I was east of the town, the banana plantation was to the west. Between the town and the plantation were miles of jungle and other rugged terrain. It wasn’t a trip I would be able to make on foot, especially during the hot months. I needed transportation and a cover story.
I thought about both as I meandered from the beach through a thinly populated area that seemed to have more barking dogs than people and finally made it to a stretch of highway that appeared to be a main road into town.
I wasn’t sure how many people lived in the town, probably about forty or fifty thousand I imagined, but it was even less of a town than that in terms of its sophistication. The southern part of the country, which had the capital, was a much more developed region. It was the main area that attracted tourists. That meant I would stand out more on the north coast.
I had that comforting thought as I came into the outskirts of town and spotted a battered taxi parked next to a shanty. I needed wheels under me. A taxi wouldn’t fit the bill, but taxi drivers are better sources of information than city hall and the tourist offices combined.
Pounding on the door brought first a little girl with a big smile and ragged dress and then her father, a short, black Dominican with a belly built upon too much rice, beans and cerveza.
“I need information,” I told him.
“It’s late, my taxi is cold for the night.”
“I need to rent a car.”
“A car?” He shook his head as if to clear his hearing. “Señor, it’s nearly midnight. Perhaps you could steal a car at this time, but you couldn’t rent one, not even if you were in Ciudad Trujillo.”
“I know it’s unusual.” I grinned. “I have a small problem.”
“A problem, señor?”
“A woman problem. A husband problem. I came here with a woman, in her car, to her beach house. Unfortunately, her husband showed up. Now I don’t have the woman or transportation.”
“Mañana—”
“I can’t wait until tomorrow. I’ll be dead by then.” I spoke with great sincerity because I believed it. “I need to get to Santiago tonight.” Santiago was to the south, a good-sized city in the heart of the agricultural region. I had been through and in it a number of times doing tobacco and sugarcane deals. I didn’t want to get to Santiago, but I couldn’t tell him my real destination.
He shrugged. “No cars tonight, maybe tomorrow. My taxi, I lost water, a radiator hose. I will replace it mañana.”
Mañana could mean tomorrow morning or a week from tomorrow in this culture, usually the latter. Like British Honduras and everywhere else in the Caribbean, it was hot much of the time, and no one was in a hurry to sweat anymore than they had to. Besides, he thought I wanted to hire a taxi. I didn’t want a taxi ride to Santiago. I wanted a car under me so I could head west up the coast.
“I have a lot of business to attend to in Santiago, mucho running around, comprende? I need to rent a car, not hire a taxi. You know where I can rent a car?”
“Tomorrow I will help you rent a car. No one can help you tonight.”
He was probably right. It was too late to rent a car to an honest man, even if I was one. I was stuck.
“For tonight, you can stay in a hotel. Very good, just half a mile down the road. I drive you.”
“I thought you said you blew a radiator hose?”
“I tied it with my handkerchief, it will last that long.”
A hotel was a good idea. The next best thing to a taxi driver for getting things done around a town was a hotel clerk.
The hotel turned out to be a small dump. The creature that answered the office door after some pounding by the taxi driver, whose name I found out was Manuel Hidalgo, looked like he could be Manuel’s older, long-dead brother.
Before Manuel left, I took a wad of bills out of my front pants pocket and unpeeled a couple. “Mañana,” I said, “early. Get me a car.”
My room had a dumpy bed that looked like something the office clerk had once been buried in—or got sick on.
It was hot. I threw open the windows and hoped for a hint of breeze, enough to make it worth the blood I would be donating to the mosquitoes.
55
The theory that taxi drivers knew more about what was going on in town than almost anyone else had not been lost on Trujillo and his police. Manuel Hidalgo had something in common with most of the taxi drivers in the country—he was on the payroll of the police.
In addition to the almost daily “want list” that the SIM issued to taxi drivers, hotel clerks and local police agencies, an alert had been issued less than two hours earlier from SIM headquarters in the capital to be on the lookout for a blond foreigner.
Manuel was not a stupid man or a particularly clever one. He was smart enough to realize he could make good money from the stranger who had showed up at his door. Had the man been wanted by the local police, Manuel would not have hesitated to help him for a substantial fee, enough to pay off the police if they found out. But the want lists were being issued by the SIM. And everyone knew they related to the assassination of El Jefe.
El Jefe had been a hero of Manuel’s. He had been proud of the dictator’s accomplishments. And now that he was dead, Manuel would be proud of the next strong man who ran the country.
No, it was not his loyalty to the memory of the Chief that caused Manuel to go directly to the local police office immediately after settling the foreigner into the hotel. It was because the situation was political and the SIM was involved.
When the secret police came for you, they took you and your entire family. He had heard stories of children being raped in front of suspects to draw confessions—or just as punishment for a wrong.
Manuel scratched his two-day-old beard as he waited at the police station for the arrival of SIM agents. Perhaps this foreigner would be important and he would get a reward.
He kissed the St. Manuel medallion that never left the chain around his neck. Nothing was impossible for a man who honored the saint he was named after.
“I have met a man,” he told the SIM agents, “like the pamphlets said, a man with four fingers on one hand.”
56
I must have dozed off for a while as I sat in the bamboo chair when I heard a discreet tapping on my door. I jerked awake, my adrenaline on fire. It was a little past two in the morning. Nothing but trouble would come knocking at that hour.
I could go out of the window, but I knew there was no place to run. I froze in place, contemplating my next move.
“Señor, it is me.”
I went to the door and opened it.
“I have a car,” Manuel the taxi driver told me. “It is my cousin’s car.” He shrugged. “Not fancy, señor, but the motor, it is more reliable than a burro.”
The car was nosily idling on the street. A man who could pass for Manuel’s cousin—same belly—was standing by it.
“Okay.”
I didn’t know if it was a trap, but I didn’t have any options if it was. And having a Caribbean tell you there were no cars and showing up an hour later with one was par for the course for the islands.
I grabbed my bag and followed Manuel to the car. Five minutes later, I pulled away, half of my wad of money gone—I had more strapped to my leg—and a gas pedal under foot. The car was a 1949 Ford two-door sedan. It sounded like a bucket of bolts being shaken, but I was on my way.
Luz and I had visited the abandoned banana plantation twice, driving from the capital in a jeep I had shipped over from the States. But she liked to drive and I liked to read business reports and deal memos, so I wasn’t as familiar with the route as I should have been. Not that there was that much to know. I knew I had to head out of town, going west up the coast, and that civilized roads would soon degenerate into dirt roads that would ultimately deteriorate into two-wheeled dirt tracks.
Damn—damn—damn.
I should have bought a fishing boat and taken it to the area myself instead of putting myself in the hands of strangers.
&nb
sp; But at least I had wheels under me.
57
Johnny Mena was in his office at SIM headquarters and wide awake. It was still dark outside, would be for a couple hours. Three of his staff were with him. He was excited. Any one seeing him would have thought his jerky movements were signs of being nervous, but when he got excited, he became hyper, bursting with nervous energy.
“Keep the radio transmission open at all times to Puerto Plata,” he instructed his aide, who was dozing until Mena snapped at him. “Tell our people there that if we lose contact, they had better wade into the sea and let sharks feed on them.”
“Should we notify the military?” his aide asked.
“The military?”
“They would be able to cover the area much more completely than we can,” the aide said.
“Don’t be a fool,” Mena snapped. “That would tip off Nick Cutter that we are tracking him.” What he didn’t say was that he didn’t want the military to steal his thunder. To Johnny Mena, there were two things that motivated men—sex and money. They had already given Cutter a hint that he could get back his money if he cooperated and he had not taken them up on it. That meant he was only here for one reason—to rescue Luz.
“What if we lose him?” the aide asked. Unlike Mena’s hyper condition, his nervousness was exactly that. There was nothing as important to the new dictator right at the moment than capturing the conspirators who killed his father. If the SIM screwed up, someone would be severely punished. And he had been a part of the system long enough to understand that the person taking the blame was rarely the person on top.
“We won’t lose him,” Mena said.
But the aide had made a good point. He needed a backup plan.
“Why the north coast?” he asked.
His staff looked at him rather stupidly.
“Do you mean, Why is Cutter there?” his second in command asked. “Obviously because the woman is somewhere around.”
“I’m not asking why Cutter’s there, you fool, I know he’s there to rescue the woman. But why is she there?”
More stupid looks.
“The woman is hiding out,” someone offered.
Mena slammed his fist on the table. “I should have you all chopped up and fed to the sharks. I ask you again, Why is she there?”
“She knows someone who would hide her,” the aide offered.
“Of course. I want a list of every suspected subversive in the area west from Puerto Plato to the Haiti border. And I want it now.”
His aide left to start the process and Mena pursed his lips as he looked around the table.
“All right, why else would she be there? None of you can think of a reason?” He banged his fist on the table, sending a jolt through the men in the room. “She either has someone who will hide her … or she has somewhere to hide.”
He stared around the table for a moment to let his words sink in.
“Check property records in the area, tonight, get people out of beds and into the records office. Find out if the woman or anyone in her family owns property in the area.”
58
I was five miles outside the city, traveling at a snail’s pace on a road that made dirt tracks in British Honduras seem like autobahns in comparison, when I pulled to a stop, put the transmission in neutral and let the car idle. It was not a black night, but it was dark, and I had to keep the speed down to a crawl because I was driving without lights.
Getting the car was a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. But now that I had my head above water, and was at least treading water with a dog-paddle stroke, the hair on the back of my neck began to fan. It was the same feeling I’d had once when I was a starving kid in Leningrad and I’d entered a dark house in search of food. I’d tripped over a man sitting in a chair. He was dead. And I almost jumped out of my skin.
That’s how I felt now, like I should be running like hell. Something was wrong.
I stopped thinking and listened to the night.
All I heard was the sound of the bucket of bolts in the car engine shaking.
I twisted in the seat and squinted out the rear window at the darkness, wondering if I was being followed. There were no car lights behind me, which was not surprising, there was little traffic on the road. I had passed only a few cars and had gotten passed once by a drunk going too fast.
I turned off the engine and got out of the car to check out sounds. I heard something and strained to listen. I was pretty sure it was the chop-chop-chop sound of helicopter blades. I was near the coast and the sound seemed to be coming from far out, over the water, but it must have really been a long ways out because I couldn’t see anything.
It struck me that the car might be bugged in some way, that there might be some sort of transmitting device in it that permitted a copter to follow me without being in sight. Had I been in New York or London, maybe even the capital, I would have been sure there was a transmitter, but the more I thought about it, the more I was certain that that sort of sophisticated technology didn’t exist in the Dominican Republic. And if it did, if some clever bastard like SIM chief Johnny Mena bought it, it was sitting on a shelf somewhere because no one in the country would know how to use it.
So what was it? I had come to the conclusion I was being set up. Manuel the taxi driver and his middle-of-the-night cousin were too pat. And the cousin was too clean, too nicely dressed. I was sure the swine of a hotel clerk was Manuel’s cousin, but not the guy with the car.
I checked the car. It was clean. That wasn’t unusual, ownership of a car was a big deal in the country. But this one had an official look to it. What was an official look? I wasn’t sure. It looked like it was kept in good repair, except for the taillights. The red glass coverings had both been broken, as if the car had backed into a wall or something.
I started the engine again. When I put the car in reverse I noticed there were no backup lights, but I could see behind me because the tail lights sprayed white light. So did the brake lights.
I put the car into first gear and let out the clutch and started moving forward when it hit me like a bang across the head. I slammed on the brakes, turned off the engine and jumped out of the car, staring back at the car like it was a red-hot piece of coal.
I knew what the game was.
I listened to the night again, this time intently, not for a car, but anything airborne. I heard it, that chop-chop-chop of a helicopter. But where was it?
It was the middle of the night, the moon was low, but there were plenty of stars in the sky. I leaned up against a tree with my back and started looking at the east side of the night horizon and slowly made my way across the sky toward the west. I was halfway across when I saw it. Actually, it wasn’t so much what I saw but what I didn’t see. A tiny area of the sky was blanked out, with no stars, just a black void. But it wasn’t a void. It was a smudge in the night sky. Studying it, I could see the faint outline of a helicopter.
There was a chopper out there, idling in the sky, watching and waiting, its running lights off.
It knew what it was following. Yeah, I was a smart guy, all right. I’d turned off the lights and drove without taillights or headlights. But I had to ride the brakes throughout as I went from one rut and hole to another, and each time I hit the brake lights, instead of glowing red, the lights shined white, alerting the copter hanging out there over the water that they were still on my tail. It wouldn’t be hard for someone in a helicopter to keep track of me with a pair of binoculars—hell, I had two white lights flashing every time I hit the brakes.
Jesus H. Christ.
I was leading them to Luz.
I busted out the taillights and brake lights. The red glass housings were already broken; what I broke were the lights themselves. Then I broke out the headlights to avoid the temptation of turning them on.
I wondered how much time I had.
One thing I knew, Johnny Mena was no fool. I was a pro at making money, even making it a little off center. But Johnny Men
a was a bloodhound. He was a professional at finding people—and exterminating them.
My adrenaline was in high gear. Mena didn’t know where she was; if he did, he already would have her by now. And I would be in SIM custody, suffering the same torture that opponents of the regime were put through.
But that was before I headed out of Puerto Plata, heading due west up the coast, pointing an arrow directly at Luz’s heart.
Now it was a race.
Johnny Mena knew where she was by now, or had a pretty good idea.
I had to get there before he did.
59
It was nine o’clock in the morning by the time I was on the plateau overlooking the sea and had the cottage in sight. I had abandoned the car three hours earlier when I made a wrong turn and ended up high-centering it trying to get out of a gully. I couldn’t have driven all the way to the cottage, anyway; whatever road had existed had long since gone back to nature.
It was going to be another one of those hot-wet Carib days when the air was so thick with humidity that you could swim in it. It was still early, but I was already drenched in sweat. My clothes looked like I’d swam up the plateau. Except for a snake, I’d been bitten by everything that jumped, flew or crawled.
I pushed myself, breaking into a run the last hundred yards. I called her name as I ran to the house. I hit the front door so hard it flew open and broke off a hinge.
“Luz!” I cried out.
The living room was empty. And gave no hint that anyone had been there. The kitchen was empty. I checked dishes, cups, shelves. A coat of dust was on everything. The sink had a hand pump to a well. There was no moisture in the sink or the end of the faucet. It was completely dry. No one had used it in a long time.
I slammed open the door to the bedroom. The bed was not made, dust was everywhere. No one had been here in months, probably not since Luz and I were here the year before.
The Betrayers Page 29
