Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  “You’re probably right about that,” Crobey agreed.

  “Go on, Julio. I’ll be all right.”

  “But—”

  “Am I the leader here?” he demanded.

  “But what if you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not wrong, am I, Harry?”

  Crobey only smiled; finally Julio departed.

  Cielo said, “You’d like us to panic and clear out, wouldn’t you. Then you could confiscate our little arms dump and put a stop to our intentions quietly, no fuss, no headlines—the proper way to support the détente between Washington and Havana. Where’s Glenn Anders, Harry?”

  If the question surprised Crobey he gave no sign of it. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “When did you see him last?”

  “I don’t rightly recall.”

  “I suppose I wouldn’t answer questions either if I were sitting where you’re sitting. It won’t help you to talk, will it—you have to assume we’ll kill you either way.”

  “You won’t kill me right away,” Crobey said. “I might come in handy as a hostage.”

  Chapter 18

  She soaked small wads of cotton in the last of the witch hazel and placed them on her eyes and tried to relax. She’d only slept in fits and starts for the past two nights and it looked as if this one would be no different. At midnight she’d gone around the house checking the restraints on the two prisoners—Emil Draga in the front room and Stefano, who was small and ruddy and middle-aged and not frightening at all, in the bedroom. He had a fuzzy mustache and comical buck teeth and a wart on his lip and he told amusing stories about his family in south Florida. It was Stefano who had told her the sequence of incidents that had climaxed in Robert’s death.

  And these, she thought, were the terrorists who had so exercised her.

  She had spent a great deal of the past twenty-four hours resisting what Stefano had told her. She did not want to believe any of it and it was quite possible Stefano was lying: He had every reason to coat the truth with opaque paint. He claimed he didn’t know which man had actually shot Robert.

  Robert.…

  Before dark she had made sure all the lights were extinguished. Now, making her hourly rounds, she carried the revolver into the front room and had a look at Emil Draga. The smell of his sweat clouded the room. He seemed asleep. She went back to the kitchen. The waiting had gone far past dragging on her nerves; it had numbed her. She drank coffee and sat with her hands flat on the table, drooping in the humid heat, listening to the rain drum against the roof. It must be two or three in the morning. She had the jitters but attributed that to the coffee; fatigue prevented her from stirring. This afternoon she’d gone into the bathroom and studied herself in the mirror and judged she must have added a minimum of five years to her visible age in the past week’s time. I look older than Harry does.

  It didn’t matter. She’d taken three showers today but nothing helped. She felt sticky—the heat perhaps, but a Freudian would have found interesting speculations in that persistent feeling of un-cleanness. You see, Doctor, I feel like Lady Macbeth.

  Was it possible that one day—if she lived to be old enough—she would be able to forget this nightmare aberration? The absurdities of it piled up one upon the next and she could not cope with them any longer. She cast a dulled eye at the coffee cup between her hands. Harry, come back here and take me away from all this. I’ll show you Las Vegas and Palm Springs and we’ll never be without Dewar’s and cologne and clean sheets again.

  It had gone beyond the unreality of a dream. It had become the unreality of a failed movie: The kind where the director, the producer, the writer and each player in the cast had a completely different notion of what the movie was about. The sort of movie—A Touch of Class came to mind—that started out as a farce and ended up a dreary melodrama.

  Something alerted her. She snatched up the gun and went to the window, stumbling against the sink in the dark. Nothing out there but blackness; the rain pummeling the house. She felt her way to the corridor and looked both ways. She’d left the twenty-five-watt light burning in the hall closet, the door open two inches, and it threw a bit of light both ways, enough to see the hall was empty. She looked in the bedroom: Stefano smiled, his buck teeth glistening in the soft light. She went on to the front room and Emil Draga was tugging petulantly at the handcuffs and he wasn’t going to strip them off over those big knobby hands and she left him to it, prowling back through the house, wondering if perhaps it hadn’t been merely the faint metallic struggle of Emil’s manacles.

  The back door began to open.

  She lifted the revolver in both hands and pulled the hammer back.

  “Don’t shoot me.” Glenn Anders stumbled inside, nearly capsized, shoved the door shut behind him and stood swaying, dripping, an apparition. A puddle formed at his feet and began to spread, soaking into the floorboards. “Don’t shoot me.”

  She kept looking past him, looking for Harry. She lowered the gun slowly, easing the hammer down, waiting.

  “He’s not coming.” Anders, visibly in the last stages of exhaustion, lifted both hands a few inches from his sides in a gesture of helplessness. “I’m alone.” Then he staggered past her, pushing himself along the wall with both hands, lurching into the kitchen. She heard the muted crash when he dropped into one of the chairs; its legs scraping the floor. She went in and Anders’ arms slid out across the table, knocking the coffee cup off—it shattered on the floor and Anders dropped his head onto the table.

  For the longest time she only stared at him. Then with somnambulistic deliberation she opened the refrigerator door and propped a chair there to keep it open. The light exposed Anders’ profile and she saw his eye was swollen almost shut and scabbed with blood.

  He muttered, slurring the words so badly she could barely make them out, “They didn’t spot me. I don’t think they spotted me. They were banging around up there, looking for tracks I guess, but it started raining again, harder than hell and I’m sure that must have washed my tracks out. They didn’t follow me. I guess they think he was alone.”

  In a fury she snatched a handful of his hair and jerked his head up off the table. Anders whimpered. She threw him back so that he sat more or less upright in the chair. Now she could see his face clearly for the first time: His eye was a mess and something had clawed great red welts down his cheek.

  “Where’s Harry?”

  “They took him.…” She watched him gather himself with a terrible effort of will. “He was alive the last I saw of him. I heard a shot—by the time I got to where I could see through the jungle they were marching him down into the camp. He was limping but then he always limps. I don’t think he was hurt. They’ve captured him, see. I guess they’ll work on him till he talks. We found the guard they’d posted on the trail, you see, we hit him with Mace and handcuffed him to a tree with a gag in his mouth and then we went in to scout the place but one way or another Harry got unlucky and they spotted him. I don’t know how it happened, I didn’t see it. I was still back in the woods and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do for him, there were eight or ten of them scattered around the camp and mostly they had guns. I thought about shooting the camp up, driving them to cover and giving him a chance to run for it but Harry can’t run with that leg of his and it just wasn’t any use. Honest to God I’d have tried if there’d been any chance. But what was the sense of getting myself killed if it couldn’t do him any good? I got the hell out of there, didn’t make any noise at all.…”

  “He’s alive?”

  “He was the last I saw of him.”

  “Were they hurting him?”

  “Not that I saw. Nobody was beating up on him or anything. They had him at gunpoint—they took him prisoner.”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “I got lost in the dark. Slipped in the mud and fell into a goddamned cactus. I can still see—it didn’t blind me, maybe it looks worse than it is. But Jesus, I feel sick as a dog.”


  “Why don’t you see a vet,” she said with a violent contempt. She wheeled away from him and kicked the chair aside and slammed the fridge shut and tried to think.

  She tried to cleanse the wounds on his face. She found a small bottle of iodine in the bathroom and boiled up a pot on the stove and dropped a torn section of bedsheet into the boiling water, retrieved the cloth with a fork and let it cool a bit and then went at his face with it, not as gently as she might have; she was disgusted with him.

  A chip of light came in from the hall closet. It was all the light she wanted; she was afraid of attracting attention to the house. When she finished her ministrations she painted his face with iodine. Here and there he was still oozing droplets of blood but that would stop soon. She let him keep the wet cloth to dab at himself.

  He said, “We’ll have to go to the police. We’d better get moving—the longer it takes, the less chance Harry has.”

  When she didn’t answer he took it as a sign that she hadn’t heard him. “We’ve got to call the police. There must be a phone in that village we came through. Listen, they’ll keep Harry alive a while but in the end they’ll find out what they want to know from him, or they won’t find out but either way they’ll kill him, won’t they.”

  There was a plea in his tone. She perceived that he had gone up against something, up there in the jungle, and it had cracked him open; he wasn’t much good for anything now.

  Anders touched his face with the cloth. When he took it away he looked at the dark stains and winced like a galley slave. Then his face collapsed into defeat. “I’ll stay here if you want to go call the cops.”

  His voice set her teeth on edge. She turned half away from him, trying to think, frowning, snapping her thumbnail against her front teeth.

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Anders muttered. “Who’s going to care. Harry hasn’t got a family. Just another funeral nobody’ll go to.”

  He’s got me. “Shut up, let me think.”

  “What for? Call the cops.”

  She was trying sluggishly to reason it through. Finally she said, “That’s not the way.”

  “What are you talking about? We know where they are now. I mean I can lead the police right to them. And they’re not going anywhere—they think Harry was alone, they think nobody else knows where they are.”

  She was ready to retort but when she looked at him she knew it would be pointless. He was far gone past the edge; she had no idea how long he might have gone without sleep but in any case he was in shock, shivering as he slumped stuporously in the chair; berating him would serve no end.

  She said, “Listen to me, Glenn. Can you follow me?”

  “Yeah—barely.”

  “If we take an army of police up there Rodriguez will make a bloodbath of it and Harry will be the first casualty.”

  “Harry’s dead already, breathing or not. There’s no way to get him out of there now. At least we can end this.”

  “Maybe you’re ready to kiss him off just like that. I’m not.”

  Anders tried to get to his feet. “Then if you won’t do it I will. It’s my job—”

  “This is a marvelous time for you to suddenly remember your responsibilities.” She snatched up the revolver.

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “And you’re out on a limb. I may even be able to save your ass, Glenn.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re going to do?”

  “I’m going to get Harry out of there.”

  His bitter laughter followed her away down the hall.

  Chapter 19

  At daybreak it was still raining when she brought Anders and Emil Draga out of the farmhouse. Draga’s feet prodded the earth tentatively; he was still blindfolded and manacled. Anders rubbed his jaw and came to a stop when he reached the Bronco. “What now?”

  “Get in. You drive. You know the way.”

  “Up there?”

  She pushed the Cuban into the back seat and wasn’t particularly gentle about it: Rage swirled in her and Emil Draga was the nearest available target.

  Anders stumbled. He reached for the door handle for support. The bruise around his eye was big, dark and ugly. He looked half dead. It was more than just the physical injuries; probably he was suffering from some sort of shock not to mention exhaustion and fear and dejection. She didn’t know anything she could do about it except snap at him to keep him awake and functioning.

  “Go on—get in. You can drive.”

  “I can try,” he muttered, and hauled himself up onto the seat.

  She went around and climbed in and sat sideways with her gun and half her attention on Draga. He sat twisted awkwardly because his hands were cuffed behind him. But he was a big brute and his feet were free now and she didn’t trust him to stay still.

  The Bronco lurched uphill and she sat in a chilled fury with the revolver in her fist, thinking it out. They had Harry up there—hostage or dead. Very well. Now she had a hostage, too. They’d have to tread easy where Emil Draga was concerned: The power of his grandfather’s wealth would force them to take no chances with Emil’s life and as long as she had her gun to his throat she could go among them and stay alive long enough to get Harry out if Harry was alive. If Harry wasn’t alive she’d use Draga as her shield to get out of there and then, she thought, God help me I’ll kill him.

  But it wasn’t going to come to that because she couldn’t really believe Harry wasn’t alive.

  Because if he was dead it was her fault.

  Emil Draga sat rigidly upright, his shoulders wedged in the corner between seat and window, and Anders wrestled drunkenly with the wheel, driving poorly, failing to anticipate rocks and potholes in the trail; Carole clung one-handed to the armrest.

  They rolled onto a flat shelf of rock and Anders pointed vaguely to the right. “That trail’s a phony. We wasted two hours on it yesterday.” He swung left into the bed of a stream and the four-wheel-drive whined high. He was hunched forward, using the wheel for support; he was past the end of his endurance and she steeled herself against pity.

  “How much farther?”

  “Maybe an hour, hour and a half.”

  “Describe the camp again for me.”

  “What can you possibly accomplish except to get our stupid heads blown off?”

  “Tell me about the camp. Do it now.”

  The trail grew steeper and narrower. They had to use the winch. Somewhere in the run of the next hour the rain stopped but she didn’t notice, partly because her mind was elsewhere and partly because the trees kept dripping long after it quit raining. When the sun shot a ray through a hole overhead she said, “Where are we now?”

  “Not too—” Then the truck ran into something and came to a dead stop, pitching her against the dash. The revolver clattered to the floor and she felt around for it while Anders stared at her stupidly. The engine had gone dead and he was twisting the key but nothing happened: The starter didn’t grind, nothing happened at all.

  She found the revolver. “What is it?”

  “How do I know? It’s gone dead.”

  “Well get out and look under the hood!”

  “I’m no mechanic, lady.” But he got out anyway and lifted the hood. He looked in from one side and then went around to the other side and looked there.

  She got out of the car. “What is it?”

  “Maybe a wire got knocked loose somewhere.”

  “Find it. Fix it.”

  “I’m looking, damn it.” He reached in tentatively, touched something and jerked back with a little cry.

  “Did you find it?”

  “No. It’s hot, that’s all.”

  “Oh for God’s sake.” She peered in under the hood, as if that would do any good, and after a moment closed her eyes and forced herself to fend off this added frustration and get a grip on her composure. All right, the son of a bitch truck had broken down, it wasn’t that important, they weren’t far from their destination anyway—she went back to the door an
d reached in and wrenched the blindfold off Emil Draga’s head.

  Draga winced and squinted in the unfamiliar light, cowering as if he expected a bullet.

  Anders said, “What the hell are you doing now?”

  Ignoring him she stood back and waggled the revolver at Draga. “Come on. Out.”

  Draga backed out slowly, reaching for the earth with one tentative foot, presenting his big rump to the gun.

  Anders said, “Put the blindfold back on him. He’s a dangerous son of a bitch.”

  “He’ll break his neck up there if he can’t see where he’s going.”

  “I figure to break his neck anyway,” Anders said with emotionless gravity. He seemed too drained to hold onto the trappings of hate; only the core remained.

  “Maybe you’ll get a crack at him later. Right now I need him.”

  “For what?”

  “To get Harry out.”

  “You’re out of your mind. They won’t go for that.”

  “You know who this is? You know who his grandfather is? They need this big shit alive.” She had no energy for argument; she looked up into the dank jungle. “How do I get there? Follow these ruts?”

  “There aren’t any more phony trails that I remember. Yeah, we just follow the ruts. A couple-three miles, I guess.”

  “It’s not ‘we’—I want you to stay with the truck and get it fixed and wait for us.”

  A residue of pride straightened Anders and he began to protest but she cut him off. “You’re in no condition to go anywhere, Glenn. You’d be of no help to me and you’d probably give us away too early.”

  “You can’t go up there by yourself for Christ’s sake.”

  “Well I’ve got El Creepo for company, haven’t I?”

  “What is it, lady—some romantic urge to die with your lover? Is that what you want?”

  Frogs chirruped and there was a racket of birds; water gurgled somewhere. She watched Anders lean forward, propped against both stiff arms, his palms on the fender of the Bronco, legs splayed, too weak to stand without support, tremors in his knees, head sagging, squeezing his eyes shut, shaking his head to clear it of dizziness. She wondered if the swollen eye was infected. She turned away from him and peered into the dense towering tangle. “If we’re not back by morning you may as well call in the police.”