Season of the Machete Read online

  “We’re going to move you, Pete. Get ready, will you?”

  Getting dressed, Peter prepared himself mentally. No point in getting scared now. Scared or stupid … maybe there was, but fuck it.

  Three agents with automatic rifles walked him to a station wagon waiting outside with the motor running.

  A quick breath of fresh air. Appropriately fishy smell of the sea. No ca-rack of a rifle from the dark palm trees.

  They rode to the Dorcas Hotel in Coastown in eerie silence. No questions asked; no information volunteered. No phony-baloney bullshit on their side or his.

  The gray-haired CIA man—Harold Hill—was waiting for him inside the new hotel suite. A pleasant enough place—like a Holiday Inn.

  “My family has put in a formal complaint to the State Department.” Peter lied simply and effectively. “It went through Senator Pflanzer,” he announced to Hill and to Brooks Campbell, who were sitting in the living room. “If you don’t give me a crack at the blond mystery man, I’m going to force you to send me home. You know the tune—’War Hero Claims CIA Monkeyshines!’”

  “All right all right.” The gray-haired man nodded. A very sober professor type, Peter noticed. “Let’s sit down and talk, Peter.”

  By 2:00 A.M. Peter Macdonald was officially part of the manhunt for Damian and Carrie Rose.

  Shortly afterward the fat black police chief arrived at the Dorcas. Strange man! Dr Johnson just sat around talking with Peter. About the initial mistake by his constable at Turtle Bay; his own mistakes during the difficult case; the night he’d spent with Jane at Mandeville Hospital.

  “I couldn’t sleep at home,” the likable San Dominican finally said. “I thought you might understand.”

  “I understand.” Peter smiled. “I think this is going to be an awfully long night. Glad you’re here, Dr. Johnson.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Damian had gotten uncharacteristically grubby—vacant-eyed and distracted during the last months of our preparation for San Dominica. His hair was hardly ever combed. He spent entire days inside the house, wandering in wrinkled silk pajamas. He was obsessed with the idea of master criminals…. I came home one night to find him reading a book called On Aggression, babbling about brown rats and piebald eagles. Another time he was reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Lots of Nazi books after that. The Master Criminal Race, he called them….

  The Rose Diary

  Trelawney, San Dominica

  In a small den lit by a black-and-white TV, Damian sat cleaning an M-21 sniper’s rifle.

  First he pressed out the rear pin and opened the rifle. Then he withdrew the bolt and bolt carrier assembly. He withdrew the thin firing retaining pin. Withdrew the cam pin, the bolt from the bolt carrier.

  On and off he watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious coming over the island’s erratic TV network. Overall, Damian decided, he could have been a much better performer than the very one-dimensional Cary Grant. He wasn’t certain if he could have been as good as a Claude Rains or an Ingrid Bergman, though. Those two were perfectionists. They could have made something out of Basil, the Children’s Minstrel.

  When the rifle was cleaned, when the M-21 was all back together, he went into the bathroom, where he worked for another hour or so. Using a mixture of Quiet Touch and Miss Clairol) he dyed his hair what the package called “blue black,” with gray highlights. Damian’s own hair color.

  Now there was only one tall blond Englishman: Clive Lawson.

  And only one more day.

  Before Damian Rose called it a night, he took a new field machete out of its cheesecloth wrapping. He laid the knife out carefully by his rifle.

  Then the tall black-haired American went off to sleep.

  PART III

  The Perfect Ending

  May 11, 1979, Friday

  Shoot-Out! 4 Die

  May 11, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica

  Friday. Morning. The Last Day of the Season.

  Dr. Johnson broke open a croissant, dabbed half of the crisp roll with guava jelly, watched Peter out of the corner of his eye.

  “What a damn wonderful time for living it could have been.” Peter shook his head as he spoke to the fat black policeman.

  The young American man was looking especially American in the bright light of morning. He was wearing a forest green (holey, punky) SEE BEAR MOUNTAIN T-shirt; wrinkled athletic shorts; no shoes or socks; his ratty old baseball hat.

  He was rubbing his bare feet together like sticks trying to make a fire.

  “Swimming.” He continued on with his spiel. “Sailing. Playing basketball, if you’re a recidivist like me … running around in a baseball cap like you’re ten years old again and don’t care … all kinds of wonderful, life-wasting crap. Nothing too serious, you know, R and R.”

  The middle-aged police chief was beginning to feel very tired, depressed. He kept remembering the night he spent in the hospital with the blond girl. Moreover he was beginning to feel paternal toward the young American. He liked Peter. Sometimes he felt it was them against all the rest.

  “This island used to be that way. When I was a boy. I don’t know if the world will let you do that anymore. Be carefree.”

  Peter nodded without saying anything.

  He and the police chief were sitting under a striped yellow umbrella on a sixteenth-floor terrace of the Dorcas Hotel. Across the terrace from them, two CIA men stood by the railing with their suit jackets off, old-fashioned shoulder holsters strapped across their white shirts. Behind them, Coastown stretched out like a giant, glittering carnival. One story above, the roof of the Dorcas was yellow, the color of gold teeth. The sloping roof was too steep for anyone to climb on, someone who knew about such things had decided.

  Peter threw back his head and looked around and around a cloudless, china blue skyscape. He started to think about heroes, leaders, inspiration…. Once, when he was a plebe, he remembered going to a humanities symposium: “Is the Hero Dead in Western Civilization?” Four history and classics professors answered—shouted to the rafters— “Yes! Yes! Dead and buried!”

  Well, dammit, people still needed heroes. He did, anyway … Ulysses, Churchill, Lincoln … whoever! Somebody! That unbelievable ass Nixon. Gerry Ford. Jesus! Didn’t they know anything about being leaders? Heroes? … If Kissinger could get to be a sex object, Richard Nixon could have at least gotten up to the level of human being.

  “Man, oh, man, oh, man,” he said in rhythm with his neck and head circles. “It’s so damn unbelievable, isn’t it? Worse than Vietnam, and that really sucked. Bad, Meral, bad…. I keep fantasizing that Janie is going to be alive again.”

  Trelawney, San Dominica

  Damian Rose passed the first three hours of the morning struggling to fix a badly misused twenty-five-foot Bertram Sportsman.

  Naked to the waist, dressed only in striped cotton pants, he worked on the speedboat’s trimplanes first; then replaced all the plugs; then did what he could about the engine’s timing.

  The Caribbean was a pretty dark blue in the early morning. The cove where he worked was A Techni color blur. Fuzzy blue-and-gold-and-white brilliance. Like movies shot through a Vaseline-covered lens.

  The cove was also neatly hidden from passing sea traffic; a little dogleg right behind a hill thick with palmettos.

  Tucked up in the hills behind the cove was the home of a famous Caribbean landscape painter, the old recluse Eric Downes. Hidden in a closet with stacks of bare canvases, Downes now lay dead.

  As he tuned the boat’s engine, Damian’s mind slipped back and forth between the Caribbean and France. Between the start of this working year and the end of it…. He remembered walks with Carrie through the Luxembourg Gardens; whole afternoons wasted in the Tuileries, the Place des Vosges, cafe sitting around St.-Germain-des-Prés.

  After he finished the engine work, Rose took an extra gas tank and two M-21 rifles down below into the cabin. He left the new field machete up in the cockpit.

 
; When he finally looked at his watch, he was surprised to see that it was nearly nine. That meant Carrie ought to be on her way to Morocco.

  As he settled down to wait, Damian began to whistle sweet “Lili Marlene.” A truly great song. A tune that never failed to remind him of Carrie.

  Zurich, Switzerland

  Wearing a blue-gray shift and gray Valentino turban, she sat across from a red-mustached, very fat munchkin, S. O. Rogin, in the Schweizer Kreditverein in Zurich.

  A soft leather HermÈs attaché case lay on a heavy marble table between them. Over their heads a crystal chandelier provided adequate light, though filled with a blizzard of dust motes.

  Rogin spoke English with a thick German-Swiss accent with one bushy eyebrow curiously arched. “You wish to withdraw all six hundred twenty-nine thousand?”

  Carrie considered the question for a moment. “Yes. All of it,” she then said. Very businesslike.

  “Very well, then. All right. How would you like your money?”

  The American woman took out a blue pack of cigarettes—Gauloises. The banker produced a klunky silver lighter. As Rogin lit her cigarette, a strong smell of kerosene wafted up. Then the lighter clicked shut like an aspirin tin.

  “What would you suggest?” Carrie asked.

  The fat munchkin began to grin. “What would I suggest? For starters, I would suggest we transfer the funds directly to your new bank. Tout de suite, Mrs. Chaplin. Easy as apple pie. No suitcases.”

  “No. I’m afraid I must have the cash in hand, Herr Rogin.”

  “Hmmm. Of course.” The redheaded man nodded. “Will madame be needing a security guard, then? I will explain to you the simple procedure for—”

  “I’ll be fine.” Carrie smiled, effectively cutting off the man. “If you read in New Zurchen about someone murdered in the streets downtown,” she went on, “you’ll know that someone tried to take away my money.”

  The munchkin—an American and British detective fan—laughed with genuine good humor. “No one is ever murdered in Zurich, madame. Not in that manner, anyway.” The banker laughed once again. Then he left to arrange for the six hundred twenty-nine thousand—one million five hundred thousand in Swiss francs.

  As he walked through the elegant bank, S. O. Rogin wondered if the pretty lady was running away from her husband. He viewed Mrs. Chaplin as a sort of … Faye Dunaway type. The fat man recalled Miss Dunaway in a scene from Windmills of the Mind. No, no. From The Thomas Crown Affair. A wonderful escapist movie. All about robbing the banks of Boston.

  Forty minutes later Carrie Rose walked out of the Kreditverein with the HermÈs briefcase full of Swiss francs. She was beginning to perspire now; her skin was prickling. She was paranoid about strangers on the Zurich streets.

  The tall, long-haired American woman went just one block across the Stampfenbachstrasse, however. She entered the impressive Union Bank of Switzerland and redeposited the cash.

  All part of the master plan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sooner or later, we were certain they would throw Macdonald to us. Harold Hill was an executive: good executives are executors. Predictable because they try to be so logical…. Damian never tries to figure out the mazes, just the mice….

  The Rose Diary

  Wahoo Cay, San Dominica

  Friday Afternoon.

  At two in the hot, hot of the afternoon, Damian floated over an exquisite range of shallow barrier reefs.

  Sunbathing in the twenty-five-foot Sportsman, watching mullets and snipe eels forage and dart through the bottle green waters, he was beginning to let his mind drift to thoughts of meeting Carrie. Seedy Morocco. Casbahs. A perfect ending for this crime. The two who got away with it.

  Damian was convinced that San Dominica represented the best freelance work done since John Kennedy was hit in Dallas. He knew it.

  Just a few more hours to go now. All of it heading helter-skelter yet inevitably toward a small pinprick in time and space.

  Actually, the end began in a most understated manner, a curious contrast to everything that had gone before it.

  At 3:15 Dr. Meral Johnson and Brooks Campbell escorted Peter out of the Dorcas Hotel.

  The young American man was wearing gray cotton pants with a loose-fitting gray zipper jacket. Underneath the jacket was a German semiautomatic pistol. The Walther was a neat, tough gun. Compliments of Great Western Air Transport, of Harold Hill in particular.

  The three men got into a wide Dodge Charger idling in the hotel carport. Campbell looked around for rooftop snipers, and that seemed almost funny to Peter. “Uh, that’s our fort,” he finally had to say.

  From the hotel they drove to a secluded villa owned by the Charles Forlenza Family. A big flamingo pink Hollywood-style house.

  Both Campbell and Harold Hill had hopes now that the man staying at the villa—Duane Nicholson—would either contact, or be contacted by, Damian Rose. They’d put a five-car stakeout team on the house.

  Officially, Peter was along to make any necessary identification. Officially, he didn’t have a gun.

  Unofficially, Harold Hill was beginning to troll bait for Rose.

  In some ways he too was reminded of the November of 1963. Very messy stuff. A marvel how you could smooth out these things in the end—national security matters.

  At six o’clock in Washington, a Mrs. C. Rose checked into the St. James Hotel. Some mail was waiting for her—letters from Damian. Very mushy and adolescent, Port-Smithe thought.

  At seven o’clock in Zurich, Carrie waited in her hotel suite. She watched swans glide over the lake of Zurich, made casual notes for the diary, tried to take care of all the final details the way Damian would….

  At a quarter to eight, a chip of burnt-orange sun sank without a trace behind the Forlenza villa.

  His heart started to thump out strange warnings as Peter watched Isadore Goldman’s expensive lackey walk outside the big stucco house. He considered that Isadore Goldman was just a name to him; considered that he really didn’t want to die. He wanted to shoot the tall blond mercenary somehow; wanted to go home to Michigan again. Like thriller-chiller novel endings.

  “Blue. This is White Flag,” Brooks Campbell whispered into the car’s crackling shortwave radio. “You guys all awake?”

  “Peter?” Meral Johnson winked into the car’s rearview mirror. “Awake?”

  “He’s just going out for a roast beef on rye,” Peter said, feeling electricity, anyway. “I’m wide-awake, Meral.” He grinned at the fat policeman. Neither of them talked to Campbell.

  Easygoing and, to Peter’s eyes, unconcerned, Duane Nicholson shuffled across the villa’s front lawn in Indian moccasins, casual slacks, some sort of sky blue surfer’s shirt. A very expendable type, Peter couldn’t help thinking. The kind of guy who always got shot first in adventure movies. Having walked the length of the house, the curly-headed hood disappeared into a dark three-car garage.

  Minutes later a dull-white Corvette rolled out onto the driveway. Low slung on the driver’s seat, resting comfortably behind a stained pigskin steering wheel, the Las Vegas mobster wheeled the powerful car out to the dirt access road. Then bolting and roaring like an animal that wasn’t used to restraints, the Corvette chugged toward the Shore Highway.

  Izzie Goldman’s man was heading into Coastown.

  Sitting on the backseat of one of five surveillance cars, Peter had already clicked his mind into combat readiness. Just in case. He figured the punk hoodlum was going to dinner, though. Everyone in the surveillance cars figured the same thing.

  Tryall, San Dominica

  A shadowy figure thrusted itself up a long sliver of dock due west of Coastown’s twinkling pocket of electric lights.

  To the running man’s back, dark tuna boats lay on the horizon of the Caribbean. Beyond the fishing boats were several thousand miles of open sea. Then the southern extremes of Europe.

  For this last night on San Dominica, Damian Rose had chosen a beige security guard’s unifor
m. Pitch black makeup was smeared on his face and hands so that from a distance he looked like a native. An M-21 with a complicated-looking sight was slung over his left shoulder; a heavy sugar-cane machete was tied to his waist.

  Looking both ways and back over his shoulder first, he started across a wide field toward a distant, narrow road.

  Peter glanced at his watch: 8:35.

  The Chevrolet Corvette and three surveillance cars were creeping slowly down Charles Henry Street on the northern outskirts of Coastown. The cars slunk up a crowded side avenue with old wrecks of American autos lined along both sides. Black children in colorful rags darted in and out of the parked cars. Slouch-hatted Rude Boys whacked the hoods of the passing night traffic.

  The dusty Corvette swept up a dark, crowded lane that looped around and then ran alongside Queen Anne’s Park. The park was still jam-packed with laughing, running blacks practicing for Labor Day Carnival, the official end of the tourist season.

  “He’s on to us,” Brooks Campbell whispered inside the white Charger. “What the fuck is that bastard doing?”

  On the side of a damp, grassy hill, Damian Rose waited calmly with his M-21 and machete. Not sixty yards away, completely unaware of Rose, Clive Lawson stood with an Uzi submachine gun resting on his hip. He too waited.

  On the backseat of the Charger, Peter was absorbing flashing pieces of Queen Anne’s Park. Nearly subliminal stuff. Men and boys in flowing white shirts. Dancing bonfires. A few purplish clouds moving fast in a high wind…. It was a little like being on patrol—a strange, worthless night patrol dreamed up by the usual morons. Shoot anyone who doesn’t answer to the name Carl Yastrzemski.

  “He’s leading us to the tall blond man.” Peter answered Campbell’s earlier question. “He’s doing exactly what you wanted him to do…. All we have to do is figure out why.”

  Just then the Corvette swung wide around a big City of Coastown truck. The Corvette took an impossibly sharp, skidding left—then the low-slung car started to accelerate up a hill as if it were flat ground.