“What does Benito say about this kidnapping?”
“He is proud of his comrades. He knows they will be ‘connected.’ ”
A bright thick spear of lightning. They headed up the lagoon, trying to outrace the front, losing by about a hundred feet, drenched by the time they got to the dock. Ham’s driver extended an umbrella for his boss, and Slack headed back into the choppy waters and up a channel, where Joe Borbón was waiting for him with the Rover.
They received a good weather report later that day, so Borbón drove Slack to a pick-up point in La Compañía – Operación Libertad had installed itself in one of the sprawling frame buildings of that former bastion of imperialism, the United Fruit Company. The front was moving through fast, sending out trails of ripped, ragged clouds dissolving into blue sky over the ocean.
Borbón parked on the old banana dock by a Bell 205. He seemed reluctant to part from his charge, but Slack promised to be back in an hour.
The crew rushed him aboard — there were some holes over the high Savegre, they could get him in if they hurried. Slack felt his stomach drop as the helicopter rose, and he watched field and meadow grow small below him, along with the grid of palm oil trees that surrounded Manuel Antonio, an island within a monoculture sea. The highlands ahead had not yet been touched by man, and maybe that’s where he should escape to, live up in the mountains, have his own waterfall, a natural pool, a deck where he could listen to the songs of the forest.
For how long? Wherever he went, others seemed to follow, like the rats of Hamelin. When he led them to paradise they tromped upon it, flattened the land, built upon it. But hadn’t he done the same? We are all enemies of the earth, choking her to death.
Environmental angst. He was feeling it more acutely now that he wasn’t drinking and blotting out the world. On the other hand, his senses had been sharpened, he could see more clearly, enjoy as he hadn’t for years the thrill of looking upon the splendour of the pulsing green living sea below, the dense canopy layered with strands of cloud and mist.
The helicopter swooped into an opening above the Savegre, the pilot searching for a landing spot. There wasn’t any, just a narrow cleft above a creek, and standing there, on a ledge by a huge granite sphere, the honcho of the ground searchers, Yale Brittlewaite. Slack watched the rope ladder unfurling, almost tangling in the trees. One of the crew told him it was time to do his Tarzan act.
Gingerly, he crept down the rungs, until he was dangling about twenty feet above the sphere. He got some momentum going, swung himself to a liana, pushed off against the trunk of a strangler fig, and somersaulted onto the ledge. Brittlewaite was talking into a radio, unimpressed with Slack’s derring-do.
“Crawl up about another fifty yards and call in.”
“Roger.”
Slack ran his hand over the sphere, it was almost smooth as marble. What secrets did it keep, what rites had been performed around it fourteen-odd centuries ago? The Bruncas used to offer virgins to the gods, had it seen human sacrifices? If only it had a mouth to speak …
Brittlewaite explained that his crew was inching up the creek, looking for the kidnappers’ exit point back into the forest. “Those cowboys knew what they were doing, they didn’t disturb the growth.”
“You think they’re that smart?”
“Someone is.”
“If they’re that smart, maybe they backtracked, went downriver.”
The heavy stench of the rotting snake hung in the air. Vultures waited impatiently in the trees for it to be released to them again. He could see where the moss was disturbed at a rocky campsite, the remnants of a bonfire. This had probably been their fourth overnight stop, they were maybe doing six zigzag miles a day, maybe heading all the way up to the high country, the scrubby cerros. A pick-up point on the Pan-Am Highway, that seemed likely Slack couldn’t believe they’d still be outside in this weather, however well equipped they were.
He had time to do a little scouting on his own, the copter wouldn’t be back for half an hour. He rubbed the sphere for luck, maybe it had occult power, a kind of Blarney Stone. He decided to go downriver, because maybe the kidnappers were that clever. Halcón was a “cool customer,” Walker had said, “totally in control,” so he wasn’t some brain-dead camp follower of Benito Madrigal. A man in control, Slack was envious.
The water was up with all the rain, and the valley narrow here, compressing the creek into a series of swift cascades. A cyclone of small yellow butterflies swarmed into the air, then disappeared down the gut of the quebrada. Slack was feeling all right, enjoying nature’s palette, his back stiffening a bit, that was all, the thirst not gnawing at him too bad. The fear of screwing up was still there, that was the one monkey he couldn’t dislodge.
Slack scrambled over a series of boulders and around buttress roots leading to a gap in the forest. Just downstream, pinned to a fallen branch … what have we here? Panties. Slack picked up the tiny garment with the end of a stick, it was silky, maybe satin. Victoria’s Secret, said the label.
Somehow, this didn’t seem Maggie’s brand of underwear, so all credit to Gloria-May. Hansel and Gretel had only dropped crumbs. He examined the nearby foliage — trampled ferns and machete cuts in the heliconia: yes, indeed, she had accurately marked the spot where her captors had led her into the forest. The stone sphere was guarded by the ghosts of good karma, after all. He called out to Brittlewaite, who came quickly with some of his group.
“Maybe you’re smarter than I thought.”
Slack assumed the word had gone out, a general all-around fuckup was among them. His orders were to go quickly in and out of here, but the hell with it, he was hot on the trail. He wasn’t some kind of neophyte, he’d tramped all over Costa Rica, the coastal lowlands, the Talamancas, the high Atlantic rain forest.
So he pressed himself into service with the search party, and they began a hard climb up into a cloud forest luxurious with streaming banners of moss, thick lianas twisting toward the canopy, the mist rolling through the boughs. These virgin woods seemed mystical to Slack, but also hearty and generous, filled with energy, growing, struggling, sucking in the carbon, exhaling the oxygen of life.
After a slow several hundred yards the trail became easier to follow, it was as if the Cinco de Mayo had become tired, careless about covering their tracks – or in a hurry. So was Slack. The day was wasting, Brittlewaite and his crew were just poking along, examining every little mark and footprint. He marched past these slow front-runners, and soon found himself far ahead, alone. There was no rain and little fog, so he made quick progress among the giant oak trees, sparser now, dwarf palms growing in the light gaps between them.
He stopped suddenly, thrilled by the liquid fluted song of a jilguero, the black-faced solitaire, the famous chanseur of the treetops. He had never seen a jilguero in the wild, though he had once angrily freed one from some moron in the caged-bird trade. Another trill, an undulating melody. Trying for a sighting, he meandered into the dense understory. He thought he saw his bird take flight, but wasn’t sure, didn’t see the orange markings. Then, more distant, it sang a Chopin-esque étude from somewhere high among the mossy twisted boughs.
After trudging through the forest for another twenty minutes, following the siren song of the jilguero, he finally saw the small bird on a twig, slate and orange. It erupted again with song, but he applauded too loudly and it flew off. When he turned back, he found it wasn’t so easy to retrace his steps. After an hour of trying, he gave in to the annoying truth that he didn’t know where the hell he was.
The day was becoming short, and he could feel a chill through his thin cotton jacket, a papagayo blowing from the northwest. His back was starting to ache. He had no radio, no compass, no machete, and, it was becoming obvious, no brain. This was not a time to panic, he would continue upwards, toward the inter-American highway, it was somewhere up there, crawling across the top of the country. The jilguero serenaded him again, taunting him.
At sunset, scratched by
spines and thorns, his hand bleeding where he’d stumbled against a saw-toothed bromeliad, his bones aching from cold and exhaustion, his back throbbing, Slack climbed above timberline. He was in the high páramo now, he realized dully, bunch grasses, flat-topped shrubs sculpted by the wind, branches like grasping hands, all forming a thick, sticky net that seemed to grab at him, he was moving about thirty yards a minute. Once, he almost stumbled over a coral snake, bands of yellow, red, and black slithering past his boots. The ghosts of the granite sphere had lured him here, were laughing at him.
The sky had begun to glow fiercely, pink and russet. What a fool — if he survived this, Ham would be on him like a bulldozer. He had heard helicopters, they’d probably been searching for him, and he’d be blamed for losing precious time better reserved for Op Libertad.
Stop, reconnoitre. That windswept peak to the left, that had to be Cerro de la Muerte, the mountain of death. Oddly, despite its ill-boding name, the ancient volcano’s closeness gave him renewed hope, Slack had once climbed it, a clear summer day when both oceans were in view. Somewhere near was the highway, and a path from it to the peak. He took a deep breath and made his way through the elfin forest and foot-sucking bog of the páramo. As the sun vanished he felt the first drops of rain.
Two hours later, he staggered onto the road, guided by a cacophony of horns, and now, as about fifty people stared down at him from a Tica line bus, he was squatting on the road, regaining strength, wondering why vehicles were backed up for miles down the road, why their drivers were honking and cursing.
A hundred yards up the hill, where the road curved back into view, he saw lights, a barricade, people toiling around it, a helicopter behind it. He had no alternative but to go up there and face the music.
Ham started in as soon as they dragged Slack up into the big Kawasaki, scorning his explanations, raking him over for fifteen minutes as he shivered, wet and chilled and gashed, under a pile of blankets. Brittlewaite was here, too, they’d reached the highway three hours ago, while the sun was up. Outside, the traffic was moving again, vehicles being waved through, one lane at a time.
“He goes la-la’ing off up the primrose path alone, what a horse’s ass. We work as a team, that way you don’t get lost for seven hours up your own rectum.”
“Look at it as a test of young manhood,” Slack mumbled. He’d followed his nose right into Gloria-May Walker’s panties, found the trail, give him some credit.
Ham turned to one of his minions. “Get him a fucking change of clothing. The guy starts following a bleeping bird.”
As Slack was thinking how a beer would go down just fine, he noticed Joe Borbón watching him from the back of the aircraft, waiting for a good excuse to off him. Slack might even welcome that right now, the way his spine was torturing him. He was bent like a pretzel as he struggled into a dry shirt and pants.
“We must have gone past you while you were bird-watching,” Brittlewaite said, grinning at him. “Thought you were ahead of us.”
Brittlewaite had found another campsite near the road, called into head office, blocked the highway, and searched it for exit points. About a mile and a half downhill, in an area where some small farms had been hacked out of the shrub, they’d found tracks leading to a ramshackle farmhouse, abandoned, falling down.
That’s where they’d found a Christmas present. “BOTH OK,” Maggie Schneider’s note said. “NOT HURT.” Slack had felt relief when he’d read that. But then she’d written: “Chirripó, Talamanca.” Something she’d overheard? Maggie Schneider had spunk, somehow she had wheedled pencil and paper from them. But if they had gone into the vast wilderness of the Talamanca, the search would be immensely difficult.
“Injured man,” she’d also written, “short, fat, San Isidro Hospital.” About thirty miles away, in the valley of El General, the town was its commercial centre.
Ham’s pitch descended to a mere grumble. “What were those assholes at that hospital doing, they couldn’t report a wounded man. Okay, let’s get down there so Slack can get those cuts treated before we lose him to gangrene, we should be so lucky.”
Slack could tell Ham was feeling better, he’d probably even enjoyed his tirade. No harm had been done but to Slack’s body, his pride, and his already damaged sense of accomplishment.
“Just get me a chiropractor, I’ll be all right.”
“You need a head doctor.”
Records in the admitting office of San Isidro Hospital revealed that the likely suspect was one Herman Rebozo, at least that was the name on the cédula he’d produced. He’d come in four days ago, apparently after flagging a bus, and left the next day with a cast on his foot. A nurse remembered him leaving in a taxi with a young man and woman, accomplices maybe, members of the Eco-Rico raiding party.
Slack and Ham waited in an examining room until the surgeon who’d seen to Rebozo was fetched from his home. He was surprised to learn he’d been gulled by a kidnapper, who was in his estimation dull-witted, un hombre muy estúpido. He had repaired a bone splinter in Rebozo’s left foot, a bullet wound. The patient didn’t have much to say except that he’d accidentally pulled the trigger of his .22 rifle.
“He told me a hunting accident. These happen all the time.”
Ham snorted. “Yeah, right. Well, three characters including a little fat guy with a cast on his foot shouldn’t be hard to track down, so we’ll do the rounds of all the taxi drivers in this burg, also the hotels.”
The doctor looked after Slack’s cuts, then examined his back. As his fingers probed Slack’s spinal cord, he yelped.
“I believe what you have, señor, is a slight spinal misalignment.”
Slack was taken to a private ward, where he lay down heavily on the bed, depleted.
“You and your spine are having breakfast tomorrow with Benito Madrigal,” Bakerfield said.
“Hey, Christ, I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“You’re not getting paid to sleep. We want you to get onside with him, persuade him to broadcast a message to his comrades not to harm the women.” He handed Slack a battery-powered tape recorder. “You going to be able to relate to this psychotic?”
“For me it’ll be a piece of cake.”
“Don’t fuck up.”
– 2 –
Slack had the look of a bent octogenarian as he followed Bakerfield out the door of a Cessna at San Jose’s Pavas airport. Though exhausted, he hadn’t slept well, his brain replaying that moronic rollick through the jungle, now everyone in the operation was laughing at him.
Slack was displeased to see Chuck Walker seated in the waiting van, he wished he’d go away somewhere, let the real cops do their job. “Contact has been made,” Walker said. “Envelope intercepted at the post office, addressed to the embassy. This was in it.” He held up a gold hoop earring. “It’s Glo’s. Goddamn, let’s get on this. Next time it could be an ear.”
He handed Slack the envelope and a lined sheet of paper, both darkened with fingerprint dust. The postmark was San José. In Spanish, penned in block capital letters, were greetings from Comando Cinco de Mayo. Four choppy sentences: “Our demands remain firm. We will not negotiate. Lives of political prisoners are at risk. We will meet with Archbishop Mora when we are ready.”
“We will not negotiate” — a standard negotiating ploy. Halcón was just being a good businessman, not in a hurry. Totally in control. Doubtless, the wounded foot-soldier, Rebozo, had put it in the mail. Last night, investigators had traced him to a San Isidro bus station, where a cab driver had dropped him off. Now he was probably somewhere in the crowded Central Valley, among millions of people.
“We’re not negotiating either,” Walker said. “Let’s figure out a way to dump this interfering cleric.”
They were taken first to the sprawling compound of the U.S. Embassy, where Ambassador Higgins, after some effusive greetings, began fawning over the senator, congratulating him for a “great jump-start” toward the Republican nomination. A Newsweek poll had him number four
with a bullet.
The embassy’s press attaché was hanging around, so Walker provided a sound bite: “I think Americans know I am down here fighting a more important war than an election campaign, however high the office.”
In the eyes of the great American public, he was a hero, he’d offered himself to the guerrillas, pleaded with them to take him hostage in place of his wife. Slack found it hard to digest, a guy reputed to be a sure loser had announced he was no longer campaigning, and now he was accelerating through the pack.
They were ushered into a swank office where Slack was introduced to the head psychiatrist at the Psiquiatrico, Dr. Ignacio Bleyer, a jowly gentleman with a Sigmund Freud beard.
“The man you are about to talk to is a particular favourite of mine,” he said. “It is not often one sees so much varied delusional material of a persecutory nature. He sees plots everywhere.”
Slack nodded. He had some first-hand experience, his mother, neurotic, refusing to leave her house, everyone a threat, she had suffered an abnormal fear of authority. “All right, he’s bonkers.”
Bleyer looked down at Slack with an expression of professional disapproval. “I would prefer to term his condition as a borderline psychosis of the paranoid type.”
He continued with a dissertation to the effect that Benito Madrigal had been suffering a mild form of paranoid schizophrenia long before he was jailed. He was charismatic enough to have gathered some ingenuous followers into his People’s Vanguard for his quixotic run for the Costa Rican presidency.
“Clearly, he was in an extreme paranoid phase when he held the judges hostage. Regrettably, following his incarceration, the symptoms have not lessened. Señor Madrigal does, however, enter periods in which he is able to reason and to relate to others. The use of Clozaril enhances such occasions.”
The Laughing Falcon Page 18
