It was inevitable, in the circumstances, that she would be tempted toward an unhealthy attachment: Crobey was the only remotely familiar object in this alien world, the only bridge between her and the sanity she’d left behind. But she had to guard against trusting him too much.
As if summoned by her mind a car crunched into the yard. She went to the kitchen door and looked out—it was Crobey but it wasn’t the same little shoehorn car he’d had last night. This one was a high square Bronco, a coiled-cable winch on the front bumper, a drab green paint job and big-lugged tires that looked like cross-country equipment. Undoubtedly it was four-wheel-drive. Crobey stepped down and glanced at her, not smiling, and reached into the back of the truck, from which he lifted a heavy rucksack. He carried it toward the house.
Carole made an ineffectual and self-conscious swipe at her hair. “Good morning.”
“Yeah.” He squeezed past her into the house. When she followed him into the front room she found him dumping the contents of the rucksack on the parson’s table—a jumble of oily blue-black machinery that she belatedly recognized as disassembled guns.
He began to sort things out on the table. There was a flat red steel box; he slid the lid off it and revealed a collection of ramrods, white cloth patches, cans of oil and solvent.
He assembled something out of the parts—it looked like the kind of stutter gun that airborne commandos carried in war movies. Stubby, ugly, wicked. Crobey worked its action with a great deal of sinister clacking.
“I see you’ve been to the arms dealers.”
“One of ’em. If he’s been approached by Rodriguez he’s not admitting it. I’ve got a few more on the list—then we’ll have to widen the net. Caracas, Rio, the Azores.” He gave her a direct glance for the first time. “Glenn Anders is in San Juan.”
“Oh?”
“Flew in last night.”
“How do you know?”
“I haven’t altogether wasted my time since I got here. You’ve got two other people on your payroll besides me and Santana. I slipped them a little something to keep their eyes open—I check in with them now and then.”
“Who are they?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Crobey—”
“Part of the reason they’re willing to deal with me is they know I won’t name them. All right?”
She conceded it. “So Anders is here. Why?”
“I suggest we ask him.”
“We?”
“He wants to meet you. When I was in Mexico City I told him I’d try to set it up.”
“What have you told him?”
“A little bit of the truth. Not too much.” He went back to work on his toys.
She said lamely, “Where’s Santana? Working the farm?”
“No. He’s out looking into the Rodriguez family background.”
“Have we stirred them up at all yet?”
“I’ll ask Anders when I see him.”
“I’m asking you. You’re supposed to be my expert.”
“An expert’s a fellow you hire because he’s the one who knows what experts to call in, and when to call them. Are you going to dispute everything I do? Because if you are I don’t see much point in carrying on. I can’t function if I’m harassed from both sides at once. Do you want me to pack?”
“Don’t throw ultimatums at me,” she said. “I might call your bluff.”
“Then you’re ready to give it up?”
“No. I’ll look for somebody a bit less prickly. You can’t possibly be the only man alive who knew those people in the Bay of Pigs days.”
“Ducks, I don’t think I can be happy here if we have to have this conversation twice a day. It doesn’t give me a sense of job security.”
“Security? You?”
“I’m not talking about the long term. I’m talking about maybe getting the rug pulled out from under me at the wrong moment.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Ah, ducks, tell me why I should.”
She touched a finger to one of his guns and twirled it on the table, picked a stray hair off her cuff, leaned back, crossed her legs, put an elbow on the table and her chin in her palm, looked him in the eye and said, “Nobody can do that. It’s a trick question and you know it. The only way to find out whether you can trust someone is to trust the person and see what happens.”
“You’re a truly contrary creature.” He stood, pulling the Levi’s down from his crotch.
She watched him limp toward the back door. “Where are you going?”
“To the loo, ducks.”
“Why’ve you started calling me by that awful epithet?”
“Ducks?” In the doorway he turned; the smile was more sardonic than amiable. “When I use it, it’s a term of endearment.” Then he went.
She heard the slap of the privy door and realized she was smiling. She straightened her face. She kept catching herself trying to ingratiate Crobey—it was a warning sign; she had to guard against it. It wasn’t a contest of will or pride; in effect he’d imprisoned her and rendered her ineffectual; if she remained she could only sink into passivity. That wasn’t what she’d come for.
When he came in from the yard he said, “I wasn’t intending to switch cars right away but there was a problem in town—I left it parked while I went to see the man about the guns and when I came back I found it jammed in by two parked cars that hadn’t been there before. One of them had a couple of smokers in it. So I stepped into a hotel and got lost. I phoned the rent-a-car people to go pick it up and we got the Bronco from a pal of Santana’s.”
“Who were the men in the car?”
“Locals. I’ve no idea whose.”
She said, “If someone’s putting pressure on the police to scare you out of Puerto Rico, it shouldn’t be impossible to find out who that is. If the police are impressed by this person or frightened of him, it means they know who he is.”
“I realize that. But I can’t think of any coppers I’d like to talk to right now.”
“Would Anders know?”
“Anders could find out,” he conceded.
“Then let’s arrange to see him.”
Crobey said, “A while ago you were chastising me for consorting with him.”
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” She smiled. “Besides, I want to give you a fighting chance.”
“Good. I already made a date for tonight: seven-thirty at the Tres Candelas.”
The Tres Candelas struck Anders as a Harry Crobey sort of place. The long dismal narrow room was mostly bar. A row of tiny tables, a back room with half a dozen tables-for-four. There was a Wurlitzer jukebox that might have fascinated a dealer in fifties kitsch.
Anders had his jacket hung over his shoulder by one fingertip and Rosalia held his hand like a teen-ager. The bartender, in soiled apron and halfheartedly trimmed beard, waved them toward the tables in back. No one was back there. Anders seated Rosalia under a cockfight poster and selected a chair from which he could watch the entrance. According to his watch it was 7:05. He was surprised by Crobey’s absence.
Rosalia reached for his wrist and heaved it around to see the face of his watch. “We’re awfully early.”
“Once in my life I want to be somewhere ahead of Harry.”
“He’s got some kind of hex sign on you, hasn’t he.”
“Not really. Sometimes I envy him a little.” He was looking at her breasts, not smiling. “Want to know what I’m thinking?”
“I think I already do,” she said in a mock-cool voice. She had extraordinarily long natural eyelashes and knew how to use them; she batted them at him. Anders made a point of tracing the lines of her body with his eyes. Rosalia began to chuckle. “How’d you ever turn into such a lout?”
Anders shook his head gloomily. “You see it was like this. When I was nine I ran away from home and got picked up by a very smooth hair-tonic salesman who hooked me on smack and used me as a courier until he got run over by a Chinese
tank, and then I was all by myself on the streets mugging old ladies until this kindly fat man took me in to his establishment and I worked upstairs there on the line until I got arrested for selling atomic secrets, and after that things just started to go wrong somehow.”
Mirth captivated Rosalia, making her shake. Anders laughed at his own absurdity. Then he looked up in time to see Harry Crobey walk in, escorting a striking woman.
Anders watched the brisk-gaited clipclip of the woman’s good long legs as Crobey limped beside her. She wasn’t especially tall but she managed to carry herself as if she were. The skin of her face was drawn over precisely defined bones—she was at least forty and didn’t attempt to look younger; very little make-up and she’d been out in the humid wind but dishevelment suited her. In a rust-hued skirt and brown satiny blouse she managed to look cool. Her eyes were shaped for scorn and for easy laughter; her hair was reddish but not red and something made him certain she didn’t tint it. She wasn’t pretty in any of the usual ways—the bone ridges were prominent, the nose sharp, the impression one of planes and angles rather than soft curved features—but she was extraordinarily attractive and it was clear by her carriage that she knew it and was assured and confident in herself. Possibly it was a pose but if so it was one she’d had plenty of time to rehearse.
Anders shook Crobey’s hand and introductions went around: Rosalia gave Carole Marchand an ingenuous beaming smile. Crobey held the woman’s chair for her, an event that astonished Anders—he’d never seen Crobey do that before—and she sat down with unstudied grace; she seemed almost wholly without selfconsciousness.
Crobey hooked an overhand wave toward the bartender and sat down with a wince that betrayed the chronic troublesomeness of his knee. “Christ, this humidity. Like Dante said, it’s a nice place to visit but.…”
The bartender distributed menus enclosed in fly-specked plastic. Rosalia was asking Carole Marchand if it was her first visit to Puerto Rico—it was all very desultory; Crobey seemed in no hurry to get to business and Anders decided Crobey wanted the delay in order to give his client an opportunity to size Anders up.
After a time Carole Marchand wrinkled her nostrils in the direction of the kitchen. “Do I hear someone rattling my dish? I’m famished. It had better be edible, Crobey.”
“I doubt it comes with a written warranty, ducks. Last time I was in here it wasn’t half bad.”
Anders said, “Harry’s a connoisseur of greasy-spoon dives from Macao to Dar-es-Salaam. He’s got an unerring nose for the worst food in town.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” There seemed to be an easy tolerance in Carole Marchand’s acceptance of Crobey’s eccentricities and Anders wondered how much of it was sham. It was difficult to believe she didn’t actually dislike the man; Crobey wasn’t her sort—the juxtaposition struck him as something like thowing a groomed show-bred poodle into a cage with a timber wolf.
Crobey said obliviously, “I didn’t have to be the world’s greatest pilot, you know. With a little education I could have been a gourmet.”
“Don’t be sickening,” Carole Marchand drawled; she turned mischievously to Rosalia. “Harry takes a mulish delight in pretending he’s an ape. Actually beneath that rough crude exterior beats the heart of the first man in Liverpool to climb down a tree without having had to climb up it first.”
Crobey’s smile was a bit strained. “The lady likes to turn on the fan and wait for something to hit it.”
Carole Marchand breathed in slowly and expressively through her nose; she tried to suck her mouth in with a tight look of disapproval but her lips began to quiver. “Keep it up, Crobey, keep it up.” She reached sternly for her glass but then began to laugh; Anders realized to his astonishment that she actually enjoyed bantering with Crobey. Finally she drank and held the glass away from her with critical suspicion. “What the devil is this?”
Crobey said, “I suspect it ain’t Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer, ducks. Beyond that it’s hard to say, in this dump. Could be horse piss.”
“Philistine. Infidel.”
The dinner that ensued was edible if not palatable; finally the bartender cleared the dishes away with a surly crashing of porcelain. Soiled espresso cups alighted on the table like moths; Crobey lifted his, peered dubiously into it and said, “Confusion to our enemies.”
“And I believe we’re here to discuss our enemies,” Carole Marchand said. Her voice had hardened—no longer the cool acerbic drawl.
“Right,” Crobey said, “we want to win the war and get home by Christmas, don’t we.”
Carole Marchand considered Rosalia; then her glance came around to Anders. “Not to be indelicate but—”
“Rosalia knows what I know.”
Crobey smiled at the girl, full of insincerity.
Carole Marchand said, “Let’s take the man’s word for it, shall we, Harry?” She looked down, then quickly up into Anders’ face—as if trying to catch him off guard. “How do you tote it up, Mr. Anders? Are we on the same side or not?”
“That would depend.”
“You sound like O’Hillary.”
“I try not to do that.” He smiled a bit.
“I intend to pin these terrorists to the board,” she said. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding of my position.”
“We understand your position.”
“Talking like that could get you elected to Congress,” she said. “My first objective is to goad your agency into doing the job it ought to have done without goading. If that fails I have every intention of doing it myself. And I ain’t whistlin’ ‘Dixie,’ Mr. Anders.”
Anders put his head down, thinking. The phone conversation with O’Hillary ran through his mind. Defiantly he made the decision. “Rodriguez—if that’s who he is—seems to be running under the code-name Cielo. He tried to buy ordnance from a broker in Fajardo. The broker wasn’t selling but that only means Cielo’s shopping somewhere else. Incidentally a couple of policemen spent most of the day today surveilling a car that turned out to be yours, Harry.”
“The two smokers? They were about as inconspicuous as two giraffes in a bathtub.”
“Anyway two days ago the subject, Cielo, was here in San Juan driving a Volkswagen. He spent a night in the Rio Piedras area. We don’t know which house but at least we’ve got it narrowed down to a neighborhood. He may have contacts there—maybe other terrorists, maybe a safe-house, maybe a girl friend. Whatever. He may never go back there again, of course, but it’s a sort of lead. We’ve checked the municipal directory but there’s no Rodriguez or Cielo listed at any address around there. He was spotted by a cop named Perez and we had him go through the pictures and he’s identified a photograph of Rodrigo Rodriguez taken in nineteen sixty-two.”
Carole Marchand said, “All right!”
“Take it easy, ducks. The man could’ve been wrong.”
Anders said, “Perez thinks it may be the same face. But nineteen sixty-two? The man was young then. Perez admits it’s not a positive make. We ran the old Rodriguez fingerprints through the computers and got no particular results—evidently he hasn’t been arrested or identified since before the Bay of Pigs.”
Crobey kept watching him, filled with reserve. “Why the cooperative candor, Glenn?”
He’d expected it. Now Crobey had put it to him—bluntly, so that Anders couldn’t evade it without exposing the evasiveness. He knew half truths wouldn’t convince Crobey. “I have to stonewall that. I’m not at liberty to break security. All I can tell you is I’ve got instructions to find Rodriguez. Beyond that I can only suggest you don’t look a gift horse too carefully in the teeth.”
Carole Marchand said, “It’s a matter of the national security.” She looked at Crobey. “If we find Rodriguez he expects us to report it to him—but if he finds Rodriguez before we do, why do I get the feeling he won’t tell us a damn thing?”
“Maybe I won’t,” Anders told her. “I won’t make promises I might not keep. But look at it this way: You
know more now than you did before you came here tonight. It hasn’t hurt you to talk to me.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Co-operation. Quid pro quo.”
The woman scowled at Crobey. “How would you play it?”
“Under an assumed name.” Crobey smiled a little. “I know Glenn. He wasn’t born devious but he’s been playing these games a long time—I guess he knows how to finesse. He’s got something in his wallet he hasn’t put on the table. If we knew what it was we might change our minds.”
“Suppose I told you you’re wrong, Harry.”
“I doubt I’d believe you. I have to jump to that conclusion—you’ve laid on this fog of facts that don’t get me anywhere when I stop to think about them. A gift? Sure—but what’s it worth? Give us something worth trading for.”
Rosalia, flashing with anger, turned on him with low-voiced hissing savagery: “Glenn’s told you everything we know. If you think he’s lying I don’t see any point continuing this meeting.”
Carole Marchand said—ignoring Rosalia and addressing herself to Anders—“As soon as Harry began asking questions here he was given a warning by a police detective. Between the lines the policeman gave him to understand there were powerful interests in Puerto Rico who wanted him to leave. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“Such as what?”
“Clout. Local political clout. If it’s true the local police have no leads on Cielo-Rodriguez, if they don’t even know him, then obviously he’s not the one applying pressure. Someone else is. Someone known to the police. Someone who’s either fronting for Rodriguez or being fronted for by Rodriguez. Someone here in Puerto Rico.”
Anders was unimpressed. “You do stretch a point.”
“Humor me.”
O’Hillary’s instructions ragged him. He’d already disobeyed them tonight but if he started poking around San Juan police headquarters asking questions, it would get back to Langley in no time at all. That was no good. Then he turned to look at Rosalia. “It might be worth flirting with a cop or two.”
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