The Laughing Falcon (8 page)

M
aggie, in a foul temper, glared at the two-propeller aircraft on the tarmac outside the SANSA building — it was to have departed an hour ago, at eight a.m., and Maggie’s fellow passengers were grumbling. In a better mood she might have considered this lack of punctuality a quaint national trait, but there was little today that she found endearing about Costa Rica. That oily fanny-pack picker … The plunge from rapture to wretchedness was total; never in her life had she felt so degraded and betrayed.

The university switchboard ought to be open by now. After seeking instructions for the pay phone, she dialled, finally connecting with a history lecturer who confirmed that no Professor Pablo Esquivel was on faculty. Why had this crook been in the library? — a place of learning seemed an odd location to seek out his victims. How could she have been so naive? Had she not heard stories about ingenuous tourists being fleeced by Latin swindlers? Frieda Lisieux, the CSKN weather reporter, had fallen prey to such a one in Mexico, her misadventure a source of callous humour at the station.

Now, eight hundred dollars out of pocket, Maggie would have to scrimp like a miser — but at least the next four days were paid for, including overnight lodging in a beach town called Quepos and the two-hour taxi ride to the Eco-Rico Lodge.
Her remaining consolation was that she would enjoy literary revenge, recasting Pablo Esquivel as a fictional villain. Sleepless for hours with anger last night, Maggie had written furiously, recording every word of every sentence spoken, their entire interaction, even her fumbling missteps and the sensations she had felt during those two deep kisses.

A lost Spanish mission with its buried treasure: bullshit. She should have realized his tale was too tall to be true. She was stunned at how silky he had been, how adept with his hands. Why would a classy operator waste time with such small change as she? Or maybe he
had
believed she was rich and famous.

“Quepos, Quepos, Quepos.” A man was calling out like a train conductor and collecting boarding passes. Maggie and another dozen passengers scurried outside, where a heavy rain had begun to fall. Her destination, pronounced Kay-pos, lay beyond those cloud-sheathed mountains ringing the Central Valley. She knew any effort to summon Dr. Rajwani’s rules would be wasted, her ire and sense of desolation swamped every other concern. Last evening, she had dared believe she was attractive to that man …

As the plane groaned into the skies, Maggie sat stiffly in her seat, her eyes closed, but she couldn’t blot out Pablo Esquivel, his black, calculating eyes. When she looked out, the aircraft was sailing through a mountain pass, straight into a cloud. A few seconds later, she gasped as they suddenly burst into sunlight. Below her she could see a coastal plain beyond which the blue waters of the ocean stretched to an endless horizon. The aircraft curled toward a narrow asphalt strip and touched down gently.

Maggie stepped off the plane into a wall of wet heat. By the time she reached the bus sitting by the small terminal building, she felt damp with it, heavy with the weight of this thick, hot, aromatic climate. She was about to encounter her first tropical beach – she should brace up, banish this dark mood. She tried to persuade herself that now the true holiday
would begin; she should not permit one awful night to plunge her in gloom for two entire weeks.

The rickety tourist bus jounced her down a twisting road between groves of trees and fields where spindly horses grazed. Quepos arrived suddenly, unexpected, a Crosshatch of streets behind an earth dike. She got off the bus by a soccer field, hoisted her backpack, and set off to find the Kamuk Hotel, walking past wooden-framed buildings offering food, drink, gifts, and window arrangements of pots, shoes, sunglasses, floor wax, and plastic Christmas decorations. Every third or fourth door seemed to lead to a dingy saloon filled with sad-eyed men.

Her hotel sat across from the dike and offered a pool, a pair of restaurants, and a small casino. She was shown to an air-conditioned third-floor room that looked onto a well-treed boulevard and, beyond it, the dike and an estuary, where gaily coloured fishing boats bobbed: a pretty picture that allayed her gloom for a moment.

How could Pablo have been attracted to her? A handsome character like that … He had seen her exactly for what she was: a lonely rube from the boondocks of the frozen north seeking a little Latin excitement.

She was determined to snap out of her foul mood. Yes, she was going to have fun, fun, fun. It would be an adventure, living simply and stretching those colones. She would start with a dip in the Pacific Ocean. And why taxi to the beach when she could mingle with the locals on the bus? Anyway, she should be flattered that such an attractive man would even bother to steal from her.
Think positively
.

She showered, then slathered sunblock; she was as white as the Canadian snows. After slipping shorts and T-shirt over her bathing suit, she belted on her fanny pack and abandoned the shelter of her cool room.

The sight of an absurdly long lineup in a bank dissuaded her from cashing a traveller’s cheque; she had enough colones for the day. Downtown Quepos extended for only a few blocks,
and she quickly spotted the bus station at the centre; the beaches of Manuel Antonio were twenty minutes away.

But the heat made her thirsty, and the prospect of a cold beer tempted her into an open-air bar. From her outer table, she watched the passing parade: a street seller wheeling a cart loaded with bags of fresh shrimp; the town drunk, staggering and accosting strangers; a local law enforcer with a billy club on his belt, scratching his groin and looking none too sober himself.

The waiter spoke to her in Spanish. She indicated one of the bottles on the table next to her, where two men and a woman were in loud conversation. A chilled Pilsen quickly arrived; it tasted agreeably like Canadian beer. She tuned into the threesome at the next table: expatriates, she guessed, running local businesses.

“He’s got rocks for balls.”

“Slack’s a tank.”

“Yeah, a pisstank, man. A walking fucking disaster when he gets juiced up.”

“I heard he laid El Chorizo out on the ambassador’s lap.”

The laughter seemed malicious. Slack Cardinal was a name they kept mentioning, apparently a drunken brawler.

“Saw him taking out a group this morning; he looked like a head-on collision. How come Slack never got busted over that?”

“Beats me.”

A few minutes later, as Maggie was window-shopping while waiting for her bus, her eye was caught by a display of snapshots of tourists in inflatable kayaks. In one picture, the whitewater rafters looked scared; it seemed like poor advertising.

“Mono Titi Tours, River and Ocean Kayaking,” said the sign. She doubted she could afford it. “Jacques (Slack) Cardinal, gerante, manager,” read a smaller sign. Good Lord, here was her Jacques, not at all like the man she’d imagined: the flesh-and-blood Jacques, alias Slack, was the infamous local tank. She would definitely take a pass on any kayak trip. Now she saw
the scrawled note behind the door window: “Closed until creativity restored.”

The message was too enigmatic for her.

The grunting bus was crowded. Maggie gave up her seat for a pregnant woman and caught only glimpses of the ocean until the bus stopped near the beach. She got off and made her way between stalls of vendors offering fruit and juices. She bore straight for the water and did not pause until a tongue of an expiring wave licked her foot, then she removed her sandals and felt her toes sink into the wet, golden sand.

The visual banquet spread before her was so beyond her experience that she could not take it all in. She removed her glasses, fogged them, cleaned them, then slowly surveyed the long curve of beach at low tide, the canopied jungle promontory abutting it, the rocky islets in the distance, their sheer walls topped with green brush cuts, waves crashing, birds calling, a rich humid salty smell suffusing the air. The bleak prairies had not prepared her for such sensory extravagance.

She strolled along, her feet splashing through waves as they petered out by the tide line. Sandpipers scattered before her, regrouped, and flew off again on stiff, beating wings. She studied the tall, cresting waves, which had attracted several surf-boarders. Though Maggie was a strong swimmer she decided to seek out the quieter beaches of the nearby national park; she had never swum in an ocean before and worried about currents.

At a wooden booth, she paid an entrance fee and was handed a brochure, then made her way to a placid stretch of beach — a scimitar of soft sand cupping a bay of blue-green water and fringed with leafy trees twisting toward the shore. Behind her rose the virgin jungle of Manuel Antonio Park.

Her new-found bliss shattered when, out of nowhere, like an unexpected burp, came Pablo Esquivel’s sugary words.
You are unlike some of the empty-headed women I have been forced to know
.
She felt seared; no one’s head had been emptier than hers. Here, however, was medicine for her soul: the sweet healing waters of the ocean. She laid out a towel, shucked her shorts and T-shirt, tucked her glasses in her pack, and ran, arms flailing, into the tropical sea. The warmth of the water felt almost sinful.

After several minutes of a leisurely swim, and a longer time letting the surf toss her aimlessly like clothes in a washer, she began to chide herself for her glumness. What an idiot she had been: the stereotypical naïve tourist; Pablo must have seen her coming a mile down Rural Route Two.

But adversity was not without its rewards; Pablo had inspired an admirably villainous foil for her heroine’s affections. Even if spurious, his story of a lost mission was a plot that might even be worth eight hundred dollars, plus the bill for the meal and the tip. She would steal from the thief: he held no copyright on his tale of buried Spanish treasure. Several weekends of toil at the University of Saskatchewan library would bring Captain Morgan and the sack of Panama into bold relief.

As she bobbed in the waves, she felt her spirits rising on the wings of inspiration. She would refashion her novel — every second of last evening would be recreated for
The Torrid Zone
. (Will the worldly Dr. Fiona Wardell be seduced into the rascal’s bed? Will he slip away with the treasure map?)

For this conceit to succeed, however, the heroine must become more Maggie-like; Fiona, once so graceful and lithe, will find herself slightly uncoordinated: if not an endearing trait, this will add verisimilitude. The early chapters will reek of authenticity; the characters will jump from the pages. Her bad encounter could well have been a lucky turn of fate: a career-enhancing soft collision between woman and man.

After playing in the waves for half an hour, Maggie crawled onto her towel and brought out her notepad, feeling perkier, more like Maggie Poppins. She was intrigued by the concept of reshaping Fiona in her own image.
Creative Writing 403: Seek character in yourself
. Perhaps, in doing so, she will find a pathway
to the meaning of love, discover the elusive glue that binds woman and man. (Surely that overpowering rush she felt last night was a false symptom, brought on by deceit, a fleeting thing, almost forgotten now.)

She must create a role for her hero.
Only one other person knew the upper reaches of the Savage River
. Just as Fiona had begun to metamorphose, so would Jacques; someone of a different mould was now required. Discard these: intellectual, debonair, suave — those were the qualities of the scoundrel Esquivel. Jacques must be roughly hewed, a seemingly hopeless cause, turned dissolute by dejection. She wrote down the name, “Jacques Cardinal.”

Closed until creativity restored
. Decoded, that probably meant he was too sick to work today. A tank who looked like a head-on collision seemed an unlikely choice for male lead, but if she was to confound the sniggering critics of her genre, why should he not be cut of the roughest cloth? She hoped the real Cardinal would not sue her for libel; though from what she had heard of his reputation, he could not claim much of a case.

Discouraged almost to the point of abandoning her explorations, Fiona summoned the fortitude to enter one last tavern, as usual smelling of must and stale spirits and urine, where she found him leaning against the bar, his only companion a bottle of gin.

“You’re Jacques Cardinal, aren’t you?”

“Slack,” he said, slurring the name. “That’s what they call me around here.”

He did not turn to her, but continued to gaze motionless into his glass. Her impression was of a man defeated by life’s challenges. He was wiry and nearly as tall as she, a mat of dark curls atop his head and a rough scrape of beard darkening his jaw; and he was in a high state of intoxication
.

“I am told you know the Savegre River.”

“Only too well.”

“You have been up to the headwaters. To the mission site.”

He finally raised his eyes, and regarded her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “I was with your father ten years ago. Yes, we looked for it.”

“You know who I am, then.”

“He showed me your picture a thousand times. Proud of you. Must feel good to have pride in something. “A thick, sardonic laugh, and he saluted her in the mirror with his raised glass, then drained it
.

“Dad used to say there aren’t many geniuses left in the field. He also said you’re one of them.”

“Forget the Savegre. There’s no point. No point in anything.”

She slid the bottle from his reaching hand. “How about a walk in the fresh air, Dr. Cardinal?”

He finally turned toward Fiona, and with one eye closed, because otherwise he seemed unable to focus, he undertook a long examination of her, his declining gaze finally settling upon the long toes protruding from her sandals. As his eye commenced an equally slow return journey he grunted in what Fiona took to be approval. “But I’m still not taking you up the Savegre.”

“We’ll talk about it.” As she tugged his arm, one of her feet became entangled in a stool; she lost her balance and fell against him in ungainly fashion
.