White Cargo

15

Cat moved, trance-like, through the horrors of dealing with the undertaker and the American Consul. The undertaker was professionally sorrowful, the Consul, on the telephone, was brisk. It was not the first American corpse he had dealt with.

“Do you have any reason to suppose there is anyone in the United States who would want Mr. Holland’s body returned there?” he asked.

“No, I don’t believe I do.”

“Well, then, my advice is to have the undertaker bury him in Santa Marta. This is a hot climate, and even with embalming, well...”

“I see your point. I’ll make the arrangements.”

“Was there anything of value among his effects?”

“There was some money.”

“Do you want me to send it to the daughter, or will you?”

“I’ll take care of that.”

“Good.” The man sounded relieved.

The undertaker found a priest, and there was a brief, graveside service attended by Cat, Meg Garcia, the undertaker, and two gravediggers. When it was over she said, “That’s it, there’s nothing more to do.”

“There’s the watch,” Cat said. “Will you try?”

“Do you have a thousand dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me. I’ll try to find him. Wait for me at the hotel.”

Lying on his bed with the air-conditioning turned up high, Cat tried to think. Everything depended on the wristwatch; he couldn’t leave Santa Marta without knowing about that. If the Garcia woman could find out where the boy had gotten it, there might be a thread to follow, although he was ill-equipped to follow it.

He kept expecting to hear Bluey’s voice from the next room — gruff, cheerful, practical, knowledgeable — always with an idea of what to do next. Cat didn’t know what to do next. He got up and went into Bluey’s room. The clothes he had bought in Atlanta were neatly hung in the closet and tucked into drawers. He collected them and packed them into the single canvas bag Bluey had brought with him. There was about seven thousand dollars in the jacket, the remainder of the ten thousand Cat had paid Bluey in Atlanta.

In Bluey’s wallet he found a school photograph of a small, dark little girl, very pretty. Except for a few hundred dollars, the new wallet was strangely empty — no credit cards, no driver’s license, just a few scraps of paper with unfamiliar phone numbers and incomprehensible jottings. He tossed all of it, except the photograph, the money, and Bluey’s .357 magnum, into the bag and zipped it shut. There was nothing worth sending back to the States; he’d give it all to the porter. He staggered back to his bed and slept.

There was a soft knock on the door. Cat struggled up, glancing at his bedside clock. Early evening. He had slept the whole afternoon away. He went to the door.

“May I come in?” the Garcia woman asked.

“Sure, have a seat. Did you have any luck?”

She sat down on the living-room sofa, opened her handbag, and handed him a Rolex wristwatch. “He took your thousand dollars,” she said.

Cat turned over the watch, holding his breath, and read the inscription on the back. “For Cat and Catbird, with love, Katie & Jinx.” He swallowed hard. “Did you find out where he got it?”

“Yes. He stole it from a man, a man with an eye patch. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yes, yes, it does,” Cat said, growing excited. “Does he have any idea where the man is now?”

“He’s dead. The gamines killed him for the watch. A dozen of them trapped him in an alley, and... well, he wasn’t the first, and your friend, Holland, won’t be the last.”

“Did the boy know anything about the man? Anything at all?”

She shook her head. “Nothing at all. He was drinking at one of the cantinas, sitting near the sidewalk. They saw the wristwatch. When he left, drunk, they followed him. That was it.”

Cat sank into a chair. This was the end of it all. If Pedro the Pirate was dead, he had nowhere else to go in this thing, not without Bluey Holland. He felt stripped of his power to do anything about anything. In his mind, he listened once again to the voice on the telephone and the one word it spoke, and he was no longer sure. He had mounted this expedition on a wisp of a hope that his mind had conjured up, just as it had conjured up Jinx’s face on the girl in Riohacha. He had gotten a good man killed for a mindless compulsion and a wristwatch. He tried not to weep.

“What will you do now?” she asked.

“I’m going home,” he said wearily. “I’ve got all there is to get, I’m afraid.” He looked up at her. “You’ve been very kind to me. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes, you can buy me dinner tonight and tell me the whole story.” She paused. “I know who you are, Mr. Catledge. The inscription on the watch told me. I read all about it at the time. You’ve changed a lot from the pictures I saw.”

Cat nodded. “Of course I’ll buy you dinner. I owe you a great deal more than that.”

“An hour then? At the pool bar?”

“Yes, fine. I could use a shower, and I want to make some travel arrangements and call home.”

She left, and Cat called the front desk and asked about flights to Miami.

“There is a flight from Cartagena the day after tomorrow, señor, or there is the daily Eastern flight from Bogotá. There is a connecting flight from Santa Marta tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

“Will you try and get me on the flight from Santa Marta, please? And will you ask Eastern to get me on a connecting flight from Miami to Atlanta, Georgia?” He’d leave the Cessna; maybe there would be some way to get it back later.

“Of course, señor.”

“And I’d like to make a call to Atlanta.” He gave her Ben’s number. “I will have to place the call with the international operator, and that will probably take at least an hour,” she said.

“Fine, I’ll either be at the pool bar or in the dining room.” He hung up and got into a shower.

She was wearing a white silk sheath this time, and she looked even better, the whites of her eyes startling against her tanned skin. “Let’s go straight to the dining room, shall we?” he said, taking her arm. “It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday, with all that’s happened.” He took her arm and guided her to a table, noticing how pleasant her cool skin felt to his touch.

When they had ordered drinks and dinner, she took a sip of her martini and put it down. “Before you tell me what’s happened, there’s something I must tell you,” she said.

“I’m all ears.”

“I’m a television journalist — free-lance. I sell my stuff to the American networks. My proper name is Maria Eugenia Garcia-Greville, but I use Meg Greville for my work.”

A light went on in Cat’s head. “Of course, I’ve seen some of your stuff — on the Today show, wasn’t it? Something about Central American guerrillas?”

“That’s me.”

“But you never appear on camera, do you?”

“No. I was working at a local television station in Los Angeles during the early seventies, and I talked them into sending me to Vietnam with a cameraman and sound man — not for war reporting, but for human-interest stuff — talking to kids from L.A. in hospitals — ‘Hi, Mom’ — that sort of thing. We had hardly arrived when there was an attack on Saigon. My cameraman and sound man and I took a mortar shell behind a wall where we were hiding. Both my crew were killed, but I wasn’t badly hurt. I salvaged some of the gear and did my own shooting, narrating it as I went. I kept it up through the whole attack, and when I got back to L.A. it ran — first on the local station, then on the network. I got a Peabody for it.

“After that, I never worked any other way. The subjective camera, voice-over, turned into a personal trademark for me, and over the years the equipment has shrunk and gotten a lot lighter, so it’s easier than it used to be.”

“You’re free-lance, you say? You don’t work for a network?”

“Nope, I like my independence. It pays well, and I can pursue whatever interests me. Mostly I’ve reported from South and Central America and from the Philippines. I came down here the first time to do a story about an Indian family in the Amazon who run their own little cocaine factory — just a man, his wife, and two sons. I met some people, established some sources, fell in love with the country. I bought a little piece of property near Cartagena and built a beach house. I keep an apartment in New York, but the house is where I come when I’m tired. I heard about the gamines in Santa Marta, and I’ve been up here for a little over a week, shooting stuff on them. It’ll make a good piece for the Today show, I think. I’m all wrapped up now; I was shooting my last footage when I ran into you yesterday on the street.”

“Sounds like an interesting life.”

She nodded. “It is.” She paused. “I like to be up front on a story. I wanted you to know, going in, that I’m a reporter.”

“You want to do a story on what I’m doing here?”

She shook her head. “No, I wasn’t around to shoot any tape, so for me there’s no story. You’re going home, anyway, you said. No, I’m just curious, having landed in the middle of all this. But I am a reporter, and I want you to know that if you tell me something, it might end up in a story sometime.”

“Fair enough. I’ll skip the part about losing the yacht, since you’ve read the reports on that, anyway.”

“What I read was the Time story. I was in Honduras at the time.”

“That was accurate reporting, so I’ll start a few months after that, in fact, less than a month ago.” Cat took her from the phone call to the present, giving her as much detail as he could, remaining vague about his contact with Jim. He found that telling her the story was helping to put the whole thing into perspective. If he had had any doubts that he was at the end of his rope, they dissolved as he recounted the details.

“And exactly how did you meet Bluey Holland?”

“Friend of a friend. I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more than that.”

“And now you feel that your daughter is really dead?”

Cat sighed. “I’m not sure about the voice on the phone anymore,” he said, “and apart from that, I don’t have the slightest shred of evidence that she might be alive. I do know, thanks to you, that one of her murderers is dead, though, and that’s half the job done.”

“Would you finish the job if you could find Denny?”

A little flash of anger went through him as he thought about Denny. “If he were sitting here right now, I don’t think I could answer for myself. But I wouldn’t know where to start looking for him. Would you, in the circumstances?”

She shook her head. “It’s a big country, and he might not even be in it. I wish I could suggest something.”

Dinner came, and they ate slowly, making small talk about Central America and Colombia. As the busboy took away the plates, a waiter appeared.

“A telephone call, Señor Ellis,” he said.

Cat rose. “Excuse me, I placed a call to my brother-in-law earlier. I’ll be right back.” He followed the waiter to a phone. The connection was excellent.

“Jesus, I’m glad you’re alive,” Ben said. “We’ve been worried sick.”

“I’m just fine, Ben, and I’m coming home tomorrow. Everything here has come to a dead end.”

There was a short silence, then Ben said, “Listen, a guy in Senator Carr’s office called here a couple of days after you left.”

“Yeah? What did he say?”

“He said he had a message from Jim. Do you know a Jim?”

“Yes. What was the message?”

“There were two pieces of information he wanted passed on to you when we heard from you. First, he said that a guy you were in the Marines with, named Barry Hedger, is working in the American Embassy in Bogotá. He thought that might be a good contact for you if you had problems.”

Cat remembered Barry Hedger well. He had been a fellow platoon leader in the company, a gung-ho, straight-arrow Naval Academy man who none of the ROTC officers had liked very much. “Well, I guess that information won’t be of much use now,” he said. “What was the other thing?”

“The other thing,” Ben said, “was the phone call you thought you got from Jinx.”

“What about it?” Cat asked.

“This guy, Jim, says it was traced to a hotel room in Cartagena—”

“What?”

“He was very emphatic about it, said it was confirmed that the phone call came from” — a paper rustled — “from the Caribé Hotel in Cartagena.”

Cat grabbed a nearby chair and sank into it, his knees weak.

Ben was still talking. “I don’t know how the hell a thing like that could be confirmed,” he said, “but the senator’s aide said you could take it as gospel. Listen, Cat, I owe you an apology. I thought you were hallucinating or dreaming or something.”

Cat’s heart was pounding, his mind racing. He thought for a moment he might faint.

“Cat? Are you there?”

Cat got hold of himself. “Yes, Ben, I’m sorry, I was just having a little trouble absorbing that information.” He dug into his coat pocket for Bluey’s notebook. “Listen, Ben, I want you to do something for me, something important, okay?”

“Sure, anything.”

He gave Ben the address of Bluey’s daughter and ex-wife. “I want you to confirm that Marisa Holland is the daughter of one Ronald Holland, and I want you to tell her mother that Holland was killed in a mugging in Colombia, all right?”

“Sure, all right. You didn’t get mugged, did you, Cat?”

“No, just Holland. He was helping me out down here. Something else: I want you to send her ten thousand dollars immediately, then I want you to set up something for the child’s future; get hold of my lawyer, and put a hundred thousand dollars into a trust. Make her mother and me the trustees; I want to keep in touch with the child. You’ve got my power of attorney; can you get all this done right away? I won’t be coming home just yet, not after the news you’ve given me.”

“Sure, Cat, I’ll get on it tomorrow. Anything else?”

“That’s it for now. I’ll call you when I’ve had a chance to check out the Caribé Hotel. And, Ben, thanks so much for this news.”

He hung up and returned to the table. “I’m not leaving tomorrow,” he told Meg. He explained what he had just been told.

Meg leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. “Do you know anybody in any of the American intelligence services?” she asked.

“Sort of. Why?”

“Well, that phone call is the sort of thing that only the National Security Agency could track down. They’re constantly recording all sorts of international telephone calls.”

Cat nodded. “Maybe that’s how it was done. You say you’re finished in Santa Marta?”

“Yes, all I’ve got to do is edit my videotape when I get back, then lay a voice track over it. No rush about that, though. I haven’t sold the piece yet.”

“Will you come to Cartagena with me tomorrow, then? I could really use the help of somebody who knows the territory.”

“Can I come as a reporter? Can I shoot if I want to?”

“All right.”

She offered him a firm handshake. “You’ve got a deal. If I can help you find her, I will. I just want it all on tape.”

It seemed a small price for her help, Cat thought. And quite apart from that, he was glad she would be around for a while longer.