Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  One-eye didn’t repeat the word. Instead he laughed, low and deep in his chest. “Krill will clean the world.”

  “Yes, hombre.” Krill patted One-eye’s shoulder as he might his best hunting dog who was his only companion. “We will clean them all. Piricuacos, Soviets, Cubans, all those faggots and then those arrogant gringo sons of bitches.”

  “And then we will own the malls!” One-eye spoke it like a punch line. Ajax realized One-eye was playing his part—the chorus in an oft-told tale.

  Krill leaned over the fire to light another cigarette. Ajax studied his eyes, but didn’t see a psychopath, only a man for whom killing is a way of life.

  “What the Argentines taught me,” Krill sat back. “And this is something they learned from history, what they taught me is that when you are questioning a guest you tie him upside down. You know why?”

  “No sleeping,” One-eye intoned.

  “That’s right. The blood flows to the head and the guest stays awake through all kinds of shit, like the shit we put this piri’s friends through, okay? For two days he watched his friends suffer, bleed, plead. Still he didn’t talk. Do you know why, Martin?”

  “He had balls.”

  “Enormous fucking balls! And I respect that, Communist, non-Communist, I don’t care. And you know what happened when we tied him upside down?”

  “Nothing. He escaped first.”

  Krill’s mouth dropped open; for the first time he was surprised. “A la gran puta!” He tapped One-eye’s arm. “How does he know this?” Krill leaned in to study Ajax even closer. “You are not his brother. Not his father. But you know him, yes? So, Martin, you are military. Army?”

  “No.”

  “State Security?”

  “Fuck them.”

  Krill laughed out loud, a real laugh that sprayed the campfire like spittle. “Fuck them? Fuck them! You sound like me. But why? You know this boy? Did he survive his escape?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Ah, so you have come to revenge him?”

  “No.”

  “How did he die, our big-balled guest?”

  “He killed his girlfriend, then a priest.”

  “Really? Well, at least the priest was not his girlfriend.”

  Krill slapped One-eye, but he didn’t laugh, just kept his .45 pointed at Ajax.

  “So, Martin, how did he die?”

  “He killed himself.”

  “Really?” Krill made a finger gun and pointed it at his own head. “Shot himself?”

  “No. It’s called ‘suicide by cop.’”

  “Ah, he killed the others then made the police kill him. I have seen that in soldiers.” Krill leaned over the fire and laid a hand on Ajax’s knee. “Now I see. You are the police of suicide by police.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have come to revenge him?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “I want to know who murdered Enrique Cuadra.”

  “Wait, you want to solve the murder. Not the gringo?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “You have to come to Krill’s camp, a place, my friend, from which you now know you will not leave, to solve one murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think I killed him. Why?”

  “Enrique found your airstrip.”

  Krill and One-eye exchanged a look. To Ajax’s cop eye, they didn’t seem to be readying a lie.

  “We know of an airstrip, more than one. But they aren’t ours. What we get by air is dropped to us. So you don’t think I killed Cuadra?”

  “I have to eliminate suspects.”

  Ajax had deliberately given Krill the word “eliminate” to play with, but he didn’t. Krill didn’t laugh. He didn’t smile or look triumphant. He seemed to Ajax to be genuinely curious. “This whole country is a great pile of maggots.” Krill turned his knife as if lifting one wiggly worm. “And you want to pick up one maggot and say, ‘This worm offends me.’ You are confused my friend. Deeply confused.”

  “I have been told that before.”

  “Have you ever been told you are going to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Because you are, Martin the mule. That is why you have come to Krill’s camp. To die. Maybe we can call this ‘suicide by Krill.’ Tie him to a tree.”

  Krill rose and One-eye produced rope and reached for Ajax’s hand. Ajax had been studying the fire for some time, so he knew just which burning stick to use. It had, he reckoned, worked for Ulysses, why not him?

  But One-eye was too fast. As the embers flew when Ajax ripped the stick from the fire, One-eye turned his head just enough so that the burning coal hit not the fleshy grape of the one good eye, but the rough scar tissue of the other. The burly bastard seized Ajax and leapt on top of him, roaring in pain and surging with the power of it. Son of a bitch! While he fought with One-eye, Ajax noticed that Krill did not come to his dog’s defense. He just stood there, smiling, while his men appeared out of the dark like demons. Demons with fists like rocks and feet like logs. Ajax hoped the beating would put him out quickly, because he knew once he was upside down he would never lose consciousness.

  2.

  There is a certain release in pain. Pain that is not mere discomfort. Ajax had learned in the mountains that men could be driven mad by too much rain, too little food, or too much illness. But he had never seen a severely wounded man lose his sanity. In those cases you simply gave in to the pain, surrendered to it. Like a drowning man who capitulates to the water—you would live or die, but not go insane.

  Ajax was like that now. He had not lost consciousness during the beating, but he’d been able to protect himself. His balls were not swollen and his teeth still felt all in place. But the pain was everywhere else. Like a heat rising from his feet, up each leg, in all the muscles and joints and bones all the way up to his face. He could taste blood in his mouth. He let it pool there and then slowly spat it out. Sitting against the tree they’d finally bound him to was perhaps the worse discomfort. The shrapnel in his coccyx felt as if it had been driven deep into the bone and sitting on it drove a slow stream of pain up his spinal cord into his brain. Once there, Ajax pretended to suck the pain out of his head through the cuts inside his mouth. As the blood filled it, he imagined himself spitting out the pain.

  It actually helped. The spurting noise was the only sound in the dark camp. So he didn’t fight the pain, didn’t fight the knots. He just rested his head against the tree, looked at the half moon risen over his head, and spit blood. At first he’d just wanted to keep it off himself. Then he’d noticed the flat top of a buried stone between his legs and he’d aimed for that. He was hitting it pretty good when a memory floated home to him. Years ago, during the final offensive, his column had been halted outside of Matagalpa. Rhino had joined them by then, and one quiet afternoon he had stumbled out of the bushes, fumbling with his fly, practically screaming, “A la cachimba!”—the Nicaraguan version of “Eureka!”

  “Compas, I have just figured out the warlike nature of our people and indeed all men,” he’d called out. Rhino’s clownish goodwill had made him an instant hit with the veterans, even those like Ajax who’d seen right off it was Rhino’s way of dealing with fear.

  “I was taking a piss and it hit me like a bolt from the blue—men are naturally warlike because we piss standing up!”

  That had provoked no small amount of mirth and a few suggestions that Rhino maybe pissed with his hat off, rather than his fly down. But Rhino had not been deterred.

  “No, listen. What do we all do when we piss? See a little leaf over here or a stick over there or a stone further on and what do we do? We aim for it, right? How many of us pass the time while passing water aiming at something? Well, what’s the difference between aiming a stream of piss at a rock and throwing a rock at a target? It’s the same, right? It’s the same geometry to aim a stream of piss, a rock, a spear, an arrow, or a bullet! It works the same. So from our earliest age whi
le we piss standing up we are learning the geometry of war.”

  Rhino had never been a serious person, but his “pissing and the geometry of war” was widely discussed for days afterward.

  Ajax felt his mouth fill again with blood and he aimed carefully for the stone. Then a sentry approached. A bored sentry could be a dangerous thing late at night when all others were sound asleep. The strange way this one moved injected a dose of fear into the streams of hurt flowing through him. But that, Ajax thought, was another benefit to sustained pain. It made you not give a fuck.

  “Come on, boy, play with me.” He sucked blood into his torn mouth and readied a gob for the sentry’s face.

  There was no doubt the sentry was moving toward him, coming for him. But even in the quiet of the camp this one moved silently, as if floating just off the ground. The sentry seemed in no hurry, stopping by little piles of what might be rags or forest detritus, but Ajax knew each one was a sleeping Contra. When the sentry was a few yards off he stopped and seemed to look right at Ajax. But in the moonlight he could see it had no eyes to see with.

  The apparition was back.

  The silhouette stood off a ways, staring sightlessly. Maybe this was a good thing, Ajax thought. Maybe if he lost his mind before they hoisted him upside down, he would not feel what they meant to do. Still, he tugged uselessly at his bonds. No matter what or who, he did not believe he should go down without fighting. He spat out more blood and filled his lungs to cry out when the apparition began to change. Ajax wasn’t sure what was happening, but the silhouette seemed to spasm as if jerked by invisible wires. Then it seemed to shimmer, as if stirred by a breeze. But there was no breeze, nothing, only the moonlight falling silently.

  And then, there they were—two eyes looking at him. Unmistakably eyes, whose wetness was the only living thing in the camp that could reflect moonlight as these eyes now did. Only then, Ajax realized, when it had finally taken full human form, did the shining apparition approach. Slowly, but close enough for Ajax to see, to know, to recognize not only what this was, but who.

  But first he understood its look. That first night in Managua when he’d watched it watching him through the garden window, it had shimmered as if covered in a shining veneer like black paint. But now, as the ghost closed in on him, he realized to his horror it was not paint, but gore. There was a single, long slash across the apparition’s throat from ear to ear; the wound hung loosely open, the severed flesh like two lips. The ghost’s chest was soaked in still-wet, gleaming blood as if every drop had poured out of the wicked gash and saturated its front. Not its chest, Ajax saw, but its shirt. Its uniform, for the apparition was dressed in army fatigues.

  Ajax pulled furiously at the ropes. Krill might have him in the morning, but he would wrestle this demon right now. As if reading his thoughts, the apparition moved in very close, inches from Ajax’s face. And then, quite deliberately it seemed, the apparition tilted its head just so to find a spot where the moon leaked through the canopy, like a weak spotlight illuminating a lone actor about to deliver a soliloquy to an empty theater. Ajax could not take his eyes off the horrible gash, which moved like a mouth when the apparition moved.

  Again, as if reading Ajax’s thoughts, the ghost moved its head as if to show Ajax its eyes. No, not the eyes, but the eyelashes—impossibly long, utterly girlish, and completely alluring, at least in life. He had thought the same thing when he’d first seen the boy with the long eyelashes. They were a feature rarely seen on men, such sensual eyelashes. Ajax remembered they had given the boy a doe-eyed look of utter vulnerability in life that he had taken with him into death.

  He’d noticed them even as he’d held the boy’s mouth closed after he’d slashed his throat and his life pumped out. It was the boy from whom he’d taken the Python all those years ago. The boy whose throat he’d cut for that gun. Not because he’d needed it, but because he’d wanted it.

  The boy with the long eyelashes.

  The only time in all those years of killing that Ajax Montoya had murdered someone.

  His heart beat faster now than when he’d realized Krill had found him out. They were almost nose-to-nose. They hadn’t touched, but he was sure the boy was a physical thing in front of him.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “You pick the one night I don’t have the fucking thing.” For he was sure the ghost had come to reclaim the pistol. And he was as sure it was safely hidden in Matthew’s pickup as he was now sure that it was a ghost that stood before him. He took a small comfort from the fact that he was not insane, just haunted by someone he’d murdered. He was going to die soon, and Ajax preferred to die sane and screaming, rather than insane and laughing.

  “Okay. Here I am. You going to do it yourself or hang around for the morning show?”

  There was no response. At least no words. But the ghost of the boy with the long eyelashes moved closer. His lips opened and closed like a fish out of water gasps. Each time his lips moved, so did the awful gash in his throat. The ghost was so close now Ajax feared it would Judas-kiss him, and he leaned back until he was hard against the tree. The ghost moved closer still until it should have touched Ajax’s face. He shut his eyes but did not feel a physical contact as the ghost leaned into him. Rather, he felt heat like a roaring fire had suddenly been lit before him, his front hot, but his back against the tree chilled in the night air.

  And then he felt it.

  It.

  The Needle.

  The ghost had put it in his hand! The steel grip as familiar to his touch as the Python’s ivory handle. The very blade he’d used to kill the boy. Ajax should be frightened, but he was confused, even fascinated. Either Ajax had somehow (unconsciously? psychotically?) hidden The Needle on his person, or a ghostly apparition had passed him a physical object.

  But then, as suddenly as the flame had come on, it was gone. Ajax was alone. Alone, cold, and armed in a camp full of enemies. It didn’t matter where the blade had come from. He sawed slowly but surely through the ropes until he was free. He sat for a while letting tingling blood flow back to his aching limbs—the sweetest pain of all.

  He turned The Needle over in his hands. A well-machined specialty blade, The Needle was actually rather delicate for a killing tool. None of the bulk and heft of a bowie knife, built like a boxer. The Needle was like a ballerina—thin, but all muscle and gristle. It was no bigger around than a fat knitting needle, and shaped like a diamond so that each angle of the diamond formed a razor’s edge. That way, no matter how it was drawn out, a cutting edge could lead the way. It was of no use other than what it was designed for. You could not cut wood with it or even whittle. The point was too long and delicate to stab anything of any heft. It was made only to pierce soft tissue. The point was meant to penetrate the side of the neck, puncturing the carotid artery and then the larynx. The blade was meant to be flicked forward, away from the body, carving open blood vessels and the voice box.

  * * *

  That was precisely what Ajax did to the boy with the long eyelashes. It had been late in the war, and Ajax was already a renowned comandante guerrillero. But he’d still performed his own reconnaissance. He’d been outside one of the last National Guard posts still in proper order. He’d seen the boy only from afar, but had spotted the ivory-handled Python in a shoulder holster. His recon had been complete, but when he’d spotted the boy near the camp’s edge, he’d waited until long after dark. Maybe it had been something in the boy’s gait, something not quite soldierly, which had caught Ajax’s attention—had put him on full predator alert. But he remembered now, turning The Needle in his hands in Krill’s camp, that without thinking he’d gone into a crouch and drawn the blade. Something about the boy stank of prey and Ajax had moved to intercept him.

  It had been an easy kill. Ajax infiltrated the camp and the boy had practically walked into his arms. He’d taken the boy down, straddled him, and clamped his mouth shut. The boy hardly resisted at all. This surprised Ajax until he’d got a look at the unl
ined face. The long eyelashes and full lips. The boy had been a dark-skinned campesino and could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. But the Guardia, in the final days, had been conscripting anyone it could lay its calloused, shaking hands on. Ajax had known right off the Python did not belong to the boy. No weapon this fine would be issued to such a child-soldier, nor would he have been allowed to keep it had he taken it as a prize.

  No. He carried it for another, an officer, perhaps even the colonel Ajax’s sniper had been trying to pick off for two days. “Gun bearer.” It was a term they’d heard, an affectation of some of the high-born officers who choose privates to carry their favorite firearm. But one look at the boy’s long lashes, his delicate features, the way he’d surrendered instantly, and Ajax had known the boy had had other duties as well.

  That wasn’t why Ajax had killed him. All the throats he’d cut as a foot soldier. The men who’d died in his ambushes, or because of his orders. The sandbags sacrificed, the collaborators executed. Why should that boy have been any different? He didn’t know why. It was just what he had done.

  All he could remember now was that, holding the boy down, he’d seen tears flowing freely as he drove The Needle in drew it out. As he had so many times before—so often, in fact, he’d learned that a well-cut throat made a man feel, in his last moments, that he was drowning as blood poured into the lungs. Ajax had decided to spare the boy that end and so had sat him up and let him bleed out. Once the boy had ceased spasming, Ajax had almost left without the Python, took it as an afterthought. He’d stopped carrying The Needle after that. Three days later the garrison had surrendered. For the first time, Ajax broke his promise of quarter. He executed the colonel with his own pistol. It was the only time Ajax had fired the Python in battle.