The Jaguar

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Erin considered. “I don’t understand one thing about you but I’m glad you’re alive.”

  Erin listened to the smooth roll of the luggage on the studio floor. She didn’t watch Owens leave. She felt that her best and only friend had betrayed her and now the future was even more bleak. One week, she thought. Eleven and twelve. Eleven, twelve and out.

  For the next hour the music came clear and fast. Two songs stormed in simultaneously, notes and words falling close together like rain. Erin scribbled the phrases and kept two separate ledgers as each grew. One was the Tejano song that had begun in her room and the other was a lullaby to the baby, a waltz, and it brought a little mist to her eyes as it wafted across the morning and into her ears, addressed specifically to her, sent from that part of the universe unknown and unknowable. The little digital tape recorder was a sound-activated wonder—simple to use and very clear on the playback.

  My darling son

  My darling son

  On the beach

  And the meadow run

  Follow a dream

  Follow a dream

  And when you return

  A man you will be

  But until then darling son

  You are my darling son

  Goodnight to you

  You and the stars tonight

  Goodnight

  Then suddenly the Tejano song butted in and took over, as if it were jealous of Erin’s attention elsewhere. She struck the notes of melody on the grand with her left hand, and scribbled down the words in her notebook with the other. It was a song about a young man racing home to his lover on a dark night and he’s driving way too fast, and he gets pulled over by a highway patrolman. The patrolman locks him in the back of his cruiser and gets on the radio. The song is the young man’s plea to be let go because his woman is so good and sweet and he hasn’t seen her in a very long time. The more the young man brags about her, the more astonishingly beautiful, but less believable, she becomes. But the cop lets him go and in the end the young man makes it home and she is plain and poor but in his mind every bit as lovely as he had said she was.

  Time passed. She wrote and rewrote, played phrases one way and then another. She collected them all on the little recorder because sometimes you didn’t hear a jewel the first time through. It was hard to free her heart to feel the words and the stories because of the great black hole in her universe that was her captivity, and the lesser one that was her husband.

  Later she saw Armenta looking at her through the window of the control room. Heriberto stood behind him with a large black rifle of some kind strapped over his shoulder. Armenta looked weary and absent as he lifted a cup of something to his mouth and gave her a slight nod. She turned back to her notepad and a moment later when she looked back for him both men were gone.

  Later Armenta came into the tracking room with his accordion case and set it down next to one of the instrument booths. He was clean shaven and groomed, barefoot, in shorts and a blue wedding shirt. He wore a wide military-style belt outside the shirt, hung with phones and weapons. Barefoot and in shorts and a festive shirt he looked like a tourist arriving at a resort.

  “I need to play.”

  “It’s your studio.”

  “Are the songs coming to you?”

  “They are trying.”

  “I will not be a distraction to you.”

  “How can a man playing accordion not be a distraction?”

  Erin saw Heriberto looking through the glass at them from the control room. He sat at the mixing board on a stool, his weapon peeking over his shoulder from behind him. He said something, but of course she heard none of it. He shrugged and he yelled this time but it made no difference. Looking down at the mixing board he finally found the talk-back button.

  “Do you want more coffee, Mrs. Jones?” asked Heriberto.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Do not speak to her,” ordered Armenta. “She is creating. She will get her own coffee when she wants it.”

  Heriberto nodded.

  “Why is he here? Are you expecting another attack?” she asked.

  “I am always expecting another attack.”

  “You have less men to protect you now.”

  “What do you mean by this?”

  “I don’t mean anything. Only that maybe you need more men.”

  “More are coming. Why would they not come?”

  Erin felt her muses scattering, flushed by Armenta and the suspicion and violence that followed him. Don’t go, she asked them, please stay. “Play the accordion. Sometimes chaos is good.”

  “Yes, it becomes collaboration.”

  “Not quite, but one thing can lead to another.”

  He looked at her lugubriously and set down his accordion case and removed his phone-and-weapon-studded belt. He slid one pistol into the back of his waistband. Then he hung the belt over a stool where it clattered and clanked and tried to slide off until he balanced it. Then he brought the gleaming instrument from the case and worked the tooled leather straps over his shoulders and settled the heavy thing against his chest. He stepped into the instrument booth and pulled on the headset and muttered something into the mike to Heriberto.

  Erin turned her back to him. She flipped on the recorder and tapped out the melody of the lullaby on the Yamaha keys. It was a waltz and she loved waltzes of any kind. The three-quarter time soothed her darkness and when she considered her circumstances her heart did not fall, even though she expected it to crash right down through the floor. No, she thought. I am okay. I can do this. Bradley was not involved in the Zeta attack. He was not arrested by the Army. He is alive. He is coming. He is close. Very close. Mike would have gotten word to Owens if it was otherwise. Right?

  Behind her thoughts she heard Armenta’s accordion and it seemed pleasant and thousands of miles away, foreign and of another world. The lullaby grew a bridge and another verse and it felt right. She arranged the chords beneath the melody and for a moment she had that old feeling of transportation, of tagging along on a wonderful ride that required very little of her own energy. And every pinch of energy she put forth came back in ounces of music and this music made her energy grow stronger. Minutes flew, but made no sound that she could hear.

  A while later the accordion came piping softly again from what seemed miles away, Armenta finding the fills between the lines of the lullaby. My darling son/My darling son. Just as with the Jaguars of Veracruz, he played simply and directly and without great style or ego.

  Erin dug in and gave the piano chords some authority, playing the song through once and then again. She looked up and watched Armenta come from the instrument booth, the big accordion wheezing in and out and she had to smile at his shorts and his short thick legs and pale-bottomed feet and the razor-cut hairstyle that barely gave shape to his gray-black thatch. He moved in small steps to the waltz time, left then right then left again, toward her but not directly. He was concentrating on the playing. He stopped and turned his back to her, looking through the glass at Heriberto, and Erin saw the lump of the gun beneath his shirt, and his arms stretching the bellows of the accordion in and out.

  He turned and regarded her for a long beat with an expression she’d never seen, nodded, and looked back down to his keyboard. In that moment she saw him differently, not only as Benjamin Armenta the violent drug lord, but as a man who knows that no matter how much money he gives to his Church, or how much treasure he might amass, or how many lepers he might care for, he will never get his sons back and he has not one true friend on Earth. Erin suspected that he would give up his world if he could. To make music, she thought.

  She sang to herself, softly at first. But as she read the lyrics off the notepad she believed her baby should feel them too, so she filled her lungs and primed her diaphragm and raised the volume to complement the Yamaha. Armenta was standing across the piano from her now and he stopped his playing and watched her, sleepy he looked, his eyes closed and his face down and just the hint of a smil
e on his face. When she came to the end of the song she started the first verse again and he glanced at her and she nodded. The accordion notes came aptly and with some joy, and Armenta fitted his chords to those of the piano, and together they formed a firm bed on which to lay her voice.

  Not bad, she thought. Not bad at all.

  She sang, On the beach/And the meadow run, then she looked past him through the glass and saw Heriberto turn toward the door. She glanced back down at the notebook to make sure it was Follow a dream/Follow a dream and when she looked up again at Armenta he was smiling. She looked past him over his shoulder and through the glass to Heriberto, but he was gone.

  In his place Bradley and Charlie Hood and two other men she did not know were moving fast and low behind the glass, bristling with weaponry and headed for the big wooden door that separated the rooms. She looked back to Armenta and held his gaze to show that nothing was wrong, and she was able to remember the next lines without looking down at the notepad. But her days of terror and anger rose up inside and her eyes filled with tears as she sang: And when you return/A man you will be.

  And Armenta knew. He dropped his hand from the keyboard and reached behind his back, but the tooled leather straps of the accordion halted his motion. Whirling to face the men he reached for his armament belt hanging over the stool. Erin saw him raise a sleek pistol with each hand and they boomed at Bradley but he did not fall. Instead he rocked back, but his shiny little gun spat away almost silently and the accordion splintered and someone fired from behind the glass and the window shattered and dropped like a curtain. Armenta’s pistols roared away through the window and someone fell. He strode across the room to her and she could hear the bullets whacking into the accordion and see jagged pieces coming off him. When he reached her the shooting stopped and Armenta pulled her off the piano bench to the floor. He turned and lunged toward the window opening and climbed onto the sill to fire down on his tormentors but this only gave them a better target and Armenta dropped and staggered back as the ivory keys burst and the ruptured baffles sighed. He reeled against a tracking booth and the little silenced guns chattered at him and Armenta fell to his knees. One of his pistols dropped to the floor. He looked at it as if to gauge his strength against the distance and seemed to forget the gun in his other hand. He looked at Erin for a long moment, then pitched forward to the floor, draping over his instrument.

  She stood and walked over to him but there was nothing to be said or done except to watch his blood run. Bradley ran to her and took her in his arms and she could sense the gun held firmly in his hand, but still she looked down at Armenta. She clamped on to Bradley with all of her strength and she felt the flood of hope—alien, forbidden, delicious hope—rushing through her.

  Over Bradley’s shoulder she saw Hood and a bull-like man she didn’t know. The man shot down by Armenta climbed back into view, using the mixing board to pull himself up. He looked Arabic and he steadied himself as he looked at Armenta and felt at the two unbloodied rips in the chest of his shirt. Then the studio door swung open and Cleary and Caroline burst in.

  “The Army is here,” said Cleary. “We might want to get out like right now.”

  “I need Saturnino,” said the Arab.

  “He’s at the bottom of a cenote,” said Erin. “I put him there.”

  Bradley pulled her across the studio. In the hallway outside she stepped around Heriberto’s bullet-pocked body and followed Bradley toward the stairs. Through a tall window she could see the smoke rising from the distant guardhouse and the tanks and jeeps and trucks rolling into the parking area.

  “There are innocent people here,” said Erin. “Atlas and Dulce. All the servants and the lepers. The novitiates.”

  “I didn’t come this far to get you killed,” said Bradley.

  “They’re innocent people!”

  “We’ll get them out,” said Hood. “There’s time.”

  “Dulce is on the third floor with the lepers,” said Erin. “We have to use the outside stairs.”

  Erin shoved her way through the massive entryway doors while the monkeys and birds shrieked and scattered. Freedom! But as they ran into the courtyard the troops were already coming up the drive, heavily armed and armored, running past the sicarios killed by Bradley and Hood.

  Up the road she saw the soldiers coming, some of them carrying olive green military gas containers and she could see that the containers were heavy. The soldiers trotted toward the courtyard. A phalanx broke off and ran in unison around the north side of the Castle while others waited at the foot of the outside stairway as the lepers in white silence ran down the steps and across the drive and scattered into the jungle. Dulce was with them. Erin saw Atlas and half a dozen gray-clad servants hustle into the foliage and disappear. Atlas looked at her. The flames from the burning guardhouse climbed above the tree line, and a small two-winged airplane flew just through the tops of them; Erin saw someone in the open cockpit aiming something down at the scene. More of Armenta’s bodyguards lay dead on the drive and they looked frail and very human to her as two jeeps maneuvered around them, soldiers training the big mounted guns on the front Castle door. Erin ducked onto the jungle path behind Bradley, turning once to look back at the flames from the guardhouse climbing the sky.

  She held her husband’s hand and they soon fell behind the others. Charlie maintained his distance ahead, but Erin never lost sight of him. Before they’d gone far into the forest Erin brought Bradley to a stop and turned his bruised and battered face to hers and looked at him. He smiled largely and she saw the gap of the missing tooth and its sharply broken neighbor.

  “It’s good to see you, Brad.”

  “I love you so much. Sorry about my face.”

  “Don’t worry, baby,” she said softly. “Don’t you worry. You’re going to heal up all pretty again.”

  He touched her pale cheek with one dirty finger and placed his free hand on her stomach. “You are my whole life.”

  “No, I am not. Your lies almost killed me. And you. And the baby.”

  “I’ll do anything to make it right again.”

  “It never was right.”

  A short distance later they climbed a rise and stopped again. Erin turned and saw the Castle sitting in a red meadow of flames, gas-mad fire pouring from the windows and doors, climbing the walls and palms. The four novitiates and Edgar Ciel clambered across the courtyard toward a group of soldiers. Ciel towered above his charges, his arms draped around the two nearest ones as if for their protection. He appeared furious, thrusting his face into that of an officer, then waving his arms high, shouting orders drowned by the roar of the fire.

  Erin watched two lions and two leopards break through a wall of flames on the lower level and run into the jungle. Then came the tigers. The black jaguar was last, sauntering up the drive, shoulders rolling and tail swinging as he entered the foliage where Erin had entered it. Sparks arced high into the thunderhead of black smoke that roiled up from the roof of el Castillo.

  In a small camp pitched deep in the jungle Erin watched Fidel and his men remove cut branches from four filthy, bullet-pocked SUVs. She looked at the men and saw that they were nearly identical to the men who had kidnapped her and beaten Bradley and been left for dead back at the Castle. Narcos, pure and simple. Not the Mexican “counterparts” that Bradley had named them. Not his “law-enforcement friends.” Or maybe they were. She caught Hood looking at her and she guessed that he was thinking the same thing she was. Hood looked as vacant and betrayed as she felt. She looked away.

  Everyone climbed into the SUVs and they drove twenty minutes farther down a dirt road, away from the Castle, toward where she thought the coast was. She heard the engine humming under her and the huffing of the air conditioner and she could not fully believe that she was leaving this place. The jungle scrolled past outside the dirty, chipped windows. She sat back with her hands over her stomach and for the first time in ten days didn’t care who saw her pregnant. And for the first time in
ten days she let the tears roll down her face without a thought to hiding them or slapping herself silent. A sign said Bacalar.

  In a room at the Laguna Hotel, Bradley opened a big rolling suitcase she recognized from home. She saw the cash wrapped into plastic bricks that nearly filled the space. Exactly like Armenta’s. Bradley broke into one of them and pulled out a thick wad of hundreds, which he gave to Hood, and another for her, three for Cleary and Caroline and himself, and one that he held toward Luna, who refused to take it. Erin liked the look and carriage of Luna, though he said not one word to her and little to anyone else. He seemed lifted from another time, a time when honor and integrity and honest work were something more than the handicaps of the ambitious. The opposite of her husband, she thought, and not unlike Hood.

  Bradley tossed Luna’s money back into the case and zipped it, then turned to Fidel. “Divide five hundred thousand between the living and the families of the dead. Take the rest to your boss. He’ll find a way to get it to me. And thank you.”

  Fidel wordlessly wheeled the suitcase outside to one of the SUVs. He threw it into the back, then beckoned to Caroline and they walked down to the marina together. Erin watched them through a window for a moment, saw an intent conversation, a tender hug and a longing kiss.

  Hood appeared beside her and she turned into him and set her head against his chest.

  “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie.”

  “Any time.”

  “How about never!” she whispered, and she was surprised to hear a scrap of laughter come from her. “I have something for you, Charlie. Owens Finnegan was staying at the Castle with Armenta. Mike told her to. She helped me send Bradley a letter attached to a pigeon! Mike’s pigeon! Later she helped me try to escape. Then she left about two hours before you came—luggage and all. I never saw Mike, but he was helping Bradley send instructions back to me. Instructions on how to escape. We wrote on pieces of silk. It sounds unbelievable but it worked. I saw the pigeons and I held his letters in my own hands. They were real. Somehow, Mike was right in the middle of everything.”