Blood of Paradise (5 page)

They talked for another half hour, Jude confiding things he'd kept bottled up for years, wondering at that but glad to have someone to talk to who knew the family story and wouldn't judge. Malvasio chimed in, telling Jude things about his father that cast the whole Laugh Master debacle in a kinder light. Finally, the back-and-forth petered out and Malvasio sat back, drifting away into thought. His features sharpened in the candlelight, his dark eyes shone.

In time, he said, “I like hearing about your life. It's good to see you've done well, given how tough it was for you. Especially since I had no small part in it being that tough. I'm sorry. I haven't said that straight out yet, so there. Long overdue.”

Again, Jude struggled for words. How long had he wanted someone to say no more than that? “Yeah,” he said. “It's been interesting.”

“We could do it again sometime,” Malvasio said. “I mean, if you're up for that.”

4

Jude had nine more days of free time before returning to work, and suddenly two new people in his life to spend it with. Or so he thought.

Hoping Eileen would materialize, he spent the first three days back at Playa El Zonte, surfing at dawn and in the late afternoon, lazing away the long, hot midday hours in the same hammock, struggling through Manlio Argueta's
Cuzcatlan
, and hoping he'd impress her if she caught him reading it. He would've liked a better plan than just sitting there waiting, but he had to hope that she'd felt what he'd felt, that spark, and would circle back again, wanting to reconnect the same way he did. After three days, though, he had to give that up and go on the hunt.

He ventured as far west as Punta Remedios and Playa Los Cabanos—hanging out with the off-season tourists and Eurotrash vagabonds, scouring the near-empty beaches, waiting—then back east to check in at Playa El Tunco, Playa Conchalio, plus all the places they'd bumped into each other before: Santa María Mizata, Playa El Sunzal, the pier at La Libertad. He practiced the nonchalant greeting he'd use if he actually did find her, even as he chided himself for not finding out where she was staying, getting a number where he could reach her. Ask questions, he thought. You want to hook up with someone, ask questions. Idiot.

He kept his hope alive by remembering the way she'd looked when he'd seen her last, the polka-dot halter and broad-rimmed hat, her tan-lined back, that moment of unwitting nakedness when she'd slipped off her glasses, while his thoughts became haunted by that smoky bedroom voice of hers. If she wasn't the love of his life, she'd at least become the focus of an ardent obsession. The harder he looked, the more intense the need to see her became and the worse it felt when he didn't, until the only solace he could muster was the irony that now he was the one with a devotion to vanishing things.

His newfound connection with Malvasio proved less problematic, logistically anyway. They met twice more over those same nine days, always in San Marcelino. Jude told no one about the meetings, and Malvasio came and went with a nonchalance that underscored how well-connected he'd become. Jude surmised it was likely they even knew some of the same people, the country being what it was, but they shied away from discussing that, preferring to reminisce, Malvasio increasingly open about his days as a street cop in Chicago. Jude couldn't help wondering at times what life might have been like had his father sat with him like this, opened up, but quickly he'd shoo the notion away, thinking it was as pointless as wishing he'd been born on a different planet.

At the end of his furlough Jude returned to work and the tunnel vision it required, shepherding his hydrologist, Axel Odelberg, from place to place: ANDA headquarters in the capital, the bottling plant out east near San Bartolo Oriente, the test wells along the Río Conacastal. Secretly, he prepared for an unforeseen encounter with Malvasio, wanting to make sure neither of them drew attention to the other, not wanting to have to come up with an explanation on the spot. But they never crossed paths, not until his twenty days were up, when his time was once again his own and he returned to the restaurant in San Marcelino for another get-together.

They dined on shrimp creole with
casamiento
, a rice and bean dish spiced with hot peppers, washing it down with cold Pilsener. The sunset drained its reds and golds into the ocean as they ate, the trilling of
chiquirines
and the muffled roar of the surf a steady background. After the waiter cleared their plates, Malvasio reached into his back pocket and withdrew a worn plastic envelope that he shook open. A dozen or so photographs tumbled out and he shuffled them into a stack. “Time for a little show-and-tell,” he said.

He selected one from the group, spun it across the table. Picking it up, Jude saw Malvasio and Jude's father in waders with their fishing gear, standing to each side of a Latino man holding a pole of his own. They stood at the end of a dock somewhere, all sunglasses and smiles.

“That was up at Lake Darling,” Malvasio said. “Fourth of July, year before the arrests. The man in the middle—his name is Ovidio Morales.”

Jude caught the import instantly: a name. He studied the stranger's face more intently. “He's the man who helped you out when you ran down here.” He felt puzzled—Malvasio had made such a point of protecting the man's identity before. He handed the picture back. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I feel I can trust you now.” Malvasio gave Jude a disarming smile, then slipped the photo back into the stack. He took out another and handed it across the table. “I keep bringing up Candyman. You remember him, right? Phil Strock.”

The picture was much the same as the first, three amigos, except the lineup was different and Soldier Field provided the backdrop. Jude's dad was in the middle this time, Strock to his left, Malvasio his right. All three in their blues, happy as coots, some kind of game-day duty. Three strapping cops. The Laugh Masters.

“I remember all you guys,” Jude said. He tried to hand the picture back.

Malvasio didn't reach for it. “I've still got friends back in Chicago. Well, ‘friends' might be a stretch. Guys who don't automatically slam down the phone when I call, which isn't often, I admit. Any event, I hear Candyman's dropped out of sight. And if somebody actually does cross his path, they say he looks awful.”

Jude set the picture down, finally, on the table. “That surprise you?”

“What do you mean?”

“He got booted off the force and it's not like that was a secret. Who's gonna hire him? And he had that problem with his leg, the torn-up knee. Hear he's almost crippled. He gave up any claim to disability in the deal he struck with IAD. My guess is he's been on welfare or SSI or what-have-you for ten years, and the prospects there are pretty slim these days.”

“Yeah.” Malvasio nodded, staring at the picture. “You got a point.” He seemed distracted. “But that kinda brings me around to something I was thinking about. Something that's come up. I've got a line on some work for Phil, if he's up for it.”

Jude heard a commotion outside. Looking down, he saw an old man drawing a handcart with an oil drum lashed to its bed. Two stray dogs were nipping at his pant legs, and Jude watched as the old man fended the dogs off with a switch. Turning back to Malvasio, he shrugged. “That sounds good. Work, I mean.”

Malvasio laughed. “Not that simple. If Phil ever got wind I so much as had a hand in doing him a favor, he'd hunt me down and set me on fire just so he could put me out with his piss.”

“You think he blames you for what happened.”

“Not think. Know.”

“Lot of time's gone by. Maybe he's mellowed out.”

“Mellow and the Candyman don't mix. The man knows how to milk a grudge. That ain't changed from what I hear. If anything, it's gotten worse if he's drinking the way they say.”

Jude glanced down at the snapshot again. Strock wasn't the most handsome of the three, Malvasio was, Jude's dad a close second, but Strock had something about him. The slack smile, the sleepy eyelids. Lady-killer. “Why bother helping him then?”

“Because I owe him. I'd do the same for your dad if I could.” Malvasio let that sink in for a moment, then: “Any event, that's why I need your help.”

Jude glanced up. “Excuse me?”

“When's your next trip home?”

“I'm on the front end of ten days off. I wasn't planning—”

“I'll pay for your plane fare. I'm serious. Plus pocket money.” He took a roll of bills from his pocket and started peeling off hundreds. He didn't stop till he reached fifty. Five thousand dollars.

“I'd like you to try and find him for me. Talk him into coming down, if you can. Ovidio has a friend with a construction company that needs to hire a man with Candyman's skills—he was one of the best snipers SWAT had, I don't know if you knew that. The work site's kinda remote and it's huge, hard to walk the perimeter. Thieves'll walk off with the barbed wire if you're not looking, let alone what's inside. The company wants to put a gunman with a scope in a tower, which is perfect for Phil. But like I said, no mention of me.”

Jude eyed the money. “Tell me we're not talking about an airstrip.”

Malvasio's expression went from puzzled to bemused. Then he laughed. “You serious?”

The U.S. Navy had one of the best radar installations in the hemisphere at Comalapa, but it did no good to track a plane and even pinpoint its landing coordinates if the local police couldn't get judicial authority to raid the property. Corruption being what it was here, that kind of authority was virtually unheard of if the location was owned by a prominent landholder. It raised the question, again, of who exactly Malvasio worked for.

“The way you described it—”

“It's a series of dormitories for the workers on a coffee plantation up in the highlands, near the Tecapa volcano.”

The region, near the city of Berlín, was called the Valle Agua Caliente. It was known for its coffee production.

“Bill—”

“Here, I'll show you.”

Malvasio flipped through the thin stack of pictures again and pulled out another for Jude to see. With the volcano looming darkly in the background, tidy rows of coffee trees, both
pacamara
and the smaller
bourbon
varieties, thick with berries, crosshatched a sun-swept valley. Only 2 percent of the rain forest remained, due to clear-cutting for plantations like this—coffee, sugar, cotton, rubber, bananas. But that didn't make it criminal. A sprawling array of concrete slabs—for housing, Jude supposed—lay in the foreground acreage, surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

Jude felt sheepish. “Okay. Sorry.” He handed the photo back.

“No problem. I'd be skeptical too. I mean, I realize it's a lot to ask. Given the history, let's call it. You don't owe me a thing.”

“I just—”

“There aren't many second chances in life, okay? Not when you've done what we did. I've been lucky. I'd like to share a little of that luck with Phil. If I can just get him down here.”

Jude realized someone standing outside the situation might think saying no should be easy. He didn't have to be drastic about it, call the embassy, turn Malvasio in. Still, it took him several seconds to manage, “No hard feelings. But I think I'll pass.”

Malvasio studied him a moment, as though his gaze might change Jude's mind. When that didn't happen, he collected his money and shuffled it back into a tidy stack. “Fair enough.”

“I don't mean to be—”

Malvasio held up his hand. “No need to explain. Just an idea. Maybe I can work it out some other way.”

“I'm sorry.”

Malvasio sipped his beer and looked off. The silence, to Jude, felt excruciating. He wasn't sure why. “It's possible,” he said, “I could call around next time I'm up in Chicago, ask around, let you know if—”

“Can I ask you something?” Malvasio's tone was cool but not hostile. “Your principal, you told me he's working on water usage for a soft drink plant out east somewhere?”

“San Bartolo Oriente. The plant's on the Río Conacastal.”

“Do you know who the investors in that operation are?”

“Specifically?”

“Do you know,” Malvasio repeated, “who they are?”

“That's not really my area,” Jude said.

“So for all you know, the people involved in your hydrologist's project could be the worst of the worst down here. The oligarch goons who funded the death squads and all that hairy horseshit. Correct? Or am I missing something?”

Jude didn't care for the direction this was headed. “No,” he said. “Probably not.”

“It's the price you pay. Doing what we do. Here. You want innocent, move on.”

“Yeah,” Jude said. “There's always that chance.”

Malvasio laced his fingers together, then tapped his thumbs against his chin. “You said you came down here while you were in the army. Built things—schools, clinics, bridges. Seem real proud of that. But the
salvadoreños
you worked with, helped train, who knows? If things take a turn down here, as they almost certainly will, those guys you helped train may end up building some things you want no part of. Places where people disappear, for instance.”

“Bill—”

“What I'm saying is, the people who run the show have one thing on their minds and it ain't playing nice. They may wave the flag, talk democracy, pimp prosperity or whatever, but the bottom line's the bottom line: me first and money talks. Just how it is, how it's always been, always will be. And guys like you and me don't have a say in the matter. We just do what we can the best we can, stick up for the people we care about, and if we fuck up, as we invariably do, we try to make good for the people we've screwed, which is the best we can offer. Life in a nutshell. Same for cops and soldiers everywhere—you, me, everybody.” Malvasio gathered up his money and put it away. He took a deep breath. “Look, sorry. I don't mean to put you on the spot.”