The Betrayers

by Harold Robbins

  The only person she had shared her secret place with had been Nick.

  She cringed when she thought of him—and he was never far from her mind. She knew she had betrayed him. She had destroyed their relationship, destroyed him financially, humiliated him. He deserved none of the abuse she gave him. She had left him and went to the bed—to the perversions—of another man.

  That she had done it for what she considered a good cause didn’t diminish her crimes. Some would even call her courageous.

  But she knew she hadn’t been brave. If she truly had courage, she would have killed El Jefe herself, would have plunged a knife between his shoulder blades as he lay asleep on his stomach next to her on the bed, his head turned sideways, snoring like a boar hog.

  Instead, she used her body to set him up for assassination, had submitted to his perversions to gain his confidence. Finally, she had made a pleading call for his company, the kind of call no man could refuse. And he had been brought down by a blaze of bullets, like a bull elephant too strong to kill with one volley.

  After she had arrived at the cottage, she went down to the isolated beach frequently. She felt dirty and needed to wash away the filth. And the sins.

  Her life was over. She knew that. It was only a matter of time before Johnny Mena and his SIM thugs found her. Her only connection to the outside world was a hand-cranked radio—there was no electricity at the cottage. She heard the news that Ramfis had come back to the country, that most of the conspirators had been rounded up. She had no illusions about what happened to them. Or what would happen to her when they found her.

  Should I kill myself? It was a question she had asked herself many times. And the answer was always the same. I don’t have the courage.

  She was too hard on herself. Most people would have argued that joining a resistance against a tyrant was a monumental act of courage. Using her body to trick the tyrant into a mistake was nothing less than martyrdom. But she didn’t feel that way about herself.

  She had joined the resistance against Trujillo the previous year, after the Mirabal sisters were arrested the first time. She had come into the movement to help plan the overthrow of Trujillo. With his domination of the police and army, it had become obvious that the underground’s best chance of getting rid of the dictator was to kill him rather than fight his overwhelming army.

  After the murder of the Mirabal sisters, she met with ringleaders of the resistance. The discussions revolved around El Jefe’s weakness, his Achilles’ heel. That vulnerable point was the women in his life. He had a habit of installing his current mistress at the San Cristóbal estate and making his visits unannounced, making it difficult to track his movements in advance. Not even the staff in the household knew when he would come and go.

  Finally, the decision was to have a woman establish a relationship with him that would give her the opportunity to request his presence suddenly—but at a time when men with guns would be waiting for him.

  El Jefe already had a wife, mother and daughter. The only other female relationship available was a mistress. And to do that, Luz would not only have to hook the dictator, but be prepared to put up with his perversions.

  It had cost her the loss of the man she loved.

  The loss of her dignity.

  And now it was going to cost her life.

  Her only regret was that she wouldn’t know if what she had done would make a better life for the people of her country—or if Ramfis or another strong-arm personality would simply step into the shoes of the last tyrant.

  After the helicopter was out of sight, she made her way back up the hill to the cottage.

  She knew she didn’t have long to wait. Someone would make the connection to the cottage. A simple check of government records would disclose her ownership. When that happened, men from the SIM would come.

  Would they break her bones and strangle her and put her over a cliff as they did the other Butterflies?

  No, she was sure they would not. Ramfis had other plans for the conspirators. Plans that would make the devil shudder. She knew death wouldn’t be quick or easy. But a sort of peacefulness had come over her. While she would avoid capture as long as she could, in a way she had already accepted death.

  Mostly because of Nick.

  She found it impossible to redeem herself after betraying him. She had broken the mirrors in their penthouse because she couldn’t face herself. Facing Nick would be infinitely more painful. She would never be comfortable living with the knowledge that he must hate her. Worse, she knew how much he truly loved her, how deeply wounded he must be by her treachery.

  49

  As I sat out on the balcony, I started laying out the deal, point by point. It was like doing any business transaction—I had to know everything about the deal, including the seller’s motivation and any hidden points.

  Ramfis, his henchman Johnny Mena, the SIM—they all wanted Luz. But they weren’t coming clean with exactly why they wanted her. They either wanted to give her some old-fashioned justice for her part in the plot to kill El Jefe—torture and kill her slowly—or they wanted to torture and kill her slowly and get her to roll over on whoever else might be involved.

  They had called me because (a) they figured I might know where she was, or at least would have a good guess since we had lived together; (b) I was greedy enough to trade her for the millions they stole, or (c) I wanted revenge for what she did to me.

  I could toss in the fact that they knew enough about my business methods to appreciate the fact that I was probably morally corrupt, thus would not pass up an opportunity to enrich myself at someone else’s expense, especially if it was someone who had screwed me over. If the someone was a woman, all the better. Rubi was a gentlemen, but the rest of them and their attitudes toward women could be summed up by a joke Johnny Mena had told me at an Independence Day party I attended with Luz.

  “Know what you say to a woman with two black eyes?” he had asked.

  I took the bait. “No.”

  “Nothing. You already told the bitch twice.”

  Shades of Jack the Wife-Beater.

  Sure, I howled with laughter like the rest of the losers and ass-kissers in hearing range. But I only did it because I was making a buck in the country. That set me apart from the ankle-biters.

  Okay, maybe it didn’t. Maybe these guys had my number. Maybe they were right about me. A guy who always walked a crooked line doesn’t change. Yeah, I was a bastard, I could be bought. I was willing to pay my dues to make a buck—millions of them—but I was one of those rare breed of bastards that couldn’t screw over the woman I loved. Maybe it was because of what happened to my mother. My mother would have crawled over broken glass for me. She did more than that, she gave her life for me. That started me out with a rather good impression of womankind—except for the times when I got the pointy end of a spiked high heel slammed into my heart.

  That brought the whole nine yards down to one answer to the offer: Those bastards could fuck themselves.

  I was going to get Luz out alive.

  Or go down with her.

  * * *

  It was late evening, the sun had finally disappeared and a cool breeze was coming in from the bay when I took a shower and slipped into light slacks and a pullover shirt and took a walk. Old San Juan, with its narrow streets and wide history, had little attraction for me. Neither did the whores or hustlers that were waiting in front of bars and at the head of alleys.

  I had been running the situation over and over in my mind, nibbling on it, chewing it, ripping it with my teeth. I was pretty sure I knew where Luz would go. There was a special place she loved, a hideaway that was her own secret place. She was a romantic. She’d go there because unconsciously she would believe that the place had some sort of magic, that it could protect her like an enchanted fairyland. Now that I knew her motive for throwing herself at Trujillo, I was once again sure I knew her.

  She would be no match for the SIM. The only smart move would be t
o get out of the country, but that would not have occurred to her—and if it did, it wasn’t something that she would do because she would see it as a betrayal of her comrades. No, she’d stick around to tough it out. Even when the SIM thugs put a garrote around her pretty little throat and choked the life from her.

  I was walking along the waterfront, getting as close to the water as I could to pick up the cooling breeze, deep in thought, when someone bumped into me.

  “Pardon—” I said.

  A gun was in my stomach and I looked into the stone eyes of a killer.

  “In the car,” he told me in Spanish.

  The car was parked a dozen feet away. As he shoved me toward it, another man got out.

  “In the back,” he said.

  I got in, with the two for company, one on each side.

  I knew who they were, SIM. Johnny Mena’s boys. I was sure the man who had gotten out of the car as I approached had been with Mena when I was given the bum’s rush to the airport.

  I said nothing. I knew it was no use. These guys were errand boys. They were going to kill me, hurt me, scare me—they had already done that—or whatever was on the agenda Mena gave them. Whatever it was, it was a done deal. There was nothing I could say or do. But what the hell, never say die.

  “I’ll pay you each a thousand dollars to pull over and let me out.”

  An elbow came around and hit me across the face, smashing my nose, spattering blood across my face. I doubled over on the seat, holding my broken face, wavering on the brink of passing out.

  “That was for Ramos,” the goon on my left said. “He is my cousin.”

  “Fuck Ramos. Fuck your mother,” I said.

  A fist caught my unprotected left ear. Fireworks exploded between my temples. I guess the guy didn’t realize that it was just an old Russian expression, no insult was intended toward his mother.

  I had no idea where they were taking me. I was in too much pain to wonder or care.

  “You’re a woman and your mother’s a whore,” I told the bruiser on the left. I threw a right at him, twisting in the seat. He caught it with his hand. I think he twisted my arm, I’m not sure, because the guy on my right began to pound my head with the butt of a gun.

  * * *

  The car pulled up somewhere. I don’t know how much time had passed—minutes? Hours? Were we still in San Juan? The suburbs? Countryside? I could have been on Mars.

  When we got to wherever we were, Lefty pulled me with him as we got out of the car. I had a gnawing, clawing, irritating, piercing pain that went from my head down to my groin.

  As soon as I had solid ground under my feet, I threw a punch at him, bringing it up from down low, putting my shoulder into it.

  He brushed it aside and hit me in the stomach.

  I collapsed on the ground and puked, the contents of my stomach coming out in a terrible violent eruption. I got the bastard’s shoes and he went nuts, kicking me, landing one in the nuts.

  Someone, two someones, pulled him off of me.

  “Stop, he has to be questioned.”

  Lying on the ground, my mind in a haze, I realized that my benefactor had interceded only so I could be spared for some more painful maltreatment.

  I was pulled, dragged and kicked into a building. I didn’t know what it was, a palace, shack, something with a door and walls. Inside, one of the thugs threw a rope over an exposed crossbeam and tied one end to my feet.

  Even in my pain and haze, I thought it was curious—why would they tie my feet to a rope dangling from a crossbeam?

  Two of them pulled the other end of the rope, hoisting me up so I was upside down, my feet pointed toward the ceiling, my head toward the floor.

  I was held still so the man who had been on my right in the car, apparently the group leader, could lean down and talk to me.

  “Where is your woman?” he asked.

  “Fuck your mother,” I whispered.

  Someone held me while another person plugged one of my nostrils and put the pointy end of a funnel in another.

  The man on the right poured water into the funnel.

  My brain exploded. I’m sure I blew gray matter out my ears. My bashed nose, the kick in the nuts, slug in my stomach—child’s play. This was the real McCoy, this was the kind of torture Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition got his rocks off on.

  I blacked out, a merciful dark shadow seeping into my brain. I heard a slew of Spanish curses, angry accusations that they had gone too far, as I lost consciousness. I wasn’t sure if my face had a grin on it, but I knew I grinned mentally. The bastards had overplayed their hand.

  They had probably killed me.

  50

  And then there was light.

  It came at me so hard, I screamed, screeched, and made inhuman noises.

  “He’s drunk,” a disgusted voice said. “Too much booze, too many whores. He fell into the gutter and smashed his face.”

  “Akabaajabazka,” I said. It wasn’t Russian. It wasn’t even human.

  Eventually the unsympathetic hands of a San Juan street cop pulled me out of the gutter and lay me on my back until a couple of unsympathetic ambulance attendants scraped me off the sidewalk and took me to San Juan Central Hospital, where an unsympathetic ER doctor patched me up.

  “Your nose will be crooked,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do here about it. You American?”

  I had to think. “British.” That was the country on my passport.

  “They can probably straighten it out in London.” He surveyed my face. “Not that it makes you any uglier than you already are.”

  No smile. I guess he wasn’t kidding.

  “They say you got drunk, got rolled by a prostitute and fell into a gutter, flat on your face. Looks to me like you got your ass kicked, maybe even gang-stomped. You don’t get the multiple injuries you have from a single fall. Is there something I should be telling the police?”

  “You have the bedside manners of an axe-murderer,” I said. “You should be working in a butcher shop, not a hospital. Tell the police to fuck their mother.”

  He didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about.

  That was okay, neither did I.

  I took a taxi back to the hotel, my face bandaged, my body crying. I had the doorman pay the taxi based upon a promise I’d pay him later and I staggered to the elevator.

  In my room, I managed to get to the bed before I was down on my knees.

  Russians are tough, I told myself, not as convincingly as I had said earlier.

  I lay on top of the covers, too hot in the sultry tropical night to sleep, too tired and beat—literally—to take off my clothes.

  I started laughing.

  It began as soon as I had stretched out on the bed, shoes and all. It started in my stomach and worked its way up, coming up my throat and bursting out my mouth, hurting every inch of the way. I laughed and laughed and choked and cried. Tears streamed from my eyes. I laughed because I had learned something very important that night.

  Ramfis, Rubi, Johnny Mena, all of them, were real smart hombres, real tough, too, much smarter and tougher than me.

  I was a pussy compared to them.

  I laughed some more. It hurt like hell. God, everything hurt. And that fuckin’ axe-murderer of a doctor had refused to give me pain pills. I saw the look in his eyes when he turned me down. Fuck you, his eyes said, you think you’re a tough dude, so tough it out, you mouthy bastard.

  Take it by the numbers, you smart, mean Russian hombre, I told myself.

  Rubi hadn’t picked up the phone at a random moment and dialed me in Puerto Rico. Hell, no. They had tracked me down and had men in position before the call was made.

  And they hadn’t been fooled by my vague, noncommittal listening responses during the call. These smart bastards knew what I was thinking every second I’d been on that phone, could tell from my tone of voice that I was in pain from Luz, that I wasn’t going to give her up for revenge or money. I thought I was so da
mn smart, and maybe I was when it came to making a buck, but these people were professional people manipulators, whether it involved one person or a nation of millions.

  They knew by the time the call was over that I would not be a help, but a hindrance to them, that I would play the hero, not the betrayer, that I would make a play to save Luz.

  That’s why they picked me up.

  Running it back through my mind, I don’t believe they really thought they’d get Luz’s location from me. People readers that they were, they realized Luz would not have let the man she was screwing over know her plans.

  No, they knew they’d get nothing of value from me. I think the number they did on me was intended to scare me off, teach me a lesson, disabuse me of any heroic notions about jumping in and saving Luz from the SIM. Something short of actual murder, because it was on American soil and the last thing Ramfis wanted with his new regime was to show bad faith to Washington by murdering someone in a U.S. jurisdiction.

  “They have my number,” I told the ceiling as I lay in pain and agony, my nose ballooned.

  They had only made one mistake.

  They had overestimated my good sense.

  I laughed until tears rolled down my face from the pain it caused.

  I’d show them.

  Fuck their mothers.

  51

  “What happened to your nose?”

  Sam Denver stared at me like he had never seen an inflamed, crooked nose before. I went looking for him and found him hugging a Bloody Mary in the hotel lounge.

  “Bite a shark. He bites back. Tell me, does that submarine of yours really go underwater?”

  “Why do you think they call it a submarine?”