The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Innocence was not, as Laila had had the grateful occasion to discover, an attribute of his. He circled his hand under her hair so that the nape of her neck was caught in the soft vise of his thumb and other fingers. With a languorous movement he drew her face down to his and held it there, their lips barely touching. Finally, reluctantly, be released her.

  “I’d forgive you anything.”

  Laila circled the banquette and slid down onto the cushion beside him.

  Across the way a joint was moving from hand to hand. Michael reached for it and passed it to her. Laila, still shaken by her experience in the garage, inhaled a full breath, holding the smoke in her lungs every second she could before letting it glide out her nostrils. Michael started to pass it on, but before he did she grabbed it back and gulped another lungful. Then she sat back, eyes closed, waiting, praying for the gentle numbness to seep through her. She opened her eyes to see Michael staring down at her, a crooked half-smile on his face.

  “Dance?”

  As soon as they reached the dance floor, she hurled herself into the music, eyes closed, racing off alone along the crashing tide of sound, away from everything, the grass finally enclosing her in its protective cocoon.

  “Black bitch!”

  The shrill scream shattered Laila’s reverie. The young black she bad noticed on the way in was slumping to the floor, blood spurting from his temple, his mouth open in a prayer of pain from the blow, from the agonizing tear of his weird harness. His aggressor, a squat young white with a beer drinker’s belly and a floppy leather hat, planted a vicious kick in his groin before two bouncers could shove him away.

  Laila shuddered. “Oh God,” she whispered. “How awful! Let’s sit down.” Her hand clutched Michael’s tightly as they started back to their banquette.

  Dizzy from the grass, the scene on the dance floor, she leaned against him, raising her head toward his. Her eyes were glistening.

  “What a hideous world we live in!”

  Michael studied her. She seemed distant, distraught almost. Perhaps, he told himself, the new Mexican grass was too strong. He stroked her auburn hair as they sat down. He could see she was still far away, running down her own track.

  “Why is it always the ones like him that get hurt?” she asked. “The weak, the helpless?” Michael didn’t answer; he knew she didn’t want an answer.

  “For people like that there’s never any justice until they start to use the violence others use against them. And then there’s more violence and more violence and more violence.”

  Hearing her own words, she trembled.

  “You don’t believe that, Linda.”

  “Oh yes I do. They”-she waved scornfully to the crowded dance floor-“never hear anything until it’s too late. They’re only interested in their bodies, their pleasures, their money. The poor, the homeless, the wronged-that doesn’t interest them. Until there’s violence, the world is deaf.” Her voice fell until it was barely a whisper. “You know, there’s a saying in our Koran. A terrible saying, really, but true: `If God should punish men according to what they deserve, he would not leave on the back of the earth so much as a beast.”’

  “Your Koran? I thought you were Christian, Linda.”

  Laila stiffened, suddenly wary of the grass. “You know what I mean. The Koran’s Arabic, isn’t it?”

  From across the banquette someone waved another joint toward them. Michael pushed it away.

  “Let’s go back to the studio.”

  Laila cupped his face in her hands, her long fingers fondling the skin on his temples. She held him like that for a while, gazing at his beautiful face.

  “Yes, Michael. Take me home.”

  As they walked toward the door, a chubby paw beckoned to them out of the darkness.

  “Linda, darling! You’re stunning, duh-voon!”

  She turned to see the pudgy figure of Truman Capote, resembling a scaled-down Winston Churchill in a mauve velvet jumpsuit.

  “Come meet all these lovely people.”

  With the pride of a jeweler pointing out his choice baubles, he introduced them to the gaggle of Italian pseudo-nobles fawning over him.

  “The Principessa’s giving a luncheon in my honor tomorrow,” he gushed, indicating a gray-haired woman whose taut facial skin was evidence of more than one visit to the fashionable plastic surgeons of Rio. “You must come.”

  The bright eyes swept over Michael. “And do bring this lovely creature along.” Capote leaned over to her. “Everyone will be there tomorrow. Gianni is coming from ‘Iurino just for me.” His voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “Even Teddy’s coming. Isn’t that marvelous?”

  With a kiss and a promise, Laila managed to extricate them from Capote’s grasp. Leaving, she heard his voice squealing through the shadows after them, its high timbre rising above the din of the club. “Don’t forget Tuesday lunch, darlings! Everyone will be there!”

  * * *

  “They’re here, sir.”

  The words had no sooner drifted from Jack Eastman’s intercom than “they” were in his office, terrorist experts from State and the CIA: Dr. John Turner, head of the Agency’s Psychiatric Affairs Division; Lisa Dyson, the thirtyfive-yearold CIA officer who had what was referred to in the Agency as the “Libyan account”; Bernie Tamarkin, a Washington psychiatrist and a recognized world authority on the behavioral psychology of terrorists in stress situations.

  Eastman scrutinized them all, noticing the faint flush on their faces, sensing the shortened rhythm of their breathing. Nervous, he thought.

  Everybody peaks when they come to the White House.

  As soon as they had sat down, Lisa Dyson passed out copies of an eighteen-page document. It was enclosed in an embossed white folder bearing the pale-blue seal of the CIA, a “Top Secret” stamp and the words “Personality and Political Behavior Study: Muammar al-Qaddafi.”

  The study was part of a secret program run by the CIA since the late fifties, an effort to employ the techniques of psychiatry to study the personality and character development of a selected group of world leaders in intimate detail, to try to predict with some degree of certainty how they would respond in a crisis. Castro, Charles de Gaulle, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao Tse-tung, the Shah, Nasser, all had been put under the dissecting glare of the CIA’s analysts. Indeed, some of the perceptions turned up in the profiles of Castro and Khrushchev had been of vital help to John F. Kennedy in dealing with both men during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Each involved prodigious expense and effort. Everything about a “target”

  was examined: what had influenced his life, what its major traumas were, how he had responded to them, whether he had developed certain characteristic defense mechanisms. Agents were sent all over the world to determine one precise fact, to explore just one facet of a man’s character.

  Old military-schoolmates were hunted down and probed to find out if a man masturbated, drank, was finicky about his food, went to church, how he responded to stress. Did he like boys? Or women? Or both? Had be had a mother fixation? Trace him where you could through his oral, anal, genital stages. Find out if he had a large or small penis. If he had sadistic tendencies. Once a CIA agent had been smuggled into Cuba for the sole purpose of talking to a whore with whom Castro had often gone to bed when he was a student.

  Eastman turned back the folder of his study and looked at the portrait inside of the man who was threatening to massacre his daughter and five million other Americans.

  He sighed and turned to Lisa Dyson. She had a mane of long blond hair that streamed below her shoulder blades. Her slender hips were forced into blue jeans so tight the men around her could not miss the welt made in them by the edge of her panties. “All right, miss, why don’t you start by summing up just what that report of yours tells us about this son of a bitch and how he’s going to act in a crisis,” Eastman ordered.

  Lisa reflected a moment, searching for the phrase, for the one all-embracing thought, that would capture the
essence of those eighteen pages she knew so well.

  “What this tells us,” she answered, “is that he’s as shrewd as a desert fox and twice as dangerous.”

  * * *

  In New York, Times Square was empty. A chill wind sweeping up from the distant harbor twisted the cottony tufts of steam spurting from the Con Ed manhole covers and sent the night’s harvest of litter scuttling along the sidewalks and curbs. The predominant sound was the clattering of the suspensions of the Checker cabs as they hurtled over the potholes of Broadway in their flight downtown.

  At Forty-third and Broadway a pair of half-frozen whores huddled in the doorway of a Steak and Brew Burger, listlessly calling to the few late-night passersby. Three blocks away, in the warmth of a third-floor walkup, its walls and ceilings painted black, their pimp lolled on a mattress wrapped in a gold satin sheet. He was a lean black with a precisely trimmed goatee. He had on a white beaver hat with a three-inch brim, and, despite the almost total lack of illumination in the room, dark glasses screened his eyes. His hips, covered by the white silk folds of an Arab djellabah, twitched suggestively to the rhythms of Donna Summer’s voice flooding out of his stereo system.

  Enrico Diaz turned to the girl beside him. She was the third and newest member of his stable. He reached for the ornament dangling around his neck on a gold chain. It was a representation of the male sex organ and it was there that he kept his finest Colombian coke. He was about to offer the girl a jolt and a loving stroke, the assurance that she was his main woman, when the phone rang.

  His irritation became evident displeasure when he heard a voice saying, “This is Eddie. How about a party?”

  Fifteen minutes later Enrico’s lime-green custom-built Lincoln paused at Forty-sixth and Broadway just long enough to allow a figure to emerge from the shadows and slip into the front seat.

  As he guided the car into the traffic, Enrico glared disdainfully at the man beside him, the collar of his beige overcoat turned up to screen his face. Enrico was typical of dozens of men and women being contacted in these predawn hours in bars, on street corners, in restaurants and bedrooms around New York. He was an FBI informer.

  He owed that distinction to the fact that he had been caught one night with a dozen dime bags of heroin in his car. It was not that Enrico scored horse. He was a gentleman. The bags were for one of his girls. But it had come down to doing eight to fifteen in Atlanta or walkingand talking, from time to time, with the Bureau. Besides pimping, Enrico, the son of a black mother and a Puerto Rican father, was a senior member of the FALN Puerto Rican underground, a group of considerable interest to the FBI.

  “I got something heavy, Rico,” his control agent said.

  “Man,” Rico sighed, maneuvering deftly through the late traffic, “you always got something heavy.”

  “We’re looking for Arabs, Rico.”

  “No Arabs fucking my girls. They too rich for that.”

  “Not that kind of Arab, Rico. The kind that likes to blow people up, not screw them. Like your FALN friends.” Rico eyed the agent warily. “I need anything you got on Arabs, Rico. Arabs looking for guns, papers, cards, a safe house, whatever.”

  “Ain’t heard about none of that.”

  “Suppose you just ask around for us, Rico?”

  Rico groaned softly, all the strains and tensions of his double life encapsulizcd in the sound. Still, life was a deal. You made, you took, you gave, you got. The man wanted something, the man give something.

  “Hey, man,” he said in that low gentle voice he reserved for special moments. “One of my ladies, she be in this thing with the Pussy Posse down at the Eighteenth Precinct.”

  “What kind of thing, Rico?”

  “Hey, you know, this John, he don’t want to pay and…

  “And she’s looking at three to five for armed robbery?”

  There was an almost reluctant, liquid roll to Rico’s answer. “Yeahhh.”

  “Pull over here.” The agent waved to the curb. “It’s heavy, Rico. Real heavy. You get me what I need on Arabs, I’ll get you your girl.”

  Watching him disappear down Broadway, Rico could only think of the girl waiting for him on the gold silk mattress, of her long muscular legs, the soft lips and the swiftly moving tongue he was training to perform the arts of her new calling. Sighing reluctantly, he drove off, not back toward his Forty-third Street fiat but east toward the East River Drive.

  * * *

  For fifteen minutes, Lisa Dyson had kept the men in Jack Eastman’s White House office captivated with her profoundly disturbing portrait of the man threatening to destroy New York City. Every facet of Qaddafi’s life was covered in the CIA’s report: his lonely, austere boyhood in the desert tending his father’s herds; the brutal trauma of being cast from the family tent by his ambitious father and sent away to school; how he had been despised as an ignorant Bedouin by his schoolmates, humiliated because he was so poor that he bad to sleep on the floor of a mosque and walk twelve miles each weekend to his parents’ camp.

  The CIA had indeed found his bunkmates at the military school where his political ambitions had begun to emerge. The portrait they gave of a youthful Qaddafi, however, was anything but that of a masturbating, eagerly lecherous young Arab male. He had been instead a zealous Puritan, sworn to a vow of chastity until he had overthrown Libya’s King; abjuring alcohol and tobacco and urging his fellows to follow his example. Indeed, as Lisa Dyson pointed out, he still flew into wild temper tantrums when he heard that his Prime Minister was fooling around with the Lebanese hostesses on Libya’s national airline or womanizing with bar girls in Rome.

  The report described the carefully planned coup. that had given him control on September 1, 1969, at the age of twenty-seven, of a nation with $2 billion a year in oil revenues, pointing out the code word he’d assigned the operations: “El Kuds”-Jerusalem.

  It detailed the extreme, xenophobic version of Islam he had imposed on his nation: the return to the Sharia, the Koranic law, cutting off a thief’s hand, stoning adultresses to death, putting drinkers under the lash; his conversion of Libya’s churches to mosques, his decrees forbidding the teaching of English and ordering all signs and documents written in Arabic; how he had banned brothels and alcohol; how he had personally led, pistol in hand, the raids that had closed Tripoli’s nightclubs, ordering strippers to dress, gleefully smashing up bottles like a Prohibition cop. There was his “cultural revolution” that had sent illiterate mobs into the street burning the works of Sartre, Baudelaire, Graham Greene, Henry James; smashing into private homes in search of whiskey; storming through the bunk rooms of the oilfield tool pushers, ripping Playboy centerfolds from their walls.

  Most terrifying of all was the long history of terrorist actions for which he had been directly or indirectly responsible: his repeated attempts to assassinate Anwar Sadat, to organize a coup in the Saudi Arabian Army; how he’d funneled millions into Lebanon to foment the bloody Lebanese civil war and other millions to aid the Ayatollah Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah.

  “‘Muammar al-Qaddafi is essentially a lonely man, a man without friends or advisers,”’ Lisa Dyson read with the singsong Scandinavian speech pattern of the tiny Minnesota village in which she’d been raised. “‘In every instance, his reaction to new situations has been to retreat back to the old and the secure. He has discovered all too often that rigidity works, and he will inevitably become rigid in difficult circumstances.”’

  She cleared her throat and pushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead.

  “‘Most important, it is the Agency’s conviction that in a moment of great crisis he would be perfectly prepared to play the role of a martyr, to bring the roof down over his head and destroy the house if he is not allowed to have his own way.” `He likes to be unpredictable, and,”’ she concluded, ” `his favorite tactic in a crisis will be to lunge for his enemy’s weakest spot.”’

  “Jesus Christ!” Eastman groaned. “He certainly found it in New York City.”


  “That, gentlemen,” Lisa Dyson noted, closing her report, “is Muammar al-Qaddafi.”

  Bernie Tamarkin had followed her, leaning tensely forward, elbows on his knees, his hands clasped so tightly together his knuckles glowed. He stood up and began to stride around Eastman’s office, tugging nervously at his mat of curly hair. Without being asked, he started to offer his evaluation of the material Lisa Dyson had just read.

  “We’re looking at a very, very dangerous man here. First of all, he was humiliated as a kid and he’s never gotten over it. He was the dirty little Bedouin boy despised by everybody else, and he’s been out for revenge ever since. This business about keeping his family in a tent until everyone else in Libya has a house. Bullshitl He’s still punishing his father for taking him out of his desert and throwing him into that school.”

  “I think there are some vital clues for us in the desert’s impact on him,”

  Dr. Turner, the CIA’s Psychiatric Division head, noted. He was a big man, his bald head meticulously shaved, delicate gold-rim glasses on his nose.

  “Our key to getting to him may be religion-God and the Koran.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Tamarkin was still pacing. His own reputation as a terrorist negotiator had been considerably enhanced by his skillful use of an Arab ambassador familiar with the Koran during the Kannifi Black Muslim crisis in Washington a few years before. “But I doubt it. This guy thinks he’s God. That stuff about raiding the nightclubs. The story about how he goes to the hospital disguised as a beggar asking for a doctor to come to help his dying father, then throws off his robes and orders the doctor out of the country when he tells him to give his father an aspirin. That’s omnipotence. The man is playing God. And you don’t negotiate with God.”

  “Do we have to take this man at his word?” Eastman asked him. “Is he the kind of guy who really could go through with something like this? Could he be bluffing?”

  “Not a chance.” There was not, Eastman noted grimly, a hint of hesitation in Tamarkin’s reply. “Don’t doubt that son of a bitch even for a second.