If Ziro didn’t listen to reason, it would be up to Los Soldados de San Miguel to take it from there. Malvasio would try to get that through to him: This little visit from me is the good news. Don’t be dundo.
The air smelled of rotting garbage and urine, a carryover from the street markets in the baking sun earlier that day. Here and there, faces emerged from the shadows—scowling boys, fat tattooed men with lacquered hair wearing shapeless guayaberas, the occasional prostitute squeezed into a spandex top and miniskirt. Then just as quickly the faces pulled back into the swallowing darkness again.
Malvasio said, “You’re sure he’s out tonight?”
“You never hand up your spot, Duende. Never.”
They crossed a steep narrow alleyway cluttered with lumber, leading back toward the main plaza. Sleeper held out his hand, signaling Malvasio to stop.
Rolling down the passenger-side window, Sleeper pursed his lips and let go with a soft lilting whistle. At the same time, with his hand hidden, he gestured for Chucho to get ready. Almost imperceptibly, a figure edged back farther into the shadows.
Sleeper whispered to Chucho: “¡Ahorita!”
The kid slid open the van’s side door and darted into the alley. Ziro, running for his life, scattered two-by-fours behind him, but Chucho hurtled past or fought through them, possessed. Malvasio gunned the motor and, a hundred feet ahead, turned sharp, racing down a brick-paved side street, then turning back again at the next corner just as Chucho flushed Ziro from the mouth of the alley. The two boys raced downhill half a block toward the cathedral square, then Chucho tripped Ziro up and tackled him. Malvasio sped to the spot, braked hard. He and Sleeper jumped out to join in as Chucho pulled the machete from his belt with a spinning flourish and pressed the blade to the other boy’s throat.
Faces stared from black doorways. Ziro—scrawny and small, boxers high, pants low, no shirt or shoes—lay on his back in the street, chest heaving, his breath a soft, wheezy shriek from the sheer force of the air pumping in and out of his lungs. Sleeper strolled up grandly, leaned down, put his hands on his knees and cocked his head, peering into Ziro’s bloated eyes.
“Hola, chero. Tienes el culo a dos manos ¿verdad?” Hey, buddy. Scared shitless, am I right?
He and Malvasio each took an arm and hefted Ziro to his feet as Chucho kept the machete blade pressed to the boy’s neck. They trundled him into the van, forcing him to lie on the floor where Sleeper tied his hands behind his back with hemp cord and stuffed a filthy rag deep into his mouth. As quick as that, they were on their way, out of town.
They drove to a deserted spot along the dry riverbed of the Río Conacastal, where the proceedings would be shielded from view by a copse of spindly fernlike carago trees. The three of them dragged Ziro out and stripped off his pants, then pulled his pockets inside out, collecting his bottles—the boy was dealing crack mixed with crumbled Alka-Seltzer, drywall for the cluckheads—and the measly fifty dollars he had on him, a fraction of his nut. Then, as he knelt in the brittle, black carago pods, Sleeper went to work, whipping him with a car antenna he liked to use, finishing up with a few good blows to the head, the gut, the kidneys, using a fish billy he’d brought along as well. Chucho, a mere spectator now, sat to the side on a rock, bored, twirling the handle of his machete between his hands. One of Ziro’s eyes had swollen closed and a deep gash along his brow oozed blood down his face. He hung his head, choking back tears.
Malvasio gave the signal and Sleeper pulled the rag from Ziro’s mouth. The boy gasped and spat out the noxious taste and caught his breath, then looked straight up into Malvasio’s eyes. He said, “I know a boy you want. He see. He see the woman get take.”
The kid had the gall to bargain. “What woman?”
“¿Qué mujer?” Sleeper translating, just to be sure.
Ziro licked his lips. The dried blood clotting there glistened. “La mujer del pozo.”
The woman from the well.
The caserio sat among low hills, the five tiny houses made of bahareque, a mix of cane stalks and wood sticks glued together with mud. As the van pulled up, climbing the last of the rutted path from the nearest road, Malvasio spotted a small figure darting into the forest. Sleeper saw it too. He and Chucho jumped from the van and gave chase, thrashing through the underbrush beneath the dark tree cover.
Ziro, barely able to sit upright or even see much given the damage to his eye, remained behind with Malvasio, still bound but not gagged. Minutes passed. Sleeper and Chucho reappeared finally, alone, drenched in sweat, cursing and swatting at buzzing mosquitoes as they trudged back to the van.
Malvasio drew his pistol, got out of the van and gestured for Sleeper and Chucho to take the back of the hut, he’d take the front. Once he knew the other two were in position, Malvasio stuck his head through the beadwork hanging in the doorway.
A candle burned in a wood holder and quivering shadows stretched across the dirt-floored room. An indígena woman sat on a pepeishte, a woven mat for sleeping. She wore only a light cotton falda and had a homely, square, girlish face belied by her eyes, which seemed to belong to a much older woman. She cradled an infant in her arms. There was nothing else in the tiny house except a log to sit on, a guacal filled with corn, and a metate grinding stone.
Malvasio called the others inside, then asked the woman where her boy had run. She tried to pretend she didn’t understand, but then Chucho tapped her alongside the head a few times with the broad side of his machete. When she still wouldn’t answer, he went to grab the child.
The woman spoke then, in a rush of Spanish tinged with Nahuatl: “My son didn’t see what he thinks he saw. It was all a mistake. I will tell anyone who asks that he admitted to me he was lying. He never saw the woman who was taken away, the woman who complained about the water going bad in the well.” She looked at Malvasio with heartsick eyes, then crossed herself, kissing her infant’s head as she clutched its body tight against her own.
Malvasio returned to San Bartolo Oriente, climbed the hill past the cathedral square, and parked in the shadow of the amate trees outside El Niño de Atoche. He’d dropped Ziro off a mile from the bahareque village to make him walk—one last exercise in the tutorial—so only Sleeper and Chucho needed out. He paid them for the night’s services, and Chucho left promptly, gladly. Sleeper lingered.
“I don’t know, Duende.”
He looked at the infant, swaddled in its cotton manta, lying on the backseat. They’d told the woman her baby would be returned if her other child, the boy who’d fled, said nothing about what he thought he saw. That meant the abduction was open-ended, but that seemed the least of the mother’s concerns. She’d begged and sobbed and promised while Chucho ripped the infant from her arms and Malvasio dictated terms.
Malvasio gestured for Sleeper to take off. “Let me worry about it.”
Sleeper shook his head, muttering, “Muy fregado.” Fucked up. Reaching into his pocket, he took out the tinfoil bindle with the last of his crank inside and tossed it onto the dash. “You gonna need that more than me.” He got out, slammed the door, and, not looking back, melted into the church shadows with Chucho.
Malvasio turned in his seat, reached back for the child, and managed to lift it onto his lap without waking it. It’d bawled like a banshee when they’d taken it from its mother—the mother’s howling hadn’t helped—but once the van had started up, the little squirt had dropped into a dead sleep. Not so much as a chirp since. He wondered if it was retarded, or already had mother issues. Christ, maybe it’s sick, he thought, laying his hands against its brow. He felt no conspicuous fever but he knew nothing about children or their afflictions. He needed to find a place where the kid would be safe for a few weeks, maybe longer.
The obvious choice? Take it to the judge’s finca, let the women on the house staff fuss over it. But he could imagine the judge, the colonel, or Hector deciding the child was too big a risk, or too needless a bother, to keep around that long. Bodies moved quickly in their business.
The baby would be sold or given away, or they’d find some other way to make it disappear.
Just then the infant stirred and Malvasio adjusted the manta around its body. Its face was broad and dark and gnarled up in wrinkly flesh with a porcine nose and bubbly pink lips. Thin tufts of black hair smeared its skull, and its skin smelled oddly like grass. Stretching, it reached out a chubby arm, flexed its fingers, then settled back into sleep, its black-lashed eyes never opening.
Malvasio thought of Anabella, the girl who’d shared his bed, as he racked his brain. He came away with nothing but senseless ideas until, after the fifth time it occurred to him, he stopped discarding one particularly reckless option and considered it more mindfully.
27
Strock awoke with his skin sheathed in sweat but his mouth bone-dry. He’d slept like a stowaway, mind crawling with shadows that loomed and receded in time to the monotonous ocean, the taste of salt water pickling his throat. He sat up in the lumpy bed, rubbed his gluey eyes, and stifled a yawn. Finding his cane, he rose, tottering a second, then hobbled to the door of the tiny, airless room and headed down the narrow hall, craving something cold to drink.
As he entered the kitchen, he heard voices murmuring somewhere nearby. He hadn’t expected that, figuring he was alone here with Clara the maid, housekeeper, slave, whatever. He’d been thinking he could stand another alcohol bath. Senseless not to take full advantage of the perks. The sliding doors leading outside from the dining room were open and he headed that direction.
On the concrete patio, under the shifting patchwork of shade and sun beneath the windblown palms, he found Clara in her blue and white uniform sitting with a man, the two of them facing each other in the rough-hewn chairs. The man’s back was turned and he cradled a swaddled child. Clara cooed and stroked the infant’s face with her fingertips—rapturous, glowing, impossibly happy. Strock felt a bewildering surge of nausea tinged with rage. He realized why when the man turned suddenly, glancing over his shoulder.
Strock lurched as fast as he could on his cane back through the kitchen and down the hall to his room. He slammed a magazine into the AR-15 and primed a round into the chamber. When he turned, Malvasio stood there in the doorway, still holding the infant. The years had worn him down, his face washed out, even those dagger eyes a little spent now—and the rug rat, what was that about?—but there was no mistake. Strock shouldered the rifle and sighted the barrel on the bridge of Malvasio’s nose.
“Put the kid down.”
Malvasio said, “Like this close, Phil, you’d miss.” Then: “Sure. Hold on.” He turned to hand the child to Clara who’d scrambled up behind him in the hallway. Malvasio stroked the infant’s head and murmured something to Clara in Spanish, then gestured for her to take the child away. Strock sighted on Malvasio’s ear, the easiest pathway into his brain at this angle, and told himself, Don’t wait. Pull the trigger. Now.
“What are you telling her?”
“Phil, relax. Okay?”
“Tell me what you said.”
“She’s not calling anybody, Phil, if that’s what you’re thinking. There’s no one to call. Just me.” He leaned into the doorway, like he hadn’t slept and it was all he could do to stand upright. He seemed wired, though, a bit of a twitch here and there. “Ray’s kid mentioned you felt like this.”
“He’s in on this, I’ll kill him too. Kill you both.”
“And accomplish what?”
“You left me for dead, shitbird. I lay there damn near eight hours before Ray showed up. Tendon and nerves in my knee cut to crap. Never has healed right.”
“I didn’t know you were hurt that bad.”
“How bad did it need to be, asshole?”
“Ten years ago, Phil. If it’ll do any good, I’m sorry.”
Strock nudged the barrel to one side and pulled the trigger. The report was deafening in the confined space and plaster shattered on the wall. Malvasio dropped to his knees and covered his head with his hands as, from the kitchen, Clara screamed. The ringing in Strock’s ears muffled the sound as the tang of cordite filled the air, scalding away the smells of mold and brine. Malvasio, brushing plaster dust from his neck and hair, shouted back, “¡Está okay, quédate allá!”
Strock said, “You’re sorry?” His voice sounded muddy inside his own head.
Malvasio glanced up. The baby was wailing in the kitchen now, distant but gradually more clear, Clara sobbing as she tried to comfort it. “You want to kill me, Phil, fine. But not here. Not like this.”
“Here’s perfect. You, your kid, your third world squeeze.”
“Jesus, Phil, no, you’ve—”
“How many times we see that, Bill? Break down the door and find the little kids in their rooms, baby in the crib, wife in the bed—always the bed, remember that? Daddy last to go, can’t live with himself now. Happened a lot around the holidays. Easter’s coming up. I’m sure it happens down here.”
“Phil, you’ve got it wrong. They’ve got nothing to do with me. With this. And you’re not that kind.”
Strock cackled at that. “What kind would that be, Bill? Kind who backed you up every time some saggy-pants turf toad needed his money roll lifted?”
“And you blame me.”
Strock fired a second round, closer than the last. A ricochet of plaster caught Malvasio’s cheek and drew a thread of blood. Clara screamed again and Malvasio called back—they jabbered in clipped, fevered Spanish, Strock reveling at the fear in Malvasio’s voice, regretting it in Clara’s. And the baby, its bawling, he was having trouble with that.
Malvasio turned back to Strock. “Let them leave, Phil.”
“You got the say here? I don’t think so.”
Malvasio, already on his knees, seemed to shrink a little more. “This thing between you and me, they shouldn’t have to pay. That’s crazy.”
Strock gestured with the rifle barrel. “Move.”
“Promise me, Phil.”
“I said move.”
Malvasio got to his feet, shedding coarse white dust. The floor was hazed with it now. The baby’s shrieks remained unabated and Strock still felt haunted by that.
“I won’t hurt them,” he said. “I promise.”
“Thank you.” Malvasio inched back till he butted up against the wall. “One last thing. I brought you down here to help me look after Ray’s kid. Jude. Don’t blame him for any of this. I put him up to it, sure, told him not to mention me and he went along, but I sold him some bullshit about having work for you, wanting to do you a good turn. The truth? I did it for him. He’s in over his head down here. The guy he’s protecting, he’s made some enemies and this is the wrong place to make enemies. They’re going to do what they want to this guy, and if Jude gets in the cross fire, tough. And that’s Jude’s job, right? Take the bullet meant for the guy he’s hired to protect.”
Strock’s finger eased on the trigger. The rifle’s stock separated from his cheek. “And you know this how?”
“People I work for down here, they’re staging the hit.”
It was the first thing Malvasio said that Strock believed.
“I’ve been mixed up in a lot of things the past ten years, it’s how I get by. What did you think, I came out of it clean? None of us did.”
Strock’s finger tightened around the trigger again. “What happened to you, what happened to me—you think they’re the same?”
“Phil, all right, I get it. But did you hear what I just said? Ray’s kid is gonna get taken out. You want to just sit by and let that happen?”
PART IV
THE ONE
LOST SHEEP
One rarely rushes into a single error. Rushing into the first, one always does too much. So one usually perpetrates another, and now does too little.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
28
Nothing happened overnight to improve Fitz’s humor. As he provided his Monday morning advance report to the EP crew, he could barely bring himself to meet Jud
e’s eyes, as though the unannounced visit from the FBI, Jude’s failure to mention his father’s past, and the dubious company he’d kept of late were a scandal. The fact that nothing had come of this wickedness seemed to matter little. He’d let everybody down, created a needless bother, an irritant. He’d overtaxed Fitz’s mind.
And so, as Fitz recounted his litany of reported atrocities that had occurred throughout the country the past seventy-two hours, noting their locations on a wall map, followed by a recitation of known post-election demonstrations planned for the coming days—“Have alternate routes in mind ahead of time,” Fitz warned, “don’t leave it up to the drivers”—Jude decided Axel was right, Fitz was best kept in the dark for now about the disreputable entanglements among the men connected to the Estrella project. He’ll only compound the problem with a load of blame, Jude thought, or denounce us for slandering the client’s in-country partners. And the men presented no immediate danger, as long as Axel remained discreet in his liaison with Señora Rojas and kept any untoward findings about the water plant’s expansion to himself. It seemed wise he withhold his final determination on the aquifer drawdown until he left the country. Till then, Jude surmised, as long as they kept their eyes and ears open and smiles at the ready, ruffling as few feathers as possible, they were safe. It might get tricky if Consuela demanded more of Axel than he could reasonably provide, but Jude figured they’d just have to burn that bridge when they came to it.
He nearly leapt from his seat, eager to escape, when the briefing session wrapped up. Back in his room, he collected his weapons: a .22 he carried in an ankle rig, and a Sig Sauer 9mm, small for its caliber and thus easy to conceal beneath the ballooning contours of his guayabera. Strike fear with fashion, he thought, regarding himself in the mirror. He looked more like a barber than a bodyguard.
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