EDITORIAL NOTES
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
EDITOR’S NOTES
The Black Orchid Novella Award goes to . . . Once again we received many fine submissions for the Black Orchid Novella Award, now in its fourth year. This is a competition for novella-length stories...
Top of EDITORIAL NOTES
FICTION
EDITORIAL NOTES
EDITOR’S NOTES
The Black Orchid Novella Award goes to . . .
Once again we received many fine submissions for the Black Orchid Novella Award, now in its fourth year. This is a competition for novella-length stories in the classic detective mode exemplified by Nero Wolfe. Our partner in this contest is The Wolfe Pack, the organization for enthusiasts of Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe. If you’ve read and enjoyed Rex Stout, you should consider joining. You may find information about the group and the contest at www.NeroWolfe.org.
This year’s winner is Brad Crowther; his novella “Politics Makes Dead Bedfellows” will appear in our July/August issue. Congratulations, Brad! His story is an interesting homage to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin that we think will please our readers. This will be the author’s first appearance in AHMM, and we’re delighted to welcome him to our pages. Mr. Crowther will receive his award at the annual Black Orchid banquet held the first Saturday of December in New York City.
Meanwhile, the fifth round of the Black Orchid contest is now open. Please see the announcement ad elsewhere in this issue for details.
LINDA LANDRIGAN, EDITOR
FICTION
FICTION
MARLEY’S HAVANA
JOHN C. BOLAND
Art by Edward Kinsella III The Englishman stood close to Charles Marley, suit coat cuffs dingy, cola-colored rum drink held away from his chest, hands and face slippery with sweat, half absorbed in...
SMALL FAVORS
STEVE LINDLEY
“You remember my daughter Amber.” Kubiak didn’t, would have bet even money the two never had discussed her. “My oldest.” Torasella shifted his weight, reached into his back pocket, extracted his wallet, opened it, and offered it to Kubiak, who had to lean forward and raise himself a foot off the...
LITTLE BROTHER
ANN WOODWARD
Art by Linda Weatherly It was a time when summer lingered beyond its season, distilled into pleasant warm days of sun and nightly rains. The gardens surrounding the house of the princess were still...
THE PAIN OF OTHERS
BLAKE CROUCH
The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity . . . Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? —Friedrich Nietzsche Letty Dobesh, five weeks out of Fluvanna Correctional Center on a nine-month bit for felony...
ET TU, VALENTINUS
R. T. LAWTON
Art by Kelly Denato Yarnell felt guilty about having the thin guy from the mortuary sleeping in his front closet. As he’d explained to his wife Patricia after she went to get her overcoat the next...
CATCHPHRASE
NEIL SCHOFIELD
Frank put his arms around Donna’s throat in a pretend choke hold and said, “Get out of that.” Over her head, he grinned at her in the mirror. Donna said, “Do you mind? Very much not? Doing that?” She was trying to apply lipstick and her mouth was distorted so that the words came out all twisted....
Top of FICTION
EDITORIAL NOTES MYSTERY CLASSIC
Next Article
FICTION
MARLEY’S HAVANA
JOHN C. BOLAND
Art by Edward Kinsella III
The Englishman stood close to Charles Marley, suit coat cuffs dingy, cola-colored rum drink held away from his chest, hands and face slippery with sweat, half absorbed in the open-air nightclub’s floor show. Nodding to the catwalks that snaked upward behind the palm trees, the man named Gilbert said, “Did you know they were doing this same routine twenty years ago? With the same costumes, I think. I’ve been in and out since fifty-eight.’’
“For the same company?” Marley said.
Gilbert, who was at least fifteen years older than Marley’s forty-three, kept his eyes on the show. “Hah, yes, of course. Good old Panama Transport. Niggardly pensions, but I’ve got to see a bit of the world, haven’t I? It isn’t as much fun as it used to be, I can tell you.”
“Hard on your family?”
“Oh, Winnie got along. Yes.” Private laugh. “Made do until she ran off with a vacuum cleaner salesman.’’ That was Tony Gilbert’s legend, according to Marley’s colleagues at CIA headquarters, sad old born-again bachelor, traipsing in and out of Latin America selling rebuilt automobile parts. He must have been discreet over the years to have lasted so long. Or possibly the Cubans were willing to put up with a little espionage to get gear boxes and ignition coils. Not everything that happened was political, Marley believed.
A spotlight followed a dozen women in flowered headdresses and spangled tank suits who marched up the ramp, hips swaying to a rumba in which the brass section notes sprayed like static from the ancient loud speakers. The spotlight washed out the stars above the trees.
Between the two men and the dancers were a score of long tables covered in white paper, supporting rum bottles, ice buckets, glasses, and mixers. At the tables, elbows planted or chairs tilted back, wilted from the long tropical day, were twenty-six American businessmen and women, several representing large industrial corporations. About half of them had brought secretaries or spouses along. Already the wife of a tractor company vice president had been photographed patting Fidel’s beard. Her smiling face had made newspapers all over the world. Wasn’t he a nice man to let her play with his beard? Officially, the business reps were there to meet the heads of Cuban empresas to line up relationships in case bilateral trade was ever restored. As the chartered plane taxied across Jose Marti Airport, Marley had snapped a picture of an Air Angola transport on the runway. He needn’t have. It was no secret that Cuba was sending troops to Angola to help out Neto’s rebels. As long as that went on, nobody at the State Department was going to relent on trade. Maybe ten years from now, but not in this politically chilly March of 1978, when the U.S. president was smarting over domestic problems.
Marley’s documents identified him as a senior vice president of a Midwestern tool and die maker. The name on the passport was Dennis Purdom. It had taken him two days to rendezvous with Gilbert, who had the contact that mattered.
“Your mob used to run this place,” Gilbert said. “Same with the hotel you’re camped at.”
For an instant Marley wondered if by “mob” the Englishman meant CIA. No, he meant mob.
“Your hotel was called the Havana Riviera,” said Gilbert, speaking softly. Now it was the Habana Libre. “Meyer Lansky had it built for his chums in Las Vegas.”
“Really,” said Marley.
“I stopped by off and on in fifty-eight. A first-class place.”
“The toilets must have had seats then.”
The Englishman laughed without making a sound. “You can’t ask a revolution to think of everything.” His watery eyes shifted. “I admire these people. I really do. They got bored with the old rotters. Brought in new ones.”
“What about our friend?” Marley spoke as if it were a natural transition. Rotters. Russians. Kiril Yanov. If a KGB colonel didn’t qualify on Gilbert’s terms as a rotter, who would?
Gilbert glanced at him. The music was too loud for eavesdroppers. “Lefty Clark ran this club. Do you like the nude statues in the garden?”
“Yanov.”
“He’s eager. That’s the way you want the
m, isn’t it?”
Marley let his glance drift. Speaking of eager, there was Tom Walker, certainly a candidate, if you believed the female staff at Langley. Walker sat two tables closer to the front of the club, big and soft looking. Thick red hair covered his arms and neck in contrast to thin patches on the skull; dense brows, dark eyes, round face with reddish blond stubble, a jovial slackness on the features as his right hand moved a half full glass in circles on the table to the rumba beat. A light seeking the dancers slid across tables, shone on Tom Walker’s bald patch. Marley didn’t care for Walker, who was essentially a thug, recruited from the military rather than from the Ivy League. But there was no way this job could be performed by a single agent. Just getting information out of Gilbert, who meant to be helpful, could have taken a crew of six. Marley wondered if at some point in the future his own mind would wander into the past, dragging his conversation with it.
“I want to meet Yanov,” Marley said.
“He’s a weasel, you know. Snake. You’ll see when you meet him.”
Joining an intelligence service right out of Princeton hadn’t been Marley’s plan, but that was what had happened. He thought of it that way, in the passive, allowing himself to remain a little surprised even after all these years. A few of the classmates who had known him better than he realized wouldn’t have been surprised. They knew Charles liked having small secrets. The secrets gave him the sense of superiority that other students derived from having money. For a man like Marley, trading up to the larger secrets that came with intelligence work was like inheriting a bank.
The Russians had gotten to know him early on, but there was a sort of mutual comfort in that. He ran his people in Paris, and the Russians watched him and tried to guess whether the assets they occasionally uncovered were those he wanted to be discovered. Sometimes a payment seemed to have been too easily intercepted. Or was Marley simply careless? Was he penetrating their networks, turning agents, or creating a disruptive appearance?
His last visible posting had been in Greece. His career track was predictable: he was a Soviet specialist, using embassy covers nobody in the know believed; by definition, a backfield player. It was the case officers the Russians couldn’t spot who worried them, might encourage them to get rough if they twigged to someone, or have a local group do the job. Nobody worried about Marley, until someone in Washington, a disciple of game theory, raised a question of whether Marley’s obviousness might not be concealing something less obvious. When it occurred to Langley that their own man wasn’t fully visible to them, they brought him home. If the Russians had known that, they might have enjoyed the irony.
It took the mole hunters less than six months to be satisfied that Charles Marley was monumentally neurotic but loyal. He had no perversions that were out of fashion. He had no secrets that could be turned against him. Once the deputy director of operations had decided where to post him, he would be returned to the field. In the meantime, there was this problem with the Cubans, suspicions the Dirección General de Inteligencia had made inroads here and there, recruiting sympathizers in Washington, people who were a few steps left of liberal, liked idealistic socialist revolutions, even those that were taking a while to liberate the campesinos, and could Marley please liaise with the FBI’s counterintelligence people, not that they knew anything, but only for a few months, a year at most, until we find a place for you.
Eight months into the assignment, when Marley had collected mounds of paper, up popped Kiril Yanov, third- or fourth-ranking KGB officer in Havana, offering names.
“What does he want in return?” Marley had asked.
George Donlevy, the coordinator for Cuba, gave a flustered scowl. “We may not even have the right message. It all comes through a clandestine Brit. Grow a mustache and comb your hair forward. You’ll be good for a week.”
The KGB had a long memory, but Marley had never been on the Cubans’ radar, so he might be good for a week. Donlevy said, “This will be the fourth group of American businessmen going to Cuba. State has cleared them. There’s a fellow in Washington running the tours. We know about him. Yanov wouldn’t waste our time on something silly, would he?”
“Why not?” Marley said.
“He’d know we wouldn’t pay up unless he’s got something good. And he is risking his life.”
“If it’s not a setup.”
Donlevy leaned back, steepled his fingers, a gesture Marley always found pretentious. “Do you have an idea worth developing?”
“Moscow and Havana could be at cross purposes,” Marley said, wondering if he had to spell it all out. “Say Cuba wants trade, George, and the Sovs see it as undermining their influence. Nabbing an American spy could disrupt things.”
Donlevy kept his fingers together while he shrugged. “Subsidizing Cuba costs the Rooskies a million dollars a day. A little prosperity on the island might lighten the burden.”
“If they think that way.” Marley doubted that the Kremlin cared if a few hundred million dollars going to Cuba meant less cabbage and beets at home next winter. The island gave Moscow an air base at Cienfuegos, which in a few years could accommodate long-range bombers. It was a contagion dish for spreading revolution through Latin America, vexing the imperial power. It exported surplus labor as troops doing Moscow’s bidding. Surely all that was worth a million dollars a day, Marley thought. So what if someone’s stomach growled.
“But it’s worth a shot, don’t you think?” Donlevy said. He had never been a field man, so he retained his optimism.
“It’s worth a shot,” Marley replied.
Tom Walker was to some extent Marley’s cover. “The DGI would be disappointed if we didn’t have someone along on these trips,” Walker said. They were having coffee at a cafeteria at headquarters, sizing each other up: Walker second-generation military, neither stupid nor trustworthy; somebody’s idea of a good field man. He told Marley, “Once they identify me, there’s no reason for them to look any further.”
“I’ll send you a postcard from Isla de Pinos,” Marley said. If he made it to Isla de Pinos, he wouldn’t be sending postcards.
“They had Bishop there five years ago,” Walker said, “but he escaped. Think you could escape?”
Marley doubted anyone had escaped the prison who the Cubans hadn’t wanted to escape.
Walker sensed his doubt. “I was on the Zodiac that pulled Bishop out of the water. Saw what they’d done to him.”
“All right.”
“Sanchez, I knew her too. Got special treatment when she got caught down in Sancti Spiritus. First the DGI, then Dirección de Inteligencia Militar interrogators. They poured Sanchez off a boat in sight of a Navy frigate. Looked like chum. I know it’s not supposed to be personal. But why’d they have to do that?”
“Who was running the DGI then?”
“Mendez Cominches. Humane bastard.”
“A believer,” Marley said. “Maybe that’s why.”
Walker shook his head. “I believe and I would never do that.”
Marley wasn’t convinced what Walker wouldn’t do, but he said, “Some people would say you don’t believe enough.”
Kiril Yanov didn’t strike Charles Marley as a snake the first time they met. The man was shorter than average, thin but strong looking, with a high, thick forehead and intense blue eyes. For Marley, who had been rousted from bed at three in the morning by several Cuban men in plainclothes, and delivered to a building in the old diplomatic neighborhood, the setting was a disappointment. He didn’t know whose embassy it had been. The building had parking spaces underground, bare-looking rooms and hallways. But it was clean, and there was no blood on the chair where he had been seated. Yanov glanced up occasionally from the report on his desk, otherwise ignoring Marley. There were two Cubans in the room with him. The only Russian was Yanov.
“So you’re a businessman, are you?” Yanov said.
“And a guest of the Cuban Republic,” Marley said. Tone cold, nothing to fear, nothing to hide, letting
these people know it.
“So arresting you was all a mistake. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“I notice you haven’t demanded to speak to someone at the American embassy. Most people do. You haven’t. Why is that?”
“It’s because I know we don’t have an embassy in Cuba,” Marley replied.
“No, you have a couple of consular officers in an ‘interest section’ at the Swiss embassy. Would you like to speak to one of them?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look like a spy.”
“I’m not one.”
“Then we have made a mistake. But you were observed at the Tropicana talking to an Englishman who we know for a fact works for their intelligence service. Do you know whom I mean?”
“No.”
“His name is Tony Gilbert.”
Marley let himself look surprised. “I didn’t know.”
“You meet a man, share a drink, there’s nothing suspicious in that, you say. Yet I find it suspicious.” Yanov nodded to himself.
Like that for more than an hour. Then Yanov said, “Put him in a cell.” The Cuban men, who wore plaid shirts, took Marley downstairs and beat him up a little before dropping him into the cell.
“There was no other way,” Yanov said.
It diminished Marley’s respect for the man that he thought he needed to explain. But the lack of respect was mutual, if Yanov thought Charles Marley needed an explanation. Of course there had been no other way. A KGB colonel couldn’t drive off in the middle of the night for a clandestine meeting with an American. And none of the Americans could wander out of the hotel without picking up a tag. Taxis didn’t cruise the streets. To get one, you had to visit two desks beside the steps at the hotel entrance, one to declare a destination, the other to turn in the slip of paper the first desk had issued. Then a driver would step out of a waiting line and open the door of a twenty-year-old Ford. And chat in the friendliest way, all the way to wherever you were going, about the benefits of the Revolution, and you would be careful what you said because it was going to be reported.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 Page 1
