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back. In a spring like a jaguar, he was off the bed, through the window, and prone, naked upon the garden ground. The Needle, too, was naked, now, shucked from its sheath. The smell of the oil on the blade. His heart thumping against the earth, his muscles flexing, coiled, his ears attuned to every sound. And then he heard it, again, his name.
    â€œAjax?”
    In the dream, the soldier had said his name. Was that it? Had the kid’s ghost followed him home? Ajax opened his mouth wide to keep silent his heavy breathing. No. This had begun before he’d met the soldier.
    Again his name.
    â€œAjax!”
    This time followed by a low whistle. Just a two-note whistle so quiet most people would not hear it. It had been the universal password up in the mountains. Only one person still hailed him that way. Horacio. Ajax rolled onto his back. What the fuck was happening?
    â€œAjax!”
    It didn’t matter just then. He could not be found crawling around naked in his garden with a knife in his hands, and especially not The Needle. He went back through his bedroom window as silently as he’d gone out, and stashed The Needle under the bed.
    â€œAjax?”
    It would be like the old fucker to barge into his bedroom. Horacio claimed that his sense of privacy had been twisted by the communal living of the mountains, but Ajax knew he was just nosey. For once he was glad Horacio was almost lame.
    â€œ Viejo !” Ajax yelled through his door. “Momentito ! Sit down.”
    â€œWhere’s the bottle?”
    The what? The bottle. Shit! In the drawer where The Needle should be.
    â€œI’ll get it! Just grab some glasses!”
    â€œHow about some light?”
    â€œIt’s Wednesday. Light the candle.”
    Ajax could hear him shuffling around, the cane tip tapping in the dark. His hands shook as he fumbled for his police khakis. What the fuck was happening? What had he just seen? Seen again, he remembered. It didn’t matter just then. He had to pull himself together. He had to be squared away in front of Horacio. His only friend, shit, his only visitor for the last two years. Horacio was not in the government, per se, had no portfolio to speak of, yet he was rumored to be everywhere and to know everything.
    Some simply called him El Viejo . The Old Man. His admirers called him El Poeta, for the poetry he’d published since he was a guerrillero. His detractors called him The Jesuit, for his allegedly Machiavellian ways. But to Ajax he was always El Maestro .
    Ajax had been a teenager in Los Angeles when he’d first met Horacio. It was Horacio who had got him buying guns for “ los muchachos, ” then smuggling them south, and finally it was Horacio who’d convinced Ajax to “come home” to Nicaragua. Had recruited him to the Sandinistas, and been his first commander in the mountains. Horacio had taught him how to fight. How to kill. How to survive. Then Horacio had been badly wounded and evacuated to Havana, and later to Moscow for treatment. Two years later, when they met again in Managua, Ajax was leading Horacio’s old command, had become “the great hero.” And the vigorous graybeard—now poking around his kitchen in the dark—had become the fragile, gentle man with black beret, mahogany cane, and all-seeing yet always smiling eyes who was determined to save Ajax from drink, from himself.
    Ajax would never say it out loud, but he felt loved by that old man. And Ajax was devoted to him in return.
    Ajax opened his mouth wide to quiet his breath, and then gave his body over to panic, knowing the trembling, the shaking, the spasms would soon stop. As they always had.
    4.
    Horacio de la Vega Cárdenas felt his way into Ajax’s kitchen and found two glasses. Knowing his protégé, he sniffed them for cleanliness. Satisfied, he made his way to the garden, sat in his chair, and arranged the glasses and candles on the table with the two pistols.