Night of the Jaguar (31 page)

Malhora took another long pull on the cigar. Ajax wandered over to the portrait of Sandino hanging from the wall. It was an excellent oil painting done from the iconic photograph of the diminutive rebel general in his ten-gallon Stetson. Ajax saw it all clearly—as clearly as when Epimenio told him the men at the airstrip had Cuban accents, just like Marta. But she was Colombian.

“You're running drugs out of a secret airstrip in the mountains of Matagalpa. Cocaine probably. Enrique Cuadra came upon it by accident while hunting a jaguar. But the men you use for it are blowhards like you, can't keep their mouths shut, don't know about light and noise discipline. Cuadra heard them talking, recognized their accents as Colombian. He put two and two together and decided to do something about it. You found out and killed him before he could tell Matthew Connelly.”

“And what if that is true? So what?”

Ajax turned from the portrait of the past to the face of the present. There was a cockiness to Malhora that hinted at a hole card.

“You murdered a citizen of the republic. A good man who gave three sons to the revolution.” He slid the handcuffs off his belt. “I'm going to put these on you and take you to jail, or I will kill you where you sit. There is no third option.”

Malhora smiled a serpent's smile and took his time relighting his cigar, the pride of the worldwide communist movement. “There is always a third way, Ajax. Morality is not arithmetic where this and that will always equal something else. Morality is like an industry. If you have certain resources, you make one thing. If you lack those resources, you use something else to make something else. Just like in war. You use what you have.”

“If you're trying to buy time until someone comes to rescue you, don't. If that door opens, I'll have you dead before they touch me. What happens after will not matter to you.” And that was true. He would carry out his threat to the letter, he was ready for that. But he sensed that Malhora had an ace facedown behind that door. What Ajax could not fathom was why Malhora had sent the Conquistadores out in the first place.

“You would kill me.”

“Yes.”

“I'm not asking. I'm telling you, you
would
kill me. But would you kill the enemy?”

“Define enemy.”

“American Imperialism! The colossus to the north. Ronald Reagan and the entire shit-eating evil empire that sucks the life out of us, all of us! That puts its boot on our neck and pushes our face into the mud until we suffocate. That screams we are a threat to them while they kill us. Literally kill us. The enemy, goddamn you, the fucking
enemy
!”

“And the murder of Enrique Cuadra served how, exactly, to kill the enemy?”

“We cannot attack the United States from outside. Only from within. Their decadence is our greatest ally. Their love of the coca is an undefended flank we can attack. We can feed the Giant poison. Right now there are tens of thousands of Americans going to jail for drug sales. In ten or fifteen years these
narcos
will have become hardened criminals to be released back into their communities to wreak more havoc. Millions of children born to drug-addicted mothers. Their Negro inner cities are like war zones. The impact on public policy, resources, the very politics of the whole country change as we make them fight the war on drugs, which they will lose. The cocaine is a weapon, a bomb we can explode now, and again fifteen years from now! Do you see?”

“The poor man's weapon of mass destruction.”

“Yes! Yes! My God, you do get it. Those shit-eating gringos never, ever have to pay for what they do. Look at Vietnam, the millions dead, the forests agent-oranged to death—and who paid for that? The Vietnamese. You know what they have done to us: Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic. And El Salvador worst of all, seventy thousand dead already. Do you think we would have this Contra war were it not for them?”

Malhora ground out the cigar in the ashtray like it was Reagan's own face. “And how many thousands have we already lost? And yet every time the Americans get to walk away complaining that they could not do more. Walk away clean. And they will do that here. No one will ever pay for the misery and death—no one. Ever! They never do. But this way, this way we can infect them with a disease. ‘The poor man's weapon of mass destruction' indeed! But unlike a nuclear bomb it does not kill all at once, but slowly, over time. As hatred should kill.”

Ajax finally sat down, relieved that he was not the craziest son of a bitch in the country, as he'd feared. “I'll take that Marlboro now.”

Malhora offered the red leather box of cigarettes and lit it for Ajax.

“And you are going to accomplish all this with one little airstrip hanging to the side of a mountain in Matagalpa?”

Malhora laughed. “Admittedly, the means of production are not yet sufficient to our purposes.”

“Why not use the airports if you had to move bulk?”

“
Our
airports? Ajax, even you have heard of satellite surveillance. No. An airstrip in Contra country would have to do, and, yes, if in a few months we decided to ‘raid' the airstrip, capture it with its evidence of drug smuggling, then who else would the world blame but the Contra?
Surely the government could not run an airstrip in such a place
.”

Ajax took a drag on the red. It was American-made, he had to admit. “So it was a setup against the Contra. Okay. We've done that before. But why kill Enrique Cuadra? Didn't he think it was a Contra airstrip?”

“Cuadra was not the great citizen you think. He was Contra. Did you know he was involved with Jorge Salazar? Yes, our old friend Jorge. It was Cuadra's gas station Salazar used. Why? Because he felt safe there to plan his treachery.”

“There weren't any traitors. That was a setup. We lured Salazar into it.”

“Yes, but Salazar chose where to meet. And that revealed his network of traitors. Salazar and Cuadra were related by marriage. Did you know that?”

Ajax did not, but he did not reveal it.

“Salazar's widow and Cuadra's wife are cousins, raised together. She is buried on Cuadra's farm.”

Ajax had noticed the fresh grave, but had not thought to ask about it. And now the urgency in Connelly's voice came back to him.
I know who killed Enrique
. But Ajax had had too big a hard-on to listen. Doubt began to creep in.

“Do you begin to see the method in my madness, Captain Montoya?”

“What about the money?”

There it was, a flicker in his eye. Malhora had blinked. He'd shied. He'd flinched.

“Money?”

“There are no profits from the drugs? No one is getting paid?”

“You think I am enriching myself?”

Now Malhora had answered two questions with questions. In an interrogation, this was classic avoidance behavior. He'd learned that first in the mountains. It had been a rule among the guerrilleros: when you got to a campesino shack, you began by making small talk and then got quickly to questions about the Guardia. If three questions were answered by questions you assumed the farmers had been compromised and ran for it. Malhora shifted in the high-back leather chair that was not quite as big as a church door. He toyed with the extinguished cigar like he might put flame to it again. He shook his head as if deeply saddened by Ajax's lack of faith. Ajax did not know precisely what it meant, but he did know the money was the key to the mystery.

“Answer me. You think I am enriching myself?”

“I think I don't trust you as far as I could throw Enrique Cuadra's rotting corpse.”

“There is money, of course there is. A lot of it. We use it to fund certain black operations, which you will forgive me if I don't share with you.” Malhora allowed himself a chuckle as if from some private joke. “You don't think I came up with all this on my own, do you?”

“I don't think you've got the brains or the balls.” Ajax drew himself up out of the chair, dropped the handcuffs on Malhora's desk, and let his hands dangle loosely at his sides. He threw the inner switch of fight-or-flight into fight. It was time to see Malhora's whole card. “What I do think is that you will now put those handcuffs on or I am likely to break a bone doing it for you.”

“Interesting isn't it?” Malhora lifted the handcuffs as if he would put them on. “In Spanish our word for handcuffs is
esposos
. The same as spouse.” Then he tossed the handcuffs at Ajax's face. “Come in!”

Ajax ducked the handcuffs, went over the desk, and had Malhora in a choke hold so fast he had time to relish Malhora's stiffening with fear. Yes, that was what Ajax wanted, to feel his fear. The desk was enough of an obstacle that he could get to The Needle if he needed to.

But through Malhora's door came not henchmen, but Gioconda Targa and Horacio de la Vega.

Esposos.

Or the enemy?

Ajax released Malhora, who sunk back into his chair. The looks on the faces of his best friend and ex-wife foretold what they had come to propose.

The three of them just looked at each other in silence. Ajax thought
, Here we are, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Then he had another thought, and spoke it: “‘Each Judas a friend of every Cain.'”

Horacio looked away, but Gio reacted as if struck. “What did you say?”

“‘Each Judas a friend of every Cain.' It's a quote from Rubén Darío.”

“I know what it is! How dare you quote that to me!”

Horacio stepped between them. “Ajax, we must talk. Comandante, would you mind?”

“If he tries to leave the room, he's a dead man.”

“No, he's not, Ajax.” Horacio signaled for Malhora to leave. “And it is unhelpful to even talk that way.”

“It's quite all right, Horacio. I will wait right in the outer office. I believe Lieutenant Darío is there?”

Horacio nodded.

“Then I will leave myself in the ‘custody' of compañera Darío. Ajax, if, after the three of you talk, you still want to arrest me, I will be waiting for you.”

Malhora opened the door to show Ajax that Gladys was, indeed, there. Ajax looked at her. She nodded, but he was not sure what that meant. His eyes went to her sidearm, then back to her eyes. She shifted her right hand to the Makarov. But he did not know what that meant, either. He felt as if the boards and concrete of Casa Fifty had dropped away and he was falling through the foundation, through the dirt and rocks and bones of the Earth into an abiding void. And the fear which flopped his belly was not of his death upon hitting bottom, but that he would never stop falling.

The few seconds it took Malhora to vacate the room and click the door shut were the worst moments of Ajax's recent life. He stood looking at the shut door, the sealed portal which might have led to another world, another life.

Horacio, at last, walked around the desk and draped a hand on his shoulder. “Thank God you're safe, Ajax. Malhora told us about Krill.”

“Why would you even go there?” Gio sat down, folded her arms over her bosom. “Do you have some kind of death wish?”

Ajax faced them. It was like having a blindfold removed, and, blinking in the weak dawn light, discovering that his two best friends would command his firing squad.

“Did you know about this?” he asked.

Gio shook her head. Her chestnut-brown ringlets shuddered like vines hanging from a tree, vines he had once wanted climb. But now they seemed like the vines in Paradise that shook as the snake slithered up the tree of knowledge. “Of course not.”

“You, Horacio?”

“This is not about Malhora. It's not about airstrips or cocaine. And it's not about Enrique Cuadra.”

“And it's not about your gringa lover either,” Gio added.

“Are you jealous?”

“Don't be a child. This is politics. What I care about is Senator Teal and the deal we are trying to make with him while you are off fucking his aide de camp! Do you think we let Teal come here for
his
reasons? We have worked this out, I have worked this out so carefully. And now you…”

“Gio, that is also not what this is about.” Horacio eased Ajax into Malhora's chair and then sat himself down, taking a moment to massage his crippled leg. “Ajax, this is about Joaquin.”

“Tinoco?”

“Yes, and his seat on the National Directorate. Since it became clear that he was dying, and dying quickly, everything has been about who would replace him. In very,
very
private meetings many things have come out. It was decided weeks ago that this ludicrous cocaine operation would cease. If anything, Cuadra probably stumbled on the last flight. It is over, the airstrip destroyed, and any connections between us and it have been erased…”

“Or killed off.”

“Or killed off. I am sorry for the death of Enrique, but everything is at stake right now. Everything!”

“Except bringing a murderer to justice.”

“Oh please.” Gio sat down as if exhausted. “What is justice to you but getting your own way?”

“Gio.” Horacio leaned on his cane and struggled to his feet. “I asked you to come with me to help.”

“Help with what, Horacio?” Ajax rose to his feet. “Why are the two of you
here
?” He gestured to the room.

“To adjust your gaze.”

“What?”

Horacio hobbled to the big picture window overlooking the city all the way down to the lake. “Our war with America … is not a war between civilizations. Capitalism versus Communism. North versus South. Like all wars, it is between the civilized and the uncivilized. In both countries, in all countries, there exist only those two camps. The uncivilized in each country wish to make war on the uncivilized in other countries. And the civilized in each want to make peace with the civilized in other nations. We are the same. The uncivilized in America want to invade us, crush, kill, and destroy us. We have our barbarians, too. They, too, want to war with America. They want to provoke an invasion so that Nicaragua can be another, the final, Vietnam that brings America down. They are the ones who planned and launched this drug business, ‘poor man's weapon of mass destruction.' Malhora is a barbarian. My job is to keep him off the National Directorate where he will be the deciding vote in favor of all-out war.”