by Emma Lathen
Calls were bursting forth every second. The operators sounded electric. And why not? Every policeman in San Juan had been waiting for this moment.
Angrily Vallejo reached for the hand microphone.
“Vallejo here,” he snapped. “Get somebody to El Morro . . .”
But did it get through the babble of voices?
“Riot patrols ordered to the Plaza de Armas . . .”
“. . . at the bridge . . .”
Vallejo rapped out an obscenity, then turned savagely to his driver. “Switch on that siren!”
“At this rate, we’re never going to get there,” said Thatcher when Olmsted jammed to a halt. Traffic was at a standstill. Somewhere up ahead, out of sight, there was an obstruction.
Olmsted was sweating. Thatcher did not think it was because of the heat.
“I can’t believe it,” he repeated.
Thatcher’s synopsis had floored him.
“You’ve said that before,” Thatcher reminded him. “Does that mean you think we’re on a fool’s errand?”
Olmsted replied by jerking the car into motion, forcing a truck onto the curb as he swung wide.
It was a grim prospect. A decent, innocent man stalked by someone who did not hesitate to kill.
Thatcher preferred not to think of the two grandsons.
Olmsted cocked his head to the window. “Do you hear what I hear?” he said.
Somewhere behind them, a police siren was howling.
“I hope that means that Mrs. Schroeder got through to Vallejo,” Thatcher said.
“If she did,” Olmsted commented, “this sets a record for efficiency in Puerto Rico.”
Thatcher checked his watch. Olmsted was quite right. Behind them another siren sounded.
The murderer was just entering Old San Juan when his rear-view mirror reflected the flashing light of a squad car. His hands tightened briefly on the steering wheel. Then the police sped past. He relaxed. There was no sign of anxiety on his face.
He drove on. By now he was almost drained of human emotion. He had become an automaton, doing what had to be done—no matter what it was.
Just now, he had to remove one man who could reveal a lie.
It had been a mistake, he thought. Almost everything had been a mistake.
Nothing had gone according to plan, he thought with the rage that gripped him more and more compulsively. They had made him continue—by their obstinate stupidity.
Norma . . .
He shook his head slightly. He would take care of Norma too, when the time came. Now he had to concentrate on Wilfredo Moreno. It should not be difficult. It could be made to look like an accident.
Things could always be disguised.
Another squad car sped past. Something must be going on, the murderer thought. He considered this; then, without haste, he turned toward the parking lot near the post office. Old San Juan was crowded. Americans forsaking their hotels, Brazilian sailors on shore leave, schoolchildren, messenger boys, loiterers. The narrow streets were thronged.
It would be safer to continue on foot.
He parked the car. As he did so, a motorcycle trooper sped up to a bored patrolman, leaned forward and spoke urgently.
The murderer saw them, then started walking. Toward El Morro.
Hundreds of policemen were pouring into Old San Juan, in squad cars, in trucks, in patrol wagons. Up and down the streets, policemen were hammering on doors, walking through bars and restaurants, examining the pedestrians.
“If Prudencio Nadal is indeed nearby,” said one sergeant, directing his men to spread out, “he can spend his life here. It would take an army—yes, Captain?”
Vallejo’s car had finally gotten through. “Get some men up to El Morro,” he snapped.
The sergeant was embarrassed. “My orders—” he began.
“Damn your orders!” Vallejo roared. “Get some men up there or else!”
“But, Captain . . .”
The murderer had reached the top of the hill. He paused, looking behind him with a frown. Police were everywhere, more and more of them. Resolutely he pushed on.
The guard at the sentry box waved him through.
The murderer began walking up the long tree-lined roadway. He did not see the small boys flying kites over the ocean. He did not see the tourist buses parking.
He saw only El Morro rising ahead of him.
“If this is what your pal Vallejo produced,” Olmsted said disgustedly, “I think he may be overdoing.”
They were backed up behind squad cars, motorcycle police and units of the riot squad.
“I’m beginning to wonder,” said Thatcher. “Why are so many police milling around here? Unless they’re trying to cut him off.”
Olmsted inched ahead. “The place to cut him off is up there,” he said.
“You’re right,” said Thatcher.
The murderer paused, dwarfed by the ramparts above him. As he stood there, a group of schoolchildren swept past him into the fortress.
Four Americans were taking pictures of each other, first posed before the walls, then silhouetted against the sea.
They smiled at him.
He smiled back, and went inside.
“Finally!” said Thatcher a minute later. They had managed to push through the clogged city to the windswept approaches of El Morro. But his satisfaction was short-lived. As Olmsted raced up to the walls and parked, there were no signs of police activity here.
The Americans were still taking pictures. They looked up and smiled at the two men hurtling past.
Thatcher and Olmsted did not smile back.
For a moment they hesitated. The office was filled to overflowing with schoolchildren, organizing for a tour. The guides were fully occupied.
“You go that way,” said Thatcher, leading Olmsted to the courtyard. He pointed to stairs on their left as he himself set off toward the right.
Nuns. Some American teenagers. A Puerto Rican family with a small baby.
He did not see Wilfredo Moreno—or the murderer.
He looked up. There were figures on the parapets, figures up by the lighthouse.
“. . . and here,” Moreno was saying authoritatively after surreptitiously memorizing the plaque, “this lighthouse. It is not the original. Do you know what that means, Armando?”
He was not a baby, Armando said.
“Fine. This was built by the Americans. Their guns destroyed the original. So you see . . .”
Suddenly a shadow fell across his path. Moreno turned, then stiffened.
The murderer stood there, ten feet away.
Nothing was said.
“Boys,” said Moreno, his voice suddenly lifeless. “Go down to the courtyard.” He saw the murderer shift. “Go look at the cannonballs.”
Armando and Felipe scampered off.
Moreno remained where he was. He knew quite well he was looking at death. The murderer took a step forward.
Moreno backed away.
Thatcher rounded a corner, struggling for breath. Climbing to the heights of El Morro had been more strenuous than he expected. If Wilfredo Moreno was not here . . .
Thatcher froze.
The tableau before him was nightmarish—brilliant sunshine, the ramparts overlooking the sea and, in the distance, groups of tourists looking, gasping, chattering.
But in the foreground were two men tied to each other by silence and fear.
The murderer took another step.
Thatcher shouted a name against the wind and started forward.
No one heard him.
From the ramp leading to the far side of the lighthouse platform, there was an authoritative clatter. Captain Vallejo and three of his men pounded up into view.
The murderer’s spell was broken. Moreno, with an inarticulate cry, clawed at the wall. The murderer’s head whipped around. Then he pivoted and ran.
“Stop him!”
“Halt!”
“Bring him down!”
They wer
e too late. He was already clambering to the top of the battlement. Another instant and he had pushed himself into space.
Far, far below lay the rocky pits from which El Morro’s stone had been quarried.
Chapter 23.
Stitch, Stitch, Stitch
It was nearly a month since Eric Marten’s suicide.
“I suppose I should have realized earlier that Eric was behind everything,” Cesar Romero said thoughtfully.
“That’s why he laid down such a heavy political smoke screen,” Thatcher replied. “Like a conjuror, he had to rely on misdirection. Most of us were looking the wrong way for too long.”
He looked around the table affably and decided that the overriding character of Seventh Avenue, where they were lunching, had been set for all time. He and Olmsted, Romero and Annie Galiano, were all eating cheese blintzes.
Pete Olmsted was bearing out the official Sloan assessment of his abilities. Slow but sure, they said affectionately down in Commercial Credit, that’s our Pete. He may take a while getting there, but he covers all the ground.
“I don’t see how you can say that,” he protested. “I would have gone on looking that way forever. The one thing that seemed clear about the troubles at Slax was that the Radical Independents were involved.”
Thatcher shook his head. “No. When you stopped to think—and of course Marten tried to keep the pace of events so rapid that you didn’t—what evidence was there linking the radicals to Slax? There was the membership card found in Benito Domínguez’ pocket, there was a sheet of paper pinned to the watchman’s shirt at the warehouse, there was a kidnap note sent to the editor of a newspaper.”
“That is not entirely a fair summary.” Cesar Romero was looking at scenes from the past. “It is easy to see that you were not in Bayamón when several hundred students descended, calling for a strike.”
Automatically, Annie snorted.
“I know the students emerged then, after Slax had made headlines with the Domínguez murder. But let me leave that for a moment and finish this point.” Thatcher turned to Olmsted. “The evidence was all paper evidence, Pete. More important, it was a series of unconfirmed statements by the writer. That’s the kind of evidence you never accept in business dealings. If a corporation tells you that it has fourteen million dollars in assets, you ask for corroboration by an independent auditor. If somebody offers to pay you with a check for ten thousand dollars, you don’t accept it until his bank says that he has funds to cover it.”
Olmsted thought he had spotted a flaw in this reasoning. “Those are self-serving statements. If somebody admits he’s just been fired for incompetence or he’s just come out of jail, he’s not likely to be lying.”
“Has it occurred to you, Pete, that there are different views of self-serving statements? Just as there are different views of laudable actions. Eric Marten was clever enough to realize that the students would not publicly disassociate themselves from the harassment of an American company until too late. In fact, they played into his hands until the roar of protest at the kidnapping.”
Olmsted munched his way to a solemn conclusion. “Good God! I never thought of it, but there are probably lots of students in Cambridge and Berkeley boasting to their parents about taking part in riots they watched from the sidelines.”
“Exactly. The documents linking the radicals to Slax might be valid, but there was nothing on their face to make them so. And one thing we know is that anyone could pick up a good deal of radical material. Membership cards are casually issued at meetings, flyers are handed out on street corners, material is sent through the mail.”
Annie Galiano was enthusiastically scraping sour cream from a small bowl. She paused, spoon in hand, to intervene. “But you can look at something besides the paperwork. Cesar says the kids turned out in force for the strike agitation. But that proves your point, in a way. There was nothing to show they ever heard of Slax until the newspapers carried the story of Domínguez’ murder. There was nothing to show they knew of the fire in Cataño or Harry’s disappearance until after these things were public.”
Thatcher beamed at her. He was in a good mood. That morning the Sloan had severed its ties with Slax Unlimited. For good, he hoped.
“Once you approached the subject with an open mind, there were many questions you could ask.”
Cesar Romero was inclined to take that as personal criticism.
“You mean that I should have asked these questions?” His handsome face clouded. “I think perhaps you are right.”
The others immediately applied themselves to the task of lifting his spirits.
“Christ, Cesar, you had enough on your plate keeping the plant running,” Olmsted said stoutly. “And you did a damn good job.”
Annie took a more belligerent line. “Handling the Lipperts is a full-time job by itself.”
Thatcher thought the best thing he could do was hurry on. “If you had been sitting miles away with nothing else to do, you would have come to the same conclusion I did several weeks later. You would have looked at the character of the sabotage itself.”
“Like all sabotage, it was designed to do as much damage as possible.” Olmsted was so anxious to support the diversion from Romero that he spoke too quickly.
“That’s not true. After all, what are we celebrating today?”
Pete looked puzzled. “We’ve just signed all the papers on the sale of the Bayamón plant by Slax Unlimited,” he said warily.
“Put it another way,” Thatcher advised. “A perfectly standard garment factory, in good working condition, has been sold.”
He might have known that this would awaken partisan instincts.
“We’ve saved the jobs of three hundred and fifty garment workers without a single hour’s layoff,” said Annie Galiano piously. This had been her chief, but not her only, concern during the negotiations.
“Puerto Rico now has a modern garment factory which is fifty percent American-owned and fifty percent Puerto Rican-owned.” Romero’s white teeth glinted briefly as he relaxed into the vernacular: “And I’m in charge of the whole shebang.”
Olmsted happily flipped a blintz onto its side. “And the Sloan has recovered its three million from the purchase price.”
“Yes, yes!” Thatcher might have been waving away a swarm of gnats. “My point, however, was that there is a garment factory to sell, and one without substantial damage. Which is rather surprising, if you accept the theory that it has been the target of sustained attacks by Nadal and his followers. They don’t specialize in subtle methods. Puerto Rican students have thrown bombs before. And with an inside man like Domínguez to help them, they could have leveled the plant. Instead, what do we find? A good deal of harm to finished goods, to supplies, to a warehouse. It was almost as if the factory itself were being carefully preserved.”
“All right, I’ll grant you that,” Annie conceded. “But there had to be an inside man. That business of changing the thread on the bobbins was done by someone who knew his business. Are you telling me Domínguez didn’t do that?”
It was Romero who answered. “I doubt it. I have doubted it since acid was used at the warehouse. What bothered me about the saboteur was his mobility. Domínguez was a foreman. He didn’t have anything to do with the warehouse.”
“Already we have established a good deal about the saboteur,” Thatcher summarized. “He was someone in the garment business, someone who moved freely between Slax’s various sites and someone who did not wish to destroy the basic value of the plant. He does not sound like a promising recruit to Prudencio Nadal’s organization. You could add that Slax was never a reasonable choice for a radical assault. What do students all over the world attack? They concentrate on the big, visible symbols of the establishment they oppose—universities, the military, defense contractors, the government. On balance, I was inclined to decide that this saboteur had nothing to do with the Radical Independents. What, then, was his motive? That brought me to two interesting stateme
nts made by Brad Withers.”
Olmsted goggled.
“Withers?” he repeated unbelievingly.
Before the outside world, Thatcher thought it best to ignore this incredulity.
“Brad,” he said firmly, “in reviewing everything that happened up to the kidnapping, said that the only change, after everything settled down, would be the sale of one garment factory at distress prices. Then you, later on, said that Slax could weather sabotage. It was Zimmerman’s murder that forced the sale of Bayamón. Naturally, that made me think. If there was to be only one significant result, maybe that was what the murderer had in mind all along. Furthermore, it explained the death of Benito Domínguez. As we have all agreed, the radicals didn’t even know anything was going on until his murder. But when they learned of it, they reacted precisely as Eric Marten planned. He had taken Prudencio Nadal’s measure very accurately.”
Annie shoved aside an empty plate. “That,” she pointed out, “isn’t very hard to do. Nadal thought the Domínguez murder was a gift from heaven.”
“I doubt if he’d phrase it that way. And I suppose it was irresistible to him. A Puerto Rican, who has been described by the press as a Radical Independent, has been murdered in an American plant. The implication is plain that management fired the gun. Prudencio Nadal doesn’t stop to think. He swallows the story whole and organizes demonstrations at Bayamón, embracing Domínguez as a martyr to the cause for independence. So far, everything has gone according to Marten’s plan. At this point, he hits two snags.”
“Two?” asked Annie, who did not suffer from false modesty.
Thatcher was gracious. “You, of course, were the big one. But I think Nadal himself was a disappointment to Marten. Oh, I don’t mean in losing his rounds with you. I mean in his generally peaceful approach to the situation. Marten, I am afraid, was overimpressed by Prudencio Nadal’s publicity. He expected some kind of revolutionary ferment—trucks overturned, buildings occupied, all work effectively halted. He did not allow for the fact that Nadal was out of place in a garment factory. Nadal instinctively recognized that tactics appropriate in a university would be wrong at Slax. I know you don’t have a high opinion of the boy, but he recognized from the start that he had to win the sympathy of the workers. He could not count on the carefree indulgence he would get from students. When you close a university, you are not taking bread from the mouths of the students. He knew that the only way he could usefully close Slax was by having the workers do it themselves. And you took care of that, very neatly. All Nadal could do was retreat. And he did. Give him that much credit.”