Season of the Machete Read online

  Someone had thrown a sun-catching, silver Fris-bee high up into the air. It curved down into the crowd around the handcuffed murderers.

  As fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet reached the bottom of the courthouse steps, where the back door of a black police Rover was flung open to receive him, his eyes turned up toward the suddenly descending silver Frisbee—and a white man in a Panama suit and hat stepped out of the crowd and fired three shots into the mad boy’s face.

  Carrie Rose watched the strange, possessed teenager crumple up and fall. She was among the large group of white tourists behind police lines. She hoped the rest of the terrors would go as smoothly as this one had.

  Robert F. Kennedy Airport; Coastown, SanDominica

  Tuesday Evening.

  At 9:45 that night, an American Airlines Boeing 727 began its light, feathery approach down into San Dominica’s Robert F. Kennedy Airport.

  The massive silver plane glided in amazingly low over the blue-black Caribbean.

  Big red lights blinked at one-second intervals on the plane’s wings and tail. The red lights reflected beautifully off the dark blue sea.

  Hidden in blackness beside a filling station near runway two, Damian Rose watched the pretty landing with considerable interest. He ran through his final plan one more time.

  Meanwhile, out on runway one, the tires of the 727 were already touching down with the slightest bump and grind. A half-stoned calypso band began to play up near the main terminal.

  The airplane’s wheels screeched as its brakes and thrust-reversal system took hold.

  As the plane reached a point halfway to its landing mark, Damian Rose was forced to make a decision. Raising an expensive German-made rifle to his cheek, he got a small dark box on the runway into the clear greenish light of his nightscope.

  He fired three times.

  The unsophisticated bomb on the runway went off, drowning out the rifle explosions, and blew away a large section of the airplane’s belly.

  As the 727 rolled to a stop, flames burst from its midsection, then out the windows over its wings.

  Doors flew open, and emergency escape equipment tumbled outside. Screaming passengers started to come out of the airplane, some of them on fire.

  The airport’s two emergency trucks headed out toward the burning plane, slowly at first, their inexperienced drivers not believing what they were seeing.

  A person’s burning head was in one of the plane’s tiny windows.

  A white woman on fire ran across the dark tarmac, looking like a burning cross.

  A stewardess stood at one door with her fingers buried in her frosted blond hair, screaming for help.

  Four hours later—when the fire was finally out— six people from the 727 were dead, more than fifty others had been burned, and nobody on the island had a clue why it happened.

  The next day the puzzle seemed to become a bit clearer.

  April 25, 1979, Wednesday Couple Slain On Beach

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In 1967, when we were selling fifty- and hundred-milligram bags of heroin, Damian told me that he aspired to be the greatest criminal mind in the world. He said that the world was ripe for a criminal hero: brilliant, with a little raffish touch of William Henry Bonney—a little Butch Cassidy gilding…. I liked that idea very much. I got to be Katharine Ross in the fantasy.

  The Rose Diary

  April 25, 1979; Turtle Bay, San Dominica

  Wednesday Afternoon. The Second Day of the Season

  On the macadam highway that sliced through Turtle Bay, Peter Macdonald—a young man who was to play a large part in things to come—made his daily bicycle ride through the lush, sun-streaked paradise.

  As he pedaled a ten-speed Peugeot, Macdonald was enjoying the extra luxury of recalling several foolish glories out of his past.

  Nearly twenty-nine years old, Peter rode well enough. He looked healthy. Physically he was an attention getter. A pleasantly muscular six feet one, he rode in holey gray gym shorts with Property of USMA West Point printed in gold on one leg.

  He wore ragged Converse All-Star sneakers from Herman Spiegel's Sportin' Supplies in Grand Rapids, Michigan … gray-and-red Snowbird socks that made his feet peel their yellowing calluses … a bent, dusty Detroit Tigers souvenir hat that looked as if it had been worn every day of his life. And nearly had been.

  Underneath the baseball hat, his chestnut-colored hair was cut short, very high up on the sides. It was a real throwback haircut—a cut they used to call a “West Pointer.”

  Nearly everything about Peter Macdonald was throwback: his young lumberjack's good looks; his high Episcopal morals, philosophies; midwestern farmer stubbornness. Everything except for the last four months, anyway—the times he'd spent on San Dominica—the four months he'd been a lackey bartender, a beachcomber, a fornicator. Quite frankly, a nothing.

  As he passed through the island hills, gnats began to swim in the sweat on his strong back.

  Peter the Ridiculous, his girlfriend, Jane Cooke, liked to say in private places.

  Once upon a time Peter had run around Michigan like that: quietly, desperately, ridiculously … in winter … in ten-pound black rubber sea boots.

  Once upon a time he'd been an army brat—the last of the six Macdonald brothers, the last of the Super Six; then he'd been a West Point cadet; then a Special Forces sergeant in Vietnam and Cambodia.

  Old foolish glories.

  When the high weeds and banana plants started to get too thick—buggy, disturbingly itchy—Peter rode closer to the sea, on the wrong side of the two-lane Shore Highway. He was getting tired now. Rhythm going all to hell. Breaking down. Paradise Lost.

  He looked down on the starry Caribbean—Turtle Bay—and thought that he would take a swim after his ride. Find Jane and take a dip with her … maybe talk her into spending the afternoon in bed.

  He was very, very tired now, though. Knees threatened to wipe out his chin. Pedals fell flat as pancakes.

  Stik-shhh, stik-shhh, stik-shhh, stik-shhh …

  Shiny with sweat, Peter came around a sharp bend in the highway … and saw Damian Rose … thirty yards ahead of him on the road.

  The tall blond man stood with a rifle in the crook of his arm, looking out over the sea.

  Peter’s first thought was that the blond man was enjoying some impromptu hunting. Pigs, most likely.

  He could see the man’s car parked a little way up the road. Green sedan. License plate CY and a few numbers.

  Local? … Hadn’t seen him around…. Must be renting a villa…. Looked rich enough. Snobby, too….

  For some reason Peter took the man to be an Englishman…. He saw the flash of a tag marked “Harrods” inside the man’s jacket…. The tall blond Englishman. Smashing.

  As he passed by, the blond man turned and yelled out to him. Almost as if he’d been in a trance.

  He yelled “Constitutional!” Some long word….

  Macdonald took it for a greeting. Waved. Kept riding.

  He even picked up his speed a little. The slightest show-off move: Daniel Morelon imitation. That saved him, they said.

  The whole scene took less than fifteen seconds. Fifteen mind-bending, life-changing seconds.

  Then, another turn down the Shore Highway— bicycle flew downhill like a bat whistling—Peter was startled by a loud thrashing in the kelly green bush leading down to the beach.

  He expected a little band of goats or some wild pigs. What he saw were two sweating, barebacked blacks running up the hill.

  One of the men, the Cuban, was covered with blood. Smears that looked like finger paints.

  All of which would eventually send tremendous shock waves through the CIA, the Cosa Nostra, the San Dominican government…. At a cost of one and a quarter million dollars, the Roses weren’t supposed to leave witnesses.

  As for Peter Macdonald, he was in deep trouble … but at least he was on the run.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In Paris, he would sleep no more than three o
r four hours during the months before we left for the Caribbean. Usually, he’d go to bed around five in the morning. Until then, he’d just be sitting in front of a gooseneck lamp, turned so the bright light was almost shining in his face. Thinking things through. He’d sleep three or four hours, then be up by nine at the latest. Thinking some more about the machetes.

  The Rose Diary

  Michael O’Mara and his wife, Faye, were walking very, very slowly.

  Sand worshipers, they plodded westward, from cove to shining cove.

  Sixty-year-old Faye hummed absently to herself. She made up a silly tune for “She sells seashells by the seashore.”

  From a distance, Mike and Faye looked like two old men down on the beach … as they turned a sharp bend and entered Turtle Bay.

  “No wonder I’m so damn achy and tired,” Mike said, hitching his baggy, electric blue swim trunks every fourth or fifth step, walking with his feet, splayed out like a large arthritic duck.

  “I can’t sleep at these goddamn, ridiculous hotel prices. Who can sleep at forty … no. What is it? Fifty? … No, forty. Say thirty dollars every time you snooze…. I’ll wait’ll Coastown to sleep at those prices. At those prices, I’ll wait’ll we get back home if I have to.”

  Faye laughed right into the long ash of Mike’s cigar. “That’s very humorous, Miguel.”

  She stooped to pick up a nutmeg seashell, and her stomach bounced like a beach ball in her one-piece bathing suit. “Ha. Ha. Ha. That really cracks me up. Hee, hee. See, I’m laughing.”

  “Laugh away. Room in Coastown’s thirty bucks for a double. European plan. That place I think I could sleep, maybe. Shit fire and save matches. Skip eatin’ dinners altogether. Cut out the goat steaks easy enough….”

  Which part Faye didn’t really hear—not this time around on the familiar broken, skipping record: Mike. Instead the big white-haired lady seemed annoyed at the shell she’d just found.

  “I hate some people.” She weighed the tiny shell scientifically in her palm. “The way they make ashtrays out of these beautiful things. Nature’s wonders. Such a waste. And sooo tacky.”

  Mike O’Mara briefly examined his wife’s new treasure. He thought he heard somebody coming and looked off toward the bushes. Nothing. Couldn’t see worth a shit anymore.

  He dropped her seashell in the rope net bag he was dragging along the hot sand. Began to feel a little like a Fairmount Park sanitation man, he thought. Asshole seashells.

  “Who gets this work of art?” he asked in the seldom used, nonshouting voice he used as “good old Mike,” doorman and purveyor of goodwill at, the Rittenhouse Club in Philadelphia.

  “That one goes to Libby Gibbs.” Faye stooped for another shell, a rose murex, she thought. “Uhnn … which leaves Aunt Betsy, Bobo, Yacky. And Mama.”

  Mike stooped down and splashed cool water around his ankles. Pink, swollen, starting-to-blister ankles. Damn. Jaysus Christ Almighty. Was he actually paying good money to be tortured like this?

  When he straightened up, he took his wife’s soft, flabby upper arm. Dammit, he owed her this trip. He really did. Second honeymoon? Whatever you wanted to call it.

  “Faye Wray,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t understand why we have to fly away to some island …. Then buy presents for everybody and their brother…. Now if this was the Christmas Islands …”

  Suddenly Faye O’Mara looked awfully sad and tired. She was thinking that her kids didn’t care anymore. Mike certainly didn’t care. Nobody in this big wide world cared a whit what she thought about anything.

  “Aren’t you having fun here, Mike?” she asked for real. Serious. Then the bucktoothed Irishwoman grinned—the eternal struggle between the two of them—sharing that … something … making her smile and feel tender toward Mike.

  The answer to her question never came, though.

  Because Mike O’Mara was running for the first time in fifteen years. Huffing and puffing forward, looking as if his knees were locked.

  He couldn’t believe his eyes and waved for Faye to stay back. “Go back, Faye. Go back.”

  The Philadelphia doorman had found a bloody machete driven halfway to China in the sand. He’d found the two hippies who had been killed and mutilated by the Cuban and Kingfish Toone.

  And so had a hungry band of wild goats.

  CHAPTER SIX

  We forget that policemen are relatively simple-minded human beings for the most part. Damian said that they are basically unequipped to deal with the creative personality (criminal). It’s impossible for them now, and it’s getting worse. An amoral generation is coming up fast. Can another police state be far behind?

  The Rose Diary

  Wednesday Evening

  It was getting dark fast, black and blue and pink out over the Caribbean, when the chief of San Dominica’s police force came to see the extraordinary machete murders.

  Twenty or so less important policemen and army officials had already arrived. They were deployed all over the beach, like’ survey engineers.

  Taking notes. Making measurements. Spreading out litters and yellow sheets that looked like rain slickers from a distance.

  The policemen’s white pith helmets floated through the crowd like carnival balloons.

  Before he did anything else, the chief of police counted the valuable helmets on the heads of his men.

  Then Dr. Meral Johnson quietly pushed himself through a buzzing ring of bathing suits and cutoff blue jeans; bald heads and brown freckled decolletage; double-knit leisure suits and pantsuits and flowing Empire dresses.

  At least four hundred very frightened and very confused vacationers had gathered on the finger-cove beach.

  To get a look at the bodies.

  And then not to believe their own eyes; not to believe their luck.

  Once he was inside the circus of people, Dr. Johnson stopped to catch his breath. He lit up a stumpy black Albertson pipe. Pup, pup, pup, pup …

  The Americans were restless tonight! He made a small joke, then quickly felt very bad about it. Very bad. Awful.

  A little shorter than five feet ten, four-eyed, seer-suckered, two hundred fifty pounds, Meral Johnson looked rather tenuous as a policeman, he knew. Tenuous, or was it timorous?

  More like a proper, stern West Indian schoolmaster—which he’d been—than a Joseph Wam-baugh-style policeman come to solve grisly murders. More like a hick islander who polished his shoes with palm oil, his teeth with baking soda.

  Well, so be it, Meral Johnson thought to himself. So be it. The massive policeman thereupon entered the machete Terrors.

  Almost instantly the flustered German manager of the nearby Plantation Inn began to shout at him.

  “What took you so long? Now you stop to smoke a pipe?”

  Dr. Johnson paid the hotel manager as much attention as he would some sandfly buzzing around his trousers cuffs. Speaking to none of his subordinates first, he began to walk around the yellow rubber sheets that covered bits and pieces of the teenagers’ bodies.

  After his short walk, the police chief stood with his back to the sea and simply watched the scene of the double murder. He tried to bring his mind back down on an even keel.

  The manager of the Plantation Inn had apparently ordered his waiters to cordon off the bodies of the two young people.

  The waiters, mostly old blacks with fuzzy white crew cuts—earning less than thirty dollars a week—stood at parade-ground attention in their stiff white dinner jackets. Each man had on black dress shoes with especially shiny toes. Each held a flaming torch removed from the inn’s dining veranda. Each of the waiters looked sad and dignified and, above all, respectful of the terrible situation.

  The scene was extraordinary—both colonial and primitive—and Johnson wanted to be certain he had it reproduced, burned into his optic nerve, before he began the thumb-screwing work ahead of him this night.

  What a sight—tragedy, mystery. The worst he’d ever come upon.

  First, Dr. Johnson approache
d the very inexperienced, frightened constable of Turtle Bay District.

  Almost since he had arrived, twenty-eight-year-old Bobbie Valentine had been kneeling among the rubber sheets, looking like a mourner, looking as if he would be sick to his stomach.

  Meral Johnson kneeled and spoke to the man in a clear, relatively clean, Oxbridge accent. No trace of island patois.

  “What is your thought here, Bobbie?” he asked. A short pause, then he answered his own question. “I think Colonel Dred, perhaps. He’s contacted the newspapers and claimed responsibility, at least.”

  Before the constable had a chance to agree or disagree, the German hotel manager spoke over both their heads.

  ”I am Maximilian Westerhuis,” he announced with authority—almost titular emphasis. “I manage the Plantation Inn. These two dead …”

  The large black policeman stood up faster man seemed possible. His dark eyes flashed. Looking convincingly nasty, Johnson said the first thing that entered his head.

  “You wish to make a confession here?”

  Westerhuis took a confused step backward. “Of course not. Confessions? … Don’t be absurd with me….”

  “Then I am talking to this very good policeman now.” Dr. Johnson’s voice returned to its usual polite whisper. “Please wait for me, Mr. Westerhuis. On the far side of your service crew.”

  The inn manager, tall, white blond, said nothing further. He stalked off angrily.

  “Nazi,” Johnson muttered—an obvious idea that nonetheless went completely over the head of Constable Valentine. “I must do something about this crowd,” Johnson said. “Something smart would be preferable.”

  Smoking his black pipe, the police chief started to walk from sheet to sheet again. Very gently he lifted the bulky rubber covers, then put them back exactly as they had been. It looked almost as if the policeman were checking on small sleeping children.

  He stayed over the severed head of the young woman for what seemed like a very long time.

  Shining a small pocket light on the bodies, he studied the bloody faces and skulls.

  The crowd of hotel guests became silent as he worked. Every man and woman watched him, but the police chief never looked up. For the first time in hours, you could hear birds in the air at Turtle Bay; you could hear the sea lapping.