The Marchand Woman

Chapter 7

They made the transfer uncomfortably in a heavy chop forty miles off San Juan. A line came across from the catamaran weighted by a small grappling hook; Cielo’s crew drew the two boats together and with great care they cabled the money sacks across by a breeches-buoy system. Then they used the dinghy and everyone got soaking wet.

When the ketch turned about and headed back into the Gulf toward the Mexican town from which it had been rented, the three men aboard her were newcomers to her deck. Cielo and his entourage ensconced themselves along the rails of the catamaran and watched her go. The ketch slid quickly into the darkness, running without lights. A good vessel; they’d never see it again.

It wasn’t a storm, just a wind; the men stood on the open decks drying out in the warm breeze. Someone revved the engines and the catamaran’s stern went down as she wheeled toward home. Cielo with his head thrown back counted stars and felt gloomy. Before sunrise they’d arrive on the coast; the boat had only left port a half day earlier and this was its home registry so there would be no customs inspection, not for a brief fishing foray. The ransom would go ashore without trouble.

Julio was on the half-rotted little dock to greet him: a bear’s embrace. “Hermano — I meant to be aboard the catamaran to meet you but my plane from Mexico was late.”

“No harm.” Cielo batted his brother about the shoulders and they watched the men file ashore. The money sacks went into the station wagon; two other cars stood aslant on the coast road and there wasn’t any traffic at this hour — it wasn’t yet daylight. The catamaran’s captain, who was Vargas’ cousin, shook Cielo’s hand and exposed his teeth in a piratical grin and went away to drive his boat back to San Juan. On the lonely coast Cielo studied the sea and the sky and the mountains; then he spoke to his men. “You know where to wait. Don’t show yourselves. I’ll be along by noon.”

The men — Vargas, young Emil Draga, Luz, the rest — climbed into the two sedans and Cielo watched them draw away. Beside him Julio hoicked and spat. “The old man is worked up.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“He’s angry, I mean.”

Cielo opened the car door and noticed approvingly that the interior dome light didn’t go on. Disconnected. Julio was good at that sort of detail.

The money was heavy. There was so much of it in the back of the station wagon that the car bottomed on the ruts. Julio drove very slowly and without lights until they got onto the paved surface. Then he turned it east, built up the speed and switched on the headlamps in a hollow. The Michelins hissed metallically.

Cielo leaned back against the headrest and rolled his head to the left to watch his brother’s profile. Julio just now was possessed of a sort of Wagnerian sadness. It meant very little; in a moment he might be bursting with laughter. Cielo watched him squint against the oncoming headlights of a truck. Julio had skin like rough concrete, large greasy pores on his nose, a drooping mustache like a Mexican bandit’s. He’d gone mostly bald; there was a black monk’s fringe around the back of his head. He was two years Cielo’s senior but had always deferred to Cielo’s intellect, even when they were children.

“How did the old man’s grandson behave?”

“He went wild once — killing the American boy.”

“Perhaps it was for the best.” Abruptly Julio glanced at him and smiled. He had a very good smile: It changed his face radically, surprising strangers, often changing their minds about his character. “Is it really that much money?”

“We counted it.”

“Dios. Hard to believe.”

“It’s not as if it’s ours to piddle with.”

“No. Not yet, anyway.”

Julio wrenched the wheel and a battered car shot past on the left, going too fast for the curves. “Christ. Puerto Ricans make the worst drivers in the world. It’s a wonder they’re not all dead.”

Cielo had been watching the overtaking car but it shot on out of sight and he relaxed. He was thinking how ironic it would be to be hijacked here on the highway by petty robbers. What a surprise they’d get when they went into the back of the wagon.

Every security precaution was laid on, no matter how redundant. Julio drove clear into Rio Piedras and eased the wagon into the down ramp of an office building’s garage; stopped at the automatic lift-bar, extracted the computer ticket from the machine, waited for the bar to rise, drove in and parked in a vacant slot. Then Cielo waited by the wagon, a bit unnerved, while his brother walked among the parked cars in the dim silent cavern and disappeared beyond a thick pillar. Shortly thereafter a four-door Mercedes slid forward through the gloom and stopped in the aisle just behind the parked wagon. Julio unlocked the trunk, throwing the lid open. They had a look around to make sure they were unobserved; then with a good deal of grunting and whooshing they transferred the money sacks into the trunk of the Mercedes. It made a tight squeeze and the sedan went right down on its springs. Julio slammed the trunk lid, tested it and grinned. They drove out of the garage at dawn, paying at the booth, merging into the light early traffic. They ran westward, retracing their route as far as the Dorado turnoff; Julio turned toward the sea, driving with one eye on the mirror. No one followed. Julio said, “No trouble besides the American boy?”

“One of the Marines wanted to be difficult. We had to keep reins on him. But he wasn’t hurt. I’m amazed how well it all went. I mean, one or two got dysentery — that’s unavoidable. I don’t like to think about how their families suffered. But it’s over now, for them.”

Cielo picked at a fingernail, squinting through the windshield. Everything was murky in the half light. A tentative drizzle misted the glass. They drove through the palm forest and up past the private airfield and the entrance to the Dorado Beach resort; on along a rutted dirt side track, several miles looping toward the cliffs — undergrowth scratched the sides of the car and Julio said, “Maybe someone forgot something, left a clue behind. We won’t know that for a while. The old man’s plans remind me of those guaranteed roulette systems, you know? The roulette wheel never heard of them... I’m just nervous, pay me no attention. The boy shouldn’t have died, but...”

“No,” Cielo agreed, “the boy shouldn’t have died. We’ll all do some time in Purgatory for that.”

“But tactically it may have been right.”

“Maybe we should tell the old man to his face that he’s dreaming.”

“We can’t do that.”

Cielo changed the subject. “Have you seen Soledad?”

“No, I told you, I just got in from Mexico. I did talk to her on the telephone. She’s anxious about you. I told her you’d see her today.”

“I wonder if Elena got rid of her cold.”

“You’d better stop in town and buy presents for them.”

“You’re right, I’ll do that. Thanks.”

“I know,” Julio said. “You’ve had a lot on your mind.”

The gate guard recognized the car of course but it didn’t cause him visibly to relax; he wasn’t paid to take things for granted. Julio rolled the window down and the guard stooped to search their faces. No words were exchanged. The guard merely retreated to his post out of the rain. There was the noise of electric motors, gears gnashing; the iron gates swung open with stately slow ease and Julio steered the stocky car through them, up the winding drive amid oleanders and bougainvillea, palms and cacti, the oversized rock garden that served, as if by coincidence, to screen the house from the view of anyone on the landward side of it. A man in a gray uniform and black Sam Browne was walking two Dobermans on leashes. He watched the car go by and dipped his head an inch and a half to Julio, who said, “You’d think the old man was already in Batista’s palace.”

“He never will be,” Cielo said.

“You think we should tell him that, don’t you.”

“Somebody ought to.”

“He wouldn’t listen.”

Cielo got out of the car and looked up at the house. It wasn’t excessive or even prepossessing; whitewashed stucco, curved red tiles on the low roof.

The old man came out to meet them. Julio opened the deck lid and the three of them contemplated the money. The old man opened one of the sacks and fingered a few banknotes. Then his eyes flicked at Cielo like a lizard’s tongue. “Well done.” Then he turned away — he’d seen money before, “Come inside. Have you had breakfast?”

They ate on the terrace overlooking the sea. The veranda roof and the screen kept the rain out. The breakfast came in courses; with rigid Old World courtesy the old man refrained from discussing affairs of importance until the dishes had been cleared away and the second coffees served.

The old man, Jorge Felipe Vandermeer Draga-Ruiz, was a sly figure, full of calculation and insinuation. He was gaunt and had once been quite tall; now he stooped. The backs of his hands were flecked with cyanotic age spots and his flesh hung a little loose. His hair was a bit thin but hadn’t receded and he kept it dyed black. He had a ropy chicken neck and a querulous way of thrusting his jaw forward and chewing on his teeth. An engaging grin and an archaic manner of gallantry; pride, and a capacity for cruelty, and the vanity of polished shoes and good clothes and cared-for fingernails.

“It was Emil who disrupted the plan? Tell me the truth.”

“It was Emil.”

The old man snarled. “What, have the termites got at his brain?”

A woman with a well-developed mustache came out of the house with a pot of coffee and warmed their cups. Cielo had never seen her before; the old man had a staff as big as a hotel’s. Three quarters of the house was underground, buried back in the cliff, and there were coach houses and servants’ quarters scattered around the property — the place was like an iceberg, you didn’t see much but there was a lot of it.

When the woman departed Julio said, “A man who disobeys one order will disobey another.” He stared at the old man contentiously.

“This isn’t the Wehrmacht,” Cielo said, trying to placate them. “And Emil, Jr., didn’t train with us. He’s young.”

“What you’re saying is it’s my fault this happened. I saddled you with him. Well I thought he might learn something about manhood from you. I meant you no disservice.”

“The American’s dead,” Cielo put in. “Whipping Emil won’t revise that.”

“Whipping,” the old man said, “doesn’t come into it. No one is going to whip Emil.”

Julio stroked his bandit’s mustache and watched Cielo ingenuously, eyes like black olives. Abruptly and brashly Julio said, “If we punish him we make him our enemy, he’ll come at our kidneys one night with a knife. But if we don’t punish him we’ll only encourage his contempt for what he believes is our weakness. Either way he’ll betray us sooner or later. I don’t give a damn whose blood relation he is.” And his eyes rolled back to the old man again.

Cielo sucked in his breath. It wasn’t the proper time for such a confrontation.

The old man took it calmly enough. “What, did you expect we could retake Havana without firing a shot? Don’t tell me after all the blood that’s been shed you’re turning into mangy intellectuals, you two. Pacifists, is it?”

“No, we’re soldiers,” said Cielo. “But we weren’t at war with the American Peace Corpsman.”

“Emil won’t betray his own family.” Cunning thinned the old man’s eyes. “The two of you would welcome an excuse to ease him out, wouldn’t you. His presence threatens your authority.”

Cielo felt a twinge of disembodied pain. He felt trapped between his brother and the old man. He was losing ground, as he always did before the old man: Draga might as well have been his father, he always made Cielo feel eleven years old. He was like a Renaissance cardinal.

He made a feeble attempt: “We must do something, you know.”

“Leave my grandson to me. I’ll make sure he understands.”

Julio spoke up resolutely: “We must take a position, that’s all there is to it.”

Draga frowned at Julio, then turned to his brother.

“What do you say, Cielo? You know I’ve always trusted you.”

“With all due respect, sir. We believe we are the ones to settle the matter.”

“You have the floor.”

Cielo drew a breath deep inside, expanding with reluctant resolve. He knew he must step in, if only to protect his older brother. The old man would accept it from Cielo — he must have sensed Cielo’s lack of ambition. Julio was another case and his presence at this meeting goaded Cielo into taking a stronger position. “You’ll recall none of the hostages was to be killed,” he said finally.

“There was an excellent reason for that. One can’t very well litter the landscape with American corpses and expect the Americans to reconfirm their neutrality afterward. I don’t expect support from Washington but we must have their assurance that they will keep hands off. That’s why this crime distresses me so deeply.”

And never mind that an innocent boy died, Cielo thought sorrowfully. To the old man the boy was a casualty of war. He could hear himself thinking: Why don’t we tell him the truth? He looked at his brother, expecting a mocking expression; fortunately Julio had put his nose in his coffee cup.

Cielo said, “The thing would have worked out according to plan if I hadn’t been saddled with your grandson.”

The old man went very calm. “Yes?”

“From here on I’ll move only with my own people. Not your grandson, not anybody from this villa. I know this deprives you of eyes and ears — I’ll keep you abreast. But I must maintain absolute discipline and I can only do it by excluding outsiders.”

“Emil is hardly an outsider.”

“He is to us. He wasn’t in the Sierra Maestra — he didn’t fester in Fidel’s prisons.”

He heard the breath sawing through Julio’s nostrils, saw the encouragement and surprise in Julio’s eyes.

The silence stretched until he thought his nerves would crack. Then the old man put on a brittle smile. “This demand — is it non-negotiable, as they say? Or may I have a moment for rebuttal?”

Cielo sagged back. It hadn’t worked.

The old man pushed both palms against the table, rising to his feet. He began to pace, chewing on his teeth, emitting hard little bursts of dogmatic thought:

“The organism’s a fragile thing. I should have checked into a hospital long ago. They tell me I’ve got to have surgery for this and that — hernia, prostate, whatever. We’re all dying, aren’t we? I’m sure I shall be forced to settle for the limited satisfaction of having set things in motion. I won’t live long enough to see these efforts come to fruition. I envy you — you’ve both got so much more future than I have.”

Cielo had heard it before. He didn’t dare look at his watch.

“That a man like me should have instigated this movement is peculiar, isn’t it? I never took much interest in politics. I’ve no desire to correct injustices or reform the world. In fact I’ve never viewed the human plight as anything one ought to improve — as Léautaud said, I’d like to be a lover of mankind but unfortunately I have a good memory... This started with me because I wanted to redeem the family name by recovering our lost properties. The arrogance of that snaggle-bearded jackass, expropriating things he’d never have the ability to build... I suppose they’ve learned their lesson under Castro — they’re far worse off now than they were before, they’ve got no shred of dignity left but they brought it on themselves. You know, I begin to see as I approach the grave that I never honestly cared whether I reoccupied the mansion in Havana. Cuba wasn’t my home, it was our family’s corporate headquarters. Even if we win this fight in my lifetime I’ll have no wish to leave this house. Yet I’ve gone on with the fight. Do you know why? It’s a matter of challenge. It’s not very different from raiding a corporation — you don’t need the money, you do it to prove yourself.”

The old man paused at the screen. “The rain’s stopped.” Then he swiveled slowly and paced again, hands in his pockets. “I could have paid for this operation out of my pocket. The kidnapings were necessary not to raise money but to legitimize the raising of money. The question would have been raised as to who was financing our movement. There d have been inquiries — that might have led them here. After all, how many expatriate Cubans are wealthy enough to mount the operation we’re planning? But now we have ten million in cash and they know where it came from, so it won’t occur to them to seek its source. If necessary we’ll be able to spend twenty million. Spread it around and no one will notice the discrepancy. Clever, isn’t it?”

Momentarily pleased with himself, he walked out to the corner and pressed a switch. The screens slid up into the veranda roof — a soft humming of motors. The old man hunched his shoulders in the breeze and stared down at the sea. “I won’t live to see it finished. Emil will.”

Cielo glanced at his brother. Julio rolled his eyes toward Heaven and shook his head.

The old man turned to face them. “My blood is in him. I want him to be there. To see it when that infamous regime of thieves and pimps is brought down. My satisfaction, you see, is in knowing Emil will be there — to slap Fidel Castro in the face with the name of Draga.”

Such foolishness, Cielo thought sadly.

“You will keep him by your side. Discipline him if you must. But you haven’t the authority to dismiss him. I don’t grant it to you. Understood?”

Cielo said, “We had to try. You can see why.”

“Your positions are threatened by his presence.”

“No,” Julio replied. “It is our discipline that is threatened.”

“Nonsense. Discipline him. I’ll help — I’ll remind him he is under your orders and can expect no protection from me.”

“You’re protecting him right now,” Cielo pointed out.

“Don’t split hairs.”

Julio made a face but held his tongue. Julio had dreams of political power — and of course Emil was a threat to that.

The old man approached. He stood before Cielo and addressed him directly, excluding Julio. “I trust you.”

“Thank you.” He felt miserable but he met Draga’s watery eyes. By playing along with the farce he was, in an ironic way, betraying the old man. It filled him with guilt.

“I trust you,” the old man said, “not to try to circumvent Emil after my death.”

“And what if he turns against us?”

“Then you’ll do what you must. I’m not an oracle, nor a psychiatrist. I think he has it in him to be a leader but he wants more training, more discipline, more experience. These things you can give him.”

Emil might have the makings of a tyrant, Cielo thought, but he didn’t have it in him to be a leader. The old man was wrong — blinded by the sentimentality of blood relation. But no purpose would be served by arguing the point now. Familial prejudice was stronger than reason.

I’ll have to give him my word now — and break it later. Dismally Cielo said, “All right.”

The old man straightened — now he was brusque: “The next step is the acquisitions. You know enough to be circumspect. You’ve got my list of dealers? Yes, of course — you wouldn’t have misplaced those. Very well, I hope to hear from you.”

Cielo stood up with Julio at his side. The old man gravely shook their hands; Cielo saw a wistful sadness in Draga’s eyes when they withdrew.

At the front of the house a Volkswagen was drawn up, keys in the ignition. They settled into it and when Julio put it in gear he said, “The old man’s still quite an adventurer.”

“I suppose we’ll just have to string him along.” Cielo fastened his shoulder belt. “We’ll buy the ammunition and the ordnance. After all, we’ve got the money. We may as well go through the motions — it’ll please him.”

“Do we owe him so much?”

“We owe him everything,” Cielo said, “beginning with our lives. Take me home first, then we’ll go on to meet the others.”

He wanted to see Soledad first — he needed to draw strength from her.

The smell of Soledad’s talc was thick in the room. He called out and heard her answer, faint in the back of the house; he went through and found her waiting for him, combing her fingers into her long dark hair and lifting it loosely, high above her head. She gave him a blinding smile and it immediately lifted his spirits.

“You see? I’m home unharmed. You can release the hostages.” He made a joke of it but after she kissed him, running her tongue around his mouth, she stepped back out of his grasp and hugged herself.

“What’s wrong?”

“You were gone so long,” she said.

“I’m back now.”

“For how long?”

“Who can say. What difference does it make? Lets take what we have.”

Her smile, then, was sweet and shy. Fourteen years, three children, and she still had the slender quickness of a fawn doe. She took his hand and led him to the bedroom.

He sat at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around the coffee cup and his eyes returned at intervals to the clock. When Soledad came into the room she made a face. “I wish you’d learn to put the toilet seat down.”

“Did Elena get over her cold?”

“Sure. It’s been weeks. She has a new boy friend. Very rich and fourteen years old.”

“I hope he doesn’t keep her out at night. At fourteen these days they’re more worldly than we were at twenty.”

“She has a head on her shoulders,” Soledad said. “She inherits that from — well, God knows not from you.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I don’t care if she retains her virginity—”

“At thirteen?” He was shocked.

“—but I do care that she not give it away too cheaply. I’ve told her that. She knows what I meant.”

“Por Dios.”

“Well it’s not the same world anymore, querido.”

“I feel old.”

“Not in bed, thank God.”

She was going past the table; he arrested her, reaching out for her hand, pulling her into his lap. Her arms slid around his neck and he tasted her mouth. The hoot of the VW’s horn outraged him. Soledad looked toward the window. “Julio?”

“Yes. I asked him in but he preferred to wait in the car. He’s reading a science fiction.”

“How long will you be?”

“I’ll be home tonight. Fairly late.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s something I have to do.”

“Something you don’t want to do.”

“Well it’s got to be taken care of.”

“Let someone else do it. Julio, Vargas.”

“It’s not something I could shift onto someone else.”

“Then I’m sorry, querido. I’ll go out and buy a bottle of Bourbon for tonight.”

“Two bottles,” he said on his way out the door.

Julio shifted down into second and made an abrupt unsignaled turn into a one-way street and stopped the VW almost immediately at the curb. Cielo twisted around in the seat to watch the boulevard. Traffic streamed past. No cars turned into the one-way street. If any had, Julio would have backed out into the boulevard and gone on his way, leaving the tail stranded halfway down the one-way street. It was a simple device designed to prevent pursuit, one of many in Julio’s bag of tricks. He was always the one who took the wheel; Cielo was a mediocre driver.

They went along Highway Three to the east, bottled in by heavy traffic as far as the El Verde turnoff where Julio turned south and picked up speed. In town they doubled back on several packed-earth streets; there was no tail and they emerged from the town with church bells ringing noon behind them. On the country road a horseman drove a bunch of cattle across, delaying them five minutes, and then they caught up with a farm tractor and couldn’t get past it until they were over a hill. The mountains ranged up ahead of them, tier upon tier, shades of pastel green. Sugar cane on the right, pasture on the left; Julio turned the VW into a narrow driveway between fences. There was the smell of manure.

Vargas and two others ranged along the porch of the farmhouse trying not to resemble lookouts. No weapons were in evidence but they were near at hand out of sight. Cielo walked along to the end of the porch. Julio sat down on the wooden bench, pressing back the dog ear on the page of his paperback galactic-empire saga. Vargas turned to go into the house and Cielo said, “Ask Kruger to come outside.” Old Draga had infected him with a paranoia about indoor microphones.

When Kruger came out Cielo said, “Any problems?”

“Luz was complaining there’s no television set. When do we go up to the camp?”

“Maybe tomorrow. Julio and Vargas will scout it first. We want to know if anybody’s been there.”

“Nobody’s likely to find it unless they know where to look. And the guards we left there—”

“The guards could be dead or in jail and there could be an ambush waiting for us,” Cielo said. “Let Julio scout it first — he knows how to go in for a look without being spotted.”

“You have a good head for security,” the German admitted. Kruger was slight, almost delicate with a little round head and wide thin lips that gave him an ascetic appearance. He talked with a Bavarian hiss. He was forty-six, much too young to have been a Nazi, but some of the others joshed him by greeting him with stiff-armed Heils and addressing him as Mein Führer. Kruger didn’t seem put off by it; he had a healthy sense of humor. At first he’d been a mercenary but the Bay of Pigs had made a believer of him.

Cielo said, “Keep your eye on Emil. I want him here at nightfall.”

“I understand.”

Darkness came. A light from the porch fell obliquely through the window bars, painting stripes across the floor. Emil stood at a cracked mirror in the hallway. A sprig of hair stood up disobediently at the back of his head, glistening with the water he’d used to try and stick it down. He was hacking at it with his palm.

Julio moved toward the door and Cielo faced Emil. The others had gone back to the kitchen; it was only the three of them, and Kruger who stood at the far end of the hall blocking it, his back to them and his shoulder propped casually against the doorframe. Emil at the mirror finally got his hair stuck down and turned to glance at Cielo. Something in Cielo’s expression betrayed him and Emil went rigid. His face, almost always studiedly calm, went slack and his thief’s eyes went restlessly around the room. Julio lifted the .44 Magnum revolver into sight and made a show of cocking it, the noise quite loud in the room. “Stand still now.”

Cielo walked toward Emil, a gun in his fist. He felt foolishly melodramatic. Emil flattened himself back against the wall. “What’s this? What’s this?”

Julio said, “I guess nobody trusts you, Emil. I’m sorry.”

The flash in Emil’s eyes, Cielo thought, was that of someone in the climax of orgasm.

They went out to the yard. “Bring his car around.”

Emil’s car was a sporty little Mustang convertible, dented here and there, the paint flaking off; it had seen better days. Kruger got in behind the wheel and Cielo pushed Emil into the back seat, feeling foolish with a gun in his hand.

Julio stood outside the car. “All right?”

Cielo nodded to him and Julio walked away to get into the VW. It followed the Mustang down the driveway and they went in convoy up the El Verde road through the town onto Highway Three; then a few miles of divided road and another turnoff to the seacoast road, passing through villages. The morning’s rain had left puddles in the chuckholes. They went out into the banana farms and Kruger stopped the car at the verge when Cielo tapped his shoulder. Kruger got out of the car; Julio’s VW stopped alongside and Kruger got into it and the VW drove away leaving Cielo alone in the Mustang with Emil. The keys dangled in the ignition. Cielo climbed out and reached for the keys, put them in his pocket and spoke. “Stay there. We’ll talk a minute.” Through the open door he kept the revolver pointed at Emil.

Emil, breathing through his open mouth, stared at him without blinking.

Cielo said, “Other people’s lives don’t seem to mean much to you but I wonder how you feel about your own.”

Emil’s mouth snapped shut. “I came here to get killed, not to listen to a speech.”

“Listen to this one and maybe you won’t get killed.” He studied his revolver. “So?”

“So I’ll listen.”

“I brought you out here as a favor to your grandfather. Otherwise I’d have had to shoot you in front of the others. You understand? It’s nothing to do with you — I don’t care if the others see this or not — but I prefer not to offend the old man.”

“That’s smart.”

“Don’t sneer, Emil. The order not to harm the hostages came from your grandfather, not from me. You knew that. It was your grandfather you disobeyed. He’s run out of patience with you. Just the same I owe him something — I’d rather not be the instrument of murder against his family, but he’s told me he won’t stand in the way of my disciplining you.”

“What do you want?” Emil feigned disinterest.

“I want you to remember that Julio and I are the padrones and that you are with us by our sufferance. I want you to learn, and never forget, who runs this outfit.”

“I believe my grandfather runs it.” Emil had a hot kind of courage and this icy calm was unlike him; Cielo stepped back a pace to keep his revolver out of Emil’s reach.

“Your grandfather is the President, so to speak, but I am the General. I give the orders in the field and he doesn’t countermand them. Am I getting through to you? When you volunteer to serve with an army you take orders from its generals, no matter who your grandfather is. Your grandfather understands that. I understand it. Now it’s time for you to understand it.”

Emil considered the Magnum. “You can’t teach a man much by killing him. Now it seems to me either you’re going to shoot me or you’re not. Which is it?”

“If you turn on us, sooner or later one of us will finish you. If that happens you won’t have an easy death. What if Julio gets at you, or Vargas? Vargas, for example, has a thing about pouring boiling water into a traitor’s ear through a funnel,” he lied. “You look unimpressed. All right — I’ll impress you.” And he clubbed Emil across the side of the head with the revolver.

It wasn’t a very hard blow but Emil fell back with a grunt and it dazed him enough so that he didn’t put up effective resistance when Cielo proceeded methodically to batter him with his boots, cracking a rib and bruising a kidney but not doing anything that would leave visible scars. A man of Emil’s vanity wouldn’t be able to live with that; he’d have to come back for revenge. This way perhaps Emil would get over the rage and chalk it up to lessons learned.

He nudged Emil to make sure he was awake. Emil uttered a sound and blinked up at him. “The point is,” Cielo said, “I can be just as hard as you when I need to be. And I’m a kitten beside Julio or Vargas.”

He tossed the car keys on Emil’s chest and walked away.

A few hundred yards round the bend he reached the Volkswagen. Julio, in the back seat, leaned forward to open the door for him. Cielo got in and they drove off. Kruger said, “All right?”

“Yes.”

Julio was dour. “What if he learns nothing from it?”

“Those who do not learn from history,” Cielo said airily, “are doomed to die from it.”

Kruger said, “I don’t trust Emil. I never will.”

“He understands power,” Cielo said, “and he understands fear. In any case, as long as the old man is alive we’re saddled with Emil.”

“And afterward?”

“Emil’s the sort who’ll destroy himself, I think. He may not even need any help from us.” Cielo sank back in melancholia. “The old man won’t live forever. Neither will any of us.”

Chapter 8

Glenn Anders unpacked his suitcase with the efficiency of long practice. It wasn’t merely his suitcase; it was, largely, his home.

At the bedside desk he swept aside the fan display of tourist folders and local guides — This Week in Mexico — and reached for the phone to buzz Rosalia’s room but before he touched it the instrument rang. Disquieted by the coincidence he picked it up tentatively. “Hello?”

“Anders?”

“Yes.”

“Wilkins.”

“Hello, George.”

“How’re they hangin’, old buddy?”

“All right.”

“O’Hillary asked me to brief you. Right now all right? I’m in the lobby.”

“Come on up.” Anders pushed the cradle down to break the connection. Then he dialed Rosalia’s number. “If you’re all beautiful and your pantyhose are on straight, come on down to my room. Bring your notebook. We’re getting a briefing from the station chief.” He hung up and glanced around the room. No possibility of its being bugged; he’d booked it at random. That was the best kind of security. He had no reason to suspect anyone might be interested in his conversations but when you went into any foreign country where you were known as an agent of the U.S. government you had to expect counterintelligence types to keep an eye on you as a matter of drill.

Rosalia’s tap; and as he opened the door to her he saw George Wilkins tramping forward in the corridor. Wilkins’ high long face developed a funereal smile as he followed the girl into the room.

Rosalia perched by the desk with her notebook, looking efficient, but the soft smile in her eyes betrayed something else and Wilkins seemed wise enough to spot it and cosmopolitan enough to refrain from comment.

“Welcome to the pits,” Wilkins said. “I suppose I should say something like that. By way of official greeting and all.”

“How’re things?”

“Tedium, ever tedium. I wish somebody would try to overthrow the government around here. At least it would give us something to take an interest in.”

Anders said, “Did you know this Lundquist kid?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“Allerton did, I think. Over at the consulate.”

“We’ll talk to him. What have we got?”

“Not much since we sent the last report to O’Hillary. They haven’t turned up but one or two items out of that old oil camp.” Wilkins talked with a slow prairie twang. Kansas? “A Gauloise butt, for instance, and a corner of a page, out of a paperback book. Been dog-eared a few times and broke off, you know how they do. A whole gang of bright scholars are trying to find out what book it’s from. Only got about four complete words on it and bits of a few others so it may take them a while and then I expect they’ll come up with something like Gone with the Wind or How to Have a Happier Sex Life.”

“It’s in English?”

“Yeah. We already knew they spoke English, didn’t we. Let’s see, what else. Oh yes — debriefing on Velez, he came up with an item—”

Rosalia looked up from her notebook. “Velez who?”

“Juan-Pedro Velez. Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. One of the hostages, you know. The one that had to go into the hospital with dysentery.”

“Coals to Newcastle,” Anders observed.

“He’s all right now. They turned him loose yesterday and we interrogated him. Anyhow he seems to remember one of the gang talked Spanish with a German accent. Thin guy, he says. Not very big.” Wilkins blinked slowly; he looked tired. “They’re scraps but it’s the best we can do right now. Any of it help you?”

“Who knows,” Anders said.

He told Rosalia to go around and see the consulate attaché who’d known Robert Lundquist. Nothing would come of that but he wanted to accrete more of an impression of the dead boy. Why had Lundquist been chosen as the exemplary victim? Was it simply because he’d been the least important of the hostages or had there been something abrasive about him that might have provoked them to kill him? If the latter, would this tell him anything about the nature of the terrorists? He doubted it but believed in thoroughness.

She was putting on wraparound sunglasses. Anders glanced at her notebook. “Your handwriting’s an atrocity.”

“I can read it,” she said defiantly. She slipped the notebook into her shiny red plastic handbag.

“They used to teach us that penmanship was a matter of communication, not self-expression. But I guess that was back in the days when you still hadn’t grown a chest.”

“Yes, you’re so old you’re creaking with age.” With her hand at the doorknob she said, “If I get drunk tonight will you promise to take advantage of me?”

He spent a largely fruitless afternoon shambling around Mexico City interviewing informants he’d cultivated over the years. He hadn’t expected anything to come of it. He had nothing like the network of contacts that the local station personnel had developed. Anders had a few people in each of most of the Third World capitals — acquaintances rather than agents; they weren’t spies but favors were exchanged and Anders had built up a rudimentary list. One of the men he went to see was an export broker of the kind who admitted to a degree of knowledge about the traffic in arms and narcotics. Another was a printer who vehemently claimed he did not deal in false passports and identity papers. Neither of them purported to know anything about the terrorists.

At four he went around to the Federal Police barracks and was granted an audience with Chief Inspector Ainsa who was burly and sly — he might have been assigned to his role by Central Casting. Ainsa had charge of Mexico’s harbor police activities. Glenn Anders had not known him before so there was the monotony of establishing credentials and exchanging amenities; then Anders said, “Ambassador Gordon’s a yachtsman. He had a feeling the boat was a ketch. They were blindfolded but I suppose sailors have intuitions for these things. I don’t know much about it myself — a ketch is usually what, a forty-or fifty-foot sailboat?”

“They vary in size,” Ainsa said. “It’s a two-masted design with the taller mast forward and the rear mast above the rudder. In English cómo se dice — mizzenmast. Quite graceful. Usually there is a low cabin amidships. They tend to be long and narrow, being designed for speed and sport rather than capacity.”

“This one must have been big enough to accommodate about twenty people.”

“That’s possible. With some crowding below decks.”

“It occurred to me,” Anders said, treading gingerly because it wouldn’t do to get the policeman’s back up, “that perhaps the boat was stolen or hired.”

“Hired? Ah, you mean rented. Yes, I see.”

“It’s hard to picture a terrorist group owning a sporty sailboat.”

“Yes.”

“There can’t be too many vessels of that size stolen or available for hire in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Ainsa’s smile was indicative of low cunning. It was a pose, for nothing he said was suggestive of stupidity. “Especially,” he said, “ketches stolen or rented during, say, the month of August?”

“That would be the framework,” Anders agreed. “I’ve already asked the United States police to check around the Texas and Louisiana ports.”

“Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia...”

“We’re checking them all.”

“Leave it to me. I’ll put out the word immediately.” Ainsa stood up and pressed against the desk to reach across for Anders’ hand.

He called Rosalia from a pay phone. “What did Allerton tell you?”

“He only met Lundquist once or twice. Sorting out his papers when he first arrived for the Peace Corps. He couldn’t tell me anything we didn’t already know. I’ll type up the notes for you but I certainly didn’t see anything in it. Incidentally Mr. Wilkins says they’ve identified that torn page from the paperback book. It’s a science-fiction novel.”

“Good grief.”

“One of those adventures about intergalactic wars or something.”

It came as no particular surprise to Anders. Once in Nam he’d dived into a bunker and thrown himself flat, terrified by the exploding rockets and bullets cracking everywhere; he’d looked up and discovered a grunt who, in the midst of that madness, was reading a paperback Western shoot-’em-up, enthralled.

Rosalia on the telephone said, “I’ve got it all doped out. The whole thing. You know what we’re up against, don’t you?”

“No. What?”

“A nest of aliens. Martian invaders.”

“Right,” he said. “I’m on my way to Wilkins’ office. Meet me there in an hour. Stop by the newspaper on your way and see if they’ll let you have another photocopy of that ransom note.”

He went along toward the embassy on foot; it was rush hour and he made better progress that way. Traffic was clotted in the boulevards and there was a dry chill in the thin air. Two blocks short of the embassy he espied Harry Crobey.

He wouldn’t have noticed Crobey in the throng of commuters but for the peculiar roll of Crobey’s limp. It gave him a swaying gait that made him noticeable because he didn’t move with the same rhythm as the others in the crowd.

“Harry.”

Crobey gave him a startled glance; a bit furtive, Anders thought. A quick distracted smile twitched back and forth across Crobey’s lips. Crobey shook his hand; the crowd milled past, jostling them both.

“Let’s get out of this jam.” Anders selected the empty pocket beside an office building’s revolving door and pried his way toward the opening. The building was emptying out and people eddied past them into the stream.

Crobey seemed to have gone a bit to seed but then, Anders recalled, Crobey had always managed to look that way. “What’re you doing here, Harry?”

“You know. This and that. You look good — lost some weight.”

“Not as much as I ought to.” Anders looked at his watch. “They told me you’d signed on in Ethiopia.”

“Contract ran out. So did I.”

“You never did have much of an attention span.” Anders studied the hard face. “I didn’t know Mexico was at war with anybody.”

“Somebody told me it was a nice place for a holiday.” Far back around the edges of Crobey’s accent you could detect a residue of sooty Liverpudlian squalor.

Suspicion ran high in Anders. He did not buy coincidences right off the shelf. “I want to talk to you.”

“Sure, Glenn.”

“I’m on my way to the embassy. Keep me company.”

“Can’t,” Crobey said, “I’ve got an appointment. Where are you staying?”

He felt a keen reluctance to let Crobey out of his sight but he had no weapon with which to hold the man. Anders considered the options and conceded. “The Hilton.”

It provoked Crobey’s caustic smile. Everybody in the trade knew the stale joke — two secret agents meet by chance in the lobby: “I say, old chap, this is frightfully embarrassing but can you tell me, is this the Tel Aviv Hilton or the Cairo Hilton?”

Crobey said, “Drinks then. What time will you be free? I’ll come by the Hilton.”

“Make it nine.”

“See you.” Crobey thrust his prow into the crowd. Anders watched him sway out of sight.

Wilkins said, “I just got off the scrambler with Sturdevant in Buenos Aires.”

Anders sat down. His feet were tired. “Anything?”

“The politicals seem to be coalescing toward Paraguay. It looks like they’ll be taken in by one of those Bund groups on the Pampas. You know. Bunch of senile characters with brown pasts. We’ve had taps on their phones for years but the Bundists know it. They don’t use the phones for much except ordering groceries and selling their beef cattle. But there’s no sign of unusual activity there. We’d know it if they were planning to start World War Three.”

“Doddering Nazis in their seventies or eighties.” Anders shook his head. “They’re just waiting to die. They’ve got no wars left in them.”

Wilkins’ smile agreed with him, rueful and doleful as always — the man lived under a cloud of wry gloom. “Sturdevant asked me if you want him to bring one of the politicals in for questioning.”

“No. O’Hillary’s orders — we shadow them but keep hands off.” Anders resented having to wear reins and blinders but you didn’t kick up a nest until you found out how many and how virulent the hornets were.

Anders unfolded his copy of the list of the eleven politicals who’d been released from prisons at the terrorists’ behest. They were old-timers, most of them. Leaders from the early 1960s. One of them had tried to lead a commando force into Cuba to assassinate Castro in 1961; another had gone around systematically executing people who were suspected of having been followers of Ché Guevara in Bolivia and Ecuador. Some of them probably didn’t even know one another; the thing they had in common was their anti-Castro fanaticism. Now they’d been turned loose but apparently no one had made contact with them except the old Germans in Paraguay who were offering them not armies but refuges.

The only geographic spot all eleven politicals had in common was the airport at Buenos Aires to which, on the terrorists’ instructions, the politicals had been delivered at various times during the day following the murder of Robert Lundquist. But the airport had been covered by surveillance platoons and no one had spotted anything. The politicals came in, they were processed through, they were followed when they left. No one saw any of them make contact with anyone except the aged chauffeur who had collected all of them; the chauffeur was a deaf ex-Wehrmacht colonel who, under questioning, showed no reluctance to reveal his instructions. He’d been sent to B.A. by his employers in Paraquay who felt the politicals would need a hand of friendship and who had dispatched the chauffeur with small amounts of money to be given to each of the politicals along with an open invitation to join the German hosts on their Paraguayan estates. The way in which it was all done, openly and cynically, suggested that the German invitation was a matter of sympathy more than conspiracy. Two of the eleven politicals were themselves German; that probably contributed to the Bundists’ decision to offer a haven to the ex-prisoners.

“It’s one of two things,” Anders said. “Either it was a propaganda gesture or it was a smoke screen. If it was a propaganda gesture it was designed to show the world that the anti-Castro people still have friends. That would have some value, I guess, if it encouraged other people to get on the bandwagon. It’s the only political purpose I can see in this business because it’s becoming obvious the terrorists don’t have any real practical use for these eleven politicals. Most of them are has-beens anyway. Relics of the sixties.”

“That’s the way I see it,” Wilkins agreed.

“Or it could be a smoke screen. Maybe these guys are simply a little team of crooks who figured out a handy way to earn ten million dollars tax free.”

Bemusement seeped into Wilkins’ dewlappy eyes. “Now that would be funny. You think that’s what they are?”

“I don’t know. In any case I don’t think these eleven are going to lead us anywhere. Probably they don’t know any more than we do. But I guess we’ve got to maintain surveillance on them. It’ll be a waste of time but you have to go through the motions. Right now I imagine they’re sitting around a German ranch swapping yarns about the good old days.”

“Speaking of the good old days, guess who dropped in a little while ago?”

“Harry Crobey.”

“You saw him, then. Good. He was looking for you.”

“Was he now?”

Wilkins said, “You think he’s got anything to do with this?” He looked honestly surprised. “Crobey? Terrorists?”

“He’s a hired gun. He works for just about anybody.”

“These guys are circumspect. They wouldn’t hire a known mercenary.”

“Maybe that’s just why they would,” Anders said. “He agreed to meet me for a drink tonight. If he keeps the appointment I’d like to have him shadowed when he leaves the Hilton. Can you spare a few men and a couple of cars for a day or two? They’ll have to be good at it — Crobey’s not a fool.”

Wilkins scratched his throat and blinked dismally. “Crobey? No, I can’t see him tying up with that kind. He’s arrogant, he wouldn’t hire out to a gang of off-the-wall crazies.”

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“Maybe he came to get laid. Who knows. But I can let you have a surveillance team for a little while.” He picked up a letter opener and made a dour stab at a fingernail.

Rosalia was cross when he refused to take her with him. She wanted to meet Crobey because she’d heard some of the legends about him. Finally Anders compromised. She could wander into the bar at 9:45 and he’d introduce her. But he wanted time alone with the Englishman.

Crobey was more than punctual. When Anders arrived Crobey was already there in a corner banquette; probably he’d been here twenty minutes trying to spot ambushes or eavesdroppers before they could get set. A bit amused Anders said, “Been here long?”

“Just got here. How’ve you been?”

“Busy. You know how it goes.” Anders sat.

“Getting anywhere on this terrorist thing?”

“That’s pretty blunt, even for you.”

Crobey said, “I’m working on the same job. Let’s help each other.”

“This afternoon you pretended you didn’t want me to see you. What’s the game?”

“No game. You startled me on the street — I hadn’t expected to run into you there. I had something on my mind. But I wanted to see you.”

“You didn’t say so.”

“I hadn’t decided how to play it yet,” Crobey conceded.

That was plausible enough but Anders reserved judgment. Crobey was too good at looking you in the eye.

Crobey grinned. “I could ooze a little guile. Would that make you more comfortable?”

“Probably.”

“How far have you got?”

“It’s no good pumping me, Harry, I haven’t got any secrets for sale.”

“I was thinking more about the lines of barter.”

“What are you offering to swap?”

“I just had a talk with Ortega. He was helpful. You ought to go see him.”

“The Times reporter?”

“Yeah, him. You remember he said he thought he recognized something familiar about the big guy with the beard — the terrorist leader.”

“We sat him through two days with the mug books. He didn’t come up with anything.”

“You didn’t ask him the right questions,” Crobey said quietly.

“And you did?”

“Yes. I know who the bearded guy is now.”

It extracted Anders’ slow smile. “That’s quite a teaser.”

“Isn’t it.”

“And you’ll give me the name if I’ll divulge what I know.”

“That’s the idea, Glenn.”

“If Ortega remembered something for you he can remember it for me. What if I just ask him?”

“He doesn’t know the name. He only knows the face.” Crobey lifted his glass, an ironic toast. “Ask him. He’s probably home, you’ve got his number. You want me to order you something while you’re on the phone?”

It couldn’t be a bluff; too easy to call. Anders subsided in the seat. “You’re cute, Harry. All right. Who is he?”

“Scratch my back first. Then I’ll scratch yours.”

“Who are you working for?”

“That would be telling.”

“Then we haven’t got much to talk about.”

“You don’t want the name of the terrorist, then?”

“Look at it from my point of view. I have to calculate the possibility that you’re working for the terrorists. Maybe they sent you here to find out how close I am to getting my hands on them. Maybe you’re supposed to send me on a wild goose chase?”

Crobey said, “Give me a minute, I’ll think out a way around that.”

“Do that.”

Crobey tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

Crobey was getting a bit long in the tooth, Anders thought. How old was Crobey now? Late forties anyhow; Crobey had flown combat in Korea.

Crobey had flown P-51 Mustangs. He had peculiarly rigid prejudices — he hated jets and when they’d transferred him to Sabers he’d turned in a wretched performance, a kind of protest, cracking up two planes on the runway. The Air Force had yanked him out of the combat zone and set him to training young pilots on piston-engine planes at Edwards Air Force Base. Crobey, fuming, had served out the rest of the Korean War there.

At the first opportunity he’d resigned his commission and gone mercenary, flying any kind of old crate so long as it had propellers. He wouldn’t touch jets. But that was all right because most of the Third World air forces were too poor to equip themselves with jets. Whole generations of African and Latin American military pilots had been trained by Harry Crobey. Most of them probably still remembered the first time he had sent them out to find a skyhook or a bucket of prop-wash. Crobey’s pranks were like the bad jokes of vaudeville comedians.

Anders’ first meeting with Crobey had been on a field in Alabama, the property of one of the Agency’s innumerable civil-air front companies; Crobey had been brought in to teach Cuban exile pilots how to avoid flying their B-26 bombers into chimneys, mountains and power lines. That had been 1961; Crobey already trailed a legend — the Congo, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic. He didn’t limp then and his hair was a bit darker and his face had been almost cherubically naïve. Those who knew him insisted he had an aging portrait in his attic but in truth Crobey was only in his thirties then and it was pre-Bay of Pigs and pre-Kennedy assassination — life was still a wild sort of fun for men like Crobey: The world is my whorehouse.

In Djakarta they said Crobey had screwed his way systematically through every brothel, working north to south, until the government had tied a can to his tail: Everybody knew that half the whores in Djakarta were Communist spies. Crobey’s retort made its way into the Agency’s folklore. He said it wasn’t his mouth he exercised in bed. Anders had never found the story particularly uproarious but the line — “Don’t exercise your mouth on her” — had worked its way into company jargon until it became a shorthand notation of the fact that a woman didn’t have a security clearance.

The Crobey myth was Bunyonesque among the young Turks in the Agency, of whom in those days Anders had been one. Crobey was a free-lance and didn’t have to take jobs he didn’t like — that alone made him the envy of every civil servant but beyond that was Crobey’s panache, his Scarlet Pimpernel insouciance, his way of greeting the world with a distended middle finger and a cheerful “Merde.”

Anders had met him fairly frequently during the late 1960s and early ’70s; their paths had crossed at intervals in Laos and Chile and Viet Nam, Crobey flying surplus Spitfires or rattling DC-3s or worn-out B-24 Liberators; as long as it wasn’t a jet Crobey would fly it. Anders had formed an acquaintance with him, something short of friendship; it had lasted with a reasonable lack of abrasion over a decade but he’d lost touch with Crobey after the fall of Saigon. At first he had enjoyed Crobey’s cut-ups; they’d got drunk together and wasted several bars in their time but Anders had outgrown that. After a while it had begun to occur to him that Crobey wasn’t dashing; his jokes were crude and sometimes cruel, his personality often offensive — he had a rude way of rebuffing ordinary politeness, a contempt for normal people. “There are only three hundred real people in the world,” Crobey used to say, “and we all know each other. The rest are farmers and shopkeepers and politicians — otherwise known as the gutless rabble.”

Crobey opened his eyes and fixed them on Anders. A waitress, unbidden, took their empties and placed a second round of drinks on the table; it was that kind of bar — you spent money or you left.

In the depths of Crobey’s glance was something Anders hadn’t found there before. Maybe it was the birth of maturity or a belated sense of mortality or the beginnings of the hangover from twenty-five years’ irreverence; maybe it was simply sham — Crobey was something of an actor.

“Phomh Penh,” Crobey said. “Remember? Those Cambode MPs wanted to put some welts in our skulls.”

“We had it coming.”

“If I hadn’t dragged you out of there—”

Anders had to smile. “I owe you that one.”

“Then there was the time you tried to decapitate yourself on that chopper’s rotor blades because you forgot to duck going in—”

Anders nodded; he’d forgotten that one. Now it came back — the shock of being tackled from behind, Crobey’s weight slamming him down.

Crobey said, “Beirut, now, that was interesting, too. Kalashnikov slugs going every which way.” Then his brazen smile. “But there’s no need to keep books on it, is there?”

“Are you fishing for references?”

Crobey tapped a finger on the tabletop. “I’m not asking you to fall on a grenade. I’m only asking you to trust me with information. I’m asking you to go first because I’m not bound by oaths of secrecy and you are — you’ve got orders to keep your trap shut and you’re a fairly good German; I need the leverage to shake you loose from that position. That’s why you have to go first. You can refuse me — it depends how much you want the name of this joker.”

“I could haul you in for interrogation.”

“Debriefing with scopalomine and rubber hoses? No, you won’t do that. I came to you voluntarily.”

“Who are you working for?”

“No signatures. I get paid in cash. But I’ll go this far — you and I are on the same side. We both want to nail these guys.”

There was a glint of forlorn doubt in Crobey’s eyes as if he saw he’d shot his bolt. Anders felt disquieted. He studied it briefly but there was no need to dissect it; the impasse was still there. He squeezed his lips together and shook his head back and forth just slightly. “Can’t do it,” he said. “If I knew who your clients were—”

“The client is no threat to you.”

“I don’t know that, do I?”

“You do now. I just told you.”

“Come off it, Harry. I was born a little earlier than that.” Anders began to slide over. “I’m going to assume you’re bluffing. If I assume you don’t really know anything then I don’t have to file a report that would get you hauled in for questioning.”

“In Mexico? You guys are damned arrogant.” Crobey leaned across the table and touched his arm, arresting him. “Sit still a minute. I’ll tell you who the client is if I have your guarantee it goes no farther than this table. You don’t report it back to Langley and nobody harasses the client.”

“How can I sign a blank check like that?”

“The client’s an individual. Not a government, not a terrorist gang, not a corporation. One person. Vulnerable. Now you see the point?”

“A Cuban?”

“No. If you want I’ll try to set up a meeting — just you and me and the client, no minions. Fair enough?”

Anders bit into it and began to chew; and Crobey said harshly, “It’s farther than I intended to go. It’s more than I owe you. And I’ll tell you this — if you turn it down I’ll rub your fucking nose in it. I promise you I’ll make it a point to find those guys before you do and then I’ll make sure O’Hillary hears about it. Your ass will be grass.”

“Don’t threaten me, you cheeky bastard.” Anders grinned at him. “I don’t scare, remember?”

“That’s because you’re a bloody fool.”

Anders said, “At last we understand each other.”

“Right.”

He extended his hand; Crobey grasped it. Anders said, “All right. Who’s the client?”

“Carole Marchand.”

“Who?”

“The Lundquist boy’s mother.”

In astonishment Anders sagged back in his seat. He must have been gaping; Crobey leered at him.

Then Crobey said, “Your turn at the wicket now. I want to know everything you’ve got.”

Crobey’s claim was too wild to be disbelieved. Still Anders said, “I’ll want to talk to her.”

“I told you, I’ll arrange it,”

“All right.” He bought it. Time might prove him an imbecile but he had to take the chance.

He began to talk, keeping back nothing of consequence; Crobey was a good listener, he didn’t interrupt. After a little while Rosalia came into the bar expectantly eager but Anders, after curtly introducing Crobey to her, shooed her away; the girl looked so crestfallen it made Crobey laugh. When she was gone Anders resumed his litany.

Afterward Crobey squinted shrewdly. “Most of it won’t get you anywhere. You’ll find the guy they hired the ketch from but he won’t know anything — they’ll have used a blind front for that, a cut-out, some guy without a face. Boats don’t leave tracks. The eleven politicals, they’re a dead end, too — likely they don’t know who rescued them. But then you’d already discounted that. Your theory about it being a caper strictly for the ten million bucks — that’s cute but I don’t buy it. I think they’re in it for nationalist reasons, they’re not just thieves.”

“Why?”

“Because — I told you — I know who the head man is.”

“It’s time you gave me the name.”

“If I give you the name, what will you do with it?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. My client thinks your people are determined to sweep the whole thing under the rug.”

“Your client’s wrong, as far as I know.”

“As far as you know?”

“I can’t read minds,” Anders said. “Who’s the terrorist?”

“He used to go by the name of Rodrigo Rodriguez, believe it or not.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He was one of the pilots who washed out of that Cuban flight school I ran in Alabama. I think he was kicked out before you got there.”

“Rodrigo Rodriguez? What kind of name is that?”

“Far as I know it’s the name his parents gave him. But I’m sure he’s got something else in his passport by now. I’ve already checked out the Rodriguez angles. All blind alleys. He’s covered his tracks beautifully.”

“That’s why you came to me?”

“There’s a limit to how much legwork can be done by one man with a sore leg. You’ve got armies — your people can sift a thousand leads through the strainer and come up with a clue. Give me that clue and I’ll find the guy for you. I know him a little, I know how he thinks.”

“What makes you connect this Rodriguez with the terrorists?”

“He was a kid then, it was long before the Bay of Pigs and I don’t know what happened to him afterward, but in those days he had what your military types like to call leadership qualifications. Tough, bright and blokes liked him.”

“But he washed out of pilot training.”

“You don’t have to be an expert sharpshooter to be a good general, do you.”

“All right.”

“I got onto the idea because of the report that was filtered back from Ortega — something about the guerrilla leader wearing a beard and a big belly. It put me in mind of Rodrigo Rodriguez in his Santa Claus suit at the Christmas party in 1960.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Well it wouldn’t have occurred to me if that was all I’d had. But I started from the obvious premise that the beard was phony. If that was phony then maybe the belly was phony. Then we got the interesting tidbit from one of the Mexican hostages that the leader had a Puerto Rican accent. Rodrigo has a Puerto Rican accent — he’s Cuban by birth but his family ran a business in Puerto Rico. They were in the rum trade in a minor way. Rodriguez and his brother went to school in Mayaguez. Which brings us to another point, the brother. I think his name was Julio. Actually there were three of them, like musketeers, inseparable — the two Rodriguez brothers and a young brute by the name of Vargas. Now Vargas used to smoke Gauloises. And Julio Rodriguez used to read pulp magazines all the time. Science-fiction pulp magazines. You see where it all points?”

“Flimsy,” Anders said. “Flimsy as hell.”

“It was,” Crobey agreed, “until I showed Ortega an old photograph of Rodrigo.”

“Ah.”

“Ah indeed. I didn’t tell Ortega the name of the guy in the photograph but he identified it.” Crobey’s hand came out of his pocket with a two-by-three glossy. “Keep it, I’ve got a bunch of them.”

“From where?”

“Florida. I went through the files of the old Free Cuba outfit. Hardly more than a shell nowadays but they’ve still got a secretary and an office. She remembered me from Alabama.”

The face in the photograph was striking enough. Enormous square cheekbones and bleak eyes overhung by great ramparts of bone. Hard, but you sensed the capacity for compassion — that must be the aspect that invited people to like him. There was intelligence in it, and stubborn boldness.

Crobey said, “You wouldn’t have tumbled him. He hasn’t been affiliated with any of the organized exile groups since sixty-three. As far as I know there’s no record of his escaping from prison in Havana but he must have. He was one of the troops captured at the Pigs.”

“What rank?” Anders was businesslike when he needed to be.

“Second lieutenant I guess. Platoon leader, or that’s what I heard. It’s a long time ago. I think he was one of the ones on Red Beach. Lucky he didn’t get shrapnel up his ass.”

“I see the problem. He’s had fifteen years to establish a new identity.”

Crobey said, “You can probably get your hands on his fingerprints from some file or other. That might help a little.”

Anders doubted it; he knew of no case in which a fugitive had been found on the basis of fingerprints. But he had to try.

Anders said, “For all practical purposes you’re simply handing him over to me. Why?”

“I’ll reach him before you do, Glenn. Don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t see how. Not with what you’ve given me.”

“We’ll see. Do you still want to talk to the client?”

“What does she want?”

“She wants a little justice. Just a little justice.”

“Vengeance is mine.”

“You ever read Francis Bacon?”

“Maybe in high school. I don’t remember.”

“Revenge,” Crobey quoted, “is a kind of wild justice. Bacon.”

“The lady’s angry then.”

“You could say that,” Crobey agreed. Then he got up to go. “I’ll be in touch.”

Anders watched him beat a path among the tables. Highly puzzled, Anders finally slid out of the booth and went toward a phone.

Chapter 9

Cielo had tumbled asleep like a weary peon who had shaken off his load but when he awoke he found evidence in the tumbled bed of a difficult night; nor did he feel rested.

After a while he went along to the kitchen ramming his shirttails into his pants. Soledad stood over the ironing board looking cross, her hair tied in a horsetail with a small ribbon; he thought she was breathtakingly beautiful.

She said, “You were impossible. I had to sleep on the couch in the end. I don’t know what the children must think.”

“I’m sorry. It must have been bad dreams or something.”

“And now you have to go out again?”

“Si.”

“For how long this time?”

“I can’t say. You realize I should be up there with them all the time — I’m shirking my duty, laying so much onto Vargas and my brother.”

“When will this madness stop?”

“When the old man dies, I suppose.”

“The Dragas are long-lived — his uncle lived to ninety-four.”

“But blind and senile the last few years, wasn’t he?”

“Old Draga isn’t blind or senile.”

“Don’t nag me,” Cielo said, “you won’t change anything.”

She said, “It takes young men to do this sort of thing. He should know that. Your heart isn’t in this.”

“No, most of the time it’s not. Once in a while I try to remind myself. You know I talked to Ortiz yesterday? Raoul Ortiz?”

“You didn’t mention it.”

“Ortiz was in Cuba just a few months ago. Running guns to people in the mountains. He said it is even worse than before. The squalor and all. The despair.”

“You’re trying to pump yourself up but it all keeps leaking out again, doesn’t it.”

“Well I’d like to do something for them. You know.”

She said, “Surely, but this way? Who are you — Don Quixote?”

Cielo watched her push the iron back and forth across his black chinos. “It’s not that bad, you know. I don’t mind what we’re doing now. One day these weapons will be used.”

“But not by you.”

“No, I’m too old. I’ve turned cautious.”

“Someone will confiscate the weapons before anyone can use them. How do you expect to keep them hidden for years?”

“Bury them. Nobody looks in El Yunque.”

“It takes a big hole to bury cannons and machine guns.”

“We’ve got plenty of time to dig it.”

“Not really. The old man, Draga, he’ll get impatient soon.”

“I’ll tell him the time isn’t right yet.”

“And he’ll believe it just because you say so?”

“He trusts me.” The statement came out like a confession, shaming him.

She said, “Rodrigo — talk to me about it.”

“How can I talk about things for which there aren’t any words? Feelings—”

She smiled mournfully. “You poor thing. You hang onto this nonsense as if it was the first woman’s breast you ever sucked. You’ve even forgotten why you’re doing it.”

“I know why it’s done. But it’s just that it’s no longer fashionable to spend one’s life discussing the ultimates of good and evil. That’s for university students. The advocates of revolution.”

She said, “I remember the days when even villainy was innocent.”

“You know the CIA has received orders from the White House to stop all secret anti-Castro exile activities. We must be circumspect. Old Draga understands that — he’ll curb his impatience.”

“Those orders were issued more than a year ago, querido. Nobody paid much attention to them.”

“Just the same.”

“Is it the old Draga who worries you — or the young one?”

“Emil.” He only sighed.

“That one is trouble, since he was little.”

“You know the expression ‘trapped between a rock and a hard place,’ querida? Well the old man is the rock. All the same, I think we can control Emil. I think we’ve thrown a little respect into him. His ribs are still taped up, though he doesn’t want anyone to know it.”

Suddenly he could feel the air whistling through his own nose. He unraveled the handkerchief from his hip pocket and blew his nose.

She sighed with infinite tolerance. “Put it there with the laundry and get a clean one. Por Dios, you can’t even get out of the house in the morning without soiling another bit of cloth.”

“When the girls come home from school I want you to have a talk with them about this TV business. We should ration their hours — there are things in life besides television.”

“They would listen more closely to you than to me. It’s something you ought to take care of.”

“I probably won’t be here tonight.”

“Then it can wait until you come back. Tomorrow maybe?”

“Maybe. I can’t promise.”

“It’s a good thing I know you. Otherwise I’d think you had a woman squirreled away.”

He reached out for her hand, took the iron from it and stood it up on the metal pan; he put his hands on her shoulders and uttered each word as if he had coined it on the spot: “I adore you with all my heart and soul. I always will — to the end of my life.”

The liveliness came back into his eyes. She walked into his embrace.

He went out the back way across the rear neighbor’s yard and skirted trash cans on his way past a carport. He’d left the car two blocks away for reasons of security. When he reached it he was already sweating — the humidity was shocking, the sun ablaze; the faded stucco houses seemed to cringe. An infant was tumbling on a parched lawn watched by an old woman who sat shriveled in the shade fanning herself with a magazine. Two cats pursued each other comically up the alley and Cielo opened the deck of the Volkswagen. Last night he’d removed the rotor from the distributor and walked away knowing the car would still be there when he needed it. Now he replaced the rotor from his pocket, snapped the clips onto the distributor and unlocked the door.

Ernesto Mendez — the name on his mailbox — might be a tame lower-class surburban but Cielo had been trained in the guerrilla arts. It was this training that alerted him to the presence of a man standing in a doorway half a block distant. The man wasn’t watching him but Cielo knew the neighborhood and the man didn’t’ belong there: poplin suit, tie, the sun glinting on polished cordovan. Standing in the doorway, Cielo thought, was foolish: It only framed the man, focusing attention on him as if he were a portrait. A smart one would have strolled in the open, looking as if he had business.

Possibly it had nothing to do with him but he was troubled. He made a U turn in the potholed street and drove away watching the mirror. His alarm increased tenfold when the man turned and went inside the house whose doorway had framed him. If the man was going to a phone...

Driving into Hato Rey he was remembering his introduction to the heroic arts: the Sierra Maestra, 1958, nothing more than a skirmish really — the rebels under Ché Guevara had ambushed the trucks and Cielo had dived out into the ditch along with the other soldiers. The rebels had used mortars and Brownings and grenades; the noise of battle had confounded and infuriated Cielo. Finally — to stop the noise — he had performed heroically. Madly. Afterward six rebels were dead and Batista himself pinned the medal on Cielo. It was all so comical. He’d had no thought of earning medals; he’d only wanted to stop the noise.

But after that he was a hero and they promoted him and he was looked to as a leader and he was too young to know better than to play along with it. The attention was too flattering to be rebuffed.

An accidental moment of madness, but it had changed and colored everything in his life since then. He had never confided this to anyone but Soledad; no one but Soledad would understand. Not even his own brother.

Still troubled by the man in the doorway, he pulled around behind an open-front cantina and parked the Volkswagen in the dust where it was hidden from the street. He went to the public kiosk and Luz answered the old man’s phone. He exchanged counterproposals with Luz and then cradled the phone and walked away — walking up the alley past the Volkswagen and on past the back doors of several seedy shops. At the corner of Avenida Hostos he turned north and walked at a steady pace, using the side mirrors of parked vans to examine his backtrail. No one was following him; he was positive of that after ten minutes. At the corner of the Calle Eleanor Roosevelt he waited in the shade until a bus came by. He rode it across the causeway into San Juan and dropped off at the edge of Santurce. He went around the block twice on foot, picked up no tail, and was waiting by the curb when the Pinto drew up. Cielo got in and the car started moving before he’d pulled the door shut. Luz, at the wheel, said, “Señor Draga is anxious to know what this is about.”

“Maybe nothing — maybe it means nothing.”

“But if it does. What would they be?”

“Police. CIA. Castro’s men. Who can say?”

“But they were not watching your house?”

“No, I’d left the car away from my house and that was where I saw the man. Near the car.”

“Where were you yesterday that someone might have noticed you and taken down the license number of the Volkswagen?”

“The old man knows where I was. I reported to him last night by phone.”

Luz’s voice had the quality of a rusty hinge in motion. “You’ll have to stay out of sight for a while. Don’t go back to your home.”

“I know that, you don’t have to tell me.”

“And don’t telephone the house again.”

“He gets upset if I don’t report to him.”

“We’ll have to find a way to do it without telephones. El viejo no longer trusts their security.”

Luz drove east toward the airport. Cielo had never quite comprehended Luz’s exact place in the Draga scheme of things; Luz apparently was something between bodyguard and secretary, with a bit of valet thrown in, but the old man had secretaries and bodyguards and a valet besides Luz. There wasn’t much likelihood that Luz was of any importance in the management of the Draga businesses — Luz wasn’t a businessman, he was too coarse, he was nearly a thug. He was a Cuban mountain peasant whose parents had worked for the Draga interests in some capacity.

Luz was low-profile; he usually didn’t appear in public at Draga’s side and most of the world didn’t associate him with Draga, which gave him a certain freedom of movement; Cielo suspected that Luz perhaps acted as a sort of bagman in Draga’s dealings with officials and police and the Jews and Italians from Florida with whom the old man did certain kinds of business. It was old man Draga who in 1963 had acted as intermediary between the Free Cuba movements and the Santos Trega group of Sicilians; the Sicilians had made six separate attempts on Castro’s life. Santos Trega himself was Cuban, a former criminal boss in Havana, imprisoned in ‘61–‘62 by Castro, then deported — after a substantial sub-rosa payment to Castro — to Miami and New Orleans. Jack Ruby, who had shot Lee Oswald in Dallas, had been one of Trega’s associates; Cielo had heard rumors that Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli were part of it as well. In subsequent years old man Draga had withdrawn from most of his contacts with Trega and Lansky, mostly because he disapproved pragmatically of their ethics but also because he came to regard them as bunglers.

It was taken for granted by Draga and those around him that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had been formulated in Havana and dictated by Castro because Castro knew that the CIA had employed the Mafia to try to assassinate Castro: The killing of the President had been a retaliatory hit. Cielo had believed in these conspiratorial complexities for a long time but just recently he had begun to question them; he no longer knew what to believe — he no longer was sure he cared.

Along the service road beside the airport Luz slowed the Pinto. Its air conditioner blew a chill draft against Cielo’s throat and he reached out to change the direction of the vent ribs. By the side of the road a small station wagon was parked, a man in the front seat; its sun visors were lowered to indicate all clear. Luz drew past the station wagon and touched the brake pedal — three taps, to signal the station wagon — and drove on toward the big hangars that butted up against the chain fence. Cielo glanced back and saw that the station wagon was following. He hadn’t recognized its driver.

He began to think about the niceties of his situation: Was this an execution ride? But he knew better; he was relaxed when Luz stopped the car behind one of the hangars. “Is there anything you want me to relay to the old man?”

“No. Tell him I’ll be in touch.” Cielo pushed the door open and got out.

The station wagon drew up and its driver left the door open when he walked forward. The driver nodded civilly enough and went past him. Cielo recognized him now — he’d seen the man around Draga’s place a few times walking the dogs on leashes. He’d never seen the man out of uniform before; that was what had thrown him.

The dog handler got into the Pinto, the seat Cielo had just vacated; the Pinto drove away.

It was so hot there didn’t seem to be any air. Cielo went squinting to the station wagon and, shut himself in, grateful for the air conditioning.

He had a look around the car’s interior and opened the glove compartment to see if anything had been left for him — an envelope or whatever. There was nothing, only a flashlight and the car’s registration papers made out to somebody named Juan D. Ruiz at an address in Ponce — he was sure it was phony although it looked good enough to his untrained eye; Cielo had no talent for forgery.

He put it in drive and pointed it out toward the highway, thinking now of the old man up there possibly sitting over iced tea on his veranda overlooking the Cerromar golf course and all the tourists getting their exercise in electric carts: The old man sitting on his wealth and still deluding himself into the belief that he was the power behind the operation that would liberate Cuba.

The farm was deserted except for one man whom Julio had left on guard: Stefano — small, ruddy, quick, with an incipient potbelly and under his mustache a set of buck teeth like a steam engine’s cowcatcher. Stefano had a disconcerting wart at the corner of his lower lip. Stefano greeted him with a casual remark and an easy smile, and it struck Cielo suddenly how old Stefano looked — how old they all were getting.

Cielo sent out a three-second radio signal; then he popped the tab of an aluminum can and sat down on the porch trying to find the breeze; he tasted the thin Puerto Rican beer and thought how egotistical their dreams had been, how pathetically comic and how posturingly tragic. They had been blind to the realities of power. The old man and the other zealous exiles believed, against all evidence, that they needed merely to provide the spark and that the tinder would burst into flame immediately, fueled by a popular will that would sweep away the Castro commissars. It amazed him now how long he had been able to sustain his own belief in that scenario.

After about three hours the Land Cruiser appeared at the head of the cornfield and came forward along the furrows, Vargas at the wheel. Vargas’ big lips went all shapes when he smiled. Cielo dropped off the porch and tossed his bags in back and climbed into the passenger seat and Vargas turned the Land Cruiser around to head back up into the hills. Cielo looked back — Stefano waved to him. Stefano’s chest had caved in with age; his clothes looked as if they hung on a hanger that was too small. My God, Cielo thought, how ridiculous we are.

Vargas said, “Julio’s run out of books.”

“Hell. I forgot to bring more.” The damned science fiction. How did Julio tell them apart? They all had the same covers. Byzantine creatures with all sorts of eyes and arms.

“How goes the cave?”

“It goes. Not very fast.”

“That’s all right, there’s plenty of time. Everything’s out of sight?”

“We’re very careful,” Vargas said. “Enrique’s very stern, he doesn’t let anybody make mistakes.” Kruger’s first name was Heinrich but they’d called him Enrique for nearly twenty years — it hadn’t made a Latin of him.

“Did you see the old man?”

“A couple of days ago. In his counting house.” Cielo grinned a bit maliciously; it pleased him to think of Draga as a miserly Scrooge. The vault in Draga’s basement was truly formidable. Cielo had watched in amazement while the old man unhooked alarms, inserted keys, dialed combinations and turned handles up instead of down. “If a man turns it down,” the old man had told him with ferocious satisfaction, “he gets a squirt of disabling gas in the face.”

Cielo was bemused that after so many years the old man would entrust him with such a secret. It was because the old man wanted his confidence, of course; the old man was thirsty for information — he’d wanted every detail no matter how trivial. How much was this dealer charging for Kalashnikovs? Couldn’t they have got a better price in Algiers? What was the exact range of the rocket launchers? How many rockets? Which model of flame thrower had been settled on? How much was being paid per thousand rounds of rifle ammunition? It all went into the ledger in the old man’s head. Cielo remembered thinking, You won’t make a profit on these transactions no matter how you bargain the prices down. But it was in the old man’s blood.

The Land Cruiser bumped painfully into the woods. The trail lifted them at a grinding deliberate pace toward the Cordillera — green peaks rising in a thin mist that the heat never quite seemed to dissipate. After a little while it dipped into a wide cañon and Vargas guided the wheels carefully up onto a vast shelf of rock that was tipped just enough off the horizontal to give Cielo a queasy feeling — one day, he thought, the Land Cruiser would tip right over on its side along this stretch.

Off to the right the tire-truck ruts resumed at the edge of the rock; in plain sight they stretched up into the woods toward the southeast. Julio and Vargas had spent half a day making that false trail.

Vargas put the Land Cruiser down the slope toward the creek that made its shallow way along the bottom of the rock slab. Driving slowly in the water with white froth birling off the hubcaps they spent a difficult five minutes pushing uphill in the streambed. This part always troubled Cielo because the rock supported no growth at all and this meant they would be visible from the air for the duration of this stretch. Ground trackers would lose them at this point but all it needed was one helicopter or a light plane passing over at the wrong moment.

Zigzagging from one side to another Vargas wrestled the Land Cruiser toward the head of the canyon. Eventually the bottom changed from solid rock to gravel; the walls began to narrow and the trees to press down; here Vargas and Cielo had to get out and unwind the cable from the winch. Hooking it to an enormous banyan they hauled the Land Cruiser up over a slumping shoulder of rock, after which Vargas reeled in the cable and they drove on through the trees.

This was the edge of El Yunque — the Luquillo Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rain forest on U.S. soil — the Puerto Rican mountain jungle. In his odd-job days as a tour guide in the late 1960s he had recited by rote that the El Yunque Forest covered nearly thirty thousand acres, climbed to an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet and absorbed an annual rainfall of more than one hundred billion gallons. The figures were impressive in the abstract; when you got down to a personal level what was more impressive was the sense of utter isolation that cloaked him every time he penetrated the jungle. Once inside the towering shade of El Yunque he no longer had any confidence he was on the same planet.

A paved road of narrow hairpin bends and frequent washouts bisected the forest to the east, going right over the central pass between the peaks of El Toro and El Yunque; that was the tourist route and if you were on it you could be back in the fleshpots of San Juan in less than an hour — it was only twenty-five miles away. But on these outer slopes there were no roads, no farms, no evidence that humans had ever passed this way.

Overhead the sun flickered like a moving signal lamp among the interlaced branches of sierras and tree ferns, colorados and palms, clumps of bamboo a hundred feet high, dotted bromiliads and orchids below; a rotting rich thickness of life.

Bugs buzzed. Parrots, macaws — flashes of color. And always the chirping of tiny coqui frogs like cicadas in the branches. The air was damp but not unpleasant; thinner here than at sea level and the smell was rain-clean.

Even to cut their basic primitive pioneer road they’d had to spend months chopping their way through coagulated undergrowth and laying stones across watercourses; at frequent intervals the rains washed these away and there was never a trip without having to stop and replace them. And still the pitch of the ground was so steep they had to use the winch several times each way.

It made for a long difficult trek despite the fact that the distance between the lowland farm where he’d left Stefano and the El Yunque camp was not more than seven miles as the buzzard flies and perhaps sixteen miles by pioneer track: They’d never done it in less than two and a half hours.

Twice after the rock slab they covered their trail again — made as if to strike out along false roads they’d prepared; then doubled back through water or rock.

A determined Indio tracker with dogs might find the camp eventually but he’d need to have a good idea where to look and he’d take so long about it that they’d have considerable warning of his approach. As added security they’d laid tripwires across the path on the high ridges nearing the camp. Driving in, Cielo had to dismount twice from the Land Cruiser to disconnect the wires while Vargas drove across them; then he hooked them up again and they rolled on into the camp. The tripwires were connected to cowbells in the cave — a rudimentary device but adequate.

The roadway entered the camp by way of a narrow gap — bamboo on one side, a sheer drop on the other: The path rode along this brief shelf and tipped down toward the camp of huts. Nothing short of a wrecking ball could make headway through the thickness of high bamboo that screened it. This was the only way in — easy to command, easy to defend; conceivably a man or two could deny passage to a battalion.

It wasn’t going to come to that. Cielo had no ambition to hold out heroically against an armed assault. Discovery here would mean surrender; he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice his men for nothing. The chief weapons in his arsenals were secrecy and concealment and deception.

There was a man on guard at the gap; there always was; this one waved his hand lazily and didn’t bother to unsling his submachine gun and Cielo reminded himself to have a talk with the man later — they all were slipping toward apathy, taking things for granted, depending on tripwired cowbells in place of vigilance.

Past the gap the road dipped toward the huts. It was a compact area with its back to the cliff, screened by thick growths of high bamboo and trees that soared to vertiginous heights; the cliff was a jagged upheaval of faults and abutments on top of which was a flat granite promontory, an open field beyond which another tier of jungle sloped up steeply toward the heights. The promontory overhung the camp and it was his plan to use it as a helicopter landing pad from which heavy equipment could be winched down and rolled into the cave behind the camp.

When he stepped out of the Land Cruiser he found Julio waiting for him.

“Did you bring me a few books?”

“I’m sorry, I forgot.”

“Damn.”

“Read the old ones again. What difference does it make? You can’t tell them apart.”

“The hell I can’t. A man gets bored up here. Did you give the girls a kiss from their uncle?”

“Sure... sure.”

Cielo went into the command hut with his brother; Vargas and Kruger drifted in and Cielo made his report to them — it contained no surprises except for the possibility that the man in the doorway had been spying on him. This disquieted Kruger more than the others; he was volatile and tended to fret about things. Kruger’s Spanish was even worse than his English, even after all the years, and in his presence they all tended to speak English although their conversation was peppered with common Spanish words and phrases. Kruger said, “If someone’s onto us, who?”

“I’ll consult the tea leaves and let you know,” Cielo said, making light of it.

“Have you no idea at all?”

“None, nor do I care very much. Whoever he is he didn’t follow me up here, did he. Let’s have a look at the cave.”

They all trooped out to the foot of the cliff like an inspector general’s party, everyone suitably deferential. The cave was natural — a fault in the rock cleft by some disturbance aeons ago. It was nearly thirty feet high and extended well back into the mountain to a depth of a city block or more. Its width varied considerably from point to point. The floor sloped up from the mouth toward the back, which was a good thing because it meant rainwater didn’t run into the cave. When they’d first discovered it they’d known it was the best they were going to find. You could crowd quite a lot of heavy military equipment in here. Nothing like airplanes or helicopters, nor would it accommodate more than a few tanks, but they weren’t acquiring anything that heavy anyway. The planes wouldn’t be needed until the very end — and Cielo believed the very end would never come. In the meantime there was room for field mortars and rocket launchers and flame throwers, machine guns and small arms and grenades and a few Jeeps that could be winched down or driven up the pioneer road.

The floor of the cave was dusty with debris. Several men were hammering rock drills into uneven lumps; small explosive charges would be set into them. The floor of the cave in its natural state had been jagged and useless; they were flattening it as best they could and knocking protrusions off the walls at the same time.

He vaguely hoped all this violence wasn’t going to bring the whole thing crashing down. There didn’t seem too much likelihood of that — the cliff was so massive, the cave so small in relation — but Cielo didn’t know much geology and thought perhaps there might be cracks that would be widened by the dynamite. It wasn’t anything he intended to lose sleep over.

He said, “Satisfactory, I think. You’ll be finished in a day or so?”

“As near finished as we need to be,” Julio replied. “We’ve already begun clearing the junk off the floor as you can see. It’ll be ready to receive the armas by tomorrow.”

Kruger said, “Are they delivering so soon?”

“Some of the things will be available tomorrow night,” Cielo said. “Some others will take several weeks.”

They were walking back out onto the open ground. Kruger twisted his head far back on his neck to peer up through the inter-knotted treetops. It was not possible to see properly the promontory above; the outcrop was more of a hint — a darker more substantial mass beyond the matted leaves. The occasional thin finger of sunlight probed down through the mist like a laser; other rays flickered on and off as the breeze stirred the trees. The light here was muted and had a greenish tinge. Sound seemed to be absorbed instantly into the damp cushion of the jungle; the quiet was intense and sometimes distressing — the silence, the dampness, the dim light, the invisibility of the outer world, all these conspired to instill the feeling that one’s senses had been drugged into half service. Cielo found that he slept longer and more often here than he did anywhere else.

Kruger, looking up toward the top, was saying: “I’m still worried about this helicopter delivery system. It’s not secure. A helicopter is so” — he searched for the word — “visible. You know? They have ground radar, don’t they? And anybody can see it going overhead. And it can be heard for miles.”

“I’m not worried about security,” Cielo told him. “Aircraft fly around the island all the time. There are helicopters everywhere these days. The radar can’t follow the helicopter because of the mountains — radar can’t distinguish between one solid object and another. We’ll make deliveries only at night when the clouds are down below us. We can guide him to ground with a flashlight or two, it’s not as if he needs a whole runway lighting system. It’s our good luck Zapatino’s a hell of a chopper pilot — he can do everything but fly upside down, you know. The main risk is weather, of course — we’ll end up aborting flights because of fog.”

Kruger walked away with Vargas; Cielo wasn’t sure he’d reassured the German — Kruger was always looking for things that might go wrong.

When the other two had gone beyond earshot Julio said, “Any news from the old man? Has he mentioned what happened to Emil?”

“No, hermano. Sometimes I hope I’ll never see him again. I wish him to be dead — peacefully — just to have it done with. I don’t have the nerve to tell him he’s crazy. And in the meantime we go through this farce of bringing in weapons by the helicopterload and caching them in this cave, where we both know they will rust away for five hundred years before anybody touches them again. The waste makes me ashamed.”

Julio looked at him harshly. “Are you still thinking of going to the old man and telling him he’s a blind fool?”

“No, I can’t do that. We’ve worked too hard for him for these fifteen years. We’ve earned the money he’s paid us. And when he dies there won’t be any nonsense about waiting for a will to be probated. A man will simply come and give each of us a little booklet containing columns of figures and the numbers of bank accounts in Zurich. Do you think I would jeopardize that? Do you think I want those Zurich bank books burned in his fireplace? We’ve earned that money — and I don’t feel like going back to work guiding tourists or unloading airplane cargos. And I don’t guess you feel like driving a taxi again.”

“Just one thing, Rodrigo. Say the old man dies and your man never comes with the bankbooks?”

“Don’t worry about that. There are ways I trust the old man completely and that’s one of them. He’ll cheat in a lot of ways but not that one.”

“Maybe he won’t cheat you.”

“If you feel that way I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If when the old man dies and you don’t get your share I’ll split mine with you. And I’ll make you a present of all the arms in the cave.”

“That is a promise hermano?”

“A promise. You can dedicate the rest of your life to seeing that the money doesn’t go to waste.”

Julio nodded pensively. “Or the arms.”

Cielo frowned at him, but he did not want to know any more about his brother’s schemes. Then he said, “Where the hell is Emil?”

“He left this morning for San Juan, so he says.”

“I suppose I should count my blessings.”

“I don’t know, Cielo. I don’t trust him when I can’t see him. Suppose he’s hatching something?”

“Hatching what? Do you think he means to hijack this place? Let him — more power to him.”

“Hermano, don’t be facetious. He’s dangerous. He sits off by himself too much — he’s planning something.”

“What? Has he been talking to the others much?”

“He’s taken two or three of them aside. One at a time.”

“Which ones?”

“Ramirez. Ordovara. Kruger, too, I think, but I saw Kruger give him his back. Maybe others, too, that I haven’t seen.”

“He’s plotting a palace coup,” Cielo mused, and smiled when he looked around. “Some palace.”

“I’m worried about some of them, brother. Emil is the old man’s blood.”

“They’re loyal, that much we don’t have to worry about. Loyal to one another, and loyal to us.”

“Or loyal to the Draga name?”

“No, they’d string him along for the amusement but they wouldn’t turn on you and me.”

“Then why hasn’t one of them come forward and told us what he’s up to?”

Cielo brooded on that. Cielo said, “I think we’d better have a little talk with Ramirez and Ordovara.”

Chapter 10

Toting her overnight case, Howard hurried along ahead of her into National Airport’s noisy terminal. By the time she caught up he’d claimed a spot in the ticket-counter queue. She said, “If I’m not back by Thursday, drag the Caribbean.”

“I don’t see the point of this. There’s nothing you can do down there.”

“I can’t sit on my hands.” The line inched forward. She glared at the clock, worried about the time; traffic on the bridge had coagulated around a stalled car and she was late. “Will you do something for me? Will you keep feeding the fire under your friend O’Hillary?”

“Sure... sure.”

“Not that it’ll do much good. It’s a grotesque farce. They’re all engaged in this monstrous masquerade.”

“You’re getting alarmingly paranoid about this, Carole.”

“I am? Then why is it, do you suppose, that I could hire one solitary middle-aged man with a limp and no pull at all, and he was able to accomplish in six days what all the forces of the most powerful government on earth failed to do in fifteen?”

“Your man Crobey may think he knows the name one of them used fifteen years ago but that’s a far cry from catching them. He’s no closer to them than anybody else is. Why persist in this absurd anti-Washington neurosis? You know they’re doing everything they can.”

The queue crept forward a notch. Howard put the case down to free his hands for a cigarette. Carole said, “Don’t you know those things will stunt your growth?” Agitation made her bounce up and down on the balls of her feet; she kept looking resentfully at the clock above the oblivious ticket clerk. A metallic disembodied voice ran around overhead, half comprehensible — “Mr. Equation Funeral, Mr. Equation Funeral, please report to the American Airlines information desk.”

“You’re flagellating yourself,” Howard told her in an intense hiss. “Stop building dungeons in the air. No one’s conspiring to cover up Robert’s murder.”

“Howard, I’ve never known quite such a round-heeled pushover as you are. Working in the guts of it all this time I’d have thought you’d have learned better. I hold these truths to be self-evident: That irrespective of realities, the deformed indoctrinations of nationalistic stupidities will take precedence every time over basic human morality; that the secret war against Castro is not over just because the President of the United States goes on television and says it’s over; and that us niggers are being discriminated against because these terrorists happen to be the right political color — therefore they will be protected whatever their crimes.”

“Carole, your mouth runneth over.” Howard had gone very pale; he glanced around to see if anyone had overheard.

She slapped her bag down on the counter and demanded her ticket. When that rigamarole was completed — “Aisle or window?... Smoking or nonsmoking?” — she snatched up the boarding pass, hiked her bag over her shoulder and turned to Howard to make a grab for the overnight case. Howard kept it, determined to race along with her to the plane. Striding across the terminal he got some of his color back. “I get awfully tired of banging up against that brittle impregnable wall of your wise-ass cracks,” he drew a shuddering long breath to continue, “and I wish that just once in a while you’d give the rest of the world credit for possessing at least a tenth of the lofty moral values that you claim to possess.”

There was another queue at the security funnel. The metal detector kept beeping and several men were emptying out their pockets of coins, keys, cigarette cases, ballpoints. The loudspeaker announced the final boarding call for Carole’s flight to San Juan.

She began to push forward, cutting into the line, fuming.

Howard grabbed her sleeve. “Calm down. They won’t take off without you — they wouldn’t dare.” The afterthought amused him; she saw it in his eyes and knew abruptly that he was patronizing her. She couldn’t stand it.

She said, “You can still be a master of the gentlemanly shiv when you want to be,” and icily put her shoulder to him.

The queue began to move again. Carole placed handbag and overnight case on the moving belt. “Try to keep me posted, will you?”

“Yes, I’ll try.” He wasn’t quite being evasive; he was just staying low-key in order to counterbalance her. She knew he wasn’t her enemy. Looking back from beyond the checkpoint she caught the gentle worry in his face. He still had a hopeless remnant of feeling for her.

Howard waved; and she ran to catch her plane.

Incidents could be remembered but it was hard to recall a passion that was dead. She had loved, or been infatuated with, or had fond affection for, or perhaps merely sought refuge in Howard; but what she remembered most vividly from their marriage was the moment in Alexandria when they had looked at each other and realized they were stuck with each other. It was too depressing; not a word had passed between them but after that they had gone about embittering each other’s lives until there was no possibility of re-warming the soufflé of pastel dreams with which they had fed their initial illusions. The question of blame didn’t come into it: Vindictiveness had consumed them both. Now it was burnt out and she was grateful for that because she was able to view him as human.

Nothing remained between them except a distant fondness, as for a cousin who lived two thousand miles away with whom you exchanged Christmas cards and perhaps a biennial phone call. They were still wired tenuously to each other by memories of the dead child. Robert — Robert, she thought, we owed you a better chance than you got. She knew in her intellect that nothing she could do would make up for it. But all the same she was on this plane.

Crobey collected her in the midst of a chattering mob. He looked a bit surly. Making no offer to carry her bag he led the way outside into a drizzling rain that matted her hair in seconds. Crobey trudged across the parking lot without talking to her at all and she felt as if she were an errant schoolgirl being tugged along by the ear. He folded himself in behind the wheel of a little bullet-shaped car, not opening the passenger door for her, waiting stone-faced with his hand on the ignition until she pushed her case into the back seat and got in. Then Crobey turned the key; the starter meshed brutally; he jerked the lever into drive and the car lurched forward.

She said, “You’re bilious tonight.”

“Yeah. I had one of those submarine sandwiches. It keeps surfacing.” Finally he came out with it. “I don’t recall inviting you.”

“I don’t recall giving you a choice.”

He drove it onto the expressway. An amazing traffic of suicidal imbeciles zigzagged all around them. Carole composed herself. “Do you think you could be an angel and give me a progress report?”

“Not much to report.” The wipers batted back and forth. Red tail-lights swam in the windshield. A huge baroque old car fish tailedpast, swerving, cutting in too soon, and Crobey had to stab the brake. She warded off the dashboard with her palm. “I made a little progress,” he conceded.

She let the silence run until it was clear he wanted prompting. “I’m not just here to feed you lines. What progress?”

“Somebody seems to be interested in me.” He had his attention on the rear-view mirror.

“The Rodriguez gang?”

“Or anybody. My ex-wife’s private detectives, who knows.”

The expressway ended in a muddy rubble of construction. Crobey maneuvered it through the side streets onto Avenida Ashford. The tall beach-front hotels might have been in Miami Beach. Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet pavements. A fool blocked Crobey’s progress, leaving them stranded at the stoplight. When the light changed Crobey kicked the pedal; the car shot forward half a block and abruptly, without signaling, Crobey turned it into a narrow passage.

Street lights shone pale along the empty alley; at the far corner a traffic light blinked red, on and off. Crobey pulled in to the curb and extinguished the lights.

She reached for the door handle but Crobey stayed her. He kept watch on the mirror. After a while he said, “All right,” and switched on the lights and drove on.

“Were we being followed?”

“No.”

He was still driving with half his attention on the rear view. She had been in San Juan before but only as a tourist; he was driving through sections she’d never seen — stucco slums, open-front shops blaring an astonishingly loud cacophony of strident recorded music.

They emerged onto a narrow blacktop road that two-laned away to the end of what appeared to be a swamp; then it began to climb into the hills. The rain had stopped. She rolled down the window and heard the pneumatic hiss of the tires on the wet asphalt.

They passed a white paddock fence — horse stables — then ran up along a curling track through a dark tracery of trees. The road had sharp bends and the headlights kept flashing across gnarled tangles of leaves and wood. Sensitive to shadows and compositions, she felt suddenly aware of her position: the dark mysterious hill road, the car in the night, the silence — nothing but the rush of the car — and her companion: half civilized, as coarse-edged as rough hand-hewn woodwork, as secure (she suddenly feared) as a three-legged chair.

“Where are we going, Crobey?”

“Well it ain’t the Ritz.”

“You could have booked me into a hotel—”

“No,” he said, “I couldn’t.”

They ran slowly through a village: a little row of shops, an intersection. Everything jerry-built and as shabby as the sets for a nonunion movie; corrugated metal roofs, tattered remains of circus posters, here and there a yellow pool under a naked light. A small dog barked at the car. For a little way it chased them, yapping alongside Carole’s window; then Crobey accelerated and the dog fell behind and they were out in the lonely darkness again.

“Where are we?”

“The interior. Up-island.”

“Specifically.”

“Does it matter? You wouldn’t find it without a guide.” He was slowing, looking for something — he leaned forward to peer out over the wheel. There was a gap in the trees on the left. He turned the car slowly, easing into the narrow opening. A pair of muddy ruts curled into the trees. Crobey hauled the stick down to low and the transmission whined as the car lurched forward.

“Crobey, this is absurd.”

He was concentrating only on the driving; he didn’t reply. His massive corded forearms fought the wheel. A wet leaf pasted itself to the windshield. Branches scraped alongside, flicking moisture in her face; she rolled up the window. The car pitched and bucketed, the rear wheels spinning at times on the slick mud but momentum carried it through each time and finally they emerged — one last bend and they were in the open, grass on the slopes to either side, dark hulks grazing: cattle or horses, she couldn’t tell in the night. Just above the horizon she could see a patch of stars but the sky overhead was dark. She sat rigid with alarm and the uneasy speculation that Crobey night have sold out. Why else would he drive her so secretively into the wilderness? She drew the handbag into her lap — it was heavy enough; perhaps she could club him in the face with it; fling the door open and dive from the car...

A shabby little house loomed in the headlights. Crobey said, “We’re here.”

She braced her feet against the floorboards, pushing herself back stiffly in the seat as if it were a dentist’s chair. Too late to run now. Her eyes went dry and she began to blink rapidly; there was a taste like brass on her tongue.

He ran the car across the grass, around behind the house. When he switched it off there was abrupt silence broken only by the pinging of heat contractions in the engine. The darkness was almost total. She had trouble drawing breath. Then Crobey opened his door and stepped out. “Come on, then.”

She let herself out. On rubber knees she lurched a few paces and then waited for him to guide her. He chunked the door shut and took her elbow.

“Crobey—”

“Relax. You’re tight as a drumhead.”

His grip was light; he didn’t squeeze her elbow. She hadn’t the presence to pull away. Crobey took her around the house — she had an impression of clumped shadows, a barren yard, another building over to the right (a barn?), the steamy smell of manure and livestock. A cowbell jingled distantly. There was a heavy weight in the air — the rain hadn’t refreshed it but only matted it down, like her hair which felt pasted on her skull and wet against the back of her neck.

“Mind the steps.” Just the same she nearly tripped; she felt blind — had she ever known such complete darkness outdoors? She felt tentatively with each foot, scraping the rough surface of the steps. Four of them and they were on the porch. Then Crobey’s fist was thudding — the rattle of a screen door’s frame. Heavy footsteps within. A man’s rough voice: “¿Quien es?”

“Crobey.”

And the door opened, throwing light.

She only saw the man’s silhouette — thickset, massive; and the hard outline of a revolver in his hand.

Crobey made an impatient noise in his nose and she felt herself propelled through the door. The man with the gun stepped back, lowering the weapon to his side — an exchange of glances with Crobey; the screen door slapped shut and Crobey leaned back against the solid door to close it.

Crobey said, “Santana — Miss Marchand.”

The other man smiled a bit and dipped his head to her. He put the pistol away in a pocket of his baggy pants. She heard him mutter something — “con mucho gusto” — and then Crobey walked past to drop her case on a rickety old parson’s table.

The room hardly registered on her awareness; it was a basic enclosure — rustic, beaten up, more than lived-in. The air smelled of garlic and sweat. Santana in the light was squat, shorter than she’d thought at first — no neck; jowls; dark unruly hair; a swarthy face. His little eyes kept watching her and she wondered if she was going to scream.

Santana said something in Spanish. Crobey said, “Talk English now.”

Santana shrugged and gave an apologetic smile. With a thick accent — annyWHAN for anyone, jew for you — he said, “Did anyone follow you?”

“No. I guess they weren’t looking for me at the airport. Well they wouldn’t care if I left — it’s my staying here that burns them.”

Carole drew a ragged shuddering breath. Crobey said to her, “If you want to wash up there’s a pump on the kitchen sink. The privy’s just outside the back door.”

“Talk to me,” she said. “Am I your prisoner here?”

“What?”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Santana? He used to be my ground-crew mechanic.”

Santana beamed at her. “I used to keep Crobey’s planes flying.” She barely understood him. “Then my brother, he died and I inherited this place.”

“I see.” She looked at Crobey. “And what do you and your old buddy here have in mind for me?”

“Maybe you’d rather sleep out in the rain?”

“It didn’t occur to you they have hotels in Puerto Rico?”

Crobey glanced at Santana, who only grinned infuriatingly; Crobey’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling, seeking inspiration from the Almighty.

“Crobey, tell me what’s going on.”

“We’re staying out of sight — I’d have thought that was obvious. It won’t kill you to spend the night here. Tomorrow we’ll put you back on a plane home.” He picked up her case and walked out of the room. She counted four doors: the front one through which they’d entered, one that led into a hallway through which she could see part of a rudimentary kitchen, two others. Crobey went through one of these and she glimpsed a cot before he blocked the view with his body. “This’ll be your room for tonight. I’ll bunk down on the couch there. Now sit down.”

With his gravelly manner Crobey made the most innocuous command sound like a ferocious threat. She backed up to the window and hiked her haunch onto the sill defiantly. She was still trembling slightly.

On his way to the couch Crobey’s limp seemed more pronounced; maybe it was the rain. He sat down, gave her a hostile grin and picked up the drink Santana had left on the table. Crobey said, “I’ve been making waves since I got here. Apparently I splashed the wrong people. I was at the Sheraton like any other tourist until yesterday. Then I went down to breakfast and a cop pulled up a chair at my table. Very polite, very diffident and the personality of a closed door. No threats, but a visit from those folks can be a threat in itself. He asked questions and I told lies, the kind where I know he knows I’m lying — he wanted to know what I was doing in Puerto Rico and I told him I was working for a movie director, which was true, and that I was down here scouting locations for a movie about the Bay of Pigs, which was not true. He wanted to know why I was going around asking peculiar questions and what gave me the idea I could pester citizens without an investigator’s license. The hint was that there are people here who can make their wishes known in official circles and that it wouldn’t take too long for the order to come down, and when it did I’d probably be collected by the security police and escorted to jail or the airport or something. We’re very sorry but you understand, señor, an irregularity in your papers. It’s funny in a way, if that kind of thing amuses you — I feel like I’m running out of places to hang my hat. Nowadays it seems you can tour all the friendly countries with an overnight bag.”

She had grown impatient with him. “You had a visit from a policeman and he didn’t actually threaten you but you read between the lines and as a result you seem to have spent the past twenty-four hours changing into dry pants, and now you run me through a wringer of mystery and intrigue and when I ask you what it’s all about, all you do is stick your jaw out at me and do an impression of Charles Bickford playing a warden who’s glaring at the convicts. Let me tell you, Crobey, the acting stops right now.”

She clapped her lips shut and glared.

“Let me remind you,” he said quietly, “that I’m not your lackey. For a thousand a week I’m not going to die in the service of the memory of a dead kid I never met. If the precautions seem excessive you’ll just have to humor me. Now I’m not entirely as Mongoloid as I look and I do understand a couple of things — I understand that you have this habit, when you get rattled you just tend to keep talking until you think of something to say, and I understand that flip snide insults are to you what fodder is to cannons and I don’t expect to break all your unpleasant habits for you overnight but I want you to keep a curb on your tongue because otherwise things could get a little dicey around here. There are people I take insults from but you don’t know me well enough to be one of them. You’re completely out of your element here and you’re scared — you’re a city kid out in the wild jungle and every last thing is going to cause fear and trembling until you get used to it. Mostly right now I expect you’re scared of me. I don’t have a lot of polish, I haven’t got any cocktail party chitchat, I’m not the kind of domesticated house-pet you can put in his place with wise-ass remarks.”

His insight startled her — she was, above all, afraid of him. There hung about him a kind of menace; the type of quality that might emanate from a dozing predator. It wasn’t just her private reaction; she saw it as well in the way Santana watched Crobey. And Santana was his friend.

Fear was something she wasn’t used to. She fought it and this brought out the anger in her. Knowing it was foolish she blurted, “I’d be more impressed with all that if I thought you were doing an acceptable job of chasing the mice. I didn’t ask you to lay your life on the line for a thousand a week but I did ask you to do a job. I don’t see much sign you’ve been doing it. For instance maybe you’d better run that Glenn Anders business past me one more time. Maybe you can explain who authorized you to make cozy deals with the CIA.”

“Apparently I was under a misapprehension — I understood I had a free hand.”

“Did you honestly think I wanted you to share everything with the CIA?”

“The CIA has facilities that I don’t have. It’s my intention to use them to provoke Rodriguez. When he learns they’re sniffing around his backtrail he’ll get nervous and a nervous man makes mistakes. It may provoke him into showing himself and when that happens I plan to be there.”

“Even though you’ve given the CIA the inside track.” She snorted theatrically.

“It’s no great trick to get there ahead of those jokers,” Crobey said mildly. “They move like slugs. Anders is all right by himself but he’s lugging all the dead weight of the bureaucracy behind him.” Then his voice turned hard. “Did you listen to anything I said before?”

“I heard you talking.”

“Right. Look. I can’t do a job for you if I’m chained up in a dungeon or thrown out of Puerto Rico. The only way I can make any progress is to go to ground. If they can’t find me they can’t deport me, you dig? That’s why we’re out here instead of drinking banana daiquiris at Dorado Beach. I don’t know if you were tagged at the airport but we have to assume you were. By coming here you’ve exposed yourself and that makes my job harder. If they can reach you it’s the same thing as reaching me.” Then Crobey showed anxiety: “You’re dealing with terrorists — people who kill people. If Rodriguez gets the idea you’re putting him in jeopardy—” and he shrugged without finishing it. Then: “Maybe it’s time you put paid to this thing. Go home to the world you know, don’t try to mess about with things you can’t handle — you’re a guppy trying to swim through a school of piranha. If they’re hungry they’ll have you for breakfast and they won’t even belch afterwards.”

“Have they got you scared, Crobey? Is that it? Do you want me to call it off because that way you won’t have to think of yourself as a coward?”

“Believe that if it makes you feel better.”

“My son isn’t any less dead now than he was when I hired you.”

“When we get too close to Rodriguez he’ll do something about it. You understand that?”

“I understand he’ll try. It’s your job to make sure he fails, isn’t it.”

“Given a free hand I’ll try. But it means you’ve got to stay out of it. Go back to the mainland, hide out somewhere, hire a bodyguard if you can, wait it out.”

“No. I’m staying, and I’m setting the rules. For a thousand a week you can play it by my rules.”

“Rules? Do you think there are rules in this game?”

“I want every scrap of information you get — whether it’s useful or negative or just immaterial. When decisions are made I’ll discuss them but I’m in charge and I don’t put things to a vote. If I want you to divulge anything else to Mr. Anders or the police I’ll let you know but until then you’ll keep your lip buttoned and say nothing to anyone.”

Santana gaped at her — he’d never heard a woman talk to a man that way, let alone to a man like Crobey.

“I hear you,” said Crobey, amused, waiting her out.

“I was told in Washington that if they’re arrested on American soil they can only be charged with violating the U.S. neutrality laws. Conspiring against a foreign government. That’s a slap on the wrist. My son was murdered in Mexico — I want to know what the official Mexican position is. Legally it’s their case.”

Crobey said, “Forget the Mexicans.”

“Why?”

“There’s no material evidence he was killed there. The body was dumped there but for all we know he was killed out at sea aboard a boat — and wouldn’t that be a nicety for a few dozen lawyers. In the second place even if the Mexicans had it airtight they wouldn’t touch it with a rake. The rightists would condemn them if they convicted, the leftists would condemn them if they didn’t. If you want an opinion, the only way you’re going to get revenge on these bastards is to kill them yourself.”

“No. I don’t just want them punished. I want them punished publicly, in the eyes of the world. I want justice, and I want the world to see it. I’m not about to go to jail for murdering Rodriguez. I don’t want it to be a joke, Crobey. I want it to be a memorial to my son.”

“You don’t get it, ducks.” His voice was softer now. “The kind of justice you’re asking for is out of stock. It was rendered obsolete by reality. The Mexicans won’t touch them. I explained that. And nobody else has jurisdiction.”

“You’re wrong about that.”

“Am I? Show me.”

“I’ve had time to think it out,” she said. “There’s one government that will be sure to execute them with full-scale publicity. All we have to do is catch them and turn them over.”

Crobey looked at her, baffled.

“Castro, Crobey. We deliver them to Fidel Castro.”

Crobey scowled. His mouth prepared for a speech but he subsided; finally he cocked his head, reluctantly pleased. “My God. It might work.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, obviously pleased with herself.

“Anything else up your sleeve?”

“A thought or two. For instance — you must know a few of the black-market arms dealers in this part of the world.”

“You want a bazooka for Christmas.”

She said, “Suppose you’re a terrorist gang and you’ve just collected ten million dollars in cash ransom. Where do you spend it?”

Crobey didn’t answer for a moment. His face changed a bit. Finally he said, “I hadn’t thought of that one. I wonder if Anders has.”

“A civil-service apparatchik? I doubt it.”

“Don’t undersell Anders.” But he was watching her more alertly than he ever had before, as if for the first time he recognized her as something more than an attractive bit player.

Chapter 11

Glenn Anders slouched in an uncomfortable wooden chair while Perez flipped through the photo cards with the repetitive efficiency of a bank teller counting money. Perez had been through mug-shot canvasses before; just the same Anders was dubious — Perez flipped them over so quickly. After a while there was a danger of forgetting what one was looking for. One’s eyes began to go out of focus and one might flip right past the vital one.

A girl in an Afro natural hairdo and bone earrings came in. She put a paper bag on the table and smiled brightly and left.

Anders removed two capped Styrofoam cups from the bag.

“Yes. Black please, with two sugars, yes?”

The room was prim and sinister, the windows set high. The tile floor sloped to a center drain and the walls were slick with high-gloss green paint. This was police headquarters: a washable room designed for interrogations.

Anders stirred sugar into the coffee with the wooden tongue-depressor stick and pushed the cup across the table to Perez. “Take a break. Tell me again what he looked like.”

Perez — slight, birdy, poplin suit, fake silk tie — had a cocky way of narrowing his eyes and dropping his voice near a whisper, as confidential as a desk clerk pimping for a girl on the third floor. As it happened he was neither pimp nor pusher; Perez was a plainclothes police detective.

Perez said, “I wasn’t so close to see him clearly,” and ended the sentence with a nervous meaningless laugh that sounded like a telephone’s busy signal. The habit irritated Anders. Perez, proud of his English, said, “I was tired to sit waiting in the car, I was getting out for walk, then I hear the footsteps, yes? In the open he startled me and I went up in a doorway to look like I’m ringing the bell of the house. I am afraid he spotted me. I think so, yes?” And another honk of laughter, this one to cover his shame. It was another point against him that he still hadn’t understood Anders’ question.

Anders contained his irritation. None of it meant much anyhow. Likely the whole thing was a false lead. The Volkswagen had provoked the attention of the bureaucracy and Anders was obliged to follow up dutifully but he wasn’t sure it would take him anywhere.

Reasoning that Rodrigo Rodriguez might spend part of the ten million dollars’ ransom on armaments, Anders had activated the clumsy apparatus. Inquiries were made in seventeen ports. The report that flagged Anders’ attention came from Fajardo, the port town at the northeast tip of the island of Puerto Rico.

The dealer was a regular police informant who ran a small import business in molasses and wine and occasionally cocaine. He had reported a visit from a Cuban who went by the name of Cielo, was unfamiliar to the dealer and had visited him to inquire obliquely into the possibility of purchasing certain arms — mainly mortars and rocket launchers, not hip-pocket stuff. The dealer informed his visitor that he did not traffic in such items. When the visitor left the dealer made a note of the plate number of the Volkswagen and telephoned to his contact on the police.

It was tenuous but it had drawn Anders’ eye because of the locale and the nature of the request. Not just anyone had much interest in mortars and rockets; and Crobey’s clue had given him a reason to be interested in Puerto Rico.

Anders had flown into San Juan and exercised a few quiet pressures to set in motion a search for the Volkswagen. The dealer from Fajardo had gone through the same photo files that Perez had before him now; the dealer hadn’t singled out a face but he was an odd vague sort and a simple experiment had proved he had an almost nonexistent memory for faces. Under repeated questioning he’d proved uncertain about nearly everything. He couldn’t remember what clothes Cielo had worn; yes, Cielo might have been older, might have been heavier — it was hard to say. The dealer had gone home bewildered and Rosalia, her hand on Anders’ shoulder, had exhaled with a slumping sag of disappointment.

The name Cielo clearly was not so much an alias as a nom de guerre, a code name; You can call me Cielo, it meant nothing to the police or the agency; quite possibly it was a name adopted for one operation, as disposable as a paper wrapper.

But then the Volkswagen had been identified by its license number and the police had sent Perez to cover it. Now Perez had seen the man who drove the car and Perez had been trained to identify faces.

Anders said, “He didn’t have a belly or a beard.”

“No. No beard. Big in the shoulders and as tall as you, yes? But no heavier than you are. One-ninety, perhaps two hundred. No more.”

“The face? Tell me again now.”

“Comó se dice, square, yes? Latino but not too dark. Not Indio. Short hair, not crew-cut but short and neat, and not bald. A, how do you say, widow’s peak, yes?”

“Then he didn’t wear a hat.”

“No, no hat.” Perez scowled. “The face, yes. I have a good picture here.” He tapped his temple. “A square face, heavy bones, is hard but not stupid, you understand? Wide face, very wide.”

“And the clothes?”

“Khaki jeans, a light windbreaker jacket, faded gray. Work boots like a car mechanic. Your clothes would fit him.”

“When you first saw him he wasn’t coming out of a house, you’re sure of that?”

“He came out a driveway between two houses. From behind, the next street I think, yes?”

If it was Rodriguez, Anders thought, he’d have been smart enough to leave his car parked several blocks from his destination. It made for the dreary prospect of house-to-house inquiries.

Perez said, “If he is in these pictures I’ll find him. It’s a promise, yes?”

“All right. I’ll check back with you.” Anders left the second cup of coffee for him.

The federal building looked like something the Spaniards might have constructed to contain lunatics and violent offenders. The agency had borrowed a desk for him in an office attached to the Department of Agriculture; officially he was out-of-bounds on U.S. soil. At least the office had a scrambler phone. He found Rosalia there — she gripped his tie and pulled him down, licking his mouth lasciviously.

Anders poked both fists into his kidneys and reared far back. “You yank at me like that again, you’ll have me in traction for a week.”

Rosalia leaned leeringly forward, straining cloth with breasts. “Your place or mine?” She was in a springy droll mood.

“You’ve got fabulous boobs,” he told her. “But it’s the wrong time of day to be caressing each other’s erogenous zones. Did George Wilkins call in?”

“Not yet. If we got married could we still work together?”

“I doubt it. Against regulations.”

“Then we won’t get married until you retire.”

“Got it all worked out, I see.”

From the beginning she had amused him with her cub-reporter bounce and cuddly lovability; she’d inculcated in him a kind of playfulness he thought he’d lost. It was beginning to occur to him that perhaps she was the girl to whom he wanted to be faithful: Despite her overt sexuality she possessed the soft nesty instincts of a purring kitten.

“Oh dear. I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.” She rummaged through papers. “Here it is. Mr. O’Hillary wants you to call him.”

“God.” He fixed his glance on the phone as if he expected it to serve a subpoena on him.

“Also there was a call from Harry Crobey.”

“How the hell did he know where to find me?”

“I gather he called the FBI and they transferred him to the Justice Department and they transferred him to—”

“No. I mean how’d he know I’d be in San Juan at all?”

“Are you asking me?” She ripped the page off her pad. “He’d like to meet you tonight at half past seven for dinner at the Tres Candelas in Old Town. He said he’d be bringing a guest.”

“Carole Marchand?”

“He didn’t mention a name.”

“All right. Why don’t you come along?”

“Love to. I’ll put on something slinky.”

He regarded her husky ripe shape. “Sure. You’d better ring O’Hillary for me and put it on the scrambler.”

O’Hillary — smooth, avuncular, elegant: “Glenn, how are you? Any fix on Rodriguez?”

“Not yet.”

“Can you be overheard?”

“Only by my assistant.”

“Ask her to leave, will you?”

Anders cupped the mouthpiece. “He wants privacy.”

With genial disgust Rosalia lifted her nose into the air and went out, pulling the door shut with a quiet reproachful click.

“All right. I’m alone.”

O’Hillary said, “This project of yours has consumed a lot of time in briefings and meetings. It’s becoming a tedious football.”

“What am I supposed to do about that? Drop the ball?”

“It’s not quite that simple, as I’m sure you appreciate. As you know, Glenn, there are varying factions of opinion on this issue. There is, not to put too fine a point on it, an ambivalence in the Administration’s attitude. On the one hand an Ambassador was victimized, an American murdered, and the Administration can’t be seen to condone terrorism—”

Can’t be seen to. That summed up O’Hillary all right.

“At the same time,” O’Hillary went on, “there’s also the matter of the current efforts to ameliorate relations with Cuba.”

Anders could picture him tipped back in his wingback swivel chair with his silk-clad ankles crossed, gently palming the distinguished wave in his silver hair and staring whimsically at a point about a yard above the President’s official photograph.

O’Hillary said, “Conversely Castro is still, in an unofficial way, the enemy. There’s the sticky affairs in Somalia and Ethiopia — and we have people among us who still haven’t forgotten the history of the Angola affair. In certain eyes Fidel Castro remains the bad guy. In regard to the Rodriguez group, there’s still a faction here that takes the understandable position that he who is my enemy’s enemy is perforce my friend. To be blunt, this faction — numbering not an inconsequential few persons in high places — is engaged in the attempt to persuade the Administration to let Rodriguez run and see if perhaps he won’t take care of Castro for them. As a result we’re in dubious straits, my friend. We’re in grave danger of being short-circuited by conflicting orders.”

Whenever O’Hillary turned pedantic and longwinded it meant he was preparing a smoke screen. O’Hillary had an abstract fondness for intrigue as an end rather than a means. He had an infallible intuition for gothic complexities — he thrived on deceptions even when they were superfluous; he was a success in his profession because he had mastered the skill of trick marksmanship — shoot first, then draw a bull’s-eye around the bullet hole.

The principal of survival in Langley was Cover Your Ass; ultimately the decision would come down on one side or the other and O’Hillary would be ready, either way, to end the match with a perfect bull’s-eye — a neat trick and one that might require the sacrifice of a subordinate or two.

Anders knew he had to listen very carefully to O’Hillary now: It wasn’t what O’Hillary said but what he didn’t say.

“I do hope you’re not recording this, Glenn. If things backfire we mustn’t make the error of leaving tape-recorded evidence of our misstatements about, must we.” Like a disagreeable schoolmaster, Anders thought, O’Hillary selected his tone for its prim offensiveness.

“It’s not being recorded.”

“Good. Your instructions — from me, not from above me, and not in writing — are to proceed with the investigation, to locate this man Rodriguez and his little Sherwood Forest band, and to report personally and directly to me and to no one else. You’ll consult with me before taking action of any kind. And you will not take the police or anyone else into your confidence. In other words you must proceed henceforth without police assistance.”

“Then how am I supposed to find them?”

“Wits. Ingenuity.”

“And what am I supposed to tell the police?”

“Tell them the leads proved false. Pull them off the case.”

“You honestly expect me to find Rodriguez without any help?”

“I do. If there’s a man who can do it it’s you.”

“You can butter me up all you want,” Anders said, “but you can’t have me for breakfast. This opens up a provocative can of beans. You want me to find Rodriguez but then keep hands off him. That’s pointless.”

“We must be prepared for whatever decision comes down, mustn’t we. We can do that only by performing thoroughly the task to which we’re officially assigned — the task of intelligence-gathering. Once we fix Rodriguez’s location we can then take whatever action we’re ordered to take. In the meantime nothing is to be filed through normal channels. You’re on your own and I’m your only contact with the company. Understood?”

“In other words if the Administration decides to let him run you don’t want the record to show we knew where to lay hands on him. You want to keep it private because you don’t intend to produce it until it’s absolutely clear you’ll be applauded for producing it. Christ — what a grisly waste,”

“Regardless of provocation you’re to take no action that might jeopardize security. You understand your instructions, don’t you? You’re to find Rodriguez. But you’re to do it in such a way that no one except me knows you’ve done it. Not Rodriguez, not the police, not the agency. No one.”

“We’ll see.” Anders smiled, anticipating the response.

“Don’t give me evasive answers!” He could have heard O’Hillary without a telephone.

It made him laugh aloud. “You’re so easy to string along. Mind your blood pressure. I understand the orders — we may have an argument about it when I get back but I understand them. Anything else on your mind?”

“As long as you’re on the phone you may as well bring me up to date.”

Chapter 12

She awoke stiff and grumpy to the buzz of a distant tractor. Sunlight stabbed in through holes in the cheap blind.

It was too rustic for words. She had to pick a barefoot path across weeds to the privy; she accomplished her morning toilette at the kitchen sink with the aid of the compact mirror from her handbag.

There didn’t seem to be a soul in the house. She was glad of that; it gave her time to collect herself. She dressed in a plaid shirt and blue jeans and desert boots; and rummaged through the Spartan kitchen.

Last night, she thought, they seemed to have reached an understanding of sorts. Her last glimpse of him had discovered a defiant and lascivious grin. She had responded in kind.

It was inevitable, in the circumstances, that she would be tempted toward an unhealthy attachment: Crobey was the only remotely familiar object in this alien world, the only bridge between her and the sanity she’d left behind. But she had to guard against trusting him too much.

As if summoned by her mind a car crunched into the yard. She went to the kitchen door and looked out — it was Crobey but it wasn’t the same little shoehorn car he’d had last night. This one was a high square Bronco, a coiled-cable winch on the front bumper, a drab green paint job and big-lugged tires that looked like cross-country equipment. Undoubtedly it was four-wheel-drive. Crobey stepped down and glanced at her, not smiling, and reached into the back of the truck, from which he lifted a heavy rucksack. He carried it toward the house.

Carole made an ineffectual and self-conscious swipe at her hair. “Good morning.”

“Yeah.” He squeezed past her into the house. When she followed him into the front room she found him dumping the contents of the rucksack on the parson’s table — a jumble of oily blue-black machinery that she belatedly recognized as disassembled guns.

He began to sort things out on the table. There was a flat red steel box; he slid the lid off it and revealed a collection of ramrods, white cloth patches, cans of oil and solvent.

He assembled something out of the parts — it looked like the kind of stutter gun that airborne commandos carried in war movies. Stubby, ugly, wicked. Crobey worked its action with a great deal of sinister clacking.

“I see you’ve been to the arms dealers.”

“One of ’em. If he’s been approached by Rodriguez he’s not admitting it. I’ve got a few more on the list — then we’ll have to widen the net. Caracas, Rio, the Azores.” He gave her a direct glance for the first time. “Glenn Anders is in San Juan.”

“Oh?”

“Flew in last night.”

“How do you know?”

“I haven’t altogether wasted my time since I got here. You’ve got two other people on your payroll besides me and Santana. I slipped them a little something to keep their eyes open — I check in with them now and then.”

“Who are they?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Crobey—”

“Part of the reason they’re willing to deal with me is they know I won’t name them. All right?”

She conceded it. “So Anders is here. Why?”

“I suggest we ask him.”

“We?”

“He wants to meet you. When I was in Mexico City I told him I’d try to set it up.”

“What have you told him?”

“A little bit of the truth. Not too much.” He went back to work on his toys.

She said lamely, “Where’s Santana? Working the farm?”

“No. He’s out looking into the Rodriguez family background.”

“Have we stirred them up at all yet?”

“I’ll ask Anders when I see him.”

“I’m asking you. You’re supposed to be my expert.”

“An expert’s a fellow you hire because he’s the one who knows what experts to call in, and when to call them. Are you going to dispute everything I do? Because if you are I don’t see much point in carrying on. I can’t function if I’m harassed from both sides at once. Do you want me to pack?”

“Don’t throw ultimatums at me,” she said. “I might call your bluff.”

“Then you’re ready to give it up?”

“No. I’ll look for somebody a bit less prickly. You can’t possibly be the only man alive who knew those people in the Bay of Pigs days.”

“Ducks, I don’t think I can be happy here if we have to have this conversation twice a day. It doesn’t give me a sense of job security.”

“Security? You?”

“I’m not talking about the long term. I’m talking about maybe getting the rug pulled out from under me at the wrong moment.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Ah, ducks, tell me why I should.”

She touched a finger to one of his guns and twirled it on the table, picked a stray hair off her cuff, leaned back, crossed her legs, put an elbow on the table and her chin in her palm, looked him in the eye and said, “Nobody can do that. It’s a trick question and you know it. The only way to find out whether you can trust someone is to trust the person and see what happens.”

“You’re a truly contrary creature.” He stood, pulling the Levi’s down from his crotch.

She watched him limp toward the back door. “Where are you going?”

“To the loo, ducks.”

“Why’ve you started calling me by that awful epithet?”

“Ducks?” In the doorway he turned; the smile was more sardonic than amiable. “When I use it, it’s a term of endearment.” Then he went.

She heard the slap of the privy door and realized she was smiling. She straightened her face. She kept catching herself trying to ingratiate Crobey — it was a warning sign; she had to guard against it. It wasn’t a contest of will or pride; in effect he’d imprisoned her and rendered her ineffectual; if she remained she could only sink into passivity. That wasn’t what she’d come for.

When he came in from the yard he said, “I wasn’t intending to switch cars right away but there was a problem in town — I left it parked while I went to see the man about the guns and when I came back I found it jammed in by two parked cars that hadn’t been there before. One of them had a couple of smokers in it. So I stepped into a hotel and got lost. I phoned the rent-a-car people to go pick it up and we got the Bronco from a pal of Santana’s.”

“Who were the men in the car?”

“Locals. I’ve no idea whose.”

She said, “If someone’s putting pressure on the police to scare you out of Puerto Rico, it shouldn’t be impossible to find out who that is. If the police are impressed by this person or frightened of him, it means they know who he is.”

“I realize that. But I can’t think of any coppers I’d like to talk to right now.”

“Would Anders know?”

“Anders could find out,” he conceded.

“Then let’s arrange to see him.”

Crobey said, “A while ago you were chastising me for consorting with him.”

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” She smiled. “Besides, I want to give you a fighting chance.”

“Good. I already made a date for tonight: seven-thirty at the Tres Candelas.”

The Tres Candelas struck Anders as a Harry Crobey sort of place. The long dismal narrow room was mostly bar. A row of tiny tables, a back room with half a dozen tables-for-four. There was a Wurlitzer jukebox that might have fascinated a dealer in fifties kitsch.

Anders had his jacket hung over his shoulder by one fingertip and Rosalia held his hand like a teen-ager. The bartender, in soiled apron and halfheartedly trimmed beard, waved them toward the tables in back. No one was back there. Anders seated Rosalia under a cockfight poster and selected a chair from which he could watch the entrance. According to his watch it was 7:05. He was surprised by Crobey’s absence.

Rosalia reached for his wrist and heaved it around to see the face of his watch. “We’re awfully early.”

“Once in my life I want to be somewhere ahead of Harry.”

“He’s got some kind of hex sign on you, hasn’t he.”

“Not really. Sometimes I envy him a little.” He was looking at her breasts, not smiling. “Want to know what I’m thinking?”

“I think I already do,” she said in a mock-cool voice. She had extraordinarily long natural eyelashes and knew how to use them; she batted them at him. Anders made a point of tracing the lines of her body with his eyes. Rosalia began to chuckle. “How’d you ever turn into such a lout?”

Anders shook his head gloomily. “You see it was like this. When I was nine I ran away from home and got picked up by a very smooth hair-tonic salesman who hooked me on smack and used me as a courier until he got run over by a Chinese tank, and then I was all by myself on the streets mugging old ladies until this kindly fat man took me in to his establishment and I worked upstairs there on the line until I got arrested for selling atomic secrets, and after that things just started to go wrong somehow.”

Mirth captivated Rosalia, making her shake. Anders laughed at his own absurdity. Then he looked up in time to see Harry Crobey walk in, escorting a striking woman.

Anders watched the brisk-gaited clipclip of the woman’s good long legs as Crobey limped beside her. She wasn’t especially tall but she managed to carry herself as if she were. The skin of her face was drawn over precisely defined bones — she was at least forty and didn’t attempt to look younger; very little make-up and she’d been out in the humid wind but dishevelment suited her. In a rust-hued skirt and brown satiny blouse she managed to look cool. Her eyes were shaped for scorn and for easy laughter; her hair was reddish but not red and something made him certain she didn’t tint it. She wasn’t pretty in any of the usual ways — the bone ridges were prominent, the nose sharp, the impression one of planes and angles rather than soft curved features — but she was extraordinarily attractive and it was clear by her carriage that she knew it and was assured and confident in herself. Possibly it was a pose but if so it was one she’d had plenty of time to rehearse.

Anders shook Crobey’s hand and introductions went around: Rosalia gave Carole Marchand an ingenuous beaming smile. Crobey held the woman’s chair for her, an event that astonished Anders — he’d never seen Crobey do that before — and she sat down with unstudied grace; she seemed almost wholly without selfconsciousness.

Crobey hooked an overhand wave toward the bartender and sat down with a wince that betrayed the chronic troublesomeness of his knee. “Christ, this humidity. Like Dante said, it’s a nice place to visit but...”

The bartender distributed menus enclosed in fly-specked plastic. Rosalia was asking Carole Marchand if it was her first visit to Puerto Rico — it was all very desultory; Crobey seemed in no hurry to get to business and Anders decided Crobey wanted the delay in order to give his client an opportunity to size Anders up.

After a time Carole Marchand wrinkled her nostrils in the direction of the kitchen. “Do I hear someone rattling my dish? I’m famished. It had better be edible, Crobey.”

“I doubt it comes with a written warranty, ducks. Last time I was in here it wasn’t half bad.”

Anders said, “Harry’s a connoisseur of greasy-spoon dives from Macao to Dar-es-Salaam. He’s got an unerring nose for the worst food in town.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” There seemed to be an easy tolerance in Carole Marchand’s acceptance of Crobey’s eccentricities and Anders wondered how much of it was sham. It was difficult to believe she didn’t actually dislike the man; Crobey wasn’t her sort — the juxtaposition struck him as something like thowing a groomed show-bred poodle into a cage with a timber wolf.

Crobey said obliviously, “I didn’t have to be the world’s greatest pilot, you know. With a little education I could have been a gourmet.”

“Don’t be sickening,” Carole Marchand drawled; she turned mischievously to Rosalia. “Harry takes a mulish delight in pretending he’s an ape. Actually beneath that rough crude exterior beats the heart of the first man in Liverpool to climb down a tree without having had to climb up it first.”

Crobey’s smile was a bit strained. “The lady likes to turn on the fan and wait for something to hit it.”

Carole Marchand breathed in slowly and expressively through her nose; she tried to suck her mouth in with a tight look of disapproval but her lips began to quiver. “Keep it up, Crobey, keep it up.” She reached sternly for her glass but then began to laugh; Anders realized to his astonishment that she actually enjoyed bantering with Crobey. Finally she drank and held the glass away from her with critical suspicion. “What the devil is this?”

Crobey said, “I suspect it ain’t Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer, ducks. Beyond that it’s hard to say, in this dump. Could be horse piss.”

“Philistine. Infidel.”

The dinner that ensued was edible if not palatable; finally the bartender cleared the dishes away with a surly crashing of porcelain. Soiled espresso cups alighted on the table like moths; Crobey lifted his, peered dubiously into it and said, “Confusion to our enemies.”

“And I believe we’re here to discuss our enemies,” Carole Marchand said. Her voice had hardened — no longer the cool acerbic drawl.

“Right,” Crobey said, “we want to win the war and get home by Christmas, don’t we.”

Carole Marchand considered Rosalia; then her glance came around to Anders. “Not to be indelicate but—”

“Rosalia knows what I know.”

Crobey smiled at the girl, full of insincerity.

Carole Marchand said, “Let’s take the man’s word for it, shall we, Harry?” She looked down, then quickly up into Anders’ face — as if trying to catch him off guard. “How do you tote it up, Mr. Anders? Are we on the same side or not?”

“That would depend.”

“You sound like O’Hillary.”

“I try not to do that.” He smiled a bit.

“I intend to pin these terrorists to the board,” she said. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding of my position.”

“We understand your position.”

“Talking like that could get you elected to Congress,” she said. “My first objective is to goad your agency into doing the job it ought to have done without goading. If that fails I have every intention of doing it myself. And I ain’t whistlin’ ‘Dixie,’ Mr. Anders.”

Anders put his head down, thinking. The phone conversation with O’Hillary ran through his mind. Defiantly he made the decision. “Rodriguez — if that’s who he is — seems to be running under the code-name Cielo. He tried to buy ordnance from a broker in Fajardo. The broker wasn’t selling but that only means Cielo’s shopping somewhere else. Incidentally a couple of policemen spent most of the day today surveilling a car that turned out to be yours, Harry.”

“The two smokers? They were about as inconspicuous as two giraffes in a bathtub.”

“Anyway two days ago the subject, Cielo, was here in San Juan driving a Volkswagen. He spent a night in the Rio Piedras area. We don’t know which house but at least we’ve got it narrowed down to a neighborhood. He may have contacts there — maybe other terrorists, maybe a safe-house, maybe a girl friend. Whatever. He may never go back there again, of course, but it’s a sort of lead. We’ve checked the municipal directory but there’s no Rodriguez or Cielo listed at any address around there. He was spotted by a cop named Perez and we had him go through the pictures and he’s identified a photograph of Rodrigo Rodriguez taken in nineteen sixty-two.”

Carole Marchand said, “All right!”

“Take it easy, ducks. The man could’ve been wrong.”

Anders said, “Perez thinks it may be the same face. But nineteen sixty-two? The man was young then. Perez admits it’s not a positive make. We ran the old Rodriguez fingerprints through the computers and got no particular results — evidently he hasn’t been arrested or identified since before the Bay of Pigs.”

Crobey kept watching him, filled with reserve. “Why the cooperative candor, Glenn?”

He’d expected it. Now Crobey had put it to him — bluntly, so that Anders couldn’t evade it without exposing the evasiveness. He knew half truths wouldn’t convince Crobey. “I have to stonewall that. I’m not at liberty to break security. All I can tell you is I’ve got instructions to find Rodriguez. Beyond that I can only suggest you don’t look a gift horse too carefully in the teeth.”

Carole Marchand said, “It’s a matter of the national security.” She looked at Crobey. “If we find Rodriguez he expects us to report it to him — but if he finds Rodriguez before we do, why do I get the feeling he won’t tell us a damn thing?”

“Maybe I won’t,” Anders told her. “I won’t make promises I might not keep. But look at it this way: You know more now than you did before you came here tonight. It hasn’t hurt you to talk to me.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Co-operation. Quid pro quo.”

The woman scowled at Crobey. “How would you play it?”

“Under an assumed name.” Crobey smiled a little. “I know Glenn. He wasn’t born devious but he’s been playing these games a long time — I guess he knows how to finesse. He’s got something in his wallet he hasn’t put on the table. If we knew what it was we might change our minds.”

“Suppose I told you you’re wrong, Harry.”

“I doubt I’d believe you. I have to jump to that conclusion — you’ve laid on this fog of facts that don’t get me anywhere when I stop to think about them. A gift? Sure — but what’s it worth? Give us something worth trading for.”

Rosalia, flashing with anger, turned on him with low-voiced hissing savagery: “Glenn’s told you everything we know. If you think he’s lying I don’t see any point continuing this meeting.”

Carole Marchand said — ignoring Rosalia and addressing herself to Anders — “As soon as Harry began asking questions here he was given a warning by a police detective. Between the lines the policeman gave him to understand there were powerful interests in Puerto Rico who wanted him to leave. Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Such as what?”

“Clout. Local political clout. If it’s true the local police have no leads on Cielo-Rodriguez, if they don’t even know him, then obviously he’s not the one applying pressure. Someone else is. Someone known to the police. Someone who’s either fronting for Rodriguez or being fronted for by Rodriguez. Someone here in Puerto Rico.”

Anders was unimpressed. “You do stretch a point.”

“Humor me.”

O’Hillary’s instructions ragged him. He’d already disobeyed them tonight but if he started poking around San Juan police headquarters asking questions, it would get back to Langley in no time at all. That was no good. Then he turned to look at Rosalia. “It might be worth flirting with a cop or two.”

She made a face at him.

Crobey said, “I think our best shot’s still the arms merchants. If we find the dealer we might follow the shipment to Rodriguez.”

Anders said, “I doubt he’ll be that obliging. He doesn’t leave a lot of tracks — you said that yourself. I’d like to concentrate on looking for the connection in Rio Piedras. He spent the night there with somebody.”

“You go poking around down there,” Crobey warned, “you could get your guts handed to you.”

“On the other hand,” Carole Marchand said, “you can’t steal second base if you insist on keeping one foot on first.”

“I don’t follow the game, ducks.”

Anders said, “Can I take it we’ve agreed to join forces?”

“For the time being,” she said.

Crobey was dubious. “It’s your money.”

“I think it’s money well squandered,” she replied. “Let’s not tiptoe, Mr. Anders. If we keep secrets from one another we’ll have terrific problems questioning each other because the nature of our questions will have to describe the limits of our own knowledge. Miss Rojas assures us you’ve turned the bag upside down and shaken it — Harry’s obviously not convinced of that and neither am I. It seems to me you’ve had minions upon minions working on this case. Haven’t they come up with anything more than what you’ve told us? Haven’t they tried to check up on sales of paperback science-fiction books, for instance, or Gauloise cigarettes? It’s the kind of grinding legwork that requires a flat-footed legion of peons — I’d have thought your organization would have done it.”

“Inquiries have been made.” Anders regretted his stiffness as soon as he couched it that way. “They’ve looked, they’ve asked around. They haven’t come up with anything. A lot of people buy paperbacks and cigarettes. You can’t stake out every shop on the island. Nobody’s got that much manpower. There’s a limit — you’re new to this, I guess, but believe me we’ve tried to follow every lead. Keep in mind this case isn’t right at the top of the San Juan police department’s list of urgent matters.”

“It’s at the top of mine.” The intensity with which she spoke drove him back like a physical blow to the face. “What about yours, Mr. Anders?” The challenge was harsh, and she was throwing it in his face.

Anders said lamely, “My instructions are to find Rodriguez. It’s my full-time job right now. I’ve got no other assignments. Does that answer you?”

“To find Rodriguez — and do what?” She was as persistent as a dentist’s drill.

Anders said, “Let’s just find him first, shall we?” Rising, he reached for the back of Rosalia’s chair. “Where can I reach you?”

Crobey said, “We’ll be in touch. You’re at the Sheraton, right?”

Carole Marchand was still watching his face; she hadn’t cooled. Anders paused and tried to smile. “We’ll find him, you know.”

“Yes, I know.” She wasn’t giving an inch. He’d failed to put anything over on her; she was shrewd — she didn’t trust him. He felt a touch of shame, as if he’d been caught with jam on his face.

She said, “Do you have children, Mr. Anders?”

“No.”

“Imagine if you had,” she said. “Imagine what you’d do if someone murdered your child.”

It was impossible to find a parking space in Old San Juan; they hadn’t even bothered — they’d come by taxi. Now and then you could find a cab in the plaza; they set out that way on foot with three or four blocks to cover. Rosalia said, “One tough lady.”

“Not all that tough,” he judged. “But angry.”

“Didn’t you ever want to be a father?”

“Not with the wife I had then.”

“How about with me?”

“A whole mess of kids.”

“I love you,” she said.

“Is there any truth to the rumor that an unidentified male made an ass out of himself in the restaurant back there?”

“None,” Rosalia said. “She was trying to get your goat — that’s not your fault.”

“I don’t mind lying, it’s part of my job. I do mind when somebody catches me at it. Makes me feel like a foolish little boy.”

“What lies did you tell them? I didn’t hear any.”

“Lies of omission, querida. A lot of things. I didn’t tell them they’re to be shunted off into the cold as soon as we get anywhere near Rodriguez. I didn’t tell them I’m using them because I’ve been disconnected from the machinery and I need all the manpower I can get now that we’ve got no staff, no connections, no police privileges. I didn’t tell them how badly I need their help, or how high the odds are that I’ll have to betray them later. In short I didn’t level with them and she knew it.”

“So did your friend Harry,” she said. “He just wasn’t so obvious about showing it.”

“Well Harry understands. He won’t get sore if I push him overboard — he knows how to swim. Let’s cut through here, save a block.” It was a steep cobbled passage walled by crowded stone-and-stucco buildings; a drainage rut ran down the center. An old man with a collapsed mouth sat on a worn step nodding, reeking of wine, looking back past them. The old man sat under a twenty-five-watt bulb in the doorway. Beyond it the passage was dark — at the top was the glow of the plaza. Anders was saying, “I don’t feel sorry for Harry but the woman’s another thing...” And then he let his voice peter out because it occurred to him that the old man hadn’t looked at him but had looked behind him, which meant the old man had seen something back there more interesting than Rosalia or Anders. He looked over his shoulder with a sudden sense of alarm.

There were two of them, big in the shoulders, soft caps over their eyes — menace in the speed of their approach: Now they began to run and Anders took the girl’s arm. “Come on.” And bolted for the head of the passage, ankles twisting on the cobblestones, leather soles slipping. At an awkward shambling pace they scrambled for it — he couldn’t hear the two men behind; they ran on rubber soles; then he stopped and swiveled, propelling Rosalia away: “Go on — keep running.”

One of them was nearly on him; the other unaccountably was sprinting away, back toward the street, rushing past the old man in the doorway whose head swiveled to indicate his bewildered interest in the dashing to and fro.

The assailant slowed to a jog and Anders saw the glint of a knife and aimed a kick at it but the cobblestones unsettled him and he careened against the wall, all but going down; the assailant half circled to cut off escape and then moved in fast and Anders hauled the jacket around — he’d had it hooked over his shoulder — and dragged it against the knife, snagging the blade, a desperate parry: He’d never been good at this, and science always went out the window when panic set in.

He heard the knife tear through the cloth but it was deflected just a little and he went for the man’s wrist left-handed, trying for a grip. He nearly missed.

He let go the jacket and flung a fist toward the man’s face but the man knew that one and went under it, twisting his knife wrist out of Anders’ grip and swiveling: The knife plunged forward and Anders got his arm up, forearm against forearm, batting to one side — the knife scratched stucco but then the man’s knee grenaded into Anders’ thigh and he felt himself go over.

With his back against the wall he slid off his feet, thrusting his arm out to break his fall. The assailant loomed.

Anders tried a scissor kick but he had no purchase, slithering on the stones, and the man stepped right through it, stooping; the knife poised to slash upward through Anders’ belly, the man waiting only for a clear target, and Anders tried to bicycle his way out of it, lying on his side, but knew he couldn’t make it.

He tried to reach out for the knife — better to lose a hand than be gutted — but the knife jinked easily to one side and jabbed toward him and Anders squeezed back from it, knowing it was hopeless, eyes popping and mouth wide open in the rictus of terror. Feeling like an utter fool. And then the man howled and sprawled away, falling across Anders’ legs — he heard the clatter of the knife when it fell.

Rosalia tugged at his arm. “Come on—”

“What the hell did you hit him with?”

“This.” The wooden heel of her shoe. She was hopping on one foot trying to get it back on. Anders clambered to his feet and steadied her; then he made a dive for the knife and got it in his hand before the assailant rolled over. The man was groggy but not out. Anders waved the knife in his face and hissed at him: “Hold still, you bastard.”

Something screeched up at the head of the passage. Rosalia said: “Glenn—”

“I see it. Come on.”

Up there a car had slewed across the opening and the driver was getting out and Anders suspected the dark shiny thing in his hand was a gun. Together they ran down the passage, bouncing off walls. Anders risked a glance over his shoulder.

Blind luck: The big assailant was lurching back and forth on his feet trying to clear his head and blocking the sight lines of the man above.

Anders knew the second man had run back down to the bottom, got in the car and driven around to the head of the passage to cut off escape; the man up there with the car and the gun was the same man who’d come after them on foot, the assailant’s partner. That meant there were two men and one car. It should be possible to elude them.

Steering Rosalia by the elbow he skidded around the building corner at the foot of the passage and ran her catty-corner up the street.

Dimly he heard the slam of a car door and the race of an engine: It meant the gunman hadn’t waited for his partner but was coming after them with the car but he had to get around several corners and hope not to encounter traffic in the narrow one-way streets of Old Town. The chances were getting better every moment. There was a drugstore half a block farther, lights splashing out onto the sidewalk — Anders made for that, hauling Rosalia by the arm.

Tires screeched not far away. They ran full tilt toward the doorway.

“Oh shit,” she said. “It’s closed.” A lattice gate was padlocked across the drugstore; the lights had fooled him.

He led the way on toward the head of the street: a sharp left into another passage — blank walls, locked doors, poor light. But he could hear the car again and there wasn’t time to turn back. At least this one wasn’t cobbled. They ran fast and hard, the shirt pasted to him by sweat.

At the corner he pulled her around the edge and they flattened back against the wall. Fighting for breath Rosalia said, “Why don’t they go crawl back under their rock? Those are the most persistent muggers I’ve ever—”

“I guess they’re not muggers. Come on.” He moved out slowly, looking for the shadow that shouldn’t be there.

Rosalia said, “Who are they?”

“Rodriguez or his friends.”

“But how did they know?”

“Either they followed us or they followed Crobey. Come on, keep moving.” An L turn, no choice which way to go — and the passage was leading them back toward the street they’d left. The crime rate here was on a par with that of Spanish Harlem and as a result everything was locked and bolted; no way to get out of the street.

A sign under a tall hooded whip-lamp on a silvered stalk: Calle Del Cristo. Street of Christ. He tugged her out of the pool of lamplight.

He wished he’d paid more attention to the field courses that trained you how to get out of places; he wished he’d had more aptitude for this sort of thing.

Above them was the veranda of El Convento. A quartet of tourists was getting into a taxi. He rushed her forward, waving, shouting to the taxi — and then a garish baroque automobile, some dinosaur of the fifties, came down Sol Street like a seed squeezed from an orange, horn-honking the length of the passage, sliding maniacally around the bend and slamming with a tremendous racket into the taxi. The old Buick bounced off and kept coming like a juggernaut, leaving the hard-hit left side of the taxi destroyed, the sheet metal looking like a crumpled paper napkin. On the sidewalk the taxi driver and the four tourists flung themselves belatedly against the wall in terror.

The Buick was bearing down on Anders and Rosalia, its right-side wheels climbing the curb — above the sidewalk was an iron fence six feet high and Anders flung Rosalia toward it. They leaped off the ground, clenched the wrought iron overhead, drew their legs up — and the car cannoned past, the driver at the last minute lacking the nerve to crash the fence.

The car lost a hubcap — it went rattling away bouncing off things — and the Buick slewed toward the intersection below, the driver trying to control it, fishtailing for a U turn and another try.

Anders dropped off the fence, helped Rosalia to her feet — “You all right? Jesus!” — then they were racing for it again, heading for the battered taxi. The five people had fled into El Convento but the veranda was too long, the door too far away — the man in the Buick had a gun. Running past the taxi Rosalia said, “They don’t build those things the way they used to,” and giggled, on the near edge of hysteria. “I bet you haven’t had this much fun since World War Two.”

“I’m not that old—” and he never finished it because the Buick had stopped and the gun started shooting and Rosalia dropped like a stone beside the taxi’s fender.

Something plucked at Anders’ sleeve. He dived for the pavement, rolled, heard something whine away, got an elbow under him and flung himself toward Rosalia. “Querida — querida?”

“Shit, I think he’s shot me. Jesus Cristo — I’m bleeding!”

He crouched over her, lifting her with an arm behind her shoulders.

“Get up, Rosalia, we can’t stay here.”

She cried out when he touched her and he felt the sticky warmth of her blood; he couldn’t see where she was injured.

Over the hood of the taxi he saw the Buick start to move.

Rosalia had her feet under her after a fashion. He slid backwards into the taxi on his rump — the tourists had left both doors wide open — dragging Rosalia into the cab with him. She slumped, head lolling back, and he had to reach across her to pull her right leg into the car.

The Buick at the foot of the street was maneuvering back and forth trying to get turned around, its wide turning radius incompatible with the narrowness of the intersection. But the taxi’s engine was reluctant and Anders could hear every turn of the starter inflict its drain on the weak battery and if it didn’t start soon it would be dead and they were trapped in the thing now and the Buick was starting to accelerate, coming up the hill right at them.

Nearly twisting the key to breaking point Anders stared ruefully at the approaching juggernaut, yelling at the top of his lungs a strained litany of oaths — then it caught, coughed roughly, revved screaming high: Anders jammed the lever into drive and the taxi roared forward, jerking his head back, making Rosalia cry out.

He spun the wheel left to get out from the curb and almost took the skin off his knuckles — the Buick had smashed the door in too close to the steering wheel.

The only way through was to bluff the Buick out: a deadly game of chicken and Anders had the rage for it now, he wanted nothing except to kill the son of a bitch in the Buick and he aimed straight down the steep narrow street, knowing just the point where he’d thrust the wheel left and drive his front bumper right into the driver’s door.

The taxi’s rear wheels scrabbled for purchase, the tail sliding a bit from side to side as it gathered speed and settled in. He had the pedal on the floor and that prevented the transmission from shifting up; the engine whined painfully to its highest revs. Collision course and he had the momentum for it now; he clenched the wheel and only then did it penetrate his awareness that the girl sagging beside him was injured and not strapped in and that the impact would crush her against the dashboard: At the last minute, with the Buick slowing and hugging the far wall, Anders straightened the wheel and shot past.

Anders knew where the hospital was and that occupied everything in his mind except for the portion that made him keep searching the rear-view mirror. The Buick never appeared. By now its driver knew he’d lost his chance; probably he’d known he’d lost it when they got too near El Convento — that was why he’d started shooting at them: If they’d got inside the restaurant he’d have lost them.

It was madness. Anders’ pulse throbbed; he blinked in quaking disbelief. The hospital — he slewed into the ambulance driveway, stopped the cab by the emergency ramp and started to yell again. After a little while they came out with a stretcher and took Rosalia inside.

He sat on a hard bench watching the wall clock. The waiting room was crowded with people sick and people bleeding. It was the kind of sultry night that provoked violence and disease. Anders kept watching the door, half afraid his assailants would appear again.

They wouldn’t; by now they’d have disappeared into the demimonde. Rodriguez’s people, he was sure. It gave him pause, sudden concern for Crobey and the Marchand woman.

He looked at the clock again, got up in anger and presented himself at the desk and demanded news of the heavy-set nurse. She had nothing to tell him: Miss Rojas was undergoing emergency surgery, he must wait.

The bullet had struck her in the back; it had hit bone somewhere, for there hadn’t been an exit wound in front. It was all he knew for certain — that and the fact that she’d been unconscious when they’d removed her from the car.

God, God. He’d only just found her...

Those two with the Buick had exceeded their orders; he felt morally certain of that. They’d had instructions to follow the quarry and attack them where there were no witnesses: with knives to make no noise. Mugging victims found dead in an Old Town alley — nothing to stir up much of a fuss. The thing had gone awry because the man with the knife had been knocked down by a shoe and Anders and Rosalia had got away from them. The man in the Buick had got mad. The continuation of the attack, beyond all reason, had taken place because the man in the Buick was angry and at the same time atavistically shrewd enough to know that if he killed Anders and Rosalia he’d have no witnesses against him.

I didn’t even get the license number, he thought savagely. Not that it would matter. The antique car would be easy enough to find; but it would prove to have been stolen. Not even an amateur killer set out on his nightwork in a car that could be traced to him.

Anders tried to remember the face of the man with the knife. The police would be here soon; the hospital had called them. He had to clear his mind, make a decision: Give a description to the police or keep it to himself? He wanted someone to nail the bastards but at the same time he was unable to lose sight of the fact that the two men, if he could find them without police help, might lead him to Rodriguez. And he wanted Rodriguez now, not just the hired guns. It was Rodriguez who was responsible for what had happened to Rosalia. The hired guns were only tools.

It had been dismally dark in the passage. Mainly he’d seen the knife; it had drawn his attention. The man’s face? He thought he’d know it if he saw it again — big, blocky, young, a bit of a double chin, clean-shaven except for the mustache: It might have been the face of Pancho Villa from an old photograph. Yes, he’d know the man again.

And the man in the Buick? No. Anders had never really seen that one’s face — only enough of him, running in the cobblestoned alley, to know he was a fairly big man.

He decided to tell the police he hadn’t got a good look at either of them.

The nurse summoned him to the desk. “The doctor will see you now.”

The doctor was a tired young man with dust on his glasses and fresh creases in his white smock; clearly he’d just changed into it. He was scrubbing his hands in a lavatory sink at the side of the cubicle. “Sit down.”

“How is she?”

“I’m sorry,” the young man said as if by rote, “she didn’t make it.”