by Ross Thomas
Across the road from Yarn, Richard Tighe stepped out from behind some of Citron's coffee plants. He moved over to Blaine, nudged him with a toe, reholstered a short-barreled revolver, and looked at Yarn. “What’d he say? I didn’t quite get it.”
“He said, ‘Fuck you, turkey,’“Yarn said.
“That’ll go down on my list of famous last words.” Tighe looked at Citron, who stood near the Fiesta, his knees trembling. His hands were also trembling, but he had jammed them down into his pants pockets. There was apparently nothing to be done about his knees.
“I don’t suppose you remember us?” Tighe said.
“I remember your voices,” Citron said, thinking that his own voice sounded high and scratchy and probably frightened. “I’m good at voices.”
“You mean when you threw us the bouquet in the Keats girl's apartment?”
Citron nodded.
Tighe looked at Yarn. “Hell, I don’t think we said more than five or six words, did we?”
Yarn shrugged. “Like he says, he's good at voices.”
“But you don’t know who we really are, do you?”
“One of you claims he's Yarn and the other claims he's Tighe, but you’re not really because Tighe and Yarn were buried back over there about three hundred yards.”
“I don’t mean who we pretend to be,” Yarn said. “I mean who we really are. You don’t know that, do you?”
Citron wordlessly shook his head.
“We’re your baby-sitters, friend,” said Tighe with a chuckle. Yarn nodded happily at the description. “That's right, your babysitters.”
“Then Mommy must have sent you.”
“She gets worried about you, Morgan.”
“What about him?” Citron said, nodding toward the dead Blaine. “Who sent him?”
“You’ve made a lot of enemies, you and Haere,” Yarn said. “Any one of them could’ve sent him.”
“Who was he?”
“Him?” Yarn said, moved over a few steps, and stared down at the body of the man who had killed Mr. Eckys. “Well, that's the Hallmark.” He looked up. “What name was he using?”
“Blaine,” Citron said. “James G. Blaine.”
“His real name was Livingstone Creek, although everyone always called him either Stony or the Hallmark.” Tighe paused. “He was pretty good.”
“That still doesn’t tell me who he was.”
“Well,” Yarn said, “the Hallmark here was the one they always sent when they wanted to send their very best.”
They walked Citron away from his Fiesta and down the rutted trail and around a curve to where a green BMW 320i was parked. They went past the BMW and the only comment they gave it was when Tighe said, “The Hallmark always did like a nice machine.”
Around another curve in the trail was parked a dusty four-door white Volkswagen. Tighe opened the rear door and indicated that Citron should get in. “Ours,” he said. “He followed you and we followed him.”
“I thought he was supposed to be the best,” Citron said as he got into the rear seat.
“We’re the best,” Tighe said, getting in beside him.
Yarn slipped in behind the wheel of the VW and backed it down the trail until he came to a spot where it was wide enough to make the turnaround. They drove in silence along the bumpy dirt road until Citron said, “You can drop me off at my hotel. The Inter-Continental.”
“Afraid not,” Tighe said.
“I thought you were supposed to be my baby-sitters.”
“Oh, we are, we are. But we don’t want to wind up doing life in Leavenworth—or Atlanta either, for that matter, and neither does Gladys.”
“Especially Gladys,” Yarn said.
“So what happens to me?”
“Well, we just might have to tuck you away for a while,” Tighe said. “
Where?”
“That's what we’re gonna talk to the general about,” Tighe said. “They’ve got a pretty nice jail right here in the capital, and then there's another one over on the east coast that's not so nice. Sort of hot over there. On the east coast.”
“No jail,” Citron said.
“That's right, I almost forgot,” Yarn said. “You just got out, didn’t you, about a year ago? In Africa.”
“Yes,” Citron said. “Africa.”
“Tell me something,” Tighe said. “Was that chief spear-chucker over there really a cannibal like they all claimed?”
“Yes.”
“No kidding? Well, I don’t know what kind of jail he ran, but I imagine it's going to seem like the Ritz compared to the one over on the east coast here.”
“No jail,” Citron said.
“You hear that?” Tighe asked. “Morgan here doesn’t like the idea of spending two, three, maybe four years in some beaner jail.”
“Can’t say I blame him,” Yarn said.
“Of course,” Tighe continued, “you may not have to go. It all depends.” “
On what?”
“On how much you know.”
“I don’t know anything.”
Tighe sighed heavily. “Morgan, let me tell you something. For your own good. All Gladys said was that we’ve got to keep you alive. That's all. I mean, Gladys is probably just one hell of a mother, but for some reason I don’t think she's the type who’d spend the rest of her life in the slammer for her baby boy, although, like I said, she really must be some mom.”
“But it's not up to us, you’ve got to understand,” Yarn said.
“Who's it up to?”
“The general.”
“You see, Morgan,” Tighe said, “the general's going to want to know what you know.”
“Very little,” Citron said. “Almost nothing.”
“Well, I believe you, and Yarn up there, he believes you, but the general, well, he's going to want to take you down in the cellar and beat the shit out of you and stick hot wires up your dong just to make sure.”
“A very cautious guy, the general,” Yarn said.
“And mean. About the only thing meaner is a Cuban.”
“Or a Uruguayan. They’re pretty mean, too.”
“So what do you want?” Citron said.
“Tell us what you know,” Tighe said. “Tell us what you know, and what you think you know, and what you’ve guessed, and even what you think you’ve guessed. Then we’ll tell the general that all you’ve done is to make some pretty wild guesses and we don’t see any reason to keep you in the pokey for more than a month at the most, and no reason at all to take you down in the cellar and shove hot wires up your dong.”
“A month,” Citron said. “I’m not sure I can take a month.”
“What about the hot wires?”
“No, I couldn’t take that either.”
“Then let's hear it,” Yarn said from the front seat. “Your version.” He pulled the car to a stop, turned off the engine, and twisted around in the seat.
Citron took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You suckered them, didn’t you?” he said. “Langley, I mean.”
There was a long silence until Yarn said, “That's right. We suckered them.”
CHAPTER 31
Draper Haere walked back to the Inter-Continental from the American embassy. It was a four-mile walk that led him past the Presidential Palace. He paused to examine the bullet holes in the wall where the President had been executed and wondered if the generals might someday commemorate the spot with a plaque.
Haere walked slowly, because it was hot and because the leisurely pace enabled him to gawk at whatever caught his interest: a three-hundred-year-old Spanish colonial house, a pair of eleven-year-old prostitutes, a forty-one-year-old Buick Roadmaster taxi, and a man in his late twenties who played the guitar while his five-year-old son sang a sad song about how desperately poor they were and held out an International Harvester cap into which no one but Haere dropped any money.
Across the square from the cathedral in a large crowded outdoor cafe, Haere found a vacant table and orde
red a cup of coffee. He was halfway through the cup when a man sat down beside him. The man was young, somewhere around twenty-three or twenty-four, and wore a white short-sleeved shirt and dark pants. Haere thought he looked vaguely familiar.
“Naturally, you do not remember me,” the man said in English which had almost no accent.
“You look familiar.”
“Really? I’m surprised.”
“Why?”
“Busboys are rarely remembered.”
It came to Haere then. “At the hotel last night. You replaced the napkins that didn’t need replacing.”
The man smiled politely as though Haere had remarked upon the weather. “We are being watched. In a moment a taxi will arrive. I will get into it. You will remain here. They will follow me. Agreed?”
Haere nodded. “What's the problem?”
“Please listen carefully,” the man said and looked up at the sky as if to check on the chance of rain. “The man your Mr. Citron met with this morning has been murdered. Smile, please.”
Haere made himself smile. “And Citron?”
The man smiled back. “He was taken to the Presidential Palace by two North Americans. In their early thirties. They shot and killed the man who murdered our leader. Please laugh a little.”
Haere chuckled and nodded.
“Very good,” the busboy said. “The man who killed our leader arrived with you on the flight yesterday.”
“He called himself Dr. Blaine.”
“We have reason to believe he was a hired killer, one without politics, who was sent to kill both you and Mr. Citron. Another small laugh, if you can.”
Haere chuckled appreciatively. “The two North Americans who took Citron to the Presidential Palace?” he asked, still chuckling.
The busboy grinned broadly and wagged his head. “One had blue eyes, one had brown. That's all I know.” He looked at his watch. “Please remain here until I’ve gone.”
Haere tried, but failed, to keep smiling as the busboy rose with a grin and made his way through the tables to the sidewalk. A taxi pulled up. Haere noted that it was the same 1941 Buick Roadmaster he had seen earlier. The busboy reached for the rear door handle. Hehad his hand on it when two men in open-necked shirts, sport coats, and blue jeans moved up to him from behind and jammed short-barreled revolvers into his back. The busboy tried to wrench the Buick's door open, but the old taxi was already pulling away when the two men with the revolvers began firing.
One man shot the busboy three times; the other man shot him twice. The old Buick sped away and a woman screamed. Some cafe patrons rose and began to race toward the cathedral, either to hide or to pray. Others ducked beneath the cafe tables. There were more screams and shouts. One man cursed steadily in a low, calm voice. Haere watched as one of the two gunmen knelt by the fallen busboy and shot him through the neck. Haere wondered why, since the bus-boy already seemed quite dead.
The kneeling man rose and said something to the other gunman. Both turned to look at Haere. Still staring at him, they slowly put their short-barreled revolvers away in small belt holsters. They entered the cafe, made their way through the tables, and stopped at Haere's. He saw that they were younger than he had thought, neither of them much more than twenty-five. Their black eyes seemed bottomless. Neither wore any identifiable expression, although one of them, Haere noticed, was a mouth breather. The mouth breather was the one who had knelt and shot the busboy through the neck.
“Do you understand Spanish?” the mouth breather asked.
Haere nodded. “A little.”
“Good. Leave our country. Today.”
“Do you understand that?” the other one asked.
“Yes,” Haere said. “I understand.”
“Good,” the mouth breather said. They stared at Haere for a moment longer, then turned and walked back through the tables to the sidewalk and over to where the busboy still lay. A new green Volvo sedan pulled up. The driver popped the trunk latch. The two gunmen bent down, picked up the dead busboy, and folded him away into the Volvo's trunk. They slammed the lid down, turned, gave Haereanother thoughtful look, and then climbed into the rear seat. The Volvo sped away.
Haere rose. His knees felt as if they were going to give way, so he leaned on the table, his head down, gulping great gasping breaths. When the trembling finally subsided, he looked up. People were staring at him. They had all edged away until none was closer than twenty feet. Haere moved slowly through the cafe tables and onto the sidewalk. He looked down at the spot where the dead busboy had fallen. There was a large thick smear of blood. Haere stared down at it for several seconds, then slowly turned and started walking west toward the Inter-Continental.
In the Presidential Palace, Morgan Citron had been kept waiting for almost an hour in an anteroom just outside a pair of sixteen-foot-high doors through which Tighe and Yarn had gone. Citron did not wait alone. Seated across the room from him were a young uniformed captain and an even younger lieutenant, both armed with M-16 rifles. The rifles were pointed at Citron, one at his head, the other at his stomach. The fingers of the two young officers were on the triggers. The safeties were off. Citron sat virtually motionless, remembering that the last time he had gone through such a pair of doors, he had been given a diamond. This time he expected no gift.
One of the sixteen-foot-high doors opened and Tighe appeared. “Okay, Morgan.”
Citron rose and followed Tighe through the immense door and into a room that was too large for any conceivable purpose other than a state ball. It was a dark room, made even darker by the heavy curtains that covered a long row of windows. Citron suspected the windows looked out over the grounds that led to the street. The entire room was paneled in a wood so dark it seemed almost black. The paneling only added to the gloom.
Citron followed Tighe across several large, old, and very expensivelooking oriental rugs and past a long library table that held the current issues of the Economist, Business Week, Time, National Geographic, and People. Citron read the magazine's names as he moved past the table and toward the desk at the room's far end. The desk was the size of a dining table that would seat twelve comfortably and seemed to have been carved out of the same dark wood used to panel the room.
On the front right corner of the desk, his legs crossed, his hands clasping one knee, perched Colonel-General Rafael Carrasco-Cortes. Three leather armchairs were pulled up in front of the desk. Yarn was seated in one of them. Carrasco-Cortes smiled at Citron and gestured toward the center chair. “Please,” he said. Citron took the center chair and Tighe sat down next to him.
“So,” the General said. “You are Gladys's son, hmm?”
Citron nodded. The general sighed. “Whatever are we to do with you, hmm?”
“Why not put me on the next plane out?”
The general smiled and eased himself off the edge of the desk. He was not wearing a uniform. Instead, he wore a dark-blue pinstripe suit with a vest and a white shirt and a blue-and-gray-striped tie. As he moved around behind the desk, Citron wondered if the general and Draper Haere bought their suits at the same store.
The general sat down, opened a drawer, took out a piece of Kleenex, removed his rimless bifocals, and began to polish them. Without the glasses, his eyes looked almost bewildered. Citron knew that they weren’t.
Still polishing away, the general said, “I’m going to ask you to do something, Morgan.” He looked up. “I hope you don’t mind if I call you Morgan, but I’ve known your remarkable mother for so many, many years that calling you Mr. Citron makes me feel—well, old.” He smiled and slipped the glasses back on.
“What’re you going to ask me to do?” Citron said.
“I’m going to ask you to tell me exactly what you told our two friends here earlier.”
Citron looked at Yarn. “This isn’t quite the way it was supposed to go.”
Yarn shrugged. “All bets are off.”
“You see, Morgan,” the general said, “what I’m trying to decide is whet
her to have you shot. I must confess that at the moment I’m leaning in that direction. This little session here will be, in effect, your trial—although I suppose court-martial would be more accurate.”
Tighe turned to Citron with a grin. “I’m your defense attorney.”
Citron nodded, turned to Yarn, and said, “What’re you—the prosecutor?”
“Right,” Yarn said.
“What's the charge?”
“We’re going for espionage and see what happens.”
The general took a large gold watch from his vest pocket, snapped its cover open, and placed it on the desk. “Could we begin with your statement, Morgan, hmm? I do have a rather busy schedule today.”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?”
“None,” Tighe said.
“You put up a great defense.”
Tighe shrugged. Citron looked at the general, who was now leaning back in his chair, his hands steepled in front of him. “All right,” Citron said, “I’ll tell you what I know, what I think I know, and what I suspect. A lot of it's conjecture.”
“Of course,” the general said and nodded encouragingly.
“After you lined the President up in front of the wall out there and shot him, you found that the coffers were bare. The country was bankrupt and you needed money. As I recall, before your coup the country was divided, mostly for administrative purposes, I guess, into two states or regions—the Eastern Region and the Western Region. You carved it up into thirty-two regions and parceled them out to theother generals according to seniority. You kept the largest region—the capital—for yourself.”
“All this is common knowledge,” the general said.
“A lot of what I know is only that—common knowledge.”