Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  “These guys are circumspect. They wouldn’t hire a known mercenary.”

  “Maybe that’s just why they would,” Anders said. “He agreed to meet me for a drink tonight. If he keeps the appointment I’d like to have him shadowed when he leaves the Hilton. Can you spare a few men and a couple of cars for a day or two? They’ll have to be good at it—Crobey’s not a fool.”

  Wilkins scratched his throat and blinked dismally. “Crobey? No, I can’t see him tying up with that kind. He’s arrogant, he wouldn’t hire out to a gang of off-the-wall crazies.”

  “Then what’s he doing here?”

  “Maybe he came to get laid. Who knows. But I can let you have a surveillance team for a little while.” He picked up a letter opener and made a dour stab at a fingernail.

  Rosalia was cross when he refused to take her with him. She wanted to meet Crobey because she’d heard some of the legends about him. Finally Anders compromised. She could wander into the bar at 9:45 and he’d introduce her. But he wanted time alone with the Englishman.

  Crobey was more than punctual. When Anders arrived Crobey was already there in a corner banquette; probably he’d been here twenty minutes trying to spot ambushes or eavesdroppers before they could get set. A bit amused Anders said, “Been here long?”

  “Just got here. How’ve you been?”

  “Busy. You know how it goes.” Anders sat.

  “Getting anywhere on this terrorist thing?”

  “That’s pretty blunt, even for you.”

  Crobey said, “I’m working on the same job. Let’s help each other.”

  “This afternoon you pretended you didn’t want me to see you. What’s the game?”

  “No game. You startled me on the street—I hadn’t expected to run into you there. I had something on my mind. But I wanted to see you.”

  “You didn’t say so.”

  “I hadn’t decided how to play it yet,” Crobey conceded.

  That was plausible enough but Anders reserved judgment. Crobey was too good at looking you in the eye.

  Crobey grinned. “I could ooze a little guile. Would that make you more comfortable?”

  “Probably.”

  “How far have you got?”

  “It’s no good pumping me, Harry, I haven’t got any secrets for sale.”

  “I was thinking more about the lines of barter.”

  “What are you offering to swap?”

  “I just had a talk with Ortega. He was helpful. You ought to go see him.”

  “The Times reporter?”

  “Yeah, him. You remember he said he thought he recognized something familiar about the big guy with the beard—the terrorist leader.”

  “We sat him through two days with the mug books. He didn’t come up with anything.”

  “You didn’t ask him the right questions,” Crobey said quietly.

  “And you did?”

  “Yes. I know who the bearded guy is now.”

  It extracted Anders’ slow smile. “That’s quite a teaser.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “And you’ll give me the name if I’ll divulge what I know.”

  “That’s the idea, Glenn.”

  “If Ortega remembered something for you he can remember it for me. What if I just ask him?”

  “He doesn’t know the name. He only knows the face.” Crobey lifted his glass, an ironic toast. “Ask him. He’s probably home, you’ve got his number. You want me to order you something while you’re on the phone?”

  It couldn’t be a bluff; too easy to call. Anders subsided in the seat. “You’re cute, Harry. All right. Who is he?”

  “Scratch my back first. Then I’ll scratch yours.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “That would be telling.”

  “Then we haven’t got much to talk about.”

  “You don’t want the name of the terrorist, then?”

  “Look at it from my point of view. I have to calculate the possibility that you’re working for the terrorists. Maybe they sent you here to find out how close I am to getting my hands on them. Maybe you’re supposed to send me on a wild goose chase?”

  Crobey said, “Give me a minute, I’ll think out a way around that.”

  “Do that.”

  Crobey tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

  Crobey was getting a bit long in the tooth, Anders thought. How old was Crobey now? Late forties anyhow; Crobey had flown combat in Korea.

  Crobey had flown P-51 Mustangs. He had peculiarly rigid prejudices—he hated jets and when they’d transferred him to Sabers he’d turned in a wretched performance, a kind of protest, cracking up two planes on the runway. The Air Force had yanked him out of the combat zone and set him to training young pilots on piston-engine planes at Edwards Air Force Base. Crobey, fuming, had served out the rest of the Korean War there.

  At the first opportunity he’d resigned his commission and gone mercenary, flying any kind of old crate so long as it had propellers. He wouldn’t touch jets. But that was all right because most of the Third World air forces were too poor to equip themselves with jets. Whole generations of African and Latin American military pilots had been trained by Harry Crobey. Most of them probably still remembered the first time he had sent them out to find a skyhook or a bucket of prop-wash. Crobey’s pranks were like the bad jokes of vaudeville comedians.

  Anders’ first meeting with Crobey had been on a field in Alabama, the property of one of the Agency’s innumerable civil-air front companies; Crobey had been brought in to teach Cuban exile pilots how to avoid flying their B-26 bombers into chimneys, mountains and power lines. That had been 1961; Crobey already trailed a legend—the Congo, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic. He didn’t limp then and his hair was a bit darker and his face had been almost cherubically naïve. Those who knew him insisted he had an aging portrait in his attic but in truth Crobey was only in his thirties then and it was pre-Bay of Pigs and pre-Kennedy assassination—life was still a wild sort of fun for men like Crobey: The world is my whorehouse.

  In Djakarta they said Crobey had screwed his way systematically through every brothel, working north to south, until the government had tied a can to his tail: Everybody knew that half the whores in Djakarta were Communist spies. Crobey’s retort made its way into the Agency’s folklore. He said it wasn’t his mouth he exercised in bed. Anders had never found the story particularly uproarious but the line—“Don’t exercise your mouth on her”—had worked its way into company jargon until it became a shorthand notation of the fact that a woman didn’t have a security clearance.

  The Crobey myth was Bunyonesque among the young Turks in the Agency, of whom in those days Anders had been one. Crobey was a free-lance and didn’t have to take jobs he didn’t like—that alone made him the envy of every civil servant but beyond that was Crobey’s panache, his Scarlet Pimpernel insouciance, his way of greeting the world with a distended middle finger and a cheerful “Merde.”

  Anders had met him fairly frequently during the late 1960s and early ’70s; their paths had crossed at intervals in Laos and Chile and Viet Nam, Crobey flying surplus Spitfires or rattling DC-3s or worn-out B-24 Liberators; as long as it wasn’t a jet Crobey would fly it. Anders had formed an acquaintance with him, something short of friendship; it had lasted with a reasonable lack of abrasion over a decade but he’d lost touch with Crobey after the fall of Saigon. At first he had enjoyed Crobey’s cut-ups; they’d got drunk together and wasted several bars in their time but Anders had outgrown that. After a while it had begun to occur to him that Crobey wasn’t dashing; his jokes were crude and sometimes cruel, his personality often offensive—he had a rude way of rebuffing ordinary politeness, a contempt for normal people. “There are only three hundred real people in the world,” Crobey used to say, “and we all know each other. The rest are farmers and shopkeepers and politicians—otherwise known as the gutless rabble.”

  Crobey opened his eyes and fixed them on Anders. A waitress, unbid
den, took their empties and placed a second round of drinks on the table; it was that kind of bar—you spent money or you left.

  In the depths of Crobey’s glance was something Anders hadn’t found there before. Maybe it was the birth of maturity or a belated sense of mortality or the beginnings of the hangover from twenty-five years’ irreverence; maybe it was simply sham—Crobey was something of an actor.

  “Phomh Penh,” Crobey said. “Remember? Those Cambode MPs wanted to put some welts in our skulls.”

  “We had it coming.”

  “If I hadn’t dragged you out of there—”

  Anders had to smile. “I owe you that one.”

  “Then there was the time you tried to decapitate yourself on that chopper’s rotor blades because you forgot to duck going in—”

  Anders nodded; he’d forgotten that one. Now it came back—the shock of being tackled from behind, Crobey’s weight slamming him down.

  Crobey said, “Beirut, now, that was interesting, too. Kalashnikov slugs going every which way.” Then his brazen smile. “But there’s no need to keep books on it, is there?”

  “Are you fishing for references?”

  Crobey tapped a finger on the tabletop. “I’m not asking you to fall on a grenade. I’m only asking you to trust me with information. I’m asking you to go first because I’m not bound by oaths of secrecy and you are—you’ve got orders to keep your trap shut and you’re a fairly good German; I need the leverage to shake you loose from that position. That’s why you have to go first. You can refuse me—it depends how much you want the name of this joker.”

  “I could haul you in for interrogation.”

  “Debriefing with scopalomine and rubber hoses? No, you won’t do that. I came to you voluntarily.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “No signatures. I get paid in cash. But I’ll go this far—you and I are on the same side. We both want to nail these guys.”

  There was a glint of forlorn doubt in Crobey’s eyes as if he saw he’d shot his bolt. Anders felt disquieted. He studied it briefly but there was no need to dissect it; the impasse was still there. He squeezed his lips together and shook his head back and forth just slightly. “Can’t do it,” he said. “If I knew who your clients were—”

  “The client is no threat to you.”

  “I don’t know that, do I?”

  “You do now. I just told you.”

  “Come off it, Harry. I was born a little earlier than that.” Anders began to slide over. “I’m going to assume you’re bluffing. If I assume you don’t really know anything then I don’t have to file a report that would get you hauled in for questioning.”

  “In Mexico? You guys are damned arrogant.” Crobey leaned across the table and touched his arm, arresting him. “Sit still a minute. I’ll tell you who the client is if I have your guarantee it goes no farther than this table. You don’t report it back to Langley and nobody harasses the client.”

  “How can I sign a blank check like that?”

  “The client’s an individual. Not a government, not a terrorist gang, not a corporation. One person. Vulnerable. Now you see the point?”

  “A Cuban?”

  “No. If you want I’ll try to set up a meeting—just you and me and the client, no minions. Fair enough?”

  Anders bit into it and began to chew; and Crobey said harshly, “It’s farther than I intended to go. It’s more than I owe you. And I’ll tell you this—if you turn it down I’ll rub your fucking nose in it. I promise you I’ll make it a point to find those guys before you do and then I’ll make sure O’Hillary hears about it. Your ass will be grass.”

  “Don’t threaten me, you cheeky bastard.” Anders grinned at him. “I don’t scare, remember?”

  “That’s because you’re a bloody fool.”

  Anders said, “At last we understand each other.”

  “Right.”

  He extended his hand; Crobey grasped it. Anders said, “All right. Who’s the client?”

  “Carole Marchand.”

  “Who?”

  “The Lundquist boy’s mother.”

  In astonishment Anders sagged back in his seat. He must have been gaping; Crobey leered at him.

  Then Crobey said, “Your turn at the wicket now. I want to know everything you’ve got.”

  Crobey’s claim was too wild to be disbelieved. Still Anders said, “I’ll want to talk to her.”

  “I told you, I’ll arrange it,”

  “All right.” He bought it. Time might prove him an imbecile but he had to take the chance.

  He began to talk, keeping back nothing of consequence; Crobey was a good listener, he didn’t interrupt. After a little while Rosalia came into the bar expectantly eager but Anders, after curtly introducing Crobey to her, shooed her away; the girl looked so crestfallen it made Crobey laugh. When she was gone Anders resumed his litany.

  Afterward Crobey squinted shrewdly. “Most of it won’t get you anywhere. You’ll find the guy they hired the ketch from but he won’t know anything—they’ll have used a blind front for that, a cut-out, some guy without a face. Boats don’t leave tracks. The eleven politicals, they’re a dead end, too—likely they don’t know who rescued them. But then you’d already discounted that. Your theory about it being a caper strictly for the ten million bucks—that’s cute but I don’t buy it. I think they’re in it for nationalist reasons, they’re not just thieves.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—I told you—I know who the head man is.”

  “It’s time you gave me the name.”

  “If I give you the name, what will you do with it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. My client thinks your people are determined to sweep the whole thing under the rug.”

  “Your client’s wrong, as far as I know.”

  “As far as you know?”

  “I can’t read minds,” Anders said. “Who’s the terrorist?”

  “He used to go by the name of Rodrigo Rodriguez, believe it or not.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He was one of the pilots who washed out of that Cuban flight school I ran in Alabama. I think he was kicked out before you got there.”

  “Rodrigo Rodriguez? What kind of name is that?”

  “Far as I know it’s the name his parents gave him. But I’m sure he’s got something else in his passport by now. I’ve already checked out the Rodriguez angles. All blind alleys. He’s covered his tracks beautifully.”

  “That’s why you came to me?”

  “There’s a limit to how much legwork can be done by one man with a sore leg. You’ve got armies—your people can sift a thousand leads through the strainer and come up with a clue. Give me that clue and I’ll find the guy for you. I know him a little, I know how he thinks.”

  “What makes you connect this Rodriguez with the terrorists?”

  “He was a kid then, it was long before the Bay of Pigs and I don’t know what happened to him afterward, but in those days he had what your military types like to call leadership qualifications. Tough, bright and blokes liked him.”

  “But he washed out of pilot training.”

  “You don’t have to be an expert sharpshooter to be a good general, do you.”

  “All right.”

  “I got onto the idea because of the report that was filtered back from Ortega—something about the guerrilla leader wearing a beard and a big belly. It put me in mind of Rodrigo Rodriguez in his Santa Claus suit at the Christmas party in 1960.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Well it wouldn’t have occurred to me if that was all I’d had. But I started from the obvious premise that the beard was phony. If that was phony then maybe the belly was phony. Then we got the interesting tidbit from one of the Mexican hostages that the leader had a Puerto Rican accent. Rodrigo has a Puerto Rican accent—he’s Cuban by birth but his family ran a business in Puerto Rico. They were in the rum trade in a minor
way. Rodriguez and his brother went to school in Mayaguez. Which brings us to another point, the brother. I think his name was Julio. Actually there were three of them, like musketeers, inseparable—the two Rodriguez brothers and a young brute by the name of Vargas. Now Vargas used to smoke Gauloises. And Julio Rodriguez used to read pulp magazines all the time. Science-fiction pulp magazines. You see where it all points?”

  “Flimsy,” Anders said. “Flimsy as hell.”

  “It was,” Crobey agreed, “until I showed Ortega an old photograph of Rodrigo.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah indeed. I didn’t tell Ortega the name of the guy in the photograph but he identified it.” Crobey’s hand came out of his pocket with a two-by-three glossy. “Keep it, I’ve got a bunch of them.”

  “From where?”

  “Florida. I went through the files of the old Free Cuba outfit. Hardly more than a shell nowadays but they’ve still got a secretary and an office. She remembered me from Alabama.”

  The face in the photograph was striking enough. Enormous square cheekbones and bleak eyes overhung by great ramparts of bone. Hard, but you sensed the capacity for compassion—that must be the aspect that invited people to like him. There was intelligence in it, and stubborn boldness.

  Crobey said, “You wouldn’t have tumbled him. He hasn’t been affiliated with any of the organized exile groups since sixty-three. As far as I know there’s no record of his escaping from prison in Havana but he must have. He was one of the troops captured at the Pigs.”

  “What rank?” Anders was businesslike when he needed to be.

  “Second lieutenant I guess. Platoon leader, or that’s what I heard. It’s a long time ago. I think he was one of the ones on Red Beach. Lucky he didn’t get shrapnel up his ass.”

  “I see the problem. He’s had fifteen years to establish a new identity.”

  Crobey said, “You can probably get your hands on his fingerprints from some file or other. That might help a little.”

  Anders doubted it; he knew of no case in which a fugitive had been found on the basis of fingerprints. But he had to try.

  Anders said, “For all practical purposes you’re simply handing him over to me. Why?”

  “I’ll reach him before you do, Glenn. Don’t worry about it.”