Night of the Jaguar Read Online Free Page B

He’d moved back two years ago after the divorce. Horacio, his old mentor and only regular visitor, liked to tell him he lived in a cave, like a bear with furniture. But at least he had furniture. The only major changes to the small house were the wrought-iron bars he’d installed over the windows, and the jagged glass cemented on top of the wall that surrounded his little garden. He’d mixed the cement himself and smashed more bottles than he’d needed. (That they’d been empties from his wedding party had had nothing to do with it. He’d just gotten into a rhythm.)
    There was no need of light. Garden to sala to kitchen to bedroom to office, all paths were well worn. He was like a monk in his monastery. Or a prisoner. But a monk was not a prisoner, he reasoned. If you willingly went into the monastery you were not a prisoner. Wrongdoers got life sentences. Monks were devoted to a cause. The Knights Templar were monks and warriors and you wouldn’t call them dickless, not to their faces anyway, even if they were celibate.
    Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme just the one.
    Ajax turned left and went into his office. It was really a second bedroom—might have been a child’s bedroom. He sat in the comfortable leather chair she had given him back when she was mostly a pretty face but he was the great man. He opened a big desk drawer and stared through the darkness into it. He thought of it as the Dead Drawer. There were only four objects in it, like relics that, if laid out just the right way, offered clues to the loss of some bygone tribe. He removed The Needle, wrapped in oil skin to protect the blade, and set it aside with no more thought than you would give an old shoe. Then his fingers touched the finely framed photo she’d given him. A picture of the one perfect moment in his life—the afternoon of July 20, 1979. The day that divided his life into the Before of “All was possible” and the After of “Life is a double-dealing bitch.”
    He ran his fingers over the glass, closed his eyes. The image showed Ajax before a wildly cheering throng of people in what was now the Plaza de la Revolución, but was then still the Ogre’s Plaza de la Republica. Ajax stood on a platform, front and center, held an American sniper rifle over his head, the ivory handle of the Python visible on his hip. He was surrounded by his smiling compañeros. The look on his face was not one of triumph, but of joy. There was a watch on his wrist. Through a magnifying glass he had once tried to check the exact time. But it was obscured. She who had given him the watch stood at the back of the platform, her face just barely visible through the crowd of scruffy, fatigue-clad men and women. She was the only one not in fatigues. She stared at the Ajax the crowd adored. On her face was a look of hunger, but also of admiration. A look frozen for all time as incontrovertible proof that she had once adored him. No matter what bullshit evidence would later be introduced that he was cold, distant, and unable to live in the present.
    Ajax dropped the photo carelessly onto the desk and fumbled for the third object, a small makeup case. Through the plastic he could feel the tube of dark red lipstick. The brush still woven with strands of her chestnut hair. The nail file, long like her fingers. And, most precious, the small bottle of perfume. She’d worn the perfume the night of the photograph. His head had swum with the fragrance as she had torn at his clothes. He’d just been able to drag her into the back of a truck before she took him like some ravenous marauder, took him with such intensity, such unhinged abandon that it had been as if the people’s delirium at the Ogre’s overthrow had been channeled into her, the suffering and sacrifice of the guerrilleros channeled into him, so that when he’d entered her their bodies had become something new, some Adam and Eve, and the long stream of