The Jaguar

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Is it?”

  Erin sipped more of the drink. It was the first alcohol she’d had in two months and the powerful tequila went quickly to her head. She watched Edgar Ciel and his retinue of young novices making their way along the edge of the canopy. There were four of them now, two boys and two girls. Ciel stopped at a group of the wealthy and it parted for him and the women kissed his hand and the men bowed.

  “Why do you put yourself in the middle of all this?”

  “Mike asked me to come here.”

  “To become Armenta’s mistress and confidante.”

  “It’s the confidante that Mike wants.”

  “But why? What does he care what happens down here?”

  “He cares what happens everywhere, Erin. You’ve seen how curious he is about everything. And everyone. In the years I’ve known him I’ve yet to find something or someone he isn’t interested in. He makes friends in minutes and keeps them for life. He gets so wrapped in people and their worlds that he can go a week without sleep, helping out one friend, then going on to help out another, and not show any effects from it. He reads books in a dozen languages. He gives them to universities and libraries when he’s done. Hundreds of them every year. He never forgets, even the smallest things stay with him, and he can call up a memory in high, high resolution.”

  Erin could hear the admiration in Owens’s voice. She saw the dilation of her pupils—pride in Mike, she thought. Her boss, father, brother, friend. Her reason to live. And to sleep with a narcotics trafficker and murderer.

  “So, that’s why I’m here in the middle of all this,” said Owens. “I know it can seem cruel and barbaric sometimes. That’s what I thought at first. But Mike’s world is full of people and music and art and history and incredible energy.”

  “Mike’s world? Not Benjamin’s?”

  “It’s the same, Erin. Mike has known Benjamin since he was born. Did you know that Benjamin was named Mexico’s third richest man by Forbes magazine? That he donates scores of millions of dollars a year to the Legion of Christ? That his great-grandfather fought with Zapata?”

  “I know he threw an innocent man to the leopards. I know he plans to skin me alive if he doesn’t get my husband’s money in four days. So how can his alleged greatness mean anything to me? I’m supposed to be impressed by him because Forbes magazine is?”

  “You’re an artist so you see things differently. You have to simplify things into songs. So the things you can’t simplify you don’t see. You make beauty, Erin. What you do is important. But it’s not the world. It’s only part of the world. What you see here is another part of it, in all its glory and its pain.”

  “I’ll stick with music.”

  “You have no choice. You were born to it. Mike said some people are born prone to do certain things and I believe him. He said that you are one of the great surprises of his life. He searched out Suzanne Jones. He found Bradley. And he found you too. He says that truly great men and women are not often found together. That’s why we’re helping you communicate.”

  “What if Benjamin knew?”

  Owens gave her a gray-eyed stare and ran a fingernail across her throat.

  As if on cue Armenta turned to look at them. Erin saw the happy smile come to his face when he looked at Owens, and when he looked at Erin she saw it grow stronger. He raised his hand to his mouth and kissed the air like a chef pleased with a sauce. Saturnino looked at her too, with a smile of a different nature, one that momentarily gutted her courage and made her look away in anger and shame. She wished she had the Cowboy Defender taped to her leg but she did not. It had come to seem increasingly useless.

  The Jaguars of Veracruz took the stage at ten o’clock, by which time Erin had seen scores of gallons of alcohol consumed by the crowd of roughly one thousand people. The air hung heavy and sweet with mota smoked mostly from joints but there were pipes and bongs and huge Jamaican-style spliffs being shared too, and beautiful dinner plates piled high with fluffy cocaine being passed around from guest to guest, and they used everything from rolled currency to fingernails to bread knives in order to shovel the stuff home before the plate was passed along or set down and forgotten or spilled and refilled by whomever from a shiny new galvanized thirty-gallon trash can next to the beer kegs.

  The Jaguars wore their trademark black satin suits with orange piping and elaborate multicolored embroidery on the shoulders. Their shirts were black. Erin felt swept up in their energy as they took their positions and instruments. She clapped hard but could barely hear her own hands within the riotous tumult of the crowd. When the music started the crowd let out a huge round of applause, then quickly quieted to hear the story.

  Story, thought Erin. The Jaguars always tell stories. Tell me a story that will take me away from here. That’s what you’re doing for everyone else.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and listened to the music. The Jaguars were led by Caesar Llanes, who had a frontal, penetrating voice and a strong vibrato that he used to sustain his notes. She had seen the Jaguars perform live but she was struck anew not only by their taut, bright musicianship, but by the emotional level that Caesar brought to each song. He made the words sound so important not by hiking up his voice but by taking it down just a little, making it sound almost factual to better serve the story. The songs were mainly up-tempo, but on the less urgent ones Caesar would roam the stage randomly, delivering the lines as if he were just now making them up. Really, she thought, he does very little. And makes it count for so much. The beautiful black-and-yellow accordion swung in for a fill between the verses and Erin caught herself smiling.

  The song was a narcocorrido about a couple of young drug runners who die in a hail of bullets fired by American DEA agents in a dusty border town. It was upbeat but haunted by its inevitable catastrophe. She had heard that the narcos commissioned such songs to be written about themselves and their exploits, each cartel boss hoping for a bigger hit song than that of his rivals. Stories again, she thought: sing me a story. She’d also read that the Jaguars sorted through the thousands of letters that came to them or were thrown up onto the stage at each performance, every one a story, most of them true, and they chose the best ones and wrote their songs around them. Erin looked into the crowd and found Armenta and she saw his woebegone face looking up at Caesar as if he was hypnotized.

  “He listens to music most hours of the day,” said Owens. “He sleeps to music. All that hair of his? He uses it to hide the ear buds. He’s always got an iPod hidden on him somewhere. He strolls around the Castle looking so intense and forbidding but he’s almost always listening to music. He wears elaborate disguises and attends concerts around the world.”

  “He looks afraid right now.”

  “His greatest fear is of being betrayed by his own men.”

  “He scares me no matter how afraid he is. But he doesn’t scare me as much as his son does.”

  “Stay far away from him.”

  “He threatened to rape me.”

  “Benjamin took his key. You’re safe in your room.”

  “How can you be safe in a room where everyone knows where to find you? How hard is it for Saturnino to steal a key?”

  “Benjamin rebuked him. Strongly. It’s not the key that stands between you and Saturnino. It’s his father.”

  “The head of the Gulf Cartel.”

  “Let’s go sit with him.”

  “No. Stay here with me. I’m your responsibility, remember? And I can’t be that close to his son.”

  By midnight the wind was slashing through the palm trees and the tent rippled violently to and fro against the tethers and the rain slanted through the open walls. The crowd roared just to be heard and for a moment the Jaguars huddled together back by the drum set, then they nodded and broke the huddle. Erin watched Caesar come back to center stage and peer into the lights until he found her.

  —Erin, would you like to join us for some music? And please,
we beg Benjamin to come up here and play the accordion for us! Come now, before the world blows away!

  Another blast of wind and roar of voices and Erin found herself pushed forward by Owens and Armenta, then Caesar had stepped off the stage to offer her his hand and Armenta handed her up and followed.

  Caesar unshackled himself from his splendid accordion and handed it to Armenta, then the Jaguars began their first huge hit, “Ballad of the Red Road.” This too was a drug story but it focused on a betrayal by alleged friends. Erin had first heard it twenty years ago and long ago committed it to her singer’s memory, a memory that was easily engaged and practically flawless. She laid back and sang harmony and tried to let the music get inside her. Caesar sang and Armenta played much better than Erin had expected, full bodied and melodic. Next they played Linda Ronstadt’s “Adios” sped up to the pace of a Mexican bolero, trading verses while Armenta chimed away happily with the accordion. To Erin’s ear it had a kind of daft charm but when it was over the crowd rose in ovation, though some of the first to rise with such appreciation were also the first to fall over drunk. Then the Jaguars burst into one of their new songs and Erin was utterly lost in it but she managed a harmony that fit the chorus nicely and the audience was beginning to rise for still another ovation when the wind finally ripped the tent off its stanchions and the pooled rainwater cascaded down through the lights, drenching everyone.

  Erin crumpled under the weight of the soaked canvas. She rose to her knees and felt no pain so she swam forward through the clinging material until she reached an edge and lifted it, which allowed it to catch the next blast of wind and suddenly she was standing on the stage with the Jaguars, who were all emerging from the drenched sheet in their black-and-yellow blazers and black shirts with dazed smiles on their faces.

  Then Caesar’s amplifier began throwing sparks. He dropped his mic to the watery floor and strode off regally as the amplifier exploded into a cloud of white smoke. Manny the guitar player shucked his instrument a second later and so did the bass player, then both of them ran off stage. Overhead the stage lights popped and the glass rained down and a moment later the generators in the basement offered a series of muffled explosions and suddenly the world was dark.

  The crowd roared but Erin couldn’t tell if it was in disappointment or fear or even the spirit of adventure. She stepped off the stage and in the slight moonlight she could make out the politicians and their wives making for their vehicles and the policemen hustling off for their own and the media people seemingly uncertain what to do without cameras or microphones. Scores more were raiding the bar and the trash can full of cocaine and she saw the gaunt figure of Edgar Ciel gliding through the crowd, his four novitiates fanned out behind him. Armenta jumped onto the stage and started yelling. A group of armed guards detached and ran toward the Castle basement. Owens stood shivering with her arms around herself with the rain pelting down and she was looking up to the sky with a smile on her lovely face.

  Erin stole down the walkway alongside the Castle, which in a moment brought her to the pigeon coop where the birds stood dry in the overhang and oddly unruffled by the storm. She walked by them and around a corner to the zoo and she could see that the grates were up and the big cats were visible in their shaded runs, the tigers pacing and the lions lying half awake with their tails twitching and the leopards sleeping big-bellied through all the excitement.

  She cut across the clearing to the edge of the jungle and stood still. She saw the headlights of the vehicles crisscrossing in the darkness and she memorized the location, then ducked her way into the wet dark. The branches tugged at her hair and clothes, and the floor was covered with hard roots and some of them were exposed and grabbed at her boots. It was surprisingly cool. She pulled herself through in the direction of the headlights. The lower leaves and fronds dumped their collected rain onto her as she climbed along, lifting her feet high to keep the roots from dragging her down, and she imagined snakes waiting down there to strike and wondered if Jimmy Choo boots were snake-proof but bet not.

  At the edge of the parking area she crouched behind a cluster of sea grape. She watched the cars jockey toward the one narrow exit road. Most of them had their windows down and the people sang and yelled and threw beer cans at each other while their stereos blasted away, mostly the Jaguars, but Erin could also hear Fabian Ortega and Los Tucanes de Tijuana and Ry Cooder and Luis Miguel and Julieta Venegas.

  She stood on trembling legs, then stepped from the foliage into the parking area. Look calm, she thought. Look assured. Surely, someone will give the gringa singer a ride to town. She approached the SUV and held her hand against the door and saw that it was one of the mayors and his wife and she addressed them in her able Spanish.

  —I need to go to town.

  —You are a guest of Benjamin.

  —I need medicine from the pharmacy in the morning.

  —But he can have it brought to you.

  —Please, can I get in?

  —We cannot interfere. You must talk to the boss.

  She grabbed the back-door handle but she heard the click of the locks going down and then the mayor’s window rose and closed and the vehicle jumped forward. The front tires dropped into a rain-filled pothole, which threw muddy water against her knees and she could feel the grit of the dirt as the water washed down her calves and into her boots.

  She splashed her way to the next vehicle, a late-model Mercedes sedan. The windows were up and the brights went on. With her hands cupped to the glass Erin could see the governor’s wife sitting behind the wheel and the governor himself resting an open bottle of tequila on his thigh. The woman refused to look at her and the man waggled a finger in front of his face and shook his head as if Erin were a child and should know better.

  She pushed off the car angrily and stood up straight, looked around in the rain for someone who might care. There in a swank metallic cream-colored Escalade she saw the TV network anchor and the reporter and two of the magazine editors that Owens had pointed out. Both of the windows on her side went down and the four journalists stared at her in collective disbelief.

  —I need a ride. Do you have room for me?

  —Aren’t you a guest? said the anchor.

  —I am not a guest. I am not here of my free will.

  —Oh, Miss McKenna this is very, very bad. However, your music was beautiful tonight.

  —He has kidnapped her, said the TV reporter. Her voice was loud, and sharp with alarm.

  —Let me in.

  —This is impossible, said the anchor. We cannot defy Benjamin. This would only heat the plaza.

  —Fuck the plaza, friend, these people are going kill me.

  —Let her in, said the reporter.

  Erin pulled on the door but it was locked and the Escalade rolled forward and bumped into the pickup truck in front of it. The cops in the truck started yelling and the anchorman hit his horn.

  —Let her in. She’s been kidnapped, yelled the reporter over the horn blast.

  —Please let me in. I’ll tell you everything.

  —You will be safe now, said the anchor. See? This is perfect. You now will be safe.

  With this the driver’s window started up and in the glass Erin saw Saturnino close behind her, his face growing full as the window rose. She felt his hand clamp down on her arm and twist. The excruciating pain that shot into her shoulder collapsed her to her knees in the muddy lot.

  —You don’t have to hurt her, yelled the reporter.

  —Thank you, Dolores, said Saturnino. Many thanks to everyone at ‘Veracruz Tonight!’

  —Be merciful to her, Saturnino.

  —And you be silent, you mouth of a whore.

  Saturnino pulled Erin to her feet and marched her struggling out of the parking area and toward the jungle from which she knew she would not return whole if at all.

  Deep in the darkness they stopped and he clamped his hands on either side of her face very hard and dragged his tongue against her lips and teet
h. She struck him and Saturnino slammed her flush on the jaw with his elbow and she went down. “Sing to me now,” he said. Through the dizziness she felt one of his hands tight against her throat and the other yanking her dress up over her knees and waist, then tearing and rolling it up to her neck and over her face and she kept flailing at him, but most of her blows missed and none of them had the power to hurt him and she could hardly draw breath. He pulled off her underpants and drove his knees between her legs and forced them open. The jungle floor was cold and sharp against her legs and back but she thrashed and screamed into the fabric piled tight against her face. His hand was rough against her center and he pulled a handful of her hair and said again, “Sing to me now.”

  She heard a loud smack, as if he had hit her, but felt nothing. She wondered if she were passing out. She couldn’t feel his hand around her throat as she gasped for a full breath, and she couldn’t feel the weight of him between her legs either. Is this how you survive it? she thought. Do you shut down in shock? Then a more terrifying and practical thought: no, he’s let go of my throat and lifted up his body and he’s getting himself ready. He’s going to do it.

  Erin lashed out with fresh terror but her fists found nothing to hit so she dug in her heels and pushed herself backward fast across the slick ground and rolled over to her knees, grabbing two big handfuls of fabric and yanking the dress all the way over her head and covering her near naked self with it while she panted. She managed to stand and was ready to run.

  Air and breath. Air and breath. Two lights. Two men. Benjamin and Father Ciel.

  On the ground between them in their flashlight beams Saturnino swayed on hands and knees. He was frowning at her and his mouth hung loose. His head was split open at the hairline, a gash of white skull, a stream of blood running down his face to the jungle floor. He looked insensible but surprised.

  Ciel walked around Saturnino without taking his eyes or light off him. Standing before Erin he handed her the flashlight, then took off his black jacket that smelled of vanilla and wrapped it around her while he muttered a prayer.