6

Jude changed into his trunks and a T-shirt and buried Malvasio’s cash in his duffel. The money felt strange in his hands, like it had a life of its own, stories to tell—but whose money didn’t? He grabbed a towel and rushed out the door, thinking: All the more reason I do this thing, not someone else. I know the lay of the land, I can see these characters for who they are. More to the point, when the chore’s done, I can cut the cord and walk away. Watch me.

He headed down the dark, winding path of volcanic sand that led through a grove of broad-leafed almond trees to the water. As he came close to the beach, he picked out the voice—husky, womanly—struggling to be heard among several others amid the roar of the wind and surf.

Eileen.

He pulled up, thinking: Search up and down the whole Costa del Bálsamo, spend six days doing it—she turns up right here, under your nose.

As he broke into the clearing, his spirits dropped when he saw the crowd she was sitting with. He’d crossed paths with them before, a close-knit bunch, guests of an efemelenista professor with a vacation house here at El Dorado Mar. He hadn’t realized they were friends with Eileen, and wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that they were. Though there wasn’t blatant ill will on either side, they weren’t exactly Jude’s kind, or vice versa. Don’t read too much into things, he told himself. Wait and see.

They all sat gathered around a wood-plank table inside a thatched glorieta, the open hut lit by a single bare bulb. There was Waxman, an American reporter for a left-leaning Net zine, burly and freckled with thinning red hair. He was all right, Jude thought, but a little too earnest and wedded to the radical line. Beside him sat his photographer with the sneaky wit and sad eyes and impossible Italian name. He was an ex-con, the story went, a reformed pot smuggler, which made him the most interesting of the bunch for Jude’s money. On Waxman’s other side sat a young, slight Guatemalan woman named Aleris with waist-length hair and a badly scarred throat. According to the reporter, she’d been seventeen, trying to reach the States through Mexico, when the man she’d hired as a coyote raped and strangled her and left her for dead. Missionaries found her and nursed her back to health. She was connected now with the Stone Flower Association, an NGO doing outreach for prostitutes, and took every opportunity, whenever her path crossed Jude’s, to make it as obvious as possible that she had no use for him or the men he worked for.

There were two other men at the table Jude didn’t recognize. They were both shirtless and—this was the odd part—garishly tattooed. Mareros, he thought. Gang members. Somebody must have snuck them in. They’d never have made it past the gate otherwise.

Jude’s work obliged a working knowledge of the local crime world: at the top, a virtually untouchable Mafia of ex-military officers and other prominent men; at the bottom, Mara Salvatrucha and Mara Dieciocho, named after the marabunta, a voracious ant. The gangs had roots in Los Angeles but had spread as far as Houston, Chicago, D.C., and Boston, while continuing to expand down here as well, especially since the Peace Accords in 1992, when America began deporting its mareros back to El Salvador. Some of them had come to the States as infants with parents fleeing the civil war. They’d grown up on the streets. Many could barely speak Spanish. Convicted on drug charges mostly but everything else too—car theft, burglary, rape, murder—they got shipped here en masse aboard weekly chartered flights under armed guard, courtesy of the U.S. Marshals Service. Several thousand a year got repatriated, sent to a homeland they’d never called home, America’s latest export.

There were rumors that some of the Mafia syndicates were cherry-picking the maras for manpower, which, given the politics of the situation, meant that the command structure would remain intact while the foot soldiers filled the prisons. That’s what they got paid for, Jude supposed, oldest story in the world. Meanwhile, cliques had taken over parts of whole cities in and around the capital, then spread to the smaller towns, muscling for turf and running protection rackets against gas stations, bars, buses, hair salons, any business that generated cash.

By the late nineties the gang wars had escalated to where El Salvador had the highest murder rate in Latin America, higher even than Colombia or Haiti. The death squads stepped in then—La Sombra Negra, Grupo Extermino—until the government got sick of the bad press and launched its own, more official crackdown.

La Mano Dura they called it—“The Firm Hand” or “The Iron Fist,” depending on your slant. The police swept the streets and stopped buses, picking off any badass too dumb to hide his tattoos. You could get two to five years just for tagging, throwing up a placa, or being sleeved. And if they thought you were worth it, they’d stop you on your way from the prison on release, check for those telltale tattoos—or, if anybody in the car had them, pop you for criminal association—and throw you right back inside for another two-to-five.

The government knew the law was unconstitutional but it got renewed anyway as an emergency measure every three months. Human rights groups fought for its repeal. Some judges refused to enforce it, letting suspects go after just a few days in jail. But the sweeps kept coming. Some mareros, sick of the hassle, tried to leave the life and joined outreach groups for the purpose of proving to the authorities they’d left it all behind. Unless you had your tattoos removed, though—an expensive and sometimes fatal procedure: they used acid, white-hot machetes—the cops rounded you up regardless. Others headed north for their old home turf but if you got caught in the States things hardly got better; the Americans only had to prove you’d been deported before coming back and they could put you away for ten years. After which, they’d just ship you off all over again.

Thousands of mareros had fled the capital to hide in the smaller cities. Some had bagged up and headed off to Honduras or Guatemala or Nicaragua, picking up the gang life there. But others had drawn the line and decided to stand where they were, live proud, die young. Jude wondered which category could claim the two sitting there with Eileen.

Sensing it would be unwise to just barge in, he dipped back into the shadows, skirted the palms and almond trees rimming the beach, and headed toward the Comedor Erika, a surf shack serving food and drink on the beach till ten. He counted heads in the glorieta, then ordered another round for the crowd, thinking it might help with introductions. With an extra tip, he got Erika’s ten-year-old daughter to help him carry the drinks through the trees.

The voices in the glorieta continued to swell. An argument—the two mareros were going at it. Jude gestured for the girl to wait a moment while he listened.

“We’re trying hard as you, help vatos bang out. But now, boom, Uncle Sam says we’re a terrorist organization. It’s insane. Like we’re fucking al Qaeda. Nobody can send us money from the States no more—so what can we do, who can we help?”

“I’ll tell you the word on the street—guys in your group still ball on the side. It’s all a scam.”

“That’s a goddamn lie.”

“You got to change your life, chero. Your heart. Without Christ? No way.”

Their English seemed largely free of accent, unless you considered the lilting cadences of East L.A. an accent. Jude strained for a better look. One of them, the one talking conversion, seemed almost normal in appearance: clean-shaven, barbered hair, glasses. Take away the garish inkwork sleeving up each arm and darkening his hairless chest and back, he could have passed for a software rep. The other had mournful eyes, an extravagantly sculpted goatee, slickedback hair, and even wilder tats.

“Don’t preach to me about Jesus,” the slick one said. “Talk about scam.”

“No, you listen.” The devout one leaned in. “I was in the hole three months. Why? Some cat talking head in the metal shop came at me with a hammer. I messed him up, took his hammer and made him eat it, okay? So don’t try to out-tough me, chero. But after, my whole face puffed up, I had infection everywhere. Cut on my head started leaking pus, feet turned moldy, skin started peeling off my legs. I was hideous, man. I smelled like death. Only thing they’d let me have was a Bible. Read it cover to cover three times. I turned to God and said, ‘I give up. Help me.’ It changed my life.”

No one else spoke, the whole table enthralled or too polite to contradict him. Regardless, Jude relaxed. The mareros had handed up the flag from the sound of things, left the life, even joined groups to help the like-minded. It put the get-together in a different light. He leaned down, told Erika’s daughter, “Venga conmigo”—Come with me—and led her out from beneath the trees.

Eileen spotted him first. She broke into a lovely smile that turned uneasy almost instantly and Jude’s heart sank in a sadly familiar way. Coming up to the table, he said, “Thought everybody might need another,” then started passing out drinks. Aleris, the Guatemalan woman, gestured to the two mareros to be still, then flashed Jude a vaguely hostile smile. The two mareros shrugged at each other across the table, aware something was up but otherwise lost, and Waxman and his photographer seemed confused too. Meanwhile, Eileen still looked torn.

Jude saw no point pushing it. “Go on back to what you were doing. I’m heading off for a swim.”

“Don’t forget this.” It was Aleris, handing back the beer he’d just given her.

On the dark beach Jude stripped off his T-shirt and, a beer in each fist, headed for the water, dodging the smooth black rocks, feet sinking into the muckish sand as he splashed through the surf. He walked out maybe twenty yards, then just plopped down, facing shore. The water, at low tide, reached his shoulders—still warm from the day’s sun—the waves gently nudging his neck, the back of his head.

He belted back half his beer in one go. It took away a little of the sting, being insulted like that, in front of everybody. Lifting his head, he took in the cloudless night, the spray of stars, a mist of tiny pinpoints of light smeared across the darkness. It made him feel lonely but not in a bad way. And that, he supposed, was as good as it was going to get.

He downed the last of the beer and tossed the empty toward the beach, then started in on Aleris’s.

“Jude?”

The voice sent a shiver through him. He liked it so much, the gravelly lowness of it, like everything she said was a secret. Turning toward the sound, he spotted her silhouette against the darkness, mincing along the smooth rocks, arms extended for balance.

“Out here!”

He stood up and started back in. They met on the wet sand, just beyond the reach of the surf. The wind blew her hair across her face, the strands clinging to her throat or catching in the corner of her mouth.

“I came to apologize. What happened back there …” She looked off, unable to wrap it up.

“It’s okay. Really.”

“No. It was unnecessary.”

Reaching down for his towel to dry himself off, he wondered what the others had thought when she’d excused herself, followed him out here. It took nerve on her part and he was grateful for the kindness. Then, fleetingly, he pictured the two of them entwined on the sand, all From Here to Eternity.

She said, “I don’t know how much you caught of what they were saying. Jaime and Truco. They were both in Mara Salvatrucha. Now they run foundations here to help guys leave the life. Jaime’s very Christian but Truco’s got no use for any of that and they just lock horns whenever they’re together. Meanwhile the anti-terrorist laws in the U.S. make it impossible for families to send money here to help guys turn themselves around. It’s crazy, it’s cynical—”

“I get all that,” Jude said, not meaning to sound rude. “But I’m not sure what it has to do with me.”

She looked away and, peeling a strand of hair off her face, said, “Look, I need a ride back to where I’m staying. Near La Perla. Give me a lift, we can talk.”