Night of the Jaguar (7 page)

He shook his head. Ajax waved the three little ones over. “Vengan niños.” The kids came as called.

“This your brother?”

The two boys dutifully muttered, “No.”

The little girl began to cry. “What do I say, Ernesto?”

“That's a yes,” Ajax said. He knelt before Ernesto. “If you don't tell me what you know, I'm gonna take you to a holding cell. What are they gonna do tonight with you gone?”

All fight went out of the kid.

“What time did you find the body?”

“I don't know, man. It was late. The train had passed.” The kid motioned to the tracks running down the middle of an adjacent boulevard.

“The train from Estelí. That gives me a time. What else did you see?”

“Nothing, I was out … looking around. I saw him there. His pockets were empty. I only took his boots.”

Ajax slapped the kid a good one. “Get up, Ernesto.” He whipped out his handcuffs, fastened them on too tight and turned on the little ones. “You three get fucking lost!”

“Okay, okay. All right! I'm sorry.”

“Last chance or they're on their own.”

“I took his ring.”

“His wallet?”

“He didn't have one. I swear!”

“His hat?”

“I sold it.”

“Baseball or cowboy hat?”

“Cowboy.”

“Straw?”

“No, not straw, something else. Gray colored.”

With his index finger, Ajax lifted the boy's face. “What'd you do with his keys?”

“Keys?”

“His car keys!”

“No keys, señor. Just the ring.”

“And the shoes and the hat and the belt.”

“Yeah, and the doll.”

Ajax looked at Ernesto's little sister. She dropped her head and held out the doll. Ajax looked it over—one of those colorful Mayan Quiche dolls with an embroidered red top with a blue skirt. Hair of yarn and face drawn in dark pencil. Handmade, Ajax thought. And well made.

“This was on the corpse?”

“Next to it.”

“Where's the ring, Ernesto?”

The boy looked at his little sister, who lifted her grimy shirt to reveal a pouch tied around her waist. She handed it to Ajax, who examined the contents: about ten thousand Cordobas in old, dirty bills. Not even a dollar's worth, even at the black market rate. Some weather-beaten photos of the children with a smiling woman in a folkloric outfit at what looked to be a festival. Not more than a year old, from the look of the kids now. And a dull, gold wedding ring. Its history written in every ding and scratch.

Ajax held it up to the children.

“This goes to the man's wife, or family. I'll find them. I promise you that.” He unlocked the cuffs. “You keep the stuff you didn't steal, but let me examine the shoes. C'mere.”

Ajax led them to his Lada where Gladys waited in a soiled uniform. Ajax reached inside the car, took out a pad, and scribbled something. Then he bent over the boy. “Lemme see those boots, the bottoms. Now the belt, Ernesto.”

Ajax scribbled in his notepad. “You know where the Cine Cabrera is, where they show the films?”

“You sending us to the movies?”

“From the Cine Cabrera you walk two blocks toward the lake and three toward sunset. There's a white house with four palm trees in front. You hear? It's run by foreigners. They help orphans.”

Ernesto stood in front of his three siblings like a mother rat, ready for all comers. “We're not orphans!”

“No? Then where's your father?”

“I don't fucking know.”

“Your mother?”

“Where is mama, Nesty?” The little girl tugged on Ernesto's T-shirt.

“You know where she is, Claribel.” He shot Ajax a look. “She went north and when she's got a job she'll send for us and we'll all go live in Texas.”

“That's right,” Ajax said, echoing the boy's story. “But until then”—he thrust the paper into Ernesto's pocket—“you go to this house. It's not an orphanage. They won't separate you. It's run by foreigners.” Ajax rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “They got resources. You ask for a Nicaraguan named Marlene. Give her this note. Tell her I sent you. Ajax Montoya. They'll help you out.”

Ernesto eyed Ajax like he was a dirty old man with a bag of candy.

“Just trust me on this kid, right?”

“Maybe.”

Ajax gave the doll to the little girl and shook Ernesto's hand. His little siblings lined up to do the same. Ajax watched them file off like ducklings into the maze of ramshackle homes. Ernesto turned back. “You didn't say what yours is.”

“My what?”

“Your noom de whatever.”

“Nom de guerre.”

“Yeah.”

“In the mountains, fighting Somoza, they called me Ernesto. Everyone wanted to be called Ernesto.”

The boy looked like he might actually smile.

Ajax watched the little shipwrecked family drift down the crowded alley, which suddenly felt like a vast and empty shore. He let out a long breath. “‘We do not simply manufacture orphans, or raise crows as children.'”

“What does that mean?” Gladys said.

“Cuadra.”

“Who?”

“The poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra. ‘Third Class Country.' ‘We do not fold paper boats to sail puddles, or, inadvertently, raise crows as children.'”

Gladys looked at him like she was waiting for the punch line.

Ajax smiled. It had been an excellent morning. “It means, Gladys, that you must broaden your horizons and embrace the mystery.”

“Of what? The stiff? In this barrio? They killed him for his wallet.”

“Wrong, Lieutenant Of False Suppositions. Our stiff had knife wounds but no blunt trauma. And ‘in this barrio,' you kill someone for his possessions, you bash his fucking head in. But maybe someone wanted to make it look like robbery. I'm not sure yet. The good news is his keys are missing. Whatever vehicle he was driving is still out there. We'll be looking for someone selling a stolen pickup.”

“Why a pickup?”

Ajax leaned against his Lada, drew the Python, rolled the chamber over his palm and closed his eyes. “The kid said he took a cowboy hat. Farm workers wear baseball caps, landowners wear cowboy hats. Farm workers with money dress up in straw cowboy hats. You know the kind I mean?”

“Yeah, sure, I've seen them.”

Ajax closed his eyes again. “Kid said the stiff's hat was gray, so it was maybe felt, not straw. The ring and the jeans show he's got money. A landowner with money drives a pickup. But he's wearing boots. Landowner with money and a felt cowboy hat doesn't wear cowboy boots on the farm. The boots mean he was driving his pickup to Managua on business, so maybe he's got family here.”

Ajax holstered the Python. “If he's got family here, they'll look for him when he doesn't show. Eventually they'll go to the morgue.” He opened his eyes. “I hope you're taking notes.”

She fished for her notebook. “No, sorry, I mean…”

“Just kidding, Gladys. What do you think?”

“It's a lot of ideas, but why not robbery?”

“Why, because of the method of murder. Come here.”

Before Gladys could react Ajax had seized her, pressed her back against his belly, and pulled her head back with his left hand, exposing her throat.

“Ever killed anyone with a knife?”

Her body stiffened. “No, Captain.”

“Our stiff has stab wounds to the throat and the chest.”

He held up his right hand with the thumb skyward like a Roman emperor about to decide someone's fate.

“To get someone in the throat like this”—he brought the thumb slowly in until it pressed lightly against her larynx—“is not so hard, if he's still, like you are now. But if he fights, fights at all, not so easy. You might even miss and get yourself.”

He pulled his hand back, and thrust in again, thumb poised between her breasts. “To hit the heart, or at least a lung, is easier, again, if the victim doesn't struggle. But if you get him in the heart, why then go for the throat at all?”

Gladys managed to nod. “I don't know.”

“Now if it was a knife fight”—he spun her around and brought quick blows with his hand—“a blow to your throat, what do you do? Bend over, fall down; same with the chest. If you're not dead, you wave your arms. Instinct says, do anything to live. But there were no defensive wounds on the hands or arms. No other blows but those two, one to the chest, one at least to the throat. So he never fought back. And like you said, he looks middle-aged. From his clothes, he wasn't poor. From the calluses on his hands, I'd guess he worked for a living, but not too hard, thus a landowner. So there was no knife fight. Gimme your hand.”

Gladys looked at her hands, then reluctantly held out the left one. In one deft movement, Ajax bent her arm over her head, tripped her, gently dropped her onto her back and straddled her.

“But if you put the victim on his back”—with his left hand on her chin, he pushed her head back—“then you can come down clean.” He brought his hand down on her throat, raised it over his head to demonstrate the blow to the heart, but then he froze as if turned to salt. His eyes went to the hand holding the imaginary knife and the world seemed to melt away. The harsh sunlight of a city without trees dimmed. The hot urban jungle cooled.

*   *   *

Ajax was surrounded by forest, touched by dappled sunlight, chilled by mountain air putrid with death. The woman beneath him was not Gladys in her dusty uniform, but a middle-aged lady caked in the dark earth of the selva. Ajax had brushed the soil from her ashen, bloated face. Their faces. There had been four of them: two health workers, a teacher, and a local militiaman. All had the same wounds, stabbed once in the throat and twice through the heart. He'd found out later that the Contra had made them dig their common grave. Lie in it and fold their arms over their chests. Then a Contra had straddled each and delivered the fatal blows. This was March or April 1982. It was the first of many such graves unearthed in the mountains during the early days of the counterrevolution. But he remembered that one woman most. She'd had a hole in her sneaker and her big toe had poked out. The toenail painted red. The little piggy that went to market had gotten all prettied up for it. But the toe had been very white, not discolored like the rest of her. He couldn't stop looking at that toe and had finally pulled the shoe off to solve the mystery of its whiteness. It was a prosthesis. She'd lost her foot just above the ankle and wore a wooden one on which someone had painstakingly—lovingly—carved the separate toes. Not etched on a block, but sculpted, each toe separate from the others, just like a real foot, with toenails and everything. Then she'd painted them red, just like her real ones.

That had stayed with him. That little red toenail in that immense green jungle.

Later, when they'd taken the bodies back to the base in Wiwilí, he'd removed the foot and given it to a French group that made prosthetics for the victims of Contra land mines. For all he knew, someone was stumping around on it right now.

*   *   *

“Ajax?” Gladys' voice cut through the memory.

“Kill the vampire.”

“What?”

“Once in the throat, twice through the heart. That's what they called it. ‘Killing the vampire.'”

“Who?”

Ajax saw that he still had his hand in the air. He jumped up and helped Gladys to her feet. “Sorry.”

“Why are you talking about vampires?”

He shook his head. He didn't trust her yet. “I don't know. Spacing out. Anyway, that's how it happened. They got him on his back and delivered the blows.”

He spun her around and brushed the dirt from her back. His mind whirling—could it be?

“Well, that was a sweet dance! Go on, kiss her!”

Ajax hated to be surprised, so he already hated the intruder. He knew what to expect when he turned around. If it was civilians, the tone would have been a more democratic teasing rather than the cold, authoritarian mocking he had just heard. He faced the voice. The mocker was a uniform. Two uniforms. What surprised him was to see the uniforms leaning against a car marked
DGSE
. Dirección General de Seguridad del Estado. It was one of the quirks of the Sandinista revolution that State Security, the secret police, traveled the country in clearly marked cars. And the two cocky hijos de puta leaning against it had Seguridad plastered all over their smirking mustachioed faces.

While he gave them the once over, Ajax carefully finished dusting off Gladys's uniform. One man was a major, the other a captain.

“Stonewall these fucks, Gladys,” he whispered.

The major sauntered over. “You're Ajax Montoya.”

“That why you came here?”

“What?”

“To tell me my name—is that why you came here?”

“I'm Major Pissarro; this is Captain Cortez.”

Ajax snorted with delight. “I get it. The
conquistadores.
We've been invaded, Gladys.”

The intruders exchanged a brief glance.

“Cortez and Pissarro, the
conquistadores.
You know, Aztecs, Incas. Guess that makes us the Indians.” Ajax tried to suppress the laugh he felt welling up, but for some reason failed to muster the will power. Gladys, on the other hand, looked ready to crawl out of her skin.

“We're here about the murder, compañero
.
”

Ajax cut his chuckle. “What murder?”

Captain Cortez stepped forward like he didn't know he was being fucked with. “You just had a body hauled away. That murder.”

“Wait, which one are you again? Doesn't matter, but yeah we had a corpse taken to the morgue. We don't know if it's murder. Do you? And if so, how do you know that?”

“Look compa.” Pissarro stepped in front of the other, his hands out in reconciliation. “State Security has an interest in this … death. We got it from here. Thank you.”