by James Ellroy
He flipped the Piper belly to backside. Pete spun topsy-turvy.
His head hit the roof. His seatbelt choked him immobile. Chucky rolled and flew upside down all the way to U.S. waters.
Dusk hit. Blessington glowed under high-wattage arc lights.
Pete popped two Dramamines. He saw redneck gawkers and ice cream trucks perched outside the front gates.
Chuck fishtailed down the runway and brought the plane to a dead stall. Pete hopped out woozy—Benzedrine and incipient nausea packed this wicked one-two punch.
A prefab hut stood in the middle of the drill field. Triple-strength barbed wire sequestered it. Unsynchronized shouts boomed out—a far cry from your snappy PIGS PIGS PIGS!
Pete stretched and worked out some muscle kinks. Lockhart ran up to him.
“Goddamnit, get in there and calm those spics down!”
Pete said, “What happened?”
“What happened is Kennedy’s stalling. Dick Bissell said he wants a win, but he don’t want to go the whole hog and get blamed if the invasion goes bust. I got my rusty old cargo ship all ready to go, but that Pope-worshiping cocksucker in the White House won’t—”
Pete slapped him. The little shitbird weaved and stayed upright.
“I said, ‘What happened?’ ”
Lockhart wiped his nose and giggled. “What happened is my Klan boys sold the provisional government guys some moonshine, and they started arguing politics with some of the regular troops. I whipped up a crew and isolated the troublemakers with that there barbed wire, but that don’t alter the fact that you got sixty frustrated and liquored-up Cuban hotheads in there biting at each other like copperheads when they should be concentrating on the problem at hand, which is liberating a Commie-held dictatorship.”
“Do they have guns?”
“No sir. I got the weapons shack locked and guarded.”
Pete reached into the cockpit. Right upside the dashboard: Chuck’s fungo bat and all-purpose tool kit.
He grabbed them. He pulled out the tin snips and tucked the bat into his waistband.
Lockhart said, “What are you doing?”
Chuck said, “I think I know.”
Pete pointed to the pump shed. “Let go with the fire hoses in exactly five minutes.”
Lockhart hooted. “Them hoses will tear that prefab right down.”
“That’s what I want.”
The sequestered spics laughed and yelled. Lockhart took off and hit the pump shed at a sprint.
Pete ran over to the fence and snipped out a section of coiling. Chuck wrapped his hands in his windbreaker and pulled down a big wall of barbs.
Pete scrunched down and crawled through. He ran up to the hut in a deep fullback crouch. One fungo bat shot took the door down.
His crash-in went unnoticed. The government-in-exile boys were preoccupied.
With arm wrestling, card games and shine-guzzling contests. With a baby-alligator race right there on the floor.
Dig the rooting sections. Dig the blankets covered with bet chits. Dig the bunks weighted down with moonshine jugs.
Pete choked up a bat grip. On-GO: that good old boot-camp pugel-stick training.
He waded in. Tight swings clipped chins and ribcages. The government-in-exile boys fought back—odd fists hit him haphazardly.
His bat shattered bunk beams. His bat shattered a fat man’s dentures. The gators scurried outside while the getting was good.
The government boys got the picture: Do not resist this big Caucasian madman.
Pete tore through the hut. The spics made like a backdraft and got waaay behind him.
He tore out the rear door and swung at the porch-to-roof stanchions. Five swings left-handed, five swings right—switch-hitting like fucking Mickey Mantle.
The walls shuddered. The roof wiggled. The foundation shimmy-shimmied. The spics evacuated—Earthquake! Earthquake!
The hoses hit. Jet-pressure tore the fence down. Hydraulic force ripped the hut roofless.
Pete caught a spritz and went tumbling. The hut burst into cinderblock shingles.
Dig the government-in-exile:
Running. Stumbling. Doing the jet-spray jigaboo jiggle.
Call it Hush-Hush style:
WATER-WHACKED WETBACKS WIGGLE! BOOZE-BLITZED AND BESOAKED BASTION BOOGIE-WOOGIES!
The hoses snapped off. Pete started laughing.
Men stood up soaked and trembling. Pete’s laugh went contagious and built to a roar.
The drill field was an instant prefab dump site.
The laughter went locomotive and shaped into a perfect martial cadence. A chant built off of it:
PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS!
Lockhart dispensed blankets. Pete sobered the men up with bennie-laced Kool-Aid.
They loaded the troop ship at midnight. 256 exiles climbed on—hotwired to reclaim their country.
They loaded weapons, landing craft and medical supplies. Radio channels stayed open: Blessington to Langley and every port-of-departure command post.
The word passed through:
Jack the Haircut says, no second air strike.
Nobody proffered first-strike death stats. Nobody proffered reports on coastal fortifications.
Those spotlights and beach bunkers went unreported. Those militia lookouts went unmentioned.
Pete knew why.
Langley knows it’s now or never. Why inform the troops that we’re in crap-shoot terrain from here on in?
Pete swigged moonshine to wean himself off the bennies. He passed out on his bunk midway through this weird hallucination.
Japs, Japs, Japs. Saipan, ’43—in wide-screen Technicolor.
They swarmed him. He killed them and killed them and killed them. He screamed readiness warnings. Nobody understood his Québecois French.
Dead Japs popped back to life. He rekilled them barehanded. They turned into dead women—Ruth Mildred Cressmeyer clones.
Chuck woke him up at dawn. He said, “Kennedy came halfway through. All the sites launched their troops an hour ago.”
Waiting time dragged. Their short-wave set went on the fritz.
Troop ship transmissions came in garbled. Site-to-site feeds registered as static-laced gibberish.
Chuck couldn’t nail the malfunction. Pete tried straight telephone contact—calls to Tiger Kab and his Langley drop.
He got two sustained busy signals. Chuck chalked them up to pro-Fidel line jamming.
Lockhart had a hot number memorized: the Agency’s Miami Ops office. Boyd called it “Invasion Central”—the sparkplug Cadre guys never got close to.
Pete dialed the number. A busy signal blared extra loud. Chuck nailed the source of the sound: covertly strung phone lines overloaded with incoming calls.
They sat around the barracks. Their radio coughed out strange little sputters.
Time dragged. Seconds took years. Minutes took solar-system eternities.
Pete chained cigarettes. Dougie Frank and Chuck bummed a whole pack off of him.
A Klan guy was hosing off the Piper. Pete and Chuck shared a reeeeealllly long look.
Dougie Frank jammed their wavelength. “Can I go, too?”
Diversionary dips got them close. They caught the Bay of Pigs in tight and ugly.
They saw a supply ship snagged on a reef. They saw dead men flopping out of a hole in the hull. They saw sharks bobbing at body parts twenty yards offshore.
Chuck swung around and made a second pass. Pete bumped the control panel. The extra passenger had them cramped in extra tight.
They saw beached landing craft. They saw live men climbing over dead men. They saw a hundred-yard stretch of bodies in bright-red shallow water.
The invaders kept coming. Flamethrowers nailed them the second they hit the wave break. They got flash-fried and boiled alive.
Fifty-odd rebels were shackled facedown in the sand. A Commie with a chainsaw was running across their backs.
Pete saw the blade drag. Pete saw the blood gout.
Pete saw their heads roll into the water.
Flames jumped up at the plane—short by inches.
Chuck pulled off his headset. “I picked up an Ops call! Kennedy says, ‘No second air strike,’ and he says he won’t send in any U.S. troops to help our guys!”
Pete aimed his Magnum out the window. A flame clap spun it out of his hand.
Sharks were churning up the water right below them. This fat Commie fuck waved a severed head.
68
(Rural Guatemala, 4/18/61)
Their room adjoined the radio hut. Invasion updates seeped through the walls uninvited.
Marcello tried to sleep. Littell tried to study deportation law.
Kennedy refused to order a second air strike. Rebel soldiers were captured and slaughtered on the beach.
Reserve troops were chanting “PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS! PIGS!” That silly word roared through the barracks quadrangle.
Right-wing dementia: mildly distracting. Mildly gratifying: a detectable rise in contempt for John F. Kennedy.
Littell watched Marcello toss and turn. He was bunking with a Mafia chieftain—mildly amazing.
His charade worked. Carlos scanned ledger columns and recognized his own Fund transactions. His indebtedness increased exponentially.
Carlos was accruing large legal debts. Carlos owed his safety to a reformed FBI crimebuster.
Guy Banister called this morning. He said he picked up some straight dope: Bobby Kennedy knows that Carlos is really hiding out in Guatemala.
Bobby applied diplomatic pressure. The Guatemalan prime minister kowtowed. Carlos would be deported, “but not swiftly.”
Banister used to call him a weak sister. His phone manner was near-deferential now.
Marcello started snoring. He was drooping off his army cot in monogrammed silk pajamas.
Littell heard shouts and banging noises next door. He formed a picture: men slapping desks and kicking odd inanimate objects.
“It’s a washout”/“That vacillating chickenshit”/“He won’t send in planes or ships to shell the beach.”
Littell walked outside. The troopers worked up a new chant.
“KEN-NEDY, DON’T SAY NO! KEN-NEDY, LET US GO!”
They bounced around the quad. They swigged straight gin and vodka. They gobbled pills and kicked apothecary jars like soccer balls.
The case officers’ lounge had been looted. The dispensary door had been trampled to pulp.
“KEN-NEDY, LET US GO! KEN-NEDY IS A PU-TO!”
Littell stepped inside and grabbed the wall phone. Twelve coded digits got him Tiger Kab direct.
A man said, “Sí? Cabstand.”
“I’m looking for Kemper Boyd. Tell him it’s Ward Littell.”
“Sí. One second.”
Littell unbuttoned his shirt—the humidity was awful. Carlos mumbled through a bad dream.
Kemper picked up. “What is it, Ward?”
“What is it with you? You sound anxious.”
“There’s riots all over the Cuban section, and the invasion isn’t going our way. Ward, what is—?”
“I got word that the Guatemalan government’s looking for Carlos. Bobby Kennedy knows he’s here, and I think I should move him again.”
“Do it. Rent an apartment outside Guatemala City, and call me with the phone number. I’ll have Chuck Rogers meet you there and fly you someplace more removed. Ward, I can’t talk now. Call me when—”
The line went dead. Overtaxed circuits—mildly annoying. Mildly amusing: Kemper C. Boyd mildly flustered.
Littell walked outside. The chants were a good deal more than mildly pissed-off.
“KEN-NEDY IS A PU-TO! KEN-NEDY FEARS FI-DEL CAS-TRO!”
69
(Miami, 4/18/61)
Kemper mixed the dope. Néstor mixed the poison. They worked on two desks jammed together.
They had the dispatch hut to themselves. Fulo shut down Tiger Kab at 6:00 p.m. and gave the drivers strict orders: Visit riot scenes and maim Fidelistos.
Kemper and Néstor kept working. Their hotshot assembly line moved slowly.
They mixed strychnine and Drano into a heroin-like white powder. They packaged it in single-pop plastic bindles.
They played their short-wave set. Awful death tallies sputtered in.
Hush-Hush went to press yesterday. Lenny called him for details. The piece described a resounding Bay of Pigs victory.
Jack could still force a win. The ODs would defame Castro, WIN OR LOSE.
They B&E’d the drop house two days ago—a little safety-first trial run. They found two hundred “H” bindles stashed behind a heating panel.
Don Juan Pimentei fed them straight information. His death eliminated witness testimony.
Néstor cooked up a shot. Kemper loaded a syringe and test-fired it.
A milky liquid squirted out. Néstor said, “It looks believable. I think it will fool the negritos who buy it.”
“Let’s go by the house. We have to make the switch tonight.”
“Yes. And we must pray that President Kennedy acts more boldly.”
• • •
A rainstorm pushed the riot action indoors. Prowl cars were double-parked outside half the nightclubs on and off Flagler.
They drove to a pay phone. Néstor dialed the drop pad and got an extended dial tone. The house was two blocks away.
They circled by it. The street was middle-class Cubano—small cribs with small front yards and toys on the lawn.
The drop pad was peach-stucco Spanish. It was late-night quiet and nonsecurity dark.
No lights. No cars in the driveway. No TV shadows bouncing out the front window.
Kemper parked at the curb. No doors opened; no window curtains opened or retracted.
Néstor checked their suitcase. “The back door?”
“I don’t want to risk it again. The lock mechanism almost splintered last time.”
“How do you expect to get in, then?”
Kemper pulled his gloves on. “There’s a dog-access door built into the kitchen door. You scoot down, reach in, and pop the inside latch.”
“Dog doors mean dogs.”
“There was no dog last time.”
“Last time does not mean this time.”
“Fulo and Teo surveilled the place. They’re sure there’s no dog.”
Néstor slipped gloves on. “Okay, then.”
They walked up the driveway. Kemper checked their blind side every few seconds. Low-hanging storm clouds provided extra cover.
The door was perfect for large dogs and small men. Néstor scooted down and pulled himself into the house.
Kemper worked his gloves on extra-snug. Néstor opened the door from the inside.
They locked up. They took off their shoes. They walked through the kitchen to the heat panel. They took three steps straight ahead and four to the right—Kemper paced off exact measurements last time.
Néstor held the flashlight. Kemper removed the panel. The bindles were stashed in the identical position.
Néstor re-counted them. Kemper opened up the suitcase and got out the Polaroid.
Néstor said, “Two hundred exactly.” Kemper shot a re-creation closeup.
They waited. The picture popped out of the camera.
Kemper taped it to the wall and held the flashlight on it. Néstor switched bindles. He duplicated the arrangement all the way down to tiny tucks and folds.
They sweated up the floor. Kemper swabbed it dry.
Néstor said, “Let’s call Pete and see how things stand.”
Kemper said, “It’s out of our hands.”
Please, Jack—
They agreed on a through-to-dawn car stakeout. Local residents parked on the street—Néstor’s Impala wouldn’t look out of place.
They slid their seats back and watched the house. Kemper fantasized Jack Saves Face scenarios.
Please come home and get your stash. Please sell it quick to validate our hotoff-the-press propaganda.
&nb
sp; Néstor dozed. Kemper fantasized Bay of Pigs heroics.
A car pulled into the driveway. Door slams woke Néstor up wild-eyed.
Kemper covered his mouth. “Ssssh, now. Just look.”
Two men walked into the house. Interior lights framed the doorway.
Kemper recognized them. They were pro-Castro agitators rumored to dabble in dope.
Néstor pointed to the car. “They left the motor running.”
Kemper watched the door. The men locked up and walked out with a large attaché case.
Néstor cracked his window. Kemper caught some Spanish.
Néstor translated. “They’re going to an after-hours club to sell the stuff.”
The men got back in their car. The inside roof light went on. Kemper saw their faces bright as day.
The driver opened the case. The passenger unwrapped a bindle and snorted it.
And twitched. And spasmed. And convulsed—
GET IT BACK. THEY WON’T SELL IT NOW—
Kemper stumbled out of the car and ran up the driveway. Kemper pulled his piece and charged the dope car head-on.
The OD man spasm-kicked the windshield out.
Kemper aimed at the driver. The OD man lurched and blocked his shot.
The driver pulled a snub-nose and fired. Kemper fired straight back at him. Néstor ran up firing—two shots took out a side window and zinged off the roof of the car.
Kemper caught a slug. Ricochets ripped the convulsing man faceless. Néstor shot the driver in the back and blew him into the horn.
It went off AAAH-OOO-GAAAH, AAAH-OOO-GAAAH—LOUD LOUD LOUD.
Kemper shot the driver in the face. His glasses shattered and tore the pompadour off his toupee.
The horn blared. Néstor blew the steering wheel off the column. The goddamn horn reverberated LOUDER.
Kemper saw his collarbone push through his shirt. He weaved down the driveway wiping somebody’s blood out of his eyes. Néstor caught him and piggybacked him to their car.
Kemper heard horn noise. Kemper saw spectators on the sidewalk. Kemper saw Cubano punks by the death car—boosting that attaché case.
Kemper screamed. Néstor popped a real “H” bindle under his nose.
He gagged and sneezed. His heart revved and purred. He coughed up some pretty red blood.