Cat Chaser

by Elmore Leonard

  He turned his head to see Mary’s slender body in the yellow bikini, the delicate line from armpit to breast, her belly a shallow basin between the small-bone mounds of her hips. He wanted to jump on her.

  “You asked me because you knew I was gonna ask you. Where you stand.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Okay, where are you?”

  “Well, not too long ago I almost asked Andres for a divorce. I had the words ready, exactly what I was going to say . . .”

  He was aware of his instant reaction: great. He didn’t tighten, begin to feel trapped. No, he liked what she was saying.

  “But I chickened out.”

  “How come?”

  “Well . . . I felt sorry for him.”

  Moran didn’t say anything.

  “Or I felt sorry for myself—I don’t know. I thought, if I’m gonna leave, I should be going to something I want to do. But even if there was something, I don’t want to just walk out. I want to talk to him, so he’ll understand how I feel. But we don’t talk. In the six years we’ve been together”—she turned her head to look at Moran—”if there’s a gale blowing out of Biscayne Bay in the hurricane season we might get in a good exchange about the weather. We don’t even see each other that much. We have dinner together about three times a week. Half the time he doesn’t get home till late, or we meet at the club.”

  “What’d you marry him for, his money?”

  “I might’ve.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “No, you weren’t. But that may be the real reason, security,” Mary said. “At first I was fascinated by him. General Andres de Boya. In a way I thought he was cute.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Moran said.

  “I did, at first.” Mary pushed up on her elbow, getting into it. “Usually—well, you know—he’s very formal, he’s the boss, you have to do things his way. But then when you see a vulnerable side, just a glimpse, you realize he’s a person like everyone else.”

  “Regular guy,” Moran said.

  “No, he’s not a regular guy. That’s what I mean. He was a soldier in the Dominican army, worked his way up to general, then lost everything. He came to Miami with practically nothing and did it all on his own.”

  “I heard he escaped with a fortune.”

  “You heard wrong. He put fifteen thousand down on an apartment house in South Miami and that was everything he had.”

  “You stick up for him.”

  “George, what do you want to believe? That story—he came with millions on a private yacht, that’s baloney. He escaped with his life, very little else. But I know one thing, if he ever has to make a quick exit again he’s gonna be ready.”

  “He keep his money under the mattress now?”

  Mary paused. “It sounds funny, but to Andres it’s real life. He thinks there’s always somebody out to get him, so we have full-time security guards, armed. They never smile.”

  “Well, I guess you were head of secret police for Trujillo,” Moran said, “and now you’re sitting on all that dough . . .”

  “That was political,” Mary said, “we’re talking about the man now.”

  Moran could argue the distinction—the man was still responsible for a lot of people dying—but he let it go.

  “All right, you’re telling me why you married him.”

  “I’m trying to think of a good reason,” Mary said. “I was twenty-eight and all the good guys were taken. And he talked me into it.”

  “I hope you can do better than that.”

  “I was ready to get married. I didn’t like what I was doing. My dream, always, was to get married some day.” She paused, thinking. “He’s not bad-looking really, and he’s very romantic.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Moran said.

  “Well, he thinks he is, but most of it’s in Spanish. He’s very, you know, serious, a heavy breather.”

  “I’m not gonna say anything,” Moran said.

  “On the other hand he’s extremely cold, aloof,” Mary said. “Sometimes smirky. If I want to see him I practically have to get an appointment. But he’s a rock, George.”

  “I won’t argue with you there.”

  “He’s absolutely reliable. If Andres says he’s going to do something, believe it. Whatever it is.”

  “He wants to buy the Coconuts,” Moran said. He had told Mary about Andres’s sister and the piano player, without going into much detail. “He came—I was gonna say yesterday, but it was three days ago. Anyway he made an offer and I said, ‘You trying to get rid of me, Andres? Come on, what’s your game?’ “

  It brought her upright. “You didn’t. What’s your game?”

  “Listen, the other day I beat a guy playing tennis, a young hotshot, I said to him, ‘You’re all right, kid.’ I’m starting to say things I’ve always felt like saying. But try to get anything out of your husband—I think you could punch him, he wouldn’t make a sound,” Moran said. “Maybe when you married him you thought you could change him. Turn him into a teddy bear. He’s not at all cute, I’ll tell you, but you thought you could make him cute.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” Mary said. She eased back to lie flat on the lounge again. “I was working in that law office typing one profit-sharing plan after another, pages and pages of figures, pension plans, trust funds, all due at five o’clock, always, and I had to get out. Andres came along—it was his lawyer I worked for. He’d divorced his first two wives. He has four grown children, a girl who’s married and lives in California, three sons in Madrid who’re in business together—those are the legitimate ones. He let his mistress go . . . I think. And I decided he was fascinating. I thought the difference between us might make it all the more interesting, maybe even fun. I thought, well, assuming there’s a person under that cold, formal exterior, why don’t I try to bring him out?”

  “How’d you do?”

  “Well, the only thing I can figure out,” Mary said, “he puts on the front so no one will know what a real asshole he is.”

  “So walk away,” Moran said. “What’s the problem?”

  “I told you, I want him to understand why I’m leaving. I don’t want him to think it’s for any other reason than we shouldn’t have got married in the first place. We made a mistake and I want him to realize it.”

  “What other reason is there? You don’t like him, that’s all.”

  “There’s a good one,” Mary said. “I signed a prenuptial agreement. I didn’t want to but Andres insisted. In the agreement it says if the marriage ends in divorce, for any reason, I’m to be given a flat settlement of two million dollars.”

  Moran said, “You didn’t want to sign it?”

  “I felt like it was an inducement. I didn’t want to make a deal with him. I wanted to marry him. I might’ve been dumb, but I was sincere.”

  “Well, it was his idea,” Moran said. “But if you’re worried about what he thinks—I mean you want to prove you’re still sincere, then don’t take the money.”

  “Yeah, except that I like being rich.”

  Moran studied her face, the fine bone structure, the delicate line of her nose, knowing the face would change and he would still want to look at it for a long time to come.

  “You got a problem,” he said.

  They were silent now. His gaze moved past her to the shrubs that bordered the south end of the hotel grounds. After several moments he said, “My first night here, I slept in a hole. Right over where that hedge is . . .”

  6

  * * *

  THE AFTERNOON OF the fourth day. The Chevrolet Impala moved in low gear through streets that were like alleys, past stone structures with wooden entranceways, tenements that dated only a hundred years—new housing in a town where the son of Christopher Columbus had lived in style. Mary stared at scarred walls. They could be in San Juan or Caracas. The heat pressed motionless in the narrow streets. She searched for something to hold her interest as Moran spoke to Bienvenido in English and pidgin present-tense Spanish. The
oldest buildings of all, she realized, the ones that dated to the early sixteenth century, were the newest in appearance, clean, reconstructed among recent decay, with all the charm of Disney World.

  When they left the car to walk, Moran would nod to people along the street and in doorways staring at them, staring longer at the blond-haired woman than at the bearded man.

  Mary said, “You’re sure we’re all right.”

  Moran’s gaze came down from the upper floors of a building to the narrow shops on the street level. “They look at you and it’s instant love. Blondes have some kind of magic.” His gaze lifted again. “Up by that corner window—those are bullet holes. My fire team came along this street . . . We shouldn’t have been anywhere near this area.”

  “What’s a fire team?” She pictured firemen.

  “A third of a squad. Two riflemen, an automatic rifleman and the fire-team leader. Thirteen men in a squad, forty-eight in a platoon. The platoon was Cat Chaser. After we lost our sergeant I was Cat Chaser Four—if anybody wanted to call up and say hi.”

  “Mister!”

  Moran turned to see the dark face close to him, teeth missing and brown-stained eyes smiling, the man holding up lottery tickets. Moran waved him away, moving past.

  “You the Marine, uh?” the man said, stopping Moran again in his tracks. “I hear it on the radio, the marine looking for his girl. You the Marine, yes?”

  “I was a Marine,” Moran said.

  They were standing now, people gathering around. Mary saw the eager expression on the man’s face as he said, “This is the Marine!” Excited. “You looking for the girl Luci Palma. You find her?”

  Mary watched Moran shake his head, with the same eager expression as the man’s. “You know her?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” The man turned to the other people and began speaking in Spanish.

  Moran took Mary’s arm. They continued up the old street past lingering people, piles of trash, children following them now, the children and the lottery-ticket man’s voice raised, telling everyone something in Spanish, with feeling, like he was telling a story.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “I ran an ad in the paper, looking for somebody,” Moran said. “Evidently one of the radio stations got hold of it.”

  “Looking for somebody,” Mary said.

  “Someone I met after I was taken prisoner. One of the snipers.”

  “A girl?”

  “She was about sixteen. Luci Palma.”

  “That’s why you came here? To see her?”

  “No, this is why I came. What we’re doing now. But I was curious.”

  “I’ll bet you are.”

  “She was a skinny little kid.”

  “She won’t be now, though,” Mary said, “will she?” Have you seen her since then?”

  “This is the first time I’ve been back,” Moran said. Coming to a corner he was looking at the upper stories again. Mary watched him turn to look off in the direction of the river. “There the grain elevators I told you about. See? Ten stories high. The Eighty-second sat up their with their cannons. Up on top.”

  Mary stared at the cement cylinders standing about a mile away, on the opposite bank of the Ozama River. She felt Moran’s hand on her arm and they continued across the intersection. Behind them, Bienvenido’s Impala came to a stop. Moran was pointing now. “That’s the building. The one on the corner. Where I chased the sniper.”

  “The girl?”

  “No, it was a guy in a green striped shirt. Green and white.” Moran turned, looking at the side streets again, thoughtful. “They’d hide a gun in an upstairs room, take a shot at you, come out, walk up the street to an apartment where they had another gun stashed and let you have a few more rounds. You see how narrow the streets are, you have to look almost straight up. You feel exposed, looking up, trying to spot the window, the guy’s already someplace else, drawing a bead on you . . .” He turned slowly back to the building on the corner and stared, squinting in the sunlight. “I stuck my head out of that third-floor window, right there. . . .”

  * * *

  It was the girl, Luci, who had brought him here, this far, and got him in a lot of trouble, though she was not the one he had chased. A sixteen-year-old girl playing with him, now and then taking shots at him. That was the trouble with the whole deal: After a while it was like a game and he would get excited and lose his concentration. He got chewed out for it more than once by the platoon sergeant who told him he was going to get fucking killed and go home in a bag.

  A lot of it was boring and a lot of it was fun. More exciting than anything he had ever experienced before. Hugging a doorway under fire, then stepping out, seeing them running across the street down at an intersection and squeezing off rounds at them. Hearing the voices then laughing and calling you hijo de puta, son of a whore, that was the favorite; learning what it meant and yelling it back at them, though “motherfucker” remained the all-time any-situation favorite. (Ham and lima beans: ham and motherfuckers.) “Hey, motherfucker! Come on out of there! Where’s your balls!” Kids playing. Working a street and finding a cantina open, Christ, and stopping for a beer in the middle of a firefight. Or stopping to let the trucks go through with sacks of rice and powdered milk, the U.S. military feeding the people they were fighting. Did that make sense? None of it did. That’s why you might as well accept this deal as being pretty weird and have some fun. Though it wouldn’t be fun now.

  Mary walked back to the taxi. Bienvenido got out. He opened the door for her and she said, “I’ll wait. Thanks.” She watched Moran, on the other side of the intersection, then said to Bienvenido, “Do you remember General Andres de Boya?”

  Bienvenido said, “Oh my. Oh my, yes. General de Boya, ouuuh, he was a devil, that man.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he kill people with his Cascos Blancos. Everyone the enemies of them. They kill more people than the malaria fever.”

  Mary said, “Oh . . .”

  “That fella was a devil. Yes, we very glad he’s gone from here.”

  Mary got in the car. She sat in back, staring through the windshield at Moran across the street.

  Once Luci picked up their radio frequency she kept cutting in on them. They didn’t know what she was using and they didn’t talk to her at first. They’d switch frequencies and there she’d be like Tokyo Rose, giving them the business. “What you doing here, Marines? You come to kill us? Why? We haven’t done nothing to you. You afraid of Communists? We not Communists, but you turning us into Communists you stay here.” Political at first, till she got to know the Cat Chasers that patrolled along Independencia as far as La Carreras in a jeep with a 50 mounted on it. He spoke to her a couple times, asking her name and if she’d have a beer with him. She said sure, come over to Conde Street, she’d meet him. Conde, where rebel headquarters was located.

  They were almost ambushed and got in a firefight at the corner of Carreras and Padre Billini; the Cat Chasers gave chase, in and out of the buildings, and that was when he finally saw her the first time, running across a rooftop with her carbine.

  He saw her from a window across the street, the window a story higher than the roof she was on. He put his M-14 on her and began to track and saw her look back, laughing, yelling at somebody, waving then, Come on! Then she was looking this way, surprised, and he saw her face clearly. There was a burst from a submachine gun. He saw a guy on the same roof now, a guy wearing a baseball cap, a pouch of magazines slung over his shoulder, the guy aiming at him. Moran hung in and squeezed off and the guy spun, grabbing at his side above the left hip, and went down behind the cornice of the building. The girl disappeared. They went up to the roof but all they found was some blood and a few 9-mm casings. The next day, over the radio, the girl’s voice said, “You so slow, you Cat Chasers. You tired from chasing putas.” She didn’t mention the guy who got hit.

  The second time was after the 106 fired from the silos across the river almost put
him under, tore his leg up with shrapnel and he had an awful time getting down from the third floor with the stairway blown to hell. He should have stayed up there. He climbed through the rubble, slipped out the back thinking he was pretty cool and walked right into them. A gang of guys in sportshirts carrying old M-1s and Mausers. He’d always remember how they grinned at him. The fuckers, they weren’t even soldiers.

  They blindfolded and quick-marched him to a house he’d never have found again even if he could have seen where they were going; gave him a bucket of water and a dirty towel to do something about his bleeding and locked him in a room. Every once in a while the door would open and some more of them would look in to see the prize, laughing and making, no doubt, insulting remarks in Spanish. He told them to get fucked but they just laughed some more. When the girl came and stood in the doorway he knew who it was right away. Maybe it was the carbine she had slung over her shoulder, though he told himself later it was her eyes, the way she looked at him like they had met before.

  She was skinny, without any breasts to speak of, but had beautiful eyes and chestnut brown hair.

  He said, “Well, Luci, how you doing?” Taking a chance and hitting it on the head. She smiled. She looked like she’d be a lot of fun just to be with. She wore a T-shirt and jeans that were patched and faded. She left the carbine outside, came in and closed the door.

  She said, “You’re the Cat Chaser.” Her whole face smiling.

  “I’m one of ’em.”

  “You catching much lately?”

  “Well, I didn’t do too good today, I’ll tell you.”

  She liked that; she smiled and went out and came back with a bottle of El Presidente and a dressing. She fooled around with his leg while he drank the beer, the leg not hurting yet, though it looked a mess. He asked about the guy he’d shot and she mentioned the guy’s name, which he forgot, and said the guy was not hurt bad but had quit the war. She asked him where he lived; he said Detroit and she told him she had stayed in Miami, Florida for two months, visiting. She told him she loved Miami, Florida and wanted to go back there sometime. She asked him if he liked the Beatles or did he prefer the Rolling Stones? Everyone, she said, was in love with the Beatles. They discussed the Supremes, Freddie and the Dreamers, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, the Righteous Brothers, Herman’s Hermits . . . She did not care much for the Beach Boys or Roger Miller. He said he didn’t either. Her favorite of all was Petula Clark. She sang a little of “Downtown” in English, snapping her fingers; she knew more of the words than he did.