Season of the Machete Read online

There were nine chauffeurs driving such cars as Mustangs, Wildcats, Hornets, Cougars—even a Volkswagen Beetle.

  There were seven bodyguards, out-and-out Buster Crabbe types.

  Eleven actual participants besides himself and the shriveling zombie Tuch.

  Somebody had remarked at the last meeting that they didn’t want to have another Appalachia at Lathrop Wells: twenty Cadillac Fleetwoods suddenly arriving at some deserted farmhouse. Drawing attention from locals or the state police.

  So there were none of the usual big black cars at the meeting in the Nevada desert.

  All of the twenty-seven men wore dark business suits, with the exception of one Gucci-Pucci fag and Frankie “the Cat” Rao of Brooklyn, New York. Rao wore a black-and-white-checked sports jacket, a sleazy open-necked electric blue shirt, white Bing Crosby shoes.

  “Dirty azzhole,” old Tuch said. “Azzhole with all of his pinky rings.”

  “All very predictable,” Isadore Goldman muttered. The old man lit up his first cigarette in more than eight months. Then he headed inside, through hot, heavy air that smelled like horses.

  Inside the farmhouse it was air-conditioned, thank God.

  A Fedders was blowing dust and what looked like cereal flakes all around the rustic, low-ceilinged rooms.

  Goldman noticed the other side’s head man whisper something to a younger man—his aide-decamp. The younger man looked a little like the Hollywood actor Montgomery Clift.

  His name was Brooks Campbell, and he would be going to the Caribbean for them.

  The older man, their side’s main spokesman, was Harold Hill. Harry the Hack to the trade.

  Harold Hill had spent nearly ten years in Southeast Asia, and he had a certain inscrutable look about him. Something intangible. Isadore Goldman suspected that Hill was a pretty good killer for such an obvious loser type.

  Within ten minutes the thirteen important negotiators had settled down comfortably around a widebeam table in the living room. Characteristically, they had taken opposite sides at the big wooden table.

  Dark, slightly European-looking men on one side.

  All-American football-player types on the other.

  “By way of a brief introduction”—Goldman began the meeting after allowing just a snitch of small talk—“it was agreed at the last meeting—January seventeenth—that if Damian and Carrie Rose were available, they would be satisfactory contract operators for everybody concerned….”

  Goldman peeked over his silver-rimmed eyeglasses. So far, no objections.

  “Consequently,” he continued, “the Roses were contacted at a hotel in Paris. The St. Louis, it’s called. An old gun sellers’ hangout through several wars now.

  “The Roses were given one month to prepare an outline for a plan that would achieve results agreeable to both sides at this table. They declined making an appearance at this meeting, however.”

  The consigliere looked up again. He then began to read from twenty-odd pages sent to him by the Roses. The pages outlined two rough plans for the proposed operations. One plan was titled “Systematic Government Assassinations,” the other was simply called “Machete.”

  Also included in the brief was a list of pros and cons for each plan.

  In fact, what seemed to impress both sides gathered around the table—what had impressed Goldman himself—was the seriousness with which both theoretical plans had been approached and researched.

  They were referred to specifically as “rough,” “experimental,” but the outline for each seemed obsessively airtight. Typically Damian Rose.

  “The final bid they put in for this work,” Isadore Goldman reported, “is one point two million. I myself think it’s a fair estimate. I think it’s low, in fact. … I also think this man Damian Rose is a genius. Perhaps the woman is, too. Gentlemen?”

  Predictably, Frankie Rao had the first word on the plans.

  “Is that fuckin’ francs or dollars, Izzie?” he shouted down the wooden plank table. “It’s fuckin’ dollars those loonie tunes are talking about, isn’t it?”

  Goldman noticed that their man, Harold Hill, seemed startled and upset by the New York mobster.

  The young man who looked like Montgomery Clift broke into a toothpaste smile, however. Brooks Campbell. Good for you, Isadore Goldman thought. Smart boy. Break the goddamn tensions down a little.

  For the first time since the meeting began, most of the men at the long wooden table laughed. Both sides laughed like hell. Even Frankie Rao began to howl.

  As the laughter died down, Goldman nodded to a dark-haired man who sat very quietly at the far end of the table. Goldman then nodded at their side’s chief man, Harold Hill.

  “Does the figure include all expenses?” was Hill’s only question. The young man-at his side, Campbell, nodded as if this were his question, too.

  “It includes every expense,” Isadore Goldman said. “The Roses expect this to take approximately one year to carry out. They’ll have to use twenty to thirty other professionals along the way. A Who’s Who of the most elite mercenaries.”

  “Dirt cheap.” The quiet, dark-haired man suddenly spoke in a deep, Senate floor voice. The man was Charles Forlenza, forty-three-year-old don of the Forlenza Family. The boss of bosses.

  “You’ve gotten us a good price and good people, Isadore. As I expected. … I can’t speak for Mr. Hill, but I’m pleased with this work myself.”

  “The price is appropriate for this kind of guerrilla operation.” Harold Hill addressed the don. “The Roses’ reputation for this sort of complex, delicate work is excellent. I’m happy. Good.”

  At this point on February 24, 1979, the United States, through a proprietary company called Great Western Air Transport, entered into one of the more interesting alliances in its two-hundred-year history: a large-scale working agreement with the Charles Forlenza Family of the West Coast. The Cosa Nostra.

  For both sides it meant that they could immediately farm out some very necessary dirty work.

  Neither the United States nor the Forlenzas wanted to soil their hands with what had to be done in the Caribbean during 1979.

  That was why they had so very carefully sought out Damian and Carrie Rose. Les Dements, as the couple was once called in Southeast Asia. The Maniacs.

  Two hours after the meeting in southwestern Nevada—on the way back to Las Vegas—a silver-gray Buick Wildcat stopped along a long stretch of flat, open highway. The youthful chauffeur of the car got out. He went to the back door of the sedan and opened it. Then Melo Russo politely asked his boss to get out of the car.

  “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” Frankie Rao said to his driver, a skinny young shark in reflector sunglasses.

  “All right, so fuck you, then,” Melo said.

  He fired three times into the backseat of the Buick. Blood spattered all over the rear windows and slowly misted down onto the light silver seat covers. Then Russo dragged Frankie the Cat’s body outside and put it in the trunk of the car.

  It had been quietly decided at the farmhouse meeting that Frankie Rao was an unacceptable risk for Harold Hill and the nice young man who looked like Montgomery Clift.

  “Typical,” Isadore Goldman muttered somewhere out on the Nevada desert.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Once—in France, this was—in June or July—Damian had gone on a tirade about how perfect our work in Cambodia and Vietnam had been. How it bothered the hell out of him that no one could know. That there was no way to capitalize on the work … Funny quirk (twist): In a French village, Grasse, we sat in an espresso house. Damian conversed in English with a very polite street cleaner who spoke no English at all. He told the man every last detail about the Caribbean adventure. “Genie! Demon! Non?” he said in French at the end of it. The poor confused street cleaner smiled as if Damian were an insane little boy….

  The Rose Diary

  June 11, 1979; Paris

  Three months after the Nevada meeting, in the fashionable St.-Germain section
of Paris, Damian Rose swung back and forth on a rope hammock from Au Printemps. The hammock was tied to a heavy stonework terrace. The large pigeon-gray terrace overlooked the Jardin des Tuileries, the Seine, the Louvre. The scenery of Paris was as pretty as a Seurat painting this hazy morning.

  Lying there in the late spring sun, Rose indulged himself in his one fatuous addiction: the reading of sensationalist newspapers and magazines.

  After perusing The Boys from Brazil, then glancing at the opening stories in the Enquirer, the overseas edition of Time magazine, and Soldier of Fortune, the elegant man rolled out of the hammock. Inside his and Carrie’s apartment, he got out of a lamb’s-wool pullover and expensive cream gabardines. Then he started to piece together the international costume of American students abroad.

  He put on faded blue jeans, a police blue work-shirt, lop-heeled Frye boots, and, finally, a red cowboy neckerchief. He applied light makeup to his eyes. Fitted a long dark wig over his own shorter hair.

  Today Damian Rose was going to play the part of a professor from the Sorbonne.

  He had to buy a small supply of drugs in Les Halles: amphetamines, cocaine, Thai sticks. Then off to meet with a mercenary soldier who called himself the Cuban.

  Tucking the workshirt tightly into Jockey shorts and zipping up his jeans, Damian walked through a living room overflowing with Broadway and Haymarket theater paraphernalia.

  Then out the apartment’s front door with a bang.

  “Bonjour,” he said to an emmerdeuse named Marie, an ancient woman who was always reading newspapers in the light of the hallway window.

  Then boots clomped down marble stairs to a circular courtyard inside the building itself.

  Damian climbed into a small black convertible in the courtyard. He left the convertible’s top up. Windows partially up. Visors down. He put on blue air force-style sunglasses.

  The sports car rolled out of the yard’s black ironwork gates, and Rose started to hum an old song he liked very much—sweet “Lili Marlene.”

  It was a brilliantly clear and warm spring day now. White as paper.

  The sweet smell of French bread baking filled the air on the narrow side streets.

  As the shiny black car turned onto the boulevard St.-Germain, a bicyclist—a healthy-looking girl in an oatmeal tank top—strained her long, swanlike neck to see the face of the young man behind the sun-dappled windshield.

  The pretty girl wasn’t quite fast enough.

  As of June 1979, no one who shouldn’t would know what the face of Damian Rose looked like.

  April 24, 1979, Tuesday

  Machete 3 Guilty!

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bookkeeping … over the course of the year, we had to hire over a hundred different people. We paid out nearly $600,000 in overhead expenses. We paid forgers from Brussels, counterfeiters, gun salesmen from East Germany and the United States, informers, dope peddlers, whores, pickpockets, American intelligence men, top mercenaries like Kingfish Toone, Blinkie Tomas (the Cuban), Clive Lawson. And not one of these people was ever told exactly what it was that we were putting together in the Caribbean….

  The Rose Diary

  The saying “Mad dogs and Englishmen” refers obliquely to the fact that our sun will cook you like bacon. Beware!

  Sign on beach at Turtle Bay

  April 24, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica

  Tuesday. The First Day of the Season.

  Not by coincidence, April 24 marked the end of the most spectacularly newsworthy trial ever held on the eighty-one-by-thirty-nine-mile Caribbean island of San Dominica.

  Parts of the pyrotechnic high court scene were hard to imagine or describe.

  For a beginning, the tiny, plain courtroom was packed to its high, square beam rafters. The room was as noisy as a sporting event. The slow-turning fans on the ceiling, like the ones in the movie Casablanca, were a sharp contrast to the frenzied atmosphere. The most perversely interesting of the defendants was fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet.

  The five-foot-six-inch teenager had a slate black, intelligent face that was at the same time piggy and cruel. He had long black cornbraids that were sopping wet all through the trial, dripping at the ends like frayed rope hanging in the rain.

  Every five minutes the boy’s grandmother, his guardian, punctuated the final proceedings with a loud, pitiful scream from her seat in the courtroom gallery. “Leon!” she shouted. “My bway Leon! Oh, no, son!”

  “You are murdering curs without any shame.” The seventy-year-old judge, Andre Dowdy, lectured the teenager and the two grown men standing beside him.

  “I feel no mercy toward any of you. Not even toward you, boy. I consider you all mad dogs….”

  Flanking Rachet, thirty-year-old Franklin Smith aimlessly shifted his weight from one orange work-boot to the other; Chicki Holt—father of fourteen children by five women, the local newspaper liked to reprint with every new story on the trial—just stared up at the plain white ceiling and watched the slow fans. Frankly Chicki was bored.

  Eight months earlier the same three men had stood outside a stammering Volkswagen Superbug one mile from the country town of New Burg. They’d robbed an American tourist, Francis Ci-choski, a fireman from Waltham, Massachusetts, on a golfing vacation.

  At the end of the broad-daylight holdup, one of the three blacks had knocked the white man down with the business side of a sugar-cane machete. The blow had killed Cichoski instantly. Then the man’s crew-cut head had been chopped off and left lying on its cheek on the blacktop road.

  In the eight months that followed, the motivation for the murder had been described as racial unrest; economic unrest; sex unrest; blood lust; obeah; soul music and kinky reggae; insanity; and, finally, the unsubtle beginning of a terrifying Pan-Caribbean revolution. These were not mutually exclusive, it was understood.

  Recently, however, San Dominican’s prime minister, Joe Walthey, had simplified the sociological aspects of the crime.

  “No matter what else,” the dictatorial black said over rolling, blipping island TV, “these men must hang, or this island shall never find peace with itself again. Mark my words on this.

  “The life of Francis Cichoski must be avenged,” Walthey repeated three times before he finally faded from the television screen.

  At 10:30 A.M. Judge Andre Dowdy read his verdict in an unsteady, emotion-packed voice.

  “All three of you men—Franklin Smith, Donald ‘Chicki’ Holt, Leon Elmore Rachet,” he read, “are found guilty of the murder as presented in evidence before me and this court. All of you will be taken to the Russville jail, and there be hanged no more than one week from today. May God have mercy on your souls. And on my own.”

  “An’ on yo’ ahss, too!” young Leon Rachet suddenly screamed out in the hushed courtroom. “An’ on yo’ ahss, Dowdy mon.”

  Franklin Smith turned to the teenager, winced, and said, “Oohh, Leon, mon.”

  At 10:40 the dull gray roof of the Potts Rum Factory blew off like a slapstick comedian’s hat; then flashes of leaping flames of orange and red fired up into the balmy clear blue sky.

  Literally within minutes, the Coastown factory was gone; an entire block of the capital was hopelessly ablaze.

  At precisely 11:00 two white foremen were beaten senseless with ball bats at the Cow Park Bauxite Mines.

  A hundred car windows were smashed in an executive parking lot.

  The executive dining room was rushed, and all the prime ribs and hot fried chicken were either taken away or destroyed.

  Inside the courtroom in Coastown, meanwhile, Franklin Smith and Chicki Holt screamed obscenely at Judge Dowdy. Their already hoarse, long-haired American lawyer screamed at the elderly judge, too. They called him “mama’s man”; “runny ass”; “shit pussy”; “blood clot.”

  Young Leon Rachet stood by quietly, simply watching. He reached inside his back pocket and produced a black beret for his sweaty head. At fifteen he fancied himself part Huey P. Newton, part Selassie, part Che.


  During the mad courtroom screaming, he turned to Franklin Smith and told the older man to shut his “black nager-boy mout.”

  Strangely, the thirty-year-old man did as he was told.

  Outside the cigar-box courthouse, the reggae singer Bob Marley was being blasted from loudspeakers on top of a rainbow-colored VW van.

  Marley and his Wailers also yelled out of oversize transistor radios along the crowded palm-tree-lined sidewalks.

  Angry black faces screamed at the courthouse building as if it were alive. Rude boys in the crowd carried posters promoting the cause of the revolutionary colonel Monkey Dred, and also of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Pretty, innocent-faced schoolchildren waved beautiful hand-painted banners—GO HOME ADMIRAL NELSON, GO HOME LAURENCE ROCKEFELLER; SAN DOMINICA A BLACK REPUBLIC.

  Shiny-faced city policemen marched up Court Street behind see-through riot shields. People threw ripe fruit at the police. Mangoes, green coconuts, small melons.

  A nut-skinned man in army fatigues ran up to a TV camera and made a bizarre, contorted face into the lens. “Aaahh deangerous!” he shouted, and became famous across the world.

  At 11:15 a row of five Hertz rentals was blown up with plastique at Robert F. Kennedy Airport outside Coastown.

  At 11:30 the three black murderers were led out onto the shiny white courthouse porch.

  The San Dominican terrors were about to begin in earnest.

  Fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet had on a Day-Glo flowered shirt and dark Tonton Macoute sunglasses. His black beret was tipped slightly over one eye. Deangerously.

  At first Rachet smiled broadly as he waved his handcuffed hands high over his head like a prizefight winner. Then, as the police shoved him down the glaring white steps, the boy began literally to scream at the sky.

  “Dred kill yo’, mon! Monkey kill al you’! Slit al yo’ troats.” Over and over the boy screamed out the name of an island revolutionary.

  “Monkey Dred slit me own auntie’s troat. Ay-ee! Ay-ee!”

  Suddenly a well-dressed black man in the crowd screamed out above all the other noise. “Gee-zass, mon. Oh, Gee-zass Ky-rist!”