Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  The Portsmouth vice squad worked on the gang but with no result. The pimps claimed they had never known Lorraine’s real name, that she had been a professional when she arrived, and that she had left voluntarily to return to the West Coast. The photograph was simply not clear enough to prove otherwise.

  But Washington did. They came up with a firm ID based on the prints. Amanda Jane Dexter had tried to fool the security of a local supermarket and shoplift an item. The security camera won. The juvenile court judge accepted her story, backed by five classmates, and let her go with a caution. But her fingerprints were taken. They were with the NYPD, and had been passed to IAFIS.

  ‘I think,’ muttered Sgt Austin of the Portsmouth vice squad when he heard the news, ‘that I might at last be able to get those bastards.’

  It was another filthy winter morning when the phone rang in the apartment in the Bronx, but perhaps a good enough morning to ask a father to motor three hundred miles to identify his only child.

  Cal Dexter sat on the edge of the bed and wished he had died in the Tunnels of Cu Chi rather than take this kind of pain. He finally told Angela, and held her while she sobbed. He rang his mother-in-law and she came over at once.

  He could not wait for the aeroplane out of La Guardia for Norfolk International; he could not have sat and waited if there had been a flight delay due to fog, rain, hail, congestion. He took his car and drove. Out of New York, across the bridge to Newark, on through the country he knew so well as he had been hauled from one construction site to another; out of New Jersey, through a chunk of Pennsylvania and another of Delaware, then south and ever more south past Baltimore and to the end of Virginia.

  At the morgue in Norfolk he stared down at the once lovely and much-loved face, and nodded dumbly to the homicide detective with him. They went upstairs. Over coffee he ascertained the basic outlines. She had been beaten by person or persons unknown. She had died of severe internal haemorrhaging. The ‘perps’ had seemingly put the body in the trunk of a car, driven into the most rural part of First Precinct, Virginia Beach, and dumped it. Enquiries were proceeding, sir. He knew it was a fraction of the truth.

  He made a long statement, told them all about ‘Emilio’, but it rang no bells with the detectives. He asked for his daughter’s body. The police had no further objections but the decision was down to the Coroner’s Office.

  It took time. Formalities. Procedures. He took his car back to New York, returned by air and waited. Eventually he escorted his daughter’s body, riding in the hearse, back home to the Bronx.

  The casket was sealed. He did not want his wife or any of the Marozzis to see what was inside. The funeral was local. Amanda Jane was interred just three days short of her seventeenth birthday. A week later he returned to Virginia.

  Sgt Austin was in his office in the Portsmouth police HQ at 711 Crawford Street when the front desk phoned to say there was a Mr Dexter who wished to see him. The name did not ring a bell. He did not connect it with his recognition of a battered face in a photograph as the departed hooker, Lorraine.

  He asked what Mr Dexter wanted and was told the visitor might have a contribution to make in an ongoing enquiry. On that basis, the visitor was shown up.

  Portsmouth is the oldest of the six cities; it was founded by the British well before the revolution. Today it slumps on the southwest side of the Elizabeth River, mainly low-build redbrick, staring across the water at the high-rise modern glitz of Norfolk on the other side. But it is the place many of the servicemen go if they are looking for ‘a good time’ after dark. Sgt Austin’s vice squad was not there for decoration.

  The visitor did not look much compared to the muscular bulk of the former linebacker turned detective. He just stood in front of the desk and said:

  ‘You remember the teenager, turned to heroin and prostitution, gang-raped and beaten to death, four weeks back? I’m her father.’

  Alarm bells began to tinkle. The sergeant had risen and extended a hand. He withdrew it. Angry, vengeful citizens had his fullest sympathy and could expect nothing more. To any working cop they are tiresome and can be dangerous.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, sir. I can assure you that every effort—’

  ‘At ease, sergeant. I just want to know one thing. Then I’ll leave you in peace.’

  ‘Mr Dexter, I understand what you must be feeling, but I am not in a position—’

  The visitor had put his right hand in his jacket pocket and was pulling something out. Had front desk security screwed up? Was the man armed? The sergeant’s own piece was uncomfortably ten feet away in a desk drawer.

  ‘What are you doing, sir?’

  ‘I’m putting some bits of metal on your desk, Sergeant Austin.’

  He went on until he was finished. Sgt Austin had been in the military, for they were of a similar age, but had never left the States.

  He found himself staring down at two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, the Army Commendation Medal and four Purple Hearts. He had never seen anything like it.

  ‘Far away and long ago, I paid for the right to know who killed my child. I bought that right with my blood. You owe me that name, Mr Austin.’

  The vice detective walked to the window and looked across at Norfolk. It was irregular, completely irregular. Worth his job on the force.

  ‘Madero. Benyamin “Benny” Madero. Headed up a Latino vice gang. Very violent, very vicious.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man behind him. He collected his bits of metal.

  ‘But in case you’re thinking of paying him a private visit, you’re too late. I’m too late. We’re all too late. He’s gone. He’s back in his native Panama. I know he did it, but I don’t have enough to apply through the courts.’

  A hand pushed open the door of the small emporium of Oriental art off Madison at 28th Street, Manhattan. Above the portal a bell jangled with the movement of the door.

  The visitor looked around at the shelves stacked with jade and celadon, stone and porcelain, ivory and ceramic; at elephants and demi-gods, panels, wall hangings, parchments and innumerable Buddhas. At the rear of the shop a figure emerged.

  ‘I need to be someone else,’ said Calvin Dexter.

  It had been fourteen years since he had given the gift of a new life to the former Vietcong jungle fighter and his wife. The Oriental did not hesitate for a second. He inclined his head.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Please come with me.’

  It was 15 March 1992.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Settlement

  The fast fishing boat Chiquita slipped away from the quay in the resort port of Golfito just before dawn and headed down-channel for the open sea.

  At her helm was owner and skipper Pedro Arias and if he had reservations about his American charter party he kept them to himself.

  The man had turned up the previous day on a trail bike with local Costa Rican plates. In fact it had been bought, second-hand but in excellent condition, further up the Panamerican Highway at Palmar Norte where the tourist had arrived by local flight from San José.

  The man had strolled up and down the quay, checking out the various moored game-fishing boats before making his choice and his approach. With the trail bike chained to a nearby lamp-post and his haversack over his shoulder, the man looked like a mature backpacker.

  But there was nothing ‘backpacker’ about the block of dollars he laid on the cabin table. This was the sort of money that caught a lot of fish.

  But the man did not want to go fishing, which was why the rods were all racked along the cabin ceiling as the Chiquita cleared the headland at Punta Voladera and emerged into the Golfo Dulce. Arias set her head due south to clear Punta Banco an hour away.

  What the gringo actually wanted accounted for the two plastic drums of extra fuel strapped into the stern fishing deck. He wanted to be run out of Costa Rican waters, round the headland at Punta Burica and into Panama.

  His explanation that his family was vacationing in Panama Ci
ty and that the visitor wished to ‘see some of the Panamanian countryside’ by riding the length of the country struck Pedro Arias as being as substantial as the sea mist now dissolving in the rising sun.

  Still, if a gringo wanted to enter Panama on a trail bike off a lonely beach without passing through certain formalities, Señor Arias was a man of wide tolerances, especially where neighbouring Panama was concerned.

  At the breakfast hour the Chiquita, a thirty-one-foot Bertram Moppie, cruising happily at twelve knots over calm water, cleared Punta Banco and emerged into the swell of the real Pacific. Arias pulled her forty degrees to port to follow the coast two more hours to Burica Island and the unmarked border.

  It was 10 a.m. when they saw the first finger of Burica Island lighthouse jutting above the horizon and half past the hour as they turned the corner and veered back to the northeast.

  Pedro Arias swept his arm towards the land to their left, the eastern coast of the Burica Peninsula.

  ‘Now is all Panama,’ he said. The American nodded his thanks and studied the map. He jabbed with a forefinger.

  ‘Por aqui,’ he said.

  The area he indicated was a stretch of coast where no towns or resorts were marked, just a place that would have some abandoned empty beaches and some tracks back into the jungle. The skipper nodded and changed course to cut a straighter and shorter line across the Bay of Charco Azul. Forty kilometres, a tad over two hours.

  They were there by one o’clock. The few fisher-boats they had seen on the broad expanse of the bay had taken no notice of them.

  The American wanted to cruise along the coast a hundred yards offshore. Five minutes later, east of Chiriqui Viejo, they saw a sandy beach with a brace of straw huts, the sort local fishermen use when they wish to overnight. That would mean a track leading inland. Not feasible for a vehicle, even an off-road, but manageable with a trail bike.

  It took some grunting and pushing to get the bike down into the shallows; then the haversack was on the beach and they parted company. Fifty per cent at Golfito and fifty on delivery. The gringo paid up.

  He was a strange one, thought Arias, but his dollars were as good as everyone else’s when it came to feeding four hungry kids. He backed the Chiquita off the sand and headed out to sea. A mile offshore he emptied the two drums into his fuel tanks and gunned her south for the headland and home.

  On the beach Cal Dexter took a screwdriver, unscrewed the Costa Rica plates and hurled them far into the sea. From his haversack he took the plates a Panamanian motorcycle would carry and screwed them on.

  His paperwork was perfect. Thanks to Mrs Nguyen he had an American passport, but not in the name of Dexter, which already bore an entry stamp apparently entered a few days earlier at Panama City airport. Plus a driving licence to match.

  His halting Spanish, picked up around the courts and remand centres of New York where 20 per cent of his clients were Hispanic, was not good enough to pretend to be Panamanian. But a visiting American is allowed to ride upcountry to look for a fishing resort.

  It was just over two years since, in December 1989, the USA had turned parts of Panama into an ashtray to topple and capture the dictator Noriega, and Dexter suspected most Panamanian cops had retained the basic message.

  The narrow trail led back from the beach through dense rainforest to become, ten miles inland, a track. This became a dirt road with occasional farms, and there he knew he would find the Panamerican Highway, that feat of engineering that runs from Alaska to the tip of Patagonia.

  At David City he filled the tank again and set off down the Highway for the 500-kilometre run to the capital. Darkness came. He ate at a wayside halt with truck drivers, tanked up again and rolled on. He crossed the toll bridge to Panama City, paid in pesos and cruised into the suburb of Balboa as the sun rose. Then he found a park bench, chained the bike and slept for three hours.

  The afternoon was for the extended recce. The huge-scale city map he had purchased in New York gave him the layout of the city and the tough slum of Chorillo where Noriega and Madero had grown up a few blocks from each other.

  But successful low-lifes prefer the high life if they can get it, and Madero’s reported watering holes were two he part-owned in upscale Paitilla, across the bay from the slums of Old Town.

  It was two in the morning when the repatriated thug decided he was tired of the Papagayo Bar and Disco and wished to leave. The anonymous black door with discreet brass plaque, grille and eyehole opened and two men came out first: heavily built bodyguards, his personal gorillas.

  One entered the Lincoln limousine by the kerb and started the engine. The other scanned the street. Sitting hunched on the kerb, feet in the gutter, the tramp turned and grinned a smile of rotting or missing teeth. Greasy grey locks fell to his shoulders; a fetid raincoat clothed his body.

  Slowly he eased his right hand into a brown paper bag clutched to his chest. The gorilla slipped his hand beneath his left armpit and tensed. The hobo slowly pulled his hand from his bag clutching a bottle of cheap rum, took a swig and, with the generosity of the very drunk, held it out to the gorilla.

  The man hawked, spat on the pavement, withdrew his own hand empty from beneath his jacket, relaxed and turned away. Apart from the wino, the pavement was empty and safe. He tapped on the black door.

  Emilio, who had recruited Dexter’s daughter, was the first out, followed by his boss. Dexter waited till the door closed and self-locked before he rose. The hand that came out of the paper bag a second time held a shortened barrel .44 magnum Smith and Wesson.

  The gorilla who had spat never knew what hit him. The slug broke into four flying parts; all four penetrated at ten-feet range and performed considerable mischief inside his torso.

  Drop-dead handsome Emilio did exactly that, mouth open to scream, when the second discharge took him in the face and neck, one shoulder and one lung simultaneously.

  The second gorilla was halfway out of the car when he met his Maker in an unforeseen rendezvous with four spinning, tumbling metal fragments entering the side of his body exposed to the shooter.

  Benyamin Madero was back at the black door, screaming for admission, when the fourth and fifth shots were fired. Some bold spirit inside had the door two inches open when a splinter went through his marcelled hair and the door shut in a hurry.

  Madero fell, still hammering for admittance, sliding down the high-gloss panel work, leaving long red smears from his soaked guayabera tropical shirt.

  The tramp walked over to him, showing no panic or particular hurry, stooped, turned him on his back and looked into his face. He was still alive but fading.

  ‘Amanda Jane, mi hija,’ said the gunman and used the sixth shot to shred the entrails.

  Madero’s last ninety seconds of life were no fun at all.

  A housewife in an upper window across the street later told the police she saw the tramp jog away round a corner and heard the puttputt of a scooter engine moving away. That was all.

  Before sunrise the trail bike was propped against a wall two boroughs away, unchained, ignition key in place. It would survive no more than an hour before entering the food chain.

  The wig, the prosthetic teeth and raincoat were bundled into a trashcan in a public park. The haversack, relieved of its remaining clothes, was folded and tossed into a builder’s skip.

  At seven an American business executive in loafers, chinos, polo shirt and lightweight sports jacket, clutching a soft Abercrombie and Fitch travel grip, hailed a cab outside the Miramar Hotel and asked for the airport. Three hours later the same American lifted off in Club Class on the regular Continental Airlines flight for Newark, NJ.

  And the gun, the Smith and Wesson adapted to fire slugs that split in four lethal fragments for close-quarter work, that was down a storm drain somewhere in the city now dropping beneath the wingtip.

  It might not have been allowed in the Tunnels of Cu Chi, but twenty years later it worked like a dream on the streets of Panama.

 
Dexter knew there was something wrong when he entered his latchkey in his own door in the Bronx. It opened to reveal the face of his mother-in-law, Mrs Marozzi, her cheeks streaked with tears.

  Along with the grief, it was the guilt. Angela Dexter had approved of Emilio as a suitor for her daughter; she had agreed to the ‘vacation’ by the sea that the young Panamanian had proposed. When her husband said he had to leave for a week to take care of unfinished business, she presumed he meant some legal work.

  He should have stayed. He should have told her. He should have understood what was in her mind. Leaving her parents’ house where she had lodged since her daughter’s funeral, Angela Dexter had returned to the apartment with an over-supply of barbiturates and ended her own life.

  The ex-hardhat, soldier, student, lawyer and father went into a deep depression. Finally he came to two conclusions. The first was that he had no further life in the office of the Public Defender, scurrying from court to remand centre and back again. He handed in his papers, sold the apartment, bid a tearful farewell to the Marozzi family who had been good to him, and went back to New Jersey.

  He found the small town of Pennington, content in its leafy landscape, but with no local lawyer. He bought a small one-man office and hung up his shingle. He bought a frame house on Chesapeake Drive and a pickup truck in lieu of the city sedan. He began to train in the brutal discipline of the triathlon to take away the pain.

  His second decision was that Madero had died too easily. His just deserts should have been to stand in a US court and hear a judge sentence him to life without parole; to wake up each day and never see the sky; to know that he would pay until the end of his days for what he had done to a screaming girl.

  Calvin Dexter knew that the US Army and two tours in the stinking hell under the jungle floor of Cu Chi had given him dangerous talents. Silence, patience, near-invisibility, the skill of a hunter, the relentlessness of a born tracker.

  He heard via the media of a man who had lost his child to a murderer who had vanished abroad. He made covert contact, obtained the details, went out beyond the borders of his native land and brought the killer back. Then he vanished, becoming the genial and harmless lawyer of Pennington, NJ.