Bandits

by Elmore Leonard

  “He said I’d have to come by his office with thirty-five dollars.”

  “Wait and have him check you for both things.”

  “Do you want me to tell you what I give a shit about at age sixty-five,” Cullen said, “and what I don’t give a shit about?”

  Lucy had come out of the sun parlor to the edge of the flagstone patio. Wearing black again today. Her new habit, Jack thought, the revolutionary new Lucy playing her part; his gaze held on her slim figure, her hands shoved flat into the pockets of her jeans. He followed Cullen along a brick walk through the backyard garden, through branches and flower stems grown lush from spring rains. In the tall cover of the trees the patio appeared in dim detail, Lucy’s face pale in the fading light, composed.

  She said, “Roy called, twice. They went to five banks today and came out of each one with a canvas sack.”

  Cullen made a sound that was like a groan.

  Jack heard it, still watching Lucy as they reached the steps of the patio. He saw she was tense, holding on, the hands in the pockets no more than a pose.

  “Where are they now?”

  “They went back to the hotel. He just called again a few minutes ago. He said they put the car in the Royal Sonesta garage, across the street . . .”

  “The new one?”

  “Yeah, they got it. A cream-colored Mercedes sedan. The 560 SEL, top of the line.”

  “I guess they can afford it.”

  “Roy said they took the bank sacks up to 501, ordered champagne, and have been there ever since. He’ll call again in about an hour. He said, ‘To report in.’ ”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s there. He got a room at the hotel, on the same floor as the colonel’s. . . . How do you suppose he managed that?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “Maybe he was lucky. You never know about Roy, what he’s gonna come up with. That’s why we have him and hold him dear to our hearts.”

  Lucy didn’t change her expression or say anything. Finally she turned and they followed her into the house.

  21

  * * *

  DAGOBERTO GODOY AND Crispin Reyna drank champagne with their shrimp and spoke to each other in Spanish, ignoring the CIA man, Wally Scales. They were commenting on the Ferdinand Marcos home movies showing on the television news. In this one, at a party, his wife, Imelda, was singing “Feelings” to the dictator as he bit into a slice of pizza. “He doesn’t even stop eating,” Dagoberto said, “while the cow sings. I hear she left thousands of dresses and pairs of shoes . . .” Crispin said, “He stole billions of dollars, maybe more.” Dagoberto said, “Listen to me. She had so many pairs of shoes she could wear different ones every day for eight years without wearing the same pair twice. She had five hundred bras to hold up her great breasts, most of them black. Look,” he said then, “there’s Bong Bong, the son of Marcos, the one singing now. I think he’s a queer.” Crispin said, “That’s George Hamilton singing.” And Dagoberto said, “No, not him. The other one, with his face painted, the queer.” Crispin said, “That fucking Marcos, he had big balls for a little gook.” Dagoberto said, “He knew how to live. I hear he had more women than Somoza. Well, of course, being married to that cow. But, man, he knew how to live. Look at that.” Crispin said, “Yes, and now he pisses in a machine for his kidneys.” Dagoberto said, “You pay in the end sometimes. You have nothing to say about it, what happens to you. But until the end . . . Man, he knew how to live.” Dagoberto took a drink of champagne with shrimp in his mouth, then looked across the room and said, “Please, Wally, have something to eat with us, our last evening.”

  Wally Scales stood looking at the television screen. He turned, shaking his head, and adjusted his glasses as he came over to the room-service table. He picked a shrimp from the platter resting in a bed of cracked ice.

  “We possibly could’ve save Ferdinand’s ass, but the man’s time was up. Even the president had to swallow hard and admit it. But that fucking slope knew how to live, didn’t he?”

  “I was saying to Crispin,” Dagoberto said, “yes, is fine to enjoy yourself if your people aren’ starving. But to take what he did, all that money, and put it in this country is a shameful thing to do. Here . . .” He pulled a bottle of champagne from the bucket stand next to his chair and poured Wally Scales a glass. “I look at this table I think, yes, here I am also enjoying myself. Ah, but there is a difference. It could be my last meal of this kind. In a few days I’m in the mountains again eating C rations, fighting for freedom.” He raised his glass. “Who knows but this could be the last champagne I drink in my life.”

  “You better have a few more then,” Wally Scales said. “Do it up good your last night. Hey, but don’t forget to pay your bill when you leave.” He looked at the five canvas bank sacks lying on the sofa, three of them full, two folded empty. “What’d you say you scored, two and a half million?”

  “No, Wally, two million, one hundred sixty-four thousand,” Dagoberto said. “Enough maybe to buy one gunship. Unless we get one for half price. You know we offering Sandino pilots a million dollars to bring us an Mi-24.”

  “And you understand why you haven’t had any takers, don’t you? They know they’ll get shot in the head.”

  “No, no, we wouldn’ do that, Wally.”

  “I know where you could get about a half million M-16s cheap. The Filipina army, they got all kinds of weapon systems and shit.” Wally Scales finished his champagne and looked at the bank sacks again. “You think it’s safe to leave it there all night?”

  “We’re going to guard it,” Dagoberto said, “with our lives.” He raised the champagne bottle, offering it.

  Wally Scales put his glass on the table. “Uh-unh, I have to go. But you’re gonna call me tomorrow from Gulfport, right? Before you get on the boat. Call me on my secure line and then eat the piece of paper with the number on it.” Wally Scales watched the colonel’s expression change to a dumb stare and said, “I’m kidding, Bertie; little spook humor. Everybody knows what we’re doing. Some of the local Nicaraguans, I might add, are pissed off you didn’t call them to help out.”

  Dagoberto leaned his head toward Crispin. “I use who I trust. Sure, there people here I use to know, but people can change their mind. Crispin, I know his family, I know is loyal.”

  “You trust Franklin?”

  “Yes, of course. He does what we tell him.”

  “Well, he isn’t too sure about you guys, the way you’re acting.”

  “What, he told you this?”

  “He said all you talk about is Miami, what a great town it is, full of blond-haired quiff.”

  “Franklin said that?”

  “I’ll tell you fellas two things. One, you got somebody watching you, boy I took a keen interest in and loves me like his white brother. You understand the implication there? Boy is dedicated, eats his rais and bins during the trabil and never complains. Two, I think you should know Franklin’s lonely. I think the only reason he’s got a hard-on for you guys is because you don’t talk to him enough. You dig? Invite him up and give him some drinks, for Christ sake, it isn’t your money. What do you say?”

  Dagoberto shrugged. “Of course. Why not?”

  Wally Scales started to turn, looked over at the television set, and paused. “You know what I think was most interesting about this whole Filipina show? I mean about the way they threw Marcos out? I thought of it yesterday when I was reading about that guy Jerry Boylan getting murdered in the Men’s room—I mean assassinated; excuse me. Way back when his people, the Irish Republican Army, rebelled against the Brits in 1916—the Rising, they call it—they stormed and took the post office in Dublin. But when the Filipinas revolted against Marcos, what’d they take? The fucking TV station. Times have changed, gentlemen; we live in an age of instant electronic intelligence. If the video camera doesn’t get you the computer will.”

  Now the Nicaraguan colonel and the Cuban Nicaraguan from Miami were again speaking in Spanish and drinking champ
agne but only picking at the shrimp. Dagoberto frowned at the television screen. He thought for a moment they were showing more home movies from the Malacanang Palace, but it was “Wheel of Fortune” that was on now.

  Crispin said, “You think Franklin tells him things?”

  “I think Wally made it up,” Dagoberto said, “so we’ll think the CIA is watching us. I should have told him it was an insult. I should have been offended, perhaps gone into a rage.”

  “Forget it,” Crispin said. “Today in the newspaper a man writing about aid to the contras asked the question, will it go to anti-Communist patriots or to bank accounts in Miami? I say don’t protest, give them something to think about.”

  “Tomorrow, I’ll tell him I was insulted.”

  “You have only one thing to tell Wally tomorrow. ‘I’ve been robbed!’ With feeling. Practice it. ‘The son of a whore took all the money!’ Like that.”

  Dagoberto was thinking, staring at the window that framed in faint evening light a balcony of the Royal Sonesta Hotel across the street. “Tomorrow, Nacio will pick up a ticket at the airport issued in the name of Franklin de Dios.” Thinking aloud now. “At 9:10 a.m. he boards the flight to Atlanta. There, he changes flights to go to Miami.”

  “Nacio doesn’t resemble Franklin in the least.”

  “It’s all right. Nacio calls us from Atlanta when he’s certain the Miami flight is leaving. Just before.”

  “As long as you can trust him.”

  “Nacio was in the Guard, my aide until 1979, when he came here. He asks no questions. . . . All right. Franklin goes to the airport tomorrow at the same time to return the automobile . . .”

  “He doesn’t know Nacio,” Crispin said, “if he were to see him?”

  “There is no possibility they could know each other. Nacio is from Managua. All right. Franklin comes back to the hotel in a taxi and we leave in the new Mercedes. Yes,” Dagoberto said, “yes, before Franklin goes to the airport I could call Wally and tell him he insulted me.”

  “You’re crazy if you don’t forget it,” Crispin said. He was relaxed, his leg over the arm of his chair. “Listen, the only thing you tell him, Franklin was in this room guarding the money during the time we went downstairs for breakfast. We came back and he was gone and the money was gone. And the automobile, the Chrysler.”

  “I don’t tell him Franklin returned it to the rental company at the airport.”

  “Mother of God,” Crispin said. “You don’t mention the airport, you say he took the money and the Chrysler, the trusted friend of the CIA man, it’s marvelous, and we’re going now to look for him.”

  “Wally will ask me where.”

  “You don’t know where—you’re frantic, man, excited. Now you’re in your rage. You tell Wally you’ll call him back.”

  “What if he alerts the police?”

  “Let them look, too, we don’t care. Then by the time you call him back, we will know your man Nacio has left Atlanta, uh? Almost to Miami. You tell Wally you called several airlines, but they wouldn’t give you information about a Franklin de Dios, so you demand that he finds out and you’ll call him later.”

  “A third time.”

  “Yes, you’re very anxious.”

  “Where do I call from?”

  “Wherever we are, I don’t know. We’ve left here. I suppose we’re in the state of Mississippi.”

  “I call him after we kill the Indian.”

  “Of course, after.”

  “All right, I call Wally the third time . . .”

  “And he tells you Franklin went to Miami.”

  “What if he doesn’t know it yet?”

  “He will, don’t worry. You say we’re going there immediately, and hang up the telephone. Simple? That’s all you have to do.”

  “Yes, but go back. We’ve killed the Indian—where did we hide his body?”

  “Something new for you,” Crispin said. “The way you do it, you leave the bodies.”

  “I want to know where.”

  “We’ll see the place. In Mississippi, in a forest.”

  “I don’t want blood in the car.”

  “If it becomes soiled, buy a new one.”

  “Man, it cost almost sixty thousand.”

  Crispin raised his glass, sipped champagne, letting a quiet settle.

  “What is it about killing this one that sticks in your mind?”

  “I don’t care about the Indian. He means nothing to me.”

  “Then why are you annoyed?”

  “I’m a soldier. This isn’t like fighting in a war.”

  “Well, you won’t be a soldier for long,” Crispin said, and then smiled. “You can look at this as beginning to learn a new business.”

  Dagoberto was silent for several moments.

  “We’ll need a shovel.”

  “For what?”

  “To bury the Indian.”

  “We bury only his hands and his head. We don’t need a shovel for that.”

  “We’ll need an axe.”

  “We’ll get one.”

  “Or a machete.”

  “I think the axe will be easier to find.”

  “That fucking Indian, reporting on us.”

  “You said you thought Wally made it up.”

  “Some of it. But I know that fucking Indian has been reporting on us. It’s shameful, isn’t it, that we can’t trust anyone?”

  Wally Scales came out of the hotel and walked straight across Bienville to Franklin de Dios, standing by the black Chrysler in his mod black suit, shirt buttoned but no tie: the Indian chauffeur, brought out of the wilds of the Rio Coco by way of Miami to a street in the French Quarter. Man, oh, man—and you’ll never know, Wally Scales thought, what’s in his head.

  “Why don’t we have us a farewell drink, amigo?”

  “I have to be here.”

  “They may have company in, but I doubt they’ll be going out on the town, all that loot there.”

  “They say I have to stay outside.”

  “Use the back door, huh? And wipe your feet.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m just talking. You suppose to stay here all night?”

  “They say to keep watch, that’s all.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know what.”

  “They don’t seem worried about anything, that I noticed. They seem worried to you?”

  “They see only themselves.”

  There, just for a second, the Indian starting to show himself.

  “Anything you want to tell me, Franklin?”

  Wally Scales noticed a slight hesitation before the Indian shook his head.

  “No strange or unusual occurrences? . . . Where’d you go today?”

  “Follow the woman’s car.”

  “Yeah? Where’d she go, anyplace special?”

  “Just around.”

  “You can tell me anything you want, my friend, that might be bothering you.” Wally Scales gave him time to unburden, but got nothing for it. He said in a quiet, confessional tone, “I imagine it was you had to take out that guy in the restaurant. In the Men’s room.”

  Franklin said nothing.

  “I’m sorry you had to do that. You understand he was a very dangerous individual. He would’ve tried to steal your money, I’m confident of that, and kill anybody in his way. We know for a fact he was in Managua. . . . Well, anyway . . . Okay, so you’re all set? Ready for your ride on the banana boat?”

  “I think it’s time to go back now, yes. See my family.”

  “And fight your war?”

  Franklin moved his shoulders in what might be a shrug, the man back inside himself.

  “You want to stay, I can fix it.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “If that’s what you want, Franklin, you can have it. You can have the goddamn bats flying in the window, the malaria, hepatitis, diarrhea—Somoza’s revenge, the son of a bitch—and the bugs. All the bugs known to man and some more. I n
ever saw bugs like that anywhere in my life. They’re more like fucking animals than bugs. Two years I spent down there, my friend, and I ain’t ever going back. Not for pay or at gun point. I listen to those two freedom fighters upstairs saying they could be eating their last three-hundred-dollar meal, it breaks my heart. The colonel talking out of both sides of his mouth . . .”

  Wally Scales looked toward Bourbon Street at the passage of tourists, stared for several moments before his thoughts came back, and he said, “I’ll tell you something, Franklin, since it isn’t likely we’ll ever meet again. I speak fairly good Spanish and can even understand most of what I hear, but I never let on. Act dumb and listen and you learn things. I hear the colonel, for instance, saying one thing in Español and something entirely different in English. Even his tone, going from one to the other, gives him away and he doesn’t even realize it. I failed to learn any deep secrets, but I recognize the man’s greed and I’ll tell you straight, keep your eyes open. If they haven’t included you in their conversation there might be more to it than common snobbery. The way those two cowboys enjoy the good life it’s hard to imagine them ever again taking a dump in the woods. They’re just liable to leave you standing on a street corner and disappear. If the dirty bastards ditch you, call me. I’m gonna give you a number in Hilton Head—that’s in South Carolina. See, I can have you picked up and somehow get you back home. That’s a promise. Or, on the other hand, they take you along, say back to Miami or someplace like that? Key Biscayne? I’d appreciate your letting me in on that, too. I don’t give a shit about the money they scrounged—they didn’t exactly get it from widows and orphans. But I’d hate to think I’ve been used. Is that a deal? You’ll call me?”

  Franklin nodded.

  “Did they show it to you, the money?”

  Franklin shook his head.

  “Five bank sacks up there—three of them, they say, full of American dollars.” Wally Scales put on a frown and adjusted his glasses. “Wait a minute—are they dumb? I doubt they know the capital of Nebraska, but they’re not foolhardy, are they? Leave two million bucks lying on the couch and go to bed? . . . If you were the colonel, Franklin, how would you safeguard it?”