American tabloid

85

The dispatch hut was boarded up. The orange-and-black wallpaper was stripped into souvenir swatches.

Adios, Tiger Kab.

The CIA divested their half-interest. Jimmy Hoffa dumped his half as a tax dodge. He told Pete to sell the cabs and make him some chump change.

Pete ran the parking-lot clearance sale. Buyer-incentive TV sets were perched on every tiger-striped hood.

Pete hooked them up to a portable generator. Two dozen screens blasted news: a spook church in Birmingham got bombed an hour ago.

Four pickaninnies got vaporized. Kemper Boyd, take note.

Browsers jammed the lot. Pete pocketed cash and signed over pink slips.

Goodbye, Tiger Kab. Thanks for the memories.

Agency cutbacks and phaseouts dictated the sale. JM/Wave slogged on, minus mucho personnel.

The Cadre was disbanded. Santo said he was getting out of narcotics-an all-time epic lie.

The formal order came down last December. Merry Xmas- your elite dope squadron is kaput.

Teo Paez was running whores in Pensacola. Fulo Machado was on the bum somewhere. Ramуn Gutiйrrez was anti-Castroizing outside New Orleans.

Chuck Rogers was phased off contract status. Nйstor Chasco was dead or alive in Cuba.

Kemper Boyd was still running his Whack Castro squad.

Mississippi got too hot for him. Civil rights grief was escalating and polarizing the locals.

Boyd moved his squad to Sun Valley, Florida. They took over some abandoned prefab pads. That old Teamster resort finally saw tenants.

They set up a target range and a reconnaissance course. They stayed focused on the KILL FIDEL problem. They infiltrated Cuba nine times-white men Boyd and Guйry included.

They took a hundred Commie scalps. They never saw Nйstor. They never got close to Castro.

The dope was still stashed in Mississippi. The “search” for the heist men was still in sporadic progress.

Pete kept chasing fake leads. The fear got bad sometimes. He had Santo and Sam half-convinced that the heist men split to Cuba.

Santo and Sam harbored lingering suspicions. They kept saying, Where’s that guy Chasco?-he split the exile scene post-fucking-haste.

He kept chasing fake leads. He synced the chase to Barb’s road schedule.

Langley sent him out gun running. His circuits supplied good lead chase cover.

The fear got bad sometimes. The headaches came back. He popped goofballs to insure instant dreamless sleep.

He panicked last March. He was stuck in Tuscaloosa, Alabama-with Barb’s local gig stone flat canceled.

Thunderstorms flooded the roads and closed down the airport. He hit an exile-friendly bar and tamped his headache down with bourbon. Two scraggly-assed spics got shit-faced. They started talldng heroin, too loud.

He pegged them as skin poppers with a dime-bag clientele. He saw a way to close the fear out once and for all.

He tailed them to a dope den. The place was Hophead Central: spics crapped out on mattresses, spics geezing up, spics scrounging dirty needles off the floor.

He killed them all. He burned his silencer down to the threads shooting junkies in cold blood. He rigged the scene to look like an all-spic dope massacre.

He called Santo with his fear choking him dry.

He said he walked in on a slaughter. He said a dying man confessed to the heist. He said, Read the Tuscaloosa papers-it’s got to be big news tomorrow.

He flew to Barb’s next gig. The snuffs never hit the papers or TV. Santo said, “Keep looking.”

The junkies died on the nod. Chuck said Heshie Ryskind was dying-Big “H” had him phasing out on a painless little cloud.

Bobby Kennedy cleaned house last year. He initiated a shitload of non-painless phaseouts.

Contract guys got fired wholesale. Bobby sacked every contract man suspected of organized crime ties.,

He neglected to fire Pete Bondurant.

Memo to Bobby the K.:

Please fire me. Please take me off the exile circuit. Please phase me off this horrible search-and-find mission.

It could happen. Santo might say, Take a rest. Without CIA ties, you’re worthless.

Santo might say, Work for me. Santo might say, Look at Boyd-Carlos has kept him employed.

He could beg off. He could say, I don’t hate Castro like I used to. He could say, I don’t hate him like Kemper does-because I didn’t take the fall that he did.

My daughter didn’t betray me. The man I worshiped didn’t ridicule me on tape. I didn’t transfer my hate for that man to some loudmouthed spic with a beard.

Boyd’s in this deep. I’m treading air. We’re like Bobby and Jack that way.

Bobby says, Go, exiles, go. He means it. Jack refuses to greenlight a second invasion.

Jack cut a side deal with Khrushchev. He’s phasing out the Castro War in not-too-provocative fashion.

He wants to get re-elected. Langley thinks he’ll scrap the war early in his second term.

Jack thinks Fidel is unbeatable. He’s not alone. Even Santo and Sam G. cozied up to the fucker for a while.

Carlos said the dope heist queered their Commie fling. The Castro brothers, Sam and Santo were now permanently Splitsville.

Nobody got the dope. Everybody got fucked.

Browsers walked through the lot. An old guy kicked tires. Teenagers grooved on the spiffy tiger-stripe paint jobs.

Pete pulled a chair into the shade. Some Teamster clowns dispensed free beer and soft drinks. They sold four cars in five hours-not good, not bad.

Pete tried to doze. A headache started tapping.

Two plainclothesmen crossed the lot and beelined toward him. Half the crowd sniffed trouble and hotfooted it off down Flagler.

The TVs were stolen. The sale itself was probably illegal.

Pete stood up. The men boxed him in and flashed FBI ID.

The tall one said, “You’re under arrest. This is a non-sanctioned Cuban-exile meeting place, and you’re a known habituй.”

Pete smiled. “This place is defunct. And I’m on CIA contract status.”

The short Fed unhooked his handcuffs. “We’re not unsympathetic. We don’t like Communists any more than you do.”

The tall man sighed. “This wasn’t Mr. Hoover’s idea. Let’s just say he had to go along. It’s a standard, across-the-board order, and I don’t think you’ll be in custody that long.”

Pete stuck his hands out. The cuffs wouldn’t fit around his wrists.

The rest of the browsers vanished. A kid boosted a TV set and hightailed it.

Pete said, “I’ll go peacefully.”

o o o

The booking tank was triple-capacity packed. Pete shared floor space with a hundred pissed-off Cubans.

They were crammed into a thirty-by-thirty-foot stinkhole. No chairs, no benches-just four cement walls and a wraparound piss gutter.

The Cubans jabbered in English and Spanish. Dig the bilingual gist: Jack the Haircut sicced the Feds on the Cause.

Six campsites were raided yesterday. Weapons were seized. Cuban gunmen were arrested en masse.

It was some sort of first salvo. Jack was out to ram all non-CIA-sanctioned exiles.

He was CIA. He got popped anyway. The Feds jerry-rigged a plan and went off half-cocked.

Pete leaned against the wall and shut his eyes. Barb twisted by.

Every time with her was good. Every time was different. Every place was different-two people always moving hooking up in odd locations.

Bobby never harassed her. Barb figured a fix was in. She said she didn’t miss Two-Minute Jack.

She gave her sister her shakedown fee. Margaret Lynn Lindscott now owned a Bob’s Big Boy franchise.

They met in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Tampa. They met in L.A., Frisco and Portland.

He ran guns. She fronted a cheap dance show. He chased nonexistent dope thief/killers.

She said the Twist was burning out. He said his Cuban hard-on was, too.

She said, Your fear gets to me. He said, I’ll try to tamp it down. She said, Don’t-it makes you less frightening.

He said he did something very stupid. He said he didn’t know why he did it.

She said, You wanted to force yourself out of the Life.

He couldn’t argue.

Barb had a busy autumn pending. She had long club stints in Des Moines and Sioux City and a big Texas run through Thanksgiving.

She added lunch shows to her performance slate. The Twist was phasing out-Joey wanted to wring it dry.

He met Margaret in Milwaukee. She was meek and scared of just about everything.

He offered to kill the cop rape-o. Barb said no.

He said, Why? Barb said, You don’t really want to.

He couldn’t argue.

He had Barb. Boyd had hatred: Jack K. and the Beard as one fucked-up, pervasive thing. Littell had powerful friends.

Like Hoover. Like Hughes. Like Hoffa and Marcello.

Ward hated Jack on a par with Kemper. Bobby fucked them both-but they bypassed him to hate Big Brother.

Littell was Dracula’s new Field MarshaL The Count wanted him to buy up Las Vegas and render it germ-free.

You could read Littell’s eyes.

I have friends. I have plans. I have the Fund books memorized.

The holding tank smelled. The holding tank boomed with John F Kennedy hatred.

A guard cranked the door and pulled men out for phone calls. He yelled, “Acosta, Aguilar, Arredondo-”

Pete got ready. A dime would get him Littell in D.C.

Littell could rig a Federal release writ. Littell could hip Kemper to the campsite raids.

The guard yelled, “Bondurant!”

Pete walked up. The guard steered him down the tier to a phone bank.

Guy Banister was waiting there. He was holding a pen and a false-arrest waiver.

The guard walked back to the tank. Pete signed his name in triplicate.

“I’m free to go?”

Banister looked gleefuL “That’s right. The SAC didn’t know you were Agency, so I informed him.”

“Who told you where I was?”

“I was out at Sun Valley. Kemper gave me a note for you, so I went by the stand to deliver it. Some kids were stealing hubcaps. They told me the big gringo got arrested.”

Pete rubbed his eyes. A four-aspirin headache started pounding.

Banister pulled out an envelope. “I didn’t open it. And Kemper sure seemed anxious for me to make the transmittal.”

Pete grabbed it. “I’m glad you’re ex-Bureau, Guy. I might’ve had to stay here awhile.”

“Don’t fret, big fella. I have a hunch all this Kennedy bullshit is just about to end.”

o o o

Pete caught a cab back to the stand. Vandals had stripped the tiger cars down to spare parts.

He read the note. Boyd cut straight to the point.

Nйstor’s here. I got a tip that he was seen begging gun money in Coral Gables. My source says he’s holed up at 46th and Collins. (The pink garage apartment on the southwest corner.)

The note meant KILL HIM. Don’t let Santo get to him first.

o o o

He took bourbon and aspirin for his headache.

He took his magnum and his silencer for the job.

He took some pro-Castro leaflets to plant near the body.

He drove to 46th and Collins. He took this weird revelation with him: You might let Nйstor talk you out of it.

The pink garage apartment was right there, as stated. The ‘58 Chevy at the curb looked like a Nйstor-style ride.

Pete parked.

Pete got butterflies.

Go ahead, do it-you’ve killed at least three hundred men.

He walked up and knocked on the door.

Nobody answered.

He knocked again. He listened for footsteps and whispers.

He couldn’t hear a thing. He picked the lock with his penknife and walked in.

Shotgun slides went KA-CHOOK. Some unseen party hit a light switch.

There’s Nйstor, lashed to a chair. There’s two fat henchmen types holding Ithaca pumps.

There’s Santo Trafficante with an icepick.