by Burton Hersh
“You leave him that way,” the woman said, calming down, “them ‘gators movin’ in over yonder gonna drag his foul little carcass into their nest until he swells up. They’ll feast on every morsel.” A pair of what looked like long, knobby gray logs had started to slide out of the mangrove thicket in our direction. Something in the woman’s tone suggested that abandoning the shooter might be a practical alternative.
“Let’s get him back into the boat, and for God’s sake both of you dimwits get in yourselves, chop-chop,” Dad urged. I was already in the water grabbing the Latino around the ribs while Erskine helped. Both alligators now pulled up as close as twenty feet, then opened their jaws at us as if to yawn, then stopped. We were clambering aboard. “There must be some kind of shore patrol or rescue squad service or somebody we could call,” Dad proposed once he was satisfied that everybody was out of the water.
“Just Elvis McKechnie. Works with the sheriff. Got his own boat.”
“Let’s get him out here ASAP,” Dad said. He dug his cell phone out. “Will 911 make it happen?”
While we were waiting around the Welcome Center an hour later it occurred to me that now might be our chance to end this once and for all. “Let me get in touch with that FBI agent in Tampa,” I proposed to Dad. “Get those people involved. Find out who put these stiffs up to something like this. “
Dad thought it over, then nodded, not entirely persuaded. I made the call. Elvis McKechnie had proposed that the whole incident go on the books as an alligator attack, that the two Latinos be advised once they came to in the local infirmary that unauthorized possession of or the unprovoked discharge of an automatic weapon in Dade County amounted to a felony. A second AK 47 had turned up in the bilge at the bottom of Erskine’s boat. The County would extract a very heavy fine before either perpetrator went free. Swamp justice.
I think Dad liked the idea of putting the whole incident behind us without a lot of follow-up. That way we wouldn’t have to wait around, sign depositions, no doubt come back on some inconvenient date to appear in court. Dad was already impatient because we were being held up throughout that midday waiting for the FBI. Except for two Ford Explorers with their launch trailers from the sheriff’s department and a couple of rescue ambulances, the Welcome Center tarmac was deserted once we all straggled back onto shore. The downpour had probably scared away tourists for the rest of the afternoon. The car of the Latinos was still in the lot, but the Jeep Cherokee had disappeared. One of the Center’s rental canoes seemed to have drifted to shore; apparently somebody had slipped it out of the racks much earlier without leaving money down.
I understood perfectly well why Dad detested the idea of tangling both of us up in some hillbilly court case. Apart from his teaching load, he was already looking at an autumn and winter of flogging his big book about Keynes, which was being published in September. This was a situation where he had his priorities, and I had mine. I liked the idea of establishing precisely who kept setting us up, and why. That way we might stay alive.
Tampa’s Special Agent in Charge Vincent Hardagon, his deputy, and one technician landed in a Bureau chopper on the parking area of the Welcome Center barely an hour after he got my call. Paramedics from the infirmary were still flowing in plasma and smearing antibiotic ointments on the many wounds preliminary to binding the two Latinos up. The shoulder was effectively shattered. The FBI technician worked adroitly around the paramedics to collect fingerprints. Hardagon relieved himself of his jacket and his tie and handed them to an assistant to put back in the helicopter.
“I would imagine even you realize that we are a long way out of our jurisdiction,” Hardagon breathed at me while his technician was running the prints electronically. “Only for you.” His breath smelled of blended whiskey.
“You were the one who warned me off the Miami field office. Everybody in the tank?”
“In the tank. That’s beautiful. You get that off some George Raft movie?”
“I’m not cool, is that what you’re trying to say? Dude!”
“I don’t know why I bothered with this motherhumper today,” Hardagon said. “You are a pippin.”
“You know you trust my judgment. This could be a really big collar, reputation-making.”
“When I need you to pump up my career—“ Hardagon stopped. The technician had just handed him a printout from the FBI Biometric Center. “Holy shit!” Hardagon said. He pulled a flat chromed flask from inside his jacket. “I think we got us a couple of live ones here.”
The Latinos were Colombians, brothers, Cesar and Victor Parcado. “Not your plain-brown-wrapper hit men, these two,” Hardagon had to admit. “Big league, in demand, top of the Interpol wish list. Have a drink.”
I took a short pull from Hardagon’s flask. Awful!
“These shitheads been around a while,” Hardagon said. “Our intel people picked up on the pair of them fifteen years ago, when they were first started pulling Liberal politicians out of their apartments in Cartagena at three in the morning for the Marulanda wing of FARC. Kidnappings, a source of income for the FARC guerillas second only to cocaine. The last few years they been on notice to deal with some of the skuzzier chores certain of the international corporations and even, I’m told, certain questionable governments around the hemisphere need them to take care of. They supposedly pull down a very serious dollar.”
“But why us?”
“That is the question, Bud. Why you? You probably know, but until you start to level with us you can expect to deal with clowns like these two from time to time. On this occasion I guess it worked out, but—“”
“Un hunh,” I said. I had a decision to make, and I made it. “I think this might have something to do with that Cuban family I told you about that my sister Wendy married into. Ramon Perez y Cruz. He came over early, when Castro let the Battalion survivors out, and he has been very active socially and in a business way in émigré affairs.”
“What a surprise,” Vincent Hardagon said. “You know, it started with those bums. Then came the freakin’ Marilitos, the boat people. The day a couple of hundred thousand of those jailbirds arrived courtesy of Ronald Reagan Miami was absolutely dead-ass gone. Not that those Bay of Pigs jerkoffs were a walk in the park. I guess the Agency loved them, but they were the heart and soul of Watergate, and you can’t tell me they weren’t right in the middle of offing JFK. No matter what Mister Hoover wanted middle-level pogues like us to think.” Hardagon took a minute to check something on his laptop.
“There’s something else,” I said. I took a breath. “I have reason to believe, and a certain amount of evidence for this has come my way, that Ramon has been in touch with elements on the island and has been making certain….specific arrangements for them. Getting their assets out. Against the day when Castro isn’t around any more.”
“That I can believe,” Hardagon said. “When Gorbachev pulled the economic plug down there those campesinos were left with a choice between chopping sugar cane and peddling their overripe pussies to whatever half-ass tourists made it through the blockade. They poured in here, and -- what a surprise -- their whole freaking barrio turned into a political tinderbox.“ Hardagon arched his back and absent-mindedly started to knead his breasts. “Fucking hot!” he said. “What evidence?”
“I’ll have to let that slide. For the moment. We have just managed to extract ourselves from a potentially very damaging business relationship with Ramon and his people. We need whatever leverage we can hang onto.”
“What evidence?”
“That’s all I can let you have. You’ll probably have to get a subpoena.”
Hardagon let his breath out. “You’re very cute,” he said. “You know that? Not that it makes me no nevermind, but I think I’m going to throw you at least part of a fish. We have our lines into Havana too. Fidel is a dead man walking, and he has been for ten years. When he goes down the termites will own the place. People in power – top people, all the way up – are cannibalizing what little is lef
t and exporting whatever they can. They’ll join their bank accounts when the opportunity arises. If the last of the bardados don’t put them against the wall on the way out.”
“What else is new?”
“What else is new, wiseass, is the fact that no prisoners are being taken. The pipeline is in operation, and people are dying on both ends of it. That’s why you merit the Percalo brothers – you know too much, and here was a chance to catch you off your home turf. You obviously did some things right – you will notice I haven’t even mentioned that shoulder wound.”
“That’s a blessing,” I said.
“I just ran your in-law, Ramon Cruz. He’s no boy scout. Along with the usual fascists he was a regular asshole buddy with Miguel Recarey, another bleeding heart in the medical field who managed to scam HUD out of millions before he fled the country. All tied in closely with Governor Bush, and the late Trafficante, Jr., and a couple of fast-talking Batista knuckledusters from the rubber-hose era who managed to squeeze their way onto FBI payrolls. As I say, it’s no boy scout troop down here.”
“So what should we do?”
“Do? Come clean with us, for one thing. Then arrange to look away. Pull in your horns. These types will take one another out, if you leave them alone long enough.”
“I wish we could,” I told Hardagon.
17
By 3:30 we had managed to explain away whatever the sheriff thought he was going to need. We signed a packet of releases. The fact that I was an attorney did a lot for us. If the locals were going to make a mistake, it had better not be in front of me. It was easiest to release us on our own recognizance. Meanwhile, the FBI delegation had long since lifted off.
Dad was certainly grateful. “I had dark visions of two weeks in the no-tell motel in adorable downtown Sweetwater,” he confided once we were back on Highway 41 headed west.
“What good could we do? I have a feeling from what Hardagon was implying that this is going to be the event that never was. Our hostess will have another drink and tell whoever will listen about the time two nutcases who didn’t wear their life preservers turned into an alligator’s dinner. The Bureau will grab both those hairpins the day they can walk again and pop them black into some off-the-books dungeon in Transylvania, where they will live on in transcripts from their interrogations. Only Carl here will get it right. ‘Bang bang. Bang, bang, bang.’”
“I’m getting very depressed at having raised such a cynic,” Dad said. “What did you make of Rick?”
“Of Rick?”
“Absolutely. Who else do you imagine got in behind those thugs in that canoe and disabled the living shit out of both of them?”
“You think it was Rick.”
“Either him, or a saber-toothed tiger. Either he got my message, or he caught enough of my back-and-forth with Caridad and maybe heard her dial up her support group at the Venezuelan consulate and doped the rest out. So Ricky got there first. You must have seen his Cherokee.”
“I thought you had things pretty well in hand. The Beretta was a surprise.”
“On a visit to the Miami area? Wouldn’t leave home without it.” Dad put his hand on my knee. “Are you under the impression that I am totally out to lunch? I get the message that you’re trying to protect me, but how could I miss what we’re up against. Don’t confuse yourself -- I got a lucky round or two off, but against a couple of pros with machine guns? Never happen. Rick made all the difference.”
“You could be right. I realize you always expected he would come around.”
“Ricky is in our family. He is the father of my grandson. Look, I don’t want to get all epistimological on you, but sometimes things go the way you want them to because you want them to go that way badly enough. Meanwhile – pull over at that rest stop up there. Doff gehn pischen. In Middle-High German that means: My back teeth are floating. I’m sure Carl here will join me.”
We showed up in St. Petersburg not long before eight. The sunset over the Gulf of Mexico once we started north was stunning, indescribable. On Snell Isle I took Carl in to introduce him to Mother, who had gotten back from Philadelphia hours earlier. Dad poured a round of vermouths and we sat around briefly to compare notes.
Dad had cashed out in Palm Beach, which was wonderful. We had stopped off briefly for a look at a unique zoo and an air-boat ride. Mother fussed over little Carl for several minutes, then hurried off into the kitchen to get him a small dish of ice cream and strawberries. But something wasn’t right. Mother seemed distracted.
“So,” Dad wanted to know, “how was Philadelphia? Overflowing brotherly love?”
“The same as always,” Mother said. “Stuffy. Well organized.” She started to say something, then couldn’t, then started again. “The doctors weren’t particularly encouraging.”
“Anything too radical?” I could see the blood draining out of Dad’s face.
“Not radical, exactly. It’s just that things aren’t progressing in what we all hoped would be a desirable direction. They’ve upped the prednisone. Quite a lot.”
“Well,” Dad said. “You knew that could happen.”
“But this is obviously quite serious.“ Mother examined us all, her look of peaked grandeur. “They’re telling me I will have to be very, very deliberate from now on. Step off the curb wrong and I could snap my femur. They raised the possibility of some motorized thingamajig. That I would ride around in. I mean – talk about awful!” Mother was fighting it, but I could spot tears forming. “I have to live in this body, Sylvan!”
“Hey, Weeze,” Dad said. “We could get used to it.” He forced the legendary grin. “I suppose that means sex with the trapeze is out for a while.”
As I was taking the last turn off Serpentine Drive onto the Oval Crescent Annex I spotted Linda’s ramshackle Volkswagen in my drive. Sonny had dropped off Linda’s mother and left a few minutes before. I grabbed my carry-on and unsnapped Carl’s safety belt in the back and let us both in. Linda and her mother were waiting in the living room, quietly. Penelope was sprawled out next to the door.
Linda’s mother was a short but muscular woman still in her forties dressed in a shawl and a woven skirt along one seam of which raven feathers and silver studs had been stitched for ornamentation. Her hair, still dark, was braided into one plait and pinned in a tight bun above her neck. What was most striking was her eyes, like Linda’s a little bit canted but even blacker, pools, as alert as a deer’s, constantly searching.
“Sonny says to tell you give him a call,” Linda said. “He wants to know about Palm Beach.”
“I’ll call him tomorrow.”
Carl was standing his ground, examining his grandmother. The enormous knitted satchel with which she had just arrived sat in the floor next to his grandmother, who had settled into the sofa. Obviously, Carl liked the looks of the satchel.
“He don’t know me,” Linda’s mother said. “I saw him two times. He know I brought. Somethings.”
“Mother uses the dialect mostly back on the rez,” Linda said, and smiled up at me in an extraordinarily bewitching way: our secret. “She is very, very excited to see Carl.”
“And you’re not?”
Linda was hunkering down to confront the child face to face. He took a step to her and she engulfed him in her hug, tears flowing down her cheeks. I’d had no idea she’d needed this so badly.
Penelope shrugged and hauled herself to her feet and began to sniff at the mother’s satchel, which smelt of peat fires in the teepees.
* * *
I arranged to meet Sonny for lunch the next day at Harvey’s, a dimly lit restaurant in a small shopping center up Fourth Street North. Its management was cultivating a reputation as hip but civilized – no adult customer could expect to be blared at throughout the meal by the overhanging plasma television monitors demanded by the city’s sports fanatics, or chivied cheek-to-jowl over a quick one at the bar by the singles crowd. They served the best Margaritas in town.
We passed on drinks but ordered Ha
rvey’s world-class chili. Sonny wanted to know how our trip had gone.
“Dade County is always exciting,” I had to acknowledge. I detailed our adventure in the airboat, and the aftermath. “So – what’s your take?” I asked when I had finished.
“I think you have made it onto the screen of some heavy, heavy hitters. Cesar and Victor Parcado – congratulations, nobody sends them after just anybody. Even a back-country pissant like me runs across their debris every once in a while. I’ve got to think you browned off somebody with a dollar to spend. Wha’d you do?”
I hadn’t had it in me before to tell Sonny about my ransom note to Ramon. Now I did. He gave me a very long look and shook his head.
“That’s what got us our properties back,” I said.
“I hope you’ll be around long enough to enjoy ‘em. I gather you don’t think Ramon is your problem at this point.”
”They’re after him too, they blew up his car a couple of weeks ago. They’ve got him thoroughly wired, from what I can tell. I think I know how.”
Sonny remembered the secretary with the jugs; he too had noticed the tell-tale pinch on the shoulder. I filled him in on Olivia’s comments.
“Everything certainly fits,” Sonny acknowledged.
“So what do we do?”
“Arrange something. Give the letters back.”
“ Sure. Where? During the Friday afternoon cocktail reception at the Vinoy?” The Vinoy was the landmark hotel in town across from the yacht basin.
“I’d go to Havana,” Sonny said. “Those old Sierra Maestra hands around Castro will understand the gesture. Valentia, valor, that’s what they like to think it’s all been about even at this late date, while they’re hobbling toward the lifeboats. They stood up to Batista, and they stood up to John F. Kennedy and el gigante del norde, and then they hung on when the Soviets deserted them. They built their hard-core socialism in one country, no matter how grubby it turned out.”
“Will you come along and translate?”