Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  Having consulted with himself for over an hour, he was renewed in his conviction that it was better to think about the world than about himself, for the world remained, recoverable and redeemable, when the individual did not.

  He refueled with a slug of reposado and turned his attention back to the real work. Sat down, tore the paper from the typewriter, and rolled in a fresh sheet and began to type:

  The most impolitic of the local Administration’s moves had been when it antagonized the Vesuvius Fruit Company. Reasonably, an established concern like Vesuvius would become irritated at having a small retail republic with no rating at all attempt to squeeze it. So when the government proxies applied for a subsidy from the American company, they encountered a polite refusal. President Flores at once retaliated by clapping an export duty of one real per bunch of bananas and an import duty of a penny a pound on heavy equipment—a thing unprecedented in fruit-growing countries.…

  Continuing at a rapid clip, he finished his account of the tension between banana man and president and stepped out to the telegraph office at Hilario’s so that Pierre could wire it to the A.P.

  

  Terencio Flores, the once and future president, was a squat dark man with a steely mustache and hair like wire. He had a broad nose and hooded eyes, which caused people to assume he was an Indian or even part African. Walter Whitaker considered this misapprehension a point in the man’s favor, since an insurrection led by the swarthy pock-marked Flores would have the color of a popular uprising. Besides, he had already been president, so he knew how to operate the machinery of government—which judges and congressmen needed bribing or blackmailing, which ministers were loyal and which had to be defanged by exile, prison, or firing squad. Whitaker would not have to waste his time playing puppet-master. All he wanted was the freedom to operate, duty-free and with absolutely no governmental oversight. The way business was meant to be done.

  Ever since he had toppled his cousin Terencio, Francisco Flores had proved a thorn in Whitaker’s side. Francisco was everything that Terencio was not: educated, handsome, and crafty without being crass. He understood that if one makes a personal bank of the public coffers, the public needs something in return for not noticing, and he had managed up to now to enforce this policy in his cabinet. When he needed to bolster his popular support, he provided a new school, a municipal water system, or an attempt to establish the rule of law in far-flung locales. Such projects cost money, however. Thus, the import duties and export taxes, split with the Morgan combine, that were threatening to ruin Vesuvius Fruit Company. Walter Whitaker repeatedly reminded him, via letters drafted by McCoy but signed by the boss himself, that Vesuvius was the foundation of the national economy, like it or not.

  Flores replied with telegrams in Latin and enigmatic bouquets of chrysanthemums, which seemed a kind of sinister threat, although Whitaker could not figure out why. It galled him. Even worse, Whitaker suspected that the president had designs on his wife. What a man like Flores, with his needlepoint and his velvet lapels, would do with a woman like Isabel was beyond his powers of imagination.

  At last began the procedure to pluck the thorn from his side. Whitaker and Butch Higbee were faced with the problem of spiriting Terencio Flores, along with the crew of toughened mercenaries Higbee and Leonard Vaught had assembled, out of New Orleans and into international waters before either Treasury or the Revenue Cutter Service knew what had happened. Off Algiers Point was anchored a 160-foot former U.S. Navy ship called the Hornet. The ship, which was built in 1890 by Harlan & Hollingsworth for Henry M. Flagler of Standard Oil, could do sixteen knots. During the Spanish conflict, the vessel had been requisitioned for battle at Manzanillo harbor. In 1903, the government sold it, firing guns intact, to a businessman who spoke of trade in Trinidad. It quickly passed into the possession of Mr. Joseph L. R. Nixon. No one believed that he was the actual owner.

  Every day or two, Treasury agents boarded the Hornet for inspections, but they never found any weapons, maps, or documents implicating the captain, who was known to have run guns to Bluefields, in any action contravening the Neutrality Act. According to her paperwork, the Hornet was a merchant vessel owned and operated by Nixon. It carried agricultural cargo between the Gulf Coast and sundry ports around the Caribbean. The State Department suspected a ruse. The press could smell something cooking all the way from New York. The wire reports from points south had the ring of truth.

  Whitaker needed to get permission to sail before William S. Porter scotched his plans with his impertinent reportage. He had spent the past several days pacing the streets of New Orleans in a bubble of his own rage, cursing his men who were taking so long in Washington.

  

  They could have visited the editorial office at the Picayune on Canal Street, but Butch Higbee had expressed a desire for ice cream, and Walter Whitaker had decided that approaching the assistant editor in a public place had certain advantages. Threatening a man in a crowd, if it came to that, demonstrated earnestness.

  So they were on Decatur Street in the Vieux Carre, where a Sicilian named Brocato had recently opened a parlor. Whitaker did not care about torroncino or granita al limon, but H.L. Stroud, the assistant editor, could not get enough of the stuff. He arrived at three o’clock every afternoon, blown in by the warm breeze, to deliberate, with the intensity of a numismatist studying a proof set, the offerings chalked on the board behind the counter.

  When he had been given his glass bowl of pistachio gelato and a long-handled spoon, Stroud could not find a place to sit. Walter Whitaker beckoned from across the room. Higbee was licking the last of his ice cream from his own long-handled spoon.

  Stroud slipped into the empty chair. “Thank you, gents.”

  He was a man-about-town, comfortable with anyone he might meet, and he looked pleased to share the table with these two well-dressed individuals. He felt primed for conversation. Before he could make an observation about the joy that Brocato had brought to the city, one of the gentlemen said:

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Stroud studied the man’s face. His eyes flickered with recognition. “I believe I’ve been invited to join Mr. Walter Whitaker of the Vesuvius Fruit Company.” He took a bite of his gelato. “My, that’s tasty. Pistachio. A banana would go nicely with this.”

  “And do you know this man?” Nodding toward Higbee, who sat back and crossed his legs.

  “Everyone in the Third Ward knows Mr. Higbee.”

  Walter Whitaker took a folded paper from inside his coat. He spread it on the table in front of Stroud.

  Stroud took another slow spoonful of gelato, smacking his lips and making delighted mmm sounds which diminished as he read the handwritten document. He looked up questioningly.

  “I didn’t catch that,” said Whitaker. “It’s rather noisy in here.”

  “You want me to publish this?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s rubbish.”

  “You’ll fix it up to read well.”

  “Furthermore,” Stroud frowned, “despite the byline, this wasn’t written by William S. Porter.”

  “A trivial point. As I said, you’ll fix it up.”

  “But, sir, the Picayune already prints stories by William Porter. I understand why you might object to Mr. Porter’s perspective, but still.…”

  “This will be simply another installment in the series, with more to come.”

  “More to come,” Stroud echoed. “But why me?”

  “Come now, Harold. You have no real allies on the Picayune, no secure position on the masthead. You’re up and coming.”

  Another spoonful of pistachio gelato. “Insulting me does not help your cause, Mr. Whitaker.”

  “I’ll make this very easy for you, Harold. You will print this story and subsequent stories I may deliver to you, depending on future circumstances. Otherwise, one of two things will hap
pen. One, Mr. Higbee and I will visit you some night and force you to eat more ice cream than you imagined existed; then, if in your chilled and sickened state you remain unconvinced, we will remove you from your position at the Picayune once and forever.”

  Stroud looked a little worried. He put down his spoon and tugged on his collar. “And two?”

  “Two?”

  “What’s the other thing that will happen?”

  Whitaker thought for a moment. “I misspoke. Only one thing will happen. Do you need more?”

  “No,” said Stroud. He folded the sheets and put them in his pocket and swallowed. “I’m surprised that you would come here to threaten me personally.”

  “Don’t be flattered. I keep a close eye on my business. I prefer to cut out the middleman, particularly when time is of the essence or my wishes have been crossed. I don’t bother to keep my hands clean. I don’t have to.”

  Whitaker stood up and brushed his trousers. He pulled a sterling money clip from his pocket, counted out five twenty-dollar bills, and fanned them on the table in front of Stroud’s gelato dish.

  “I’m going to leave Mr. Higbee here while you finish your treat. He can answer any questions you have about the details of the ice-cream sanction. I’m going for a haircut.”

  He slipped the money clip into his pocket and started to leave but turned back. “By the way, Stroud, if this works out, I have a job for you. I’ve been searching for a publicity man to take care of this kind of thing when I’m not around, someone who has good relations with the press. The fellow I thought to hire can’t recognize an opportunity when it’s handed to him. I’ll triple your current salary.”

  When Whitaker had gone, Stroud and Higbee looked out the window at the mercantile traffic on Decatur Street. It was a sunny autumn day. “Sounds like a good deal,” Higbee said.

  “I don’t think I would like working for that man.”

  “Better’n chokin’ to death,” Higbee said.

  

  As Porter went up the stairs after the noonday meal, his thoughts drifted to Isabel. He had come to expect her to be lying in his bed when he returned for his siesta. Room Five seemed lonely without her. Yes, he admitted, lonely. Aside from Buck Geddie, she was the sharpest wit in town and considerably livelier. And better-looking. Granted there was a shortage of women in Coralio, but she would have impressed him on the boulevards of the busiest metropolis. He unlocked the door and peered around the edge, hoping.

  Geddie had given him the recent newspapers, which were at least a week old. The consul said he was feeling too good to be discouraged by news reports, but maybe Porter had better read what the Picayune was printing. It was in the Times as well, but unsigned, as per custom.

  Porter shrugged off his jacket and sat on the edge of the bed. He opened the newspaper and smoothed it on his lap. There was a story about the State Department’s sending Judge William Penfield to Brazil to determine the extent of German aggression in the hemisphere, and another about repairs to the battleship Kentucky, and another about the filibuster Homer Lea, who was training a Bao Huang Hui military cadre in California with the goal of restoring the Chinese emperor to power. Turmoil and intrigue across the globe.

  A headline caught his eye: Vesuvius Co. Leader of Tropic Medicine.

  He was surprised to learn that the fruit company had completed a sprawling new medical facility for its plantation workers, equipped with modern laboratories, a staff of two-dozen, and a medical officer from Johns Hopkins University, despite fierce opposition from the government of Francisco Flores, who preferred to see his people suffer and die of fever, plague, and injury. “Christian charity compels me,” Vesuvius Company president Walter Whitaker asseverated. “We cannot allow the petty grievances of one powerful man to prevent the dispensing of medical care to the peasants of the tropics. Following the path blazed by Walter Reed in Cuba, I propose to tame the scourge of yellow fever once and for ever.” Schools for the children of plantation workers were planned for the coming year, in addition to new Vesuvius firehouses equipped with Dietz lanterns and Harris Safety hose carts in every town and village. The story was signed by William S. Porter.

  In the next day’s edition, William S. Porter reported that German agitators had sabotaged the only railroad in the country, in an effort to cut off Americans living on the inland plantations and, he hinted, to install a government friendly to European powers.

  Porter picked up the next newspaper and discovered that he had it on the highest authority that agents of the Flores government were to be dispatched to Washington, D.C., with bags of American dollars and a list of United States Navy personnel. One could draw one’s own conclusions.

  “I’ll be damned.” Porter gazed at the newspaper in his hands. “I’m working for him after all.”

  

  Seventy miles below New Orleans, Captain Johnson watched the three Treasury agents disembark. They had traveled down river with him to make sure that nobody loaded any dynamite or light artillery along the way. He was operating with a full crew, making, so he had been instructed, a three-week run for iron ore. The Hornet had without warning received permission to sail. They had cast off Algiers Point, a scrum of reporters, foreign spies, and members of the interested public fighting for position on the dock. Now he guided her past the custom house and on through the ghostly islands of the sound, until the scattered lights along the shore winked out over the horizon, and he dropped anchor in the dark night.

  

  Butch Higbee, Terencio Flores, and two no-account filibusters recently returned from a two-year stint in the Atlanta federal penitentiary were sitting around a table in one of the parlors in Sally Rae Malone’s whorehouse on Basin Street. Higbee did not care much for the no-accounts, but one of them knew how to drive and the other knew how to fix the car when it broke down, and they could both speak Spanish from their time in Cuba after the war. They were playing boathouse-rule Michigan rummy, and drinking, unhappily, water—not because Sally Rae lacked a liquor license but because they were trying to stay sharp long enough to set in motion their plan of action. In one corner, a man with a handlebar mustache and sleeve garters played ragtime piano, until the no-account filibusters explained to him what would happen if he did not haul himself somewhere else and leave them in peace. According to the clock on the mantel, the hour was approaching midnight.

  The four men had been paying guests at Sally Rae’s for the past five nights, although not once had any of them followed a woman upstairs. Sally Rae’s employees had the highest ratings for deportment and stamina awarded by the Blue Book guides you could buy for a quarter at the barbershop; but the men’s presence in the house with the stained-glass fanlights and the steady stream of eager customers was meant to establish a pattern of activity; it was diversionary tactic, not an amorous expedition in the demimonde.

  After a while, Higbee looked down to find that he had no cards left in his hand. He cleared his throat. “Prepare yerselves, gentlemen.”

  He stood up, clamped his stogie between his teeth, and put on his coat. He went out the front door and down the wide worn stone steps to the sidewalk. The air was sharp with winter. A light rain was falling. Across the street, two Secret Service agents stood beneath a streetlamp, shivering in the night air, bored out of their skulls. Anyone with any sense was tucked away in a warm room with a quilt and a toddy. Higbee glanced to the left, glanced to the right, and crossed the rain-glazed street.

  “Evenin’, fellas.”

  They pretended he wasn’t there.

  “Me and the boys,” Higbee pressed on, puffing on the stogie, “was chattin’ over a game of cards, and it come up that Señor Flores—Terencio, that is, the man y’all are keepin’ tabs on—would like to turn hisself in for questionin’. He’s had a change of heart, he has, and he’s ready to talk about how Vesuvius Fruit Company’s stagin’ this thing down there. Innarested?”
/>   One of the agents glanced at Higbee long enough to say, “Bullshit.”

  “No, it ain’t. You wanna interrogate the man, earn some recognition back in D.C., come get him. He’s waitin’. I trust one a y’all speaks Spanish.”

  Higbee tossed the stogie in the gutter. He turned on his heel and walked back across the street and up the stone steps and into the house. He motioned to Flores and the no-account filibusters, and the four of them filed upstairs and went down a hall decorated with palms in brass pots to one of the rooms, which reeked of face powder and perspiration. The wallpaper featured an aquamarine floral motif. There was a chandelier and steam heat. The men arranged themselves on the furniture.

  Higbee went across the hall into another room, where Sally Rae’s two most popular employees, clad in Chantilly lace, were lounging on the bed.

  “Hi, Butch! When’re you coming for a toss?” They were old pals.

  Higbee opened the closet and squeezed in beside a camera on a wooden tripod. He took a moment to check the camera’s focus and then swung the door nearly closed.

  In a few minutes, Higbee heard Sally Rae joking with the Secret Service agents. He peered through the crack between the door and the jamb. As soon as Sally Rae ushered the two dupes, overcoats draped over their arms, into the room, the popular girls bounded up and threw themselves on the men.

  Higbee flung open the door and triggered the shutter. There was a blinding flash of blitzlicht powder, and in ten milliseconds agents and women were committed to photographic memory.

  While the federal agents were cursing and rubbing their eyes, the women hustled into the hall, followed lickety-split by Higbee, the camera and tripod under one arm. He yanked the door closed and locked it with a skeleton key. The federal agents pounded on the door and threatened to have him castrated, then sent to prison, then disemboweled.

  “You can come out for breakfast,” Higbee called through the door. “Meanwhile, you fellers take the opportunity to reflect on what would happen to your careers and the remnants of your domestic tranquility if this photograph was to get passed around. In other words, keep your damn traps shut.”