Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  That had stayed with him. That little red toenail in that immense green jungle.

  Later, when they’d taken the bodies back to the base in Wiwilí, he’d removed the foot and given it to a French group that made prosthetics for the victims of Contra land mines. For all he knew, someone was stumping around on it right now.

  * * *

  “Ajax?” Gladys’ voice cut through the memory.

  “Kill the vampire.”

  “What?”

  “Once in the throat, twice through the heart. That’s what they called it. ‘Killing the vampire.’”

  “Who?”

  Ajax saw that he still had his hand in the air. He jumped up and helped Gladys to her feet. “Sorry.”

  “Why are you talking about vampires?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t trust her yet. “I don’t know. Spacing out. Anyway, that’s how it happened. They got him on his back and delivered the blows.”

  He spun her around and brushed the dirt from her back. His mind whirling—could it be?

  “Well, that was a sweet dance! Go on, kiss her!”

  Ajax hated to be surprised, so he already hated the intruder. He knew what to expect when he turned around. If it was civilians, the tone would have been a more democratic teasing rather than the cold, authoritarian mocking he had just heard. He faced the voice. The mocker was a uniform. Two uniforms. What surprised him was to see the uniforms leaning against a car marked DGSE. Dirección General de Seguridad del Estado. It was one of the quirks of the Sandinista revolution that State Security, the secret police, traveled the country in clearly marked cars. And the two cocky hijos de puta leaning against it had Seguridad plastered all over their smirking mustachioed faces.

  While he gave them the once over, Ajax carefully finished dusting off Gladys’s uniform. One man was a major, the other a captain.

  “Stonewall these fucks, Gladys,” he whispered.

  The major sauntered over. “You’re Ajax Montoya.”

  “That why you came here?”

  “What?”

  “To tell me my name—is that why you came here?”

  “I’m Major Pissarro; this is Captain Cortez.”

  Ajax snorted with delight. “I get it. The conquistadores. We’ve been invaded, Gladys.”

  The intruders exchanged a brief glance.

  “Cortez and Pissarro, the conquistadores. You know, Aztecs, Incas. Guess that makes us the Indians.” Ajax tried to suppress the laugh he felt welling up, but for some reason failed to muster the will power. Gladys, on the other hand, looked ready to crawl out of her skin.

  “We’re here about the murder, compañero.”

  Ajax cut his chuckle. “What murder?”

  Captain Cortez stepped forward like he didn’t know he was being fucked with. “You just had a body hauled away. That murder.”

  “Wait, which one are you again? Doesn’t matter, but yeah we had a corpse taken to the morgue. We don’t know if it’s murder. Do you? And if so, how do you know that?”

  “Look compa.” Pissarro stepped in front of the other, his hands out in reconciliation. “State Security has an interest in this … death. We got it from here. Thank you.”

  “If it is murder, it’s Policía, compa. That’s me and my young lieutenant here. We do cops and robbers. You do spies and assassins. We don’t need your help.”

  Cortez moved like he was waiting for that. “Yeah, well maybe if you’d had our help yesterday that soldier would be alive.”

  Ajax knew from experience that he could get people to do what he wanted, when he wanted. Not by force of will but more by a kind of telepathy, by telegraphing certain information. He thought of it as creating a vacuum that others unconsciously rushed in to fill. So at Cortez’s rebuke he’d taken a step backward as if struck, dropped his eyes to the ground as if shamed, and slumped his shoulders as if defeated.

  Cortez took two steps forward. Said almost kindly, “It’s okay, compa. You get to take the day off.” He sympathetically patted Ajax’s shoulder, as Ajax had wanted him to do. Ajax snatched his hand, put Cortez in a shoulder roll, his feet swinging high in the air, then slammed him into the ground, face down in the dirt, arm twisted to the breaking point, and all in what gringos called a New York minute.

  “We did have your help yesterday,” Ajax hissed in his ear. “You fucking shot him.”

  He felt Cortez go limp from the pain of his arm halfway pulled off. Ajax was kind of enjoying it, it stirred nearly the same feeling as shooting that crow had. The feeling was cut short by the blow he took behind the ear from Pissarro. Damn! He should’ve known Gladys wouldn’t have his back.

  Ajax rolled with the punch, blinking away the stars that swam in his head, flipped onto his back in time to catch the charging Pissarro in the nut bag with his boot heel. Ajax leapt up as the conqueror of the Incas landed in a heap on the destroyer of the Aztecs.

  Ajax straightened his uniform. “Someone wants to take my stiff they have to send higher-ranking assholes than you two. Let’s go, Lieutenant.”

  Gladys looked ready to die, mouth wide open, big eyed. Ajax felt that he ought to reassure her, but the pain behind his ear reminded him that she’d failed to jump in. Then, for some reason, he remembered a delightful idea from long ago. He was making a beeline for the DGSE car when he heard the slide on a Makarov.

  “Halt!”

  Pissarro moaned pitifully and cradled his bruised manhood, but Cortez had his Makarov out. Right off, Ajax saw the tremor in his hand. Shit, more like an earthquake. He smiled and shook his head. “Halt? Halt? Where do you assholes do your training?” He made a few quick steps toward Cortez, who retreated the same few steps. “See? You escalated too quickly. What you want from me is cooperation, but you said ‘halt.’ If I don’t ‘Halt!’ what are you going to do? Shoot me?”

  “You want out of your misery, Montoya? I’ll do it.”

  “I’m not miserable, but I dare you. Shit-eating puto.” Ajax opened the door of the DGSE car, rolled up the windows, locked the doors and snatched the keys from the ignition.

  “Stop!” Cortez waved the pistol at him. The hammer was cocked and there was a finger on the trigger. Ajax realized he might just get him to do it. He saw that Gladys had finally snapped out if it and held her pistol at her side. He wasn’t sure she’d fire, or at whom, but at least her eyes were on Cortez.

  Ajax waved the keys at him. “Come on. How much provocation can you stand!” He pocketed the keys. Turned his back and took his time getting behind his own wheel. Just as he cranked the engine, Gladys climbed in, shaky and shaken. His only regret was that the Lada didn’t have the juice to sow a whirlwind of dust in his wake.

  4

  1.

  The Tomas Betulia Central Morgue was an ugly, low-slung building that had been erected piecemeal amid the ruins of the original morgue, flattened, like so much else, in the ’72 earthquake. Inside it was dim. Three windows had been carelessly knocked out of the cinder block walls when power outages had become a regular feature of the Revo. The morgue was as dank and unadorned as death itself. Three beat-up metal trolleys bearing corpses that emitted the nauseating sweet smell of early putrefaction were backed up like traffic. Plastic temporary caskets lined the walls like indolent orderlies. The air stank of formaldehyde—the poor man’s embalming fluid. In a country with only four funeral homes, used almost exclusively by the rich or connected, the dead got buried quickly or pumped full of formaldehyde—which smelled like embalming fluid, only more so. The colossal ice machine stood by the back door leaking tepid water. Ajax’s old friend Marta had let him and Gladys sneak through that door after they had spotted the DGSE car parked out front and the two guards posted there. Marta had assured the guards would not interrupt by inviting them to help wash the corpse and witness the autopsy.

  Now a clandestine school was in session.

  Ajax whispered it: “Touch his penis, Lieutenant.”

  “What?” she had to whisper back.

  “You
heard me, Gladys, touch the stiff’s dick.”

  “That’s not right, Captain.”

  “Lift his dick and check under it for clues.”

  “With what?”

  “I told you to have a look at him in the ditch and you tucked your arms behind your back like you’re studying a pile of fresh shit. Corpses are our playground. Once you can touch a corpse’s genitalia, you can examine the whole thing with ease. Right, Marta?”

  “Don’t involve me in your initiation rituals, Montoya. You were always a freak around death.”

  Marta Jimenez was a compa from the old days. An ex-pat from Colombia, still lithe and long haired in handsome middle age, she’d joined the Sandinistas fresh out of medical school in the mid ’60s when their cause made tilting at windmills seem the sport of sages. She’d spent years making miracles in the mountains. And not just with bullet wounds and amputations. She’d saved more limbs than she’d sawed, conjuring penicillin out of moldy bread; kept the compas’ blood strong with iron supplements alchemized from nails in jugs of water. The compas had sometimes called her Doctora Higado Mono—Doctor Monkey Liver—because she made them hunt and eat it for the vitamin A. But her nom de guerre had been Mami. She’d picked lice from their hair, hovered over their nasty feet fighting jungle rot, and wiped asses when dysentery was killing them. Hers was the last face many a compa had seen. She was now the chief pathologist in Managua—meaning the only one in the whole country.

  “But you agree, Marta, that a corpse must become a thing if it is to be studied?”

  In reply, Marta handed Ajax a pair of gloves—not surgical gloves, but the kind the maids of the rich wore while doing dishes.

  “Why don’t you show her, Ajax?”

  Ajax pulled the gloves on.

  “He uses these when he plays with himself, you know.”

  “Not this actual pair, Gladys; I keep some at home.”

  Ajax ran his hand expertly over the corpse. Stiffness had crept into the limbs, but he lifted them, running his fingers over the skin, looking closely.

  “Some long scratches here on the right forearm.”

  Marta nodded. “Yeah. Mostly healed. Looks like a cat.”

  Ajax rolled the body to look at the back, ran his fingers through its hair.

  “How long he’s been dead, Mami?”

  “Rectal thermometer’s ready to come out.”

  “You have one of those?”

  “Used to hang on the wall over there.”

  Ajax looked archly at Gladys. “Lieutenant?”

  “No fucking way.”

  Ajax slid it out and handed it to Marta.

  “Fifty-six Fahrenheit.”

  He finished his examination. Then, because he had to, he lifted the penis and looked under it. He pointed the head at Gladys and wiggled it. “Don’t be afraid of me, Lieutenant!”

  Gladys turned her face away. Ajax saw she was truly embarrassed.

  “Ajax, have some goddamn respect,” Marta said.

  “Sorry, Marta. Sorry, Gladys. We’ve got to objectify the corpse. It’s just ground to be searched for clues.” He ran his fingers through its hair again. “And I do feel a bump on the back of the head.”

  Gladys perked up, suddenly interested. “Maybe someone did bash his head in?”

  Marta ran her fingers over the same spot. “I don’t think so.”

  Ajax pulled his glove off. “Tell me his story, Marta.”

  Marta pulled her gloves off, crossed her arms, and looked at the corpse like a sculptor at uncut stone. “He’s a ladino. Mid-fifties. Got calluses on his hands, but not enough to be a laborer. With his good clothes and body fat I’d guess a farmer or rancher, but a landowner, not a worker. You saw the discoloration on the back of the left knee?”

  Ajax nodded, lifted the leg to show Gladys.

  “It’s pre-mortem. By the color, a bruise from a blow delivered just before death. Maybe a kick. I found some loose hairs on the back of his head, so I’d say he was struck on the back of the leg. That brought him to his knees, then his hair was yanked to put him on the ground. That’s when he got the bump on the head. The killer then straddled his chest and delivered the blows with a knife.”

  Ajax smiled, more self-satisfied than self-righteous. “We went over that very scenario at the crime scene.”

  Marta shrugged. “The blade was about three inches wide.”

  Ajax grunted. “Three inches across is a big knife.”

  “Doubled-edged, too. Straight down and in. Ninety degrees to the neck and chest. See?” Marta took a pen and slid it into the chest wound. “You should notice this, Lieutenant.”

  Gladys grimaced, took the pen, and slid it up and down into the wound. Ajax did the same.

  “How many wounds, Marta?” Ajax asked, but he’d already counted them. He was hoping he was wrong.

  Marta waited before answering. “Three. Once in the neck and twice through the heart.” She looked into Ajax’s eyes as if she wanted him to speak next. Instead they both just stood in silence.

  Gladys looked from one to the other. “That important?”

  “No.” Ajax realized he’d spoken too fast, but he wanted to cut off Marta’s response. If he was right, he wasn’t yet ready to share the info with Gladys. He had a hunch she’d been assigned his partner to keep an eye on him. “No, no, it’s not important.” He realized he’d said too many no’s. “Well, thank you, Dr. Jimenez.” Ajax felt his heart beat faster in a familiar way; his thoughts spun like a chance wheel at a carnival. This is how the Contra execute people.

  A sudden commotion in the outer office brought him out of himself. The three of them froze. Marta pointed at the connecting door, mouthed, It’s locked.

  She and Ajax slipped to the door. Marta showed him a place where the mortar in the cinder block had cracked. He had a long look through it. A tall, blond gringo was haranguing one of the State Security guards. With him was a campesino with the hawk nose and high cheekbones of a mountain peasant. He was dressed in his Sunday whites, looking at the floor.

  “He is the man’s cousin.” The gringo spoke slowly to the State Security guard as if to a child, the way they all did when not getting their way. As if his being denied something could only come from a misunderstanding. “The man is missing. Do you understand ‘missing person’? We just want to know if there are unclaimed bodies here. We want to speak to someone.”

  The guard wiggled his index finger. “No bodies here, señor.”

  “There are no bodies in the morgue?”

  Then the gringo turned and seemed to look right into the spy hole. Ajax recognized him. He took a half step backward as if pushed by a memory. He glanced back at the corpse—back at the crime scene his instincts had told him this murder might need some stones overturned to solve. The Conquistadores showing up had confirmed that notion. Now he wondered if an avalanche was in the offing.

  “Puta madre.”

  He let Marta have a look, then drew her away from the door.

  “You know him, Mami?”

  “Do you?”

  “Es periodista. A gringo journalist. He hooked up with us when we were clearing out Matagalpa. Must’ve been spring ’79. You don’t remember?”

  “I wouldn’t unless he got shot.”

  “Not enough of them did.” Ajax had another look. “What’s his name? Marcus. Mateo, maybe. Matthew something. He was a pain in the ass like all of them, eating our food, drinking our water.” Ajax turned the memory over in his mind like old compost. “But he had lots of cigarettes. I taxed him heavy on those.”

  Ajax smiled.

  “What is it?” Marta asked.

  “I sent him through the lines one night to get more. Figured either the Guardia would kill him or he’d take refuge in the nearest hotel.”

  Ajax looked through the crack again. “Son of a bitch was back the next day with every pack of cigarettes in the city. We smoked ’em all the way to Managua.”

  “He had balls.”

  Ajax dismissed th
e idea with a wave. “He just wanted a story.”

  “Did he get it?”

  Ajax smiled again.

  “Don’t know. The next day we left him under a tree. Told him we’d be right back.” Ajax peeked through the crack. “Ain’t seen him since.”

  “Now here he is. Looking for your guy?”

  “Gotta be. The campesino with him is country, not a refugee. You said my corpse is from the countryside.”

  The voices rose on the other side of the wall. The gringo threatening the guard with all the big shots he would report him to if he did not get his way. The guard was unmoved, however, and the two men left. Ajax fished out his keys and tossed them to Gladys.

  “There’s a tall gringo headed for the parking lot. Got a campesino with him in his Sunday whites. Take the Lada, don’t approach. Just follow him.”

  “For how long?”