Whitaker looked at him.
The clerk slid the telephone across the front counter.
Just as Higbee was about to get up and telephone the boss at his hotel, Leonard Vaught pushed through the phony-brick door.
Higbee’s chortling delight in the banana mule melted away, and was followed by a cold bucket of fear. Vaught was not a large man, but he looked scary, as is often the case with not-large men. He was dressed in a checked suit and cap. He had short red hair, a small nose above a small round mouth, and narrow feverish watery eyes. A scar zig-zagged from his right temple to his chin. Patches of what looked like black powder burns were scattered across his face and neck. His arms were long, ape-like, and his wrists stuck out of his sleeves, culminating in hands that were too large for the rest of him. He was carrying a mesh bag of oranges.
Higbee had not, so far as he could remember, ever been afraid of anything in his life—not the snakes in the cotton fields of his childhood, not his father on a three-day bender, not the gang from Oklahoma who had robbed an I.C. fruit express he was running to Memphis, not any of his ex-wives’ extensive families. During the campaign in the Cordillera to install Francisco Flores, Higbee’s horse had been shot out from under him. The animal lunged onto its side, breaking Higbee’s leg. As the federal soldiers bore down through the smoke, killing everything that moved, he unholstered his Luger and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Again. A dry click. He looked up at a dozen rifle barrels trained on his broken body. His shin-bone was poking through his pant leg. “Goddammit,” he seethed, unafraid. “Shoot me, if you got the guts, and leave me on the ground to rot.”
The lieutenant in charge of the ambush blinked at him. “Por qué, you stinkin’ Yankee?”
The epithet enraged the Mississippi native even more. “I want the buzzards to eat me and fly over you afterwards and scatter white shit all over your goddamned faces is why.”
The lieutenant looked surprised. He translated for the platoon, and the soldiers burst into laughter. Then they beat in his head with their boots, and with their rifle butts they broke his ribs and ruptured his spleen. They strapped him onto a mule and sent him back to Coralio with a note and a pouch of rough opals to pay for a stay at the hotel, where he was nursed back to health by Cornelia Anderson and the quack doctor who lived down the hall.
Something of a legend grew up around his fearless encounter with the federales.
That was how Higbee saw himself in the mirror each morning: a legend, a red-eyed bastard who cursed his killers and came out a hero. And now this Vaught, this soldier of fortune, with his bag of oranges and his nasty reputation, had sent a shiver down his spine, and it galled him.
“You Higbee?” Vaught said in a high-pitched voice, the sound a fishing line makes when cast.
Higbee did not get up. “You must be the gunner.”
Vaught crossed the filthy wooden floor with an odd bouncing stride and tossed a wrinkled paper in Higbee’s lap. He reeked of florida water. “Here ya go. My so-called credentials.”
“Sam Dreben tells me you’re a soldier.”
“Yeah.” Vaught smirked. “Man come with a goldang letter of introduction how good he is on the big gun. Other man wonderin’ where the hell this dandy-dressed clodhopper come from anyway.”
He leaned against a pillar and assessed the shadowy warehouse. The sparrow beat its wings against a high window.
“I need a man with tactical experience,” Higbee said.
“Why’s there blood on the floor?”
Higbee looked at the stain at his feet. “Old news.”
“Look pretty fresh to me.”
“Just a beef. The boss was dickerin’ for the wharves with the Provenzanos, what I hear. Too many middle-men takin’ cuts and gummin’ up the works. The fruit was goin’ bad ever’ time a crew stayed home sick. Somebody needed to—er—rashernalize the business.”
“Higbee,” the machine-gunner said in his high whining voice. He leaned his back against one of the pillars that held up the roof. His eyes glittered. “I don’t give a horse turd ’bout that. I thought we was signin’ up for some action.”
He dropped the bag of oranges at his feet and pulled an eight-inch blade from somewhere and began twirling it through his fingers. Higbee watched him without comment. Vaught reached down and slit open the mesh bag and took out an orange. He bounced over and set the orange on an empty crate. As he was returning to his pillar, he whirled and flung the knife. It nicked into the orange with a slick little sound and took it off the crate.
There it was again: a chill of fear.
“How about that?” said Vaught, boucing over to retrieve his blade. He bounced back and plucked another orange out of the bag and tossed it in the air once or twice. Then he flung it at the ceiling. As the orange reached the vertex of the parabola, flashing out of the shadows into a blotch of weak sunlight, he flicked the knife and pierced it in midair. The orange dropped like a dead duck, the knife clattering on the floor.
“Nothing?” Vaught said, frowning. He sprang over to retrieve the blade and went back for another orange. This time as he was straightening up, he spun and hurled the orange at Higbee’s head. Higbee flinched as it winged past him, followed an instant later by the knife, which pierced the orange and pinned it to one of the crates stacked against the wall.
“Jesus God!” Higbee leaped up, knocking over the café chair with a crash. Juice dripped from the pierced orange. The bitter smell of citrus stung the air.
Vaught let out a high barking yip. “See, I’m all wound up!”
“I shoulda brung a bottle,” Higbee said weakly, trying to calm himself.
“Action—that’s what I need,” Vaught yelped. He sprang over and reached around Higbee to retrieve his blade. “If I don’t get me some action, I get all tense.”
Higbee set the café chair upright but decided he was better off on his feet, in case the knife came flying at him again. He took a breath, and another, wondering if he dared reach in his waistband for the Luger. “How’s Central America sound to you?” he said.
Vaught’s narrow feverish eyes grew even brighter. “If they’s jungle involved, I’m ready right now. Get in there and show ’em how we do it in the civ’lized world, dirty buggers.” He tossed the sticky knife from one hand to another, as if weighing options for murder.
Higbee said, “First, I gotta round out the crew. I figger a hunnert bodies all told. I already got some boys from the last time I’se down there. We got us a seven-point-five Krupp and a six-point-five Asbury mountain cannon, more rifles’n Fort Bliss, grenades, a Hotchkiss gun—ever use one a those?”
“Four-hunnert fifty rounds a minute, thirty-eight-hunnert-meter effective range,” Vaught said, like someone rattling off prices in a wholesale market.
Higbee went on: “We got two boats, cash pay, and enough whiskey to rile up the temperance league.”
The sparrow banged its head against the dirty window and then with a flutter of wings settled on a rafter.
Vaught flicked his wrist and the little bird tumbled to the floor, skewered through the breast with the eight-inch blade.
“Give me twenty-four hours,” Vaught said. “I’ll get you some sumbitches.”
A maid the size and shape of a pile of sugar sacks was cleaning up the breakfast wreckage while Walter Whitaker sat brooding in an armchair by the window, oblivious to the noisy banging of broom in pan. His conversation with the vice-president of the Manhattan Commerce Bank, William Krum, had not gone well. Neither had his conversation with Arthur Krum, the president. The Times had the cartoon that morning, along with more speculation—pure pettifogging—about why Terencio Flores was living in a cold-water flat on Basin Street, shadowed twenty-four hours a day by agents from the Treasury Department. The Krums had wanted to know about this William S. Porter who was shining the spotlight on
things down there.
Whitaker had expressed his outrage. William Krum had expressed his outrage, and so had Arthur Krum.
Then the senior banker told the banana man that they were calling his notes in sixty days if the situation was not resolved. Get a concession on the railroad. Ask the Morgan people for help.
Whitaker pointed out that since Morgan recouped his loans by collecting import duties, the so-called combine had no reason to help Vesuvius with the railroad problem, cutting into their own profits, and that until the railroad connected the plantations to the Canal, it was all money down the drain for the Manhattan Commerce Bank.
Krum protested that he had no pull, zero, with J.P. Morgan, which Whitaker knew was a lie. The nincompoop practically sat in the man’s lap at the Met.
Whitaker pledged his forty-six thousand acres of Cuban sugarcane as collateral.
Sugar was too volatile; if he held copper claims, they could talk.
Christ Almighty, he was a grower, not a miner.
Krum told him to get the concession or come up with seven and a half million dollars, sixty days and counting. Otherwise, they would piece out Vesuvius to the vultures who hung around the Hoffman House hoping to get in on the banana business and go toe to toe with United Fruit.
Whitaker chewed his lip. So in other words, they were going to sell his company, his life’s purpose and product, to United Fruit.
That was correct. He had mentioned the other vultures for dramatic emphasis.
For a man who believed that he numbered among those rare individuals who got to determine their own fates, this was devastating news. At this point in his life, Walter Whitaker felt he should be getting credit for his accomplishments not an earful of wet shit from some arriviste banker. Walter Whitaker’s mother would have thrown a fit if she were seated next to him at dinner. People like Krum were why he refused to live in New York.
The maid moved heavily across the carpet on her hands and knees, sweeping shards into the dustpan. “I’m fine down here,” she said to Whitaker’s feet. “The gout don’t hurt at all. Don’t get up on my account.”
He didn’t.
Halfway up the only way up the hill to the Whitaker estate, Porter was accosted by someone with a .44 Colt pistol. McCoy. The same McCoy he had met the first and only time he had called on Walter Whitaker. The same McCoy who occupied some crucial spot in the Vesuvius hierarchy, above the plantation managers, security persons, shipping clerks, and engineers, but not exactly at the level of corporate executive. He, McCoy, stepped out of the livid late-day shadows of the calabur and ficus trees and stood in the middle of the road. Casual. Out to see what Mother Nature was wearing this fine evening. He looked dapper in a light alpaca jacket and a panama hat with a red-and-blue-striped band around the crown. He raised the Colt pistol with slow patience, thoughtfulness even, and pointed it at the top of Porter’s chest. “Evening, Mr. Porter. Do you know who I am?”
Porter kept his hands as still as ice. “Elliot Evans picked up the telephone,” he surmised.
“Indeed he did. Mr. Evans doesn’t usually engage in chit chat. When he calls, he always has something interesting to say. He’s an interesting man.”
“I’m afraid that hasn’t been my experience.”
“Well. Sometimes you just don’t take to a person.” He offered a kind of smile. He thumbed back the hammer of the Colt.
“I’m not armed,” Porter informed him.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Porter?”
Porter cast his eyes up the road. Why, he thought, not for the first time, do I end up in these positions, letting some goon get the drop on me? Clearly, I have insufficient presence. No, check that. Clearly, my presence attracts problems. Other people manage to avoid beatings by creditors and romantic rivals or even taste a little success without everybody piling out of the woods to take a whack.
“To be honest, I aim to call on Isabel Whitaker.”
McCoy acted surprised. “Mrs. Whitaker? Why would you need to see Mrs. Whitaker?”
“I’m following up.”
“Ah. Following up, are you?” McCoy looked puzzled. “She cannot tell you anything about the unfortunate fire that consumed your livelihood. Mrs. Whitaker is not, I assure you, the bomb-throwing type.”
“Again, I beg to differ,” said Porter. “She is most certainly the bomb-throwing type, although I don’t believe that the prima donna of the Metropolitan Opera burned down my newspaper.”
He did not think that McCoy would shoot him and deprive Walter Whitaker of the chance, but he could imagine any number of terrible non-fatal things McCoy or his henchmen might do to him. Obviously, he was not going to make it up the hill.
He said: “If you didn’t throw the bomb yourself, McCoy, you know who attacked my press. I don’t take kindly to violence.”
McCoy guffawed. “Don’t take kindly to violence!” he cried.
McCoy lowered the pistol so that it was pointing at Porter’s crotch and took his thumb off the hammer. “See, that kind of blather can cause a lot of trouble. That’s why I’m stopping you right here, before you make everything worse. Not much happens within fifty miles of Coralio that I don’t take an interest in—on behalf of Mr. Whitaker, you understand. For example, I know what you ate for supper last night—machuca, potatoes, plantains, coffee, three glasses of wine. I know that you bought yourself some new mandolin strings at Hilario’s dry goods store. I know you’ve developed a taste—a craving, even—for reposado, and I know which books you’ve borrowed from the library at the consulate. By the way, why First Families of Maine? I also know that Mrs. Whitaker has been spending too many evenings in your hotel room. You’re turning into a project, Mr. Porter, and that doesn’t bode well.”
“How do you find the time?”
“I’m what you call an aggregator of information. Just like you.”
“The last time I came up this road, the president of a United States company threatened to murder me. You guys don’t run a very friendly business. I’m not like you at all.”
“Vesuvius is a private concern,” McCoy said, dodging, it seemed to Porter, the issue.
“It’s public knowledge that Walter Whitaker plans to kill me.”
“So it is. I find your courage stupid, Mr. Porter.”
“So do I,” Porter said. “I guess I can’t help it, being a Texan and all.”
“Now that’s just shit in a bag.”
“What kind of a citizen are you, McCoy?
“Like everybody else, I exercise my God-given right to my opinion.”
“That’s real courageous.”
McCoy studied him with a frown. “I’m authorized to make you an offer—one American to another, if that helps.”
Porter was caught off guard by this sudden diminution of hostility. He said nothing. A scruffy black cat with white paws and an oozing sore on its neck wandered out of the underbrush and looked around with a wide yawn. It picked its way through the mash of ficus berries on the road, tracking indigo paw prints across the damp dirt. The cat rubbed its chin on the toe of Porter’s boot and mewed piteously. Maggots seethed in the raw red sore.
A cat was not supposed to show up at this juncture. Porter was not sure if he should kick it or pet it or pretend that it wasn’t there. McCoy had the grace to pretend it wasn’t there. He said:
“Come to work for Vesuvius. You’re an engaging writer, I suppose. Not a great stylist in my opinion. Too verbose. You have an affection for dialect but no real ear. Your writing strikes me as, I don’t know, febrile and at the same time inconsequential.” He paused to think this over. “Still, we can use a man like you, someone whose written words resonate—for whatever reason—with people. Maybe you’ve heard of Ivy Lee.”
“I have not,” said Porter stiffly. He was stung. Who was this company fixer to criticize his narrative style?
Porter thought this over. “What are my other options?”
“If I were you, I’d move down the coast or out to the islands. The Amish farmers might shelter you, if you gave up liquor. They don’t believe in killing people.”
McCoy, having passed the point where the gun was necessary, spun his pistol on his finger and stuffed it back into its holster.
Porter started to say something, but McCoy held up a hand: “Uh uh uh. Do you mind? Let me finish. Whatever you choose to do, don’t come up this road again. You’ve seen my men down at Connie Anderson’s place. Shows you how bored they are, following the outcome of sporting events half a world away. The men are ready to get bloody.” He paused; Porter kept his mouth shut. “What will you choose to do, Mr. Porter? We have arrived at a defining moment.”
Indeed. Here he was, halfway up the only road up the hill, inky shadows gathering round, the dripping jungle gold-tipped with the dying rays of the sun. Sweat ran down his neck. The maggoty black-and-white cat started sharpening its claws on his shin. He felt that he must explain himself, but could not see how there was time. McCoy waited, as patient as a good brother.
“Can I ask one question?” Porter said, trying to shake the cat off his leg.
“Shoot.”
“Why is that piss-ant Cajun riding around town on Walter Whitaker’s horse?”
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