The Laughing Falcon (23 page)

But he had abstained, discovering there was a nubbin of toughness still within him, a small piece of grit. He had rescued someone. Maybe he could do it again, si
Dios quiere
. If God was still in the miracle business.

Slowly he became aware that Joe Borbón was in the room, there, standing against the kitchen wall. It was always eerie, the way Slack could sense his near-invisible presence.

“You want some coffee?”

“I don’t drink poison.” He preferred some kind of brown syrupy goop, a health concoction.

“What’s up?”

“We found one of their camps. The old man wants to see you.”

Borbón, who wasn’t much for small talk, went out and began strapping a couple of inflatables onto the Rover. Since Joe would be hanging around without apparent reason, Slack had been given permission to put him to work, helping with the tours. That way, they could meet openly, and Slack could spar with him, get some help with the weight training.

While waiting for his coffee to brew, Slack thumbed through the pile of papers and reports on his desk. “Operación Libertad,” they were stamped. “Classified.” Under the sullen dawn light he studied one of the photos of Gloria-May Walker taken at the lodge. She was stunning in her swirling skirt, her show of dancing leg, a hibiscus between her perfect teeth. Walker was in the background, looking awkward.

The colonel’s official flack had also managed to capture Margaret Schneider, romance writer, in a couple of unguarded moments. Making notes, interviewing Walker in his hammock, her eyebrow raised as if in disbelief. In another photo, Glo was posing with Maggie Schneider at the hot springs, her arm around her shoulders. Bosom pals. The Canadian woman wasn’t exactly what you’d call voluptuous, she was built like a high jumper. Despite her cropped hair and thick glasses, she was more pretty than plain. Comely, even, when she smiled, which she was doing here, easy and cheery.

She’d mailed a postcard to her mother from San José, a picture of the Opera House. “Dinner date tonight with
world’s most gorgeous man.” That dinner had cost her eight hundred bucks.

Slack had wanted to talk to her parents, but that was not permitted. Officially, he was still waiting to be called in. He wasn’t sure that was even going to happen because the minister of security had gone off on his own tangent with a nationally broadcast plea to the Cinco de Mayoists, urging them to start negotiating, offering Archbishop Mora as an emissary. That put Ham Bakerfield on a slow burn, he had no time for amateurs.

So Slack had been hanging about Quepos, pretending it was business as usual, though yesterday an interview had been arranged with one of the big networks. Again, Slack expressed support for the kidnappers’ goals, sympathizing with Benito Madrigal, denigrating Chuck Walker. This was a part of the job he liked, there was a theatrical vein in him somewhere. After it aired, he was again taken in for questioning. Friends began to shun him.

Ham Bakerfield seemed oddly impassive, a cop collecting data, as he watched Esperanza slide from the mud below the mangroves. Crocodile, six feet, fanged, possibly dangerous, sign here, you’re hired. “I named her after a woman I used to know,” Slack said. She was always around here, a scary treat for the tourists. “Stay behind me.”

They manoeuvred their kayaks around, and followed Esperanza as she wove down the narrow channel to Estero Damas, a Quepos lagoon sheltered from the pitch and toss of the ocean by the sandy islands of Big and Little Damas. The landward side was choked with mangrove swamp.

“Her brother ate a dog a few weeks ago,” Slack said. “Over there, on the island. Owners were fairly pissed.”

Ham just grunted. He was doing okay for his age, able to keep up, shrugging off the discomfort of the sporadic rain.
Lightning was crackling over the ocean, the skies pulsing with the energy of yet another coming thunderstorm.

“Where did you find their pit stop?”

“Beside a creek in the high Savegre. Interesting artefact there, a stone sphere, some kind of pre-Columbian sculpture.”

Slack’s interest was piqued, he had seen a few granite spheres at the National Museum, but never in the wild. Costa Rica’s first peoples used to roll them down the rivers to the plains for reasons no one understood, maybe tributes to their demanding gods. “How did you stumble on the site?”

“We sent climbers up the river with ropes and pylons, it was steep. The guys who read the site said it was an overnight. Someone shot a snake, the buzzards had got at it pretty good, big one, a boa constrictor. A slug from a 7-mm parabellum. Not much else, a cigarette butt, some rocks probably used to weigh down the tents. From there they must have gone up the creek bed.”

Slack listened to the burps and grumbles from the massing clouds. He wanted to see this prehistoric sphere, and he needed action, it might alleviate his drying-out pangs. “How about flying me up there?”

“If it ever clears.”

“Any word from the kidnappers?” Ham had people hanging around the post office to intercept any notes addressed to the U.S. Embassy.

“None. We’ve set up Benito Madrigal for you, we have a nice place for him, a house in San José, maid service, home-cooked meals. He’s on medication, seems okay. I’m stalling the security minister — he wants to send the archbishop in to see him, that could gum everything up. Madrigal liked you on the TV, he wanted to see the print interviews. I can’t believe this is actually working, but he wants to meet, comrade to comrade. We’re trying to fix that up for tomorrow.”

Slack had memorized the brief on Madrigal, unmarried at forty-nine, degree in economics, a former top mandarin. The
cramped little San José office of his People’s Popular Vanguard had been tossed but found deserted, every scrap of paper spirited away. A couple of party adherents had gone missing and were likely involved in the plot. The few others who could be found claimed to know nothing.

“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.