by Joe Gannon
“No, no, no, no, no. In the country? I’ll tell you why.…”
“I’d rather…”
“You are here for precisely the same reason as that carrot-headed gringa and her Senator Tony with his fact-fucking mission are here. Wanna know what that reason is?”
“Can I say ‘no’?”
“Because we can’t keep you out, that’s why you’re here. We are too weak a nation to keep you meddling sons of bitches out. You come down here and live in neocolonial splendor because your goddamned democratically elected government has elected to impoverish and murder us. And whether you support or oppose that policy makes not one scintilla of difference to us. So Jesus Christ yes, I have a chip on my fucking shoulder.”
Matthew let out a long breath. “Well, Professor Garcia, may I ask one question?”
“Sure.”
“How do you know she calls him Tony?”
“What?”
“How do you know Amelia Peck calls Senator Teal, Tony.”
“What?”
Matthew spoke slowly. “You said you’d never met her before yesterday at the hotel, other than that show at the airport, so how do you know she calls him Tony?”
Ajax pulled a long face to show his disappointment at the question, but he was thinking fast. When you were caught in a lie by someone unlikely to use physical force, obfuscation was often the best tactic.
“Why does she call him Tony? You’re asking me?”
“No, I asked how do you know she calls him Tony?”
“I don’t know why she calls him Tony. Ask her.”
Matthew pointed into the sideview mirror. “Let’s.”
The squeal of worn brakes sounded. A beat up old Jeep flying yellow Vatican flags rolled to a stop. Lurch sat behind the wheel, next to him a shock of orange hair and freckles.
Ajax muttered a curse, but his heart did a drumroll. He climbed out of the pickup and hoped he could maintain his most severe look while the drumroll in his chest beat on. He pulled her door open. But didn’t look her in the face.
“Miss Peck, you cannot make this trip. Please get out.”
“No, Captain.” She didn’t look at him either, but drew an envelope from her bag. “Sorry, but I have a letter from the Interior Ministry giving me permission to travel anywhere in Matagalpa province.”
Ajax pointed up the road. “That’s Contra country up there.”
She revealed a second envelope. “And I have a letter from the Contra leadership requiring their forces to let me pass peacefully.”
“May I see them?”
“And what are the chances of me getting them back if you do?” She put them away, and then looked at him. “It seems, Martin, I am better protected than you. If you and Matthew won’t lead the way, we’re going on alone. Aren’t we, Father?”
Ajax returned to the pickup thinking, This was precisely why enforced celibacy had been the rule in the mountains during his guerrilla days.
2.
They arrived at Enrique Cuadra’s coffee finca at sunset. Father Jerome’s Jeep had broken down a few hours out and they’d had to tow it with the pickup the rest of the way. Enrique’s house was a low-slung bungalow raised a foot off the ground on concrete blocks. Most unusual, it had a tile roof in a part of the country where all but the richest would’ve had zinc. It meant the house was either pre-revolution or exceptionally well cared for.
The sun was down beyond the western mountains, but enough of it still shone to smudge the high nimbus clouds a prophetic scarlet. Ajax got out and stretched. He immediately picked up the scent of jasmine from the shrubbery surrounding the house and the smell of coffee ripening in the fields. It was an indelible smell, hundreds of acres of coffee beans.
Epimenio appeared first. Ajax could tell from the look on his face that he was stunned to see the police captain here. Ajax went straight to him and in greeting whispered, “I’m Martin Garcia, I work for don Mateo. Keep my secret, hombre.”
Epimenio nodded. He began to slowly ring a bell on the house’s deep porch. Workers began to arrive in ones and twos and gathered around the pickup with what Ajax could only describe as reverence. Then Enrique’s widow appeared. Doña Gloria was a strikingly lovely woman, tall for a Nicaraguan, with the jet-black hair and eyes of an Indian, but the white skin of a Ladino. Ajax reckoned she had to be fifteen years Enrique’s junior. A beautiful young widow immediately raised his cop’s suspicion. But they were temporarily allayed when she took one look at the coffin and collapsed to the ground.
3.
“Can we speak in English?”
Dinner was a subdued event with the mystery of Enrique’s death made all the more real by the evidence of his life—family photos, a rack of shotguns on the wall, his spare cowboy hat on a side table as if he had just taken it off after a day in his fields. And of course, his widow, whom Ajax was now fairly certain was unlikely to be hiding any knowledge of the truth of her husband’s murder.
But the fare was better than Ajax ate at home or in the comidores populares he could afford back in Managua—tamales with pork, gallo pinto laced with cilantro from Gloria’s garden, and black beans in a heavy cream that might have been warming in a cow’s udder that very morning.
“Yes, mine is not so good, but okay.” Gloria was a gracious hostess. Once revived from her faint in the yard, she had immediately set about seeing to her guests, who would have to be fed and put up for the night. And the faint had been real. He had checked. Ajax had learned from Marta that if he wanted to make sure someone was truly unconscious he had to lift an arm and let it fall directly on the face. Someone who was faking would instinctively correct to make it a glancing blow. Connelly had looked at him like he was crazy, but to hell with the gringo. Ajax was here to solve a murder.
“I speak Spanish as well, señora.” Amelia shot Ajax a look. “We don’t have to speak English for me.”
“Please, Amelia, call me Gloria.”
“Gloria.”
“We’re not speaking English for you.” He didn’t want to explain himself, but English gave them privacy. He turned to Gloria, but paused as her cook set down another steaming bowl of frijoles. “Gloria, I know your family and employees are close to you. But I have to keep my identity secret while I make inquiries. I trust Epimenio to do that.” He gave the others at the table a sharp look, “And everyone here as well.”
“Of course, Martin. But what do you expect to find here?”
“Perhaps it’s what I don’t expect to find here. Can I speak plainly about your husband?”
“I’ve had several days to, to adjust to his death.”
“Your husband’s wounds suggest he might have been killed by the Contra.”
“What wounds?”
“Señora, I…”
“Tell me.”
Ajax looked at Connelly, who nodded his agreement with the widow.
“He was stabbed once in the throat and twice through the heart. It’s a common type of Contra execution.”
“That’s true, Gloria.” Connelly, seated on her left patted her hand. “I’ve seen it, too.”
Gloria’s hand went to her throat, and then slid down to her breastbone. “The Contra? But why would they…?”
“I don’t think they did.” Ajax was thinking he should’ve had this conversation in private. “But that puts me in the minority. I don’t believe the people who killed him are here. But the reason he was killed might be here.”
“But what reason could there be?” Her composure broke and she wept into her napkin. Ajax was unsure what to do. To his surprise, Amelia was out of her chair and by Gloria’s side in a heartbeat. She said nothing to the widow, just gave her a literal shoulder to cry on.
The next moment, Epimenio slipped into the room, splattered in soil from the grave he’d dug. He watched Gloria cry. It seemed to Ajax that his eyes filled with more pain than Ajax would credit a man capable of. Epimenio looked away from Gloria, then nodded to Father Jerome, who pushed himself from the table.
“I’ll get my vestments.”
* * *
Ajax stood on the Cuadra porch and peered around the corner of the house, back toward the small fenced-in plot where, under a half full moon, he counted eight other headstones. One, he noticed, stood over a recent grave, if the earthen mound, which had not yet gone flat, was anything to go by. He wondered who else Gloria had lost.
He felt as if he was spying on the huddle around Enrique’s grave, but he had wanted to see without being seen. He’d told himself he might learn something from watching the mourners’ body language. But now he thought not. How many funerals had he been to in his life? These very hills were dotted with the graves of many old compas whose remains had never been recovered after the Triumph and removed to Heroes and Martyrs cemeteries. So, too, he supposed, were all the bodies of the Guardia he’d killed—after all, who would have come looking for them? These hills were strewn with the fallen going all the way back to Sandino’s fight against the Marines. And before that to the Independentistas who fell fighting the Spanish. The Indians who fought the Spaniards, even the Spaniards who’d fought the Indians, and on and on all over the world to the last Neanderthal who’d fought the first Cro-Magnon. The land was full to the treetops with ghosts. It occurred to Ajax that maybe he was lucky to be haunted by only one. Because he was sure now that’s what it was. He just wasn’t sure whose ghost.
She came up on him like a specter, too. She didn’t speak, just leaned around the corner of the house with him, and watched in silence as he did. But close enough to make him suddenly feel deeply the loss of Enrique Cuadra to his family, his finca, his land. He turned his head enough to see her freckled nose, and could not contain a flood of feeling, which brought tiny diamonds of pain to his eyes.
They spoke each other’s name at once so it came out as “Amelajax” or “Ajamel.” It brought smiles to their faces so that they could face each other, chests lightly touching without embarrassment, or regret.
“I’m sorry, Ajax, I should’ve told you I meant to come here. Or, maybe not come at all.”
“It’s different for me and Connelly. We…”
“I know. I’m a tourist.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt. I…”
“I know. Me, too.”
“I almost…”
“Shhh.” She pressed her fingertips to his lips. “My father was like that, too.”
“Like what?”
“He was in the Korean War. My mother said they didn’t spend a whole night together for the first two years they were married.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“It’s called post-traumatic stress. Even when I was a kid, Mom told us to never, ever wake Daddy if he was asleep. And never touch him if he was having a nightmare. He still has them.”
“I don’t…” Ajax was dumbfounded. Post-traumatic stress? That was something rich people got, gringos with money and too much time on their hands. But then he remembered Fortunado Gavilan, so haunted by crows he’d killed his lover and then forced his own death.
“Amelia, I almost…”
“But you didn’t. You scared me, scared the crap out of me. But you didn’t hurt me. I’m okay. I’m not the feeble little gringa you think I am.”
“I don’t…”
“And Matthew is not the annoying, nosy gringo you think he is. Okay?”
Ajax was staggered. He looked into her eyes, which were green even in the dark, and for the first time in years he was empty inside. Empty of noise. He didn’t want a drink, he didn’t want a smoke, and he didn’t want to yell at anyone. He didn’t want to speak at all. He was empty of anger. He wasn’t angry at anyone about anything. Not even himself. He realized that the emptiness was stillness. A stillness Amelia had brought to his mind. And in that stillness all he wanted—God help him, even more than to prove them all wrong about Enrique Cuadra—all he wanted was her mouth on his. Her body against his.
“You should visit Granada before you go.”
Those green eyes smiled at him.
“Should I?”
“It’s the jewel of our country. A little colonial town, down on the big lake. Like something preserved inside one of those snow globes.”
“Are you asking me on a date, Ajax Montoya?”
Stupidly, foolishly even, moreover, unwisely in the extreme—he realized—he was. Or wanted to. He wanted to want something, frankly, a little silly.
“We could ‘make the clock.’”
“Is it me or is there a double meaning in that?”
“In colonial times, Granada was a wealthy town with a clock tower on the main plaza. The children of the rich couldn’t court each other because of the Honor Code. Marriage was business. So they’d ‘make the clock.’ One lover would send an anonymous note with a clock face and a time drawn on it. The recipient would go the plaza at that time, but also stand in the plaza aligned with that time. At three o’clock on the three o’clock position. Whoever was directly opposite you was pitching woo.”
“You didn’t just say ‘woo.’”
“It sounds better in Spanish. Then the couple would promenade around the plaza.…”
“Clockwise naturally.”
“… but always keeping the other exactly opposite. Family, chaperones, friends, would be clueless. The lovers would never even glance at each other, yet be utterly focused only on each other.”
Amelia’s patella brushed like a whisper against his inner thigh. “You want to make the clock with me?”
“I do.”
Then Gloria Cuadra’s weeping came to them from the graveyard. Ajax peered back around the corner to see the widow being held up between Father Jerome and Connelly as they and the other mourners processed back to the house. He felt Amelia slip away, but said nothing.
He watched the graveyard and listened to the sounds of the mourners in the house. He was about to join them when a lone figure returned to the grave, carrying something. A sack? It looked like Epimenio. Whoever it was laid the sack on the ground, lifted a shovel, and brought it down violently. The figure tossed the sack into the grave and shoveled the freshly turned earth into it. Ajax’s cop sense set off a silent alarm which pushed him off the porch. The sounds of the shovel covered the sound of his light steps.
“Epimenio.”
It was just a whisper but the campesino jumped out of his skin.
“Captain, you scared me to death.”
“Martin.”
“Yes, don Martin.”
“Just Martin.”
“Yes, señor.”
Ajax watched his silhouette in the darkness. He could not see Epimenio’s face, but he could almost smell the fear. That nervous fear of someone caught in the act. Ajax let several seconds tick by, and then he gently took the spade by its long handle.
“I’ll finish.”
“No. No, señor, it is the last thing I can do for don Enrique.”
“What did you put in there?”
Epimenio stuck his left index finger into his ear and rattled it around like he’d not heard right.
“Señor?”
“What did you put in there with Enrique?”
Epimenio knelt and used his hands to scoop earth into the dark hole. It was the blackest black Ajax had ever seen. He gave the spade back.
“Answer me.”
Epimenio put the shovel back to work.
“A jaguar.”
“What? A real one?”
“A cub.”
Ajax rubbed his fingers along his right forearm. Enrique had had scratches there, he’d seen them in the morgue. “Why did you kill it?”
“I couldn’t bury it alive.”
“No, I mean why put it in there at all?”
“Doña Gloria said it was evil.”
Ajax looked back at the house and wondered what the pretty young widow was literally trying to bury.
“Why?”
Epimenio sighed in a manner Ajax had heard before—it was usually followed by a co
nfession.
“Its mother killed one of our cows, our best milk cow. Enrique and I tracked her for a few days. We didn’t find her, but then we were hurrying home and we came across her very near here. Don Enrique thought she was coming back for another cow. He got one shot off. We tracked the blood for a while, but lost her. A neighbor found the carcass and the cub the next day.”
“When was this?”
Epimenio stopped for a moment. “The last full moon.”
Ajax looked up to the half moon. “Three weeks ago.”
“I suppose.”
Ajax watched him shovel earth for a few moments. “Why were you hurrying?”
“What?”
“You said you and Enrique ‘were hurrying home.’ Why?”
Epimenio had the spade in the small mound of earth, and had only to lift it and toss the dirt in. Instead, he left it there a good long while. Ajax knew from many interrogations that it was vital not to speak next, because whoever did would lose. He took out the Reds Connelly had given him, lit two, and passed one over.
4.
“Are you insane?”
It was precisely the reaction Ajax expected from Connelly, which was why he hadn’t revealed his plan to him before they left Managua. The dawn was breaking rosy as the four of them drank coffee on the porch. The morning sky was more beautiful than the sunset’s scarlet, but it was still red. A cock crowed and Ajax smiled.
“Define insane.”
“You go hunting the Contra and they kill you.”
“But we’ve got a get-out-of-the-grave-free card.”
“What?”
“My letter,” Amelia said. “From the Contra leadership.” She handed it to Matthew, who tried to give it back.
“Amelia, please don’t encourage this.”
She held her hands up and refused to take it back. “It says ‘the bearer is an aide to Anthony Teal of the United States Senate, a great friend to our movement.’ I won’t be going, so you’ll be bearing it.”
“I am not going!” Matthew read the letter, and shook his head no. It seemed to Ajax he was disagreeing, rather than refusing.
“Ajax, what makes you even think we can find them?”
“Epimenio knows where to start looking. We use that point as an anchor, and hike a circle around it. If we make enough noise, they’ll find us.”
