Jungle of Glass Read online

  He smiled. It was a smile that took some effort. He went back behind his desk and dropped into his chair. "Have a seat," he said. "Would you care for a smoke?" His accent was thick, but it had hints of Spanish around the edges.

  I waved him off.

  He leaned back and lit up a Viceroy, then tossed the pack on the desk. It wasn't much of a desk, just some planks supported by a couple of sawhorses. "You said on the telephone you had something to ask me?"

  "Yeah, it's about Roderick."

  Strassberg leaned forward and put his elbows on the planks. "It is really a pity. We were good friends. Everyone in our community is angry about it. Any one of us could be kidnapped. It could happen to me." His eyes became beady behind his large glasses. "Those bastards."

  "Looks like your army here could hold off Attila the Hun."

  He snorted. "These boys go to the highest bidder. I do not fool myself. Somebody offers them more money, they are gone." He spread his hands. "What can one do?"

  "Pay more than anyone else."

  He let out a loud guffaw. "You are correct. Plus acquire all the latest electronics and weaponry. This place is more secure than a military base. And my house is just as secure. The weak link is when one is in transit. Then you are exposed, even if you travel in caravan. Just like Don Jaime. He was careful as one could be, but that did not help him."

  I looked at him. He seemed straightforward enough. "Who do you think took him?" I asked.

  "The sonofabitch Reds, of course."

  "I read in The New York Times that the war was over. The Times never lies."

  He gave me a grim smile. "Shit. The war will not be over until the last communist is dead. It is like an anthill. You kill some, but there are always some more underground. I would personally like to stomp them all into the ground if I could."

  This guy was more rabid than Jesse Helms, but not half as charming.

  "What about the story that your family was feuding with Roderick and that you swore an oath on your brother's deathbed to harm Roderick and his family?"

  Strassberg stood up and wagged his index finger at me. "That is bullshit. Any person who told you that is full of bullshit. That rumor has been around this country for a long time and it is a false and malicious rumor. There is no truth to this."

  "Then how did that rumor get started?"

  "Malicious people talking bullshit," Strassberg said. His gray pallor took on a reddish hue.

  "Where there's a corpse, there's a stink," I said. "There must have been some reason for a story like this to get started. Some basis in fact. A story like this doesn’t just get made up out of thin air.”

  He walked around from behind the desk and pointed at the door. "Be so kind as to leave my factory." He had trouble keeping his hand steady.

  I got up and stood in front of him. "Sure. Just as soon as you fill in some of the blanks."

  He stared at me. His eyes were very small. "Mister, I am finished with you. Get out of my factory." He reached behind his desk and pressed a buzzer on the wall.

  It wasn't long before the riot troops showed up. Seven of them in their boy scout uniforms. He pointed at me. "Take this son of a whore out of my sight."

  They had M203's and I had a couple of empty fists. Uneven odds, wouldn't you say?

  They grabbed me and started shoving me toward the door. I turned around and said to Strassberg, "This isn't the end."

  "It is for you," he replied.

  CHAPTER XVII

  The guards let go of me outside the front gate.

  "My gun," I said.

  They nodded and laughed through gold teeth at each other, like I'd said something really funny. It looked like a jeweler's convention with all that gold on display.

  "Imagine this, senor," a guy with sergeant chevrons said to me. "Unfortunately the man who has your gun has already gone home for the day. Come back tomorrow. He should be here at that time."

  There was no use arguing with these turkeys. I cursed them with expletives they would’ve had a hard time understanding and thought about the six hundred bucks I'd have to charge Mrs. Roderick under the sub-category of miscellaneous expenses and confiscated weapons. I turned and walked to where I'd left Luis.

  He wasn't there.

  I looked back at the guards. They were still watching me with self-satisfied smirks. Just waiting for me to say something.

  "Where is my driver?"

  They broke up and started laughing and guffawing and snickering. Then they pointed somewhere in the distance.

  "Look, senor. He has already gone. He left sometime ago."

  I walked back to where they were standing. "Do not tell me lies. My driver would not leave without me. Where did you take him?"

  "Honest, Senor," the sergeant said. "We do not know where he is. He left sometime ago without saying anything. You can look for him. He went in that direction."

  He tried to stifle a laugh as he pointed down the single lane dirt road we had come on. The road was clear as far as you could see, which wasn't far. It went for maybe a quarter mile and then twisted into a clump of straggly trees. Even from where we stood, the racket from the factory drowned out any sounds of the countryside.

  I started back into the factory. The three men blocked my path. "I want to talk to Strassberg," I said.

  They looked at each other and then back at me. The sergeant shook his head. "Senor Strassberg does not want to talk to you. He said to remove you from the factory because he does not want to see your face."

  I tried to bull my way past the men but they formed a scrimmage line and wouldn't let me through. "My face is not so bad," I told them. "It is better than most."

  Three more guards joined our little discussion group. One of the new guys flicked the safety on his M203 and fired a burst into the air as he approached.

  That caught everybody's attention. We all stood where we were, looking stupid. I started into the factory again and this time they formed a circle around me.

  "OK," I said. "I just want to urinate."

  They didn't buy that either. The sergeant shook his head. "It is not permitted. You cannot go into the factory."

  "Then where can I urinate?"

  "You can urinate in the woods or in your pants."

  "OK, then I want to use the telephone."

  The sergeant shook his head again, more vigorously this time. "You cannot use the telephone. You must go now." He pointed vaguely somewhere in the distance. "There is a telephone three kilometers down the road in that direction."

  "Thanks a lot, fuckface," I muttered in English. It looked like I was confronted with what is called an impasse.

  I started down that long, lonely road, wishing I had a cellphone.

  I walked for the better part of an hour without seeing anyone. There was a lot of time to think.

  The goddam case didn't make any sense. All the ends were loose. There was no indication as to who had kidnapped Roderick, although I was leaning to the Left. From what I'd seen and heard, that looked like the odds-on possibility. Maybe it was the guerilla leader, El Ciego, that Mayorga had given me.

  But it didn't look like too many people wanted Roderick back, from the affectionate words they had to say about him. I believed Mrs. Roderick and I believed Caridad, his mistress, but it was kind of hard to trust anyone else down here. Lacayo, the leftist professor, was as slimy as academics come and Mayorga was a posturing braggart of a military man.

  I didn't like Hoag, but he'd given me a good opening to Strassberg, so now I'd have to deliver his token of love to his girlfriend. Lightener appeared to be a straight arrow, but those Agency types were always tough to figure out.

  Strassberg was the one to keep an eye on. He was the first candidate I'd had the pleasure of speaking to who had a good enough reason to kidnap Roderick.

  And all these damn people disappearing. In the States, people just didn't keep on vanishing with clockwork regularity the way they did here.

  And what about McInerny? Was he a Jud
as goat or a schemer who got blown away by mistake? Was he supposed to be killed or was it me? Or neither of us? Were we two guys who walked into a set-up or were we supposed to walk into it?

  Nothing was getting me any closer to Roderick and the little time left was running by real fast. The hard fact of life was that I had no idea what to do next.

  And where the hell was Luis?

  I kept on walking until I came to a hamlet set back thirty or forty meters from the dusty road. It wasn't much of a hamlet. There were only six shacks, more or less in a semicircle around a small clearing. You could see there was no electricity in the village.

  The flashback hit me then and it almost stopped me in my tracks. All those decades back in time in less than a second. I was a boy when I walked into a village just like this one, wearing torn combat fatigues, badly wounded and dragging a gimpy leg. Exhausted, scared and in pain. A boy who didn't know jackshit. Only that he knew he had to do what was right.

  There were three men in the clearing. Farmers, by the look of them. They wore straw cowboy hats and ragged work clothes. Each one had a machete. I walked up to them. They didn't seem surprised to see me. I would've been surprised to see me, a gringo wearing a navy blue Brooks Brothers suit, a white button-down shirt with no tie, an empty shoulder holster and black wing-tip shoes in the middle of this jungle.

  I smiled at them. "Good morning," I said, only by now it was afternoon.

  "Good morning," they responded in unison in a soft voice. They looked down at the ground. Nobody looked at me.

  "Nice day," I said. I didn't want to frighten them by being too abrupt.

  They nodded. "Yes, senor. It is a nice day."

  "Is there a telephone in the village?"

  They looked at each other. One man shook his head.

  "No, senor. There is no telephone here." He seemed apologetic.

  "How do you call someone on the telephone?" I asked him.

  "We walk to the next village, senor."

  "How far is the next village?"

  "It is about eight kilometers, senor."

  I nodded. "I understand."

  I looked down and inspected the ground, just like them. It would've been hard to grow anything here. The ground was creased with deep dry cracks. There were a few blades of brown grass and a lot of rocks.

  One of the men moved a pebble with the toe of his shoe.

  "Is there a car or a truck around here?" As if it would have been too much to hope for some form of internal combustion transportation.

  "No, senor," the same man said.

  "How do you get your supplies and food?"

  "The truck will come tomorrow."

  "I understand," I said. I didn't say anything for a couple of minutes. They didn't say anything either. Nobody moved. We looked like some sort of tableau, a waxworks exhibit.

  Finally, I said, "Do you have any ideas?"

  "Concerning what?" the man asked.

  I wanted to say, "About how to get back to the twentieth century." Instead I said, "About how to get back to San Salvador."

  They shrugged, this time not in unison. The man said, "If you like, you can spend the night in my house. Then, tomorrow, when the truck arrives, you can go on the truck most of the way to San Salvador."

  "That is very kind of you," I said. "Very generous. But I think I will start on the road today and hope for a ride."

  The man nodded. "As you wish, senor."

  I was going to ask for a drink of water, but then thought better of it. I knew what the water would be like. Brackish and lukewarm. It wouldn't be ice-cold kumquat-flavored Clearly Canadian with a twist. "Do you have a beer?" I asked.

  One of the other men nodded. "One moment, senor," he said. He went into one of the huts and came back with a bottle of Pilsener.

  "Many thanks," I said. I reached in my pocket and handed him a twenty colon note.

  He shook his head. "No, senor. You are our guest."

  I nodded. I understood their pride. Dirt poor, but with a code that went back centuries. "Thank you very much for your hospitality."

  "It is nothing, senor."

  I shook hands with all of them by way of farewell.

  "Many thanks," I said. "Until we meet again."

  "May you travel well," they said softly in unison.

  I started down the road again. The beer was warmer than room temperature. But it was beer.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  I walked for another half hour without seeing a car or even a person. It was getting very hot. The sweat was pouring off me like a waterfall. The days when I was an eighteen year old shavetail were long gone. My feet hurt and my back hurt.

  The road kept on narrowing. It was more rutted and more dusty the further I went. I was beginning to doubt that it headed anywhere. From time to time, you could hear a bird sing or some kind of animal move in the undergrowth. The vegetation was thick on both sides of the road. It was tough to see more than ten meters in either direction.

  Then it became very quiet.

  I smelled it before I heard it. It stunk to high heaven.

  A truck came around a bend in the road behind me. It was an old wreck of a vehicle without a bumper or a grill.

  The windshield was so dirty I couldn't see who was driving. It wasn't going that fast.

  I turned around and stood in the middle of the road. I could have stuck out my thumb, but this was a less tentative way of asking for a ride and I was running out of patience.

  The truck didn't slow down. I was reasonably sure it would stop, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure. The truck kept on coming. I could jump out of the way or I could stand my ground and get hit. It kept on coming. This was a serious game of chicken.

  You could tell the truck didn't want to stop. It didn't slow down. It just kept on coming and then slammed on the brakes at the last possible second.

  It stopped a foot in front of me. Then it started to bull its way past me. I stood there and let it push me back. They weren't going to get very far that way. The truck pushed me back about ten or fifteen meters. Then the driver must've gotten pissed off because he finally opened the door and climbed down and walked over to me.

  "Are you crazy, man?" he said in Spanish. He was a short man with a withered left arm and a broken nose. "We have to deliver our cargo. Get out of the road and let us pass."

  "I need a ride," I said.

  "I am not a taxi."

  "That is obvious. But I have been walking all morning without seeing a taxi."

  "Then continue walking, man."

  The guy was not being very solicitous about my welfare. "I would be willing to pay you well. Just drive me to a place where I can find a taxi or other means of transportation."

  He shook his head. "I have no time and I have no space."

  "I will ride in the back of the truck," I said. "I do not mind."

  He shook his head again. "It is impossible. Find yourself another ride."

  The guy was almost as much of a hardhead as me. I didn't know what else to say, so I didn't say anything. He must have thought he had convinced me because he climbed back into his seat and the truck started forward. The only problem was I was still in the middle of the road.

  "Get out of my way, fool," he yelled.

  I didn't answer him. I just stood there.

  He started moving toward me but I stood there like Horatio at the bridge. He kept coming and I kept moving back slowly. I mean, I may have been stupid but I wasn't suicidal. Little by little we moved, like some kind of slow-motion Morris dance.

  Finally he jumped down again. This time he was holding a machete and waving it in my direction. "Son of a whore, get out of my way."

  He was a little guy. I could take the machete away from him. He took another step toward me. I was about to grab his arm when the other door of the truck opened and a girl in jeans and a white shirt climbed down and said, "Ernesto, wait."

  He stepped back and turned to look at her. "Do not have fear, Sister Angela. I will take
care of him."

  The girl shook her head. "That is what I fear, Ernesto. Let me talk to him."

  "Do not trouble yourself with this dog," the man said. "I will cut him and he will get out of our way."

  "No, Ernesto," she said. "I do not want that. We will find a better way."

  She walked over to me. She wasn't much taller than Ernesto. She was thin, built like a boy. Her hair was dark and cropped short, but her skin was light. She looked like she was in her early twenties. Her appearance was plain, by most standards, but there was an intensity in her eyes.

  "Can we work this out without killing each other?" she said in English. She had a New England accent, probably Boston.

  "You're American," I said, like an idiot.

  "Sure," she said. "From Woostah, Mass." That was the way she pronounced it. "What do you want?"

  "I need a lift. I've been walking all morning."

  "Walking for pleasure or for exercise?"

  "Neither. My driver went missing and I'm trying to get back to civilization."

  Her eyes flashed. She obviously didn't like my answer. "This is civilization. These are decent hard-working people."

  I shook my head. "That's not what I meant. I'm trying to get back to San Salvador."

  "That's a long walk," she said with a straight face.

  I smiled at her. She was one tough broad. "I didn't intend to walk all the way. I was hoping I could hitch a ride."

  She shook her head. "Not with us. You'll have to try your luck with someone else."

  "Why not with you? If you don't have any room up front, I'll be glad to ride in back."

  "You wouldn't be glad to ride in back when you see our cargo."

  "Is that what stinks so bad?" I said.

  She grimaced. "It does smell very bad." Maybe she figured she could get rid of me this way. "You can take a look."