Strachey's folly

Chapter 26

Just before noon on Saturday, October 19, a week almost to the hour from the time Maynard had stared in amazement at Jim Suter's panel in the AIDS memorial quilt, I pulled off Highway 307 onto the beach road at Los Pajaros.

I had spent the previous evening, on my return from Log Heaven, checking in on Timmy and Maynard at GW, then shaking any tail Ray Craig might have still had on me by slipping on and off a variety of subway trains at D.C. Metro Center and other nearby stations. I ended up at the Farragut West station, near the White House, where I caught a cab to National Airport.

I had booked the first leg of my journey under the name of Cray Mameluke, paid cash for the ticket, and arrived un-interferred-with in Miami soon after midnight. There I reserved a seat on a 7 A.M. flight to Cancun under the name Donald Stra-chey, the name the airline would see on my passport. If my movements were being monitored, I guessed, this would be done at the Washington end, rather than in Cancun, and surely not in Miami, a mere transit point that was one of several to the Yucatan.

From my hotel near Miami International, I phoned May-nard's hospital room and woke him up so that I could be reassured that he was safe. He was, as was Timmy, asleep on a couch in the nearby visitors' lounge. I also phoned Chondelle Dolan at home, woke her from a sound sleep, too, and described what I had learned over the past four days from Carmen LoBello, Betty Krumfutz, Maynard Sudbury, and-for what it was worth-Jim Suter. I said I might need her advice and help when I got back to Washington, and she said fine.

Dolan told me, "It looks like maybe your boyfriend the conspiracy nut wasn't such a nut after all."

"Could be, but I'm still having a lot of trouble believing that a Catholic schoolboy's lurid fantasies about what makes the world go round might actually exist in modern-day reality. The evidence, however, does seem to keep pointing that way."

Dolan said, "The world we live in isn't the same world it was just ten years ago.

Nowadays they don't call these things conspiracies, though. Now it's called synergy."

Dolan soon hung up to resume the night's sleep I'd interrupted, and I, too, caught a few hours of restless semicon-sciousness, before heading to the airport and the flight to Cancun, my second in three days.

When I rounded the first bend in the Los Pajaros beach road, I saw not one but three vehicles in the driveway of Jorge Ramos's house. The big mud-spattered Suburban was there, along with a couple of Jeep Cherokees. I drove on, glancing at the house in hope of catching a glimpse of Suter. All the louvered windows were open, but I saw no one inside moving about.

Walking up and boldly knocking on the front door would have been macho in a way that might have been appreciated locally, but it might also have been suicidal. So if Suter was inside the house and still alive, I knew I'd have to get to him in some other way. I turned around at the next driveway, maneuvered my rental car through the mud and potholes back out to the main highway, then drove back up 307 to a hotel near Yalku.

I rented snorkeling equipment, reluctantly leaving my passport as collateral, and returned to the beach road, parking at a closed-up and apparently unoccupied house a third of a mile up the beach from the Ramos house. I changed into my bathing suit, and ten minutes later I — was floating twenty yards off the Ramos beach, interested in the gray ray that flopped across the sandy seafloor six or seven feet beneath me, but even more interested in the scene on the Ramos terrace. Two large, muscular, dark-haired men in chinos and polo shirts were seated in the shade of the house, one on a chaise and one in a deck chair, and a third man in a skimpy bathing suit-I recognized him from the now all-too-familiar head of hair-sat stretched out on a chair in the sun.

For fifteen minutes I swam slowly back and forth, like a U-boat off Scotland, hoping the two guards, if that's what they were-was one of them Jorge? would go inside the house. Finally one of them did get up, but the other one stayed put. The one who went inside, however, returned shortly with a couple of bottles, it looked like, and another object. The second man then joined him at a round table where they both seated themselves and began to do something with the unidentifiable object. A deck of cards? No, the motions were not card-playing motions. When the two seemed to become more deeply engrossed in their activity, I moved in closer to shore. Suter now seemed to be looking my way, so I lifted my mask, pointed theatrically at my upper lip, then vigorously and repeatedly shot Suter the finger. When I saw him stiffen and continue to stare at me, I pulled my mask back down and resumed an easy breaststroke in a northerly direction.

A moment later, when I glanced his way, Suter stood up, slipped out of his bathing trunks, and headed toward me in a leisurely way. With the sun above him, he was magnificent to behold. But now his beauty kindled not appreciation or desire in me, just sudden anger. What a careless, destructive man he was.

And when he reached me and chimed, "Strachey, I thought you'd never show up!" it was all I could do to keep from swatting him with my snorkeling mask.

I snarled, "You are getting people killed! Do you know that?" Startled, Suter said,

"Who? Now who's been killed?" "Why, Nelson Krumfutz and Tammy Pam Jameson and Hugh Myers! Suter, you dumb fuck! What did you tell Jorge that you told me?"

Suter lost his coordination for an instant and nearly slipped under the water. He recovered, gestured urgently toward the north, and as we both began to swim that way, he said breathlessly, "They knew you were here on Wednesday.

They asked me what I told you. I told them I made up a story to throw you off."

He watched for my reaction as he swam.

"You made up the drug-smuggling story? All of it?"

"The part about Nelson Krumfutz and Hugh Myers, sure. I thought you'd be smart enough to be scared off by the whole drug-gang angle. These are not people you want to want to play with, even a little, and I wanted to impress that on you, Strachey. That's all I meant to do. And the Ramoses do have drug-gang connections. Not in Pennsylvania though. Just in Washington and Alexandria."

I looked back toward the Ramos house. The two men were still seated, absorbed in whatever they were doing. "Well, Jim, you miscalculated. You miscalculated badly."

"They actually killed Nelson and Tammy Pam?" Suter said, spitting seawater.

"Well, of course they did! Somebody in Washington was telling them that I was not only competent but dogged, so they couldn't risk Nelson's coming up with a convincing denial. They had to kill Nelson and Hugh Myers, not because they were witnesses to drug smuggling, but because they were witnesses to your lie.

And the Ramoses decided that once 1 uncovered your lie, I would go after the real and even worse crime that the bunch of you were involved in. For Christ's sake, Suter, don't you understand how vicious and remorseless the Ramoses are? You tell me how savage they are, but you don't act like you really understand it. Jesus!"

Suter stopped swimming and looked at me. We were close enough to shore now for our feet to touch bottom. We stood there in the crystalline blue water, the Caribbean sun blazing down on us, and he said, "You know what really happened, don't you?"

"A lot of it, yes. You can fill me in on the rest."

"How did you figure it out?"

"A number of people provided information that I pieced together. That's usually the way an investigation goes-a lot of digging, a certain amount of luck. In my asking around about you, Jim, Carmen LoBello was especially helpful."

Suter actually had the decency to blush. "Carmen's pissed off at me, I suppose."

"You don't suppose it. You know it. And let me tell you something else, Suter. I think I noticed a small sore on my upper lip yesterday. If you gave me herpes, the Ramoses are going to feel like Rosie O'Donnell in your life next to me."

"I seriously doubt that," he said mildly. "Anyway, I wasn't oozing viral fluids on Wednesday, so you're probably safe. Look, Strachey, I've made a decision. It looks like I really have no choice. I'm ready to take you up on your offer. Get me together with some uncorrupted authority, if you can find one-I'll take a chance, I guess, on Janet Reno's Justice Department-and I'll tell what I know in return for a chance just to disappear and start over."

"Oh, you've made that decision, have you? When did you make it?"

"Just now." Suter looked back at the two men bent over the table on the Ramos terrace. "I'd have made the decision an hour ago if I had known you were going to show up and rescue my ass. But I had no way of knowing you were going to find me irresistible a second time. I guess I'm just a lucky so-and-so. Now, how do we get out of here?"

I looked up at the men on the terrace and said, "I don't know. How do we?"

"Is your car nearby?"

"Just up the beach."

"Jaime and Ramon are absorbed in their dominoes. It will be fifteen minutes before they notice that I'm not here. Let's go."

"You're naked."

He shrugged. "Have you got an extra pair of shorts and a T-shirt?"

"Sure. But I don't know about shoes that will fit. And whatever else we'll need to get you on a plane at Cancun. Your passport, for instance."

Suter began to swim again, faster this time, and I swam with him. "We've got one stop to make, "where I can pick up clothes and documents. Anyway, we're not going to Cancun. As soon as they realize I'm gone, Jaime and Ramon will notify the Ramoses, and they'll be watching for me at the airports in Cancun and Merida and probably Chetumal. There's another way out of here that I've been working on since we spoke on Wednesday. It'll take more time than flying to Miami, but it's uncomplicated and I know the people involved-they're actually competitors of the Ramoses-and I know this will work."

I said, "Don't tell me. We're going to be driven for four and a half days in the back of a truck to the outskirts of San Diego, where we'll crawl under a chain-link fence by the light of the moon and hope we're not ripped apart by Border Patrol rottweilers."

Suter looked at me as he swam, his wet locks gleaming in the hot light. "No, what I have in mind is easier than that-and a lot more romantic. We'll be traveling by sea. We can cuddle naked under the stars, Strachey, and make love again."

What a piece of work he was. "Jesus, Suter, do you really call what we did the other night making love?" He seemed to hear what I said, but Suter did not meet my eye and did not reply. "Anyway, I told my boyfriend I wouldn't screw around with you again. So that's that. Forget it. What we can do tonight is have a long, informative talk. With you doing most of the talking and all of the informing."

"I can see that you're going to insist on being in charge. Doesn't your boyfriend get tired of that? It really seems to me, Strachey, that you've got some control issues to work out."

I ignored this drollery-if that's what it was; you never knew with Suter-and soon we came to the deserted house where I had parked my rental car. We walked out of the water and across the beach. A small group of nude sunbathers lay on towels twenty or thirty yards away, some with their heads beneath makeshift palm-frond shelters, but none seemed to show any interest in us.

Suter and I shared the one towel I had with me, then quickly dressed, with Suter slipping into the extra briefs, khakis, and T-shirt I'd brought along. The pants were a little loose around his slim hips, so I gave him my belt to hold his drawers up. Suter crouched in the backseat as we passed the Ramos house. I stopped at the main highway while he hopped into the front seat, and I followed his directions north up Highway 307 toward the resort and retirement town of Playa del Carmen. I made a quick stop to return the snorkeling gear and retrieve my passport, and then-like all the other maniacal drivers on the two-lane highway-we moved fast.

Half an hour later, on the outskirts of Playa del Carmen, Suter returned to the backseat and crouched down again-he said the Ramoses had people working for them everywhere on the Yucatan coast-and directed me down a muddy road with ruts like canyons and into a compound where the road dead-ended.

Suter conversed briefly in Spanish with a middle-aged man in work clothes something about a boat and a trip and the weather. Suter told me he'd be right back, he had some phone calls to make-it did not reassure me that apparently I was not to overhear these conversations-and then he disappeared into a bright blue, one-story cement house with bars on all the windows.

I climbed out of the sweltering car and stood looking around. There wasn't much to see, just the house and a high cement wall around it with shards of glass embedded on top. The workman stood impassively next to the side door of the house, smoking a cigarette, and, it appeared, waiting for Suter.

I said, "Buenas tardes."

"Buenas tardes, " the man replied.

I gazed some more at the wall.

Suter returned a few minutes later wearing his own khakis, T-shirt, and leather sandals and carrying a large black canvas suitcase. He handed me my clothes and said, "Get your stuff out of the car. Manuel will return the Chevy to the rental agency. We're being picked up."

"I believe I have to turn the car in. And under the terms of the rental agreement, I'm the only person authorized to drive it." Suter smiled. "Just give Manuel the keys. It'll be fine." Suter pulled a roll of U.S. bills out of his pants pocket, peeled off four fifties, and handed them to Manuel.

"The keys are in the ignition," I said. "I guess I'm not the boss after all."

"Sure you are," Suter said, showing me his famous teeth- and cold sore.

Seconds later, a decrepit VW Bug, with one dented gray fender and one dented green one, pulled into the compound. The driver was a slender, tanned bleached blond in scruffy cutoffs. He had a tattoo of three intertwined nasturtiums on his left shoulder. He looked Californian, but Suter greeted the man in Spanish, which, when the blond replied, sounded like his native language.

I rode in the front seat with the driver and Suter slouched in the back, our bags upended on either side of him. After ten minutes of bumping and sliding up and clown a series of un-paved back roads north of town, we came to a simple wooden house on the seaside that appeared deserted. We quickly carried our bags around the house, where a small boat was beached. The blond unlocked the beachside door to the small house and soon carried out an outboard motor. After he had resecured the house, we shoved the boat into the water and the blond attached the motor to it. We climbed aboard with our bags. The blond got the motor going and soon we were headed north. "What's this from?" I asked Suter. "The Old Man and the Sea? Kon-Tiki?"

He grinned and said, "It's a Carnival cruise, Strachey. Romance on the high seas. I'll be your Kathie Lee, if you'll let me."

The blond cracked a little smile. I said nothing until we rounded a palm-lined point, and there looming ahead of us, bobbing on the light swell, was a forty- or fifty-foot cabin cruiser.

"Oh, I see," I said. "That looks comfortable enough."

"It is," Suter said.

"Where are we headed? Key West? Miami?"

"No, we'll soon be on our way to La Coloma."

"Where's that? Florida?"

"Cuba."

All I could think to reply was "None of this would surprise Timothy Callahan."

Suter said, "It's simple. Nobody will be watching for us in Havana. From there we fly to Mexico City-there are several flights a day-and then on to Washington. A piece of cake."

"If you say so, Jim." I wondered again what Timmy would make of this twist out of Maclnnes or Ludlum, and what I should make of it.