Night of the Jaguar (15 page)

“Yes, I can see where you might wish to. But where will you go? And how will you live?”

“I will find a large tree to live in. I’ve noticed that the
wai’ichuranan
walk the paths without ever looking up, so no one will disturb me in my tree. As for living, there is water all around, and Jaguar will feed me. What more do I need? Now, if you would like to help me, you must show me a large tree.”

“I believe I know just the tree you require,” said Cooksey. They spoke for some minutes longer, Cooksey answering Moie’s questions, and asking a few of his own, and then they both slipped out into the night.

A
t the sound Yoiyo Calderón was instantly up on his feet in the dark, scrabbling in a desk drawer for his pistol and at the same time kicking away the light blanket that constrained his feet. He was not in his bed, he had not been in his bed for several nights, not since the dreams had begun; he was sleeping on the long, lush leather of the couch in his den. His nights were now spent here because he did not want to disturb the sleep of his wife, not that he was ever particularly sensitive to her rest or any other aspect of her being, but she asked questions and gossiped and had a wide circle of acquaintances. He did not want it abroad in the Cuban community that J. X. F. Calderón was losing it, was going
loco,
was afraid of bumps in the night.

The sounds were coming from the front of the house, he thought. Thumps and scratchings, like rending wood, and a low coughing growl. He looked briefly at the phone. Call the police? No, not in the house, looking around, asking questions, poking into his affairs. Instead, he slipped into a light robe, and pistol in hand, he walked out of the room and down the stairs in the dark. In the entrance hall he stopped and listened again. It was cool now, the air conditioners were silent for the season, the only noises were the quiet clicking of automatic machinery in the house, a distant vehicle, the ever-present rattle and swish of tropical
foliage in the breeze. He looked at the security panel, the little green lights said all locked up, secure, which was far from how he felt, and with a soft curse, he switched the thing off and unlocked the front door.

There was his front walk, his lawn, the peaceful Gables street. He took a step outside, pointing the gun. There was a black lump of something on the path, and when he leaned over to look at it, he cursed again, this time aloud. It was a pile of feces, of a vaguely familiar type. Calderón was hardly an expert on cat shit, coming as he did from a social stratum that employed others to empty cat boxes, but his daughter had always had cats, and he had observed the occasional accident. This was cat, and if its volume was any indication, it had emerged from a beast the size of a man.

A sound behind him made him whirl, gun outstretched, finger closing on the trigger. He saw two things at once. One was his front door, its oak surface torn to ribbons by long scratches. The other was his daughter, Victoria, standing in the doorway, dressed in pink silk pajamas, her mouth gaping in shock. Calderón shoved the pistol into the pocket of his robe. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing. Go back to bed.” He started for the doorway.

“It’s not nothing. I heard sounds. That’s why I got up. And you were pointing a gun.”

“Well, obviously it
was
nothing or I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you,” said Calderón, raising his voice. He was staring at the soft earth of the flower beds on either side of the walk. With his slippered foot he effaced the pugmarks of a gigantic cat, or at least those he could reach from the walk.

“What are you doing?” Victoria asked.

“Nothing! How many times do I have to say it? Now go back to bed or we’ll have your mother down here and that’s all I need.”

He made a shooing motion with his hand, and after a few seconds, she turned and walked away. He followed her into the house, and as he switched on the security system a dissatisfied frown appeared on his face, as it often did when he contemplated his daughter. Calderón was not happy with his children. Juan Jr., the elder, or Jonni, as he called himself, was in New York, attempting to become an actor or singer and living rather prematurely the life of a star on his father’s money. This
girl had been married off right out of college in a wedding that left little change from a hundred grand, to the Pinero boy, a connection with one of the wealthiest Cuban families in Miami. Who drank, as it turned out, and had peculiar tastes (although this was not discussed among the Calderóns) and who had, three months into the marriage, run his Mercedes off Alligator Alley and into a canal. Victoria returned home, where she would probably remain forever. Not a beauty, unfortunately, but at least she wasn’t like some of these girls he saw around town, Cuban girls, from good families, too, with their bodies hanging out of their clothes and up to God-knew-what craziness. His one concession to modernity was to allow her to work, under his eye, naturally, and here, at least, she had proven her father’s daughter. He’d started her in the development office at JXF, where she’d shown an excellent eye for property and had, in fact, been the lead on the Consuela Coast deal. He was glad she was competent, but it irked him like an unscratchable itch that it was the girl and not the boy who was in the business.

Calderón returned to the den, where he dozed uncomfortably in front of a stupid movie on the gigantic television, until dawn appeared through the windows. When he heard the servants stirring, he called down and ordered Carmel the maid to clean up the mess on the front walk, and then got his construction manager out of bed and told him that some kids had vandalized his front door and that he wanted it replaced instantly. Some hours later, when he walked out, a crew was already at work on the door. Asked what he wanted done with the old door, Calderón said, “Burn it.”

But the door and what it represented was not so easily removed from his mind. All during that morning he found himself drifting away at meetings, brought out of fearful reveries by an unnatural silence, looking up at a table full of worried or too-interested faces, and having to fake some response. This could not be tolerated, for his empire was sustained by an inverted pyramid of deals, each one larger than the last, each one secured by what had gone before. Should the word get around in certain circles that Yoiyo Calderón was losing it, should his Consuela Resort go sour…it was not worth thinking about, it wasn’t going to happen, he would…

What? Like many men of his generation and profession and culture, he had no true friends. He had contacts and associates instead, and he certainly was not going to bring up what had happened last night with Garza and Ibanez. He’d promised to handle any problems with the Puxto timber deal, and that was all they needed to know. His wife was a decoration, his father senile, his son useless, he had no brothers, he could not discuss these things with an employee.

He had a meeting after lunch about Consuela Coast with Gary Rivas, his VP for sales, and Oscar Clemente, his CFO, and some of their junior people. And his daughter. The discussion was about cash flow, as nearly all his meetings seemed to be about recently. Like any big project, the Coast, as the firm called it, got its initial funding from banks, collateralized by the property itself, which money was used for initial planning and the obtaining of permits, then the construction of the first units and the amenities, in this case a country/yacht club, golf course, and marina. The money from the sales of the first units would be used to service the loans and allow construction of the next tranche of units. Actual profits would not kick in until 70 percent of the homes and condos had been sold; until then, the company was running on vapor. This was the nature of the business, and it was not for the faint of heart. This was why Calderón liked it.

They sat, they talked small a little, and then Rivas and Clemente passed out spreadsheets and went into their presentations. Rivas had the bad news, although he did not call it that. He was about Victoria’s age, dark-haired, generous of gesture, cap-toothed, and tailored to an almost unnatural degree of perfection, as if injection-molded from plastic, like Barbie’s Ken. It seemed that the nineties were over, and condos on the west coast of Florida were not leaping off the shelves at a low end of $1.2 million. He thought he would make his targets off the Europeans and the Asians, and the thankful decline of the dollar, but it would be a near thing. Victoria looked at his projections and thought it would be an impossible one, even if the Coast became the most fashionable buy for every plutocrat from Lisbon to Shanghai, but she remained silent. Her father didn’t question the figures either, and they moved on to Clemente.

Uncle Oscar, as he was called among the Calderóns, had a freckled
bald dome of a head on which artful swirls of dark-dyed hair reclined. His bright black eyes flicked in disconcerting magnification behind huge thick black-framed lenses. He spoke a thickly accented English, interlarded with frequent spates of Cuban idiom. Clemente was a classic green-eyeshade type, a legacy from the previous generation of Calderóns, who’d won his spurs sneaking Victoria’s grandfather’s millions out of the island just before Satan took over Havana. According to him, the pyramid of interlocking loans was holding up and would cover the company’s burn rate well into the following year, assuming a whole list of good tidings: the prime rate low, labor available and docile, all contractors diligent and smartly on schedule, the banks willing with the usual rollovers, and…

Victoria’s eyes darted to a set of asterisked entries that seemed to balance out the spreadsheet to create this miracle of financial solidity. She added them up mentally and said, “Wait a second, where does this five point five mill come from? Investment income?”

They all stared at her, and she felt her face flush. “I mean…it doesn’t appear on the latest financials, and without that it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to service the major loan from First Florida. Does the bank have this as part of our collateral?”

Oscar looked at Calderón, and it was clear to Victoria that the CFO didn’t know the source of the money either. Calderón said, “It’s Consuela Holdings money. It’s there. Let’s move on.”

“Consuela? There’s no cash flow from Consuela. It’s a speculative outside investment. Why’re we claiming it as an asset against which we’re proposing to borrow?”

Calderón chuckled. “My little girl’s a financial genius now. A year ago she couldn’t tell an asset from a baby buggy and now she’s running the business for me. Kids, huh?” Everyone around the table had a good laugh at that, and now Calderón stared at her with his special macho gaze until she dropped her eyes and he said, “When I want your advice I’ll ask for it, understand? Now, Oscar, let’s get this finished.”

Calderón observed his daughter shrink into submission, which reaction made him feel somewhat more in control, and after the meeting he retired to his office, having told the secretary to hold calls. He sat behind his desk squeezing a little red ball said to be good for relieving
tension and thought about the real problem, the one closely related to the $5.5 million the stupid girl had mentioned. Clearly, someone had killed Fuentes, and this someone was now trying to threaten him by last night’s vandalism. Fuentes had been torn by what was supposed to have been a big cat, an obvious scam, and someone had marked his property, as if by a big cat. They were trying to frighten them away from the Puxto, that was clear enough, and therefore it was necessary to find the people who were doing this and stop them or frighten
them
off. He had applied fear before this, including physical fear on occasion, and he understood that once the decision was made, there was no point in holding back. He dialed a number in Colombia, not the one he had used some days ago, but a special one, a cell phone, for emergencies only.

“Yes?” said the quiet voice.

“Hurtado?”

“Yes.”

“Calderón. Look, the situation we talked about the other day? I think you need to be involved.”

“I’m listening.”

“There was an incident at my house last night. It’s connected with the death of Fuentes, I think.”

“Someone contacted you?”

“No, just some vandalism, a warning. The marks of a big cat, just like there were around Fuentes’s body.”

A hissing silence; then, “And what is it you expect me to do about it, Yoiyo?”

Calderón took a deep breath. “Well, you know they killed one of us and threatened me. This is not the work of some little environmentalist
cabrón
. This has to come from your end, despite what you said before.”

“Really? What about the man and his Indian at Fuentes’s office?”

“A distraction. These environment crazies, they climb up and live in trees, they drive spikes, at worst maybe a bomb, and then they’re all over the papers with their manifestos. This is different. Forgive me for saying so, but it has a Colombian feel to it.”

“A Colombian
feel
?”

“Yes!” Calderón’s voice rose. “They tore Antonio to
pieces,
goddamnit! They ripped the heart from his body, his liver…Americans don’t do things like that.”

“No, that’s true. But calm yourself, my friend. I’m sure something can be arranged. We need to find who’s doing this business and make them stop, this is the important thing, yes?”

“Of course. So, you’ll organize this in some way?”

“I will. My people will be in touch with you. And Yoiyo? You’ll let me handle this quietly, yes? No publicity, no fuss, and no contact with the authorities. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. My best regards to your family.”

The line went dead. Calderón wiped his face with his handkerchief. It was some minutes before he trusted his legs to carry him to the little bar in his office.

Victoria Calderón returned to her much smaller office, where there was no bar. Her body was damp with a nasty fear-sweat. She plucked at her clothes and wished for a shower. She sat behind her desk and tried to work. The words and figures danced wrongly across the page, and she mouthed an unaccustomed curse, and another, and then gave vent to her quite considerable store of Spanish profanity, learned mainly during her brief marriage, but not of course loud enough to be heard through the flimsy walls of her office. Yes, it was still true: he could with a word and a sneer turn her into the brainless ornament of his fancy.

Now, almost without thought, she found her fingers punching the buttons of her phone, and in a moment she was listening to the warm, humorous voice of her favorite person in the world, her mother’s crazy sister, Eugenia Arias, who, blessed with a perfect ear for tones of woe suppressed, cut through the attempted small talk with “What’s he done to you now?”