by Bill Granger
Economic Review was one of those quasi-private companies that researches political and economic backgrounds of countries in the world. ER had 231 countries under constant monitor. Its service was expensive. The bill flashed forward to R Section in Washington was $7,312.14, authorized by November’s old account number.
All of the strands of information had become confused in the last hour. Lydia Neumann had pushed her computers back and forth, scanning for confirmation of her hunches, of her instincts. Where was November going?
But it was obvious to her.
At 3:10 P.M. eastern daylight time, a Pan Am jumbo jet had touched down at Miami International on a routine flight from London. Two Watchers from R Section had been waiting at the customs shed. They knew who they were looking for but they did not know why. Mrs. Neumann had guessed correctly.
“Colonel Ready,” she said now to Hanley.
“I don’t understand it. It’s like a masquerade inside a masquerade.”
“A charade,” she said. “He’s signaling to us and to someone else. It’s all sign language.”
“He entered London with an American passport. Made out to Ready. But it’s him, it’s not Ready.”
“And entered the United States with the same passport.”
“And his hair. His hair.”
“Perhaps he’s become touched by vanity,” she said, smiling because the sarcasm always upset Hanley. She liked to tease him.
“He dyed his hair red. I don’t understand that at all,” he said. “And then he disappeared after Miami. What is the game? He’s going to St. Michel but I don’t understand what this is all about.”
“Neither did Cohn.”
“Colonel Ready was CIA. Maybe he still is. Nobody ever seems to quit the old game.”
“Like November,” she said.
“Yes.” He opened his hands and they were empty. “Like November. Except what side has he come in on?”
The shrimp boats and charter fishing boats sat deck to deck in the crowded deep harbor of Fort Myers Beach. The harbor lies on the east side of Estero Island, which is connected to the mainland by a steep concrete bridge directly over the harbor. The shrimp boats go out to sea down the channels east of the island to Big Carlos Pass at the south tip where the water is deep enough for them to make it out to the Gulf of Mexico on the west shore of the island.
It was late afternoon and the blood-red sun was shimmering across the gulf sea, painting red colors on the lines and masts of the shrimpers in the harbor.
The Compass Rose was overshadowed on one side by a sleek seventy-eight-foot charter fishing yacht with staterooms and on the other by a rust-stained old shrimp boat with peeling paint and the stench of the fish hold. The shrimp boats ranged the gulf all the way to Mexico from this spot on the west coast of Florida. Sometimes, they were gone for weeks and even months. Sometimes, when the shrimp were not plentiful, the boats found other cargoes, which is why the Drug Enforcement Administration kept at least two agents on full-time duty in the triangle of Estero Island, Sanibel, and Captiva islands.
The Compass Rose rode high in the water. Her wooden decks and hull were painted black, her cabin was low and close to the narrow deck. The boat was longer and deeper than it appeared because of the coloring. She carried a sailing mast and riggings as well as two inboard engines.
Devereaux, who only knew a little about boats, had learned this much from one of the yard workers in a boat repair shop behind the sea wall on the east side of the harbor. She’s a good one, the sun-blackened worker had said, sweat across his brown forehead, but she’s a bastard, like the one that owns her. Neither fish nor fowl. Not big enough for a commercial fishing boat, not fancy enough for a long-distance charter. But she had too much power for day cruising. The worker had stared at Devereaux for a long moment after offering these criticisms. He had meant to imply something about the boat and the owner.
Devereaux stepped onto the deck of the Compass Rose as the sun fell low enough to cause deep shadows across the deep, still waters. The day had been long and warm. Long enough for Devereaux to finish his preparations. The most difficult part had been finding the Compass Rose. He had flown from Miami to Key West in a twin-engine P.B.A. Douglas and searched for the Compass Rose in the old harbor of the old town. Finally, at noon, someone who said he had been a pal of Cain’s said Cain couldn’t afford the fees or lifestyle of Key West anymore, that he had gone up the west coast to Fort Myers Beach, that Cain was probably running stuff now with some of the drug pirates from Mexico into Tampa and north.
Everyone knew so much about Cain, but it was never enough to see him clearly.
Only enough to let Devereaux find him.
“You want something?”
Devereaux turned and realized Cain did not recognize him. It had been twelve years, but Devereaux had made changes in the last twelve hours. He had red hair now, and gray, sick skin, the kind you can get from illness or from swallowing cordite to dull the skin tones. His gray eyes were blue. And there was a scar, a long wide scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear.
“I want someone named Cain.”
“Yeah? Who’re you?”
Devereaux smiled. “You were in Nam, weren’t you?”
“Everyone was in Nam.”
“It seemed that way.”
There was a pause. Cain was large, he had large hands and cracked, burned skin and large, empty eyes and an earring in his left ear and dark brown curly hair that fit tight over his large head. The empty eyes held the face before him and tried to sort it through the photographs of memory. There was something there.
“You remember Colonel Ready.”
“That wasn’t his name.”
“That’s what he was called.”
Cain wiped his hands on an oil rag. He wiped them over and over. The day was peculiarly breathless and still.
“Are you going to a Halloween party?” Cain said. His voice was soft, too gentle for a big man. But there was strength beneath the cadence of the words.
“I don’t look like him, do I?”
“A nice imitation. Good enough to fool someone who never saw him. But I know you, too, don’t I?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
Cain’s puzzled look cleared then and he stared at the other man. He did not smile in recognition but Devereaux saw that Cain knew.
“What do you want?”
“A boat.”
“There’s lots of boats.”
“Do you know St. Michel?”
“I don’t go that way,” Cain said. “I stick to the upper gulf. I go toward Mexico.”
“But I want to go to St. Michel.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“You ever there?”
“A couple of years ago. Think of Haiti on its worst day and then you got some idea of St. Michel at its best.”
“I want to go there,” Devereaux said. “It’s a little business. It will take a couple of days.”
“I won’t go down there.”
“You had to leave Key West. You couldn’t afford it anymore.”
“There’s a lot of coast. And the sea is the same no matter where you start from.”
“You’re a poet.”
Cain stared at him. “That’s the literary influence. Being in Key West all that time.”
“I remembered you were there. When you got out.”
“You never get out. They just leave me alone.”
“Until now.”
Cain’s dead eyes sputtered to life, like a flame lit in a dark wind, on a wet night. The flame died as suddenly as it was born. “Until now,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I told you.”
“You can’t make me,” he said.
“Yes. I can do that. You know that.”
“I might just kill you out there,” Cain said. “There’s a lot of sea between here and St. Michel.”
“Can you make it without refueling?”
“I can take on fuel at Key
West. Then there’s enough to get to St. Michel and enough to get back to the keys if we use the sail and get a breeze.”
“I don’t care about coming back,” said Devereaux. “We can take our time. I want to get in quickly and quietly.”
“There used to be a fishing village. Not a village, just a few shacks, on the road between St. Michel town and Madeleine. Halfway down the lee coast.”
“Can you pull in there?”
“St. Michel has an army, but they haven’t discovered a navy yet. Sometimes a smuggler will go in there to rest for a couple of days.”
“That’s what you do. That’s what they say in the boatyards.”
“Everyone knows everything,” Cain said with a dead soft voice to match his dead eyes. “I want five thousand. Your people have it.”
“Yes.” said Devereaux. “I want to leave right away.”
“Where’s your gear?”
“I have it in a car.”
“We could go out after sundown. See those guys on the bridge? There. Just look at them, don’t stare. DEA. They were at Sanibel last week, it’s our turn. If I pull out, I don’t want to come back with any dirt.”
“This isn’t about drugs.”
“I don’t want you planting some shit.”
“This isn’t about you.”
“But you want to use me,” Cain said, each word falling like a body jerked on a hangman’s rope. The words dropped, kicked, were still, swinging back and forth. “This isn’t about me, but it is because you’re here.”
“It’s about Ready. That might interest you.”
“What happened to him? You’re working together now?”
“No,” Devereaux said. “Ready is on St. Michel.”
“Are you going to kill him?” Cain asked the question without any passion except curiosity.
“I don’t know,” Devereaux said.
“If you were going to kill him, that would be all right,” Cain said.
“Yes. I knew that.”
“Is that why you involved me?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
“Damn you. Both of you.”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
8
AN INTIMATE RECEPTION
Rita Macklin wore a blue silk dress that was quiet and very elegant. But when she entered the large reception room she saw that quietness was not a virtue to the women assembled. It was as though the presidential reception needed all the color it could get.
The colors were to erase the face of the large hall in this dreary, gray palace, on a hill looking down on the broken slum that was the capital of St. Michel. The capital surrounded a beautiful natural harbor that had no cruise ships. The realism of the city and the palace gave way in this room to the surrealism of the colorful dresses and gowns of the ladies of the foreign dignitaries.
On the green walls of the high-ceilinged room were huge oil portraits of unknown Frenchmen who had settled St. Michel, tamed it, brought slaves to it, worked its mines, taken its meager wealth, and departed. They had places of honor in the room on the walls but no one could remember all their names.
Fourteen soldiers in khaki uniforms of the army of St. Michel stood at attention around the room.
Colonel Ready grinned at her when she entered the room and came to her with a glass of champagne. His white scar was even whiter because in the two days he had been back in St. Michel, his suntan had deepened.
“I hope you had a good flight,” he said. “Everything is satisfactory?”
She saw a look of amusement in his eyes. And something more, something deeper than the surface glitter of his blue eyes. “This is so bizarre.”
“Everything about St. Michel is bizarre,” he said. “You get used to it after a while. The bizarre seems commonplace. See that gentleman there? Sir Michael Blasinstoke. He’s the British consul. He stutters and he hates the French, an interesting prejudice for someone posted to a former French colony.”
She smiled despite herself. Colonel Ready was trying to charm her. She felt disoriented by the long flight, the time changes, the brief nap in the strange hotel. The hotel was nearly empty. She saw the keys in the mailboxes and she had turned the pages of the register and saw only her name and three others listed. Why had the clerk insisted the hotel was filled? Like everything else she had experienced here in a few hours, the reality of things seemed to exist separately in a compartment apart from the appearance of things.
“And that one is the French consul. Our president is constantly trying to prove his ‘Frenchness,’ but it’s no use when it comes to the French consul because Mazarine went to the École Polytechnique in Paris. Claude-Eduard will always be a hopeless rustic to Mazarine.”
Colonel Ready was very close to her so that his low voice only carried to her. His blue eyes were full of humor and mischief and she felt a warm wave as she realized he was trying to impress her.
“You’re very attractive, Rita,” he said.
“And who is that?”
He turned. “Morgan. The American consul.” Colonel Ready frowned suddenly. “I’ll have to talk to him. You’ll have to excuse me a moment.” His voice became tight.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re a journalist. Report the story of St. Michel.”
“Nobody is interested in St. Michel,” she said.
He paused. “Yes, that’s very true most of the time. And sometimes, it turns out not to be true. You can never be too careful. I mean, trying to make certain that you are always aware of when a thing is true and when it is not.”
“That’s why you want Devereaux.”
“Devereaux.” He stared at her. “Yes. That’s what I told him.”
“It was true, wasn’t it?”
“You have only been in St. Michel a few hours. There are things that are true and there are things that might be true.”
“Like that big excavation. For the museum.”
“Yes. The museum. That’s a good example, I suppose. The hole in the ground is there, the museum is… where? In people’s imagination. I suppose you talked to Daniel.”
“How did you know?”
“I know everything about you, Rita,” Colonel Ready said, and it was not pleasant to hear him say it. He smiled then, to mitigate the words. “This place is full of stories.”
“Nobody cares.”
“Not today, then tomorrow.”
“It is full of tomorrows.”
“Don’t forget Grenada. We have rebels in the hills. All island nations have rebels in their hills.”
She was weakening in her hatred of him. His words were light and airy and full of self-mockery. He was the only thing she was familiar with on the island. “Are they really Communists?”
“Yes, of course,” said Colonel Ready.
The reception droned on and became more listless, as damp as the muggy evening warmth that clung to the room. A small group of musicians played cocktail party music that recalled tunes played in New York hotel lobbies in the 1940s.
Rita Macklin never finished her first glass of champagne. Colonel Ready disappeared for a while with the American consul and then reappeared alone. The people of the room all seemed to know each other and talked in whispers, like members of a close, large family thrown into an unfamiliar territory. There were a couple of people who said they were reporters, and at the hors d’oeuvres table was the archbishop of St. Michel.
Simon Bouvier had the face and build of a French peasant, which was what his father had been. The archbishop had been standing at the table laden with food and he had been eating and talking for nearly an hour. He nibbled at the sweaty side of salmon, at the melting aspics and the rum-soaked fruit, at the petit fours, at the rolls and crackers and various soft cheeses that were running on their plates.
Rita Macklin asked him about the religion on the island.
“Everyone is Catholic, of course,” he said.
“Is the church very… involved?”
“In what way
?”
“There are rebels in the hills—”
“Oh. They are Communists. The hills have many believers in many religions. Unfortunately, few of them believe in our religion.”
“What religions?”
“The voodoo is in the hills.”
“Really? Still?”
“And the Communists. Such a violent religion that is,” said the archbishop and he shoved a cracker full of Camembert into his mouth and chewed loudly on it. He grinned at her. “Oh, yes. We have missionaries as well, but they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them. I am quite content with matters as they are.”
“Catholic missionaries.”
“Nuns who do not wear the habits of their order. Radicals and Communists as far as I am concerned. But then, I am a conservative.” The archbishop smiled. “It is a comfort to me to be conservative.”
She started to speak and could think of nothing to say to him for a moment. Here was another one. The bishop took a piece of dark bread and reached for the bowl of Russian caviar. The caviar smelled like rotted fish. The old prelate was sweating but did not seem to notice it.
“Where are the nuns? I mean—”
“I really don’t know. They have no convent. They live like single women. Colonel Ready asked my advice about them but I said they were harmless enough. They want to convert the people in the hills.”
“You said everyone was Catholic.”
“Which means that hardly anyone is Catholic at all. There are no churches in the hills but the hills have many believers.”
“In voodoo.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps in other things. It is difficult to understand what people who stay in the hills believe in. In any case, it is beyond me.” He turned back to the food table and dismissed her.
The evening ground on. Conversations came and went in fragments that mimicked the humid wind that failed to cool her. Once, near midnight, Rita went to a window in the reception room and looked down in the courtyard. She saw two policemen with truncheons prod a large, fat white man across the courtyard. Harry Francis looked up in that moment and saw her in the window and then disappeared behind a large metal door that led to the police headquarters and the cells in the basement near the morgue.