The Laughing Falcon (7 page)

He ducked a crashing wave and plunged into the water.

Three hours later, leading a herd of Philadelphia kayakers around the gentle rolling waters surrounding Punta Quepos, Slack was still pondering why he had not been arrested or had his face kicked in last night. Colonel Walker had commanded his troops: “Don’t touch that soldier.” Why?

It was hard work remembering, especially since his partner in the inflatable K–2 kept interrupting with the dozen questions most commonly asked. Where you from, anyway? How did you end up here? What’s it cost to buy a chunk of this neck of the woods?

The talkative red-faced stout preferred to piddle with his paddle while Slack did all the work. Harry Wilder, that’s his handle, pet food sales is his game, specializes in a line called Bow Wow Chow. Harry likes it down here. The girls are cheap, it beats Philadelphia.

“I wouldn’t advise buying around here, it’s going downhill. Full of thieves and squatters.”

It was a dilemma. Do you try to earn enough
plata
to pay your bar bill, or save some wilderness by turning off the tourists? Costa Rica – everyone wants a piece.

“Now, out there by the park entrance, that’s where you don’t want to swim, it’s an outlet, some of the hotels open their septic tanks in rainy season.”

“They said it was safe to swim.”

“What do you expect them to say?”

That shut Harry Wilder up.

Maybe he’d been saved from injury and arrest last night because the senator hadn’t wanted to cause an even bigger scene. No. Now he remembered.

“I’ll tell you about fucking terrorists,” he’d said. He had taken off his shirt, showed them the scars.

Dear Rocky,

    How’s that for an opening grabber? It’s on its way, sucked bleeding from my soul, a shocker starring a neurotic beach bum and unsung poet. But the author’s identity must be masked from Dr. Zork if he is to foil his evil plan to conquer the world – the nom de plume should be simple, jaunty, but hinting at a life lived dangerously. Harry … everyone loves a Harry. Harry Wilder, how about that? Zap, there he is, crawling from the pages with his bloodshot eyes and foul breath and twisted back.

I can hardly believe I have been so cheaply bought, selling out my art, pulping some fiction for your mingy two-K advance. I ask but one extra emolument: find me a goddamn publisher for
Hymns to a Dying Planet – I
don’t care if it’s a back-alley office – and get those poems into print before they rot of the sweat and tears that stain them.

Most of the ingredients for a convoluted page-turner are available locally, but your recipe also calls for blood, and I’m not sure if I can kill any more, Rock; I can’t even step on a blade of grass without feeling guilt. If not blood, there’s enough shit going on around here to feed the pigs of inspiration: clandestine airfields, roving bands of former Contras, Sicilian capos seeking to expand their empire, cops running the coke pipeline north. Throw in a few coral snakes, poisonous frogs, and rampaging peccaries, shake, stir, bake, and (if personal experience holds) the good guy gets to eat it in the end.

Or does he die at the beginning, crushed by an enormous writer’s block? I finally figured out why I’m a slow starter, Rocky. I suffer the poet’s curse, the obsessive need for the perfect phrase, flawless, pure, and I get stuck on the opening line. It doesn’t sound right. “Recumbent on the floor, staring at a spinning ceiling fan, Harry Wilder tried to figure out when he’d first become an alcoholic.” Recumbent, as a word, does not sing.

Other reasons for this long delay in faxing you: my back is killing me, I’m still recovering from a bruised heart, and I’m
becoming a raving maniac. But I finally managed to haul out my old Underwood. Despair inspires.

As you read through my rough initial pages you will observe there has been some early action drawn from a blurred eyewitness account. (The last man standing was not our hero, who, lacking his usual grace, slipped from a stool and banged his head against the bar en route to neutralizing the enemy with new warfare options.)

But do we not have possibilities? A high-ranking politician, his sultry wife, the brooding Harry Wilder. A hero for the ages! Enough angst to fill a septic tank. The final essential ingredient, the ravishing heroine, is more troublesome. What are we looking for here? – a shy hidden flower plucked from danger and pressed to brave Harry’s lips? Or should she be a bold, hot copy of Gloria-May Walker? Frankly, what Harry needs is good old home cooking – give him someone who can make cabbage rolls, give him someone to love, unadorned, unaffected.

Look over this initial offering, fax me at the post office, Apartado 92, and tell me if it can suck enough air to stay afloat.

Happy Hanukkah,

Jacques.

It was four-thirty when Slack rose from his siesta, awakened by the
precaria
dogs, a bitch in heat, a posse of suitors in braying pursuit. He groaned, stretched, looked out at the neighbouring slum. A television set was on full volume over there, booming out an afternoon soap. Mayor Camacho had bribed installers from ICE, the power company, to bring electricity to his subdivision. Though Slack ran his kitchen on propane, the rest of the house was solar, he’d be damned if he’d hook up to the line, hydro power spews tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

He wanted to eat out, but he was broke again. A month ago he’d had two grand sitting in his account, but he’d drained it today, dropped off a cheque to Billy Balboa, a gesture of penance for last night. He couldn’t even afford a helper’s wages, he had no one to haul his boats. Then he remembered the two hundred dollars that had mysteriously appeared in his pocket … Where had it come from?

He made ready to go out, paused, thought of celebrating his good fortune with a small tot, but then remembered his resolution. He was not going to become one of those
norteamericanos
who come down here and rot from the inside out. Jungle fever, they call it. Not for Slack Cardinal.

As he was about to lock up, his cell phone rang.

“You standing me up, honey?”

Gloria-May Walker. The shock he felt was like touching a hot wire.

“What happened to our sunset cruise?”

Two hundred dollars — she’d paid triple, and in advance. “Where are you?”

“All by my lonely old lonesome outside your empty office.”

Slack had told her to meet him at the park end of the beach, and he raced there, his inflatable roped to the top of his Land Rover. He had no memory of it, but he must have given her his card.

He parked behind a Mitsubishi four-wheel rental, her car, he guessed. No official vehicles around. Had she slipped the watchers? It’s the cocktail hour, the senator would be wondering why she wasn’t beside him with her gin fizz.

There she was on the wet sand, barefoot, a bikini under something gauzy that fluttered in the wind, showing off her Vegas legs. She turned to watch him as he dragged the kayak down to the sand, her hands on her hips, a kind of sexy smirk. This was the kind of woman he feared, aggressive, high expectations.

“So what do I get for my dough?”

“A two-hundred-dollar sunset and an hour and a half of hard paddling.”

“And you guarantee the sunset?”

“Yeah. But it goes down fast here.”

“And then what? Comes up just as quick in the morning?”

Innuendo was flying thick and heavy, she’d somehow decided he was for sale, a gigolo, a whore.

She removed her wrap, tucked it in the kayak’s sealed hatch. She looked good in just two bits of cloth. He strapped on her life jacket, his hand recoiling when it brushed one of her breasts. He helped her into the front seat and shoved off, the K-2 rising on a swell as he clambered in behind her.

“I’ve only got time for a fast sunset, anyway, sweetie. Dinner at seven.” The Walkers were at the Si Como No, southern California elegant.

Gloria-May seemed fit, she wielded a mean paddle, he assumed she did aerobics, something like that. He would take her around Punta Catedral, maybe dip between the islets. He wanted to ask if Senator Walker knew that she had contracted him for this sporting event.

The sun began to send shafts of colour far across to the high cirrus in the east, the puffballs above the horizon pinking around the edges. The grumble of the surf grew dimmer, and the sounds now were just the splosh of the paddles and Gloria-May humming old show tunes. A line of pelicans wove above the swells, one dive-bombed into the water, rose again, thrashing from the sea, water pouring from its beak, a fish tail waggling.

They stopped to watch, then Glo turned to him, a large, full-lipped smile. “You’re hiding out here, aren’t you?”

Slack felt a twinge in his back as he resumed paddling. “Without apparent success.” Where had she heard this?

“What’s your real name?”

“Harry Wilder.”

“I surely don’t think so. Chester had his security geek look you up on the computer. Leftist shit-disturbing poet, busted for sedition or some damn thing, went underground, settled in Cuba, and got yourself kicked out of there because you wouldn’t toe the party line.”

She had the whole book, Slack was shocked. Chester must have friends high in the CIA, getting his information that fast. Then in the course of pillow talk he pours it all out to his indiscreet wife.

“You did a political turnaround, or at least that’s what the CIA thought when they recruited you.”

Blackmailed into the job, press-ganged, threatened with twenty years in the brig on that false sedition rap. Walker’s geek obviously had top-level clearance, he’d been allowed into the secure files, searched the alias.
Cardinal, see Sawchuk. Warning, restricted access
.

“Infiltrated terrorist squads in Paris and the Middle East, I hear tell. Chester says after a dozen years you got so confused you couldn’t figure out which side you were on.” She laughed. The woman was full-throttle blunt, telling tales from the bedroom, critiquing his sterling record of service.

“Yeah, I couldn’t find my way in from the cold. This is just a kayak tour, it doesn’t come complete with the story of my life.”

She was paddling again, silent for a moment as she gazed at the sky dancing with the blushing hues of sunset.

“Who are you hiding from?”

“The Saudis, Iraqis, the Red Brigades, the CIA, and Harry Wilder.” They’d given him new ID, five hundred Ben Franklins, and a one-way ticket to Costa Rica.

“Who’s Harry Wilder?”

“You mean he’s not on the computer, too? His cover is pet food sales, he specializes in Bow Wow Chow.”

“Well, aren’t you just so full of bullshit.”

She went silent momentarily, picked up her stroke as the sun flattened blimp-like beyond the ends of the earth. A green spark as it sank.

“The green flash,” she said. “Heard somewhere only lovers see it.”

Slack said nothing.

She was relentless: “Chester says y’all got into some kind of screw-up with the French government, that’s why you got pensioned off.”

“Let me ask you something. Does Chester talk in his sleep, or does he just have a loose tongue?”

“He doesn’t think it’s a big deal. It’s history, honey, the cold war’s over.” Again she turned, a big smile. “Anyway, my lips are sealed.” But they were slightly parted, plump, inviting. “I’ll keep your secret, you keep mine.”

“Which is?”

“I’m not here. They’re in a meeting. They haven’t missed me, so don’t worry.”

“Do I look like I’m worrying?”

“All the time.”

“It’s getting dark, I think we should head back.” He swung the kayak around. She didn’t argue, and they headed toward shore.

As they neared the breakers, she said, “Well, now, I surely did enjoy this kayaking experience, so how about the river next time? Or that lagoon thing y’all advertise. Can we do that when I get back from the Eco-Rico Lodge? Think you can pencil me in, secret agent?”

Slack began to wonder if she was just teasing him, enjoying his discomfort. He had to admit she was entertaining, quick on the uptake.

When they slowed to surf the first breaker, she dove into the water and began swimming to the beach. He tried to follow her in the boat, but she grabbed his arm, spilling him.
Kayak, Slack, and Senator Chuck Walker’s wife were swept onto the foaming beach, and when the waters ebbed he found her sprawled on top of him. She was laughing, tugging at her wayward bikini top.

As Slack helped her up, he spotted, on the road, one of the Land Cruisers the Americans were using, a black guy leaning against it, glaring at him, one of the steely-eyed watchers from the bar. Slack escorted Gloria-May to the road, where she blew him an imprudent kiss and got into her Mitsubishi.

Slack wondered if the Secret Service also kept secrets. Probably not from Senator Walker. Maybe he should close up shop for a week, hide out in San José until she winged her way home. He could still smell her scent, her salty sweaty skin.

On his way home he bought a fifth of Ron Rico, something for his pain. Tomorrow, he promised, tomorrow he would quit this nasty habit.