Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  “Your grandfather is the President, so to speak, but I am the General. I give the orders in the field and he doesn’t countermand them. Am I getting through to you? When you volunteer to serve with an army you take orders from its generals, no matter who your grandfather is. Your grandfather understands that. I understand it. Now it’s time for you to understand it.”

  Emil considered the Magnum. “You can’t teach a man much by killing him. Now it seems to me either you’re going to shoot me or you’re not. Which is it?”

  “If you turn on us, sooner or later one of us will finish you. If that happens you won’t have an easy death. What if Julio gets at you, or Vargas? Vargas, for example, has a thing about pouring boiling water into a traitor’s ear through a funnel,” he lied. “You look unimpressed. All right—I’ll impress you.” And he clubbed Emil across the side of the head with the revolver.

  It wasn’t a very hard blow but Emil fell back with a grunt and it dazed him enough so that he didn’t put up effective resistance when Cielo proceeded methodically to batter him with his boots, cracking a rib and bruising a kidney but not doing anything that would leave visible scars. A man of Emil’s vanity wouldn’t be able to live with that; he’d have to come back for revenge. This way perhaps Emil would get over the rage and chalk it up to lessons learned.

  He nudged Emil to make sure he was awake. Emil uttered a sound and blinked up at him. “The point is,” Cielo said, “I can be just as hard as you when I need to be. And I’m a kitten beside Julio or Vargas.”

  He tossed the car keys on Emil’s chest and walked away.

  A few hundred yards round the bend he reached the Volkswagen. Julio, in the back seat, leaned forward to open the door for him. Cielo got in and they drove off. Kruger said, “All right?”

  “Yes.”

  Julio was dour. “What if he learns nothing from it?”

  “Those who do not learn from history,” Cielo said airily, “are doomed to die from it.”

  Kruger said, “I don’t trust Emil. I never will.”

  “He understands power,” Cielo said, “and he understands fear. In any case, as long as the old man is alive we’re saddled with Emil.”

  “And afterward?”

  “Emil’s the sort who’ll destroy himself, I think. He may not even need any help from us.” Cielo sank back in melancholia. “The old man won’t live forever. Neither will any of us.”

  Chapter 8

  Glenn Anders unpacked his suitcase with the efficiency of long practice. It wasn’t merely his suitcase; it was, largely, his home.

  At the bedside desk he swept aside the fan display of tourist folders and local guides—This Week in Mexico—and reached for the phone to buzz Rosalia’s room but before he touched it the instrument rang. Disquieted by the coincidence he picked it up tentatively. “Hello?”

  “Anders?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wilkins.”

  “Hello, George.”

  “How’re they hangin’, old buddy?”

  “All right.”

  “O’Hillary asked me to brief you. Right now all right? I’m in the lobby.”

  “Come on up.” Anders pushed the cradle down to break the connection. Then he dialed Rosalia’s number. “If you’re all beautiful and your pantyhose are on straight, come on down to my room. Bring your notebook. We’re getting a briefing from the station chief.” He hung up and glanced around the room. No possibility of its being bugged; he’d booked it at random. That was the best kind of security. He had no reason to suspect anyone might be interested in his conversations but when you went into any foreign country where you were known as an agent of the U.S. government you had to expect counterintelligence types to keep an eye on you as a matter of drill.

  Rosalia’s tap; and as he opened the door to her he saw George Wilkins tramping forward in the corridor. Wilkins’ high long face developed a funereal smile as he followed the girl into the room.

  Rosalia perched by the desk with her notebook, looking efficient, but the soft smile in her eyes betrayed something else and Wilkins seemed wise enough to spot it and cosmopolitan enough to refrain from comment.

  “Welcome to the pits,” Wilkins said. “I suppose I should say something like that. By way of official greeting and all.”

  “How’re things?”

  “Tedium, ever tedium. I wish somebody would try to overthrow the government around here. At least it would give us something to take an interest in.”

  Anders said, “Did you know this Lundquist kid?”

  “No.”

  “Who did?”

  “Allerton did, I think. Over at the consulate.”

  “We’ll talk to him. What have we got?”

  “Not much since we sent the last report to O’Hillary. They haven’t turned up but one or two items out of that old oil camp.” Wilkins talked with a slow prairie twang. Kansas? “A Gauloise butt, for instance, and a corner of a page, out of a paperback book. Been dog-eared a few times and broke off, you know how they do. A whole gang of bright scholars are trying to find out what book it’s from. Only got about four complete words on it and bits of a few others so it may take them a while and then I expect they’ll come up with something like Gone with the Wind or How to Have a Happier Sex Life.”

  “It’s in English?”

  “Yeah. We already knew they spoke English, didn’t we. Let’s see, what else. Oh yes—debriefing on Velez, he came up with an item—”

  Rosalia looked up from her notebook. “Velez who?”

  “Juan-Pedro Velez. Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. One of the hostages, you know. The one that had to go into the hospital with dysentery.”

  “Coals to Newcastle,” Anders observed.

  “He’s all right now. They turned him loose yesterday and we interrogated him. Anyhow he seems to remember one of the gang talked Spanish with a German accent. Thin guy, he says. Not very big.” Wilkins blinked slowly; he looked tired. “They’re scraps but it’s the best we can do right now. Any of it help you?”

  “Who knows,” Anders said.

  He told Rosalia to go around and see the consulate attaché who’d known Robert Lundquist. Nothing would come of that but he wanted to accrete more of an impression of the dead boy. Why had Lundquist been chosen as the exemplary victim? Was it simply because he’d been the least important of the hostages or had there been something abrasive about him that might have provoked them to kill him? If the latter, would this tell him anything about the nature of the terrorists? He doubted it but believed in thoroughness.

  She was putting on wraparound sunglasses. Anders glanced at her notebook. “Your handwriting’s an atrocity.”

  “I can read it,” she said defiantly. She slipped the notebook into her shiny red plastic handbag.

  “They used to teach us that penmanship was a matter of communication, not self-expression. But I guess that was back in the days when you still hadn’t grown a chest.”

  “Yes, you’re so old you’re creaking with age.” With her hand at the doorknob she said, “If I get drunk tonight will you promise to take advantage of me?”

  He spent a largely fruitless afternoon shambling around Mexico City interviewing informants he’d cultivated over the years. He hadn’t expected anything to come of it. He had nothing like the network of contacts that the local station personnel had developed. Anders had a few people in each of most of the Third World capitals—acquaintances rather than agents; they weren’t spies but favors were exchanged and Anders had built up a rudimentary list. One of the men he went to see was an export broker of the kind who admitted to a degree of knowledge about the traffic in arms and narcotics. Another was a printer who vehemently claimed he did not deal in false passports and identity papers. Neither of them purported to know anything about the terrorists.

  At four he went around to the Federal Police barracks and was granted an audience with Chief Inspector Ainsa who was burly and sly—he might have been assigned to his role by Central Casting. Ain
sa had charge of Mexico’s harbor police activities. Glenn Anders had not known him before so there was the monotony of establishing credentials and exchanging amenities; then Anders said, “Ambassador Gordon’s a yachtsman. He had a feeling the boat was a ketch. They were blindfolded but I suppose sailors have intuitions for these things. I don’t know much about it myself—a ketch is usually what, a forty-or fifty-foot sailboat?”

  “They vary in size,” Ainsa said. “It’s a two-masted design with the taller mast forward and the rear mast above the rudder. In English cómo se dice—mizzenmast. Quite graceful. Usually there is a low cabin amidships. They tend to be long and narrow, being designed for speed and sport rather than capacity.”

  “This one must have been big enough to accommodate about twenty people.”

  “That’s possible. With some crowding below decks.”

  “It occurred to me,” Anders said, treading gingerly because it wouldn’t do to get the policeman’s back up, “that perhaps the boat was stolen or hired.”

  “Hired? Ah, you mean rented. Yes, I see.”

  “It’s hard to picture a terrorist group owning a sporty sailboat.”

  “Yes.”

  “There can’t be too many vessels of that size stolen or available for hire in the Gulf of Mexico.”

  Ainsa’s smile was indicative of low cunning. It was a pose, for nothing he said was suggestive of stupidity. “Especially,” he said, “ketches stolen or rented during, say, the month of August?”

  “That would be the framework,” Anders agreed. “I’ve already asked the United States police to check around the Texas and Louisiana ports.”

  “Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia …”

  “We’re checking them all.”

  “Leave it to me. I’ll put out the word immediately.” Ainsa stood up and pressed against the desk to reach across for Anders’ hand.

  He called Rosalia from a pay phone. “What did Allerton tell you?”

  “He only met Lundquist once or twice. Sorting out his papers when he first arrived for the Peace Corps. He couldn’t tell me anything we didn’t already know. I’ll type up the notes for you but I certainly didn’t see anything in it. Incidentally Mr. Wilkins says they’ve identified that torn page from the paperback book. It’s a science-fiction novel.”

  “Good grief.”

  “One of those adventures about intergalactic wars or something.”

  It came as no particular surprise to Anders. Once in Nam he’d dived into a bunker and thrown himself flat, terrified by the exploding rockets and bullets cracking everywhere; he’d looked up and discovered a grunt who, in the midst of that madness, was reading a paperback Western shoot-’em-up, enthralled.

  Rosalia on the telephone said, “I’ve got it all doped out. The whole thing. You know what we’re up against, don’t you?”

  “No. What?”

  “A nest of aliens. Martian invaders.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’m on my way to Wilkins’ office. Meet me there in an hour. Stop by the newspaper on your way and see if they’ll let you have another photocopy of that ransom note.”

  He went along toward the embassy on foot; it was rush hour and he made better progress that way. Traffic was clotted in the boulevards and there was a dry chill in the thin air. Two blocks short of the embassy he espied Harry Crobey.

  He wouldn’t have noticed Crobey in the throng of commuters but for the peculiar roll of Crobey’s limp. It gave him a swaying gait that made him noticeable because he didn’t move with the same rhythm as the others in the crowd.

  “Harry.”

  Crobey gave him a startled glance; a bit furtive, Anders thought. A quick distracted smile twitched back and forth across Crobey’s lips. Crobey shook his hand; the crowd milled past, jostling them both.

  “Let’s get out of this jam.” Anders selected the empty pocket beside an office building’s revolving door and pried his way toward the opening. The building was emptying out and people eddied past them into the stream.

  Crobey seemed to have gone a bit to seed but then, Anders recalled, Crobey had always managed to look that way. “What’re you doing here, Harry?”

  “You know. This and that. You look good—lost some weight.”

  “Not as much as I ought to.” Anders looked at his watch. “They told me you’d signed on in Ethiopia.”

  “Contract ran out. So did I.”

  “You never did have much of an attention span.” Anders studied the hard face. “I didn’t know Mexico was at war with anybody.”

  “Somebody told me it was a nice place for a holiday.” Far back around the edges of Crobey’s accent you could detect a residue of sooty Liverpudlian squalor.

  Suspicion ran high in Anders. He did not buy coincidences right off the shelf. “I want to talk to you.”

  “Sure, Glenn.”

  “I’m on my way to the embassy. Keep me company.”

  “Can’t,” Crobey said, “I’ve got an appointment. Where are you staying?”

  He felt a keen reluctance to let Crobey out of his sight but he had no weapon with which to hold the man. Anders considered the options and conceded. “The Hilton.”

  It provoked Crobey’s caustic smile. Everybody in the trade knew the stale joke—two secret agents meet by chance in the lobby: “I say, old chap, this is frightfully embarrassing but can you tell me, is this the Tel Aviv Hilton or the Cairo Hilton?”

  Crobey said, “Drinks then. What time will you be free? I’ll come by the Hilton.”

  “Make it nine.”

  “See you.” Crobey thrust his prow into the crowd. Anders watched him sway out of sight.

  Wilkins said, “I just got off the scrambler with Sturdevant in Buenos Aires.”

  Anders sat down. His feet were tired. “Anything?”

  “The politicals seem to be coalescing toward Paraguay. It looks like they’ll be taken in by one of those Bund groups on the Pampas. You know. Bunch of senile characters with brown pasts. We’ve had taps on their phones for years but the Bundists know it. They don’t use the phones for much except ordering groceries and selling their beef cattle. But there’s no sign of unusual activity there. We’d know it if they were planning to start World War Three.”

  “Doddering Nazis in their seventies or eighties.” Anders shook his head. “They’re just waiting to die. They’ve got no wars left in them.”

  Wilkins’ smile agreed with him, rueful and doleful as always—the man lived under a cloud of wry gloom. “Sturdevant asked me if you want him to bring one of the politicals in for questioning.”

  “No. O’Hillary’s orders—we shadow them but keep hands off.” Anders resented having to wear reins and blinders but you didn’t kick up a nest until you found out how many and how virulent the hornets were.

  Anders unfolded his copy of the list of the eleven politicals who’d been released from prisons at the terrorists’ behest. They were old-timers, most of them. Leaders from the early 1960s. One of them had tried to lead a commando force into Cuba to assassinate Castro in 1961; another had gone around systematically executing people who were suspected of having been followers of Ché Guevara in Bolivia and Ecuador. Some of them probably didn’t even know one another; the thing they had in common was their anti-Castro fanaticism. Now they’d been turned loose but apparently no one had made contact with them except the old Germans in Paraguay who were offering them not armies but refuges.

  The only geographic spot all eleven politicals had in common was the airport at Buenos Aires to which, on the terrorists’ instructions, the politicals had been delivered at various times during the day following the murder of Robert Lundquist. But the airport had been covered by surveillance platoons and no one had spotted anything. The politicals came in, they were processed through, they were followed when they left. No one saw any of them make contact with anyone except the aged chauffeur who had collected all of them; the chauffeur was a deaf ex-Wehrmacht colonel who, under questioning, showed
no reluctance to reveal his instructions. He’d been sent to B.A. by his employers in Paraquay who felt the politicals would need a hand of friendship and who had dispatched the chauffeur with small amounts of money to be given to each of the politicals along with an open invitation to join the German hosts on their Paraguayan estates. The way in which it was all done, openly and cynically, suggested that the German invitation was a matter of sympathy more than conspiracy. Two of the eleven politicals were themselves German; that probably contributed to the Bundists’ decision to offer a haven to the ex-prisoners.

  “It’s one of two things,” Anders said. “Either it was a propaganda gesture or it was a smoke screen. If it was a propaganda gesture it was designed to show the world that the anti-Castro people still have friends. That would have some value, I guess, if it encouraged other people to get on the bandwagon. It’s the only political purpose I can see in this business because it’s becoming obvious the terrorists don’t have any real practical use for these eleven politicals. Most of them are has-beens anyway. Relics of the sixties.”

  “That’s the way I see it,” Wilkins agreed.

  “Or it could be a smoke screen. Maybe these guys are simply a little team of crooks who figured out a handy way to earn ten million dollars tax free.”

  Bemusement seeped into Wilkins’ dewlappy eyes. “Now that would be funny. You think that’s what they are?”

  “I don’t know. In any case I don’t think these eleven are going to lead us anywhere. Probably they don’t know any more than we do. But I guess we’ve got to maintain surveillance on them. It’ll be a waste of time but you have to go through the motions. Right now I imagine they’re sitting around a German ranch swapping yarns about the good old days.”

  “Speaking of the good old days, guess who dropped in a little while ago?”

  “Harry Crobey.”

  “You saw him, then. Good. He was looking for you.”

  “Was he now?”

  Wilkins said, “You think he’s got anything to do with this?” He looked honestly surprised. “Crobey? Terrorists?”

  “He’s a hired gun. He works for just about anybody.”