10

Malvasio sat up and rolled the stiffness from his neck. Beside him, the girl fidgeted beneath the sheets and drew away, sensing he’d woken. An unconscious impulse, her withdrawal, and unearned since he’d never touched her, not that way. He had his standards, after all. Some of these kids showed up already boiling with disease.

Her name was Anabella. She looked about twelve, scrawny and dark with a broad face and a slubby little nose. She had long straight hair that he foresaw getting cut short, molded into the pin-curled helmet the trashier local streetwalkers were famous for.

She was a reward, a bone tossed to him by the judge and the colonel, and only a fool would deny them their displays of macho largesse. She’d arrived last week from Honduras, one of thirty or so orphans and street kids on the finca at the moment, most of them due to move on today. Many had arrived with first degree malnutrition, endemic in the region—they didn’t scream out at you with fly-coated eyes and bloated bellies like the haunting kids of Africa, they just withered away from diarrhea or slowly starved to death. Here on the finca, though, they’d been fed and treated for intestinal parasites to the point they were fit enough for work—proof, Malvasio supposed, that mercy took many forms.

Of the group, a precious few would get handed over to the nuns at a local orphanage, to see if they possessed a talent for obedient suffering indicative of a religious vocation. A few more, the most rugged and unappealing of the bunch, would get sent to the judge’s cane fields. Others, boys and girls alike, would get shipped to brothels in Acajutla or the capital, where they would have the only encounters they would ever know with the rich and powerful. The rest—and this, Malvasio guessed, would be Anabella’s fate—would get sent to Guatemala and then on to a ratty little suburb outside Mexico City. There, stashed in a guarded house run by mamacitas who would console them and beat them and tutor them in the tricks of survival, they would wait until the colonel’s contacts arrived, pimps from a family of pimps who would dress them up in skimpy, hookerish things, pink and black, then parade them one by one in front of a crowd of nameless men until it was time to walk back into the catacomb of filthy rooms, armed with a condom and two sheets of toilet paper, where behind a drawn sheet they’d launch their new lives—fifty pesos for straight sex, clothes left on; fifty more pesos, the skirt comes up; fifty more, the bra comes off; fifty more on top of that for a blow job, with twenty more shelled out for every exotic position requested. Soon enough a wholesaler would step forward and pay for their transport to the border, and once across they’d get handed over to men waiting in vans that would carry them to the major hubs—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta—or anywhere else they could pay off their passage. For the next few years, maybe longer, they’d be at the mercy of men with wants that would make those days in the Mexican catacomb feel like Christmas, until they ran away or were killed for trying or died from an overdose or disease, the few survivors managing to soldier on with a steely, blank-eyed numbness that would be, from that point on, a lifelong companion—especially for those who graduated to the status of mamacita themselves.

For the past week the girls had helped clean the judge’s hacienda, the boys joining the colonel’s squad of zacateros clearing brush. It might well prove the last honest work many of them would ever know, just as they would look back at the finca itself as a sort of paradise.

Malvasio got up and drew the curtains open for the sake of a little air. He felt desperate for the rains, mosquitoes be damned. When he turned back around he found the girl watching him, the sheet pulled up to her chin, eyes dull as shirt buttons. Knowing what she wanted, he went to the room’s one chair, dug inside his pant pocket, removed his cell phone, and tossed it onto the bed. It was one of five he owned, all bought from hustlers at the mercado central. The country was swimming with black-market cells and he made it a point never to use the same phone for longer than a week.

The girl gathered the thing up happily, instantly scrolling to the screen settings, holding the gizmo to her face like a tiny TV. Soon she’d be playing the various ringers over and over, fascinated by the dinky bing-bong melodies that, when loud enough, reminded Malvasio of Vegas slots. Bizet’s “Toreador Song” seemed to hold a particular fascination for her.

When Malvasio fled the States, the man he sought out for help, Ovidio Morales, was a lieutenant in the national anti-narcotics squad, famous for breaking up a Colombian smuggling ring (while secretly shielding the local military officers involved). A man who understood loyalty and gratitude and the subtler nuances of the law, Ovidio proved an exceptional guardian angel, introducing Malvasio to men who could help him.

In time, with proper precautions, Malvasio ventured back to the States, stealing across the border with a new name each time—Richard Ferry his most recent incarnation. Up north he picked up odd jobs from men who could pay to see their seamier wants realized: landlords who had a gang or squatter problem, businessmen being shaken down by a poor choice in out-of-town company, drug dealers with runaway wives or accountants. It had worked out well for almost a decade, the work increasingly remunerative and complex, but the last job had backfired: A whole neighborhood had burned to the ground and a federal informant was among the casualties—through no fault of mine, Malvasio thought. Regardless, his situation in El Salvador went to hell. The U.S. embassy cranked up the heat, deploying an FBI fugitive unit in-country, just as they had when Malvasio first arrived. Fortunately, they enjoyed no more success this time than the last, but Ovidio couldn’t risk protecting him anymore. And so Malvasio had to root around for another angel.

The man he found was Hector Torres, one of Ovidio’s introductions. He owned the restaurant in San Marcelino where Malvasio met with Jude, plus other nightclubs and restaurants both around the capital and out east, in San Miguel, even one in San Bartolo Oriente named El Arriero. Great conduits for laundering money, restaurants, which was how Torres had insinuated his way into the graces of the powerful.

His uncle, the original owner of El Arriero, had been kidnapped by the guerrillas early in the war and then shot dead during an escape attempt. The body got dumped off in the restaurant’s trash, at which point Hector stepped into his uncle’s shoes and let it be known he would get his revenge. Soon members of the White Warriors Union came to call, and money started flowing from a group of exiled oligarchs in Miami and Guatemala City. The money arrived as investment capital for his expanding business interests, except those interests weren’t expanding quite as much as the sums in question suggested. Instead he skimmed his take, then funneled the rest of the cash to the especiales from the National Guard or Treasury Police, who kidnapped suspected dissidents and handed them over to the Fuerza Aérea’s infamous A-II unit.

That was how Hector came to know the colonel—Colonel Narciso Vides, a former intelligence officer with A-II, linked to the “night free-fall training” that consisted of dumping live, bound guerrillas from C-47s over the Pacific Ocean. A-II also had a knack for executing common criminals just so the bodies could get pitched from helicopters over the FMLN stronghold at Guazapa volcano.

With the Peace Accords in 1992, the colonel quietly surrendered his commission. He already had his future charted, thanks to Judge Saturnino Regalado.

The colonel and judge had forged their bond during the war, when the colonel introduced the judge to an Argentine military advisor who had a plan concerning the ever-expanding number of insurgent orphans in the countryside. The Argentines were old hands at this, the colonel said, and in short order the children were being collected and shipped off to other countries throughout Latin America for work or adoption, depending on their age, skills, or beauty. The scheme was originally conceived as a way to demoralize the resistance, but soon a method became a métier, even after the Argentine advisor slithered back to Buenos Aires in the wake of the Falklands disaster. And there was never a lack of children. The poor bred like cattle, the colonel was known to say—in a country the size of Massachusetts with a population density equal to India’s, no problem loomed so large as the sexual liberality of the penniless. Who but themselves did they have to blame if their children became livestock, a point underscored by how freely some of them sold their kids outright—or, currying favor, handed them up for nothing—to the colonel’s touts traveling village to village.

The blanket amnesty provided as part of the Peace Accords shielded the judge and colonel from prosecution for crimes committed during the war, while simple corruption had protected them since. Civil suits filed in the States had begun to blink on their litigation radars, but locally the two men still had sheer political clout and family connections to carry the day. The judge in particular was untouchable, enjoying a social station having roots centuries deep in colonial patronage and the cafetero system, a generous donor to the church and its many orphanages. The man had powerful friends everywhere—one might as well try to indict God’s sidekick. And the colonel had his tanda, military academy classmates, watching his back, the ones still in uniform as well as those who’d already parlayed their war service into private sector profit. He also took considerable care to champion war veterans, to the point many ex-soldiers and their families saw him as a personal benefactor.

But the nexus of influence to which Malvasio was currently beholden remained incomplete without mention of Wenceslao Sola.

Sola, connected by marriage to one of the catorce familias, the infamous fourteen families, served as a secret patrón for several brothels about the country, which was how he went from being a mere member of the colonel’s and judge’s social circle—everyone of a certain station knew everyone else in El Salvador—to the role of partner in their operation. In time, with contacts made during his travels, Sola began not merely buying children for his bordellos but helping to move them north.

There were other aspects of Sola’s pedigree, though, that recommended him to the colonel and judge. He’d come of age during the last years of the war as a member of Los Patrióticos, a gang of ARENA-linked professionals who matriculated through the First Brigade’s civil defense training program. Los Patrióticos embraced the counterrevolutionary ethos with rabid gusto, forsaking firearms (military ammunition might be traced) and preferring instead strangulation, throat-slashing, and poisoning—but not before the captive had been tortured, disfigured, and, if a woman, repeatedly raped. The Grand Guignol sadism surprised some observers since, in the words of one atypically candid U.S. Department of Defense analyst, they were really nothing but “rich momma’s boys and potbellied patriots.”

This observation did not, of course, dissuade the U.S. Military Group from funding and training Los Patrióticos and others of their ilk. As one U.S. military commander on the ground confessed, “We’re already a little pregnant.”

After the war Sola did what everyone else in his circle did—milk his connections for plum business deals, aided by the privatization schemes of the American-sponsored neoliberal economic program, which basically handed back to the wealthy everything the Peace Accords had tried to redistribute. One such windfall was a seat on the board of Estrella in San Bartolo Oriente, which bought its sugar from cane fields owned by Judge Regalado, and which had Colonel Vides to vet its workforce for unionists and other subversivos.

In truth, the bottling plant’s recent expansion concealed a hidden purpose: It was step one in the company’s bid to move in as the regional water authority when the national water agency, ANDA, was privatized, something said to be in the works if ARENA could hold on to power in the upcoming election, a virtual lock given recent polls. And that scheme was green-lighted by the powers that be, both here and in Washington, as a way to pay back Estrella’s board and executive committee for their help in furthering “hemispheric security.” But then ODIC—the Overseas Development Insurance Corporation, an export credit agency based in Washington—butted in because an American conglomerate named Torkland Overby, tapped by the Estrella board to “invest,” agreed to do so but didn’t want to risk anything. Who could blame them? And even though the ODIC flacks were sympathetic—the bank was a way station for spooks, basically—their involvement triggered the bureaucracy and that meant scrutiny. So now you had pencil pushers kicking the tires and checking under the hood and sooner rather than later it dawned on somebody the thing was a loser. With the judge’s irrigated cane fields and his sugar processing plant upstream already draining away over a thousand gallons a minute, the bottling plant, drawing off hundreds more, was sucking the aquifer dry.

But that wasn’t the punch line. In the near term, the plant’s expansion was geared toward increasing its production of bottled water, which Estrella intended to sell to all the poor schmucks whose domestic wells dried up or turned brackish from mineral intrusion because of the aquifer depletion. And if that wasn’t cynical enough, they had a backup plan if the expansion proved unviable long-term: They’d close up shop, cadge another load of cash off whoever was willing, and build an even bigger plant in a better locale, claiming they wanted to conform to the new laws concerning wastewater treatment, which older plants like the one in place were allowed to ignore.

To their credit, the Torkland Overby wonks weren’t entirely gullible, but they didn’t want to sabotage the project either. In the long run, even if the old plant had to be shut down a few years out and this whole dog-and-pony show had to be repeated, Estrella was a major regional player with strong upside potential, and Torkland knew that. So what do they do? They hire a hydrologist to look into the matter, hoping to somehow confirm the aquifer drawdown is viable, or at least stumble onto some new, untapped groundwater sources in the area. But they don’t have the good sense to retain a guy they can buy off. Instead, they bring on board somebody with a spine connected to his brain and guess what? The whole thing’s about to go south, with upward of half a million dollars per director at stake, and you don’t do that to someone connected by marriage to one of the fourteen families, especially when he has pull with the likes of Judge Saturnino Regalado and Colonel Narciso Vides. The calls will start and sooner or later the phone on the desk of Hector Torres is going to ring, and he’ll turn to Malvasio and say, “This is why I pay you.”

The hydrologist’s name was Axel Odelberg—Jude’s principal, imagine that. The whole thing felt haunted when Malvasio learned that. He started second-guessing himself, wondering if finally he’d managed to dig the hole he couldn’t crawl out of. Then he shook off the hobgoblins and saw the possibilities. Take the initiative, he told himself, get in touch with Ray’s kid and see what there is to see.

As things turned out it was a case of like father like son: The kid was the stalwart type, a little inward, more a follower than a leader, and almost embarrassingly easy to play. The trick was getting him to move fast, and Jude had obliged on that front like the good soldier he’d no doubt been. There are just some people who bite at sincerity and never see the next thing coming. The wounded ones—tell them you’re sorry, sound like you mean it, then stand back and watch the miracles unfold.

The pictures had been a particularly inspired touch. Ovidio Morales certainly did exist, and thank his unlucky mother for that, but he bore no resemblance to the man in the photo Malvasio had shown Jude—that had been a deputy from the Cook County Sheriff’s Department named Ike Ramona. And Ovidio had no connections to anyone working on the Tecapa volcano coffee plantation. Malvasio had taken that snapshot while driving through the region and had no idea who the land belonged to. So if things went sideways down the line and Jude tried to implicate Ovidio, all he’d have is a story concocted by that insufferable, elusive degenerate Bill Malvasio, who had been a plague to poor Lieutenant Morales for years, concocting self-serving tales of collusion and secret support that the good lieutenant had repeatedly and credibly denied to every law enforcement agency who’d ever questioned him on the matter, including the FBI.

There was a sad twist to the business, though. Malvasio felt for Jude, always had. He’d been raised in a family of bats—fussy wretch of a mother; headstrong old man who turned out, in the end, to be weak; a four-eyed frizzy-haired egghead sister. Malvasio figured Jude had been through enough and didn’t want to see him disgraced. Or dead. And it was when he was racking his brain over that, trying to find a way out, that the thing had come together in his mind. Bring the Candyman down, let him be the final puzzle piece. It was beautiful, really, and almost felt like old times—in the good sense, not the gone-to-hell sense. And, for now, the powers-that-be still held out hope Mr. Odelberg might somehow prove a useful fool. As long as that held true—and as long as Malvasio kept thinking several moves ahead—everybody was safe.

A knock came from outside the two-room hut. Anabella folded up the cell phone, padded into the bathroom, and shut the door. Malvasio called out, “¡Momentito!” and slipped on pants.

Opening the door, he found a gaunt, unsmiling man in a sweat-stained uniform with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. His head was shaved clean and he wore aviator sunglasses, resembling a giant bug. Beyond him, an old school bus—the kind called a chicken bus here—waited in the vast shade of several sprawling mango trees. Children filed out from the other huts under the watchful eye of the colonel’s security squad.

Malvasio knocked on the bathroom door and told Anabella to come out. She opened up and stepped timidly into the main room, wearing the pale blue dress with the white collar and belt the judge’s house staff had given her. She looked like a maid, except for the bare feet. Malvasio nudged her into the doorway, not intending to be rough but wanting it over with.

The bald guard gripped her arm and Anabella turned back, eyes flashing. Malvasio could imagine what she’d been thinking—that he was her guarantee. That’s what Americans were for, it was how they ran the world—he’d taken her into his bed, hadn’t he? And even though he’d proved unwilling or incapable of performing, it hadn’t been her fault. But she caught on quick, none of that mattered. And it seemed to surprise her little.

Wordlessly, she shook off the guard’s hand and tromped barefoot beneath the gaze of the judge’s dragoons across the hard-packed dirt toward the shade of the mango trees. She glanced back just once with that same seething hatred in her eye, to let Malvasio know she thought he was pathetic. He couldn’t help but smile; her rage seemed almost romantic. And what was romance without betrayal?

He consoled himself with the knowledge he had no more choice in the matter than she did. Neither of them was free. And without freedom there’s no responsibility. Without responsibility, no guilt. He turned away and closed the door.

In the bathroom he threw water on his face and neck. He wanted some coffee but realized he didn’t have the girl to send up to the house to fetch it for him. She’d been around for a mere three days but as rapidly as that he’d grown dependent. It conjured thoughts of family, of all things, a notion he shrank from normally. Now it brought back all his heebie-jeebies about reconnecting with Ray’s son, Jude. I watched that kid grow up, he thought, believed in him more than his own old man. Now Ray was dead but his faithless blood lived on. Malvasio wondered at that, how even the dreariest nobody, knocking a woman up, can achieve the only immortality we know.

He returned to the door and opened it just as the chicken bus, in an oily plume of black exhaust, departed for the Pan-American Highway. The windows glared from the sun so he couldn’t see any faces, couldn’t tell if the girl was looking back with that same impressive loathing in her eyes.

He remembered hearing from one of his sources in Chicago that even Strock, despite his other failings, had a child now. A daughter. Figure that one out, Malvasio thought. The Candyman, who chased skirt the way dogs chase cars, has a little girl—meaning, he supposed, that karma has a sense of humor.

He closed the door and sat on the bed. On the sheet, his cell phone lay open where the girl had tossed it aside. He picked it up and permitted himself one last rendition of the “Toreador Song.”