Lost in contemplation, she was only dimly aware of the fire flickering out, the guerrillas gathering their packs, retreating to their tents. After Buho departed with his guitar, there came just the sounds of night crickets, and that mysterious plink, plink. Mesmerized by the night, she failed to notice Halcón standing next to her, and she started when he spoke.
“I saw you were alone.”
“I was thinking about a book I’m writing. Please sit down.” Maggie had long waited for this chance to know him better. She had a sense of him as driven by forces he might not understand — but nevertheless urbane, even charming when he put his mind to it.
He continued to hover above her. “And what kind of book is this?”
“It is about love and adventure in Costa Rica.”
“Will you tell the truth of our country? How we are all peons to the pirates of Wall Street. Or am I the bad guy?” His voice had lost much of its flatness, was more mellifluous.
“Maybe not.”
“Or a fool. A romantic fool — do you have room for this person in your fiction?”
“If he is also a handsome hero.” As blatant as that sounded, she had decided to play to his ego.
He finally sat, pulling out a cigarette. They were alone but for Perezoso strolling about the sphere on night watch.
By the light of the match he struck, she could see his dark Spanish eyes above his bandit’s mask; they seemed to dance to the rhythm of the flame. Watching him insert and light the cigarette through the hole of his kerchief, she could not suppress a smile. “Tell me about this romantic fool,” she said.
He took a deep pull on the cigarette. “I can tell you a story; it might sell many books. A life outside the law in a struggle always for justice for my country. Romance, yes, I have known that, and much adventure, too.”
My contry. The way he said that, the way his hands darted as he talked … A powerful sense of déjà vu overcame her. She recalled words spoken only a week ago: Maybe you will find room in your book for a lonely history professor. Her mouth formed a wide oval of shock, and for a few moments she was unable to speak.
“Is the story also about a thief?”
Her words were met with silence.
Anger welled in Maggie, despite her consternation. She wanted to slap his face, and could barely stop herself from doing so. She sputtered: “You … you two-faced lying snake!”
“Qué? Snake? I do not understand.”
“This is too bizarre. You … you puta!” She didn’t know what the word meant, but it was obviously a Tico curse. She tried to settle herself, make reason of this. The pickpocket professor, Pablo Esquivel, had metamorphosed as captain of the Comando Cinco de Mayo.
Now she remembered his mimicry of the Laughing Falcon at the restaurant — he had called this bird, this halcón, the masked bandit of the skies. She had missed that clue and been treated to the full guaco once again.
She fought to compose herself and spoke resentfully. “I guess you thought I had come straight from the cornfields. You left me nearly broke. I was mortified when you abandoned me in that restaurant with all the people staring.”
He pulled off his blue kerchief. In the glow of cigarette and distant dying embers, she could make out his finely sculpted face, his wide handsome moustache, his easy Latin smile. “We needed your donation for a last-minute budget crisis. The caretaker at Outward Bound demanded more than our agreement called for.”
Maggie took several deep breaths to calm herself, and tried making sense of why a man she had banished to daydreams and fiction had returned to haunt her reality. If she wrote this in a book, no reader would believe it. It was too far-fetched, too coincidental.
“Maybe the plot goes like this. The villain sees a pretty señorita walk from her hotel and follows her to the university.”
A pretty señorita: still the thieving gigolo, still utterly attractive despite the recent cropping of his collar-length hair. This pseudo-professor with all his savoir faire and cool audacity was nothing more than a common rogue, a thief, and a kidnapper. Did he have credentials as a revolutionary or was he posturing at that as well? She spoke sharply: “And why would you be hanging around my hotel? You wanted to check me out – you knew I had signed on for the lodge.” Had he sloughed off her denial of being rich and famous? Had he thought a large ransom could be earned?
“This is a clever thought, but I think it belongs in the world of detective fiction.”
His evasiveness persuaded Maggie not to pursue the matter, but she was confounded — how would he have known she was staying at the Pension Paraíso?
“Let me tell you something, Maggie. It is not easy to speak of this. Perhaps you will think it is, how do you say, a line, a come-on, but you have won a place in my heart. You are, to me, a woman not merely of outer beauty but of great inner beauty, not like your companion, with all her peevish vanity. You are also a woman of courage, valiente. So compassionate in offering yourself in place of another. That I will never forget, when you said, ‘Take me instead.’ And it is my hope that maybe one day I will bring you to understand me, and to forgive me, and to know that this difficult time is a means to a great humanitarian end.”
During this speech, his voice, no longer disguised, regained its full range of tone. Though still stunned, perplexed by his return engagement in her life, her wrath had much abated. She would be better able to forgive his crimes if she could believe he had acted with benign motives. Then came an inner voice of warning: He is a master of the glib phrase, he is merely seeking to disarm you, to make sure you cooperate.
“A puta, by the way, is a prostitute. The phrase you hear, ‘hijueputa,’ was corrupted by common use from ‘hijo de puta,’ son of a whore. I think that is what you meant to call me.”
She was still trying to settle her mind, bring herself back to the harsh reality of her plight. What was the soundest course of action here? She decided she must hold to her plan to befriend and disarm him.
Perezoso, the night guard, hearing their low conversation, came to investigate. Halcón sent him retreating with a few sharp words.
“They have to understand, I am their captain – that was the arrangement. One must be firm with these people; they are amateurs, lacking experience in the hard life of a revolutionary”
“But you will lead them to the promised land.”
“Sí Dios quiere. But you must not think that we seek personal profit. It is not a crime that we commit — that is an empty word. Ours is a political act. The true criminals, the true terrorists, are those who sit at the tables of power, and the warmonger Senator Walker wants to sit at the head.”
“So why didn’t you take him?”
“Who would want him back?” That seemed flip, unresponsive.
“The real reason is that you think women are easier to control.”
“I wish I had found that so.”
“This is how you make a political statement, kidnapping women.” Maggie remained skeptical. “You don’t hope to get rich from it?”
“Only the poor will be rewarded.”
“With what? How much money are you demanding?”
“Fifteen million.”
Maggie was staggered by the sum. “That’s impossible.”
“Walker has wealthy friends.”
“You picked the worst possible target. He’ll never negotiate.”
Halcón shrugged. “If we win freedom for Benito Madrigal, that may be profit enough.”
He was prepared to bargain; Maggie felt relief. “Who is this messiah?”
“A man of honour. They have placed him in an asylum, claiming he is loco, but that is one of their many lies, that is how they stop his tongue. We do not know what tortures he has been subjected to. One day you will meet him, briefly, perhaps, during an exchange. But, Miss Schneider, understand this well: though we are not murderers, in the end we must do what we must do.”
That created a chill and a silence; Maggie thought it wise to change the subject. “The sounds of the night
are beautiful. What makes that plink?”
“Un martillito, a tink frog. It is very tiny for such a big sound.”
The night was hushed but for those bell-clear tinks and the sibilant whispers of life in the trees. She shivered, not from the cold — she was still wrapped in her sleeping bag — but from his closeness. Despite her unease, she had begun to feel more valiente, confident enough to ask a favour. “Is there paper here? A pen or a pencil?”
“And you would write your novel?”
She spoke as brazenly as she dared: “You inspired me, Halcón, with your story about the lost Spanish mission. How true was that? Captain Morgan, the treasure boats.”
“The mission truly existed. This story of buried treasure is one of the great legends of my country, and all great legends are based on truth, yes?”
“Is that what you’re doing now — creating a legend?”
“Life creates its own legends, Miss Schneider, and a life worth living creates history. Napoleon defined history as ‘a set of lies agreed upon,’ but I am not so cynical. The chronicle I write may be only a footnote, but …” He shrugged. “Life is a drama with many dangers; that is how I prefer to see it, to live it. I once wasted myself in an office – but that is another, duller story.” He looked contemplative, squinting into the smoke from the last puff of his cigarette.
His brief treatise had bared much about himself. Maybe he was, in reality, a historian who had read deeply of Napoleon, perhaps of other conquerors — and he appeared to share the personality complex coined in Napoleon’s honour, seeking fame, his own legend.
Not wanting him to leave yet, hoping to learn more, she blurted, “By the way, you will be in my book. You could have been the hero, but you lost the job.”
He laughed. “The thief of love. I cannot deny I enjoyed the stolen kisses; nor can I deny what my body felt. You were very pretty in the soft light playing on the waterfall.”
She wondered if this was just his typical blarney. Yet she had felt that pressure against her groin; they had both been aroused.
“Fiona Wardell was very disappointed in the light-fingered history professor.”
“Fiona – ah, the heroine of your book. And now who will she find to love?”
“His name is Jacques Cardinal. Unfortunately, he has problems. But he’ll have to do.” She told him she had borrowed the name from the owner of a kayak business in Quepos. “A drunken ruffian.”
“She will be sorry she rejected the professor.”
Relationship between captor and prisoner had taken on an oddly familiar character. Maggie was picking up innuendoes that added to the confusion she was feeling about him. She was finding it difficult to restructure him as a commando leader, to erase a former picture.
“But why would you not write the truth? Here is your work of literature. Here, under the stars, with this small band of men and women who dream of better worlds.”
“I dream of other worlds myself, Halcón, when I write; it’s my therapy. But I did promise to tell the story of Cinco de Mayo. I can do that, too.” She sensed he sought celebrity – probably his followers did, as well.
He stood. “One must not deny talent. And I will not deny a lady of such charm and of such … forthrightness. Is that the word?”
“Your English is very good.”
“I lived many years in the wastelands of America.”
Soon after Halcón left, Perezoso came by the tent with the reward for her collaboration: a pencil, a few sheets of blank paper, and a candle. Quetzal groaned in her sleep and rolled over.
Maggie wasn’t immediately able to write; Halcón was too much in her mind. A man of many layers, as bright and urbane as he was brazen and defiant. She must stay on guard against the pull he exerted: she was fascinated by a sense of danger that seemed to glow in him. She must not forget she was in peril; she was in uncharted jungle with a gang of revolutionary dreamers led either by a charlatan or a naïve utopian of the far left.
But surely he was committed to a revolutionary’s ethics. After all, he had surrounded himself with like-minded men and women; they had performed a daring political act, a raid on a guarded redoubt of a notorious senator. If he sought just financial gain, he could have picked a softer target of greater wealth.
She must remind herself he was acting outside the law; however dashing a villain, he was a kidnapper.
She closed her eyes and tried to visualize Fiona and Jacques and Spanish gold …
When Fiona lightly dug into the earth she realized the object she had chanced upon was not another rock. Carefully, she picked around the broken lid of a clay pot. As she began brushing the dirt from it, she felt a rush of excitement — a year had been scratched upon its surface: 1671.
Despite the pall placed on this expedition by her bearish companion, she was thrilled to be at the threshold of a brilliant success. She beckoned to Jacques, and he rose from his own toil some distance away.
As he bent beside her, he said, “You’re beautiful.”
She looked sharply at him.
“I was talking to the pot lid.” He favoured her with the mocking smile that had begun so much to vex her.
The broken lead tip of her pencil wobbled and fell out, and she gave up, dissatisfied with her meagre effort. The two characters were lacking joy. She disliked caustic Jacques and was not sure if, ultimately, she could picture him throwing himself in adoration at Fiona’s feet. She might well be sorry she rejected the professor …
But she was annoyed even more by Fiona – after a long hiatus between creative renderings, she had become a bore, and so had the plot. Her artistic juices were drying up. The likely cause: she was living a chapter of her own life far beyond her creative dreams. How could her imagination ever match this reality?
She would write a truer tale: an account of her jungle ordeal, one that honoured her commitment to be fair to Cinco de Mayo and Halcón. Anyway, publishers would be far less interested in buried treasure than the perils of Margaret and Gloria-May. The women’s magazine for which she had been cajoled to write might serialize it.
She blew out the candle and stretched out next to Quetzal and remembered again those two long kisses in the gardens of La Linda Vista.
– 2 –
Maggie woke at dawn to screams, and quickly crawled from her tent. She recognized the voice: Gordo, who sounded almost beyond terror. As she looked behind the tent toward the stone sphere, she was stunned to see a gigantic boa constrictor wrapping itself around Gordo’s leg, its mouth clamped on his left boot.
Her campmates rushed from their tents, a melee of movement and noise: “Culebra grande!” Maggie was frozen, horrified, as Gordo struggled with the snake, which was at least four metres long. He tried in vain to crawl free, then managed to pull his pistol from its holster.
He fired two great blasts that echoed through the jungle valley. The snake freed its teeth from Gordo’s boot and jerked wildly, thrashing, banging its tail against the huge round rock. A moment later, Coyote decapitated it, and there came a sickening spume of blood. Maggie watched aghast as the dying boa continued to writhe and as Gordo, grunting and gasping, crawled free, his left boot streaming with blood.
Maggie felt faint at the sight of the injury, of all the blood, the entire awful spectacle. She stepped slowly backwards, almost stumbling against a tent. Tayra, still dressing, quickly emerged from it, then Glo’s head poked out from behind the entrance flap.
“Jesus freaking Christ, what was all that?”
Maggie explained. She assumed Gordo had fallen asleep under the sphere while on guard duty; the snake had seen his chubby leg protruding. “I think he shot himself in the foot.”
“How symbolic.” Glo ducked inside to dress while Maggie joined the group squatting around the injured man. None had paused to tie kerchiefs over their faces. Coyote was looking stern: had he not warned them about the dangers of the jungle?
As Buho came rushing from a tent with a first-aid kit, Halcón sliced the boot from Gor
do’s damaged left foot and peeled away his blood-soaked sock: it was indeed a bullet wound. Everyone stood about helplessly for a few moments, then Glo burst from her tent, strode toward Gordo, and bent to examine the wound. “Okay, one of you useless pansies get some water – warm water, heat it. Get his foot up in the air, pass me the goddamn gauze.”
Maggie looked on with awe and admiration as Glo went to work, staunching the flow of blood with gauze, applying an antiseptic solution. One of the two bullets had missed, but the other had shattered the bones in the arch of his foot.
Gordo continued to moan; Halcón began demanding answers from him, his temper frayed. If Maggie understood Gordo’s response, he was denying that he fell asleep, though no one seemed to believe that, and Zorro loudly scoffed.
Finally, a pot of warm water was delivered and Glo washed the foot, applied more antiseptic, then wrapped the wound with bandages. Halcón looked around, frowning, and, aware that the entire group had been seen by the hostages in clear daylight, he didn’t order them to put their kerchiefs on.
After the tents were struck and the camp was dismantled, Halcón called a meeting of the colectivo. They crouched in a circle around Gordo, whose propped-up foot was in a bulbous bandage. At one point, Zorro seemed about to cuff him, but Halcón snapped an order and Zorro lowered his hand.
Maggie joined Glo outside the perimeter. “Where did you learn first aid?”
“Down where I come from, you see a few gunshot wounds. I felt sorry for that fat little critter. You know what? These bozos look better with their faces covered.”
“Except for Halcón.”
“Doesn’t turn my crank, honey. The guy’s right out of some 1940s B movie.”
“I had a long talk with him last night.” Maggie was about to expand on that, but the circle broke and Halcón strode up to them.
“Señora Walker, I will thank you, but we must ask you to share some of the load today.”
She raised her middle finger. “That’s what I’m sharing.”
“I am starting to worry that Senator Walker may not be so pleased to have you back.”
The Laughing Falcon Page 15
