Caught Dead

TWO

They dressed hurriedly.

Larry Howe called again from downstairs. Rourke, wearing only his socks, assured him that he was just that minute walking out the door.

“I wish there wasn’t this last-minute difficulty,” Paula said, zipping up her skirt. “But if somebody else goes to the interview with you, I don’t see that it changes anything.”

“If I was in their shoes I’d squawk, too. They don’t like somebody coming in from outside to grab off the big story.”

“So long as the cigarettes are delivered.”

“Count on it,” he told her. “I know I can make it stick.”

Paula ran a comb through her hair and checked her appearance in a mirror. She made a disgusted face, though Rourke thought she looked as splendid as usual.

“I’d better tell you,” she said nervously. “I didn’t want to worry you, but I think I spotted a policeman behind us when we went out near the prison this afternoon. But who cares? In one hour and a half you’ll be at sea and I’ll be holed up in a barrio, where they won’t dare to look for me.”

She put the two cartons of Pall Malls into Rourke’s battered attache case, otherwise empty except for a ruled yellow pad, several soft pencils, and a pint of American whiskey. Rourke thrust his necktie into a side pocket. She came up to him, put her hands inside his jacket and hugged him hard.

“It’s been marvelous,” she said. “Now, speaking as a girl… do you think we’ll ever see each other again?”

“After you win.”

“Then I hope we win soon. Tim, I think I would have come to see you even if it hadn’t been for these cigarettes-”

“I doubt it,” he said, “but that’s all right. I never thanked you for the Christmas card you sent me.”

“Oh, well. I know you’re not the Christmas card type. Tim, will you be careful?”

“You’re the one who ought to be careful. You’re the guerrilla.”

She came up on her toes and pressed her lips against his briefly, then turned and went out, cracking the door first to make sure there was no one in the hall.

Rourke’s smile faded abruptly. He opened the dispatch case. Taking out the yellow pad, he wrote a quick note. He ripped off the sheet, folded it, and slipped it into an unstamped envelope addressed to his friend Michael Shayne, the well-known Miami private detective. The envelope already contained another folded sheet, torn out of a memorandum book or a diary. The phone was clamoring again as he went out.

He knocked lightly on a door near the elevators. It was opened by an American in a T-shirt and slacks. Rourke gave him the envelope and a $20 bill.

“You’re still going up on the early plane?”

“Sure, no change,” the man said. “But I was thinking… Why don’t I wait and give it to the messenger service at the Fontainebleau, instead of at the airport? It’ll get delivered faster.”

“Fine. Just be damn sure you don’t forget.”

“Hell, it’s the easiest twenty bucks I ever made.”

Larry Howe, a long way from his usual genial self, was facing the elevators in the lobby. He was an old Latin American hand, almost entirely bald, with a moon face fitted out with big glasses and a big cigar.

Rourke looked at Menendez, who shifted weight patches-competent, plodding wire-service copy, a dim reflection of Howe himself, who drank heavily, pursued girls, and had had many lively adventures which never made it to the UPI wire.

Two of the men with him were new to Rourke. The third, Menendez, the Venezuelan information man who had handled the arrangements for the interview, seemed to wish he was somewhere else.

“The Tim Rourke legend,” Howe said sourly. “Stories breaking all over town, and he’s sacked out with a babe. We’re a little late, so this has to be abrupt. Plans have changed.”

Rourke looked at Menendez, who shifted weight and continued to look uncomfortable.

“I am sorry, you know. There are sometimes things one cannot help.”

Howe broke in impatiently. “I’ll grant you, the interview was your idea, Tim, and as a new face in town you had the leverage to put it across. But is it fair to the rest of us?”

“Who said it had to be fair?”

“Or good journalism. The whole idea, the way Menendez got the junta to approve, was to quash the rumors about Guillermo Alvares being tortured.”

“Larry, let’s talk about it over a drink,” Rourke suggested.

Howe shook his head. “We aren’t negotiating, Tim. It’s an accomplished fact. We’ve persuaded Menendez that the interview will fulfill its purpose only if it’s conducted by someone who has seen Alvares in action over the years. He’s what-fifty-nine, and he’s been sick lately. I had a conversation with him ten days ago. Do you see what I mean? I know the shape he was in then, and when I report how he looks tonight, I’ll have something to compare it with.”

“Glad to have you along, Larry. Just don’t step on my heels.”

Again Howe shook his head. “He isn’t holding a press conference. It’s a one-man interview. All the resident correspondents got together and drew for it. I drew the long straw.”

Rourke said philosophically, “I never have any luck drawing straws, especially when the drawing takes place somewhere else.”

“We wrote up a list of questions, and if you’ve got anything special you want to ask, fine. Everybody gets a copy of his answers, plus my appraisal of his physical condition. You can file your own story.”

“Gee, Larry, thanks. Did you have a hard time persuading the information office?”

He was looking at Menendez, who shrugged and looked down.

“It’s the only sensible way to do it.”

“If it’s all sewed up,” Rourke said, “the only thing I can do is write a story about under-the-counter payments made by the dean of the local press corps to venal information officials-”

Howe peered at him narrowly over his black-rimmed glasses and the Venezuelan made a placating gesture with both hands.

Rourke went on. “Nothing personal, Larry, but if you come back with a story that criticizes anybody, your sources will dry up. You’re going to be here after I’m gone. You have to deal with the powers-that-be.”

“Don’t be a horse’s ass,” Howe said quietly. “I’ve been assigned here a long time. I’ll be goddamned if I like being frozen out of a story in my own backyard.”

“Let’s be broadminded and do it together.”

Menendez said unhappily, “I have not that authority.”

“It’s set up for one man,” Howe explained, “and they’re new at this so they tend to be a little rigid. We can wait till tomorrow and try, but by then they may be having second thoughts about the whole thing. Is it that important, Tim?” He added, “Because it is to me. I got caught in the mountains and missed most of the excitement this week. I’ve been getting some nasty queries from New York. I need to recoup.”

Rourke’s mind was racing. “Hell,” he said, with a brusque gesture. “I don’t like to sound like a prima donna. Use my personal dice or I won’t play. Just give me your personal assurance, Larry, that this isn’t a cover up.”

“Absolutely nothing of the kind!” Menendez exclaimed.

Howe said, “I’ll call it the way I see it, Tim.”

“Then O.K. Here’s the question I want asked. Does he have any statement about CIA involvement in the coup? How much money did they throw in, and did they sabotage the getaway plane?”

“Absolutely not!” Menendez said. “We can’t permit such questions.”

“Why do you think I wanted this interview?” Rourke said roughly. “So he could show me his bruises? If you don’t feel like asking that question, Larry, you can expect a major stink. And there’s one other thing. I said I’d take him in a couple of cartons of cigarettes. That’s a real commitment.”

“You can give them to me,” Menendez said.

“No, I guaranteed I’d deliver them personally, and I have good private reasons for doing it. Make me a solemn promise, Larry, that you’ll lay these cigarettes on Alvares and nobody else, and maybe I won’t feel so annoyed about the rest of this.”

Howe agreed to take over the commission. After some discussion they compromised on a milder version of Rourke’s CIA question. Howe put one carton of Pall Malls in each side pocket of his jacket and assured Rourke again that he wouldn’t surrender them to anybody but Alvares himself.

“It’s a nice touch, as a matter of fact. I remember noticing he smoked Pall Malls. I’d judge he’s a two-pack-a-day man, and when he sees what I brought him he’s going to feel grateful as hell.”

Howe rode with the Venezuelan. The other correspondents arranged to meet him afterward at the UPI office on the Avenido Andres Bello. Rourke had a rented Ford. Menendez suggested that he follow them out, in case the prison people raised any objection to the last-minute substitution.

The La Vega prison had been in continuous use since the earliest years of the Republic. A fortress-like structure, it had narrow slits for windows and a red tile roof within an adobe wall topped with triple strands of barbed wire. At one time it had been surrounded by open countryside, but the city had grown up around it. It was a high-security prison, used mainly for political prisoners and others awaiting trial for capital offenses. Confined here, in addition to Alvares himself, were a half-dozen prominent Alvaresites, high Army officers who had chosen not to join the revolt, and a number of leftists who opposed both the Alvares regime and the one that had replaced it.

Rourke had spent hours studying a street plan of Los Carmenes, but knowing his facility for getting lost in strange towns, he and Paula had reconnoitered the area that afternoon and worked out the routes he was to follow.

The Menendez car went through a gate into the prison compound. Rourke parked outside, rang, and was admitted. Menendez, facing a grim prison official, was talking and gesticulating. The prison authorities, it seemed, had not been notified that Lawrence J. Howe had replaced Timothy Rourke as the American who was being given the interview with their celebrated prisoner. Phone calls were exchanged. The appointed time, ten o’clock, came and went. Final approval came through at 10:15. Howe patted the cartons in his pockets and gave Rourke a reassuring nod. He and Menendez, with a three-man escort, went up the stairs.

Rourke returned to the street.

The area around the prison was brightly lighted with mercury vapor lamps. He had parked several blocks away, outside the reach of the lights. Before getting into his car he strolled casually to the next corner.

The sidestreet climbed steeply, twisting, into the hills. A few yards from the corner he saw a closed delivery van. Like all the other vehicles on the block it was parked with its two inside wheels on the sidewalk. This, he surmised, was one of the MIR trucks, loaded with armed men, waiting on streets leading to the prison. One of the detachments had a ladder and ropes to get over the outer walls and unbar the gate. The signal was to be a single pistol shot, fired by an observer posted in one of the apartments overlooking the prison as soon as the first sign of smoke appeared.

Rourke suppressed an idiotic impulse to rap sharply on the side of the truck, to startle the men inside. Throwing away his cigarette, he returned to the rented Ford, where he eased a little of the tension with a few gulps of raw whiskey.

He was putting the bottle back in the dispatch case when the opposite door opened, turning on the dome light. A squat dark man, hatless and needing a shave, in a short-sleeved shirt, looked in.

“Mr. Rourke, I will get into the car with you one minute with your permission,” he said in heavily accented English, and slid inside. He left the door slightly ajar, so the light would stay on, and showed the American a badge pinned to a leather folder.

“Pichardo, of the Caracas police.” Having made that announcement, he pulled the door shut. “I wish something explained, please. Do you understand my English?”

Rourke forced himself to reply evenly. “Barely.”

“I attended the school in Washington, District of Columbia, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, very interesting, very informative, but I have not many chances anymore to practice the language. I am in a”-he hunted for a word-“condition of questioning.”

“Maybe I can help you.”

“You were driving around in Los Carmenes this afternoon.”

“Do you have some kind of ordinance against sightseeing out here?”

“With a senorita,” the policeman continued. “A North American, I think, from her costume. I took a photograph of her with my zoom lens.”

“She was showing me around. You probably know I’m a newspaperman. I had an interview scheduled for tonight with Alvares. Didn’t anybody tell you that? I wanted to see the prison in daylight so I could describe it.”

With the light off, Rourke couldn’t see the dashboard clock. He lit a cigarette. As the lighter flared he saw that it was 10:35.

“I don’t know why all this concerns you,” Rourke continued. “There was a change in plans. Another guy is interviewing the colonel now. I have to file a story as soon as he comes out, and I’m trying to get the lead set in my head. So if you don’t mind-”

“I have reason to think the young lady of this afternoon has revolutionist connections. Are you aware of that?”

Rourke made a clucking sound. “Such a cute kid, too.”

“I thought so, indeed,” the policeman said. “But what is inside the head can be bad, although the outside face is good, and the body. She visited you in your hotel this evening. She came out by the kitchen entrance. I thought of following her, but as you see I am assigned to you.”

“Am I supposed to be a dangerous leftist too?”

Pichardo said, vaguely, “I am given my orders, which I do my best to carry out-”

And suddenly, without warning, a tremendous blast blew part of the roof off the prison.

The street seemed to lurch violently, and Rourke had the sensation that a cymbal player had just clapped his cymbals simultaneously against both his ears. His head filled with a crash of sound.

He felt stunned and tricked. He had been told that the guerrilla experts had placed a small explosive charge in the cartons, just enough to release the smoke and gas. But this had been something on an altogether different order of magnitude, the equivalent of a couple of dozen sticks of dynamite or a 3000-pound bomb.

Both men had frozen, but Rourke, who had been listening intently for a faint bang or a pistol shot, broke out of it first. He had turned toward Pichardo, his arm resting on the back of the seat. With the echoes still rolling, an instinctive reflex action brought his closed fist down sharply against the side of the policeman’s unshaven jaw.

Rourke knew himself to be one of the least athletic members of a sedentary profession. At six-feet-two, he weighed only 160, and not much of that was muscle. Almost his only exercise was tapping a typewriter with two fingers and fishing orange peels out of Old-fashioneds. He would occasionally lose patience with some right-wing idiot in a bar, to the point where he would throw a punch, but the person he hit rarely fell down. Tonight, desperation gave him strength and the unexpected blow stunned the policeman.

Coming around, Rourke hit him with a flurry of rights and lefts, and a hot flow of pain washed up his arm. Pichardo looked at him stupidly and made a faint sound of protest. Rourke felt to see if he was carrying a gun-apparently not. Feeling a sudden clutch of panic, he lashed out again with both fists, unlatched the door, and tumbled the half-conscious policeman into the street.

Probably no more than three seconds had passed since the explosion. Rourke thought he heard a faint patter, like falling debris. A black ball of smoke rose slowly above the prison.

“Jesus,” he said aloud, and hit the starter.

He was a half block away before he remembered to turn on the lights. If anybody was shouting after him, it was lost in the wild acceleration. He swung to the left at the first corner. The street map he had studied so carefully was gone from his mind. He turned again. Instead of running downhill as he had expected, this street ran up. Remembering that most of the streets around here came to a dead end in the hills, he went into reverse and backed down frantically. As he came around, he heard shouting from the prison, the shrill pipe of a whistle.

He found a main avenue, and this time he made what he was sure was the correct turn. He had been too insistent about those cigarettes. He was in trouble now, in serious trouble, probably the worst trouble of his career. His only hope was to get out of the country before he was picked up and asked to explain. He knew that no blast that great could have failed to kill somebody. Who was the target, why had Paula done this to him-all that would have to wait.

It struck him that he was calling attention to himself by the recklessness of his driving, and he slowed down. The plan-it had been Paula’s and he suddenly mistrusted it-had been for him to circle northward and turn west on the Avenida Liberator, skirting the center of the city. Now nothing looked familiar. Every light seemed to be against him. He tried desperately to think. There was more and more traffic. Halted for a red light, he heard the clanging of a bell, a siren.

When the light changed, he turned south to put the siren behind him and was stopped almost at once by a police barrier. A policeman with huge white gloves herded the traffic off the avenue, where again it clotted. Horns blared around him. He could hear more sirens, and they seemed to be coming closer. He stepped out onto the street and looked both ways. He was caught in a solid freeze of cars.

He checked, about to duck back into the Ford. He could hardly believe that he saw the policeman Pichardo, who should have been recovering consciousness in a gutter in another part of town, limping along the crowded sidewalk toward him. The policeman was shorter than he had seemed in the car and there was a bloody smear on his face where it had been scraped by Rourke’s fist. From the beginning of the headlong flight, there had been a steady procession of lights across Rourke’s rearview mirror, and it was a bad shock to discover that one pair of those headlights had hung behind him all the way.

His heart hammering unpleasantly, he slid across the front seat and out by the other door, leaving the lights on and the motor running. Bent forward with his shoulders hunched, he sliced between the stalled lanes, around a truck and across the sidewalk to the next corner.

Here he used a trick he had learned from his friend Mike Shayne. He bent to tie a shoelace, and when he straightened, stood quietly against the building. Pichardo reached the abandoned Ford. As he bent to look in, Rourke crossed the street and started back on the opposite sidewalk. Pichardo stepped up on another car’s bumper to get added height, but he was looking the wrong way.

Rourke passed behind him. He went with the crowd. His moment of invisibility passed, and he began to feel more and more conspicuous, much too tall, too American, wearing clothes that had been bought in another country.

He reviewed his situation and found it far from encouraging. His friends were all elsewhere. He was carrying only a few hundred bolivars, about $45, not enough for an airplane ticket. In any case, by the time he could reach the airport the police would be waiting for him. The MIR, Paula’s underground organization, had gotten him into this jam and conceivably they might be willing to get him out. But how could he reach them? All the contacts had been one-way.

He lost himself in a maze of streets, came out on a major avenue and saw a hotel. Entering through a cafe, he found a public phone.

It was one of several, in open alcoves in a corner of the main lobby. One of the few things he was able to do with his limited stock of Spanish was to make a phone call. He spilled a handful of coins on the shelf beneath the phone, asked for the overseas operator and gave her a Miami number. He wanted her to hurry, but he didn’t know how to say that in Spanish.