The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  Had Dom remained there the outraged colonel might have shot him, but Dom went back into the plane and slammed the door.

  Dino was helping J.D. into his green silk suit jacket.

  “They got about a company of troops outside,” Dom said. “And about thirty plainclothesmen. And they all got guns.”

  “Whatta you expect soldiers to carry, fahcrissake?” Mr. Palladino said amiably, deeply pleased by the military reception. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Dom went out first, then J.D., then Dino; Angela last. At the foot of the ramp the Haitian colonel saluted smartly, his face stiff with rage. A sergeant bawled out to present arms. Mr. Palladino set his face into an important cast.

  Everybody sweated out layered heat. The Secret Police were duplicates of each other; expressionless faces, large shades, Hawaiian shirts, and tiny fedora hats with one-inch brims. No one but the arriving party moved; no one spoke. There was no breeze; only the pounding heat and the weight of the sun. The colonel led the way to a Cadillac limousine. The heat was awful. The heat reminded Mr. Palladino of his trip to Sicily. “You gotta go back someday, Joey,” his mother had said.

  “How can I go back, Mama? I never been there.” But he had gone back. That was the last time he had ever felt heat like this. So the limousine was air conditioned, so instead he’d get pneumonia.

  The colonel’s staff car led the motorcade, which included two filled personnel carriers bringing up the rear. The motorcade rolled them through the worst slums Mr. Palladino had ever seen including Cortile Cascino in Palermo. “Jesus,” he said, “somebody up there is really sore at these people. The people gotta be the enemy here.”

  “Listen,” Dino said, “the guy is probably takin’ us t’rough duh heart of the high-rent district.”

  The procession stopped in front of an elegant guest house with about four acres of grounds at Petionville. As they walked up the path to the house, the colonel explained that it had been built for Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, but that the Emperor had decided he could only stay in Haiti for the afternoon so the house had never been used; a relief to Dom.

  Mr. Palladino tipped the colonel ten dollars in the front hall and walked on through the house to inspect the furniture. It was the best. It cost plenty. When he got back to the front hall he found the ten-dollar bill on the floor. “What is this?” he asked Dino.

  “He t’roo it onna floor and spit on it. I swear to God.”

  “Fuck him,” Mr. Palladino said. “Pick it up by the end and burn it.”

  There was a large swimming pool in the gardens beside the house. There was plenty of help. The help wore guns, shades, and little hats. Dom and Dino didn’t want them to wear guns. The help didn’t want to take the guns off. Dino whacked a couple of them around while Dom covered him. One of the help pulled a gun, so Dom shot him in the arm. Everybody but Dom and Dino took their guns off after that. Mr. Palladino came out after he heard the shot and told the help to get them a platter of roast beef sandwiches on whole wheat toast and a couple of bottles of red wine. It was impossible to believe, considering the amount of help, but the food never came.

  “They don’t dig English, Mr. Palladino,” Angela explained. “They speak French here.”

  “Well, what the hell, then—that explains it,” J.D. said generously.

  They sat around the pool. Nice music came from behind the bushes on the other side. At about nine o’clock three sharp-looking black foxes came over in a green Bentley. Dom and Dino took turns fooling around with them upstairs. Mr. Palladino dictated steadily to Angela, sipping a very small rum with a lot of ice and pineapple juice. He was wearing his silver granny glasses, looking like the wolf in the fairy tale with his kingfisher nose and his tiny eyes focusing his concentration.

  “Fahcrissake, Angela. I am starving here,” he said at last. Angela got up and ran toward the house to see what was in the Frigidaire. She found some people in the kitchen and made them bring out a big plate of cold chicken, some bread and butter, and some cold white wine. Everybody ate.

  At twelve fifteen, nine large black cars came roaring up the driveway behind a weapons carrier crowded with armed soldiers to meet President Duvalier’s seven o’clock appointment with Mr. Palladino. For once Mr. Palladino was grateful that somebody was a little late because he had been able to get rid of all his dictation.

  He wasn’t exactly unclear anymore about the President of Haiti. He knew they called him Papa Doc, which sounded nice. Bart Simms had told him that Papa Doc wore his high silk hat into the bathtub because it helped him to meditate and that he kept the head of his (former) enemy, Philogenes, in his office, right on his desk and, when possible, preferred to have his opposition stoned to death after reading the auguries for the day in the entrails of slaughtered animals. Mr. Palladino thought Papa Doc sounded very Sicilian.

  As Simms had explained it, as long as Papa Doc voted with the United States against Cuba in the United Nations and the OAS, he did all right because they paid cash for the vote. Papa Doc needed a lot of money because one half of the revenue of the country was spent on his personal security.

  The four visitors watched the weapons carrier screech to a stop, disgorging troops, which scurried to surround the third Cadillac, which had stopped directly at the footwalk to the swimming pool. From the other eight Cadillacs forty-eight men wearing large shades, Hawaiian shirts and beanie fedoras debouched rapidly and arranged themselves around the soldiers or found positions behind shrubs, or placed empty chairs.

  “Jesus, you gotta admire this operation,” Mr. Palladino said to Angela. “Get in the house.” Angela left quickly.

  Two thrillingly bemedaled large, black, gold-aguilleted military figures got out of the key limousine. The second man out wore a circle of five stars on each shoulder. He stood at attention holding the limousine door open. A shortish, white-haired, elderly black man wearing a black Homburg hat, a blank-white shirt with a black four-in-hand tie and a black suit got out of the car and came smiling up the path. Mr. Palladino now got to his feet, turned his head slightly and said, “Okay, Dom. Cool it. This is the deal.”

  The security men blended into the foliage. Only François Duvalier, President of Haiti, his Chief of Staff, and his aide came forward to greet Haiti’s guest. He reminded Mr. Palladino of a Jones distributor in South Chicago named Grunts Patterson. The two leaders shook hands cordially.

  “My Chief of Staff, General Guerin-Reynaud,” Mr. Duvalier said simply. “My son-in-law, Lieutenant-Colonel Max Drouax, who is also my aide-de-camp.” The officers bowed stiffly. The President sat down. Mr. Palladino sat down. The officers seated themselves slightly behind the President. Mr. Duvalier spoke excellent French-accented English. (And you better believe it, Mr. Palladino told himself.)

  “I apologize for the unpleasant need for the shooting here this evening,” the President said, “but you were absolutely right.”

  “No, no!” Mr. Palladino protested. “It was a mix-up. The help here were all wearing guns and it made my people nervous except they didn’t know how to explain it in French.”

  “Well, bless you, sir—but these were not household staff. They were a part of my security force whom I sent out to protect you.”

  “Protect me from what?”

  President Duvalier smiled sweetly, giving his head a sideways wag. “It will be hard for a freedom-loving man such as you to grasp, sir, but I was born under the military dictatorship of Nord Alexis. I was one year old when General Simon overthrew him, four when the revolution threw out Simon, five when the explosion blew up the old Palais National and President Cincinnatus LeConte. I was six when President Tancred August was poisoned and so on and on. The mulatto population are violent people, Mr. Palladino. But I am teaching all of my people calm and to do this I have chosen only associates I can trust, no matter how ignorant they are.”

  “Aaaaahh,” Mr. Palladino said, “no wonder they wouldn’t bring any food.”

  “No food?” the President for Life snarled,
turning to stare into General Guerin-Reynaud’s impassive face. The General got up and strode into the house.

  “Oh! Hey! Wait!” Mr. Palladino called after him. “We straightened it out! We finally got some food ourselves in the kitchen.”

  “Guests of the Republic don’t get their own food,” Dr. Duvalier said. “Inevitably, you will want to eat again. It is possible that my Tonton Macoutes have trussed up the household staff.”

  “Tonton Macoute?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Duvalier said, smiling at the chance to impart Haitian folklore. “Tonton Macoute means Uncle Knapsack. He was a legendary giant who strode from mountaintop to mountaintop, stuffing bad little boys and girls into his knapsack. With affection, my people have named their security force after him.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “But—with all my talk of shooting, trussing and revolution you must not form the impression that we are an uncivilized people.”

  “Hey! Never.”

  “Richard Nixon has had glorious times here in our new, luxury marble mountain villa at Turgeau. When he was vice-president. Oh, yes!”

  General Guerin-Reynaud returned with a basket of apples and two bottles of Seven-Up for President Duvalier.

  “Forgive me,” the President said, “but I adore imported apples. Then, last week, after your present vice-president called me about seeing you, I took the liberty of making inquiries about your work, and I must say the results have stimulated my curiosity.”

  “Call me Joe,” Mr. Palladino said.

  “How kind. Joe, I go to a sad mission tonight. Nineteen of my officers have been revealed as traitors to the Republic and I am on my way out to Fort Dimanche to have them shot. So you will understand why we will be unable to have a lot of time together tonight.”

  “Listen! You can be as quick as you want. I have a very simple proposition. I can lay out all the details.”

  “Never mind the details. How much money is involved and how do we share it?”

  “It’s a large piece of money.”

  “Good.”

  “You get fifteen percent off the top. Of the gross. From the first dollar.”

  “No.”

  “In Cuba we gave only nine point three percent and it threw off so much money it buried them.”

  The President shrugged delicately with the slightest shiver of disapproval. “Cuba is not Haiti,” he said.

  “What’s your idea, Doc?”

  “Equal shares. I supply the country and total protection. You supply the capital, the knowledge and the technicians.”

  “I supply much more than that, Doc.”

  “For a gambling casino?”

  “The casino is only the flash,” Mr. Palladino said slowly. “Also I’m gonna turn this place into a tourist paradise because it already is a tourist paradise. When that happens we can claim total stability here, which means my friends can get you back on foreign aid.”

  The President’s white eyebrows lifted.

  “And that’s only the beginning,” Mr. Palladino said.

  “How do you bring in the tourists?”

  “Look—Doc—there are maybe four big travel wholesalers. The biggest. They buy up all the hotel rooms, all the hot dogs, the broads, whatever, and when everything is in, they roll it out, piece by piece, to the retail travel agents and they tell them this is the country the retailers are going to buy and feature for the next seven years and everybody wins. If you can’t make a little country like France or Greece in seven years it’s never gonna get made.”

  “France?”

  “A friend of mine has dug up some information on Charley Graffis, you never heard of him. He is one of the four biggies. Out of Detroit. When we talk to him he will agree your country rates it.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “The people walk into a travel agent. They think they’re gonna go up to the Catskills and—voom—they end up here.”

  “What do I get fifteen percent of, Joe?”

  Mr. Palladino ticked the items off his fingers. “Casino action, car rentals, hotel construction, hotel throw-off, roads, organized broads, post cards and native souvenirs which we will design and make for you in Akron, Ohio. You get one hundred percent on airport taxes, gasoline taxes, fishing boat rentals and night club action. You raise the price on post office stamps by three cents and you pick up a half a million dollars. You use dollars here?”

  “I do. The people use gourdes.”

  “Jesus. When my partner gets foreign aid back for you—how much were you getting when they cut you off?”

  “Twelve and a half million a year.”

  “My partner will make that twenty and our finder’s fee will be the same as your cut on my end—fifteen percent, no more.”

  The jungle was close by and its night noises became deafening all at once. Then the noise faded down, giving everything to an enormous yellow moon that hung almost within reach like an overripe melon waiting to be cut up as Mr. Palladino told Dr. Duvalier about the loan for Education and Potable Water from the Inter-American Bank. Dr. Duvalier had become very much interested. “Now,” Mr. Palladino said, “all that is just the chicken-shit part, Doc. That is just the flash.”

  “I cannot anticipate you,” Dr. Duvalier said imperturbably, “excepting that our own investigations indicated that you were mainly in the narcotics business.”

  “That is correct. And that is the real part. That is the important bread.”

  “I get fifteen percent of that?”

  “You get a thousand a kilo on the raw.”

  “What do you pay per kilo?”

  “It isn’t settled yet.”

  “Let’s say five hundred a kilo.”

  “I don’t know. It just isn’t settled yet.”

  “Well, I know. I know because I checked it.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “At five hundred a kilo you will be making a prodigious, breathtaking profit when you convert it to heroin.”

  “You can’t begin to imagine my expenses. The people in Asia, the transport, my partner, the chemists, the mules, the risks, the greed of the cops and politicians—present company excepted, naturally.”

  Dr. Duvalier nodded acknowledgment as he said, “I think you can afford to pay me four thousand a kilo for this kind of security.”

  “Listen, Doc—I can go up to fifteen hundred a kilo. And I’ll be dealing in hundreds of tons, here.”

  “Then you’ll have to reduce your finder’s fee on the foreign aid to three percent.”

  “I am showing a lot of good will here. I mean a whole tourist industry, foreign aid, the Inter-American Bank, the souvenir design and manufacture. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll accept the three percent finder’s fee for the foreign aid and the bank loans if you will pay for the construction of the heroin conversion plants.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Say eighty thousand dollars—a token.”

  “All right,” President Duvalier said decisively, clapping his hands down hard upon the arms of his chair. “I guarantee construction costs up to eighty thousand dollars. Not a penny more, Mr. Palladino. Now you must excuse me. I must go off and shoot my officers.”

  20

  July 1971

  The Operation Enigma committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was composed entirely of General officers. Lieutenant General Ludlow “Petey” Doncaster chaired the meeting. General Richards “Biff” Marek represented the Special Intelligence Section. Fleet Admiral Harold “Seagull” Matson sat in for the Navy even though the Navy could not have anything to do with this kind of operation. Two Major-Generals, Luther “Bosco” Beemis and Gordon “Kiddo” Manning completed the committee. Every man in the room was a preeminent Intelligence specialist; cold war or hot.

  There were no recording stenographers, full clearance or not. General Doncaster didn’t want any of the proceedings leaking to the White House.

  “I’ll set down some rules for procedure. We will refer to our ope
rative as the Agent because it makes no difference whether that agent is a man or a woman. And the Chairman, Joint Chiefs, regards this as such an important mission that we do not—I repeat, not—even want to refer to the Agent by the name of the person replaced. Now—not everything has worked out as planned. The first subject debriefed by Dr. Baum survived only long enough to provide insufficient information to shape up a vitally necessary new profile for the Agent and we had to start over again. General Marek got some lucky breaks when his people worked with prison and probation information records and with personnel at Joliet, Dannemora and Canon City. We were able to begin again, in a post-mortem way, and Dr. Baum was able to complete the shape of the person’s background and psychical profile without difficulty.

  “Well, the Agent is now operating. The group must be inside China now. General Marek?”

  Marek was an enormous man whose shoulders looked like they had come in pre-fab sections and were going to fall out through the sleeves of his tunic. He was an intent, possessed man with a fanatic’s eye.

  “More importantly, the Agent must have had time to reach the destination, which we assume is China. Now—it is absolutely in-evitable that the instant those persons reach a base inside China, wherever that base may be, and we have the most sensitive Air Force reconnaissance working on that, it is in-evitable that everyone in that party, including our Agent, is going to be de-briefed. The question is this: is the seal Dr. Baum locked into the Agent’s consciousness and unconsciousness going to be strong enough to withstand a really painstaking Chinese brainwash? I mean, that’s it. Right there. Everything stands or falls on that.”

  General Manning cleared his throat. Manning was a psychiatrist. He did not approve of Dr. Baum or of the Intelligence Services’ use of Dr. Baum. “Well, speaking for myself, and this area is slightly more my field than anybody else’s here today, I don’t see how this Agent has any more chance than a snowball in hell to beat an expert Chinese de-briefing. Those guys invented these kinds of tactics. They’ve been at it centuries longer than Baum or any other German sadist-quack.”