by Marc Olden
The two black distributors were conveniently out of town, and Bad Red, that shifty prick, was pushing hard to complete the buy. Neil had been ordered to stall. But Bad Red still pushed, as though he wanted to do the deal before Conquest and Shelton returned and found out their names were being used for a ripoff.
Neil didn’t like missing this chance. However, the front office was right. He also didn’t like having his informant flown down to Miami. He was responsible for Lydia, she was his snitch. Let Miami get their own.
But that wasn’t the problem. It was a good idea for her to go down and talk to Lonnie Conquest. Better she do that than Neil lose a hundred and ten thousand dollars. Okay, so he was using Lydia to cover his own ass. Wasn’t that how the game was played? So why was he feeling uncomfortable about Lydia going to Miami?
Walker Wallace said, “Neil, you’ll tell Lydia.” It wasn’t a request.
“What’s her cover? I don’t want her going down there and getting burned.”
“Understand. Give it some thought, see what you can come up with.”
“She can tell Conquest she’s on a run, she’s a mule. He won’t check, but just in case, when she meets him, she ought to be holding. She can meet some of our people down there, and they can give her confiscated narcotics. If she has to, she can flash that on Conquest.”
Walker Wallace nodded. “I like it. Like it a lot. Before you leave here this morning, I’ll check it out, get you an approval. She shouldn’t be holding much, because she’s not that strong. Say, no more than a key.”
“Key’s fine. If we find out Bad Red’s lying, then what? I can’t just back out of the deal. He’ll be suspicious, me not buying from him while still trying to cop from everybody else.”
Walker Wallace frowned. “You would bring that up, wouldn’t you? Jesus, I ain’t got a thought in the world on that one.”
Katey raised his hand as though in grammar school. “I do. We go ahead. But we set him up. We tell him we’ll do the deal, but instead, we kinda fix him.”
“How?” Walker Wallace knew about Katey’s nickname of Wile E. Coyote.
“Workin’ on that. Thing is to get him to commit, to try the rip. From then on, he’s mine. I mean ours. Soon as he tries a takeoff, we fall on him one way or another. I mean, after all, ain’t we a bunch of bad Italians?”
Kirk Holmes patted his afro, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “We sure am.” He winked at Katey, who grinned back and waved.
Walker Wallace said, “All right. Think on Bad Red, how to handle it. If he’s righteous, no problem. If he’s not, that’s the problem. No bust if we can help it. We do that, and the trail comes to an end. That means we done run out of bread crumbs.”
Neil looked up from reading Mas Betancourt’s file. “And Lydia gets burned.”
Walker Wallace held up a chubby palm. “We’ll take care of your lady, don’t worry.” He frowned at Neil. “She cookin’ you rice and beans or somethin’?”
Neil passed the file to Walter Dankin, standing next to him. “No rice and beans. But if she’s talking good noise, then we got a chance to get us an importer.”
Walker Wallace patted his thinning red hair, eyes still on Neil Shire. “Yeah. We got us that chance, all right.” Then he exhaled, looking around the room. “Gentlemen, any questions?”
Walter Dankin, a small, twenty-eight-year-old agent who looked five years younger, said, “Betancourt doesn’t have a bust for a parking ticket.”
Walker Wallace snorted in disgust. “But informants say he’s killed over a hundred men since he left Cuba’s sunny shores sixteen years ago. What we know and what we can go into court and prove are two different things. Fucking courts. It’s like a revolving door. We bring ’em in, they turn ’em out, and everybody wonders why you can’t walk the streets after six o’clock. Jesus, I should open a delicatessen or something.”
“Open a whorehouse,” said Kirk Holmes. “I got me an income-tax refund, and I’d just as soon blow the bread on good times before my wife comes back from her mother’s.”
“Yeah, sure. Everybody read that file. Our boy Mas has had one interesting life.”
Neil Shire had read the file six times in the past two weeks. He knew more than a little about Mas Pizarro Betancourt y Cortez.
Mas Betancourt was born fifty-six years ago in Guanabacoa, Cuba, a city to the east of Havana. His family was poor, his father and mother immigrants from Estremadura, one of Spain’s poorest areas. Estremadura was the birthplace of Pizarro, who conquered the Incas of Peru; of Balboa, one of the first white men to cross America and reach the Pacific Ocean; of Cortez, who defeated the Aztecs and conquered Mexico; of De Soto, who discovered Florida.
These were the conquistadores, the conquerors of the New World. Hard, brutal men. Mas Betancourt’s father always reminded him that their blood flowed in Mas’s veins and must never be betrayed. At seventeen, Mas, strong, athletic, and true to the tradition of the conquistadores, was fighting and beating grown men in illegal bare-knuckle boxing matches held at night in barns on the sugar plantations outside of Guanabacoa. The handful of pesos he won helped feed his family of nine.
At eighteen, he left home to enlist in the army, going to Havana. In the military he distinguished himself as an outstanding boxer and jai-alai player. In Cuba, where athletes were traditionally lauded and honored, Mas received quick promotions, money, and gifts from the proud officers in his regiment, who often bet on him and won.
When he was twenty-four and still in the army, he ran into serious trouble. After one jai-alai match he left with a twenty-eight-year-old American woman who had been impressed by his grace and skill during the game. The four days they spent together at a seaside resort a few miles from Havana almost cost Mas Betancourt his life.
No one could save the woman.
She was the mistress of an American mafioso, an important man in the Mafia-controlled night life of Havana. In return for huge payoffs, the Batista government had allowed the Mafia to assume control of the gambling casinos in Havana, as well as control of top nightclubs and tourist hotels. In addition, heroin from Europe was brought into Cuba, then smuggled into the United states by Mafia couriers, some of whom were world-famous entertainers appearing at plush Havana hotels.
No one could save the woman.
She was gang-raped, then taken out to sea in a motorboat, placed in an oil drum, and the drum dumped overboard. To make sure it sank, two men emptied automatic rifles into it
Mas Betancourt’s army friends saved him.
He was immediately transferred to the secret police. That made him untouchable. And to emphasize this, he was made responsible for collecting payoffs due officers in the secret police. The payoffs came from two hotels and three casinos operated by the man whose mistress Mas had taken to bed.
In the secret police, the blood of the conquistadores in Mas Betancourt began to exert itself. He had little time for athletics now. For the first time in his life, Mas tasted real power. He became insatiable for it.
He learned how to use fear to force people to betray each other. He learned to use torture to efficiently bring anyone’s mind and body under total domination. He learned that politics was only the extension of one man’s will. And a man with a strong will could extend it anywhere.
He worked closely with the Batista government, learning of its liaisons with the American government, American business, and American underworld. And during all that time, Mas climbed higher in the Cuban power structure. There was money to be made and women to be enjoyed.
In his mid-thirties, he became a colonel in the secret police and fell deeply in love with the beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter of one of Havana’s wealthiest families. Over family opposition, they married and enjoyed a carefree happiness. That happiness ended when Fidel Castro, a fat, talkative lawyer addicted to ice cream led his barbudos, his bearded ones, in a successful overthrow of the corrupt and vicious Fulgencio Batista government.
The hated secret polic
e were marked for certain torture and death if captured by Castro. In the chaos that dropped on Havana like a sudden plague, members of Batista’s government as well as the secret police fought to save their lives. Mas and his beautiful young wife, Pilar, now had two small sons, and Mas, who before had lived only for himself, now made every effort to get his family out of Havana before Castro’s revolutionaries surrounded the capital and made escape impossible.
He needed money.
Despite the money he had made in graft and payoffs, Mas had almost no cash. When each of Mas’s sons had been born, Pilar’s father had made the couple a gift of five hundred acres of excellent farmland in Oriente province.
One thousand acres, and Mas had invested every dollar he owned in the land, hiring men, buying equipment, planting, and making improvements. He could have become a wealthy man had it not been for Fidel Castro. Instead, Mas was now forced to run for his life and leave the land behind. The land now belonged to Castro, and Mas was an impoverished refugee.
That’s when Vera Sosa came to him. She was a lean, dark, intense Cuban woman involved with the American underworld in Cuba. She was also an informant for the Cuban secret police, reporting to Mas.
She told him that the Americans who had fled Castro had left a lot of money behind them. Rather than risk losing it or having it confiscated by Batista’s soldiers, the Americans had buried cash—dollars and Cuban pesos. They expected to return when Castro was deposed or killed. Vera Sosa knew where over two million dollars was buried.
She was afraid she might be killed if she went for the money by herself. If Mas went with her, they could split it. He agreed.
On a December night he and his family left Havana, planning not to return. The stories and rumors about the fast-approaching Castro army of fatigue-clad revolutionaries were frightening. It was said that some of the hated secret police who fell into Castro’s hands were made to run naked into mine fields until they exploded into spraying blood and flying pieces of flesh and white bone.
In the jeep with Mas, his wife, and sons was Vera Sosa, wrapped in a twenty-thousand-dollar mink coat despite the humid night. There was no luggage, nothing to arouse the suspicion of trigger-happy soldiers at roadblocks or roaming mobs looking for easy targets of opportunity. Vera didn’t plan to return to Havana either.
She had made arrangements for a small boat to take all of them to Florida. There would be plenty of money to pay for their passage.
Fifteen miles outside of Havana, they found the dark, abandoned hotel and turned into its driveway. Mas stopped, and Vera Sosa got out alone, walking ahead and disappearing in the darkness.
Mas waited, an American .45 on the seat between his legs. In the back seat, his wife kept an arm around each of their tiny, bright-eyed sons.
When Mas heard the first click, he knew he’d been betrayed.
He recognized a bolt sliding into place on a rifle. Screaming to his wife and sons to crouch low, he started the jeep, frantically trying to back out of the driveway and reach the road.
Gunfire exploded out of the darkness, orange streaks of flame speeding toward the jeep.
The jeep was hit. Its windshield instantly cobwebbed and shattered, filling Mas’s lap with broken glass. Pain stabbed him in the neck and both arms, and the jeep sped backward until its front tires exploded. Then the speeding jeep went out of control.
It swerved and turned on its side. Pilar Betancourt screamed, feeling her children fly from her arms.
Mas was thrown from the jeep, landing hard on concrete. Wounded and too dazed to crawl away, he lay in the shadow of the jeep, now unbalanced and teetering on its side. It fell on him, crushing his legs. Vera Sosa had been a double agent, an informant for Castro as well as for Batista’s secret police.
Both of Mas Betancourt’s tiny sons had been killed. One had been shot in the head, the other thrown from the jeep, fracturing his skull on the concrete driveway. Pilar had a broken arm.
Doctors told Mas Betancourt he would never walk again. But he was descended from conquistadores. After six months in a Havana hospital, both legs still in casts, he and Pilar were allowed to leave Havana for America. Mas needed all of his strength and massive willpower to drag himself around on crutches.
But he did it, though pain never left him. The agony was excruciating. He fell, crawled, dragged himself to his feet, and began again. Pilar wept, watching him as she had once watched her two sons. For Mas, the pain became bearable because he always thought of Vera Sosa and what he would do to her when he found her.
In Miami, Mas was contacted by the CIA, who wanted his help in planting agents in Havana. He had been a leader in Cuba, a colonel in the secret police, and among the Cuban aliens he was still a man to respect. The CIA paid him, and it gave him money to buy guns, to recruit other Cubans. Some of that money never left Mas’s hands.
The CIA asked him to travel, and he did. Mexico, Central America, North America, anywhere the CIA felt there were Cubans to be used against Castro.
In his travels, Mas Betancourt renewed acquaintances. Most of his talking was done with Cubans involved with narcotics. Dope was the future, and a man with Mas’s talent for organization and leadership had an unlimited future.
Castro had spread Cuban exiles throughout the world; CIA money had put Mas in touch with those exiles. He now had his contacts, the network he would need. In narcotics, Mas had chosen the easiest way to money and power. His body was crippled but his brain and spirit were that of a conquistador.
He dealt in guns, in counterfeit money, but all of this was only a prelude to dope. He began in Miami but soon moved to New York, the largest drug market in the world. In his years of dealing in dope in America, Mas Betancourt had ordered the deaths of a hundred and fifty-three men. During that time he also killed Vera Sosa.
She had fallen out with Castro and was forced to leave Cuba. In Miami, she contacted the Cuban community for help, and word soon reached Mas Betancourt in New York. He flew down to Miami, where he spent three days watching his men torture Vera Sosa before she finally died.
Neil Shire knew a lot about Mas Betancourt. The man was an importer dealing in millions of dollars of dope a year. He was devoted to his wife. And he killed people.
Walker Wallace asked Neil to remain in his office, dismissing Katey, Kirk Holmes, and Walter Dankin. Shutting the door, Wallace said, “Neil, I’ve got to ask this. Just a feeling. You and Lydia …”
Neil had expected it. Wallace, old Sure Shot, had looked at him in a funny way early in the meeting, and just a few seconds too long.
“It’s cool, believe me, it’s cool.”
Wallace held his palms up as though testing for rain. “You tell me it’s cool, I believe you. Just remember, out there on the street you ain’t got no friends. A snitch works because the snitch is in trouble. They’ll betray anybody to stay on the outside, and that, buddy boy, includes you. Okay, I’ve said it, now get the hell outta here, and, Neil …”
“Yeah?”
“We’ll watch her. Up here or down there, she’s covered.”
“Sure.”
Back at his desk, Neil stared at the unfinished report in his typewriter. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t always protect an informant. He knew of at least a dozen informants who had believed they were covered, too.
Protected. Safe.
They were dead now, covered by dirt and a coffin lid.
They had been found out, then burned. Some of the deaths had been horrible. Like Vera Sosa.
Neil knew of someone who had informed on a Mafia family. Twenty years later, the informant had walked into a Queens bar thinking bygones were bygones.
Within minutes, he was shot to death.
And Neil and Lydia were going to try to bring down the man who’d sat for hours a day, three days in a row, watching men do things to a woman that …
Shit.
He was putting off talking to Lydia. He had to tell her she was going to Miami.
She wasn’t being
asked, any more than Neil had been asked whether or not he felt like breaking the news to her.
Shaking his head, he sighed with self-pity, reached for the phone, and asked the operator for an outside line.
12
“WHEN YOU LAND, GO directly to the hotel,” said Neil. “You’ll get a call from a Marty Rees. Marty Rees.”
Lydia repeated the name, eyes on her wristwatch. Eight-thirty-two at night. Her flight to Miami left at nine-fifteen. Three hours, and she’d be in Florida, and in trouble if things went bad. Better listen to Neil. She chewed gum and smoked, which did little to calm her nerves.
She sat with Neil in the front seat of his car, parked in darkness behind a row of yellow taxis lined up in front of the Delta terminal at Kennedy Airport. Neil spoke slowly, distinctly, never taking his eyes from Lydia’s face.
Neil had told her all of this before. One more time before takeoff. In minutes she’d walk on the plane and be on her own. Neil was just making sure. Lydia listened as though hearing it all for the first time. She lit another cigarette. Third one in five minutes.
“Marty’s from our Miami office. He’ll set up a meeting with you sometime tomorrow, probably early. He’ll give you the package. God forbid you walk on a plane carrying that and the security people toss you and find it. Cocaine. Half a key, fifty percent pure.”
Lydia stopped chewing gum and smiled quickly. “Nothing but the best for me, right?”
“Whatever you do, don’t lose it, don’t let it out of your sight. Keep it in your shoulder bag. You’ll hold it for a day and a night, no more. Ordinarily you’d have passed it on by that time, so we’ll take it back from you sometime day after tomorrow. It’s just that if you run into Lonnie Conquest tomorrow or tomorrow night, it might ease things if he can see that you’re in Miami on business and you’re holding. Just don’t lose it, or you won’t get out of Florida. Somebody down there might think you turned it over.”