Season of the Machete Read online

  A pretty brown girl with a full breakfast tray peeked into the room. “Breakfus, sir.”

  “Oh, man.” Peter moaned. “I just woke up about thirty seconds ago.” He tried to smile. “It’s okay. C’mon.”

  The girl had brought white toast with no crust. Enough marmalade and guava jelly for several loaves of bread. Steaming coffee in a child’s thermos that showed cartoon pigs and a leering wolf.

  Peter could see the tips of the girl’s breasts as she put down the food. Pretty swaying breasts. Pretty brown legs. A nice, maidenish bum.

  The girl’s thin brown hands moved smoothly on the plastic dishes.

  Watching her work, Peter realized that he hadn’t really spoken to anyone in a day and a half—not in person, anyway. Hi, there, he heard several times in his mind. I’m feeling a little nuts right now. Sit down. Have some of your good coffee there ….

  Peter said nothing, though. He watched the girl walk back across the room. A truly lovely little ass, heartbreaking smile—travel poster material.

  “Your breakfus gettin’ cold.” She smiled at the door. Then she left. Peter chewed his toast and watched the songbird, unexpectedly hard and alive.

  And a little more afraid because of it.

  Shortly after eleven he changed into a secondhand muslin workshirt; brown chinos; a floppy blue hat. It was a working disguise he hoped would work just one more time for him.

  At quarter past he left the tiny hotel—the Welcome. Off to find a boat called the Fish ‘n Fool.

  Peter knew that the boat regularly brought guests back and forth from the expensive Rockefeller resort at Caneel Bay. From Caneel Bay he could take a prop plane to another island with safe flight connections to New York and Washington. Once he was in Washington … well, at least he wouldn’t be in San Dominica. Someone was going to listen to him and Jane in Washington. His father had an old friend, for one thing—Senator Pflanzer. Peter himself knew an army general at the Pentagon ….

  It was going to be weird when it hit the fan in America, Peter started to think. It was going to be devastating, in fact.

  Whoever hired the blond mercenary at Turtle Bay was in for a hell of a big surprise.

  Around 12:15 Peter was floating on an adrenaline high.

  It was close to the feeling he’d always gotten on afternoon patrols in Asia. No-man’s-’Nam. Where he’d invented new ways to block out as much shit as possible. To drift. Go with the flow.

  All the world a little grainy, he was concentrating hard on a handsome black dude collecting stubs at the stern of the Fish ‘n Fool. The dude was wearing a shocking-pink T-shirt; short-shorts; tightly wound coral bracelets and a necklace. He didn’t look as if he would be any trouble, but Peter braced himself anyway.

  “Parlez-vous franÇais?” He grinned big baby-grand piano teeth at Peter. “Nope. You’re American, right?”

  “New York City. West Sixty-third Street.” Peter lied so automatically, acted so well, it scared him a little. “We leave around twelve-thirty?”

  “Twelve-thirty on the button.” The young black kept his smile like a good trouser crease. “Give or take five minutes or a half hour for some of my lost turista friends … John Sampson, Norfawk, Virginah.” The man put out his hand. He widened his smile. “At your beck and call, New York.”

  Peter finally smiled back at the man. A pseu-dofag! Jesus. He tilted his floppy hat down and walked up on the main deck.

  The afterdeck of the Fish ‘n Fool was all polished brass and rich mahogany. It was jam-packed with bronze gods and goddesses. With designer-signed T-shirts and Parisian jeans; forty-dollar sun-glasses; the smell of benzocaine, camphor, hot burning flesh.

  “Hi.” Long black hair, jet-set tan. A red string bikini.

  “How are you?” Peter smiled. Felt like a boat’s chaplain.

  “Hyellow!” Frizzy, short blond hair. Mirror sun-glasses. A man.

  “Hyellow.”

  Seeming bashful and cutely backward, Macdonald made his way to a padded bench half in, half out of the sun. He was a little self-conscious about his hair—shaggy for him; about the inescapable fact that he smelled after his days on the road.

  He put his tennis sneakers up on the brass rail. Pulled the floppy hat down over his eyes. Listened to the quick beat of his good, strong heart.

  Tomorrow’s going to be so unreal, he thought. Washington. No idea exactly where he would start.

  Then, very slowly, Peter drifted far, far away from it all. To a pretty, half-awake place with no guns, no machetes, no slick blond killers. Just Janie. Rest. Escape.

  In the meantime the black dude, John Sampson, from Norfolk, Virginia, was up on shore making a phone call.

  At 1:15 the sky was a roaring firelight. Flame throwers. An entire South Vietnamese city on fire.

  The hat was still over his face, but Peter’s eyes were open wide. He was trying to see through the loose weave of the summer fabric.

  For a long moment it was almost as if he were inside a large, packed, American sports arena. A low crowd murmur echoed all around him. As if he were sitting in the bleachers during a brief lull in a dramatic World Series game. Tiger Stadium. Mickey Lolich on the mound. Everything but the hot-dog men ….

  “Mr. Macdonald.”

  Crowd murmur.

  “Good afternoon, Peter.”

  Crowd murmur.

  Clammy and dry tongued, with a disgustingly sour taste in his mouth, Peter slid back the hat. He wasn’t properly prepared to believe the things he saw in the blinding sunlight.

  A crowd, largely blacks, was being held back on the dock by CDS soldiers. Fifty people, maybe a hundred, were all straining to watch the Fish ‘n Fool. Policemen carrying old-fashioned rifles were running single file onto the yacht.

  Close up, Macdonald tried to focus on John Sampson from Norfolk, Virginia. Then on the is land police chief.

  On a gray-haired American man he didn’t recognize. Finally, on Brooks Campbell. White linen suit. Horn-rimmed sunglasses that were too big for him. Handsome as ever ….

  Suddenly Peter was very tired, unbelievably weary. His head began to swim; his heart beat so hard and fast, it scared the living shit out of him.

  “Good afternoon,” Campbell repeated.

  “You have to come with us,” the black police chief said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Now there was a Bob Hope one-liner that should have gotten a laugh, Peter thought. Instead he just blinked at the four men. His mind reeled like three windows in a slot machine … Blond Englishmen, Colonel Dred, Cosa Nostra. Not going to get to Washington, Senator Pflanzer …

  “Give you a hand, Macdonald.”

  Grubby, light bearded, he got up by himself.

  All the jet-setters on the deck were standing around watching now. Whispering in one another’s ears how they’d thought he looked funny when he came on board.

  Tourists were aiming fancy cameras into Peter’s face. Stupid, grinning bastards. Grinning soldiers with dull black rifles—phony guns that looked as if they had been carved out of soap.

  Campbell and the other American man walked right beside him. A very official-looking march. Leading him through the tunnel of ambulance chasers. The other man trying to introduce himself and saying something about Hill, trying to shake Peter’s hand.

  Then, in the middle of the mad crowd, in the middle of everything, the police chief suddenly swung Peter around. The sweating, heavyset black man stared him right in the face, looked pained and sensitive and a little crazy himself.

  “Strange, unaccountable things are still happening on our island,” Meral Johnson said to Peter. The man seemed to pause out of confusion, then tears started down the rolls of his cheeks.

  “Jane Cooke was killed this morning,” Johnson whispered to Peter. “I’m very sorry, mister.”

  Mandeville, San Dominica

  At quarter to ten that morning, two short-haired men in conservative gray suits had taken Jane—in a wheelchair—out a rear-door exit in the Mandev
ille Hospital.

  As the chair whistled along a flowery path with royal palms and plumbago everywhere, the pretty blond girl was starting to smile again. Laughing for the first time in years, it seemed.

  “Reminds me of Bermuda a little,” one of the men said.

  “Reminds me a little of Ironsides,” Jane mumbled, a small joke.

  The man pushing her wheelchair laughed through his nose. He was James McGuire, fifty-nine, a paunchy, good-natured sort who reminded Jane of Santa Claus with no white beard.

  The second man, James Dowd, was just thirty-one. James Dowd was quieter than McGuire, but very nice. Very old-world Irish.

  When the wheelchair was out of sight of Mandeville Hospital, deep in rich green brush, James McGuire stopped pushing.

  “Okay, Janie.” The red-faced man grinned. ”You want to walk, you most surely can walk. You don’t want to ride. I sure as heck don’t want to push.”

  As the three Americans continued down the path, walking, they began to see more and more colorful birds, and lizards, tree frogs, hermit crabs. An ornery little mongoose was looking for a snake in the grass.

  Then the winding path they were on ended abruptly in a flat, breezy field.

  Jane, even the two FBI inspectors, let out short gasps of delight and awe. Beyond the field was nothing but shining, royal blue sea.

  “You know, I don’t think I could be anything but happy in a beautiful place like this.” James Dowd finally entered the chitchatting. “I know that isn’t strictly logical.”

  “That’s how you’re going to get trapped into staying here.” Jane smiled at the shy, likable man. “You’ll quit your job and … James!”

  Without a sound of warning, three men suddenly appeared from behind thick brush and rocks. They wore green windbreakers and sports shirts buttoned to the throat.

  “Freeze!” one of them screamed.

  At the same time another man started to fire an Uzi submachine gun. A tall blond man.

  Both Dowd and McGuire fell backward into high grass. Then two of the men jumped on Jane. One held down her flailing arms; the other pressed a wet handkerchief over her nose, mouth, across strands of her long, curly hair.

  Understanding that it was all going to happen again, feeling as if she were on the edge of madness, Jane began to let loose amazing screams she wouldn’t have believed possible.

  They were putting the dripping cloth all over her face, and she was trying to bite the hand holding it. They were pushing her head back hard into the ground. Finally her arm snapped under a man’s heavy leg.

  Then everything was the suffocating white cloth. Its acrid, choking smell. Like trying to breathe inside a bottle of glue.

  She started to give in to it finally. Blue sky, sun, angry or frightened faces flashing over her. The blond Englishman. Here …. She thought of Peter. Started to cry. Felt like a helpless child under their arms, legs, stomachs …

  Then Jane bit down hard into a man’s ugly, bulbous thumb.

  “Don’t fight. Jesus Christ,” one of the men was yelling at her.

  “Christ. She’s biting my fucking hand!” the second man screamed.

  Hospital people—white-coated doctors, nurses —finally appeared on the far side of the field.

  Which is when Clive Lawson bent down and shot the struggling young woman in the right temple.

  Jane thought it was the tall blond man who bent over her. Not quite as good-looking as she’d thought … she wanted to hold Peter just one more time. Then it all seemed so stupid and awful …. Then it was nothing at all.

  May 10, 1979, Thursday

  Dragnet Tight.

  Thousands Stopped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The part I was supposed to play around Washington and Europe from the sixth to the ninth was no part, really. It was all the things I thought I wanted to become …. Sitting in the Gralyn Hotel. Watching a college boy eat a sandwich outside. Thinking that Port-Smithe is nearly perfect. Thinking about the Loner from Coastown. About Nickie Handy. Damian … Bizarre thoughts. Like whether I’ll be alive one year from this exact moment …. Am I?

  The Rose Diary

  May 10, 1979; Washington, D.C.

  Thursday Morning. The Tenth Day of the Season.

  At 10:00 A.M. San Dominica time, 9:00 A.M. in Washington, Mrs. Susan Chaplin sat out in the charming garden cafe of the Gralyn Hotel on N Street.

  Mrs. Chaplin wore a cream blouse with matching scarf; a navy skirt; blue-and-white spectators; big sunglasses pushed back on her hair.

  She was toying with warm baking-powder biscuits, creamed finnan haddie, and a London prostitute who went by the stage name Betsy Port-Smithe.

  Mrs. Susan Chaplin was the stage name for Carrie Rose.

  “What I have in mind,” Carrie explained, watching a Washington hippie eat an impossibly stuffed Blimpie on the other side of beautifully sculpted hedges, “is a little, uhm, unusual…. ”

  “Unusual?” Port-Smithe shrugged. “Well, let’s see. I’m too young, and too good, to get beat up for it. That means any sum of money, Mrs. Chaplin … what is unusual?” The tall, sandy-haired woman started to laugh. “You want me to pop out of a charlotte russe at someone’s fund-raising dinner?”

  Carrie Rose began to laugh, too.

  When Port-Smithe began to giggle, some of the other patrons of the garden cafe began to sneak glances at the two of them. The young women were framed against a background of plain green umbrellas and the beginnings of Georgetown. Both looked very much a part of the expensive, former embassy scene at the Gralyn. From the look of them, the two women might even be sisters. The resemblance was startling.

  An attentive waiter slipped away their breakfast plates (fish, bran flakes, porridge). He placed plump grapes and shiny pears at the center of the table.

  “Some time in the next week,” Carrie (Mrs. Chaplin) continued when the laughing had stopped, “my husband, Damian, is due to arrive here in Washington. He’s coming directly from an obnoxious, hectic, brutal series of business conferences in the Caribbean…. Damian sells clothes. Expensive women’s clothes.

  “At any rate, for some private reasons, I can’t be here to meet him. At least I can’t wait around here for the entire week. …”

  Port-Smithe sat with a plump grape ready to be popped into her pouty mouth. “And? …”

  “I’d like you to meet Damian for me…. I’d like you to meet him at the St. James, and stay with him a night if I’m not here. That’s all.”

  “Do you know how much I might charge?” Betsy Port-Smithe asked. “For a week of waiting around?”

  “I don’t. But I’ll pay you two hundred a day. Plus your room at the St. James. Plus your food…. You’re free as a bird until Damian comes. You can even work, if you like. I mean, I realize you’re very good, Betsy. That’s the whole idea.”

  The London call girl smiled. She thought that she had it figured out now…. This prissy young American wife was looking for some kind of ménage À trois. She just didn’t have the nerve to ask for it…. Well, fine and dandy.

  “To Damian.” Port-Smithe raised a cup of coffee with eau-de-vie.

  “To Damian.” Carrie Rose smiled demurely. She was beginning to get a very good feeling about the way things were breaking on her side of the partnership.

  That afternoon she had to fly out of Dulles International.

  To Zurich.

  To money, power, and those wonderful little munchkins who make the world run so fast and furiously.

  Carrie was well aware that she had only one day left now. Approximately thirty hours to outwit several self-acclaimed geniuses, all of them male.

  Coastown, San Dominica

  They had carefully hidden Peter Macdonald in an expensive suite at the posh Coastown Golf and Racquet Condominiums.

  A minimum of five CIA operatives—top men in the Caribbean account—ate, slept, and read Penthouse and Alistair Maclean novels in the seven-room suite with him.

  As many as eight agents wer
e there the first day. Three times that many rode pink-canopied golf carts around the manicured lawns all through the night. It was an accepted fact that it would take an army to get Macdonald out of there alive.

  Up to his chest in steaming water in the pink marble bathtub, Peter floated quietly in one of the three condominium bathrooms. There was a strange feeling in his head…. He’d actually felt his mind go snap Wednesday afternoon.

  Standing beside the Fish ‘n Fool, the black policeman holding him by both shoulders, whispering loudly, “Jane was killed this morning. I’m very sorry, mister.”

  Snap.

  Like breaking a bone, tearing a tendon. Never knowing before that his head was so fragile.

  It wasn’t exactly that he wouldn’t be able to exist without Janie. He would. Had for twenty-odd years before he met her…. It was more that he didn’t think he could be completely sane without her….

  Sane was something he’d never been particularly good at, anyway. Sane. Coping; content; not painfully lonely; not jumping into West Point because you think it will make your father love you.

  Six-fifteen A.M. on his old Timex. Ten days since it all began.

  Red sun shooting streaks through a louvered bathroom window. Somebody already playing tennis outside … bonk … bonk … bonk … undoubtedly-more agents….

  They’d tried awfully hard to be nice. The San Dominican police. CIA. They’d left him pretty much by himself the night before. Not bugged him with too many questions….

  He’d sat alone in a dark bedroom in the condominium most of the night. Big New York-cut steak untouched on a tray. Asparagus tips. Strawberry parfait sundae. Feeling like a little kid left alone in a big house. Having some kind of, bizarre Koda-chrome-quality memory of the first time he and Janie had been together. A three-day cross-island trip while they were still practically strangers. The kind of great, dopey, romantic stuff that could happen only in a vacation spot. Making him cry, he missed her so badly.

  Peter turned his body in the hot, soapy tub. The hot water felt unreal in the rush of air-conditioning. Like lying under the covers with the window open in winter … everything weird, and unreal, and impossible to relate to.