“In terms of fitness.”
“She might be able to hold out. Tell me about the other one.” Slack resented all the concern focused on Gloria-May Walker. What about the Canadian, anyone care about her? A goddamn hero, she’d exchanged herself for a pregnant woman. She’d been described as skinny, maybe frail. A farm girl, though, so she might be tough and innovative.
“Maggie Schneider from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.” Bakerfield emphasized each syllable, finding the place-name droll. “Writes ad copy for a TV station there. Also other stuff, romance novels.”
Slack hadn’t heard that one. He thought of petticoats and satin sheets, hearts on fire, heaving breasts. Her bravery confused him.
“So what do you think about these people? Comando Cinco de Mayo.” Ham struggled with the Spanish.
“In for the bucks. The jargon of revolution is just for the six o’clock news.”
Bakerfield wasn’t buying that. “They’re commies, fanatics. This Benito Madrigal character headed up some group called the People’s Popular Vanguard, Trots or Maoists, some damn thing like that. His nephew Vicente has been going to college in Cuba. He’s the one they call Buho. Skinny, Coke-bottle lenses, twenty-two years old, his father’s rich, owns a grocery chain.”
Slack knew some of the history, it was the stuff the pulps lap up. Vicente Bolaños alias Buho had become bitterly estranged from his wealthy bourgeois father, sought revenge by becoming a communist, siding with the family outcast, his mother’s younger brother. Lately, he had been heading up something called Citizens for the Civil Rights of Benito Madrigal. A few weeks ago, Vicente disappeared.
“The others, we don’t have any intelligence. A couple of them could be dangerous, guy they call Zorro, for one. What’s that mean?”
“A kind of possum, they get into your attic and it takes a ten-megaton bomb to get them out of there.”
“Yeah, he’ll be the headache, a serious agitator. He came on sulky about U.S. Immigration, so we’re checking deportation records. Any idea who this Halcón might be?”
“Not a clue. What were they using? “Why was Slack asking such an irrelevant question, as if he was interested.
“Skorpions, Brownings, couple of Russian choppers, RPKs.”
“Those the new Kalashnikovs?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re out of touch.” Slack’s nose crinkled as Ham lit a cigar. He had an aversion to them, especially the big coronas, maybe Freud could explain it.
“Some of these people Nicas, do you think?” Slack asked.
“Zorro apparently had a Nicaraguan accent. Ex-Sandinista, ex-Contra, who knows? But Kalashes are a dime a dozen at the border. Glut on the market.”
“Yeah, well, your pal Walker created that market.”
“No pal of mine. Guy’s a bit marginal even for me. You been up there, the Savegre headwaters?”
“I’ve tramped around there. Years ago.”
He’d once lugged a hardshell on his back all the way to the Savegre cloud forest. He’d been tough then, lean. Class four up there, even five, an amazing run. But the river was impassable now, except near the headwaters, a beginners’ course, class one. The high river had got torn up by a hurricane a few years ago, left clogged with fallen boulders, dead trees.
Bakerfield toyed silently with his cigar, then turned and studied some high-resolutions taped to the wall, the upper Savegre country.
“We never figured out how they got from A to B, but we found their base camp this morning, an abandoned farm. One of the local rustics rode thirty miles on a horse to the nearest town for supplies, happened to mention he’d found a mess of boot prints. We flew a crew in, but they lost the scent. Too much rain; the dogs got confused.”
“You don’t need dogs. Hire a campesino to look for machete hacks.” Slack could imagine the search party — preppies from Northwestern or Baylor. Hire an ignorant local? What a novel idea.
“You think you might want to help us on this?”
“I’m dying to.” He batted away the second-hand smoke. Bakerfield was still trying to find ways to kill him.
“Feel you’ve been fucked around, don’t you?”
“Right up the waste tract.”
“You’re lucky you got anything. At the end, we didn’t know who you were going to blow up next, us or them. Lots of people thought you had rolled, maybe a mole all along, ever since Cuba. Others thought you were totally nuts. And the rest figured you were just a general all-around fuckup. Count me with them, because I don’t remember you ever doing anything right.”
The last one had been a classic débâcle — CIA agitators in the Green Party, their names exposed, flushed faces in Washington, the French government huffily ordering the U.S. ambassador to pack his bags. Twelve years later, Slack could almost remember it with pleasure.
“Well, I guess you know what you’re doing, Ham.” He slugged back his beer. He could take Ham’s insults. The old man was looking put out now, his goading was going nowhere, Slack wasn’t rising to the bait – it was an old trick, prove what a man you are.
Slack rose. “Good luck.”
“For Christ’s sake, you’re broke. We can come up with a few bucks, make us an offer.”
“Your brain for my ass.”
“I can’t help wondering if you’ve lost it, Sawchuk. Even a lady romance writer has more guts.”
An empty appeal to his vanished pride.
“The name is Cardinal. I do kayak tours.” He rose and stretched. “Time for my nap. I’ll take one for the road.” He helped himself to another umlaut.
“You got a problem, pal.”
After Theodore drove him back to town, Slack considered dallying longer at Hector’s, but decided against it. A mood had come over him, maybe dangerous, another beer might send him over the edge. Had he always been this neurotic? No, it was a learned thing, all those years of working as a spook had driven him halfway to the cackle factory. And now they have the gall to ask a favour. He’d spent too many years burying those memories, he wasn’t going to unearth the coffin.
He retrieved his Land Rover, and as he set out for home the skies opened. Rumbling past the squat, swearing at his useless windshield wipers, he thought he saw El Chorizo’s truck parked down there, his Isuzu. What was he up to?
Then he noticed three tin shacks in a new clearing, right on his property, ten yards from his house, some young mangoes cut down, and a guapinol and a roble on which he’d been growing orchids. What infuriated him most was that they had killed a mother armadillo and her baby, they were hanging dead on a rope.
He parked, unlocked his shed, and brought out a heavy sledgehammer. As he advanced toward the shacks, several of Camacho’s minions scurried from them like weasels. He recognized a couple of them, clerks in the municipal office, Camacho’s hirelings. Finding strength through anger, he knocked all the tin structures down, taking out their wooden support beams with powerful swipes of the sledge.
Then he marched in the pouring rain down a muddy road into the squatters’ village, stopping when he got to Camacho’s truck. With one majestic swing, he pulverized the windshield. He waited for Camacho to come out of the house he was hiding in, his brother-in-law’s. He could see him at the window now, with his bandaged reconstructed nose. When he showed no signs of desiring confrontation, Slack smashed the headlights and went back home. Next time he’d use a gun.
As the rain pummelled his tiled roof, he stood hesitantly before his fridge, wanting a drink, fighting it. Though his anger hadn’t drained, he found his mind drifting elsewhere, being pulled up the Savegre.
A writer of insipid romances had more guts, that galled. He wondered how quickly she churned them out. His own muse, that unyielding bitch, had found him barren, impotent, had flounced from his life. Maybe just one last cold beer, then he’d quit. He examined a bottle of Imperial against the light. No dead mice.
– 2 –
Slack had brought the big raft for this morning’s excursion, the eight-seater, and he had almost
a full complement, six wet customers. They’d dropped maybe a hundred feet over half a mile, a simple run for beginners, and were now in the coastal valley, the Río Naranjo curling languidly between pastures and fruit groves.
Thanks to the Fifth of May Commando, an influx of reporters had caused an uptick in the local economy, even the small hotels filling up, Mono Titi Tours getting a booking a day, media people mostly, jungle ingénues.
“Not much wildlife to point out here. They spray these fields with poisonous chemicals so you lose the birds, their eggshells become thin as paper. Doesn’t affect the snakes, though. Fer-de-lances, corals, rattlers, we got ’em all. There’s one here they call the silent rattler, two-inch fangs, aggressive, it’ll chase you. And watch when you walk under trees, that’s where the eyelash viper lurks. Eighty per cent mortality rate.”
His customers nervously searched the overhanging boughs for this latest in Slack’s compendium of jungle menaces. He was feeling desperate – the world’s attention was focused on little Manuel Antonio, it would become a Cancún, an Acapulco, vast rows of time-shares, BMWs and Jaguars in the parking lots. The little national park would be trampled in the rush.
“We come out on Playa Rey, that’s the other side of the park, and you can swim there, but watch out for the sharks, they like to hang around the river outlets.”
The guy in front of him turned, frowning. “Man, you’ve got to be the most depressing guide in the world.” This fellow was a photographer, one of the newsmagazines, a complainer. “Isn’t anything right with this place?”
Yeah, you’re not right, I’m not right, nobody is. Slack was suffering his regular morning hangover and terminally sore back. He had been in a funk since his session with Ham Bakerfield, those digs about his lack of balls. He’d given them eight years. He’d been captured, beaten, tortured, he’d suffered electric shocks to his groin, and it was a special occasion when he could satisfy a woman, the desire there, the apparatus working inconsistently. Fifty thousand bucks they gave him, and a one-way ticket to Costa Rica.
So a couple of women were in peril, so what? The planet had greater crises. Greenhouse emissions, a birth rate climbing exponentially, the decimation of species. Soon there would be nothing. Just wall-to-wall pet food salesmen.
At Playa Rey, a couple of his clients went into the water, struggling out to the distant waves. A long straight ribbon of sand, big curls beyond that, but it wasn’t a popular beach, usually deserted, a few surfers on weekends. Not far away, near the jungled cliffs of the national park, the Río Naranjo flowed gently into the sea past a mangrove swamp. The Savegre was bigger and wilder, a few miles down the coast.
Slack led his patrons under the shade of a palm, passed out cartons of juices, then tried to find a spot away from them to sit, but a woman joined him.
“Doesn’t seem much like Christmas around here,” she said. Middle-aged, heavily oiled with sunblock, a print journalist from Chicago. “So where’re you from, Slack?”
“Uzbekistan.”
“Seriously.”
“Philadelphia. I was in pet food.”
“How did you end up down here?”
A reporter, answers must be appropriately vague. “Just looking for something different.”
“So can I ask you a sort of man-in-the-street question? What do you think of this hostage crisis?”
Slack didn’t want to get into it. “I couldn’t care less.”
She looked startled. “You’re not concerned?”
“A fifty-per-cent reduction in the price of beans seems like a good idea.”
“You approve of what they’re doing?”
Slack had been only half-serious, but she didn’t twig to the sarcasm.
“Look, no one wants to see those women harmed, but I wish they’d taken Walker instead. That guy, the last four years, he voted for every anti-environment bill that came across his desk, and every pro-poverty bill as well. Too bad the kidnappers didn’t take him, they could keep him.”
“Do I sense that your politics are a little to the left?”
“Yeah, I’m a Bolshevik.” Maybe that wasn’t funny. She started writing notes.
He escaped to the ocean, hoping to catch a wave.
Dear Rocky,
First of all, let me respond to your derisory comments about Harry Wilder. I am sorry he depresses you, but I find offensive your characterization of him as an anxiety-ridden pantywaist who can’t find his own pecker. Is it not obvious that he is an archetype for today, a hero suited to this age of angst? The world cries out for losers to love.
But the peddler of Bow Wow Chow is not in fear of physical danger, oddly that’s not on his inventory of potholes to avoid along life’s haphazard journey. No, Rocky, what carps at him is an obsessive dread of failure, of flubbing, screwing up, events going tragically wrong. The fuckup blows another operation, get the body bags ready, Dr. Zork succeeds in his plan to destroy the world.
Your number two gripe: Where have I hidden the bodies, where’s the blood? Your advice that I begin the first chapter by shooting Harry Wilder is under advisement, but I intend to give him a period of grace.
You whine that my draft chapters lack even the prospect of, as you basely put it, nooky. “A hot box lunch was draping herself all over his kayak, and the reader doesn’t even get any heavy breathing out of this schnorrer.” Sorry, Rock, the guy was practically neutered during the war against the evil empire, remember?
The real bitch is that I still can’t come up with an opening line, that perfect smooth takeoff still lurking somewhere in the blank pages of my mind. (I tried this: Hardly a day passed when Harry Wilder did not give thanks that his surname wasn’t Dick.) Obsessive, you say? I suffer an anal-retentive need to do something right for a change? Not right, Rocky, perfect, totally unfucked-up. I fear writing a pulp thriller can never satisfy that need.
Okay, maybe I am trying to sabotage this project. Frankly, it sucks air.
I am a poet!
Yours,
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Slack fought his way to the bar at Billy Balboa’s, the place was crowded, it had been discovered by Operación Libertad — many of its agents were here, some press, too. At one of the tables a reporter was interviewing a middle-aged couple who looked out of place, not wearing the latest Tilley fashions, the guy thin with callused workman’s hands, the woman matronly, both looking strained and exhausted.
Billy poured Slack a double Centenario and lifted his own glass. “Pura vida, maje,”he said.
“Who are those two people?”
Billy looked at his reservation list. “These people are called Schneiders.”
The Schneiders from Saskatchewan, the parents of the romance writer. A broken marriage, he’d heard, but they were guileless good-hearted prairie folk.
Now the woman started weeping. Slack stared hard into his glass, then tilted it back.
By ten o’clock most of the customers had departed, and Slack was alone at the bar, clutching it for support. Others swam in and out of the haze, Billy cashing out, the Schneiders finally getting to their feet. Slack couldn’t look at them, he tried to drown them in his rum, make them disappear.
He waited until their interviewer led them out before heading to the men’s facility. He was doing all right, able to walk, but then he stalled, because there was motion in front of him, three men approaching, or maybe it was four, all with determined expressions.
He knew a couple of these faces. One was a cop – with the OIJota, the judicial police — and this starched-looking android, where had he seen him before? Theodore, Bakerfield’s gofer.
“Señor Cardinal,” said the OIJota, “you are under arrest.”
He tried to charge past and was tackled. He wasn’t much of a match in his condition, and after about four minutes of huffing and swearing they had him down, pinned to the floor.
He wasn’t conscious of much after that except being dragged into a vehicle, thrown onto a cot in the roach-infested jail, then
roused from sleep, Ham Bakerfield and some of his lackeys staring down at him.
“No point trying to deal with him now. Take him home.”
– 3 –
Slack woke to African drums pounding in his head. Then he noticed the smell, a mix of stale booze and rum farts, his own putrid armpits, and — however unlikely – cigar fumes. He was covered with bites. He was lying on his kitchen floor. Because he was near the stairs, he deduced that at some point he’d made a failed effort to get up to the bedroom.
The cigar smoke was coming from the hammock, where Ham Bakerfield was stretched out.
“Wish I had a camera, former double agent depicted here as a lump of shit. You got a wheelbarrow or a forklift so we can get you to the shower?”
Slack struggled to his feet, followed Ham down the stairs to the outdoor shower, holding his back, he must have strained it in the fight.
“What was that all about, that mugging?”
“A story from the Chicago Tribune went over the wires, offering, quote, an unusual perspective from a local tour operator. It’s got your picture and everything.” Ham read from a printout: “ ‘Cardinal, a self-styled Bolshevik, claimed he supports the cause of the kidnappers.’ We had to take you in for questioning as a possible accessory.”
“Yeah, right, I’m colluding with the enemy. Christ, I was just joking with her.”
Ham grunted. “Nobody got the joke, including the senator. He thinks you staged it.”
“I staged it?”
“It’s a damn good cover. I straightened him out.”
Slack couldn’t even guess what he was talking about. “Put out that cigar, it’s making me sick.”
He peeled off his clothes and stood under the spout, feeling the cold shock of his piped mountain water. Ham flipped him a bar of soap. “Take a shampoo and a shave, too. I want you looking vaguely human when you meet with Walker. He said to me, ‘Bring me that soldier, he has the right stuff.’ He wants to make sure you can lay off the gargle, though, you were fricasseed when he last saw you. You look like a dartboard, pal.”
The Laughing Falcon Page 12
