Gone Bamboo

by Anthony Bourdain

  Time to go. Henry peeled off the oversize hooded white windbreaker that he'd worn over his parka all night. He left the rifle where it was, slipped out of his hole, and ran in a crouch toward the edge of the trail, where he'd hidden his skis and boots. Finding them, he tore off the rubber Totes on his feet and stepped into the frozen boots, strapped on his skis, quickly pulled on a silly-looking cap that said, SKIERS MAKE BETTER LOVERS, and charged down the trail, remembering at the last minute to put on his mirrored goggles. He joined a large group from a local ski club, skiing neither too fast nor too slow, content to look just barely in control of his skis, slightly off balance, so people would get out of his way.

  The first snowmobiles of the ski patrol and mountain security began to appear, nervous young men in red jackets with radios. They drove right past him without a look. When Henry reached the bottom of the mountain, a deliberately witless-looking grin on his face, he made sure to show surprise and curiosity at the growing crowd of police and rescue workers assembling on the bunny slope. He even lingered as the first ambulances appeared, gawking with the rest of them. People were pouring out of the shops and restaurants in the main lodge for a look. Henry took off his skis and left them leaning against a ski rack by the main exit.

  A high school teacher was hurrying his charges away from the carnage, and Henry moved close, following the flow of bodies into the parking lot. The rental car was where he'd left it, and Henry removed his parka, boots, cap, and goggles. When he slipped behind the wheel, he looked like any other blue-collar, work-shirted local, out for an afternoon drink. His nice, dry cowboy boots were under the dash, and he put them on, grateful for the worn, soft leather. The engine started with the first try, and he was gone.

  Later, after the police and ambulances and television crews from the City had disappeared, and after the newspaper reporters had finished with their follow-up stories and their interviews with the local residents, the town of Huckapee, New York, returned to its usual grudging routine. People still talked about the shootings on Curleigh Mountain, of course. They talked about them a lot. Most people in the town were unemployed, so they had a lot of time on their hands. And the lucky few who did earn a regular paycheck worked over at Devil's Run, so most of them were right there when it happened. They were there when the Colombian Hit Man Blew Mob Bosses into Bleeding Chunks right there on the goddamn bunny slope! Few who worked at Devil's Run hadn't Seen It All.

  At Mary's Luncheonette, where the maintenance crews met for breakfast, at the Wigwam Tavern, right next to the Huckapee Lodge (where the alleged Hit Man had stayed), the shootings were still the subject of much wild speculation. At the Wigwam, a framed black-and-white photo of Danny Testa's body hung in a place of honor behind the bar, right next to the dusty eight-by-ten of Division Champs, the Buffalo Bills. The front page of the Huckapee Valley Courier was glued next to it, the headline screaming, MOB HIT AT DEVIL'S RUN! It was the biggest thing to have happened in the small mountain town since the mills closed down. Before the shootings, the headline was to have read PRINCIPAL'S SON IN CAR CRASH, describing a fender-bender between a milk truck and the notorious local drunk Billy Coombs.

  Most people had come to agree with the conclusion that the Hit Man was Colombian. They'd seen Miami Vice. They knew what those people could do. That dark-skinned man, no question about it, had been sent all the way from the hills of Medellin to wreak bloody havoc on their mountain. Curleigh, the largest of three mountains in the valley (the other two were referred to by local wits as Moe and Larry), had taken on a whole new luster since the shootings; some folks were already talking about changing the name to something more lurid, more marketable, like Bloody Mountain. Making a buck was getting harder and harder, they said, especially in the off-season. Summer Funtime, the water slide at Devil's Run, had failed to attract. Maybe a little notoriety would be a good thing.

  Definitely Colombian, most people said. The newspapers had described a dark-skinned male, possibly Hispanic, around six feet tall, who spoke with an accent. He had big feet. This much was known for sure. The rental ski boots and rubber Totes recovered near the scene were size twelves. The man had registered at the Huckapee Motor Lodge as Jaime Garcia, and Mrs Curleigh, at the desk, remembered him as very polite, very correct. He had spoken with an accent like Ricardo Montalban, and addressed her as "Senora."

  The jeep the man arrived in had been rented to someone fitting his description named Luis Chavez, resident of Puerto Rico, and the Ford Escort he'd apparently used to get away, rented in the neighboring town of Wolkill and later abandoned in the parking lot of the former Indian Burial Ground outside town, had been rented under the name Victor Lopez of Miami. To confuse matters slightly, Dougie Weller, the cabdriver who took a man answering the gunman's description to a shopping mall in Quonset, remembered him as a quiet man, no accent, who said his car had broken down. "He talked kind of like an old hippie," said Dougie. Most people discounted his account - Colombian Hit Man sounded so much better.

  Like Elvis Presley, the Colombian Hit Man seemed to pop up everywhere for a while. He was reported seen outside Ed's Package Store, drinking Thunderbird out of the bottle. One woman claimed to have seen him at Dick's QuickStop with a cart full of groceries, calmly reading about himself in Newsweek. When a lift attendant at Devil's Run spotted a dark-skinned man on the lift line a few weeks later, he threw the switch, marooning a hapless Brazilian ski enthusiast until the police arrived.

  The Huckapee police chief, Daryl Remick, took all of this with good humor. He refrained from pointing out that, as far as he knew, there weren't too many Colombian hit men who stood over six feet tall and wore size twelve shoes. The man was long gone in any case, the way he saw it, probably out of the country. In his comments to Hard Copy, Remick was positively admiring in his appraisal of the gunman's marksmanship. The chief had served in Vietnam, he explained, with a rifle company, and a head shot from six hundred yards, like the one that had sprayed Danny Testa's brains (a moving target no less) all over Curleigh Mountain, hell, that was "outstanding shooting."

  Chief Remick was not concerned that the killer of Mr Testa had yet to be captured or even identified. He knew enough about what the deceased had done for a living that his unsolved murder seemed to be something less than a tragedy.

  The wounded man, however, Charles "Charlie Wagons" Iannello, was another thing. Nobody likes to see a thing like that. Mr Iannello had been hit by two bullets. The first entered his hip, shattering the bone and requiring its replacement with a pin. The second bullet had entered his right buttock, traveled upward at an angle, and after deflecting off the pelvis, exited slightly to the right of his navel. An emergency colostomy was performed, and Charlie Wagons would be compelled to crap in a bag for the rest of his life.

  4

  Henry read about it later, on the beach. He'd had to drive the scooter all the way across the island for a copy of the day's Times, and Frances, his wife, was still out snorkeling on the reef when he returned. Henry sat down on the empty blanket and pressed a cold Heineken bottle to his forehead, the headline on the lower right front page playing hell with an afternoon agenda that previously had concerned only where to eat dinner and whether to order the stuffed crab backs or the curried goat.

  A few sunburned tourists gathered up their things a few yards down the beach, retreating with their Styrofoam coolers and folding beach chairs to some air-conditioned bunker in town. Soon the beach was empty. Henry looked out over the water, searching for Frances, but saw nothing. He lay back and closed his eyes, putting the thought of Charlie Wagons in his hospital bed out of his mind.

  "So that's who it was," said Frances, waking him. She was reading the paper between mouthfuls of chicken leg from the barbecue shack down the beach, still dripping wet from her swim. She gave the unfinished chicken to a scraggly, feral-looking stray who'd followed her to the blanket, and peeled down her maillot to her waist. She lay down on her back next to Henry, inscrutable in her sunglasses.

  "Should
have gone for the head shot."

  "I fucked up," said Henry, getting up on one elbow.

  Frances drained the rest of Henry's beer and lit a joint, her long, well-toned body relaxing in the sun. "This going to be a problem?"

  "Could be," said Henry. "Jimmy's going to be pissed for one thing . . ."

  "What about Charlie?"

  Henry just shrugged, all sorts of things to worry about coming to mind.

  "I always liked him," said Frances, removing a seed from her lip and passing the joint to Henry. The stray dog stood up and sauntered off to the mangroves to finish the chicken bone in the shade. Frances's hand brushed Henry's arm for a second, reassuringly.

  "Me too," said Henry.

  5

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Monsieur Ribiere, in a dark blue suit, dress shirt buttoned up all the way, and striped regimental tie, poked disinterestedly at his spring rolls in the deserted dining room of the Jardin Indochine Restaurant in Marigot. He was a small man, in his late sixties, and he looked pink and scrubbed as if he'd just stepped out of a hot bath. There were angry red marks on the papery skin of his neck where the collar had dug into his flesh. His glasses, thick lensed, with military-style wire-rimmed frames, had slipped down to the end of his nose, and he peered over them with pale, watery blue eyes at his Vietnamese bodyguard, Trung, who stood by the kitchen door gossiping with the restaurant's owner, a relative.

  Monsieur Ribiere was not happy with the events of the last week. Had it been in his power, he would have spiked the whole deal, answered the first Americans' approach with a resolute non and let them make problems for some other island. But it wasn't up to him. By the time the matter had reached his tiny outpost, it was a foregone conclusion. The decision had been made in Paris, and he was to see that the Americans got what they wanted.

  A direct, written order would have been too easy, and too embarrassing if something went wrong. It had been left for him to arrange, running back and forth between his nominal office at the gendarmerie and his real offices in the Government House, the Americans insisting on the use of a secure phone for every conversation, regardless of substance.

  In the event, Monsieur "Pastou" had arrived on Saint Martin with all the usual American play at top secrecy. A huge C-5 Galaxy Transport, painted ostentatiously black (just in case anybody had missed how Top Secret it all was), had touched down at one-thirty in the morning at the tiny French-side airport of L'Esperance, waking the entire village of Grand Case a few yards beyond the runway. The Galaxy's rear cargo hatch had dropped open and four, count them, four, identical new Jeep Wagoneers had come rolling out onto the tarmac. Monsieur Pastou was in the third Jeep, sandwiched between two marshals, neither of whom looked to be older than Ribiere's grandson, and Pastou himself looked decidedly un-French - even his passport photo looked like a mug shot.

  If the whole operation hadn't been spectacular enough, there was the large delegation that had come out to greet the plane. Some fools from the State Department, an FBI man, more marshals (early arrivals who Ribiere's people had picked out as soon as they'd got off their flight in tourist mufti). There was even a callow youth with an impressive overbite from the always unimpressive CIA. They were all there, come to see the arrival of America's latest and greatest pet gangster. They babbled into their radios and satellite communicators, whispering code names from the four corners of the tarmac: Big Tuna, Marlin One, Swordfish - apparently it was seafood this week in the codebook. The landings at Normandy had been less noticeable, and probably less expensive.

  Over his spring rolls, Monsieur Ribiere perused a rather more complete biography of the mysterious Monsieur Pastou than the Americans had seen fit to provide. That he had been previously known as Charles "Charlie Wagons" Iannello could be no secret to anyone who read The New York Times and then gazed upon his wizened face. His career, spanning four decades in which he had been at one time or another implicated in dozens of murders, was the subject of countless quickie paperbacks, television documentaries, and made-for-TV movies. The usual suspicions of involvement in the disappeareance of witnesses fleshed out a resume dotted with the kinds of allegations you would expect of any self-respecting capo: jury tampering, extortion, racketeering, bribery, receiving, usury, hijacking, counterfeiting, auto theft, and filing a false instrument. Following M. Wagons/Iannello/Pastou's long life of toil in the vineyards of organized crime, Monsieur Ribiere felt a grudging respect for the wounded old murderer. They were, after all, about the same age.

  Apparently M. Iannello's brush with death a year previous (coupled with the certainty of an imminent indictment under federal RICO statutes) had convinced him to cooperate with his former tormentors. Nothing in Iannello's file disturbed Ribiere as much as the thought of all those corn-fed, overmuscled marshals traipsing around Saint Martin with Swedish K's under their arms. In his experience, for sheer destruction and chaos, America's criminals couldn't hold a candle to the bungling, well-intentioned efforts of its official organs. Ultimately, however, it wasn't the thought of the incontinent old gangster growing tan under Saint Martin's sun that disturbed Monsieur Ribiere's enjoyment of his meal. It was something else.

  The suspicion had grown in increments from one anecdotal fact in the Iannello file. The hapless M. Iannello, it appeared, had been shot with a Galil 7.62 sniper rifle. Though the attempt on Iannello had failed, Monsieur Ribiere had read with interest that a Mr Dominic "Danny" Testa had been effectively dispatched with a single shot to the head from over six hundred yards.

  Monsieur Ribiere, over his cold, uneaten spring rolls, was uncomfortable with coincidence, especially this one. He knew somebody who liked a Galil, even insisted on one. Who did things like shoot gangsters for a living. That they had known each other well for over twenty years was cold comfort.

  Monsieur Ribiere put his napkin down on the table and stood up. Across the room, Trung abruptly cut off his conversation with the owner and went ahead, out into the steamy afternoon heat. Ribiere paid his check and made his way slowly back to his office in the Government House, lost in thought. Trung walked a few dozen yards in front of him, scanning the faces of passersby, in search of enemies.

  His office was no cooler than the street. The ceiling fan that droned and squeaked overhead only served to push the hot, humid air from place to place, offering no relief. Monsieur Ribiere sat rigidly behind his desk, tapping a pencil against his front teeth and thinking about Henry. Shortly, he stood up, clipped a plastic laminate to his jacket pocket, and walked down to the basement registry. A sweating security officer buzzed him through a heavy steel door into a long, narrow room lined with file cabinets. It was airconditioned here to prevent all the valuable paper from moldering, and Ribiere got down on one knee to work the combination lock on a corner safe.

  Henry's file weighed over five kilos. Monsieur Ribiere took the unwieldy pile of cables, photographs, after-action reports, and page after page of his own creative and potentially damning accounts to a reading desk against a far wall. He spread his bony fingers across the cover sheet, where Henry's cryptonym appeared in red lettering, and took a deep breath before opening the file to the first page.

  6

  There were pelicans circling overhead. They came down past Henry and Frances's balcony at eye level, riding the air currents; then, one by one, they plummeted out of the sky, diving straight into the water with a heavy splash. Every third or fourth attempt would yield a fish.

  The sun was getting low, and the silhouettes of returning sailboats began to appear on the horizon, heading for port. Henry, still wet from the shower, a hotel towel wrapped around his waist, reclined lazily on a chaise, feet up on the balcony railing, sipping tequila.

  "Look," said Frances, her white terry-cloth robe hanging carelessly open, "there's Captain Toby and Meathead."

  A red Zodiac dinghy slipped out through the narrow channel from the lagoon behind the hotel into the sea. Toby was impossible to confuse, at any distance, with the other charter captains. He stood er
ect next to the motor, one hand on the throttle as he bounced the tiny inflatable craft over the swells to meet an incoming sailboat. Meathead, his dog, stood in the bow, ears back, face leaning proudly into the wind. Frances put two fingers in her mouth and let loose with a piercing whistle. Toby turned and waved.

  The hotel rested on a spit of coral separating the Oyster Pond, a lagoon, on one side and the choppy, dark blue sea on the other. From their balcony, Henry and Frances could watch the sun rise over Saint Barts, and from the bedroom-living quarters of their suite, they could watch it set behind the mountains ringing the pond.

  The Oyster Pond Yacht Club was a small Moorish structure, Spanish tile roof and white stucco walls, with twenty rooms built around a center courtyard and six suites further out on the coral peninsula. Henry and Frances lived in the one farthest out: two rooms, balcony, bathroom, and kitchenette. The furniture was white wicker, the floors glazed terra-cotta - cool on bare feet. As Henry enjoyed saying, it was like staying with a very rich friend - only the friend is away. They'd lived there for twelve years.

  "Let's not go back to Orient tomorrow," said Frances, her green eyes catching light off the water. "I know the food is good. But if I have to look at one more fat fucking German, capering around the damn beach, naked, wagging his shriveled, uncircumcised, sunburned little dick around, I'm gonna start World War Two all over again. I mean, really. Put it away."