“But you work for the CIA.”
“I work for everyone. That way no one can make me do something I don’t want to do. That’s why I’ll never be like Angel.”
“But is that why you went to Miami?”
“I was in Miami on my way to Havana. I was running messages for people who couldn’t be seen to be talking to the Cubans themselves. It gets complicated. Bobby has to talk to Fidel even while he’s telling the Agency to kill him.”
“Don’t Angel and his bosses want Castro dead? He ruined their whole party in Havana. I heard he cost them a fortune.”
“They did want to kill him, but now - not so much. Bobby’s their major threat, he’s the one who declared a war on crime and it looks like he means it. He’s already nailed over two hundred of them, some of them bosses. He got Marcello deported, and he was the biggest mob guy in Dallas, sent him to the Guatemala jungle. He even has a Get Hoffa squad, for Christ’s sake. Hoffa’s been bankrolling the mob guys in Las Vegas straight out of the Teamsters pension fund. You can’t take out Hoffa, that’s like taking away their bank. These guys are scared for the first time.”
“Then why not kill Bobby?”
“Because then Jack will come after them. But once Jack’s dead, they don’t need to kill Bobby, because they’ve taken away his power. It makes sense if you’re in the business.
“But Kennedy is our president.”
“No, he was their president. At least that’s what they figured when they won him the election. Now they figure he’s turned on them. “Get the stone out of the shoe.” It’s a Sicilian curse.”
“Aren’t you angry about this?”
“Why? Political assassination isn’t like re-inventing the wheel, not in the world I live in. They killed Caesar, didn’t they? They killed Lincoln. For Angel’s guys, killing people is just a way to better business--it’s their first option. With governments at least it’s the second or third option.”
“Can’t someone stop this?”
“I would bet my last dollar anyone who could stop it already knows all about it, probably even Hoover. But to stop it, you have to want to stop it. You just don’t get how many people hate the Kennedys.”
“I thought people loved him.”
“Not the people who matter: the CIA, the Pentagon, the mafia. That’s the electorate, princess. Everyone else is just crowd control.”
I put my head in my hands. “Why don’t they just do it, why do they need me?”
“Because it’s not an easy hit. You can’t walk into a barber shop in Little Italy and find Jack Kennedy sitting in a chair having a shave. But if you did it, then they would get rid of you - they’d make it look like an overdose - and then no one could ever trace it back to them. It’s a very good plan.”
“I’ve been a fool, haven’t I?”
“Not for me to say.” He stood up.
“Reyes, what’s your part in all this?”
“I don’t have one. I know what goes down, I’ve run money, I’ve run guns, I’ve even run dope to pay for the guns. I do the dirty, dangerous jobs that pay well. I walk the line. But I’m not a contract killer, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Don’t you ever get sick of it?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Will you ever get out?”
“That’s not my main concern right now, is it?” He put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re the one that needs to get out.”
“But the picture...”
“Forget the movie, that’s finished. Your career’s over. You have more important things to worry about right now. Even if you did everything Angel asked you to do, you’re dead.”
“You mean if I killed the President?”
“When they do this thing, they won’t leave witnesses. Do you understand the fix you’re in? You have to disappear.”
“How?”
“I can make you vanish if that’s what you want. In fact, you don’t have a choice.”
I stared into the pool. All my dreams gone, before they’d even begun. “I can’t believe you’d help me after what I did.”
“Neither can I, but it looks like I’m going to.”
I caught his wrist and stood up, put my arms around his neck. “Reyes, please forgive me.”
He untangled himself. “Saving you from the mob, getting you out of the country and hiding you someplace they can’t find you - that I can do. But don’t ask me to forgive you. There are some things that are impossible, even for me.”
Chapter 38
That night we drove down to Mexico. I wore a scarf and sat low in the seat until we were out of the city.
Reyes headed toward San Diego and then across the border into Mexico. He didn’t say much, he looked angry. Was he angry with me, with himself? I don’t know.
Once he said: “It’s not the way I’d do it.”
“Do what?”
“If I was in their position, I’d get one of those pro-Castro communist nuts with a grudge, some guy not even remotely connected, and I’d put a gun in his hand. There’s plenty of crazies who want to kill the president, but They’re too dumb to know how to do it. That’s what I’d do.”
“Would you?”
“Would I what, princess?”
“Would you help them kill him?”
“I didn’t even want them to kill Castro.” He drummed on the wheel with his fingers. “I have to get out of this business.”
“Come with me,” I said. “Let’s leave all this behind. We could be happy, you and me, I know we could.”
He just shook his head and smiled.
We drove through the deserts of the Baja Sur, stopped to sleep by the side of the road for a few hours, got coffee and eggs at a roadhouse. When we arrived in some one-horse town called La Paz with a dirt airstrip with a donkey on it, there was a charter plane waiting for us.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t have any luggage.”
“You won’t need any where you’re going. I’m afraid you’ll have to say goodbye to the glamorous life.”
“What about my apartment?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” he said as the Cessna bounced down the runway. “You are about to become a missing person. A day or so from now there will be cops swarming all over your place looking for signs of foul play, there’ll be mob guys watching the studio, looking all over the city for you. You have a passport and a pulse, for now that’s all you need.”
The charter flew us to Mexico City. From there we boarded a South African Airways 707. I was exhausted, slept on his shoulder on the long flight across the Atlantic. We changed planes in Madrid. By the time we reached Johannesburg, I was exhausted. I thought we would go to ground somewhere in the backblocks, but when we cleared customs Reyes walked straight up to the Air France counter and got us seats on a flight to Dar Es Salaam.
“I can’t,” I said to him. “I need to rest. Can we get a hotel for the night?”
“Where you’re going, princess, rest is all there is.”
I didn’t even know where Dar Es Salaam was. When we got off the plane the breathless heat hit me like a wall. I was dirty, tired and bathed in sweat. One night in the Mexican desert and I’d stopped looking like a movie star; by the time we stepped off the Air France flight into the white-walled, stinking terminal in some country I had never heard of, I looked more like a hobo.
Reyes seemed to know his way around. He went straight to a windowless office in a corner of the terminal. There was a telephone, a rusted metal filing cabinet and a Frenchman with three day’s growth asleep at the desk. He woke him up, said something to him in French, and took my arm.
“Not another plane,” I muttered.
“You think it’s easy to disappear?”
The pilot’s name was Jean-Luc and he talked incessantly, in French, the whole way. Reyes said a few words back. Another surprise, I didn’t even know he spoke French. Apparently there were still many things
I didn’t know about him.
Three hours later we touched down at a town whose name I could not pronounce, on an island I had never heard of. The terminal was a tin shed with goats munching on the heaps of rubbish that were piled up outside. Reyes put me in a dilapidated taxi, one door held on with pieces of wire. I couldn’t breathe because of the heat, and as I tried to gasp in some air I swallowed a fat African fly.
This was a nightmare.
The trip from hell to paradise takes about twenty minutes, bouncing across the potholes on an unmade road. The taxi left us outside a dilapidated beach hut beside a lagoon so impossibly blue it didn’t seem real. Palm trees bent over a white beach, too drowsy to stand up straight.
A hammock had been strung between banana palms.
I looked around, enchanted. In the distance clouds hugged the rainforest flanks of a volcano, banana plantations and vanilla bushes hugged the dirt road beside the beach. A group of small children rushed up and stared at us, giggling and shouting: “Mzungus!”
“What does that mean?”
“It means “white people,” Reyes said.
He led the way inside the hut. There was a table and two chairs, a bed with a mosquito net, a fly-catcher made from shells. A wood carving of a turtle and a piece of driftwood so smooth it might have been carved from marble lay on a low table next to a carved sea chest decorated with mother of pearl. There was an ancient bookcase, bowed in the centre by the weight of the books on the shelves, everything from Harold Robbins paperbacks to ancient navigational charts of the islands.
“You’ll be able to catch up on your reading,” Reyes said.
“Is this it?” I said.
“No one will find you here. Even the people who live here don’t know where the hell they are.”
A man came in wearing a long skirt, a white shirt and a skullcap. He grinned and bobbed his head.
“This is Shofa,” Reyes said. “It’s not his real name; it’s from the French word for “driver.” That’s his hut over there. He’ll take care of you, bring you food and tea, anything else you need. I hope you like seafood and fruit.”
“How long am I going to be here?”
“As long as it takes.”
“But I have no money.”
“You won’t need any--he’s been paid. Jean-Luc will fly out with newspapers once a week and check in on you. He’ll try to sleep with you, of course, but it’s up to you whether you let him.”
“Reyes, it’s you I love.”
He pretended not to hear me.
“I always thought I’d need this myself one day. It’s my bolt hole, my insurance. The people here are about as friendly a people as you’ll find anywhere, and the only danger is the volcano, but that hasn’t erupted for fifty years.”
“Stay,” I said again, convinced that if I could make him spend the night he would not leave me.
He bit his lip and I could see the torment written on his face. I held my breath. He turned and said something to Jean-Luc, who looked disappointed. He shrugged his shoulders and walked out.
“I have to leave in the morning though,” Reyes said.
I bathed in the lagoon. I was utterly exhausted, but I was determined not to go to sleep until I had made Reyes forgive me. There was not a shred of doubt in my mind that I could do it.
I didn’t care about Hollywood anymore. I didn’t care about money or proving anything to anyone. I knew that I loved Reyes. I knew I could make things different in the future. I just wanted a second chance.
It was evening. Oil lights twinkled along the beach, but otherwise it was utterly black. We had fallen off the world.
Shofa brought us fried crab, some rice, papaya. After we’d eaten we went back inside the hut and Reyes turned off the lamp. Through the doorway I could see the moon hanging fat over the ocean, making the sand glisten like bone. I took off the wrap that Shofa had given me to wear and stood in front of him naked.
“You’re beautiful, princess,” he whispered.
“I’m all yours.”
“Yeah?”
“You were right about me. I was vain and stupid and scared. Things can be different now.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“But it does matter. Can you forgive me?”
“I forgave you for what happened in Havana. I don’t know that I could do it again.”
“But you have to,” I whispered.
“Forgive once and that’s okay, I guess. Forgive twice it gets to be a habit and you spend your whole life listening to people saying They’re sorry.”
I took his face in my hands and kissed him, hard. I tore open his shirt and pushed him back on the bed. I thought I could change his mind with sex, an instinct as primitive as it is hopeless. He let me try; he was a red-blooded man, and once I started in on him neither of us could stop. But no matter what I did he wouldn’t let himself come. I did though; more times than I could count. Perhaps it was the danger or perhaps it was just that I had never let myself go so completely. When we finished, we were lying on the floor, on the straw mats, covered in sweat.
I wrapped my arms and legs around him and promised myself I would never let go. “I love you, Reyes,” I whispered.
“I love you, too,” he said.
I gave in to exhaustion, slept like the dead.
The next morning when I woke up he was gone. I ran outside, thinking that perhaps he had just gone to swim in the lagoon, but when Shofa saw me he grinned and bobbed his head to show me he was sorry and pointed towards the sky. In the distance I saw a distant speck, climbing away from the airport and heading out towards the bitter, bright ocean.
He didn’t even say goodbye.
Chapter 39
I sat on the beach, staring at the sea. I stayed there all day. Shofa came down to bring me food but I didn’t eat or move until sunset.
He was actually gone. His leaving was more eloquent than any words. He wouldn’t come back; this was the last time. There were to be no second chances.
But he had saved my life. I would be safe here, for now.
He had left me a note. Well, more a set of instructions.
1. It’s a Moslem country, cover your arms and legs, even when you’re swimming.
2. Don’t fuck the French pilot, and if you do, don’t fall in love with him, he has women everywhere.
3. I will let you know when it’s safe to return.
4. Watch out for snakes.
That was it.
The island was a paradise, and after a week I wanted to kill myself. If I’d known how long I was going to be there, perhaps I would have.
Every day Shofa brought me bananas for breakfast, rice and vegetables for lunch, crab and shrimp with a little local rice for dinner. He climbed palm trees and cut down coconuts for me so that I could drink the milk. His wife made me two shiromeni, the bright-colored skirts the local women wore. She let me use some of her sandalwood paste as a beauty mask. I swam in the lagoon and stayed out of the sun. Within a few weeks my complexion looked better than it ever had, my skin glowed. I was the most beautiful woman in the southern hemisphere and there was no one to appreciate it.
Except Jean-Luc. Every week he brought me newspapers and sometimes even a new book because I was quickly devouring the contents of the bookshelf. I hoped I would escape my island prison before I at last resorted to memorising the navigational charts. My dread was that I wouldn’t.
As Reyes had warned, Jean-Luc tried to seduce me, if you can call it that. He leaned on the doorjamb, put his thumbs in his belt and leered at me. I was supposed to swoon.
Reyes once told me that I had never loved anyone. Perhaps he was right. It seemed too cruel a joke to learn that lesson now, when it was too late to do anything about it. All I could do for the moment was remember to breathe, and try not to think, try not to remember, and tell Jean-Luc thanks but no thanks.
Months passed. I hiked through the jungle and found a waterfall. I spent an afternoon swimming with a Hawksbill turtle. I stopped
running inside at night whenever I saw a fruit bat.
Shofa's wife taught me to weave baskets. I learned to love the taarab music they played in the village at night, played tag with her children outside the white-walled mosque.
One day I promised myself I would make a new start. I had done it once, I would do it again. Not in Hollywood, not in Miami, not in Havana, but somewhere. My childhood dream was in ruins, but I would find a new dream.
Then one day Jean-Luc arrived in a battered taxi with some American newspapers, most of them a week old. He threw them down in front of me and stood there, hands on hips, waiting for me to read them.
I picked up the New York Times and read the headline:
KENNEDY KILLED BY SNIPER AS HE RIDES IN CAR IN DALLAS:
JOHNSON SWORN IN ON PLANE.
“Figure in pro Castro group is charged.”
It had been done, just as Reyes said it would be. Some pro-Castro nut, that’s what Reyes had said, and in the end that’s just what they did. No fake heart attacks, no affairs with movie actresses to cover up, as Reyes said, at the end of the day it was just another hit.
Jean-Luc handed me an envelope. I tore it open, hoping for much more than there was; a single sheet of plain white notepaper with one sentence typed on it: Another month or two and you can come home. There were three plane tickets with a final destination in Los Angeles, and an open reservation for three nights at the Beverley Hills Hotel.
Sometime in January, 1964 - I didn’t know the date or even what day of the week it was - I gathered my few things together, said goodbye to Shofa and his family and got into the back of a taxi with Jean-Luc. Even on the drive out to the airport he tried to put his hand on my knee.
I wondered if Reyes would be there to meet me when I got home. I could not accept that he was gone from my life forever. There had to be a way to get him back one day, and if there was, then Dios mio, I knew by all that was holy that I would find it.
Naked In LA (Naked Series Book 2) Page 16