The Laughing Falcon (14 page)

As the sun toiled ever lower to the horizon, the guerrillas began showing signs of anxiety, obviously behind schedule. Gordo was especially pooped, barely able to lift his feet. Buho was limping, his feet swollen. All of them were hungry. Maggie had taken only a few pieces of fruit at the aborted lunch.

But finally, where the river flattened over a bed of pebbles, they came to a sandbar. Coyote, with a groan of relief, pulled off his rubber boots and tied them to his pack. Maggie noticed footprints on the sandbar, the deeper hoof markings of horses, and the prints of other smaller animals. A path crossed the river here, she could see it winding into the forest from its banks. A campesino trail, Maggie surmised. There might be scattered farms nearby.

Halcón, scowling at Glo, issued an order. When Tayra attempted to gag her, Glo slapped her hands: “Don’t touch me, you whore.”

“Rich bitch,” Tayra said. Zorro roughly pinned Glo’s arms from behind, twisting her wrists, as Tayra tightened the bandanna over her mouth. Halcón spoke sharply to Zorro, who released his grip. Halcón then sent Maggie a penetrating look. “I am
tranquila,”
she softly said.

“Vámonos.”
Halcón again gave the lead to Coyote, who strode barefoot up the path to the right, but halted after a few minutes, stopping the column, sniffing the air. The scent came to Maggie, too, a stink that recalled to her the pens at the Klosky’s hog farm on the highway to Melfort. Coyote began talking rapidly; Maggie caught the word
“sainos.”

“Peccaries,” Buho translated. “He says they are coming to the river to drink. If there are many, they can be dangerous; they are like dogs in a pack.”

Maggie looked around for a tree to climb, but those nearest were armed with ferocious thorns. The odour was growing intense now, and she could hear a drumbeat of little marching feet, human-sounding grumblings, and an even more curious sound, like teeth chattering.

Coyote led a retreat to the river, and they waded about thirty metres upstream. The sun had set; in half an hour there would be absolute darkness. Now came the pigs, perhaps thirty in the herd, black and grey with white collars and bibs. They filed down to the river, complaining and chattering.

Maggie was more absorbed than frightened by the sight. The peccaries stank like rancid farts but did not seem threatening. Zorro muttered something, then cockily sloshed down the river, and before Halcón could check him he raised his pistol.
“Chuletas de cerdo,”
he said, and fired.

The shot rang like a thunderclap, one of the animals tottered onto its side, and the others bolted back up the path. Halcón directed a few menacing oaths at Zorro while fingering
the blade of his machete as if for sharpness. Maggie guessed the meaning of one slang word:
“huevos.”
Tayra joined in, too, with several sharp-tongued comments.

Coyote expertly gutted the dead peccary, but Zorro was made to sling the carcass on his back and endure Tayra’s continuing nagging as they made quickly for the path. Here it was darker, the twilight barely filtering through the thorn trees. Occasionally, Coyote used a flashlight as he led them another mile uphill, a ridge trail. Maggie could now make out the occasional clearing on either side, ragtag patches of corn or beans, a tumbledown shack or two.

There remained barely a crack of light in the sky, but Coyote seemed more confident, showing a familiarity with the trail. It was becoming apparent he had once inhabited this little part of the world. He may have had the kind of hardscrabble life that turns peons into revolutionaries.

An owl hooted. The path dipped to a tiny stream at which fireflies danced and bats darted. Beyond a cornfield glowed a light, a dwelling, clapboard siding and tin roof, a lamp or candle burning inside. From an open window came urgent human sounds, a man and woman making love: his ascending wail, an orgasmic yelp, then his partner softly teasing him. Buho, despite his limp, increased his pace, as if embarrassed at being in the vicinity of such intimate goings-on. Maggie was ruefully reminded of her quest, so harshly suspended, for the holy grail of love.

A few hundred metres away, from another hutch, came a woman’s voice, sweet and haunting, singing a lullaby. Maggie was entranced by the simple beauty of the song, by the perfectly pitched notes of her voice. She pictured a mother at the bedside of her children, beans simmering on the stove for a husband who has toiled all day in the fields.
No one knew Juanita Sanchez had a voice of molten silver. She remained all her life undiscovered, serenading the wilderness
.

Though weary, wet, and cold, Maggie was feeling less dispirited, more optimistic now that the initial, arduous stage
of this ordeal had to be nearing an end. One of these tiny farms must be Coyote’s; they could warm up by his fire, dry their boots and clothes.

The trail ended at an area where the forest had recently been burned. There had been an attempt to plant beans in the scorched earth, but the jungle was coming back. Maggie could make out the blackened remnants of a shack and wondered if the fire had raced out of control. Coyote paused to contemplate it, then led them down a foot-wide passage through the beans, over the brow of a rise to a gully where two small fires glowed: an encampment, tents sloppily strung up, forming a circle.

“Viva Benito Madrigal,”
Halcón called. The password was returned first by a male voice, then a woman’s. Maggie saw them now: each stirring a pot on a propane camping stove, now dropping their spoons and hurrying forward. Both were slight and youthfully attractive; neither could be twenty years old. On Halcón’s sharp command, they hurriedly pulled kerchiefs over their faces. Maggie looked quickly away, pretended she had not seen their faces.

As the other guerrillas embraced, Zorro laid down the pig carcass, talking spiritedly, the hunter returned — he had recovered from Halcón’s rebuke. While Coyote began butchering, Maggie and Glo were led to the faint warmth of the stoves, where Tayra took over stirring the rice and beans simmering in aluminum pots.

She extended a spoon to Glo, saying, “Make yourself useful, my lady.” Glo turned her back and made an angry muffled sound.

“I’ll help,” Maggie said, “but please let me take her gag off; she has to eat.”

Tayra looked at Halcón, who nodded. Maggie undid the knot behind Glo’s neck. Upon being unmuzzled, she mimicked, “ ‘I’ll help.’ Shit, Maggie, you are altogether too friendly with these creeps.”

Maggie said nothing. She had won their respect by volunteering to be a hostage; she was determined to keep it.

Zorro dumped some strips of pork into the rice pot. “You help cook,” he told Glo. “This is a
cooperativo
. Ev’ryboddy shares in work.”

She answered, “Take a flush, you lump of shit. Y’all aren’t fit to roll with a sow.”

“Gloria-May!” Maggie exclaimed. “You’re just making it worse for us. Use your head.” Then she took Buho by the wrist and led him to the haphazardly erected dome tents. The young guardians of this campsite had not grasped how to set them up; they had used tall sticks as centre posts. A tarpaulin had been rigged to shelter several backpacks and small burlap sacks of rice and beans.

Maggie knew her dome tents (“Hike over to Harvey’s Camp Capital: your store for the great outdoors”) and showed Buho the simple art of fitting the stays together. The tents, she noticed, bore labels of a wilderness trekking firm: Outward Bound. Similar insignias were on the sleeping bags inside them, so it appeared all this gear had been stolen.

While assembling the last tent, she stumbled and brought Buho down with her, their feet tangling. This prompted laughter from the others gathered around, but her tent-craft was appreciated; even the testy Zorro muttered a
“gracias.”

Halcón said nothing for a moment, studying her hard. Finally, he issued some brief instructions to Buho, who undid her leash. “You are to go about freely, señorita, until it is time to sleep,” Buho said, “but you must stay within the circle of tents.”

Maggie turned to Gloria-May with an expression of triumph, but received only a irritated look in return.

The young female guerrilla offered Glo and Maggie fresh clothes: ill-fitting but dry jungle fatigues. In the tent in which Maggie peeled off her wet outfit were a pair of sleeping bags and thin slabs of foam. Maggie would be sharing this tent with the girl: Quetzal, she was called, for the flamboyant bird. Glo
would stay tied to Tayra in another. The others would also be two to a tent, leaving one of the eight guerrillas outside as a night guard.

As they waited for the food to cook, Halcón called a meeting of, to use his term, the
“colectivo.”
The phrase was intended as a salve to the others, Maggie assumed: there were seven followers and one leader, at least in the absence of the revered Benito Madrigal. They listened solemnly to Halcón, nodded, too weary to demur.

Halcón then went off to listen to his radio, and Maggie joined Buho, who was tuning a small guitar. They would be staying here only the night, he said, no enthusiasm in his voice, his body bent with weariness. “Tomorrow we begin before dawn; we must travel far.” Maggie had suspected as much after counting the backpacks: one for each of the guerrillas and hostages. She had followed coverage of an abduction in Colombia of mining engineers: five months it lasted. An ordeal that long would see Maggie turn thirty, in April. She felt herself aging.

They lined up at the stoves to fill their tin plates, then gathered to eat in dry shelter under the tarp. Masks were removed, but Maggie could not see faces in the darkness. She picked the meat away, filled up on rice and beans, more ravenous than she could ever recall. After the camp stoves were extinguished, when figures showed as faint ghosts, the kidnappers, using flashlights, washed the dishes and assembled equipment to be stowed in the backpacks.

Wearily, she crawled into the tent with Quetzal and into the warmth of a light sleeping bag. From outside came the sad notes of Buho’s guitar, and it serenaded her to sleep.

S
lack Cardinal, already into his fourth beer of the morning, tuned in listlessly to the hubbub of complaint in Hector’s Bar, where the Quepos expats had gathered – a Christmas promotion, an
oferta
, Bavaria going for two hundred colones a bottle. The narrow dark space was loud with talk and filled with smoke and beer’s stale odours and the peculiar smells of Quepos itself, the sewers backing up in the heavy rains.

His compatriots were depressed entrepreneurs like himself, afraid to go back to their businesses, unwilling to face the truth that nothing was going to happen this tourist season. There was no point hanging around the shop waiting for customers, he’d go home, set flame to the fires of creation, a Homeric ode of tribulation and despair. He ordered another Bavaria, held it up to the light. No dead mice.

“Viva la libertad,”
someone said wearily.
“Viva Benito Madrigal.”

Benito Madrigal, for Christ’s sake. He was back on the front page, and Slack couldn’t understand why any serious revolutionary would prize him enough to engineer a hostage-taking. A failed politician of the lunatic fringe, he was now doing time in Pavas, in the mental hospital.

Don Benito had been a public servant, twenty years of rising through the Byzantine structures of government to
become deputy minister of public works. His decline and fall were as swift as his ascent had been slow. Several years ago, out of the blue, he quit his job, formed a political party, the People’s Popular Vanguard, and ran a hapless campaign for the presidency, garnering all of a hundred and twelve votes. He was a spirited orator, though, and reckless, accusing the minister of public works of taking bribes from a highway contractor. The minister was cleared and Madrigal was jailed for criminal slander, six months.

No one could understand how the poor schmuck got sucked into the maws of the justice system for accusing a cabinet minister of doing business in the traditional way, bribery was a cherished custom here. Civil rights groups spoke out. Committees formed. Madrigal did his time with constant loud complaint, and walked out of jail a hero.

He did not long remain one. Soon after his release, he strode into the Palacio de Justicia in San José with an AK-47 and single-handedly held five judges at gunpoint, a sleepless three-day standoff. Muddled with fatigue, he was jumped, his weapon wrestled from him. He went to La Reforma, sixteen years, ranting about lies and conspiracies. This all happened on a fifth of May, thus spawning Comando Cinco de Mayo.

Soon he became a victim of the nation’s short attention span, the media writing him off as a crackpot. He was transferred to the Hospital Nacional Psiquiatrico, delusional, people were plotting against him. He had Slack’s sympathy, he often felt the same way.

He wondered how the terrorism expert from South Dakota was processing this. Would the free world collapse, senator, if some delusional wanker got traded for your wife? Or would that be giving in to terrorism, thereby requiring an assessment of new warfare options?