Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  “I don’t see how. Not with what you’ve given me.”

  “We’ll see. Do you still want to talk to the client?”

  “What does she want?”

  “She wants a little justice. Just a little justice.”

  “Vengeance is mine.”

  “You ever read Francis Bacon?”

  “Maybe in high school. I don’t remember.”

  “Revenge,” Crobey quoted, “is a kind of wild justice. Bacon.”

  “The lady’s angry then.”

  “You could say that,” Crobey agreed. Then he got up to go. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Anders watched him beat a path among the tables. Highly puzzled, Anders finally slid out of the booth and went toward a phone.

  Chapter 9

  Cielo had tumbled asleep like a weary peon who had shaken off his load but when he awoke he found evidence in the tumbled bed of a difficult night; nor did he feel rested.

  After a while he went along to the kitchen ramming his shirttails into his pants. Soledad stood over the ironing board looking cross, her hair tied in a horsetail with a small ribbon; he thought she was breathtakingly beautiful.

  She said, “You were impossible. I had to sleep on the couch in the end. I don’t know what the children must think.”

  “I’m sorry. It must have been bad dreams or something.”

  “And now you have to go out again?”

  “Si.”

  “For how long this time?”

  “I can’t say. You realize I should be up there with them all the time—I’m shirking my duty, laying so much onto Vargas and my brother.”

  “When will this madness stop?”

  “When the old man dies, I suppose.”

  “The Dragas are long-lived—his uncle lived to ninety-four.”

  “But blind and senile the last few years, wasn’t he?”

  “Old Draga isn’t blind or senile.”

  “Don’t nag me,” Cielo said, “you won’t change anything.”

  She said, “It takes young men to do this sort of thing. He should know that. Your heart isn’t in this.”

  “No, most of the time it’s not. Once in a while I try to remind myself. You know I talked to Ortiz yesterday? Raoul Ortiz?”

  “You didn’t mention it.”

  “Ortiz was in Cuba just a few months ago. Running guns to people in the mountains. He said it is even worse than before. The squalor and all. The despair.”

  “You’re trying to pump yourself up but it all keeps leaking out again, doesn’t it.”

  “Well I’d like to do something for them. You know.”

  She said, “Surely, but this way? Who are you—Don Quixote?”

  Cielo watched her push the iron back and forth across his black chinos. “It’s not that bad, you know. I don’t mind what we’re doing now. One day these weapons will be used.”

  “But not by you.”

  “No, I’m too old. I’ve turned cautious.”

  “Someone will confiscate the weapons before anyone can use them. How do you expect to keep them hidden for years?”

  “Bury them. Nobody looks in El Yunque.”

  “It takes a big hole to bury cannons and machine guns.”

  “We’ve got plenty of time to dig it.”

  “Not really. The old man, Draga, he’ll get impatient soon.”

  “I’ll tell him the time isn’t right yet.”

  “And he’ll believe it just because you say so?”

  “He trusts me.” The statement came out like a confession, shaming him.

  She said, “Rodrigo—talk to me about it.”

  “How can I talk about things for which there aren’t any words? Feelings—”

  She smiled mournfully. “You poor thing. You hang onto this nonsense as if it was the first woman’s breast you ever sucked. You’ve even forgotten why you’re doing it.”

  “I know why it’s done. But it’s just that it’s no longer fashionable to spend one’s life discussing the ultimates of good and evil. That’s for university students. The advocates of revolution.”

  She said, “I remember the days when even villainy was innocent.”

  “You know the CIA has received orders from the White House to stop all secret anti-Castro exile activities. We must be circumspect. Old Draga understands that—he’ll curb his impatience.”

  “Those orders were issued more than a year ago, querido. Nobody paid much attention to them.”

  “Just the same.”

  “Is it the old Draga who worries you—or the young one?”

  “Emil.” He only sighed.

  “That one is trouble, since he was little.”

  “You know the expression ‘trapped between a rock and a hard place,’ querida? Well the old man is the rock. All the same, I think we can control Emil. I think we’ve thrown a little respect into him. His ribs are still taped up, though he doesn’t want anyone to know it.”

  Suddenly he could feel the air whistling through his own nose. He unraveled the handkerchief from his hip pocket and blew his nose.

  She sighed with infinite tolerance. “Put it there with the laundry and get a clean one. Por Dios, you can’t even get out of the house in the morning without soiling another bit of cloth.”

  “When the girls come home from school I want you to have a talk with them about this TV business. We should ration their hours—there are things in life besides television.”

  “They would listen more closely to you than to me. It’s something you ought to take care of.”

  “I probably won’t be here tonight.”

  “Then it can wait until you come back. Tomorrow maybe?”

  “Maybe. I can’t promise.”

  “It’s a good thing I know you. Otherwise I’d think you had a woman squirreled away.”

  He reached out for her hand, took the iron from it and stood it up on the metal pan; he put his hands on her shoulders and uttered each word as if he had coined it on the spot: “I adore you with all my heart and soul. I always will—to the end of my life.”

  The liveliness came back into his eyes. She walked into his embrace.

  He went out the back way across the rear neighbor’s yard and skirted trash cans on his way past a carport. He’d left the car two blocks away for reasons of security. When he reached it he was already sweating—the humidity was shocking, the sun ablaze; the faded stucco houses seemed to cringe. An infant was tumbling on a parched lawn watched by an old woman who sat shriveled in the shade fanning herself with a magazine. Two cats pursued each other comically up the alley and Cielo opened the deck of the Volkswagen. Last night he’d removed the rotor from the distributor and walked away knowing the car would still be there when he needed it. Now he replaced the rotor from his pocket, snapped the clips onto the distributor and unlocked the door.

  Ernesto Mendez—the name on his mailbox—might be a tame lower-class surburban but Cielo had been trained in the guerrilla arts. It was this training that alerted him to the presence of a man standing in a doorway half a block distant. The man wasn’t watching him but Cielo knew the neighborhood and the man didn’t’ belong there: poplin suit, tie, the sun glinting on polished cordovan. Standing in the doorway, Cielo thought, was foolish: It only framed the man, focusing attention on him as if he were a portrait. A smart one would have strolled in the open, looking as if he had business.

  Possibly it had nothing to do with him but he was troubled. He made a U turn in the potholed street and drove away watching the mirror. His alarm increased tenfold when the man turned and went inside the house whose doorway had framed him. If the man was going to a phone.…

  Driving into Hato Rey he was remembering his introduction to the heroic arts: the Sierra Maestra, 1958, nothing more than a skirmish really—the rebels under Ché Guevara had ambushed the trucks and Cielo had dived out into the ditch along with the other soldiers. The rebels had used mortars and Brownings and grenades; the noise of battle had confounded and infuriated Cielo. Fina
lly—to stop the noise—he had performed heroically. Madly. Afterward six rebels were dead and Batista himself pinned the medal on Cielo. It was all so comical. He’d had no thought of earning medals; he’d only wanted to stop the noise.

  But after that he was a hero and they promoted him and he was looked to as a leader and he was too young to know better than to play along with it. The attention was too flattering to be rebuffed.

  An accidental moment of madness, but it had changed and colored everything in his life since then. He had never confided this to anyone but Soledad; no one but Soledad would understand. Not even his own brother.

  Still troubled by the man in the doorway, he pulled around behind an open-front cantina and parked the Volkswagen in the dust where it was hidden from the street. He went to the public kiosk and Luz answered the old man’s phone. He exchanged counterproposals with Luz and then cradled the phone and walked away—walking up the alley past the Volkswagen and on past the back doors of several seedy shops. At the corner of Avenida Hostos he turned north and walked at a steady pace, using the side mirrors of parked vans to examine his backtrail. No one was following him; he was positive of that after ten minutes. At the corner of the Calle Eleanor Roosevelt he waited in the shade until a bus came by. He rode it across the causeway into San Juan and dropped off at the edge of Santurce. He went around the block twice on foot, picked up no tail, and was waiting by the curb when the Pinto drew up. Cielo got in and the car started moving before he’d pulled the door shut. Luz, at the wheel, said, “Señor Draga is anxious to know what this is about.”

  “Maybe nothing—maybe it means nothing.”

  “But if it does. What would they be?”

  “Police. CIA. Castro’s men. Who can say?”

  “But they were not watching your house?”

  “No, I’d left the car away from my house and that was where I saw the man. Near the car.”

  “Where were you yesterday that someone might have noticed you and taken down the license number of the Volkswagen?”

  “The old man knows where I was. I reported to him last night by phone.”

  Luz’s voice had the quality of a rusty hinge in motion. “You’ll have to stay out of sight for a while. Don’t go back to your home.”

  “I know that, you don’t have to tell me.”

  “And don’t telephone the house again.”

  “He gets upset if I don’t report to him.”

  “We’ll have to find a way to do it without telephones. El viejo no longer trusts their security.”

  Luz drove east toward the airport. Cielo had never quite comprehended Luz’s exact place in the Draga scheme of things; Luz apparently was something between bodyguard and secretary, with a bit of valet thrown in, but the old man had secretaries and bodyguards and a valet besides Luz. There wasn’t much likelihood that Luz was of any importance in the management of the Draga businesses—Luz wasn’t a businessman, he was too coarse, he was nearly a thug. He was a Cuban mountain peasant whose parents had worked for the Draga interests in some capacity.

  Luz was low-profile; he usually didn’t appear in public at Draga’s side and most of the world didn’t associate him with Draga, which gave him a certain freedom of movement; Cielo suspected that Luz perhaps acted as a sort of bagman in Draga’s dealings with officials and police and the Jews and Italians from Florida with whom the old man did certain kinds of business. It was old man Draga who in 1963 had acted as intermediary between the Free Cuba movements and the Santos Trega group of Sicilians; the Sicilians had made six separate attempts on Castro’s life. Santos Trega himself was Cuban, a former criminal boss in Havana, imprisoned in ‘61–‘62 by Castro, then deported—after a substantial sub-rosa payment to Castro—to Miami and New Orleans. Jack Ruby, who had shot Lee Oswald in Dallas, had been one of Trega’s associates; Cielo had heard rumors that Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli were part of it as well. In subsequent years old man Draga had withdrawn from most of his contacts with Trega and Lansky, mostly because he disapproved pragmatically of their ethics but also because he came to regard them as bunglers.

  It was taken for granted by Draga and those around him that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had been formulated in Havana and dictated by Castro because Castro knew that the CIA had employed the Mafia to try to assassinate Castro: The killing of the President had been a retaliatory hit. Cielo had believed in these conspiratorial complexities for a long time but just recently he had begun to question them; he no longer knew what to believe—he no longer was sure he cared.

  Along the service road beside the airport Luz slowed the Pinto. Its air conditioner blew a chill draft against Cielo’s throat and he reached out to change the direction of the vent ribs. By the side of the road a small station wagon was parked, a man in the front seat; its sun visors were lowered to indicate all clear. Luz drew past the station wagon and touched the brake pedal—three taps, to signal the station wagon—and drove on toward the big hangars that butted up against the chain fence. Cielo glanced back and saw that the station wagon was following. He hadn’t recognized its driver.

  He began to think about the niceties of his situation: Was this an execution ride? But he knew better; he was relaxed when Luz stopped the car behind one of the hangars. “Is there anything you want me to relay to the old man?”

  “No. Tell him I’ll be in touch.” Cielo pushed the door open and got out.

  The station wagon drew up and its driver left the door open when he walked forward. The driver nodded civilly enough and went past him. Cielo recognized him now—he’d seen the man around Draga’s place a few times walking the dogs on leashes. He’d never seen the man out of uniform before; that was what had thrown him.

  The dog handler got into the Pinto, the seat Cielo had just vacated; the Pinto drove away.

  It was so hot there didn’t seem to be any air. Cielo went squinting to the station wagon and, shut himself in, grateful for the air conditioning.

  He had a look around the car’s interior and opened the glove compartment to see if anything had been left for him—an envelope or whatever. There was nothing, only a flashlight and the car’s registration papers made out to somebody named Juan D. Ruiz at an address in Ponce—he was sure it was phony although it looked good enough to his untrained eye; Cielo had no talent for forgery.

  He put it in drive and pointed it out toward the highway, thinking now of the old man up there possibly sitting over iced tea on his veranda overlooking the Cerromar golf course and all the tourists getting their exercise in electric carts: The old man sitting on his wealth and still deluding himself into the belief that he was the power behind the operation that would liberate Cuba.

  The farm was deserted except for one man whom Julio had left on guard: Stefano—small, ruddy, quick, with an incipient potbelly and under his mustache a set of buck teeth like a steam engine’s cowcatcher. Stefano had a disconcerting wart at the corner of his lower lip. Stefano greeted him with a casual remark and an easy smile, and it struck Cielo suddenly how old Stefano looked—how old they all were getting.

  Cielo sent out a three-second radio signal; then he popped the tab of an aluminum can and sat down on the porch trying to find the breeze; he tasted the thin Puerto Rican beer and thought how egotistical their dreams had been, how pathetically comic and how posturingly tragic. They had been blind to the realities of power. The old man and the other zealous exiles believed, against all evidence, that they needed merely to provide the spark and that the tinder would burst into flame immediately, fueled by a popular will that would sweep away the Castro commissars. It amazed him now how long he had been able to sustain his own belief in that scenario.

  After about three hours the Land Cruiser appeared at the head of the cornfield and came forward along the furrows, Vargas at the wheel. Vargas’ big lips went all shapes when he smiled. Cielo dropped off the porch and tossed his bags in back and climbed into the passenger seat and Vargas turned the Land Cruiser around to head back up into the hills
. Cielo looked back—Stefano waved to him. Stefano’s chest had caved in with age; his clothes looked as if they hung on a hanger that was too small. My God, Cielo thought, how ridiculous we are.

  Vargas said, “Julio’s run out of books.”

  “Hell. I forgot to bring more.” The damned science fiction. How did Julio tell them apart? They all had the same covers. Byzantine creatures with all sorts of eyes and arms.

  “How goes the cave?”

  “It goes. Not very fast.”

  “That’s all right, there’s plenty of time. Everything’s out of sight?”

  “We’re very careful,” Vargas said. “Enrique’s very stern, he doesn’t let anybody make mistakes.” Kruger’s first name was Heinrich but they’d called him Enrique for nearly twenty years—it hadn’t made a Latin of him.

  “Did you see the old man?”

  “A couple of days ago. In his counting house.” Cielo grinned a bit maliciously; it pleased him to think of Draga as a miserly Scrooge. The vault in Draga’s basement was truly formidable. Cielo had watched in amazement while the old man unhooked alarms, inserted keys, dialed combinations and turned handles up instead of down. “If a man turns it down,” the old man had told him with ferocious satisfaction, “he gets a squirt of disabling gas in the face.”

  Cielo was bemused that after so many years the old man would entrust him with such a secret. It was because the old man wanted his confidence, of course; the old man was thirsty for information—he’d wanted every detail no matter how trivial. How much was this dealer charging for Kalashnikovs? Couldn’t they have got a better price in Algiers? What was the exact range of the rocket launchers? How many rockets? Which model of flame thrower had been settled on? How much was being paid per thousand rounds of rifle ammunition? It all went into the ledger in the old man’s head. Cielo remembered thinking, You won’t make a profit on these transactions no matter how you bargain the prices down. But it was in the old man’s blood.

  The Land Cruiser bumped painfully into the woods. The trail lifted them at a grinding deliberate pace toward the Cordillera—green peaks rising in a thin mist that the heat never quite seemed to dissipate. After a little while it dipped into a wide cañon and Vargas guided the wheels carefully up onto a vast shelf of rock that was tipped just enough off the horizontal to give Cielo a queasy feeling—one day, he thought, the Land Cruiser would tip right over on its side along this stretch.