Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  She said, “Stand up when a lady comes into your office, you son of a bitch.”

  He gave her an anemic grin. “Come on in.”

  She deposited her handbag, sat down, watched him light up a cigarette. “Did you sleep?”

  “Not much.”

  “Neither did I.”

  He said, “There’s been some movement. Mexico and Colombia have put up the ransom between them. They’ve agreed to release the six prisoners in their jails. They’ve broadcast it—I don’t know if you heard the news?”

  “I listened to it. I’m not sure I heard it.”

  “Venezuela’s balking. The money’s been raised without them but five of the political prisoners are in Caracas and the Venezuelans insist they aren’t going to release them. It’s the standard hang-tough policy.”

  “Are they that heartless?”

  “The only way to survive this kind of terrorism is to have a firm policy for dealing with it and to stick to that policy. The only real surprise has been the willingness of the other two countries to knuckle under. Venezuela’s posture is, diplomatically speaking, the correct one. Of course usually you negotiate with the terrorists while you’re hanging tough. In this case there’s nobody to negotiate with. Appeals have been broadcast on the radio in Latin America but it’s been a one-sided conversation.”

  “Hasn’t there been any word from them at all?”

  “Yes. A note last night to a newspaper in Mexico City. Giving details of where and how the ransom was to be paid. A helicopter drop over a fairly remote forest area on the Yucatan Peninsula.”

  “Are they sure it’s genuine? I mean, couldn’t anybody take advantage of a situation like this and deliver a ransom note?”

  “It appears to be genuine. It’s been examined. It matches the earlier note—the one that turned up in Caracas. Half a page of anti-Castro propaganda, same as before.”

  “Is anybody searching that Yucatan area?”

  “In a way.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You can’t send troops crashing around in the forest. They’d give themselves away instantly. And you can’t use planes or helicopters for the same reason.”

  “Then nothing’s being done. That’s what you’re telling me.”

  “Not quite. The helicopter that delivers the ransom will photograph every foot of the ground under it. Both standard film and infrared. There’ll also be—I shouldn’t tell you this, it’s top secret—an overflight by extreme high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft using that James Bondish sort of high-resolution telescopic photography. There’s a fair chance they’ll spot the pickup of the ransom and be able to trail it back to its destination. Also of course there’s a radio transmitter concealed in the container but that probably won’t help—usually they’re smart enough to take the money out of the container and put it in duffel bags before they move it. Still, you have to try.”

  She said, “They won’t be released right away, will they? Even if they get the ransom.”

  “They’ll want some assurance the political prisoners have been freed and flown to Argentina.”

  “Argentina? Do you mean to tell me the Argentine government has agreed to give them asylum?”

  “Not exactly. They’ve agreed to keep hands off until Gordon and the other hostages have been released. Which means, probably, that the terrorists must have set up some clandestine escape route to get their people out of Argentina. Probably across Paraguay or something. It can be done—it’s easy to disappear down there.”

  “Then it doesn’t end at noon today, does it.”

  “Did you ever think it would?”

  Noon came and went. She sat listless, her eyes drowsy with memories. Robert’s nine-year-old feud with the piano; his erratic career in college; his positive mania for justice.

  Howard was on the phone. “There’s no movement at all?… Very well. Thanks, I’m sorry to keep bothering you.”

  Carole said, “If I had charge of the assembled might of this technocracy I don’t imagine I’d be sitting on my ass the way these people are doing. I’d have had those hostages out of there.”

  “You and Moshe Dayan.”

  “It’s not possible that an organization as powerful as the United States government can fail to locate and rescue its own Ambassador. This whole system is rotten with the most suicidal and hysterical incompetence I’ve ever seen. Somebody should fold, spindle and mutilate the whole bureaucratic population of this town.”

  “Do sit down, for God’s sake.”

  She paced back and forth—four steps, turn, four steps.

  “How naïve you are,” Howard said. “It’s strange how familiar your tune sounds. You can’t understand how the most powerful government on earth can fail to lick a handful of scruffy terrorists. Don’t you remember hawks saying exactly the same thing about Viet Nam?”

  She professed not to hear him. “What’s the CIA doing?”

  “How do I know?”

  She advanced upon the desk. “What’s that man’s number—what’s his name, O’Hillary.”

  “He won’t give you the time of day after the way you iced him yesterday.”

  “Then you call him.”

  “It’s pointless.”

  “Call him anyway.”

  “What for?” He met her eyes. “Carole, it’s no good browbeating me any more. It won’t accomplish anything. We’re both upset as it is—what’s the point of henpecking each other to distraction?”

  She studied his face. His eyes were raw and pouched; there was a red spot on his lip where he’d chewed the chapped flesh. She said, “The conventional wisdom on the left is that the Department of State is nothing more than an arm of the Pentagon and the CIA. How much truth is there in that?”

  “Some.” She was surprised by his candor. “It depends who’s in the White House. Right now we’re better off than we used to be.”

  “If these terrorists were left-wing radicals, would this thing be handled the same way?”

  “Terrorism is equally reprehensible whatever direction it comes from.”

  “Don’t give me the official line.”

  “I don’t think—”

  The phone interrupted him. He picked it up and she watched his face change. He was looking straight at her but his eyes lost focus and he shrank.

  “All right. Thank you for calling.” He cradled it very gently as if he were afraid of disturbing something; from that action she knew what he was going to say before he spoke.

  “They have killed him.” He uttered the words with great slow precision as if by enunciating them fully he could himself believe in their reality. “They have murdered Robert.”

  She couldn’t breathe. “They haven’t—they can’t. They mustn’t.”

  He came around the desk blindly, groping for her. “He’s dead. My God, he’s dead, Carole.”

  She found herself submitting to his embrace. Her eyes were painfully dry and she seemed incapable of getting oxygen into her lungs. She was aware of the tobacco-stink of his shirt and the tension in his arms. Silent, open-mouthed, trying to hold onto consciousness, she felt him weep.

  Then she heard herself say, “Something must be done.”

  PART

  TWO

  Chapter 3

  When Glenn Anders entered the Coral Gables office the Deputy Chief told him of the death of Robert Lundquist.

  “They dumped the body on the back steps of the police station in Merida, Yucatan. They left all his identification on him so they’d be sure we got the right message. And a note pinned to his shirt. I don’t need to tell you what it said.” The Deputy Chief—Mackinnon—had a sour jowled face and wisps of black hair across his bald head. “It’s a goad, of course. Proof that they mean business. The message is directed mainly at Venezuela. The note said among other things that they’ll kill another hostage tomorrow and another the day after that and so on, saving the Ambassador till last, until their demands are met. The idea here, I guess, is
that they started with the least prominent of the hostages. The kid was an accidental member of the party.”

  “This is the Peace Corps boy, I take it? Lundquist?”

  “Yes. Poor son of a bitch. At least they did it clean. Shot him in the back of the head. Maybe he never knew it was coming.”

  “Anything useful in the note?”

  “The same anti-Castro propaganda. It’s in the lab in Mexico City. Along with the kid’s clothes and personals. They’re flying him into Houston for the autopsy. Who knows, maybe something will turn up under his fingernails.”

  “Did they set a new deadline?”

  “Noon tomorrow. Predictably.”

  “Any word from the Venezuelans?”

  “Not that I know of. But there’ll be a lot more pressure on them now. They’re holding out against three countries. A couple of Congressmen are making noises about embargoing oil imports from Venezuela. It wouldn’t happen, of course, but the fact that anybody suggests it is pretty hard on the Venezuelan image. Tourists are canceling reservations, that kind of thing. Maybe they’ll knuckle under. Personally I wish they wouldn’t. The only way to deal with these bastards is to refuse to deal with them. I’m all for the Venezuelans—let ’em stonewall it.”

  Anders made no reply to that; he rarely believed in certainties or flat statements. If the Venezuelans hadn’t stonewalled it, he thought, this Lundquist might not be dead now. But who knows. Everything was caprice.

  Mackinnon said, “I take it you didn’t turn up anything.”

  “A couple of names that need checking out. Emilio Ortiz, Guillermo Garza. Mean anything to you?”

  “Not especially.”

  “They’re both out of the country on business trips.”

  “Well maybe they are.”

  Anders went out to the desk they had lent him and wrote up a report of his day. Then he put through a call to O’Hillary on the scrambler. “Anything new on the Lundquist boy?”

  O’Hillary’s voice was calm, smooth, avuncular. “No, except that the killing achieved its purpose. The Venezuelans are capitulating. It’s not public yet but I have it on good authority. They’ll broadcast it tonight—they’ll be flying the prisoners out to Buenos Aires in the morning.”

  “So the bastards get everything they asked for.”

  “For the moment. Until we find them and take it back. That’s still your job, Glenn.”

  “At the present rate,” Anders told him, “I’ll probably find them in nineteen ninety-three. Nothing’s breaking around here. Anything from air recon?”

  “Some marvelous photographs of clouds and trees.”

  “Shit.”

  “The beeper in the container hasn’t moved since it was dropped. We don’t know if they’re leaving it there deliberately or if they’ve removed the money and left the container behind.”

  “Probably the latter,” Anders said. “Any instructions?”

  “No. Just carry on. We have every confidence in you.”

  We have every confidence—it made Anders smile when he put down the phone. He was both amused and concerned by the Agency’s attitude on this thing. By putting the job in his hands they had revealed a great deal. In the hierarchy of things he was junior-grade. By putting him in charge Washington was going through the motions but it was clear to Anders that nobody was going to be axed if he failed to produce. The whole thing was indicative of the ambivalence with which Washington and Langley regarded this affair. Terrorism must be countered of course—but what if the terrorists weren’t quite our enemies?

  What a marvelous embarrassment it would be, he thought, if I actually nailed the bastards.

  Rosalia came along to his desk. Euphonious Rosalia Rojas. She had the pert eager bounce of an earnest trainee stewardess; certainly she was out of place around here but Mackinnon had called her our best pipeline to the Cuban community. The word that suited her was cute. She had dark tangled hair, cut medium-short, that bounced when she moved. Pug nose, very large black-brown eyes shaped into an expression of astonishment and vulnerability, a short-waisted buxom little body with a nervous brisk way of moving. From the outset she had appealed to him carnally. It had ripened beyond that and beyond anything he’d anticipated: Yet somehow it wasn’t alarming.

  She had a small steno notebook from which she started reading aloud before she stopped walking. “I checked into those six names. Four of them are here in the Miami area working at their jobs and they haven’t been out of town in months except one of them took the wife and kids to Disney World six weeks ago. This leaves two, if the new math hasn’t altogether corrupted my arithmetic, and one of them is definitely in Mobile on one of those corporation refresher-training courses. He fixes cars for the Oldsmobile dealer and they’ve sent him to GM mechanics’ school.”

  “Leaving one more.”

  “Go to the head of the class,” she said cheerfully. “His name is”—just the slightest trace of accent, hees-name-ees, you might miss it if you weren’t listening for it—“Ignacio Gandara, age forty-one, occupation construction worker. At the moment he is laid off and collecting Unemployment but he didn’t pick up the two most recent checks at the Unemployment office and no one who knows him has seen him in about three weeks.”

  “Does he have an American passport?”

  “Yes.”

  “Find out if he’s used it, can you?”

  She made a note. “How did you do?”

  “About the same as you. Five negatives, two possibles. Guillermo Garza, occupation lawyer—or so it says on his shingle—and Emilio Ortiz, who’s—”

  “A construction engineer,” Rosalia said. “I know Emilio, he’s godfather to one of my sisters. He’s been shuttling back and forth to St. Thomas, working for a company that’s building a condominium over there.”

  “That could be a cover, couldn’t it? Let’s not scratch Ortiz off the list just yet.”

  She said, “Maybe you’re right. But I’ve always liked him.”

  “One of the delights of this business is learning how little you can trust people.” He looked at his watch. “Join me for supper?”

  When he looked up he caught the sparkle in her eye. “I’d love to. I’ll be ready in ten minutes—I’ll just put the Gandara inquiry on the wire to Passport Control.”

  It was a flat low rectangular building on the Tamiami Trail, its only distinguishing feature a huge towering electric sign that looked like something along the Strip in Las Vegas. The parking lot was the size of a football field. Rosalia clipped along beside him chattering—her way of talking, like everything else about her, was quick and cheerful. Inside the place he had to stop to accustom his eyes to the sudden dimness. It was one of those structures that had been built since the invention of central air conditioning; it had no windows at all. The chandeliers were imitation wagonwheels, the decor was ersatz Wild West, the booths were heavy wood lined with padded black leather, the jukebox boomed with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. The menu offered steaks, rib roast and lobster; the drinks came in massive frosted tumblers like the mugs in drive-in root-beer stands. A girl in a backless top and a skirt so short it exposed her fanny, and heels so high she tottered, guided them to a booth and, when Anders made a dry remark, guided them to another one farther from the hammering of the jukebox. There was a lousy painting of Custer’s Last Stand over the bar and the two bartenders wore handlebar mustaches and ten-gallon hats. Anders detested Florida.

  When they slid into the leather banquette he said to his companion, “I was thirty before I ever saw this part of the world. I had friends in Chicago who’d go to Miami Beach every winter—I grew up in that kind of set, lower-middle-class snobs. They kept telling me I had to go to Miami Beach and see all the fabulous hotels. I never intended to go there. I expected sooner or later Miami Beach would come to me, as it does to all men. I was right.”

  “This isn’t Miami Beach. It’s Coral Gables.”

  “Yeah. What’ll you have?”

  “A hangover.” She
was studying the menu. “But I think I’ll start with a banana daiquiri.”

  When the tedium of ordering was concluded he gave Rosalia his full attention. In the jaundiced light her skin seemed pale and velvety. She had an emphatic way of returning his gaze. Then she screwed up her nose at him. “You’re a big shambling teddy bear, aren’t you.”

  That made him laugh. “I think I’m falling in love with you.” Immediately it sounded lame; he’d meant it to be light, but not facetious: a joke to cover the fact that he meant it.

  “Shucks, all the guys say that.”

  “I believe that,” he agreed. “A backtrail crowded with broken hearts.”

  She said, “I broke up with my boy friend three months ago. I moved out. I cried for a week and went numb for a week but I’m great at bouncing back. I’m telling you that because I didn’t want you to waste half an hour groping around for a way to ask me if there were any other serious men in my life. Or men seriously in my life, or whatever—I majored in English lit but it’s still my second language. I was going to be a teacher,” she explained, “but then I realized I hate teaching. I don’t have the patience to deal with people who don’t learn everything right the first time. Anyway I’m more useful here, you know. My father was very important in the Cuban exile movement. He died a few years ago but I’ve still got the family contacts.”

  “Don’t you feel you’re selling them out?”

  “Sometimes,” she conceded. “You have to decide where your loyalties are, don’t you. We left Cuba when I was four. I’m a citizen of the United States. I don’t picture any scenario in which the exiles will ever recover the properties they lost to Castro, do you?”

  “I don’t think the restoration of confiscated properties is the motive. I give these folks a bit more credit than that.”

  “They don’t like Castro—they don’t like Communism. I don’t think much of Castro or Communism either. But then I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought much of Batista either. You know it’s not easy when you’re born into the middle of a squabble like this. Whatever I do, I’m a traitor to somebody. I’ve spent my whole life arguing these things with my family and friends.”