Elmore Leonard: Bandits

Jack understood what the colonel was up to, but wasn’t exactly sure about the war. He knew they were always having revolutions down there and did understand there was one going on right now. He remembered when he was little his dad, back from Honduras for a few days, telling them the people down there were crazy, hot-tempered; if they weren’t fighting over a woman they were biting the hand that fed them. Jack would picture shifty-eyed guys with machetes, straw sombreros, bullet belts crossed over their shoulders, waiting to ambush a United Fruit train loaded with bananas. But then he would see Marlon Brando and a bunch of armed Mexican extras ride into the scene and government soldiers firing machine guns from the train. It was hard to keep the borders and the history down there straight. He didn’t want to interrupt Sister Lucy’s story and sound dumb asking questions. He listened and stored essential facts, picturing stock characters. The colonel, one of those oily fuckers with a gold cigarette case he opens to offer the poor son of a bitch he’s having shot just what he wants in these last moments of his life, a smoke. Amelita, Jack saw a demure little thing with frightened Bambi eyes, then had to enlarge her breasts and put her in spiked heels and a bathing suit cut high to her hips for the Miss Universe contest.

But once he got her to Managua the colonel never mentioned beauty pageants again. The only feeling he had for Amelita was lust. Good word, lust . Jack couldn’t recall if he’d ever used it, but had no trouble picturing the colonel, the son of a bitch, lusting. Jack put an extra fifty pounds on him for the bedroom scene: the colonel taking off his uniform full of medals, gut hanging out, leering at Amelita cowering behind the bed. Jack watched him rip open the front of her nightgown, show-class breasts springing free, as Sister Lucy said, “Are you listening?”

“To every word. And then what?”

And then, by the time the rebels had reached Managua, the colonel was in Miami and Amelita was back home, safe for the time being.

The next part brought the story close to the present but was harder to follow, Sister Lucy referring to the political situation down there like he knew what she was talking about. It was confusing because the ones that had been the government before, it sounded like, were now the rebels, the contras . The ones that had started the revolution back in the seventies were now running the country.

He got that much. But which were the good guys and which were the bad guys?

While he was still trying to figure it out Sister Lucy was telling how the colonel had now returned to Nicaragua as a guerrilla commandant in the north, came looking for Amelita in the dead of night and took her off with him into the mountains.

Say one thing for the colonel, he didn’t quit. “Maybe the guy really liked her,” Jack said, reserving judgment, still not sure which side the colonel was on, even taking off, briefly, the extra weight he’d put on the guy. And got a look from Sister Lucy; man, a hard stare. “Or he was driven by his consuming lust,” Jack said. “That would be more like it, huh? A lust that knew no bounds.”

She said, “Are you finished?” Sounding like Leo with that dry tone. He told her he was and she said, good. It was a new experience, the feeling he could say just about anything he wanted to a nun , of all people, and she’d get it because she was aware-he could see it in her eyes-and would not be shocked or offended. He had been to prison, but this lady had been to a war.

They came to the part where Amelita found out she had Hansen’s disease. It was while she was still in the mountains with the colonel. Brown spots began to appear on her arms and face. She was scared to death. A doctor in camp-“Listen to this, Jack”-made the diagnosis and told the colonel Amelita would have to go to Sagrada Familia immediately, that day, to begin sulfone treatments. There was no sensory loss, the disease would be arrested in an early stage, and the doctor was confident there would be no disfigurement.

Jack said, “It’s hard to imagine a good-looking young girl like that-”

Sister Lucy said, “Listen to me, will you?” It surprised him and shut him up. “Where do you think the doctor was from he could take one look at her and make the diagnosis? Yes, absolutely, even before he did a biopsy and saw M. leprae bacilli and confirmed it, she had near-tuberculoid HD. Jack, he was our doctor, from Sagrada Familia. One of the disappeared ones.”

There it was again.

“Well, he didn’t just disappear then.”

“Of course not. He was taken by force, guns pointed at his head. They kidnapped him.”

“Then why do you call it disappeared?”

She said, “My God, where have you been? It isn’t only in Nicaragua and Salvador, it’s a Latin American custom. It happens in Guatemala, it’s popular all the way south to Argentina. Don’t you read? People are taken from their homes, abducted, and they’re called desaparecidos , the disappeared. And when they’re found murdered, you know who did it? Los descomocidos , unknown assailants.”

Jack was shaking his head. “I’m not sure I ever heard about that.”

“Listen to me.” She snapped it at him. Then continued in her quiet tone. “The doctor, Rudolfo Meza, from our hospital, he told the colonel Amelita was in the early stages of leprosy. And you know what the colonel did? He drew a pistol and shot the doctor four times in the chest. Murdered him, standing close enough to touch him with the gun barrel. A witness told me, a contra woman who deserted a few days later and came to us. Amelita was there, of course. She saw it…”

“I was gonna ask you.”

“And she ran. The contra woman helped her get to Jinotega, then came to the hospital to warn us, the colonel had sworn to kill Amelita… And you think maybe the guy really liked her. Is that right, Jack?”

He sat there in his navy-blue suit and striped tie and couldn’t think of one goddamn thing to say back to her. This lady was not as nice as she appeared; she could show you a hard edge. They had left the interstate and were approaching the river, past chemical works in the near distance, the sight and smell of them along the flats.

“He murdered the doctor for telling him. Then came to the hospital looking for Amelita. He said she had defiled him.” The sister’s tone hushed in the quiet of the air-conditioned hearse. “He said she had allowed him to enter her body in order to give him the disease and he would kill her for that reason, trying to make him a leper.”

THEY PASSED THROUGHthe main gate and she came to life, telling him that at one time it was called the Louisiana Leper Home. Her tone relaxed again, natural. And now it was the National Hansen’s Disease Center. He knew that but kept quiet, still trying to imagine a man wanting to kill a girl he believed had tried to give him leprosy. Was that possible? She told him the administration building predated the Civil War, was once the mansion on a sugar plantation and all those mossy oak trees must be just as old.

He knew that, too.

Now that same girl, Amelita, was suppose to leave here in the hearse. They could have got a limo for the same price. So it must be somebody was watching. Or it was possible and they weren’t taking any chances. Make them think Amelita was dead… But would the staff be in on it? How would they work it?

Meanwhile his tour guide was telling him it amazed her that the world’s most advanced training and research center for Hansen’s disease was in the United States. And how many people knew about it?

Well, just about everybody in New Orleans did. He’d heard stories that in the old days lepers were brought here in a train with the windows covered, nailed shut; the whole place guarded so they couldn’t get out and spread the disease. Somebody on his mother’s side of the family, her aunt’s father-in-law, had been brought here…