Spiral

by David L Lindsey

She looked at him, assessing his intentions. The car was filling with her perfume, carried on the cool air that blew over her. Haydon noticed that she hadn't been so preoccupied by fear that she had forgotten that detail of fragrance. Then again, with a girl like her that was no telling observation. She had probably dabbed it on hurriedly, a second-nature habit of grooming, like quickly running a brush through her hair. Then he found himself wondering where she had put it. With Celia, that could have been an erotic thing to watch.

  "Okay," she said. "Okay." She looked out her window a moment, her hands playing with the tissue in her lap. Then she turned around, squared her shoulders on the white leather seat, and stared straight out the windshield to the headlights following the winding street.

  "Valverde and my brother were tecos," she began. "They'd both gone to school in Guadalajara, where they were recruited some years ago. My brother really wasn't college material, and eventually dropped out and came back to Houston. But Valverde stayed, finished college—a degree in business—and lived there for several years. About three years ago he moved back to Houston and started the limousine business. He looked up my brother, and Esteban went to work for him as a driver.

  "I went to college here, the University of Houston. Majored in political science. One of my professors there was Dr. Daniel Ferretis."

  Haydon hadn't given any thought to where he was going, and when he heard the professor's name he didn't even give any thought to his driving. He let the Jaguar move with the traffic.

  "Dr. Ferretis had been known to alter grades for women students in exchange for sexual favors, and during every semester two or three of the girls out of his classes would be invited to his office to see if they wanted to improve a faltering grade point average. They didn't all take him up on his proposition, but enough did so that he kept trying. When my turn came around one day, Ferretis was warming up to his offer with some casual conversation. He mentioned that he frequently did guest teaching stints at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, and I said that my brother had gone there. He was surprised, curious. He asked a lot of questions, and I told him about my brother and Jimmy Valverde. He was amazed that I knew Valverde, or at least knew who he was."

  She hesitated. "I've thought about that a lot since then. It seems too much of a coincidence, but I can't see how it could have been anything else. I mean, life has got to have some actual coincidences, doesn't it?"

  Probably more than we're willing to accept, Haydon thought. We are a reasonable people, and if logic can't explain such things, then our cynicism will. But he didn't say anything. He wanted a cigarette.

  "One thing led to another, but not to sex. I had discovered there was something that obsessed Dr. Ferretis even more. I don't remember how the subject of the tecos first came up, but Ferretis began recruiting me. I'd heard a lot about them from Esteban, so I already knew much of what Ferretis was telling me. I didn't like it. I thought all that brotherhood business was a crock, and the racial hatred . . . I just couldn't get whipped up for it. But I pretended to be interested. I figured it couldn't hurt my grades.

  "I did a pretty good job of being the impressed student, and he came right along with his professor role, too. The more he told me, the more 'impressed' I was. Soon he was telling me he and Valverde, along with a couple of others, formed a kind of 'affiliate' branch of the tecos in Houston. They handled money that the teco big shots wanted to squirrel away on this side of the border, and were generally a useful support group."

  She stopped and looked out her window again as she held a well-manicured hand in front of the vents and turned it in the cool air. Distractedly, her mind absorbed in what she was going to say next, she gathered the thin material of her skirt on one side and pulled it up to just above her knee. She fanned the material, then held it there.

  "I was in for a surprise," she said. "After this had been going on for a couple of months, a graduate student I'd been dating quite a bit and had gotten to know fairly well suddenly dropped a bomb on me. One night we were having drinks at my apartment—which at that time was a dumpy little place over by the university—and he came right out and told me he worked for the FBI. I mean, not out of the blue. We had been talking politics a lot. He knew how I felt about things, and that's what we were discussing when he popped this on me. He said he worked for them on the side, that he had been doing it quite a while. He said it wasn't any big deal. He just hung around a lot of different political groups, and made extra money writing these little reports about all that was going on with these people. Jusi gossipy stuff, who their friends were, what they talked about, when they hung out, what kinds of ideas they were kicking around. Thing;

  like that. He asked me if I would be interested in doing the same thing on the tecos. He said it was a good way to pick up a little cash."

  She took a deep breath, let it out, said, "Jesus," and went on.

  "Well, I'd read all about the sixties, the Kent State business, how the FBI infiltrated those radical groups. I knew what he was asking me to do, and I knew how that was viewed by the students of the seventies when it all came out. But I personally didn't see anything so terrible about it. I can understand that a government needs to do that. What they do with the information is something else. If they use it to abuse our basic freedoms, that's one thing, but if they use it to protect those freedoms, that's something else. I don't think you can write off the entire concept of a government's right to gather intelligence because at some point in history it abused that right."

  She looked around at him, a little sheepishly he thought.

  "Anyway, I did it," she said. "I began writing reports on what I heard about the tecos."

  "Did you give these reports to your friend?" Haydon asked.

  "Initially, yes. Until they were sure I knew what I was doing. Then I started simply mailing them to a post office box."

  "How did you receive your payments?"

  "Well, that was a little cloak-and-dagger-ish. At first Rich, my friend, gave them to me. When I finally got a mailbox in the university post office—at Rich's request—I began receiving it there. It just showed up in my box on the fifth of each month. Cash in an envelope. I guess they had someone on the inside there, too. After I graduated and left the university, I got a mailbox in the post office over on Timmons."

  "How did you stay in touch with the tecos after you left the university?"

  "Things had progressed pretty well by that time, and Dr. Ferretis had gotten me a job with Valverde. Oddly, once I showed an interest in the 'movement,' Ferretis completely turned off the sex thing. Suddenly it was all business. I wasn't so lucky with Valverde. Anyway, as the quality of my information increased, the bureau increased my 'gratuity,' which, I admit, surprised me. Valverde was paying me well, too, so with the combined incomes I was able to move to the condo where I'm living now. Ferretis, Valverde, and eventually Cordero really took me in. I actually became a member, with all the attendant hocus-pocus that involves. I even took a trip to Guadalajara, where Ferretis showed me off."

  She nodded pensively, as if confirming a question in her own mind. "I'll tell you, the more I was around those people, the more I despised them. I learned to detest what they stood for more than you can imagine. Informing on them became an obsession. I would have done it for nothing. Every time I mailed a report I felt better."

  "What about your brother?" Haydon asked. "How did you reconcile working against him?"

  "Oh, Esteban was to wishy-washy to be a real teco. He did as little as possible with them. Mainly he was just a chauffeur working for Valverde. Esteban didn't have any ambition. His teco days never amounted to anything in the first place."

  Haydon had gone the length of Woodway, and circled back on San Felipe. When he got to Fountainview he cut across to Woodway again, made a jog to the left, and entered the maze of winding and wooded streets along the eastern boundaries of the Houston Country Club. After a few more turns, he pulled into a narrow cove off the street that looked across a large expans
e of the golf course. He cut the lights, except for the low glow from the dash, and left the motor running for air conditioning.

  Celia stopped talking and looked out to the rolling greens of the course, their farthest edge closed off by the towering pines. For a moment she seemed to loose the thread of her story. She had put her shredded tissue into the trash and was winding and unwinding the purple cord around one of her hands. Her eyes fell to what she was doing, watching but not watching, coiling and uncoiling the cord with a peculiar tension, pulling it tight enough to require some effort.

  Haydon looked at her profile, at her bare neck and shoulders, at the lift of her breasts holding up the lace camisole. His eyes fell to her leg where the dress had ridden slightly higher now, revealing the smooth beginnings of her thigh. It was not an artful gesture; she was too absorbed in her thoughts to play that kind of game now. If he wanted to be honest with himself, he would have to admit that he was finding practically everything about her more than a little seductive. He couldn't pretend that it was all a calculation on her part. He would have found her appealing under any circumstances.

  He remembered standing in Valverde's office and pulling the long pink stockings out from under the sofa cushion. And he remembered the way she had smiled at him as she walked out of the room. She was awfully young to be playing in this league, but she seemed capable of taking care of herself. Up to now. She obviously was feeling that she had miscalculated some angles, that she had lost control of her situation. Or, more accurately, she was only now realizing that perhaps she had never had control in the first place. In any circumstance that was a sobering apprehension, but even more so in a matter of life and death.

  "I learned about the plans to assassinate Gamboa," Celia said. "Although they included me in everything—at least I thought they did—something like that was up to the tecos de choque, their death squads, and even Valverde didn't know very much. I couldn't believe I'd uncovered this. I got off a quick note to the Bureau and they called me that night. Elkin did. He said they wanted details. He pressed me, said lives depended on it. Goddam, didn't he think I knew that? I was a nervous wreck. That . . . that was when I started letting Valverde ..." She stopped, waited, and then said, "I found out what little more he knew."

  She was winding the cord furiously now, as if the strength with which she wound it was an exact parallel measurement of her anger and, certainly, fear.

  "Esteban knew nothing about it at all," she added. "I didn't know the exact time and date, but I was scared for Esteban and had gotten reassurances from Valverde that whenever it came down, nothing would happen to him. I was concerned, because I knew he was Sosa's driver."

  "You knew how it was going to happen?" Haydon asked. "That it would be a hit on one of the limousines?"

  "No. No, I didn't. Only that Valverde had said it could be something like that. He didn't know how. Anyway, he was most reassuring," she said, remembering. "Would he do a thing like that to a friend, to my brother? He reassured me every time he took my clothes off. After a while the sexual exchange between us underwent a subtle change. I don't know; I guess he noticed it too. Before, I had always used it to manipulate him—though I don't think he ever understood that—but now it was turning out that he was using it to manipulate me. It occurred to me that my body had become Esteban's insurance policy."

  She unwound the cord. "It turned out to be a worthless one," she said.

  "Why was Gamboa targeted?"

  "As the tecos see it, and in actual fact, he was one of half a dozen former Mexican politicos from the Lopez Portillo administration who, collectively, took billions of dollars out of Mexico. Actual stole from the Mexican people. The tecos wanted to make examp] of them, a warning to the de la Madrid administration."

  "You say he was one of half a dozen. Are there plans to assas nate others?"

  She turned to him, and he saw that she had been crying. Her v cheeks glistened in the dash lights. "Yes."

  "Here?"

  "No. Other cities. Miami, one in Miami; one in San Diego; I Angeles. One in Paris."

  "When?"

  "As close to the same time as possible. Ideally within the sa day or two, for greater impact."

  God, Haydon thought. What in the hell had he uncovered?

  "And you've passed all this on to the Bureau?"

  "Yes." She frowned at him, continued looking at him, waitin see in his face that he was beginning to understand. "Goddam!" said. "Don't you see? They're not stopping this. The Bureau. I me I thought they were on top of this thing. I thought I was really dc something valuable here, but they're not moving on it. They're let this thing happen!"

  "Have you tried to contact them?"

  "Of course I have! I can't get any response."

  "What about Rich?"

  "Hell, he disappeared weeks ago," she said disgustedly.

  "Does the name Rubio Arizpe mean anything to you?"

  She shook her head. "No."

  "How about Ireno Lopez?"

  She glowered at him, her eyes portraying suspicion. "W going on here? How'd you get that name? Do you already kno about this?"

  "No, I don't. Who is he?"

  She considered her response. "One of the tecos de choque.

  "He's one of the assassins?"

  "He was supposed to be," she said. "But let me explain. He only one I know, and only because he was sent up here from J; three weeks in advance of the others to reconnoiter Gamboa's h movements, and security setup. Since he was here so long, Val couldn't keep his mouth shut, and told me. The FBI know thi; told them everything. Everything!"

  "Who killed him?"

  "Lucas Negrete. They think Negrete's boys spotted his surveillance, captured him, and tortured him for information about the plot."

  "Do you think Lopez talked?"

  She nodded. "That's why everything's coming unglued. That's why I'm afraid of Negrete getting to me. I don't even know if he knows I exist, but I don't want to let that bastard get his hands on me."

  Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then she said, "I just really don't understand this." She put one hand across her stomach and sucked in a deep breath. "It's making me sick."

  Haydon had looked away from her, through the windshield to the golf greens stretching toward the pines. Garner had been right— these people had to have some prominent connections. You couldn't expect to execute a plan of this scale in the States without a considerable amount of cooperation from somewhere. But he couldn't bring himself to accept the implications of Celia's story.

  "What am I supposed to do now?" she snapped at him, her nerves getting the best of her. "I don't know why the Bureau isn't offering me some protection, or something. Where the hell are they?" She started crying, burying her face in her hands, the purple cord dangling down in front of the black satin camisole. She leaned her head against the window and cried until her shoulders shook. She lifted the long folds of her skirt and held it to her face, trying to stop crying as she wiped her eyes. A sob escaped as Haydon handed her his handkerchief. She gained control, wiping under her eyes with the handkerchief, trying to clean up the dark smudges of mascara.

  "God," she said finally, her voice thick and scratchy from the crying. "What a mess. I can not believe this."

  Haydon looked at her. His gut feeling told him she was telling the truth—as she knew it. But he also had a strong suspicion that she had been deceived. He didn't believe she had been dealing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  "You're not going to be able to go back home," he said.

  "Yeah," she nodded, wiping her nose. "I know."

  "Why did you ride your bicycle to the station instead of driving your car?""They know the car. I'm afraid of . . . car bombs ... of, I don't know, being shot to pieces in it, like Esteban. Christ!" She wiped her nose again with Haydon's handkerchief. "I'll wash it," she said, wadding and unwadding it nervously in her lap. She looked at him. "So what am I supposed to do now? You going to be like the FBI, and drop the ba
ll on this?"

  She was talking bravely, but Haydon had been watching her twitchy movements. She was scared to death.

  He turned and flipped on the car lights, put the car in gear, and started backing out of the cove, the headlights panning across the pines.

  She jerked her head up and looked at him. "Now what?" she asked nervously. Haydon straightened out the Jaguar in the street and accelerated into the first sharp turn. "I think you'd better come home with me," he said.

  Chapter 35

  HAYDON took Fountainview off Woodway and stopped at the first telephone he saw along the street. He called home first.

  "Nina," he said, "I'm bringing Celia Moreno home with me. Would you ask Gabriela to get one of the guest rooms ready?"

  "What's the matter?"

  "I think she's going to be the key to all this," he said, looking through the glass booth at her sitting in the Jaguar. "But she's got to be tucked away somewhere for a few days."

  "Okay."

  "I'm at a telephone booth on Fountainview. I'm going to call Bob, and then we'll be coming home."

  Nina said fine. She didn't ask any more questions. Haydon hung up and dialed the dispatcher, who took his number. He waited, leaning on the aluminum shelf, watching Celia. She was still wiping at her eyes. She pulled down the car visor and looked at herself in the lighted mirror there, shook her hair, ran her fingers through it, and shook it again. She ran her fingers over her eyebrows. She stared at herself, not blinking, not fussing with her face, then in a frustrated gesture flipped up the visor. She propped her elbow on the windowsill and started chewing on a red thumbnail, looking out at the traffic.

  The telephone rang, and Haydon picked it up.

  "This is Dystal."

  "Bob. Listen, I'm at a telephone booth out on Fountainview. I've got Celia Moreno with me. Did your men get hold of Daniel Ferretis?"

  "Not exactly," Dystal said. "They got over there and he wasn't there, but a real worried wife was. She told 'em he'd called from his office at the University of Houston—he's a professor of political science there—earlier this afternoon, and told her he was going to be late tonight. But it's already a lot later than he told her he'd be."