The Last One Left
Page 24
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“If you could hate him, Roger, it would be better for you.”
“I despise him!”
“Sure. That’s why you keep straining all day to do something that will please him. Something to make him proud. And the harder you try, the worse things get. Roger, listen to me. Please. You’ve got to get out from under. Because, if you could—try what you tried, you haven’t got things under control. You could do some terrible thing. You’re a man. You shouldn’t let him make you doubt it.”
“I feel so ashamed, Leila.”
“It’s over. Okay? Don’t keep on making some kind of a thing out of it. People can start enjoying remorse. Come on, Rog. Get up. Nothing happened. Nothing will. Nothing has changed. I’ve forgotten it already.”
She could remember going back to the rocky beach with him, remember making him laugh, finally. But she could not unearth any other parts of what was left of that day. It seemed to fade out somewhere between the beach and the cruiser.
Now in this narrow bed in the clutter of the shack, with the Sergeant watching her, she wondered if it had been a very bad decision to do nothing about Roger’s attack. Perhaps, when he had the next chance, when they were in the Muñequita together, he had come at her again and she had not been able to stop him. She had read that a severe blow on the head resulting in concussion could temporarily or even permanently wipe out all memory of the incidents leading up to the moment when the injury occurred. The Sergeant said she had been naked when he found her in the drifting boat. The boat had a good range. She remembered Captain Staniker saying it would go two hundred and something miles on full tanks. That could account for her being in Florida. When it was done, and the madness dwindled, Roger would have tried to wake her up. If he couldn’t, he would panic. He would head for the states, abandon the boat, and try to run away and hide. But they’d find him. Maybe they already had. She wondered how large the gap in her memory might be, how much time had passed between that day when things faded out to the time she had been injured and abandoned.
“I guess they’ve been trying to find me, Sergeant Corpo. I guess there’d be a big fuss about it in the papers and on the air.”
“Now I wouldn’t rightly know about that, because there’d be nobody coming by here to tell me. Don’t have a radio or get a paper. Lot of noise, foolishness, gets people all stirred up.”
She tried to smile. “You’re kidding me!”
He sat on a rickety wooden chair and tilted back dangerously. “One time some kids came and messed this place up for me. But they won’t be back. And the Lieutenant stops by to see how the place looks, maybe once a year. But I go on in every month to town to cash my army check and stock up on what’s needed. Have to go back sometimes when I forget something. Damn—excuse me, Missy—nuisance.”
“Then you’re a hermit!”
The chair legs came down with a thump. He looked aggrieved. “Hermit? Some nutty old man in a cave? Miss Leila, what I am is a veteran on a pension. Having people around gets my head to hurting. Maybe on account of getting wounded in the head. I couldn’t say. When I was a little kid I liked to go off by myself. Go into the big swamp and stay in there for days.”
She sat up straight and swung her legs out of the bed. The look of them shocked her. They were like old pictures of people in concentration camps. The backs of her legs were pink and tender where the deep burn had shredded away the tanned skin of cruising.
She looked at the improvised garment, the rolled and knotted blue bandanna which served as a belt. She saw the brilliant red flowers in the glass jar on the crate beside the bed. She saw the piece of cheap costume jewelry pinned to the front of the white shirt. Red glass mounted in a brass brooch. It was like someone dressing a doll, a tender game which made her feel shy.
“You—you’ve been taking care of me since Sunday morning? Alone? You’ve been doing everything that had to be done?”
He got up restlessly. “Missy, I had a long time in them hospitals, believe you me. What has to be done has to be done. You were burning up and clean out of your head.”
She tried to stand up but the room swam and darkened and she fell back as he hurried to her. “Now don’t try a fool thing like that!”
She sat in a huddle of misery and said, “I—I have to go to the bathroom.”
He covered his eyes with his left hand and began snapping the fingers of his big right hand, making a very loud cracking sound. “Now just a minute. Now you wait. I had something worked out.
Oh!”
He spun and hurried out. A spring slapped the screen door shut. She heard him clumping down outside stairs. Soon he was back looking pleased, carrying an old-fashioned chamber pot. Water sloshed in it as he set it down close beside the bed. The lid was from a small green garbage container. He said, “You get well enough to walk, I’ve got a privvy about a hundred feet from the cabin. I recalled finding this pot a long time ago, and I kept looking till I found it. Brush grown up around it and a mess of other stuff. I sand-scrubbed it clean as a dollar.” He moved the chair over next to the pot. “You just kind of ease yourself over, and take it slow and easy so you don’t get faint, Missy. You need me, you just yank on that cord there and it’ll jangle some cans I’ve got hung below. When you get settled back into bed you jangle them anyhow. I’ve got to cook you up a good dinner. You slept on through breakfast today, and you should be next door to starved.”
After she had crawled back into the bed and covered her legs with the sheet, she lay quietly, her eyes stinging, fingertips resting on the absurd piece of jewelry. It sounded too dramatic to tell herself she had fallen into the hands of a madman.
What had happened to everyone? Where were they?
Suddenly ravenous, she reached and grasped the cord and jangled the cans vigorously.
She heard his distant voice. “Coming, Missy. Be right there.”
Fifteen
THAT FRIDAY, the twenty-seventh day of May, was a very hot still day. A mist hung over the land, a broad area of silvery glare showing where the sun was. The mist caught and held the aroma of the fires of the drying, dying Everglades, a faint stink—like a memory of disaster. The mist held the sharp pungencies of a hundred thousand tail pipes. Days such as this in Dade County, infrequent, corroded the broad leaves of tropical plantings, stung the eyes, smudged white roofs, and lay an almost invisible scum on the motionless water of ten thousand swimming pools. Off-season tourists, lard white from the long midwestern winter, would be deceived by the overcast look, spend hours on the beaches, and a certain predictable number would die days later of the merciless ultraviolet burns.
Raoul Kelly had worked all morning in his rented room in the heart of the Cuban colony along Southwest Eighth Street in West Miami. His second-floor room in the peeling stucco building had four windows across the front overlooking Eighth Street. They were double-hung windows, all with the bottom sash opened as far as they would go. He had taken the screens out and stacked them against the wall as invitation to any elusive breeze. Eighth Street was also Route 41, the Tamiami Trail, and the big diesel tractor-trailer trucks halted by the traffic signal a half block away, made a blue stench and resonant fartings as they worked their way back up through the gears, overwhelming the piercing nasal agonies of the gypsy singer on the big stereo juke in the cantina underneath his room.
His desk was a four-by-eight sheet of marine plywood laid across three two-drawer filing cabinets. On one wall he had scotch-taped detailed maps of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, South America, Venezuela. He had made marks on all the maps, a private alphabetical and numerical code cross-referenced to file cards which were in a personal shorthand meaningless to anyone but himself. He had improvised an open bookcase of boards and cinderblock, and it was stacked with reference works, the overflow piled on a table beside the shelves. On another wall he had hung a big cork board to which he thumbtacked working outlines, notes to himself, reminders o
f appointments.
He had a sagging bed, a chest of drawers, a noisy floor fan, two straight chairs, a fraying grass rug, a shallow closet, a key to the bathroom at the back of the second-floor hallway, and an old rebuilt Underwood standard. He was a very fast four-finger typist, using unlined sheets of yellow legal-size paper. He turned such sheets in at the editorial desk at the paper. For the magazine work, he would take his final draft down the street to the bakery where Señora de Onís, wife of the owner, would type them properly and carefully onto white bond with two good carbon copies for twenty cents a page. In Havana she had been a private secretary in a large insurance agency.
Raoul Kelly had worked all morning in his underwear shorts, the floor fan hurling the stifling air at his naked back. Sweat found its tickling way down through the thick mat of black hair on his chest and belly. The sheets of copy paper stuck to the undersides of his forearms when he rested them on the desk, and had to be peeled away. Just within reach was a little radio with a cracked gold and white plastic case. He kept it at a station which announced each news break with a grandiose blast of trumpets, kept it at a volume where he could hear the trumpets and nothing else, and would hear them and reach out without conscious thought to turn the volume up.
He was doing an article in depth—a phrase which never failed to irritate him—about the background, present, and guessable future of subversion in Venezuela. From time to time he would refresh his memory by finding the right portion of the three hours of tape he had recorded during an interview with one of El Caballo’s underground agents who had defected after two years in Caracas, had slipped into the states illegally, and had been fingered for Kelly by the sister of the man who was hiding him.
Though he knew it would annoy his newspaper, he had decided to place the article in, he hoped, The Atlantic, and let the wire services pick up the news breaks from the text when it was published.
It was going reasonably well, but his concentration was shaky because of the letter in the shallow straw bowl he used as an inbasket. If he could decide how to answer it, then he could forget it.
It was on the creamy bond of the Waterman Foundation:
My dear Raoul Kelly,
I am afraid I must be more explicit about the special problems of organization we are facing here in setting up Project Round-Table. Not least among the many reasons we asked you to join with us would be to have you, as an Area Coordinator, help select, recruit and train those field investigators who would work under your direction.
There is an increasing pressure upon us from the Director and the Board of Trustees to establish an operational structure. By dint of special pleading, motivated by my respect for your work and knowledge of your background, and also by the enlightening two days I spent in your company, I have induced my colleagues to grant one small additional grace period, but I fear that if we cannot have your affirmative answer by that date, we shall have to extend our invitation to the alternative choice, the man I told you about.
You must make a decision on or before the fifteenth day of next month, and the sooner you can decide, the more helpful it will be to me. We need you.
Cordially and hopefully,
G. Emmett Addyson, Deputy Director
I can make out, he thought. I can keep on doing what I am doing, which is, in effect, a one-man version of their Project Round-Table. In a world where the semantics of politics is like smoke in the wind, nothing is gained by ringing words, exhortation, cries of alarum. Facts move the world.
He turned back several pages and looked at one of the facts in the article he had just finished:
Just after dusk on November eighth last year an estimated seven tons of weapons and explosives was ferried ashore from the Polish freighter Trogir and offloaded on the beach five miles east of Rio Caribe on the Peninsula de Paris in the province of Sucre, where approximately twenty men with pack animals, under the direction of one Ramon Profeta, a Cuban national, accepted delivery and transported the material to a secret arsenal near Cumanacoa. Among the supplies were five 60-mm mortars of Chinese manufacture and four hundred rounds of ammunition, including one hundred white phosphorus mortar shells.
Orderly, triple-checked, plausible and ultimately provable, as was the shameful illiteracy rate in the Republic of Panama, the record infant-mortality rate, and the recorded voice of the President of the Republic saying, “The question is not whether we will have a Castro-type revolution, but when we will have it.”
But he yearned for access to the great flow of economic and sociological and political information the huge grant by the Waterman Foundation could create. Facts could then be interrelated, timetables predicted, causes isolated, countermeasures recommended. Facts in abundance, fed into the twin computers of the human mind and the transistor could illuminate all the misty patterns of conflict and change. Otherwise it was all blindfold chess where the opponent’s moves were neither announced nor recorded.
Yet he had promised, on his honor, to look after Francisca.
Just as he finished his penciled corrections, he heard the trumpet call of news once more and turned the volume up.
Furious debate in the Senate on the proposal to recruit mercenary combat battalions in Japan and the Philippines, uniform them in a distinct fashion to sustain nationalistic pride, staff the battalions with American officers, and use these people to fight the brushfire wars which were promising to last a hundred years, giving each man after twenty years of service the option to return to his home place, or accept United States citizenship. Mercenary was as dirty a word as empire.
And then the announcer said, “The official investigation and hearings on the Muñeca tragedy in the Bahamas which resulted in the death of Texas millionaire Bixby Kayd, his beautiful young second wife, his grown children, Stella and Roger, and his daughter’s
guest, Miss Leila Boylston of Harlingen, Texas, have now ended. Captain Garry Staniker has been cleared of any suspicion of negligence. His wife, Mary Jane Staniker, also perished in the explosion and fire which sank the yacht a few miles north of Andros Island on the night of the thirteenth, just two weeks ago today. Staniker, who was marooned for a week with serious injuries before being rescued by a pleasure boat out of Jacksonville, was earlier listed as being in critical condition, but improved rapidly enough to be interrogated earlier this week, and it is expected he will be released from the Princess Margaret Hospital at Nassau sometime next week. In a prepared statement released an hour ago, Captain Staniker said he was pleased at the decision of the Board of Inquiry and felt it was just and fair. He refused to answer any questions about the tragedy or about his future plans.”
Raoul Kelly tilted his chair back and slowly scratched at the sweat-damp bristle on his chin. Damn the pack-rat mind of the newspaperman, he thought. Grab everything that has a curious shine to it and stuff it into the back of the nest. And then, in odd moments, keep trying to fit the little pieces into a pattern.
After the weather news—thunderstorms during the night, clear and cooler tomorrow with a northeast wind—he turned the volume down. He had not gone hunting for background on the Staniker story, but he had read everything he had come across, from the two columns about Mister Bix in Time to Dud Weldon’s carefully researched history of Staniker’s maritime career in the Record.
He recalled the way, in Weldon’s feature story, Cristen Harkinson had given Staniker a clean bill, and that Weldon had not exercised his considerable talent for innuendo in trying to make something of the fact she had been Senator Fontaine’s special friend, and Kayd was known to have been associated in some vague business way with men Fontaine knew well. So it meant Weldon had put his own stamp of approval on the Harkinson woman.
There was a long scream of rubber, a janglingly expensive crunch. He leaned out of a window and saw two cars partway up the block, their front corners merged and locked in a tangle of torn metal, two men getting out of the two cars, starting to wave their fists at each other. Tempers ran short in this weather.
Kayd had visited the Harkinson woman on the last day of March, over two weeks before he had returned aboard the Muñeca and hired Staniker. And Staniker and the Harkinson woman had been having a lengthy affair.
The Crissy-Staniker setup was not likely to be known. Even without the planned isolation of the house Fontaine had given her, an intimate arrangement between a woman and her hired captain was not anything which would be likely to attract any interest in the steamy social climate of the Miami area, even if the affair continued long after the lady had given up boating. It would be of moment only to those it happened to affect in some way—Crissy Harkinson, Garry Staniker, Francisca, Mary Jane Staniker and one sweaty Cuban newspaperman.
“And so what?” he said aloud. What has it got to do with anything? He’s been cleared.
And, of course, one could not take any chances with ’Cisca’s hard-won adjustment. The only possible reason for opening up the can of worms would be to find out if some sort of curious conspiracy had resulted in the sinking of the Muñeca. And, if so, the whole story would suddenly become twice as big as it had ever been. ’Cisca would have to testify as to Kayd’s visiting the house, as well as to the relationship between Crissy and the Captain. All news media would zero in on one emotionally disturbed girl, and they would unearth every portion of her personal history. It was obvious she could not endure that sort of exposure, that intensity of focus of public interest.
He leaned and picked up Addyson’s letter, scanned it again, flipped it back into the basket. Dilemma-time, he thought. Problems with no solutions.
Just as he was trying to stop thinking about the whole thing, an inadvertent process of logic took it one step further. If there was indeed some kind of dangerous and deadly motive underlying the loss of the Muñeca, it would surely occur to Staniker and the Harkinson woman that Francisca had seen Kayd in Crissy’s house, and that she could verify the Staniker-Harkinson relationship.