Magic City

by James W. Hall

  Then again, she knew that wasn’t exactly true.

  She’d done as much herself. Agents in the field exposed who’d had to disappear. She’d overseen the work from Langley tech support. Watching them type and delete. Erase the flickering electronic codes that held the data that gave heft to human identity. A day or two was all it took, tracking down every trace, every footprint in the sand.

  Poof.

  And Hadley S. Waters had access to the best tech masters in the field. Better than anyone Pauline used. He might have already done it. He might have made Pauline Caufield and all her many accomplishments evaporate.

  When making an agent vanish, removing the data was step one. It was step two that chilled her. Carting off the furniture from her house, the books on her shelves, the photographs. Removing the files from her computer, the computer itself, the record albums, the letters. Emptying drawers, stripping clothes from the closets, checkbooks and old tax statements from the desk, the pots and pans, everything down to the last spoon and paper clip.

  Removing all physical presence of Pauline. Making her disappear.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Ten minutes after leaving Cielo’s house, battling his way through midday traffic, Thorn worked north on Le Jeune, a shady two-lane road. A dividing street: mangy Grove on the east side, tidy Gables on the west.

  He peered into the rearview mirror. Still no Jaguar.

  “He’s back there,” Snake said. “Biding his time.”

  “Maybe we lost him. Maybe he gave up.”

  “Dream on.”

  “What do you propose?”

  Snake stared out the windshield, tapping the .38 irritably against his knee.

  Finally Thorn said, “Cielo talked about being back in Havana. The gran proyecto. What do you make of that?”

  Snake gripped his forehead one-handed and squeezed.

  “When it comes to Cubans,” he said, “there is only one grand project. It is the same now as it’s been since the communists came down from the mountains. To return home.”

  “Always that,” Thorn said. “Always that.”

  “My father was no clown,” Snake said. “His men were workers, yes, that’s the only thing Cielo got right. They were common men and he inspired them. He was a lousy father and husband, but he was passionate for his cause. He had a vision. He would have sacrificed anything to return to Cuba.”

  “Look, Snake. We’re closer than we were, but we’re not there. We know their names, the five people. We know they conspired to kill your parents for a CIA operation; at least a couple of the people in the photo were at your house that night. But we don’t know why.”

  “I don’t care why.”

  Thorn braked for a long line of traffic waiting to cross Dixie Highway. They hadn’t discussed a destination.

  Snake looked out at the unmoving traffic ahead of them. He checked his rearview mirror, then threw open his door and climbed out.

  “Hey!”

  The .38 was clutched in his right hand. He raised it to shoulder level as he marched down the row of cars stalled behind them. Horns began to hoot. Thorn hopped out and chased after Snake.

  Ten cars back, the green Jaguar was wedged between a plumbing truck and an empty school bus.

  By the time Thorn caught up, Snake had gotten the drop on Runyon. Still sitting behind the wheel, the old man had his hands raised to his ears.

  Drivers in nearby vehicles were abandoning ship, escaping from the madman with his weapon. There was a strange orderliness to it, like a fire drill these folks had practiced more than once.

  Thorn hustled up as Snake said, “Where’s my goddamn father?”

  “Hey, fuck you, kid. I’m not scared of you or your asshole buddy.”

  Thorn leaned down for a look through the passenger window. Backseat empty. The butt of a chrome pistol visible in the map holder, wedged between his thigh and the door. An easy draw.

  “He’s got a gun.”

  Unfazed, Snake said, “Let me see your mutilated hand.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Raise your right hand where I can see it. Do it now.”

  “You’re in some deep shit, boy.”

  “I was born in deep shit,” Snake said.

  Behind Snake a man edged forward through the deserted cars. He wore jeans and a polo shirt, and had the square-jawed look of an off-duty cop, sworn by law to help. Thorn yelled at the guy to forget about it. He halted for a moment, making the decision of a lifetime, then took a swallow of his own spit and backed off the way he’d come.

  “The hand, Runyon, show me your hand.”

  The old man raised it to the open window. The first two fingers had been hacked away below the middle knuckle.

  “That’s my work, isn’t it?” Snake said.

  “Pull him out of there, we’ll take him with us,” Thorn called. “People are on their cells; cops’ll be here soon. We can sort this out later.”

  Snake ignored him. Fixed on the man who’d abused his sister, a member of the team who’d wasted her and his parents and sent Snake whirling off into a warped corner of the galaxy.

  Snake was daring him to make a play.

  Thorn had seen it too often before. The gestures men made in their final moments seemed to spring directly from the core of their character as if it were impossible for a dying man to lie. They fired off one last true picture of their soul. With Runyon, it was a final act of scorn for Snake and men like him who had never served on the front lines or worked the dark edges of espionage in distant lands. How could civilians measure up to battle-hardened men? It was a mistaken view, of course. Domestic horrors being what they were, men and women without experience of war could grow every bit as hard and dangerous as any Runyon. Just ask Thorn. Or Snake.

  “You only chopped off two of the ten,” Runyon said. “What’re you doing, coming back for the rest, little boy?”

  His hand slipped off the steering wheel and slid to the crack between the seat and door. Doing it openly, an insolent smile for Snake and his kind.

  The first three rounds blew open the chest of Runyon’s green Hawaiian shirt. After that, Thorn looked away.

  Around them Thorn heard the screams of good citizens. Ordinary people who minutes earlier had been running errands, keeping the fridge stocked, meeting their appointments. So many times in the past, from the safe distance of Key Largo, Thorn and his buddies had scoffed at these city folk. Their agitated lives, their callous disregard for the land and sky and natural world around them, as if they were another race of man, inferior in every way. But standing among them, Thorn felt none of that disdain. City people, island people, it made no difference. He felt an upwelling of shame that he had once been so smug and so wrong.

  He turned from the Jaguar and started toward the sidewalk. Making his exit from this mess.

  Then Snake was beside him. He’d taken charge of Runyon’s silenced pistol and used it to poke Thorn in the ribs.

  “Where you think you’re going?”

  “I’m done,” Thorn said.

  Behind them cars were jockeying for the side streets.

  Snake produced a grim smile, the muzzle of the pistol riding up and down the bumps of Thorn’s rib cage.

  “I’m not arguing with you. Walk back to the car, or die right here.”

  Thorn half turned to face him. Snake skipped back a step but kept the pistol steady on Thorn’s chest.

  “You can cut the high-and-mighty bullshit, Thorn. You and me, we’re not any different. I saw you in action yesterday. We’re just a couple of killers out for a joyride.”

  Thorn drew a breath and let it out. He walked back to the car. Snake followed closely.

  In the secret marrow of his bones, Thorn considered himself a peaceful man. Meditative, a student of sunsets and sunrises, and the trajectory of gulls and egrets and the lazy lofting flight of great blue herons. A man who hungered for nothing more than the love of a woman, the tug of a large fish on his line. Simple shit.

&nbs
p; But the years had proved a steady contradiction. No doubt about it anymore. Thorn had been born under a doomed planetary alignment. A dozen times before, he’d been on this same steep grade. Knew the feel of the tipping point—when his trot became a gallop, the gallop grew to a crazy hurtling rush, and by God, once again he found himself sprinting over the suicidal edge, into empty air, sailing down into whatever waited below.

  Snake slid in behind the wheel, and with the pistol in one hand, he whipped the Audi through a U-turn.

  Sirens howled in the distance. Snake drove for ten minutes until the sirens were lost in the traffic noise. He swung into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. He spent a moment reloading his pistol from bullets he’d been carrying in his pockets. Then he told Thorn to get out.

  “What now?”

  “I think you’re right, we should work on the why.” Snake nodded at the pay phone. “Let’s find a plumber.”

  “Humberto? The man’s been dead for forty years.”

  “We Hispanics tend to carry on our family business.”

  “We don’t know if Berasategui even had a family. And if he did, what’re they going to tell us we don’t already know?”

  “The man killed my sister. I’d like to know who he was.”

  Snake followed him to the phone, and Thorn leafed through the Yellow Pages. Ran his finger down the column of plumbing businesses. He saw his hand shaking. His body was flushed with adrenaline. The pistol’s racket still in his ear, the big man dying behind the wheel. Thorn took a breath and stilled the shiver. The day was young.

  There was one plumber with that uncommon name.

  H. Berasategui. South End Plumbing. Cute.

  “Call it,” Snake said.

  A woman answered, and Thorn asked if Humberto was in.

  There was no one there by that name. He must have made a mistake.

  “No Humberto Berasategui?”

  She thought about it for a second, then yelled in Spanish to someone in the next room and momentarily a man’s voice replaced hers.

  “There’s no Humberto,” he said. “There’s a Danny.” The man was impatient, on the verge of hanging up.

  “Yellow Pages say H. Berasategui.”

  “Nobody calls him that. Like I said, his name is Danny.”

  “Was his father Humberto Berasategui?”

  The man spoke as though delivering a blow: “His father’s dead.”

  “Murdered forty years ago?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Detective Mark Harris.” Thorn’s new career, impersonating cops.

  The man was quiet for a moment. Then more Spanish yelled back and forth. He fumbled with the phone, came back on.

  “Danny’s on a job.”

  “I’m working the murder of Humberto Berasategui.”

  “Working the murder? Some goddamn little kid did it. All that was forty years ago, for christsakes.”

  “There’s new evidence. I’d like to speak to Danny.”

  The man considered it for several seconds. Thorn stood in Snake’s shadow and watched the traffic pass.

  “He’s on a job,” the man said. “I’ll beep him. He wants to talk, it’s his call.”

  “I’ll give you my cell.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Three minutes later Thorn’s cell phone rang. Danny Berasategui had a quiet voice with an uncertain catch in his speech, like a boy summoned to the principal’s office. In the background Thorn heard a woman’s giddy laughter. She sounded so close to the phone, she might have been nuzzling the plumber’s neck.

  Thorn kept it short and gruff. Repeating what he’d said to the guy on the phone.

  Danny considered it for a moment, then covered the receiver and asked the woman a question. She must have given her assent.

  Forty-three Star Island Drive was protected by three sets of security gates. The first manned by a red-faced guard with cheap sunglasses and a cheaper grin.

  “We’re here to see Danny Berasategui.” Thorn gave him the address.

  The guard didn’t have to check his book to know there was no one by that name anywhere on that posh island.

  “He’s a plumber,” Thorn said, “working a job out here.”

  “A plumber? I’m going to buzz you through on the okay of a plumber?”

  “Ring the house, see what the owner says.”

  He did, and the owner wanted to speak to Thorn.

  It was a woman with such a purr in her voice, on a normal day Thorn would’ve felt a tingle in his gut.

  “Danny’s plunging my toilet,” she said.

  “Too much information,” said Thorn.

  He handed the phone back to the guard, the woman sent her furry voice into the guard’s ear, and a second later the steel post rose.

  The man bent to Snake’s window and delivered his parting advice.

  “No one likes a smart-ass.”

  “Wisdom for the ages,” Thorn said.

  Star Island was a dredged-up lozenge of marl and sand, so neatly sculpted and landscaped that Thorn found his hand flattening the front of his rumpled shirt.

  Movie stars lived there, rock stars, tennis stars, a TV legend or two, and the reigning basketball superman, all planted cheek to jowl, all sharing the diamond light radiating from the bay and the white distant glow of the towers of Miami Beach. The woman Thorn talked to on the phone had probably flushed a sack of gold coins down her toilet by mistake. A reason to summon Danny.

  At the second checkpoint, a black man in a Nassau cop’s uniform saluted and waved them through his gate. Word had passed along. On the eastern edge of the island they located number 43, a standard-issue villa, Mediterranean style. Ten thousand square feet of view and all the other necessities. Stepping from the private guardhouse was a young woman in safari clothes and a pith helmet, a handgun strapped to her waist. She examined them through the windshield, then pointed into the walls of the estate.

  “All these guards,” Thorn said. “Somebody’s expecting a revolution.”

  Snake pulled up behind a pink Rolls and got out.

  Thorn was imagining Mae West in a half-open silk bathrobe, but the twenty-something woman who whisked down the steps and met them in the drive was as emaciated as a Death Valley distance runner. Thorn could never be sure about such women, whether they were super-fit or anorexic. She wore pink shorts and a matching halter top. Her childish mouth was set in a pout as if Danny’s plumbing skills had not quite satisfied her needs.

  Lugging his hamper of tools, Danny Berasategui was a few steps behind. A man in his early forties, well built, in a white company shirt and stubby blue shorts. He wore a phone on his belt and several gold chains around his throat, as if jewelry were one of his accepted forms of payment.

  “Would you like to come inside?” she said in her downy voice. “Have a drink. Mojito, or something.”

  “We can’t stay,” Snake said.

  “Pity,” the woman said. “Which of you was on the phone?”

  Thorn raised a guilty hand.

  “So you’re the witty one,” she said. “I enjoy witty men.”

  “We’re always in great demand.”

  She led them to a gazebo in a grove of palms and said she’d let them talk in private. As she passed Thorn on the way back to the house, she trickled her fingers across his arm.

  “You know where I am,” she said. And headed away into luxury.

  “Okay,” Danny said when she was gone. “What the hell is this about?”

  Snake said, “Your father, was he a communista?”

  Danny stared at Snake for a moment and slowly got to his feet.

  “Now, now,” Thorn said. “He meant no offense.”

  “My father was no goddamn communist,” Danny said. “I don’t care what the cops said. He hated communists. Hated them with a passion.”

  “So noted,” said Thorn.

  “What else do you know about him?” Snake said.

  Danny sat back down. He was shaking his head.


  “Who did he work for?” Snake said. “Just tell me that.”

  Danny turned his eyes toward the waterway, where a white Hatteras yacht was steaming north, a redhead on the bow, waving in their direction. All the rich folks so happy to see one another.

  Danny swallowed and settled himself on the white gazebo bench.

  “You guys aren’t cops.”

  “True,” Thorn said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Interested parties.”

  Danny considered that a moment, his hard look relaxing by degrees.

  “There’s nothing to solve,” he said. “A kid killed my dad. Some little boy with a machete.”

  Snake sat across from him, and his tongue wet the corners of his mouth.

  “Got to be hard losing a dad at that age. What were you, two, three?”

  “I wasn’t born yet. I was in the womb. I never met my old man. But hard, yeah, sure it’s hard.”

  Snake nodded and looked back toward the house.

  “Did your father do anything besides plumbing?”

  Danny kicked a toe at his bag of tools and said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m asking a simple question. Did he have another job? Another employer?”

  “Who the fuck are you guys?”

  “I’m the kid,” Snake said. “The one with the machete. That was me.”

  This time Danny popped to his feet. Thorn braced himself to pull the two apart, but Berasategui closed his eyes and must have been weighing his own hurt against Snake’s, because when he opened his eyes again, he filled his chest with air and blew it out, then planted his butt again on the bench.

  “So what is this? You here to fuck me up?”

  “No,” Snake said. “Just to learn a few things. Did he work for someone on the side? Moonlighting?”

  Danny looked at Snake for a long moment.

  “I can’t believe it. You’re the kid. That fucking kid.”

  “I am.”

  For a second or two Thorn thought Danny might begin to sob, but he fought off the emotion and turned his face to the splash of sun on the bay.

  “Berasategui,” Danny said. “It’s a Basque name.”

  “So?”

  Danny cleared his throat and rubbed his lips with the back of his hand, as if he meant to erase any traces of lipstick he might have missed.