Cleopatra Gold

by William Caunitz

  “I brought Belmont along. The guy who liked your tape.” He lowered himself onto a metal folding chair. “He had to run or else he’d be here with me now. After watching you tonight, he and I agreed that we could maybe break you through into the major leagues.”

  “I don’t have much time, Josh.”

  Budofsky stood up and almost shouted, “What the hell is the matter with you? I’m your damn manager, and all you ever do is fight every move I make to get you to the top. Look, Alejandro, if I’m wasting my time, let me know. I’ll look around and find a real wannabe.”

  Alejandro felt a tight band of anxiety grip his stomach. Budofsky was a nice guy, a sincere person who really wanted to help him get to the top of the music business, but his dreams exceeded Alejandro’s own realistic estimate of his abilities. And now Seaver was waiting outside someplace. “I’m sorry, Josh. I’ll do whatever you think is necessary.”

  “OK. We’ll go into the studio, work on some new songs. I got a good writer for you. We’ll work on your image, too, something a little less Latin the majors could deal with. After that we’ll do a video. Shouldn’t take more than a month.”

  “Sounds good.” Alejandro said, stealing a look at his watch. “Why don’t we meet in the middle of the week?”

  “Okay. I’ll be in touch. Got time for a drink?”

  “You caught me at a bad time. I’ve got some friends waiting.”

  “Hanging around that crew could prove injurious to your health and your career.”

  “I’m a big boy, Josh,” he said, firmly leading his manager over to the stage exit.

  “And a wise one, I hope,” Budofsky said, waving good-bye over his shoulder.

  Alejandro climbed the staircase to the balcony and was greeted by back-slapping fans. He made his way through the crowd over to the banquette and slid in beside a smiling Che-Che Morales.

  “Good show,” Che-Che said.

  “Thanks.” Lapsing into Tarascan, Alejandro told him the details of the Parapoint delivery system and his need to borrow money for the purchase of ten of the parachutes and their homing transmitters.

  Che-Che held up his glass to the swirling lights, studying the colors dancing inside the crystal. “Go speak to Roberto and Pizzaro. They’re over at the bar.”

  “Are they your money guys?”

  Che-Che did not answer him, merely stared down at the action on the main floor.

  “You’ll lend me the money?” Alejandro asked.

  “Sí. We’ll be partners.” He saw the frown on the singer’s face and asked, “You’re not happy with that arrangement?”

  “I thought I’d just be able to repay you the money.”

  “This is business, my brother.”

  “It’s going to take me longer than I thought to buy that home for my mother.”

  “As I told you before, once you’re in the business you learn early that enough is never enough.”

  “I’m going to have to keep my overhead down.”

  “Yes, that’s always a problem. The golden rules are to keep the operation simple and trust no one.”

  Alejandro leaned back against the banquette and stretched his arm above his head to relieve the ache of tension he suddenly felt. “I was going to set up a phony skydiving school, but on second thought, I don’t need it. A loft somewhere in the city where I can repack the chutes and service the transmitters—that’s all I really need.”

  “You’re learning.”

  Tracing the beads of moisture on one of the champagne bottles, Alejandro asked, “Why haven’t you trusted me enough to tell me that Pizzaro and Barrios work for you?”

  “I knew you’d work it out by yourself.”

  Alejandro looked Che-Che in the eye, wondering if he was really the number one man after all.

  Che-Che met his stare and said, “Pizzaro and Barrios are waiting for you at the bar.”

  Skirting around the crowded dance floor, Alejandro headed for the busy bar. Squeezing in between Pizzaro and Barrios, he said, “So, when do we do it?”

  “Want something to drink?” Pizzaro asked.

  “I loved your show, Alejandro,” said Jasmine, the Chinese barmaid with the yellow ribbon tied around her pigtail.

  Letting his eyes smile back at her, Alejandro said, “Thank you.”

  “Johnny Black over rocks?” she asked.

  “Please,” said the singer, and watched her pour a stream of scotch into a water glass.

  Pizzaro nudged Alejandro. “She likes you.”

  “It’s my honesty,” Alejandro said.

  She looked up from her task. “It’s that, and your beautiful hands.”

  Alejandro measured his hands. “I don’t see anything special about them.”

  “You’re not a woman,” she said, placing a cocktail napkin on the bar in front of him and setting down his drink.

  When she’d drifted off to serve another customer, Pizzaro leaned into Alejandro and whispered, “I want you and two delivery systems waiting in front of your apartment at nine A.M. day after tomorrow.”

  Quickly realizing that it was going to be a close call getting back from the Hacienda in time to make the meet, Alejandro said, “I’m off Monday, but I have a show to do Tuesday. I gotta be back for that.”

  “You’ll be back when you get back. Che-Che’ll take care of this end,” Barrios said, sipping his soda water and leering at the barmaid.

  Che-Che came over to them, accompanied by three bodyguards. The other dopers standing at the bar melted away into the crowd.

  “Is everything arranged?”

  “Yeah,” Pizzaro said.

  A woman’s hand fell on Alejandro’s shoulder. She was gracefully tall and slender with thick black hair that tumbled over her shoulders. She wore a black dress hemmed slightly above the knees, and she had a Gucci tote bag slung over her shoulder. “Would you like to dance?”

  “No thanks,” he said.

  “I’m a great dancer,” she said, shrugging the tote bag off her shoulder and handing it to Che-Che, saying, “Hold this, would you?” and slithering backward onto the dance floor, shaking her body to the music’s beat, caressing herself with her hands, beckoning him with her body.

  Watching her exhibitionistic dance, Alejandro deepened his smile to one of simulated sexual interest. Could she be Seaver’s messenger?

  Her body taunted him. The crowd took up the chant. “Alejandro … Alejandro.” Jasmine came up behind Alejandro and said, “I bet you’re a great dancer.”

  “Go ahead,” Che-Che said.

  The woman’s fingers were calling to him. Alejandro began swaying to the rhythm. He slid his glass onto the bar, threw his hands on his hips, and swaggered out onto the floor.

  They circled each other cautiously, dancing closer and closer until their bodies touched and locked, grinding as one to the fierce beat of the music, their fiery eyes welded together.

  Some of the crowd watched them; others danced around them.

  “What’s he got that drives women wild?” Barrios asked Pizzaro.

  “He’s not a pig like you,” Jasmine said.

  Barrios gave her a nasty look, started to say something, and then saw Che-Che watching him.

  The woman draped her arms over Alejandro’s shoulders, licking his lips with her tongue.

  “What’s your name?” Alejandro asked her.

  “Jackie,” she answered, then ground into him purposefully, sucking on his ear, whispering, “A mutual friend sent me.”

  “Let’s make it look good,” he said, gnawing on her bottom lip.

  After several minutes of dancing together, he asked in a voice loud enough for the dopers to hear, “Why don’t we get out of here?”

  “Let’s.” She broke away from him, walked over to the bar, snatched up her tote bag, said coolly, “Thanks,” to Che-Che, and slipping her hand into Alejandro’s, she walked off toward the stairs.

  After watching them disappear, Pizzaro fixed his gaze on Barrios. The thin man caught the urgent
message in the look and motioned to four crew members to follow him. They all took off after the pair.

  Holding on to her hand, Alejandro led her through the club and out into the lobby, edging around the noisy crowd and out into the night. People milled about. They slipped deftly through groups of revelers.

  “There’s my limo,” she said, lifting her chin at a double-parked stretch job. She opened the door, and he climbed inside.

  Barrios and the four men came rushing out of the club and began to force their way through the crowd.

  “Who the fuck you shovin’, asshole?” a burly youth shouted into one of the dopers’ faces, and began pummeling him with his fists.

  A free-for-all broke out around the metal detector. Security guards rushed into the melee. Barrios and one other crew member broke through and came running up to the limo. The crew member ran out into the street, blocking the limo from driving off. Barrios yanked open the door and froze.

  Alejandro was sprawled across the seat, his eyes closed, a low moan coming from his partially open mouth. Jackie was on her knees, sucking rapturously on an erect phallus.

  Barrios brightened; he watched for a few seconds, then quietly closed the door. He gestured to the man blocking the car to step aside. The limo drove off.

  Jackie pushed herself off the floor, dropping the dildo into her tote and straightening out her clothes and hair. She reached back into the large pocketbook, took out her lipstick, and began painting her lips.

  Alejandro sat up, brushing back his hair with his hands. “Thank you.”

  “Not to mention it,” she said, blotting her lips together. “The Agency recruited me in my senior year in college. An exciting, challenging career, my political science professor told me. Giving fake head is not my idea of a challenging career.”

  He smiled at her. “Thanks anyway.”

  She tossed her lipstick into her bag. “My husband occasionally gets on my case about what it is that I do at night.”

  “And what do you tell him?”

  She winked at him. “The same bullshit you men tell women!” Pulling the tote’s drawstring closed, she said, “If you ever need an orgasm, call me. I do great orgasms.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  Across the street from the club, Andy Seaver leaned across the leather seat and lit Wade Hicks’s cheroot. They were sitting in the front seat of an Agency flash car, a 1993 Jaguar. Soft music flowed from the speakers as the silent climate control system sucked up the offending cigar smoke. Seaver asked, “None of your ‘players’ knew my boy?”

  “They’re professional, Andy,” Hicks said, watching the glowing ember at the end of his cigar. “They only want to know what they need to know to carry out an operation. The female agent was given a description of her mark and told where she’d be able to find him. The others only knew to slow up anyone who followed them out.”

  “Where are your people dropping him?”

  “Fifth and Seventy-ninth, where one of our vans will scoop ’im up and drive him to La Guardia; one of the Company’s planes will fly him to the Hacienda.” He looked at the man across from him. “Think the bad guys’ll be looking for him?”

  “Naw.” Seaver made his voice sound more confident than he really felt. “They’re going to believe he’s busy with his newfound love. They relate to that.” Rolling his cigar in small circles in his mouth, Seaver wondered if Wilma might still be up.

  15

  A ribbon of white smoke drifted up from a camper’s morning fire on the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains as a dirty pickup with dented doors sped along the road leading from the Hacienda’s airstrip, its wheels throwing up clouds of dust behind it. Sitting in the pickup’s passenger seat with his window down, Alejandro sucked in the sweet, clean country air and glanced at his driver. He had been surprised to climb out of the aircraft and not find his teacher there to greet him. Porges had always been there in the past. Was it a bad omen?

  Eight and four-tenths miles outside of Charlottesville, a tongue of winding dirt road branched off I-64 and snaked through a shaded tunnel of heavy foliage until it burst into a large clearing, where a white clapboard church rested on a cinder-block foundation. Automobiles, vans, and pickups were parked haphazardly across the untended lawn. Many of them had bumper stickers that read “Keep on Truckin’ for Jesus.”

  The church’s double front doors were tied open with string. All its windows were down, and the congregation was singing, clapping, and hallelujahing the glories of God.

  Fiona Lee, the undercover in training known at the Hacienda as Mary Beth, wearing a floral print cotton dress and no bra, stood on the aisle of the first pew, singing and waving her arms over her head. Porges was standing next to her, frowning as he tried to deal with his student’s astonishing religious fervor.

  Mary Beth had sprung her need for religion on him late Friday afternoon. They had been inside the communications training barn on the east side of the soccer field. He had just finished field-stripping a new transmitter that had been manufactured to resemble a Tampax and was worn internally by female agents. After explaining the device’s flexible power source, he had just finished with, “The pull string is the antenna,” when Mary Beth had taken the transmitter out of his hand, reassembled it, and, twirling it around by its string, announced, “I need to go to church on Sunday.”

  His brows knitted together. “We have chaplains here.”

  “What kind you got, Teddy?”

  “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish.”

  “Got any evangelical Protestants?”

  “The Protestant chaplain can conduct standard Protestant services.”

  “No offense, Teddy, but I’m not into generic religion, and I’m no lace-curtain Protestant. I’m a foot-stomping, fire-and-brim-stone-shoutin’, glory-to-God Protestant.”

  “Mary Beth, you’ll just have to do your foot stomping here, not in town.”

  Slapping the gauze-sheathed transmitter on the metal workbench, she’d announced, “I’m outta here,” and stormed off toward the barn door.

  Porges had looked down at the advanced communications device and called, “Wait a minute. Let’s talk.” He’d been trying frantically to remember what the personnel guide said under the heading “Freedom of Worship.”

  On Sunday morning when Porges had driven the pickup under the portico of the main house and seen her running toward him with her breasts bouncing, he’d sensed immediately that he had made a mistake in agreeing to take her to church.

  Now the preacher shouted out, “Glory to God!”

  Suddenly Mary Beth was sashaying out into the aisle, clapping and singing with all the others. She followed them around the church in a singing, clapping revival line. Porges felt the skin on his face and neck tighten. He slumped down into his seat, his knuckles clenched white with anger and embarrassment. He hadn’t been in any church in forty years, and he’d never been in one like this.

  Thirty-six minutes later the pickup raced along the thin road and lurched onto I-64. Porges snarled, “I ought to ground you for the duration.”

  “Chill down, Teddy, what harm did it do? I needed a little R and R from that reform school.” She looked at him. “The preacher liked my tits.”

  A begrudging smile. “I saw.”

  As Porges sped the pickup along the interstate, heading back to the Hacienda, Mary Beth stared out the window. They had just zipped past Lee J’s Gun Shop when she spotted the spur off the interstate that ran up to a large dirt parking lot in front of a long flat-roofed building. It reminded her somewhat of the roller-skating rink on 179th Street and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The sign on top of the building read TEXAS TWO-STEPPIN’ EVERY NIGHT.

  Her head turned to the window. She allowed herself a smile and said, “Don’t worry, Teddy, I’ll behave myself from now on.”

  Sergeant Ambrose J. Mayhew had the blackest skin Alejandro had ever seen and a booming voice that was a strange mixture of southern easiness and military authority. The barn that
they were in was behind the main house, a few meters to the right of the motor pool, and it had bales of hay stacked along its outer walls. The barn served as the Hacienda’s armory and parachute rigging center.

  Mayhew and the undercover known as Chilebean were standing together alongside a rigging table. “Ready?” the instructor asked his student.

  Alejandro looked at the man in the army fatigues and said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Just ‘Sergeant’ will do fine, son.”

  Mayhew yanked the ripcord of the Ram Air parachute, opening the container. He pulled the canopy out of its silken sleeve and extended it the full length of the table to the cotter pin that held the canopy in place at the apex. “First thing you do when you start is check for short lining to make sure that the suspension lines are unaltered, and none of the lines are crossed through any of the canopy’s panels,” Mayhew said as his big hands carefully patted each panel, searching for any that were blown or burned, pressing each panel by hand and smoothing away any curls or folds.

  It took a long time. Mayhew wasn’t in any rush. When that was done, he unhooked the canopy’s apex and slid the sleeve back over the canopy and down the suspension lines and then, pulling the line toward him, S-rolled them up inside the skirt. He looked at his student. “Y’all getting this, son?”

  “Yes.”

  Mayhew nodded and began S-folding the canopy into the pack tray. Taking his time, he spring-loaded the pilot chute on top and, closing the pack, carefully replaced the pin through the grommets. Resting his arms across the top of the rig, he looked his student in the eyes and asked, “Y’all got it?”

  “I think so.”

  Mayhew plunked the rig down in front of Chilebean, saying, “Have a go at it, son. Take ya time, we got plenty of it. When you pack a chute, you’re never in a hurry.”

  The dew-covered grass had that freshly cut smell. Stars filled the sky. At a little after eleven o’clock Sunday night Alejandro walked out of the main house, cut across the lawn, and sat on the edge of the soccer field, hugging his knees to his chest. His fingers were stiff from the hours spent unpacking and repacking parachutes.