Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  But if all Suñer wanted was to protect von Niehauser, what was Havens doing in Juarez?

  “Meet me at Hotel Ritz, Juarez, tomorrow. Will wait all day. Agustin Gomá is tour guide. Can deal with him.” That was what the telegram had said. And Agustin Gomá was a real person—Bureau files had him down as somebody to watch. Why bother with so elaborate a double cross?

  And if it wasn’t that, then Suñer was probably dead. And if he was dead, then Gomá had probably killed him. It was about as solid a guarantee as you could ask for that Suñer’s information had been correct.

  All except the part about what a reasonable type Gomá was. Apparently things just hadn’t worked out that way.

  So—we were in the right part of the world, and we had the right name. So then what?

  Havens hunted up a telephone, got hold of the El Paso exchange, and placed a collect call to a special number the Bureau maintained, where the phone was answered by a sweet little old lady in Baltimore—at least, that was the impression. It cut down on the risk that the switchboard girls might get curious and decide to listen in.

  “Smitty, have we got any friends in Juarez?”

  “Is that you, Havens?” The high-pitched voice at the other end of the line didn’t sound very glad to be hearing from him. “What the hell are you doing in Juarez?”

  “Looking for friends, pal. Who do we know here?”

  “Just a minute.”

  There was a longish pause, during which Havens could hear the crackle of all those hundreds of miles of phone cable and wondered if he might not be making a mistake. “Don’t call in the local authorities unless you have to,” the general had said. Well, it might just be that he had to.

  “How friendly did you have in mind?” came the voice from the cellars of Seat of Government. “Will the cops do? I can manage better, but it’ll cost—you’ll have to get clearance from the Director.”

  Oh, goody! A chance to annoy Hoover by complying with his mandate from the Army. Life was sweet.

  “Tell me about it.”

  It took some arguing, but within half an hour Havens had his clearance. It was a complicated and nasty business, not at all the sort of thing that polished up the Bureau’s image, but times were tough and even Mr. Hoover had to do what he was told once in a while. But he had made it clear that, once the present emergency was over, Havens wasn’t likely to be welcomed back into the family with open arms. So what else was new?

  The next big question was, how do you go about getting an appointment with a crime czar?

  . . . . .

  As it turned out, all you had to do was to ask. You even got invited to lunch.

  Pepe (the Razor) Romero lived in a house that overlooked the Rio Grande, which geographical and political boundary had always figured very prominently in the histories of the great Mexican crime families. It was said that the Razor was beginning to cast longing glances over at the shores of Texas, where there was money to be made in everything from gambling and women to that exciting new business venture, the importation of heroin. Perhaps that was why he had chosen this particular spot for his house, so he could sit up on the bluff and stare out through the plate glass window of his living room and dream of the wealth to be garnered on the other side of that muddy little ribbon of water.

  Or perhaps he had been moved by strategic considerations—the house was at the center of a compound enclosed by high fences and guarded by men carrying machine guns. The cliffs rising up from the river were so sheer that it would have taken a team of mountain climbers to scale them.

  Havens had been delivered by car, straight from the front entrance of the hotel. He had sat in the back seat of a black ‘38 Lincoln, between a couple of unsmiling gorillas who hadn’t even opened their mouths during the whole twenty-seven-minute drive. As he waited in that living room, looking through that plate glass window at that river, he found himself wondering if FBI agents had quite the same cachet with Mexican hoodlums that they enjoyed in the States. He didn’t particularly relish the idea of floating out to sea with the garbage.

  “Mr. Havens? Welcome to my house.”

  He turned around and was pleasantly surprised to find himself facing a small, spare man of about fifty, with a brown face, a neat black mustache, and alert, humorous eyes. The Lucky Luciano of Mexico was wearing a light gray suit that was obviously expensive but managed to keep from shouting the fact at you, and the hand he held out had clean fingernails and wasn’t dripping in blood. He looked like any successful businessman—it just so happened that his business was crime.

  Havens took the hand and shook it. His business was catching spies, so he had never developed any particular prejudice against gangsters. And, anyway, this wasn’t the occasion to be a snob.

  “Please—if you will come with me.”

  Romero took him gently by the elbow, and Havens allowed himself to be led into a small, sunlit dining room, where a table covered with a sparkling white cloth and a silver coffee service had already been set up for them. A servant, an automaton in a black tailcoat and white gloves, stood behind Romero’s chair. He leaned forward while Romero whispered something in his ear, and then he disappeared. When he came back he was carrying a couple of covered dishes on a tray. Lunch turned out to be a grilled lamb chop, a little white rice, and a grilled tomato—somehow it was kind of an anticlimax.

  “Am I to understand, Mr. Havens, that you are authorized to speak for the American federales in this matter?” Romero smiled as he spread a napkin out over his knees—it was just a pro forma question, something to get the negotiations started.

  “Your brother-in-law is at this moment being transferred to the prison facilities at Brownsville, Señor Romero. Brownsville, as doubtless I don’t have to remind you, is within wading distance of the Mexican frontier. The transfer is entirely under the jurisdiction of the FBI and, while Mr. Hoover cannot of course countenance aiding the escape of a federal prisoner, federal prisoners do escape—it happens all the time.”

  “And the translation of which is, Mr. Havens?”

  “Give me what I want, Señor Romero, and little brother Juan will be escorted to the border and kicked across. Otherwise, he gets five to ten for aggravated assault and interstate flight.”

  Romero sighed and leaned back in his chair, resting his palms on both sides of his untouched lamb chop. Across the back of each hand, about an inch behind the knuckles, ran a knobby line of scar tissue, as if somebody had once slammed a door on them. That sort of thing probably hurt like the very devil.

  “Are you a family man, Mr. Havens?” he asked, his eyes suddenly anything but humorous. Havens decided that there was a good chance he was being threatened, so he grinned.

  “Not lately.”

  “Take my word for it, it is not always a blessing.” He spoke as if he really believed it. This wasn’t a threat; this was a confession. “He is my wife’s youngest brother, the baby of the family. And by the time he was twenty-five, he had already cost me over eight million pesos. I am more than a little tempted simply to let him spend his five to ten—I believe I could use the rest.”

  They went back to their meal then, and nothing more was said until the servant returned to clear away the dishes and serve the coffee. The silence was almost morose as, presumably, Romero considered which would least ruffle his domestic tranquillity, little Juan lounging around the hacienda or little Juan in the Brownsville jug. Havens couldn’t do anything except wait for the issue to be decided.

  “It must be an immense favor that Mr. Hoover requires,” the crime czar said finally, in a matter of fact tone as he filtered a third teaspoon of sugar into his coffee. “He is not famous for his tolerance toward the southern races, and this whole business is really a bit out of character for him.”

  He raised his eyebrows inquisitively, and Havens breathed a figurative sigh of relief. Little Juan had nothing to worry about.

  “It is an important favor, yes, but the risks and inconveniences for you are insignificant. B
ut you’re quite right that the Director isn’t just thrilled. Even he has to take orders.”

  “Then why should I believe he can be trusted?”

  It was a good question, one Havens would have been just as happy not to have had to answer. But apparently it was time for the guarantees and the threats. Havens forced himself to smile.

  “Senor Romero, you’ll die a happy man if you never discover what this was all about, but you can take my word for it that if you knew what I know you’d realize that nobody’s going to mess up a deal like this just to keep his hooks in a cheap little crook like your brother-in-law. However, if it makes you feel better, as soon as the two of us have struck a deal I’ll pick up the phone and you can send one of your goons to the international border to welcome the prodigal home.”

  Romero seemed genuinely surprised, but probably his world didn’t operate very much on trust. Probably he thought that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was staffed entirely by morons.

  “Of course, you understand,” Havens went on, allowing the smile to die away like a candle flame in an airless room, “that if you in turn decide to double-cross us, you’re going to become the private obsession of every Bureau agent in the Southwest. We hear stories that you’d like to expand your operation into the States—you’ll be able to forget all about that. Your people won’t even be able to come over to watch the dog races without getting collared. Believe me, it won’t have been worth it.”

  The man’s self-possession was marvelous. Whatever he felt about what he was hearing, it didn’t show—you could have supposed he was listening to a weather report. And then he took a sip of his coffee and set the cup down on its saucer without a sound. And then, with that careless grace unknown among the Anglo-Saxons, he shrugged his shoulders.

  “Among gentlemen, Mr. Havens, these things are taken for granted. So tell me, what is this important favor you require. What do you want?”

  “I want Agustin Gomá.”

  23

  “Frank got a letter from his brother who works for the OPA in Fort Wayne, and he says they’ll probably stop meat rationing by spring. Frank thinks that means the war could be over by the end of the year and then maybe he could get posted back to Springfield, near my mother. I certainly do hope he’s right, I certainly do. I certainly am getting tired of not having enough water to do the laundry more than twice a month, and you can keep the quaint Indian jewelry and the Gila monsters. Just let things get warmed up enough so you can hope to get the chill out of your bones and you have to fight the rattlesnakes for the backyard. Lord! Can you imagine what it’ll be like to be able to walk into a grocery store and pick up a pound of butter again? I’m so damn sick of this war—you’ll pardon my French, girls—but I’m so damn sick of this war that I could scream. And I think it’s all Roosevelt’s fault that it’s gone on so long; Frank says they could’ve had the Japs beat last year if they’d. . .”

  As was usual during the regular Saturday morning car trip into Santa Fe, Mindy Applewhite was driving everyone into a stunned silence that would last at least until midway through lunch, when patience would wear thin and everybody else would begin talking at once out of sheer desperation. It would be either that or someone would have to tell her to shut up, which had happened once and had lead to an outbreak of tears.

  But for once Jenny didn’t mind if the back of the car was filled with the clackety-clack of that high, toneless voice. It kept out the sound of other voices and allowed her to let her head rest against the window and feel the cold that came pressing in, almost like the palm of someone’s hand, from the pale gray winter that sped past outside. It was all right about Mindy because Mindy provided the perfect excuse to say nothing, to withdraw into herself and try to restore something like a little surface calm. For the last couple of days the complexities of her one little life seemed to be following one of those upward curves that were printed in the newspaper to explain how everything was getting better or more expensive or more dangerous. She kept waiting for the air raid sirens to go off.

  And Mindy went on and on, reciting the gospel according to her husband, just as if he were in on the secrets of the universe, and in the one person who listened the responses had simplified themselves down to simple envy. At least someone in the wide world didn’t have any reason to think she had fashioned her own private disaster.

  “You must’ve thought I was really stupid—you must’ve laughed and laughed. I oughta kill you—I oughta kill the pair of you.”

  And she had sat on the edge of the bed, not the least afraid, feeling nothing but a dead calm at the center of shame for herself and pity for poor Hal, her husband whom she had wronged with more than her adultery. It struck her, as a species of miracle, that she was probably closer to loving him at that moment than at any time in their married life.

  “There isn’t anybody else,” she had said, lying only a little. “I don’t know what’s set you off, but if it hasn’t worked out for us you don’t have to look for anything as melodramatic as that. Don’t you think it would be simpler if we just got a divorce?”

  He stood there in the bedroom doorway, his khaki undershirt stained with sweat as his chest heaved and the big, raw-looking muscles in his arms looked like they were ready to burst. He had come home early, declined his dinner, and then lay on his back for an hour, straining under a 150-pound barbell before he could bring himself to speak.

  “What kind of a woman are you?” he asked, wiping his mustache with the back of his hand. His eyes narrowed. It wasn’t a real question—Hal gave the impression of having learned about marriage from the Sunday afternoon matinees, and it was just the sort of thing Melvyn Douglas might have asked Joan Crawford. “Don’t you care about anything? Don’t you at least care that you’re married?”

  “What are you getting at, Hal?”

  And so he told her. It wasn’t something anybody had let him in on—this was an idea he had talked himself into while he sulked and sweated and tried to fix on just where things had come unraveled. And it wasn’t even the first time. If he had hit it right, that was just an accident. He had been wrong the time before. It was just the obvious choice, and he was an obvious man.

  For a long moment she was silent. She simply sat there on the bed, staring at him, not quite sure what to say. Apparently Hal interpreted that as an angry denial, because he seemed to wilt a little.

  “I know there’s someone else. I haven’t looked at another woman since the night we met, but I guess it hasn’t been that way for you.” He paused for a moment, seeming to wait for her to answer, and when she didn’t he glanced away. “I’m not so dumb I don’t know when a woman’s making a fool out of me, and when I find the bastard I’m gonna kill him.”

  And if he wasn’t quite as sure as he sounded, that didn’t take anything away from his suffering. And if he wasn’t going to make good on his threats—and if they both knew it—that didn’t speak against him either.

  After ten minutes he went slamming out the front door, probably to do the sensible thing and go drinking with his friends. She waited for him until after midnight and then went to bed. He was asleep beside her when she woke up the next morning.

  There was no repetition at breakfast, although perhaps that would have been better than the grim silence with which he ate his eggs and hash brown potatoes.

  Could he know? Was that possible? She had heard it as the standard warning that was issued to Army brides, over and over, at each of the three bases where they had lived since their marriage—a military post was a small world where it was difficult to keep secrets. So don’t have any secrets. Either live as if each day is Mother’s Day, or don’t care. You would be forgiven anything, it seemed, except trying to have something all to yourself. Life was too short and too dull for that.

  Maybe after all someone had seen something and whispered it into Hal’s ear—or didn’t men gossip like that?

  For a moment—just a moment—she wondered if perhaps Erich. . .

  But w
hy should he have done that? And how? It seemed unlikely that he would have marched right up to the security office and filled out a form announcing himself as Jenny Springer’s lover. Hal would have beaten him to paste, and Hal had spent the evening at home last night, not in the base stockade. His knuckles hadn’t even been bruised.

  And his accusations had had a vague, made-up quality, as if he hadn’t really believed them himself. She “must have a new boyfriend,” was the way he had phrased it, which didn’t carry a lot of conviction.

  Sitting alone in their little prefabricated bungalow, she had been overwhelmed with a sense of what it probably would have been like for Hal if he had believed it. He wasn’t a thoughtful man; he would never have been able to explain something like that to himself. It would have become his failure, not hers, and he would have let it twist him around out of all recognition. Nothing, nothing he had ever said or done or failed to do could have entitled her to work that misery on him. If she had to live the rest of her days as his wife, preparing his dinner and listening to the news from his job and sleeping in his bed at night. . . They could never be happy but at least she wouldn’t have turned his life into garbage.

  So she would have to begin living through Mother’s Day. She took a kind of comfort in the simplicity of it. The terror of having a lover had been its complexity, its endless suspensions of breath while you developed an intimacy with the dread that tainted every moment. Anything was better than that. She wouldn’t mind breaking Hal’s heart so much, if she could just be sure that that was all she broke.

  Lunch, when it finally came to that, was more than she could bring herself to manage, so she begged her way out of it. When they parked the car, and the sound of the engine shutting off snapped her out of her trance, she leaned forward with her left hand resting on the top of the front seat and smiled and said something about breakfast having given her a headache. It wasn’t her turn to buy, so no one seemed to mind very much.