The Neon Rain (Dave Robicheaux 1)

"I'll make copies, many of them, and circulate them around town for those who might be interested. Maybe you have the trust of your friends, and this will be of little consequence to you. Maybe you are in command of your situation and this is childishness to you."

His face clouded, and his eyes flicked meanly at me for a moment, the way an egg-sucking dog might if you pushed it inside a cage with a stick.

"Qué quiere?" his voice rasped.

It was a strange tale. It was self-serving, circumventive, filled in all probability with lies; but as with all brutal and cruel people, his most innocent admissions and most defensive explanations were often more damning and loathsome in their connotations than the crimes others might accuse him of.

He had been a sergeant in Somoza's national guard for seven years, a door gunner on a helicopter, and he had flown in many battles against the communists in the jungles and the hills. It was a war of many civilian problems, because the communists hid among the villagers and posed as workers in the rice fields and coffee plantations, and when the government helicopters flew too low they often took hostile fire from the ground, where the peasants denied there were any Sandinistas or weapons. What was one to do? Surely Americans who had been in Vietnam could understand. Those who fought wars could not always be selective.

The soldiers went forth in uniform, as men, in plain sight, while the communists threaded their way among the poor and fought with the methods of cowards and homosexuals. If I did not believe him, witness his eye, and he pulled down the skin on one side of his face and showed me the dead, puttylike muscle under the retina. Their gun-ship had come in low over a secured area, and down below he could see Indians stacking green hay in the field, then a rocket exploded through the armored floor of the helicopter, blew one man out the door, and left a steel needle quivering in Andres's eyeball. The American journalist who visited the army hospital in Managua did not seem interested in his story, nor did he take pictures of Andres as the journalists did of the communist dead and wounded. That was because the American press's greatest fear was to be called rightist by their own membership. Like the Maryknoll missionaries, they kept their own political vision intact by compromising the world in which others had to live.

If I was offended by his statement, I must remember that he did not choose exile in this country any more than he chose the ruination of his vocal cords and lungs.

"I heard his regular punch gave him some special gargle water," I said.

"What?" Jaime said.

"He and some other guys gang-raped a girl before they executed her. Her sister poured muriatic acid in our friend's drink."

"This is true?" Jaime asked. He was a small and delicate man with a sensitive face. He always wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and rolled his own cigarettes from illegal Cuban tobacco. His toylike face looked from me to the Nicaraguan.

"Our man from Managua is a big bullshitter, Jaime."

The Nicaraguan must have understood me.

The story about the execution and the acid was a lie, he said, a fabrication of Philip Murphy and the maricón Starkweather. They took pleasure in the denigration of others because they were not real soldiers. Murphy was a morphine addict who made love to his own body with his syringes. He pretended courage but was flaccid like a woman and could not bear pain. Did I really want to know how he, Andres, had his throat and lungs burnt out, how this terrible odor came to live in his chest like a dead serpent?

"I was blind in one eye, but I could not stop in the fight for my country," Jaime translated for him. "Just as they posed as priests and labor organizers, I went among them as a radical who hated the Somoza family. But a diseased puta, a worthless army slut, betrayed me because she thought I had given her the foulness in her organs. The Sandinistas cocked a pistol at my head and made me drink kerosene, then they lighted matches to my mouth. I suffered greatly at their hands, but my country has suffered more."

"Where are Philip Murphy and the Israeli?" I asked.

"Who knows? Murphy lives in airports and pharmacies and finds people when he needs them. Jews stay with their own kind. Maybe Erik is with the rich Jew who owns the warehouse. They're a close and suspicious people."

"What Jew? What warehouse?"

"The warehouse where the weapons to free Nicaragua are kept. But I don't know where it is, and I don't know this Jew. I'm only a soldier."

His face was empty. His eyes had the muddy, stupid glaze of someone who believed that the honest expression of his ignorance was an acceptable explanation to those who had the power to make judgments.

"I'll give you an easier question, then," I said. "What did you all do to Sam Fitzpatrick before he died?"

Jaime translated, and the Nicaraguan's face became as flat as a shingle.

"Did you wire up his genitals?" I asked.

He looked out at the lake, his mouth pinched tight. He touched the rum glass with his fingers, then withdrew them.

"Murphy gave the orders, but I suspect you and Bobby Joe carried them out with spirit. Your experience stood you well."

"I think this one has a big evil inside him," Jaime said. "I believe you should give him back to the people who brought him here."

"I'm afraid they're not interested in him, Jaime. The man they work for just wanted to knock his competition around a little bit."

His small face was perplexed under the brim of his baseball cap.

"We use them. They use us. It keeps everybody in business," I said.

"If you don't need more of me, I'll go. Sunday is a bad day to be with this type of man. I've smelled that odor before. It comes out of a great cruelty."