The Laughing Falcon

by William Deverell

  There came a sound as clear as a clarion in the still night: “Chup-wheer-purr-wheew!” The warning shriek of the nightjar reminded Maggie she must keep a wary distance from the captain of the Fifth of May Commando.

  As the nightjar fluttered off into the darkness, the night fell silent. Silent night: Maggie had not thought much about Christmas, only five days hence, more or less – she was beginning to lose track of time. Barring a sudden miracle, the festive season would be shared with the Comando Cinco de Mayo. How were plans coming for the family dinner at the farm? She pictured them gathered around Aunt Ruthilda’s thirty-pound tom turkey. Surely her mother had relented and insisted that Woodrow join them.

  Don’t be depressed, she told herself, the valientes do not show distress. Stay alert, concentrate on honing survival skills. But she couldn’t help thinking of the sadness of Christmas at Lake Lenore …

  She realized she was softly sobbing, and removed her glasses to wipe away the tears. She must not succumb; she must be much stronger than this.

  But Halcón had noticed, and was now standing at her side. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I was thinking of my family.”

  He sat down and touched her hand; she was so startled that she almost withdrew it. His fingers rested lightly on hers.

  “But of course you will return safely to your family — you are our chronicler to the world. That is why I chose you.”

  She found his words reassuring but confusing. “Your first choice was a pregnant woman.”

  “In the end, we would have chosen you, but this was my test for you: I wanted you to volunteer.”

  Maggie was glad he turned silent; she needed time to absorb this information. He had planned her abduction, perhaps from the first time they met. He had known, even as he kissed and thieved, that she would be his captive, that they would come together again …

  The nightjar voiced its strident song: “Chup, chuck-weer!” She would heed its warning: be wary of men who kiss and run. She slid her hand, from beneath his, then regretted her abruptness. She would not wish him to think his offer of comfort had been rejected.

  “You’re shivering. Wrap this around you.” She extended a loose fold of her sleeping bag, and he drew it around his shoulders. Now their bodies were touching and she had to clear her throat before speaking. “Tell me your story – this life outside the law.”

  She started as his hand brushed her thigh; he was working at his pocket. He pulled out his pack of Derbys and tapped one out. The spark and flame of the match were reflected in his eyes.

  “It is not easy to begin.” He squinted forlornly into the smoke.

  “You told me it would sell many copies.”

  “Maybe not. Who enjoys reading of such sad things?” He shrugged. “When I was a little boy, an hijo, they came and burned our home. They raped my mother.”

  Maggie gasped. “How awful. Where?”

  “Here, in this proud democracy of Costa Rica. The story I am about to tell you has been suppressed.”

  He told a ghastly tale that caused her skin to prickle. His father was an honest farmer and an outspoken communist. One night, a band of drunken fascists – among them, several members of the Rural Guard – pulled into their farmyard and set fire to their house, beating a brave father who resisted, gang-raping his mother.

  “The government, it did nothing; it covered up and blamed the attack on foreigners, Nicaraguan cut-throats. No arrests were made.”

  Maggie felt him shudder. He seemed unable to continue, overcome by deep sadness. But he abruptly shook off his childhood ghosts, looked at his watch, and stood up. “It is the hour of departure. There will be other nights when I can bore you with my stories.” He called out, “Vámonos.”

  Feelings of horror and revulsion continued to assail Maggie as they made their way single file along a stretch of newly laid pavement, down hairpin twists. She tried to concentrate on their route, but was rattled, unable to shake a stark picture of a child witnessing such savagery. Many would not have emotionally survived the trauma; many would have turned cruel, scarred with bitterness. To his credit, Halcón had directed his fury toward an uprooting of the evils he saw infecting humankind.

  It was the dead of night and traffic was sparse but for an occasional van or international transport. At the first glimpse of headlights, Halcón would motion the column off the road, and they would hide among the scrub and bush until the vehicle passed. Glo, despite her pledge of cooperation, had been gagged again, her hands tied.

  Between stops and starts they moved with speed, no longer burdened with injured Gordo, who had been left behind in the care of Romeo and Juliet. The three of them had changed from their jungle fatigues into slacks and shirts, then hid themselves in foliage by the shoulder of the highway. They would wait there till dawn, then flag a bus for the town of San Isidro and its hospital. They would make their way ultimately to San José, where the commando had an apartment. All this, Halcón told Maggie as he walked alongside her.

  She doubted that Halcón was befriending her solely because he enjoyed her company. He wanted something from her. She would be the portrait artist of the Laughing Falcon, the teller of the tale of his tragic early history, of his life as a rebel. She had not failed to detect a swagger of pride, of Napoleonic arrogance — but these seemed minor faults. All great leaders have robust egos — he was entitled to his literary recognition.

  But he was fretting now. “We have to keep our fingers crossed. I am worried about those three. They are not among the brightest our country has produced.”

  “Will Gordo be able to pull it off? Won’t the police be curious about a man being treated for a bullet wound in his foot?”

  “He will describe an accident while shooting pigeons, a common occurrence here – few in my country are trained in firearms. Even if he is suspected, there is no proof against him, and I have not revealed to him – or anyone — our ultimate harbour.”

  “And where is that?”

  He merely smiled.

  After an hour of downhill plodding, a few clearings began to appear on either side of the road, and Maggie could make out an occasional rustic tile-roofed farmhouse, often with a yard light. Other properties seemed deserted, as if their tenants had given up trying to till this barren soil.

  Halcón halted them across the road from one such clearing, and under the dim glow of the thin moon studied an unlit structure set fifty metres behind a barbed-wire fence. A mile down the road were some scattered lights, perhaps a village. He checked his map – Maggie had peeked at it once: a scaled chart of the Savegre area. “Bien,” he said, satisfied. They ducked into the bush as a pickup rattled by, then crossed the highway, climbing over the fence into a field.

  Soon they were on a dirt track that led to a crumbling building of mortared stone, maidenhair fern growing along the walls – a former house or small barn, deserted but for a few squeaking bats. Was this where they would be held? It seemed too close to the country’s major highway. And Halcón had mentioned Chirripó and the Talamanca.

  “We will rest here,” he told her. “But only until dawn. There must be silence now.”

  While Maggie removed Glo’s gag and untied her, the guerrillas, all but Halcón, nestled into sleeping bags. She could see him in the glow of match or cigarette, watchful and restless, listening to his radio, which was turned low.

  Maggie lay down between Glo and the wall. Noiselessly, she tore a page from her pad, and with the lead loosened from her pencil wrote in bold capital strokes: “BOTH OK. NOT HURT.” She signed it and was about to tuck it away in a hole in the mortar, then hesitated. Did she not owe it to the authorities to elaborate?

  She felt confused about where her duty lay and struggled awhile with her dilemma: should she be aiding these revolutionaries? She thought of the terror Halcón had undergone as a child, and how justice had then become his holy cause. Should such a noble motive be subverted by her?

  She pulled herself up sharply — she must
not be blinded by sympathy into not doing the right thing. She added to her note: “Chirripó, Talamanca. Injured man, short, fat, San Isidro Hospital.” She decided not to mention Romeo and Juliet; she wanted no harm to come to them.

  Maggie quietly worked the paper into the niche, pulling back her hand just as Halcón clicked on his pocket flashlight. But he was just looking at his map.

  Denying the demands of sleep, she lay still through the remaining night, tense with worry that the note would be discovered as the crew tidied up before packing out.

  Shortly after five, as there came through a window the first slight paling of the eastern sky, Halcón began rousing his comrades, and they rose groaning. Tayra nudged Zorro, who seemed unwilling to rise. He was an almost tragic figure now, broken in rank and given to long, morose silences. To Maggie’s relief, only a cursory effort was made to pick up their leavings.

  Halcón confused Maggie by guiding them not forward into the dark forest rising to the north, but back down the rutted track toward the highway. Daring the use of a flashlight, he found a gate leading to the road. They heard a distant complaint of engine, a change of gears, as Halcón quickly shepherded them across the pavement, into a ditch, over a knoll, and down a rock scree.

  They rested for a moment at a spring bubbling from the rocks, replenishing water bottles. The sky was pinking now, the stars struggling to hold their light. Why were they returning south instead of north and east, Maggie wondered.

  Halcón ordered Glo’s wrists to be unbound. “We will need all our limbs for this. Vámonos, amigos.”

  He led them single file down the creek bed below the spring, a steep, twisting path strewn with rocks. These were hard and sharp beneath their feet and caused many stumbles. When Buho sought escape onto the mossy lip of the quebrada, Halcón ordered him back in line. There would be no boot prints to follow here, no trail of machete cuts.

  The descent became precipitous; progress was snail-like, the soldiers of Cinco de Mayo moving with cautious terror, slipping, ripping their clothes, rocks tumbling away beneath their feet. Zorro wrenched his shoulder in a fall. Tayra’s hand bled from a cut.

  Glo, however, finally freed of all restraints, was nimble and sure of foot. Maggie, though weary, dug into wells of strength and maintained pace with her, close behind Halcón.

  The next rest stop was on a boulder overhanging a spindly waterfall. They had dropped a couple thousand metres, and the growth was lusher here. Below them spread a richly green panorama of rolling hills, and, at the farthest beyond, in faded blue, disappearing in mist and cloud, the great reaches of the Pacific Ocean.

  “Chirripó, Talamanca,” she had written. Were her note found, her rescuers would set out in a wrong direction.

  Halcón was lying on his back, his shirt off. There was something in his smile that reminded Maggie of a smug, self-satisfied cat.

  “So where are we?” she asked.

  “The valley of a tributary of Río Naranjo.”

  “Are you planning on getting us lost again?”

  “We were never lost.”

  Maggie had the sense he had suspected she might leave a note. They had slogged four days northeast to the doorstop of Chirripó National Park and now were doubling back. Had he hoped Maggie would drop a misleading clue? Though his eyes were closed, the sly smile remained.

  DO NOT TRUST ARCHBISHOP MORA

  – 1 –

  Slack rose before dawn, put coffee on, and went out to the patio to do his push-ups. The dense dank air vibrated to the chatter and trill of insects. It was drizzling, a cloud-blackened night. The temporal had lasted three days, now going on four, almost constant rain, several prodigious dumps.

  It was day nine of Operación Libertad, though more apt would be Operation Frustration, the storms sweeping continuously through the mountains, obliterating the trail, the spoor, the dogs now useless. Even the best campesino trackers had failed.

  Returning to the dark kitchen, he nearly knocked over the fifty twelve-packs of beer piled against the wall. Six hundred beer on the wall, they’d arrived out of the blue. Slack had thought at first it was some kind of Christmas present, then began to suspect he was being tested by Ham Bakerfield, but it turned out the man he had pulled from the ocean was the brewmaster at Cervecería de Costa Rica. Pilsen, Bavaria, Imperial, Slack had vast tempting riches.

  But he had abstained, discovering there was a nubbin of toughness still within him, a small piece of grit. He had rescued someone. Maybe he could do it again, si Dios quiere. If God was still in the miracle business.

  Slowly he became aware that Joe Borbón was in the room, there, standing against the kitchen wall. It was always eerie, the way Slack could sense his near-invisible presence.

  “You want some coffee?”

  “I don’t drink poison.” He preferred some kind of brown syrupy goop, a health concoction.

  “What’s up?”

  “We found one of their camps. The old man wants to see you.”

  Borbón, who wasn’t much for small talk, went out and began strapping a couple of inflatables onto the Rover. Since Joe would be hanging around without apparent reason, Slack had been given permission to put him to work, helping with the tours. That way, they could meet openly, and Slack could spar with him, get some help with the weight training.

  While waiting for his coffee to brew, Slack thumbed through the pile of papers and reports on his desk. “Operación Libertad,” they were stamped. “Classified.” Under the sullen dawn light he studied one of the photos of Gloria-May Walker taken at the lodge. She was stunning in her swirling skirt, her show of dancing leg, a hibiscus between her perfect teeth. Walker was in the background, looking awkward.

  The colonel’s official flack had also managed to capture Margaret Schneider, romance writer, in a couple of unguarded moments. Making notes, interviewing Walker in his hammock, her eyebrow raised as if in disbelief. In another photo, Glo was posing with Maggie Schneider at the hot springs, her arm around her shoulders. Bosom pals. The Canadian woman wasn’t exactly what you’d call voluptuous, she was built like a high jumper. Despite her cropped hair and thick glasses, she was more pretty than plain. Comely, even, when she smiled, which she was doing here, easy and cheery.

  She’d mailed a postcard to her mother from San José, a picture of the Opera House. “Dinner date tonight with world’s most gorgeous man.” That dinner had cost her eight hundred bucks.

  Slack had wanted to talk to her parents, but that was not permitted. Officially, he was still waiting to be called in. He wasn’t sure that was even going to happen because the minister of security had gone off on his own tangent with a nationally broadcast plea to the Cinco de Mayoists, urging them to start negotiating, offering Archbishop Mora as an emissary. That put Ham Bakerfield on a slow burn, he had no time for amateurs.

  So Slack had been hanging about Quepos, pretending it was business as usual, though yesterday an interview had been arranged with one of the big networks. Again, Slack expressed support for the kidnappers’ goals, sympathizing with Benito Madrigal, denigrating Chuck Walker. This was a part of the job he liked, there was a theatrical vein in him somewhere. After it aired, he was again taken in for questioning. Friends began to shun him.

  Ham Bakerfield seemed oddly impassive, a cop collecting data, as he watched Esperanza slide from the mud below the mangroves. Crocodile, six feet, fanged, possibly dangerous, sign here, you’re hired. “I named her after a woman I used to know,” Slack said. She was always around here, a scary treat for the tourists. “Stay behind me.”

  They manoeuvred their kayaks around, and followed Esperanza as she wove down the narrow channel to Estero Damas, a Quepos lagoon sheltered from the pitch and toss of the ocean by the sandy islands of Big and Little Damas. The landward side was choked with mangrove swamp.

  “Her brother ate a dog a few weeks ago,” Slack said. “Over there, on the island. Owners were fairly pissed.”

  Ham just grunted. He was doing okay for his age, able t
o keep up, shrugging off the discomfort of the sporadic rain. Lightning was crackling over the ocean, the skies pulsing with the energy of yet another coming thunderstorm.

  “Where did you find their pit stop?”

  “Beside a creek in the high Savegre. Interesting artefact there, a stone sphere, some kind of pre-Columbian sculpture.”

  Slack’s interest was piqued, he had seen a few granite spheres at the National Museum, but never in the wild. Costa Rica’s first peoples used to roll them down the rivers to the plains for reasons no one understood, maybe tributes to their demanding gods. “How did you stumble on the site?”

  “We sent climbers up the river with ropes and pylons, it was steep. The guys who read the site said it was an overnight. Someone shot a snake, the buzzards had got at it pretty good, big one, a boa constrictor. A slug from a 7-mm parabellum. Not much else, a cigarette butt, some rocks probably used to weigh down the tents. From there they must have gone up the creek bed.”

  Slack listened to the burps and grumbles from the massing clouds. He wanted to see this prehistoric sphere, and he needed action, it might alleviate his drying-out pangs. “How about flying me up there?”

  “If it ever clears.”

  “Any word from the kidnappers?” Ham had people hanging around the post office to intercept any notes addressed to the U.S. Embassy.

  “None. We’ve set up Benito Madrigal for you, we have a nice place for him, a house in San José, maid service, home-cooked meals. He’s on medication, seems okay. I’m stalling the security minister — he wants to send the archbishop in to see him, that could gum everything up. Madrigal liked you on the TV, he wanted to see the print interviews. I can’t believe this is actually working, but he wants to meet, comrade to comrade. We’re trying to fix that up for tomorrow.”

  Slack had memorized the brief on Madrigal, unmarried at forty-nine, degree in economics, a former top mandarin. The cramped little San José office of his People’s Popular Vanguard had been tossed but found deserted, every scrap of paper spirited away. A couple of party adherents had gone missing and were likely involved in the plot. The few others who could be found claimed to know nothing.