by Ross Thomas
“A fine road, true?” the driver said. “It was built with money from your country. Many of the President's relatives grew rich from it and now live in fine apartments in Miami. The President himself, of course, never lived to enjoy his share.”
“They shot him.”
“Yes. The generals. In front of the Presidential Palace against the wall. I will show you the exact spot when we go by. You may recall it was a public execution. People came from all over. It was like a feastday almost. They led him out and put him against the wall and the generals themselves, thirty-two of them, formed the firing squad. They were not expert marksmen, but eleven bullets managed to hit him. I myself was there. When it was done, there was only silence. And then there was a long sigh—like this.” The driver sighed deeply. “It was almost like a gust of wind. Everyone was relieved.”
“And now?”
The driver shrugged. He was a young man, still in his twenties, with eyes that were too large and wrists that were too thin. Like the clerk in Houston, he wore a mustache with carefully tended, sharply pointed ends. Citron wondered if the mustaches were a badge of some kind, perhaps a sign, or just something that helped pass the time and cost nothing. He decided not to ask.
“The generals,” the driver said and again shrugged. “They cannot agree. So we have no government.” He paused. “Only soldiers and bandits.” Again he paused. “And much death.” With a nod he indicated a burned-out bus. “These wrecks. They were full of people fleeing to the airport after the President was executed. The people in these wrecks were also executed. And robbed.”
“By the bandits?” Citron said.
“Or the soldiers. There is really no difference.”
The driver turned down the Avenue of the Fifth of September and pointed out the Presidential Palace and the wall where the luckless President had been executed. Next came the large square which boasted both the cathedral, open, and the baroque national theater, boarded-up, and farther on the offices of La Prensa, a once much-respected newspaper, also boarded-up.
“We get our news from television now,” the driver said. “The television station still functions. There are many North American programs. There is the one about the attorney Perry Mason. It is a favorite. There is also the one called Leave It to Beaver. Did I pronounce it correctly?”
Citron replied that he did.
“That, too, is a great favorite.” He paused. “No harm ever comes to anyone in that program. It is very popular.”
The Inter-Continental Hotel was nine stories of steel and tinted glass built on a cliff above the sea. A drive curved up to it from the Avenue of the Nineteenth of January. The driver charged $15 for the trip in from the airport, and Citron gave him $20. The driver thanked him graciously and again mentioned the exhibition of the thirteen-year-old virgins, should the gentlemen change their minds. And the lady, too, of course. Citron said he would take it under advisement.
Their bags were carried into the lobby by a doorman who wore a chrome conquistador's helmet and a costume to match. Velveeta Keats and Citron decided to share a room. Haere was assigned one a few doors down. Both rooms were on the top floor with views of the ocean. The hotel seemed almost empty of guests. When Haere commented on this to the room clerk, the clerk replied that it was not yet the season. Haere asked when the season began. The clerk said next month—or the month after at the latest. When Haere was asked how he intended to pay, he said with his American Express credit card. The clerk said that would be acceptable. However, should the gentleman wish to pay cash in dollars, there would be a twenty percent discount. Haere said he would think about it.
Velveeta Keats was in the bathroom with the door closed when the telephone rang. Citron picked it up and said hello.
“Morgan Citron?” a man's voice said.
“Yes.”
“I think we should talk.” The man spoke in Spanish.
“What about?”
“A matter of mutual interest.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Mr. X,” the voice said, giving the X the Spanish pronunciation of either “equis” or “eckys.”
“I suppose we could meet in my room.”
“I prefer not to.”
“Where then?”
“Tomorrow morning at ten.”
“That's when. What about where?”
“I will let you know.”
The phone went dead, and Citron put it down just as Velveeta Keats came into the room from the bath.
“Who was that?”
“Mr. Eckys.”
“That's a funny name.”
“Yes,” Citron said. “Isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 28
The three of them entered the almost deserted restaurant in the InterContinental at nine that night. They were shown to a table by a bearded maitre-d’ who also provided them with menus. A busboy arrived and replaced the napkins, which did not seem to need replacing. Citron unfolded his on his lap and caught the folded piece of paper before it fell to the floor.
Citron looked around. The two other diners were a man and a woman who were seated across the room and interested only in what they were eating. Citron unfolded the piece of paper behind his menu, read it, and stuffed it into his pants pocket.
“Who's it from?” Haere asked, studying his menu.
“The guy who called.”
“Mr. Eckys?” Velveeta Keats said.
“Mr. Eckys.” Citron ran his eyes down the menu. “It's still set for ten tomorrow morning,” he said, “but it's out in the country. I’ll need a car.”
“We’ll rent one at the desk,” Haere said. “What’re you having?”
“Steak.”
“Velveeta?”
“I think I’ll have the fruit of the sea thing.”
When the waiter came, Haere ordered steaks for himself and Citron and the seafood for Velveeta Keats. He and the waiter discussed wine, Haere in his broken Spanish, the waiter in his equally fractured English. They finally agreed it would probably be wise to skip the wine, which was of doubtful merit, and try the local beer instead. The beer was called Two Brothers and turned out to be exceptionally good.
Haere put his glass down and said, “While you’re with Mr. Eckys tomorrow, I think I’ll drop by the embassy and do my outraged-American-citizen turn.”
“Over what?” Citron said. “The doctor?”
“If that's what he is.”
“The embassy folks’ll like that. They always do.”
Velveeta Keats looked first at Citron, then at Haere, and again at Citron. She frowned. “Can I ask a question?”
“Sure,” Citron said.
“What’re you guys really up to?”
Citron leaned toward Velveeta Keats and smiled in what he felt might be a conspiratorial manner. “You want the truth, of course.” She nodded.
“Well, the truth is we don’t really know.”
“Right,” she said, nodding wisely. “That's about what I figured.”
Citron lay naked on the bed and watched as Velveeta Keats, also naked, sat crosslegged in a chair by a lamp and painstakingly applied the clear polish to her fingernails. They had acted out one of her sexual fantasies earlier, something to do with a mild form of bondage, and after it was over and Citron lay exhausted, she sat up in bed, popped up really, and announced the need to repair her nails. It seemed to be more than a need. It seemed to Citron almost a compulsion. He lay watching as she hummed softly, almost tunelessly, and carefully applied the small brush to each nail. He wondered if there really were such things as born liars and, if there were, whetherVelveeta Keats could be classified as one. Was the trait inherited or acquired? Did she need to practice her skills as a liar, or was she a natural? And why were good liars usually better company than the truth-bearers who, he felt, were all too often stolid and dull and sanctimonious? Citron decided to request another performance.
“Tell me about him,” he said.
“Who?”
“Your brother.�
�
“The one I used to go to bed with?”
“Him.”
“I just made that up,” she said, still concentrating on her manicure. “I thought it might turn you on. Incest does that to a lot of people, did you know that?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“He died when he was nine and I was seven.”
“Of what?”
“Polio.” She blew on her nails. “I still miss him.”
“What happened to your husband, then? Jimmy. Wasn’t that his name?”
“Jimmy. Jimmy Maneras. Jaime really.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died.”
“When?”
She held her hand out at arm's length to examine it. “Oh, I don’t know. About six months ago, I reckon.”
“What of?”
She waved her hand to dry the fingers. “Papa shot him.”
Citron sighed. “Come on, Velveeta.”
She looked at him, and her expression seemed hurt. “I’m telling you the truth. Papa shot him.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“I think I would.”
“That's why they shipped me out to Malibu. I was going to the police. But then I got this call out of the blue from Craigie Grey inviting me to come out and stay in her beach place, and so, shoot, I didn’t really want to get Papa in trouble with the police, so that's what I did. I went. He still won’t speak to me, though, but you know that.”
“Why’d your father shoot your husband?”
She was working on the other hand now, the left one, concentrating on each small brushstroke. “Self-defense,” she said. “You know, I really shouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“Your husband was about to kill your father?”
“Uh-huh.” Her concentration on the brushstrokes was now absolute.
“Why?”
“Why’d Jimmy want to kill him?” “Right.”
“Because he found me in bed with Papa.”
She blew on her fingers, held her left hand out to admire her work, picked up the bottle of nail polish, recapped it, put it back on the table, and stared at Citron. He found her gaze cold, hostile, but not altogether mad. “Does that turn you on?” she asked in a flat tone.
“No.”
“It does some guys. Women, too.”
Citron sat up on the edge of the bed and looked at her carefully. She stared back, the hostility in her gaze slowly diminishing. He nodded slowly and said, “You’re really telling the truth this time, aren’t you?”
“The truth,” she said. “Well, sugar, the real truth is that we’ve been fuckin’ each other ever since I was thirteen.” She looked away, and although her cold expression and flat tone didn’t change, the tears began to trickle down toward the corners of her mouth. “So maybe,” she said, “just maybe that's why I’m a little bit spacey sometimes. What d’you think?”
Citron lay back down on the bed, folded his arms behind hishead, and stared up at the ceiling, suspecting that he had just been spooned a large dose of truth. As usual, lies were more palatable. “I don’t know,” he said in a carefully neutral reply to her question. “Maybe it is.”
The United States embassy, located on a wide curving avenue that bore the name of Simon Bolivar, was a large sprawling two-story building some twenty or twenty-five years old and decorated with a series of pastel masonry screens that testified to the influence of Edward Durell Stone.
Apparently as an afterthought, the embassy had surrounded itself on all four sides by an eight-foot-high concrete brick wall of such crude design that it spoke of hasty, perhaps even panicky construction. As if to compensate, all the pieces of broken glass imbedded in the wall's top were brightly colored. The wall was also capped by concentric coils of very sharp-looking barbed wire whose only conceivable function was to produce deep painful cuts.
The American diplomats were flanked on the left by the French and on the right by the British. The French had put up an elegant fence of black iron bars that ended in rather sharp-looking arrowlike points. Through the iron bars one could admire the three-story chateau that might have been transported stone by stone from the Loire. The British had not bothered to put up a fence at all, and apparently had spent their money instead on magnificent landscaping, which almost compensated for the uninspired architecture of their rather slapdash two-story stucco structure.
Citron pulled up and stopped across the street from the U.S. embassy in the Ford Fiesta that Haere had rented through the hotel. Both men examined the embassy.
“Hell of a wall,” Haere said.
Citron agreed with a nod. He looked at his gold Rolex. “It's nine-fifteen now. When do you think you’ll be back at the hotel?”
“By noon anyway. One at the latest.”
“Let's meet for lunch.”
“What about Velveeta?” Haere said.
“She's going sight-seeing and shopping around ten or ten-thirty and won’t be back until two.”
“I’ll either come by your room or call,” Haere said, got out of the car, and watched Citron drive off. Wearing his light-weight dark-blue three-piece pinstripe suit, his white shirt and striped red-and-blue tie, Haere walked quickly across the broad avenue toward the marine guard who waited behind the obviously locked gates that were made out of thick steel bars. In his blue suit and gleaming black shoes, Haere knew what he must look like to the marine: like ancient history.
When he reached the gate, he stared through the bars at the embassy building. He ignored the marine, who was a twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old corporal with one hashmark, a hand-carved Mexican Indian face, and surprisingly light gray eyes that were too old for the face.
The marine let a minute go by until he said, “Yes, sir. Can I help you?”
Still staring at the embassy building, Haere said, “Anybody in there up and about yet?”
“Yes, sir. Everybody.”
“I’d like to see whoever's in charge of lost or strayed American citizens.”
“Male or female, sir?” “
Why?”
“Well, sir, we usually let Miss Steadman handle misplaced wives. They get down here, the wives, and they meet some guy with real white teeth and his shirt open down to here and well, sir, they get, you know, like you said, lost or strayed.”
“Miss Steadman handles them, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who handles people who step off the plane and get led off by the cops?”
The marine unlocked the gate and swung it open. “That’d be Mr. Merry like in Merry Christmas.”
“And what does Mr. Merry do?” Haere said once he was through the gate and the marine had relocked it.
“He's a counselor.”
“Of what?”
The marine almost smiled. “Of people in trouble, sir.”
After he talked to the marine sergeant at the reception desk and signed in, Haere waited a minute or two until a brown-haired woman in her thirties appeared, examined him briefly, introduced herself as Mrs. Crane, and asked him to please come this way. He followed her down the hall, up a flight of stairs, down another hall, and through a door into a reception room with a small desk that had her name on it. She knocked on a closed door, opened it, said, “Mr. Haere is here,” and stood aside, indicating that Haere should go in.
The man who rose from behind the almost bare metal desk wore a seersucker jacket, a tie, and a smile. It was one of those wide white almost blinding smiles that immediately generate suspicion. Haere saw that the blue eyes above the smile seemed to be smiling, too, perhaps even grinning, although with all that crinkling it was hard to tell.
The man with the smile stuck out his hand as he leaned over the desk and said, “I’m Don Merry, Mr. Haere.”
Haere shook Merry's hand. Merry waved him to a chair, sat back down, kept on smiling, and said, “Well, now. How can I help you?”
“I arrived on the flight from Houston
last night.”
Merry nodded.
“I met a doctor on the flight, a medical doctor named Blaine. James G. Blaine.”
Merry chuckled. “From Maine?”
“Kansas. He was coming down here to take over a clinic for the Friends, the Quakers.”
Again, Merry nodded. “Joe Rice's clinic.”
“He mentioned Rice. He said they were old friends, but that Rice had disappeared.”
The smile went away and Merry looked grave, but said nothing.
“There were only five passengers on the flight,” Haere continued. “Dr. Blaine was the second one off. He was arrested when he reached the bottom of the ramp and led away by four men who looked like cops to me.” Haere paused. “I thought you should know. I might add that I find it extremely disturbing that an American medical missionary should be whisked away by the police the moment he steps off the plane. Extremely disturbing.” Listening to himself, Haere was almost satisfied with the level of his indignation.
“Excuse me a minute,” Merry said, picked up the phone, and dialed a single number. When it was answered with a faint yes, he said, “The name is James G. Blaine, supposedly a medical doctor from Kansas.” Merry looked at Haere and raised an eyebrow.
“Wichita,” Haere said.
“Wichita, Kansas,” Merry said into the phone. “You’ve got the number of the Quaker clinic over on the eastern slope, don’t you? Well, call them and see if they’re expecting the arrival of Dr. Blaine, or if he has, in fact, already arrived safe and sound. If not, call Tucaereo and see if they had a J. Blaine on yesterday's manifest. If they did, then call our friend Suro and see if his people got their sticky mitts on the doctor and, if so, find out where they’ve stashed him. Then come tell Mr. Haere and me all about it.”
Merry hung up the phone, put his smile back on, and looked at Haere, who decided that the carefully acquired tan made the smile seem whiter than it really was. The tan went well with the crinkly eyes and the lean jaw and the straight nose. It was all capped by a thatch of ginger hair that fell down over the high forehead in a careless wave. It all seemed calculated to produce an impression of warm, quick inteligence, and Haere was quite willing to buy it if only Merry wouldn’t smile quite so often.
