Chapter 23

It is not the healthy who need a physician, but they who are sick.

—Jesus

 

Father Free accompanied Yolanda Rubia through the darkened Restaurante Cuzcatlán, the purifying smell of bleach wafting around them like cheap incense. The restaurant belonged to the Todos Santos Cooperativa that Father Free had started when he finished his tenure at the academy. Father Free’s only earthly pride lay in the success of the cooperativa. A handful of hard-working people had turned several abandoned waterfront buildings into livelihood for more than a hundred. Besides Restaurante Cuzcatlán and its private bar, their holdings included a small vegetable and chicken farm on the outskirts of the city, a fishing boat, two tour boats, a carpentry shop, a mechanic’s shop and a guesthouse. The idea and organization were Father Free’s. The silent startup money was Yolanda Rubia’s.

Father Free called the superprivate bar the “National Security Alumni Club,” but the ex-agents who frequented the place called it “Spook’s Bar and Grill.”

“We have heard nothing for hours, Father,” Yolanda was saying. “I am thinking perhaps it is the equipment.”

They left the restaurant by a secret door in the back and hurried behind the freshly painted building to a drab three-story structure of metal and wood next door. The low-tide smell of the harbor mixed iodine and seaweed with the inevitable smell of the death that high tide leaves behind. Sometimes, when the world was too much for him, Father Free slept in the office behind the bar where he could be lulled to sleep by the slap-slap of waves and the clink-clink of rigging against masts. Tonight, if he slept at all, would be such a night.

Yolanda pressed a key on her Sidekick, and a lock snicked open. Father Free pushed the door aside and Yolanda secured it after them.

“It’s not the equipment,” Father Free said. “El Oso has his own agenda. It was a mistake to trust him with an Agency mission.”

“You have never liked him, Father. His team is our best, and they were a half-kilometer from the target when we needed them. Could it be that even judgment such as yours can be colored?”

“Perhaps,” he admitted. “Even priests are human.”

He could not tell her how strongly he was reminded of this truth as he followed her lithe form up the stairs to the bar. Father Free was fifty years old, and he had never experienced sex with a woman. Or with a man, for that matter, but it was the occasional woman who had him burning under his collar in his youth. Now, when he thought of it at all, he studied the matter more out of a scientific curiosity than anything else. Never lack of opportunity; many women in his life had made that clear. But he had not fallen, would not fall, which made sex one less threat that he had to face in a dangerous country in a dangerous time. No drunken, machete-wielding boyfriends pounding his door at midnight—he heard enough confessions to know where to cut losses.

And the danger was real. President Garcia’s government was of the type that disapproved of the poor getting a hand up. Garcia and his kind were more inclined to step on their fingers. From the center of the city, near the U.S. Embassy, came the pop-pop-pop of small-arms fire to punctuate this point.

The darkened bar, too, smelled of bleach. He could make out the legs of chairs sticking up like dead animals atop the tables. He drew a cold, dark beer from the tap for each of them. They clinked their glasses and stood, looking into each other’s eyes, as they sipped off the top. Yolanda was one of the few women who would meet and hold a priest’s gaze. Women would flirt with a priest, tempt him out of his cassock more as a trophy than a man. Yolanda was not one of these.

“A good batch,” he remarked, savoring the astringent aftertaste of the cooperativa’s fine hops. “Perhaps we should attempt to improve the sacramental wine. Every priest in Central America would be profoundly grateful.”

Yolanda laughed.

“Father, you’re always thinking. You should have been in business.”

“I am in business,” he said. “My Father’s business. But I see no reason for the people to suffer while they prepare themselves for Glory.”

A pair of shadows moved behind the bar’s huge mirror, and a sudden shaft of light filled a rectangle of wall.

“There you are,” a woman’s voice said. “We were worried.”

“A busy time,” Father Free said with a sigh, and set down his glass. “Now, let’s have a look at that machine.”