daughter who reminded her too much of herself and a son who reminded her too much of her husband.”

“You saw all that?”

“I'm a lot of things. Blind isn't one of them.”

Jude flashed on the day his mother had told him he'd be living elsewhere until things got “sorted out.” It was clear from the way she said it that she wouldn't mind terribly if he stayed away for good. And for the first time, Jude worked up the nerve to say: “I can understand why you're ashamed. But why are you ashamed of me?”

“So,” Malvasio prompted, “you ran away and joined the army.”

“Yeah, I chose carpentry and masonry specialist for my MOS, always liked that kind of work. I ended up with the 536th Engineer Battalion out of Fort Kobbe in Panama. We did a joint training exercise with the Salvadoran army and that's how I ended up here. First time, anyway. We put up some bridges, dug some wells, built a few clinics.” At the time, he'd puzzled over the coincidence of getting sent here, of all places, given the rumors about Malvasio. It seemed a kind of paradox: No matter how far or fast you run, the echoes are always right there behind you. “We got sent back in again after Hurricane Mitch, choppered in food and clothing, helped rebuild roads, handed out water purification kits. Did the same thing all over again when the earthquakes hit in 2001.”

“Maybe I'm missing something,” Malvasio said, “but that's a far cry from what you do now.”

“I'm getting there,” Jude said. “End of my second tour, while I was up here after the earthquakes, me and a couple guys in my unit went barhopping in the Zona Rosa. I met a guy at Los Rinconcitos named Jim Leonhard, an EP with Trenton Service Consortium, this security firm out of L.A.? We hit it off, Americans abroad, that whole thing, but when I told him I was the son of a cop—I didn't tell him everything, naturally—he damn near creamed. Boom, I got recruited. Hard. And after a few more beers on the company tab, I figured, Why not? I was tired of the army, bored with construction work, and I liked it here. I don't know how you feel about it, but there's an odd attraction to the place. It's beautiful in places and ugly as a slum in others, but the people are great by and large. I mean things are fucked up too. God knows. I wouldn't have a job if they weren't. Anyway, I signed up for training at Heckler and Koch, learned the basics, boned up on my Spanish, and earned a black belt in Krav Maga. Leonhard stuck in a good word and Trenton took me on. I still get sent around to here or there, but clients like it when they know you've got a handle on a particular place. By and large I've been here, in El Salvador, pretty steady the past two years. Feels like home.”