Marchand Woman Read online

  “And?”

  “I can’t see how war and killing will solve the problem. The counterrevolutionary movements want war. They’re wrong. So I’m against them.”

  He envied her. She’d managed to make clear simple sense out of a complex muddle.

  She said, “This Lundquist thing—what do you think will happen?”

  “It’s foregone. We haven’t had a prayer of getting close to these guys in time to do any good. The ransom’s been paid, the political prisoners are on their way to B.A. and I expect either the Ambassador will be turned loose in a few days or the bodies will turn up in a common grave in the jungle. Probably they’ll turn ’em loose because that way the thing will die down sooner.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll interview the survivors and maybe we’ll be able to identify the terrorists from that, but I get a feeling it won’t work out that way—they haven’t been stupid up to now. I’m not confident. Either way it’ll be forgotten. Nothing stays in the headlines. Another crisis will come up.”

  “They’ve got ten million dollars for making war.”

  “The terrorists? Maybe. They can’t overthrow Castro with dollar bills. It’s got to be a pretty small group.”

  “They can make a lot of trouble.”

  “There’s always trouble,” Anders said.

  “Have you had any experience with hijackers before?”

  “Sure. That’s why I was assigned to this one.”

  “These are brighter than most, aren’t they?”

  “Cool and careful. That’s worth worrying about. Terrorists are usually neurotic kids without sense—suicidal fanatics. They throw tantrums and smash toys to get attention—they’re too immature to think about consequences. Mostly they end up killed. But these guys have kept the rear exit open, nobody’s touched them and I won’t be surprised if they disappear with the ransom money. We’ll pick up a trail somewhere but it may be too cold to do us any good. Here come the lobsters.”

  His mind had jumped off the straight track and he listened with only half attention to Rosalia’s bursts of talk while he pursued this new line of thought. Over coffee he broke into her monologue with an abrupt rhetorical question: “What if the setup was a false front? What if they’re a little gang of ingenious crooks who’ve found a clever way to steal ten million dollars?”

  “What?”

  “Suppose they’re not politicals at all. It fits,” he said. “It’s starting to look as if they don’t belong to the known Cuban exile movements.”

  “But then why would they bother with the propaganda ransom notes and demanding the release of the political prisoners and all?”

  “There’d be reasons enough. A smokescreen to throw us off the track. And everybody knows governments treat political agitators more gingerly than common crooks. And in this case there’s the anti-Castro aspect—we’d have committed more resources to the hunt if they’d been Communist terrorists.”

  “Is that really how you see it?”

  “I don’t know. The theory fits a lot of the facts. It’d be a daring risky kind of crime but it’s not much more dangerous than knocking over a bank and it’s a little bit more lucrative. And if they’re not politicals that would help explain why we haven’t tumbled any leads. For all we know they could be a gang of Mexican bandits out of a Pedro Armendariz movie.”

  Rosalia had a flat in a two-story apartment court with its own pool and palm trees. The furniture was a reflection of her hectic person: busy fabrics but clean shapes. The Parsons tables were black plastic, the lamps were stark and the end tables were clear lucite cubes. There was a profusion of potted house-plants. On the walls were matted enlargements of high-contrast photographs—winter birch forests, a rocky coast that looked like Maine, something that looked at first like an abstract but turned out to be a shot of wood grain in close-up. When she turned on the stereo he was surprised by the selection: a jazz quintet coolly psychoanalyzing Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.

  She said, “Drinkie?”

  “Got any rum?”

  “That’s very diplomatic.”

  “Not really. I like it.”

  “It’s not Cuban,” she said drily and went clipping into the kitchenette, speedy and practical and sure of herself.

  He liked her. He thought perhaps he loved her but he had thought that a few times before and his ex had crashed into an overpass abutment at eighty miles an hour with a blood-alcohol content later measured at near comatose levels; now he was wary because he felt he’d driven her to it. In any case he wasn’t sure what women saw in him. He’d always been just a little overweight; he had the square face of a vacuum-cleaner salesman; and the Anders hair, a product of Danish genes, was pale and thin—it flowed in the air like seaweed, he thought. He had confidence in one thing: He did his work well. That was a reason to feel close to Rosalia. She understood the work. But then it didn’t make sense looking for reasons for such things.

  She said, “What’s on for tomorrow?”

  “I’d better get down to Mexico.”

  “Oh.”

  He said, “Your Spanish is better than mine.”

  “Anybody’s is. Yours is atrocious.” Her eyes wandered away.

  “Look,” he said, “how would you like to fly down to Mexico with me?”

  Her smile was as good as a kiss.

  Chapter 4

  A fish jumped through the surface of the river: broached, shook foam, dived. Cielo watched for a while but it didn’t leap again. He listened to the birds and then finally went back along the riverbank reluctantly; it was time to put things in motion.

  There were clouds; steam in the air; soon there’d be rain. It was what he had waited for—a safe time to move the hostages out. Later if someone tried to backtrack them with dogs or infrared the rain would protect them by washing away clues between the camp and the dock. The whole thing, he thought, was a quixotic farce; but one might as well maintain security. He slapped at a mosquito.

  Cielo wasn’t the name he’d been born with; the nom de guerre had been chosen mainly for its meaninglessness. Cielo: sky. Only two of the nine men in his band knew his real name, not that it mattered; Rodriguez was not so astonishing a surname.

  No one was in sight; that was in obeisance to the discipline of the camp—there was no knowing what sort of high-altitude equipment might be in search of them; the rule was to stay under cover at all times. Cielo entered the camp from tree to tree until he reached the covered walkway.

  The camp had been built long ago by a Dutch oil company as quarters for its men during an exploration for petroleum in the river delta. When they found no oil they’d floated their rigs away to try again farther down the coast; they’d left the camp behind, as they usually did—it was cheaper to prefabricate a new one than to dismantle the old one and haul it away.

  Cielo had left it all untouched; when he was gone he wanted to leave behind no sign of his presence. Nothing had been disturbed; machetes were forbidden—not even twigs were allowed to be broken.

  He found Vargas and the big Draga boy in the money hut standing well away from the cage and looking expectantly toward him; he had interrupted their colloquy, startled them, and there was no way for Cielo to know whether they had been discussing the weather, the subject of sex, or the possibility of stealing the ten million dollars from Cielo.

  He said, “It’ll rain soon.”

  Vargas had a terrifying smile; it went with his size. It was said Vargas had broken a man’s back with his hands but Cielo knew the story to be false. Vargas was as gentle as he was massive; a man that big rarely needed to lose his temper. Cielo had known him twenty years. That was part of the trouble, he thought: We’re too old to believe in this nonsense. It takes children.

  No, the money wouldn’t tempt Vargas; and as for the Draga boy, the idea might amuse him but in the end he would not steal because he did not need to steal. Emil Draga was the heir to his grandfather’s fortune, which would be enough to discourage him from
taking suicidal risks. The lad wasn’t in this for money. He was in it, in an atavistic sense, for the adventure—he was a clever youth, big and muscular, ugly, stuffed with Draga legends of machismo and arrogance and financial bucaneering: Through determined rapacity the Dragas had acquired empires of cane and rum. Left to himself the hard and ruthless young Emil probably would become a corporate-takeover pirate, a Wall Street raider; if and when the old man died, Emil probably would move instantly to New York. Cielo had no illusions that The Movement could survive old Draga.

  For the moment Emil would stay at Cielo’s right hand until the old man ordered him elsewhere or he saw an opportunity to flex his brutal muscles again.

  In the cage with the money the squirrel and the parakeet showed no signs of illness. It had been long enough. Cielo said, “You can pack up the money and give their freedom back to the bird and the squirrel.”

  Vargas showed his chilling smile. “It’s our day for being magnanimous. Today we give freedom back to everybody.”

  “Don’t forget your hoods.” Cielo went toward the door wondering if he’d neglected anything. The parakeet and the squirrel had been caged forty-eight hours with the ransom money because Cielo had heard once about a rigged payment of money that had been radioactively treated so as to infect anyone who handled it. During the past days they also had studied the money under infrared and ultraviolet lights to make sure it hadn’t been dyed; they had sifted laboriously through the $50 and $100 notes looking for evidences of serial-number sequences or counterfeiting; they had subjected the money to every test they could think of. So far as Cielo could determine, it was clean. No doubt there’d been giveaway devices attached to the canister in which the money had been dropped from the helicopter, but they hadn’t even bothered to search it for transmitters. They’d left it where it had fallen until fourteen hours after the drop, when they’d moved it under cover of rain and transferred the money into the canvas sacks and gone out the way they’d come in—by canoe part of the way, outboard motorboat the rest.

  He always preferred boats when it was possible. He was an island man, that was part of it, but also there was the fact that a boat left no footprints.

  He said, “We’ll go in half an hour,” and left the hut.

  He pushed the camouflage net aside and went aboard the ketch, stooping to clear his head when he went below. He cranked up the receiver and put on the headphones and consulted the dashboard chronograph; Julio was due to broadcast in three minutes. He waited with relaxed patience. He had learned patience long ago and practiced it all his life. In Sierra Maestra of the Cuban civil war, on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs waiting for the air cover that didn’t come, in Castro’s prison, in all the slow years since his escape from Cuba in 1964—the nondescript demeaning jobs, the secrecy, the undercover work for old Draga. The slow acquisition and equally slow disintegration of the hard tight determined cell of Free Cubans. After the Bay of Pigs and the softening of U.S. relations with the Castro regime old Draga had lost any trust he might have had in the American government; he had gone it alone, trusting no one outside his own household and Cielo’s tight little band. They had practiced a conscious and businesslike paranoia—Cielo’s, alone among the movements, had successfully avoided infiltration by agents of Washington and Langley. Draga kept them isolated from all the other exile armies; Cielo had admitted to membership no new recruits—the commando was manned entirely by those with whom he had done time in the dripping Havana cells.

  Until now. Emil Draga; he couldn’t be certain of Emil. The hothead had already exploded once. It was, he felt, another sign of the rot that had infected the group surreptitiously for years.

  The radio crackled in his earphones. Good dependable Julio, the best of all possible brothers: mercurial, given to fits of gloom and sunshine, macho spirit and great lusty laughter and deep brooding sorrows. The loves of Cielo’s life were few: his three daughters, his wife, his brother. He cherished them—there was nothing else. The dream of glory had faded beyond recall.

  “Merida to Constellation Three. Merida to Constellation Three.” Julio’s big voice, its boom thinned by static. “Message follows. Consignment arrived safely in Buenos Aires. All shipments on course and on schedule. Weather forecast light rain for eighteen hours. Have a good voyage. Merida out.”

  Cielo switched it off. We’ve succeeded, then, he thought. The irony of it: empty gestures to placate a rich old man’s obsessions.

  For a time it had been all right. He hadn’t minded; it was something to do. But no one was supposed to have been killed.

  In his quarters he packed everything neatly into the B-4 bag, set it by the door and went around meticulously wiping everything with a damp towel to obscure prints, searching and searching again: Nothing must be left behind.

  He went outside with the bag and set it on the pile of satchels and valises and knapsacks. Luz was there, his face an utter blank. “Put your mask on,” Cielo said, and went along under the covered walkway to the third hut. The last thing he did before reaching for the door’s latch was to press the heavy beard against his cheeks to make sure it was fixed in place. By now he was used to the pillow-stuffing under his belt. They’d remember him as a big man with a soft belly and all sorts of beard. It was what he wanted them to remember.

  He unlocked the big padlock and put it in his pocket; it wouldn’t be needed again and he could not leave it here—it was remotely possible it might be traced: Locks had serial numbers.

  Inside the windowless Quonset the air was stale with sweat. The Ambassador was in the middle of the floor doggedly doing push-ups; from the beginning he had put Cielo in mind of Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai—stuffy, blimpish, courageous. Cielo couldn’t picture himself ever trusting the man but he rather liked him and was pleased no harm had come to him.

  Cielo spoke in English because he knew the Mexicans among the hostages understood it. He was not so sure of the Ambassador’s Spanish.

  “We’re going to blindfold you. Don’t be frightened—you’re going to be set free in less than twelve hours. Our ransom demands have been met and we intend to honor our part of the bargain.”

  He watched their reactions. Vacuous slow gapes; tears; explosions of relief; glares of disbelieving suspicion. One of the Agriculture Ministry men beamed gratefully at Cielo.

  It was his first experience in the management of hostages but he had heard that they sometimes became sycophantically dependent on their captors. The friendliness with which most of them stared at him did not surprise him.

  He said without conviction, “You’re close to freedom now. Please don’t risk it by foolish behavior. If anyone tries to run for it we’ll shoot without hesitation. If you co-operate you’ll be free by morning.”

  They watched him expectantly. The Ambassador, on his feet now, tried to squint defiantly but his relief was too evident; finally he turned toward the others to hide his involuntary smile from Cielo.

  He fingered the submachine gun absently. “In a moment we’ll blindfold you. You’ll be taken out of here and down the same path by which we arrived. We’re going to take you back aboard the same boat as before and you’ll be locked in the crew’s quarters forward. As you recall there are six bunks and a toilet. It will be cramped but it’s only for a few hours. Before daylight you’ll be set ashore and you’ll see the last of us.”

  One of the American Marines glared at him, filled with distrust. That one had been a troublemaker from the beginning; in retrospect Cielo wistfully wished that if someone had had to be killed it could have been the Marine rather than the Peace Corps youth. The youth had made trouble with his mouth and drawn attention to himself but this Marine was far more dangerous in his silent scheming ways. Two nights ago he’d tried to organize an escape by digging out under the back wall. Vargas had heard the noise and they’d put a stop to it, bloodying the Marine’s nose as a lesson, but it hadn’t put a stop to the Marine’s brain. The Marine was dogged—a good soldier; Cielo didn’t lack admir
ation for him.

  “When you’re set ashore you’ll find a burro trail leading into the forest. Follow the burro trail for several hours. It will be morning by then, you’ll have no trouble. By noon you’ll come to a paved highway. After that you’ll make your own fate. A car or a truck will come along, you’ll make your own decisions. By tomorrow night you’ll be home with your families. So please be patient just a little longer.”

  He addressed this last directly to the Marine because he understood the Marine to be susceptible to reason. Threats would not dissuade the Marine from resistance or rebellion; reason might. It all depended whether he could convince the Marine that he actually meant to set them free. If the Marine believed he was destined for murder then no amount of logic would calm him.

  The Marine’s thoughts were not readable. He met Cielo’s stare without guile, reserving judgment.

  Cielo said, “It is, you see, in our own interests now that you all be released unharmed. It proves to the world that we are men of our word, and also in a practical sense it will help to calm the rage of your governments. If we were to murder you we’d become hunted outcasts everywhere. If we keep our word and release you, we are heroes—at least to those who agree with our purpose. I therefore beg your co-operation for a few more hours.”

  He was thinking, To them I must be a terrifying apparition—the size of him, the beard, the machine gun, the unnaturally gruff rasp he used for a voice in their presence. It was a good thing they couldn’t see the fraud underneath. He was searching his brain: Was there anything else he ought to say to them? He couldn’t think of anything. It would have to do.

  He backed toward the door. “In just a little while now,” he told them, and left. At the moment of going through the door he realized that if Soledad could see him now she would laugh at him.

  He imagined the bubbling caress of her voice and thought, I am truly a figure of ridicule. The thought put him in a better frame of mind until he went into the big hut and crossed glances with young Emil. The youth gave him a rakishly defiant look, brimming with sullen resistance. That one had made a murderer of Cielo and the thing had gone altogether sour then; Cielo was in command and could not absolve himself of the responsibility but it was Emil who had killed the American boy, without orders, and thus put an end to Cielo’s plan that no one be injured. From that moment it had no longer been a bluff; up to then Cielo had been prepared to give it up if the target governments had refused the ransom demands but after Emil’s act there had been no choice. Once the American was dead it would have been foolhardy not to make use of the corpse so he had ordered it dumped in the town.