John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 05 - A Deadly Shade of Gold

by A Deadly Shade of Gold(lit)

  After the shower, I sat on the bed and went through the envelope of photographs I had taken from her purse as I left her apartment. I took out the five pictures of the statues which had definitely belonged to Carlos Menterez y Cruzada and stowed them in my suitcase. I printed her name and address on the outside of the envelope in square block letters. It is an old caution, and the only way any person can completely disguise their own handwriting. Merely hold the pencil as straight up and down as possible, use all capitals, and base them all on a square format, so that the O for example, becomes a square, and an A is a square with the base line missing and a line bisecting it horizontally. No handwriting expert can ever make a positive identification of printing done in that manner, because it bears no relation to your normal handwriting. After I awoke, I would get it sealed downstairs, buy the stamps and mail it.

  I slid between the hotel sheets and turned out the bed lamp. There was a brighter morning grey at the windows. I tried to sort out the facts I had learned. Facts kept getting entangled with textural memories of the woman, so gaspingly ardent. The facts and the woman followed me down into sleep, where the little gold figures came alive and one of them, an East Indian one, a woman with six graceful arms, made tiny little cries and fastened herself to my leg like a huge spider, bared little golden teeth and sank them into the vein while I tried to kick her away.

  Seven

  I CAUGHT an early afternoon flight out of Kennedy, after phoning Nora from the terminal. She was waiting at the gate, and as I had just my hand luggage, we went directly to her little black car in the parking lot. It was a warm beautiful afternoon. She looked very trim and chic in a pale grey dress, a light yellow cardigan.

  "You look better," I told her.

  "Shaj took charge," she said. "It was a lovely afternoon, and I spent all of it in the side garden, soaking up the sun. I was beginning to look mealy. The sun exhausted me. I slept twelve hours, had my hair done this morning, and I had a drink while I was waiting for you, and I feel almost human for the first time in a long time. You didn't find out anything, did you?"

  "A little bit."

  "Really? What?" The sudden intensity gave her that hawk look, the dark eyes very fierce, the lips thinner, the nose predatory.

  I drove out of the lot. When I was clear of the airport area, I said, "A rich Cuban, a buddy of Batista's, collected the figurines. He bought five of them from the Borlika Galleries. By the best luck you can imagine, one of the five he bought was the one Sam showed me. That gave me the break, and I did a little gambling, and it opened up very nicely. Carlos Menterez y Cruzada. Businessman, age about fifty now if still living."

  "They told you all that? Why?"

  "They got the impression I have the collection. Twenty-eight pieces. They don't care how I got them. We agreed on a price. A hundred and thirtyseven thousand, five hundred. Cash. A very quiet deal."

  "Sam thought they were worth more."

  "They are, if you can sell them in the open. They're worth less on a back street. Anything is. I don't think Sam's title was exactly airtight."

  "Did Sam steal them for Carlos Whosis?"

  "That wasn't quite Sam's style."

  "I wouldn't think so. Then how?"

  "However he got them, Nora, it attracted the wrong kind of attention."

  "All right. So you know who used to own them, you think. Does that really mean very much?"

  "When we get to the boat I'll show you something."

  I fixed her a drink and left her in the lounge. I took my bag into the master stateroom, changed

  quickly to slacks and a sports shirt, and took the pictures out and handed them to her. "The one on top is the one Sam showed me. The other four are from the Menterez collection."

  She looked at them very carefully, lips compressed, frown lines between her heavy dark brows. She looked up at me. "They're strange and terrible little things, aren't they?"

  "I keep wondering how many people have gotten killed over them. I saw a golden toad with ruby eyes in New York, two thousand years old. He looked as if he couldn't count the men he'd watched die."

  She rapped the sheaf of cards against her knuckles. "This is something definite. This is real, Trav. I... don't know much about all the conjecture and analysis and so on. But something I can hold and touch...."

  I took them away from her and took them forward and put them in my safe. Any fifty-four foot boat has innumerable hiding places, and a houseboat has more than a cruiser. Once I turned a very accomplished thief loose aboard the Busted Flush. I gave him four hours to find my safe. He was a friend. I watched him work. He was very very good. When his time was up, he hadn't even come close.

  "What will you do with the pictures?" Nora asked when I returned to the lounge.

  "I don't know. They're bluff cards. And they'll come as a great shock to somebody."

  "What do we do next?"

  "Find out a little bit more about Menterez."

  That evening, in Miami, it took me well over an hour to locate my friend, Raoul Tenero. He is nearly thirty and looks forty. He was just beginning his career as an architect in Havana when Castro took over. I met him at some parties in Havana preCastro. When he got out of Cuba, he looked me up. I introduced him to some people. He worked for a time, and then went back in and was captured at the Bay of Pigs. He was finally exchanged with the others. His pretty wife, Nita, had a vague idea of his schedule.I finally caught up with him in a youth center building, part of the park system.

  It was one of their endless committee meetings, not on political action, not on invasion, but on how to fit their people into the Yankee culture, find the jobs, assist each other. It works. They have that unyielding, unending, remorseless pride. They are the objects of considerable resentment, as is only normal for the human animal when a big batch of people of a different heritage move in. But of all the ethnic groups in the Miami area, the Cubanos have the lowest crime rate.

  I spotted him on the far side of the room in a small group of about nine men, chairs pulled into a circle. Raoul has the true Spanish look, the long chalky face, deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and elegant way of handling his body when he moves. He saw me and held his hand up, thumb and first finger a half inch apart in the universal Latin gesture of indicating just a little bit more time. Six or seven groups were in discussion. Some of them were very loud. I moved out into the night and leaned against the building and smoked a cigarette and watched the asphalt hiss of night traffic.

  In about ten minutes he came out. "You all sewed up?" I asked him.

  "No. I'm through in there. It's a resettlement thing. Winston-Salem. Ten families. Fifty-eight people. I took time off and flew up there and talked to the people who've been working on it. Nice people, Travis. Now it's all reassurance, prying them loose from here, from the Havana Annex. They think there's eight feet of snow all winter in North Carolina."

  "I need some information and a drink."

  "I'll watch you drink, Se¤or. While I have milk."

  "Still messed up?"

  He gave a mirthless laugh. "I gave my stomach for my country. Tried some rum a week ago. One drink. Broken glass would have been easier. That Havana Yacht Club cruise, it was hard on the inside man. How'd you find me? You see Nita?"

  "She looks wonderful."

  "How about her English? She's working hard."

  "It's flawless."

  "Oh boy. Hey, you follow me, okay?"

  I followed his decrepit old Chev to a side street bar. The clientele was a hundred percent Cuban. He was known there. I went to a table in a far corner. He had to stop and talk to half a dozen people. Finally he came to the table, a glass of milk in one hand, dark rum on the rocks in the other.

  "How's the work going, Raoul?"

  He shrugged. "They trust me more now. The estimates are close. They see me use a slide rule. It heartens them. Slowly, slowly they are letting me do a little designing. But it is strange, you know? They speak to me loudly, very distinctly. My God, that's why
my father sent me to Choate before the University of Havana, to speak the language. It's going all right, Travis. I shouldn't bitch. But my chance of a license, the A.LA.? I wouldn't give you a Castro centavo for that, man. Hell, we had a closed shop over there too, you know. An American architect coming in, the only way he could work was team up with one of us, and the commission double. Now I get it in the eye the same way. What's on your mind?"

  "I want to know something about a man. Carlos Menterez y Cruzada."

  Raoul stared at me. "Hijo de.... A long time since I heard that name. A son of a bitch, Travis. A murderous crafty son of a bitch. He is remembered. How long would he last in Miami? With luck, twelve minutes. Where is he?"

  "I don't know. If I can find out more about him, maybe I can find him."

  He leaned back. "I will tell you about that one. You have to understand how it was under Batista. You people here have never understood. He was, for my father, for other successful men in Cuba, a fact of life. They all knew him. They walked on eggs. They walked with great care. Circumspect. It is a question of honor. You are not such a great fool as to try to fight such power, neither do you get too close to a power which has a silent and secret side, sudden disappearances, quiet confiscations. What you do, you give him and the ones close to him no opening. How do businessmen survive under Salazar, Franco, any of them? I am not being an apologist for my class. Perhaps we should have done something sooner, before the communistas came in with their perversions of freedom. How could we tell? It was a fact of life. My father lived with it. Other men lived with it. Without too great a cloud on their selfrespect. The men who lived with it, such as my father, too many of their sons have died fighting what replaced the old evil. And more will die, Travis. Ah, Menterez was totally at home in that situation. Very important, Menterez. Import, export, warehousing, shipping. Big home, big grounds. His specialty my friend, was catching some man in a political indiscretion. Then he would say that only Carlos Menterez could give protection. Sell me just fifteen percent of your business for so many thousand pesos. Cheap. Then somehow would come litigation in corrupt courts, and finally Menterez and his cronies would own the entire business, with a suitable dummy ownership to cover the men in the government who had to have their share, of course. If a protest was too strenuous, the man might disappear. He was a barracuda, Travis. One little whiff of blood, and he would find a big meal. All honest men were afraid of him. He broke hearts and lives. No, he would not live long in this city. He got out in time, of course. But where did he go? I heard one rumor he is in Switzerland, another that he is in Portugal."

  "What about his personal life?"

  "He had a wife, no children. A small silent woman, cowed by him I think. He was a womanizer. Always several mistresses in Havana. Many times they were foolish American girls he would keep there for a time. Big cars. A personal bodyguard. Another house at Varadero. A big cruiser. Also, a personal taste for gold. Gold fittings in cars and home and boats, gold accessories for himself and his woman, art objects of gold. A vulgar man, my friend. A dangerous and vulgar man, a kind we breed too often in Latin America."

  "Not just there. Everywhere."

  "But old Cuba was a place where such an animal can thrive. And the heart of it, always, is the corruption of the courts. Where justice can be purchased, animals like Menterez grow fat, and the common people despair. Then come the communistas, my friend. Look at the constitution of Panama. The president appoints the governors of the provinces for life. He appoints the justices of the Supreme Court, for life. And those justices appoint the justices of the inferior courts, for life. Can you imagine a more fertile soil for corruption? But you are not here for a political lecture. What else can I tell you about Menterez? That he sucked the life out of one of my father's oldest friends? And my father could do nothing? That a woman died aboard his big boat under mysterious circumstances, and nothing was ever done about it? That celebrities from your country stayed at his house as his guests and thought him a fine charming man? That if he walked through that door, there would be a knife in his heart before he could take a second breath? They say you can't take it with you. Menterez screwed millions out of Cuba, and he took it with him. And sent plenty ahead. Good men were excessively polite to him. In a way that was... an insult to which he could not take offense. His invitations would result in effusive and flowery apologies for not being able to attend. Let me see. What else? Oh, yes. He was a hypochondriac. Gold pill boxes in every pocket, and one week at the Mayo Clinic every six months. They say he was terrified of losing his virility. One understands that he had more than his share. He is on several lists. Many people would be delighted to diminish his virility. If you find him. Travis, promise you will tell me where he is. It would not be the same name, of course."

  "If I find him alive, I'll get word to you, Raoul. But my hunch is that he is dead."

  "Why do you think that?"

  "Some day when there is some kind of an end to the story, amigo, some day when your stomach can take the booze, we will sit around and get stoned and I will tell you all of it."

  He nodded, accepting that. "It has to be private and personal wars for you, eh?"

  "I can understand the little ones. The big ones confuse me."

  After a silent moment he said, "I have never asked you this before. Maybe I shouldn't ask it now. Haw close were you to coming on our little picnic at the Bay?"

  "Very very close."

  "I thought so. What stopped you?"

  "A nervous little C.LA. man with glasses and a rule book."

  "Then it was very close."

  "It occurred to him that I wasn't a Cuban."

  He grinned. "Do you remember when you became an honorary Cuban, my friend?"

  "At Rancho Luna?"

  "When the soldados made the lewd remark to your girl. The three of them there, standing by the sedan, waiting for the politico to finish his lunch. What a damn fool, Travis. Never, never will I forget it. You went smiling up to them and in that horrible kitchen Spanish, you asked that peasant idiot if you might examine his machine gun. You took it so gently and hit him under the chin with the stock, and in the same swing, chopped the other one behind the ear."

  "And missed the third one, boy," I said, "and you powdered him just in time."

  "And we ran like hell. And you were indignant because of all the people whistling. You didn't know it is a kind of applause there."

  "I've never seen a pair of more terrified girls in my life."

  "We comforted them, amigo mio," he said, and his smile was suddenly gone. "Yours was Teresa. She married. They waited too long. They tried to come out by small boat. Seventeen of them in a twenty-two foot boat. The motor quit. They drifted six days in August; near the Keys. They were alive when they were found, and two of those died later. Teresa was one of the dead. Her husband lived. He went on our picnic, and he died there in the weeds and the swamp water."

  "That makes my game with those soldiers sound pretty damned silly Raoul."

  "It was silly, of course. Idiotic, suicidal and foolish. I treasure it. The girls adored you for it. All Havana talked and laughed about it for weeks. One indignant tourist, armed only with rum, and three of Batista's soldiers with Thompson submachine guns, all for the honor of a pretty Cuban girl." He shrugged and sighed. "What made us think that was the most savage and dangerous of all worlds? Now it seems almost pure, something on a stage, with comedy uniforms."

  "Can you people work your way back to something easier to understand?"

  His mouth had a sour curve. "It depends, I think, on how long and how hard we can laugh." He looked around, then touched my arm. "I am getting signals from old friends. Do you have anything else to ask? No? Excuse me then. Come to our house soon, Travis. Nita will use the long words. She is in a strange limbo now, where neither Cubans nor Yankees can understand her. But she has become quite a good cook."

  By the time I reached the door, I looked back and saw Raoul hunched in fierce argument with men who all
seemed to be speaking at once, in fierce low tones. God only knows how it will come out for them. All over the world are the fringe peoples, pushed out of their countries for varied reasons, each group thinking it the most hideous inequity since the world began, the most shameful oppression. In every tiny span of recorded history, the exiles have huddled and plotted, schemed and starved and died.

  But perhaps it all used to be simpler to understand. Now the movements of nations have become like a huge slow solemn dance of the elephants, random power swaying in unpredictable directions, their movements obscured by a stifling rain of paper, pastel forms in octuplicate, programmed tapes, punch cards. Through this slow rain, in the shadowy patterns of the dance, scurry a half a billion bureaucrats, each squealing selfimportant orders. Beneath the wrinkled grey legs, ten thousand generals squat, playing with their war game toys. The billions of mankind sit in the huge gloomy reaches of the stands, staring without comprehension, awaiting the white blast that will char the dancers, end the act, and because tension and waiting can only be sustained so long, they make their own little games and charades in the stands, the charades of art, sex, money, power and random murder.