Season of the Machete Read online

  Finally, with his head still down, as respectful as the old black waiters, Dr. Johnson walked back to his constable.

  He’d spent the previous ten minutes, the entire slow dance back through the mutilated bodies, simply trying to gain some confidence from this crowd. To give them the impression that he’d handled murders like this before.

  Now, maybe, he could begin some kind of investigation.

  Using his handkerchief, he started by wriggling the sugar-cane machete out of the sand. He held the sharp broadsword up to the light of the moon.

  “Hmmm,” he muttered out loud. “Make sure no one takes any souvenirs.” He spoke in a lower voice to Constable Bobbie Valentine. “Americans like souvenirs of disaster. We learned at least that much at the airplane fire….

  “And one final thing, Bobbie. Will you spread this word for me? … If any of these men sell their hats as souvenirs, tell them they’ll be selling pukka beads and seashells on the streets by this time tomorrow night. I counted sixteen hats coming down here!”

  Coastown, San Dominica

  At 7:45 the young man who looked like Montgomery Clift sat alone at a shadowy table on the veranda of the Coastown Princess Hotel.

  As he sipped a Cutty Sark Scotch with Perrier water, he tapped his swizzle stick to the soft calypso beat of “Marianne.” Brooks Campbell was starting to get nervous.

  Small problem: He was afraid the other people on the patio were beginning to notice that he was sitting there all by his lonesome.

  Slightly larger problem: His Afro-haired waiter was hassling him, trying to get him to leave so a bigger party could sit at the table.

  Very large problem: Damian Rose was half an hour late for their first, presumably their only, face-to-face meeting.

  Brooks Campbell didn’t know all the details about Turtle Bay yet, but the general way the Roses worked was beginning to grate on his nerves. At first there were supposed to be only ten or twelve deaths on San Dominica, something like the 1973 uprisings on St. Croix. Now it looked as if it would be worse than that. Much worse. Rose was handling everything his own idiosyncratic way, and that was why Campbell had asked for the meeting. Demanded a meeting.

  At 8:15 Damian Rose still hadn’t appeared.

  Campbell sat and watched a huge artificial waterfall dump endless gallons of water into an epic swimming pool directly below the patio. He watched couples in bathing suits as they wound their way along pretty paths lined with palm and casuarina trees.

  The small combo was playing a reggae tune now— “The Harder They Come.” Revolutionary music.

  By 8:45 Brooks Campbell realized that he wasn’t going to meet Damian Rose.

  Campbell had a sneaking suspicion that no one was ever going to see the mysterious soldier of fortune.

  At nine o’clock the handsome thirty-one-year-old paid his bar bill at the Princess. He walked the twelve blocks to the U.S. embassy; heard war drums in the air out on the streets. Back at the embassy, he was greeted with the most disturbing news of his career.

  Someone had seen a tall blond man at Turtle Bay that afternoon.

  Someone had finally seen the face of Damian Rose.

  Turtle Bay, San Dominica

  The field machete left in the sand at Turtle Bay was half scythe, half butcher’s cleaver.

  From the look of it, it had seen heavy use on a sugar plantation or in the West Hills jungle. The knife part was twenty-six inches long, four inches wide. Heavy-duty steel. The wooden handle was seven inches, warped, badly nicked, with big rivets like a kitchen carving knife. When it was held in one hand, the machete brought to mind cutlasses and sword fighting.

  Sitting in the paperback library at the Plantation Inn, Dr. Meral Johnson examined the sharp knife for a long time.

  He held it up close to a bright reading lamp. He whipped it through the air, cutting at shadows. Scary weapon. Johnson had personally seen a machete cut a goat in half at a swipe.

  The weary policeman plopped down on an old morris chair in the library. He began to sort through some of the loose, contradictory details of the case … the Turtle Bay massacre. The American Airlines’ plane that was bombed. The curious shooting of Leon Rachet.

  Right then, the best Dr. Johnson figured he could do was concentrate on details that might lead him or the army to the island revolutionary Monkey Dred. He instructed his men to do the same in their investigations.

  It was an honest but costly mistake—and one the Roses had counted on.

  Policemen are relatively simple-minded human beings…

  Witnesses.

  A tennis pro and his wife from Saddle River, New Jersey, had seen a black hobo on the beach near the time of the machete murders.

  An elderly Englishwoman saw a group of “unruly native boys” congregating in the royal palms just beyond the inn’s main stretch of beach.

  A couple from Georgia remembered seeing an old black man with some mangy goats on a rope leash.

  A pretty eleven-year-old girl was brought to Dr. Johnson because she had a story, her mother said. The girl explained that around eight o’clock that evening, she’d locked herself in her mother’s suite. Then she’d screamed bloody murder until one of the hotel bartenders—Peter Macdonald—came and broke down the door with a fire ax. The girl’s mother, an actress, wanted the police chief to get both of them on an airplane back to New York that evening. Crying, occasionally screaming at the black man, she said that her daughter was about to have a nervous breakdown.

  Simultaneously, another group of “witnesses” was being questioned inside the inn’s main business office.

  “You’re one of the bartenders here.” Constable Bobbie Valentine spoke softly at first. The country policeman was sitting behind a Royal office typewriter, only occasionally glancing up from his notepad. “Talk to me, mon.”

  In as few words as possible, Peter Macdonald tried to explain what he’d seen bike riding up on the Shore Highway that afternoon.

  He described Damian Rose as English looking: “a tall blond Englishman.”

  He told the constable about the two blacks who’d come up from the beach, dripping with blood. He mentioned the expensive German rifle, the green sedan; he even described the coat from Harrods in London.

  When he was finished, the black constable seemed to be smirking. He looked at Peter as if he were just another American nut on the loose. A crank case.

  “Dat’s good, mon,” the policeman said. “Next, please,” he called out the open office door.

  Peter could feel himself starting to get a little angry. “Hey, could you wait a minute?” he said. “Slow down for just a second, please. Okay? I understand that you’re seeing a lot of very upset people tonight. I know it’s crazy around here…. But what about this Englishman?”

  “I took notes.” The black man held up his pad. “Anyway, we already know about dem killers. Colonel Dred. Bad-ass. You know about Dred, mon? Nah, you don’t know ‘bout Dred.”

  “I don’t know much about him.” Peter tried to break through to the policeman. “But I saw a blond white man up there where those two poor kids were killed. I saw a lot of blood on a couple of black guys who looked like they’d just strangled a grammar-school class with their bare hands. I got scared, and I don’t get scared very easily.”

  Once again the policeman seemed to be smirking. He was so know-it-all in his attitude, Peter wanted to rap him.

  “I know, mon. I know it. Blond Englishmon type. Tall. Green car license starts CY. Check it out for you, mon. Check it out…. Okay—who’s next with stories here?”

  As the only legitimate witness walked out of the investigation … as the unbelievable confusion and mistakes just started to mount … Dr. Meral Johnson wandered out on the dark Plantation Inn grounds.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  People never want to die, for some strange reason. Especially young people. Especially young, unfulfilled singles on vacations they can’t afford. Originally, we’d planned the first machete murders for the island
’s version of Club Mediterranee. The Plantation Inn was chosen because of secondary considerations.

  The Rose Diary

  Turtle Bay, San Dominica

  In the noisy background of the Plantation Inn’s Cricket Lounge, a young, bone-tanned woman complained that she would never be able to shut her eyes and catch some sun at a beach again.

  “Two murders. Just like the movies,” someone was saying—a short-haired man with a coke spoon dangling around his neck.

  Up at the lounge bar, Peter Macdonald talked to his girlfriend, Jane Cooke. He also served up gallons of planter’s and boom-boom punch; rum toddies; Jamaica coffee; swizzles; fog-cutters—and an amazing quantity of good old-fashioned neat whiskey.

  “I know how paranoid this sounds,” he said to Jane, “but the police didn’t seem to want to listen.”

  “That constable took your statement. He did, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah. I guess. But he seemed to have the whole thing wrapped up, Janie. Colonel Dred! Colonel Dred! Forget everything else. The tall blond man. The fancy rifle. Jesus, I don’t know. I hope they’re right…. It’s just that they weren’t very professional about it. It was like Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour in there.”

  “Ahhh, Pee-ter, mon.”

  The lilting voice of the lounge calypso singer drifted across the room.

  Then the singer whistled into his microphone. He tapped the mike with a long, effeminate fingernail. Blew softly into strange, snaky bamboo pipes.

  “No need be afraid of Leon,” he whispered to his white audience. Couples out of John O’Hara and John Marquand. Lots of bright WASPY green in their outfits—green and Bermuda pink.

  He sang to them. “San Dominic’ woman’s love day say … is lak a mornin’ dew…. Jus’ as lakly it fall on de horse’s turd … as on de rose.”

  The singer laughed. A pretty imitation of Geoffrey Holder.

  A few people in the dark, red-lanterned bar started to clap.

  Peter Macdonald pulled at a bicycle bell hidden somewhere in the liquor bottles over the bar.

  “I wan’ to sing yo peoples lubbley song ‘bout sech a ooman,” the singer went on. “‘Bout her rose. An’ … well, you know it, my friends … de unworty objet ub dat gal’s affection. Me own rival. A real shit!”

  At the same time, Chief of Police Meral Johnson walked down damp stone stairs, then along a row of cells in the dimly lit medieval basement of the Coastown jail.

  Walking behind him was a lineup of seven policemen and clerks. Nearly everyone in the Coastown jail at that late hour.

  The somber parade turned down another row of cells. Then another. At the end of the third row, a tall, perspiring constable waited beside an open, steel-plated door.

  Inside the cell, the chief of police could already see the white man who shot Leon Rachet the previous morning.

  The mysterious, middle-aged white man was lying on his cot with both arms spread wide. His hairy bare legs dangled off one end of the bed. A puddle of urine and blood ran out of the cell, right down a big drain in the dirty corridor.

  While Dr. Johnson had been out at the Plantation Inn, the man had been murdered.

  Killed in his bed. In jail. By a sugar-cane machete.

  The crude knife was sticking out of the dead man’s hairy belly—a red wool cap hung carefully on its hilt.

  “Monkey Dred,” Johnson whispered.

  “Pee-ter! Pee-ter!”

  The calypso singer’s sweet voice drifted across the Cricket Lounge.

  “Tell me dis one ting, mon? … What be de difference be-tween Irishmon wedding an’ Irishmon wake?”

  Sulking, a little embarrassed, Peter resisted. He didn’t want to be a part of the show tonight. Not tonight. Not with the image of the mutilated nineteen-year-olds crawling through his mind like bloodworms.

  “So what’s the difference?” someone called out from the dark bar.

  Peter looked at Jane and could see the same— what? distaste? nausea?

  “One less drunk?” The chestnut-haired man finally gave in; yanked the asinine bicycle bell, felt—, very strangely, dumbly—a little homesick.

  May 3, 1979, Thursday

  Tourists Flee Resort Hotels!

  “Go from Slush to Lush!’

  Magazine Ad for

  San Dominica

  Nine murders were reported around the resort island on the third day.

  Two knifings; two pistol shootings; a forced drowning; four machete killings.

  Sophisticated TV news crews began to arrive on San Dominica in the early afternoon: hippie cameramen, soundmen who looked like NASA engineers, “California Dreaming” directors, assistant directors, reporters, and commentators. Crews came from ABC, CBS, NBC. They came from local stations in New York City, Miami, and Chicago. Apparently the machete murders were an especially popular item in Chicago and New York.

  Reporters and crew members were given hazardous-duty pay just as they received for covering combat assignments, urban riots, or madmen on the loose.

  Newspaper correspondents—quieter types, less Los Angelese—started to arrive, too.

  They came from the States, of course, but they also began to come in from Western Europe; from Africa and Asia; and especially from South America. The Third World countries were particularly well represented.

  The newshounds smelled a revolution!

  Meanwhile, police and army experts were predicting that the sudden, mind-boggling violence would either die down completely—or flare up all over the Caribbean.

  So far—even with Colonel Dred as an obvious target—it was a hell of a mystery.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We had learned long before we ever saw the Caribbean that beautiful scenery provides the most chilling background for any kind of terrorism.

  The Rose Diary

  May 3, 1979; Titchfield Cove, San Dominica

  Thursday Morning. The Third Day of the Season.

  Dressed in loose-fitting blue jeans and a blue cotton T-shirt, Damian Rose climbed hard and as fast as possible. He moved toward huge outcroppings of black rock poised above the Shore Highway.

  High up in the rocks, the lazy island trade winds had chiseled two primitive heads over centuries and centuries—neither of which, Rose was thinking as he moved along, had been worth the hot air and bother.

  His fingers curled into small cracks, Rose pulled himself up over countless tiny ledges toward the sea blue sky. He could feel his boots crunching loose rocks as he ascended; he could taste his own salty sweat.

  After fifteen minutes of hard climbing, he pulled himself onto a barren ledge of flat rock. The small jut of rock was about four feet long, less than three feet wide. Close up, the black rock was loaded with specks of shiny mica. Mica and tiny seagull bones.

  From the gull’s high burial ground, Damian could see everything he needed to see.

  The morning after the Turtle Bay murders had turned out crisp and pure, with a high blue sky all over the Caribbean. A hawk flew directly over his head, watching the empty highway and watching him, it seemed.

  Far below, the sea was choppy in spite of the pacific blue skies. Brown reefs were visible on the outskirts of Titchfield Cove.

  There was a long, dramatic stretch of crystal beach that ended in another hill of high black rocks.

  Damian Rose began to concentrate on a slightly balding dark-haired man and his two children as they walked down the perfect beach.

  The three of them were getting their feet and legs wet in the creamy surf… walking along as if they were waiting for the man who photographed such moments for postcards and greeting cards.

  Damian took out two lengths of streamlined black pipe. He began to screw them together. Made a barrel. Screwed the longer pipe into a lightweight stock. Made a gun. Added a sniper’s scope from his backpack.

  The dark-haired man, Walter Marks, dived over a small blue wave and disappeared.

  His boy and little girl seemed leery of the water. Attractive children, Rose bothere
d to notice. Two blonds, like their mother.

  Their father was an ass to take them out the morning after the machete killings. A shallow, foolish ass. Promised them a vacation. Always kept his promises.

  Rose put the sight of the German rifle to his eye. Thin crosshairs that didn’t meet.

  He watched Marks’s slick brown hair surface in bubbles. The man stood up, and the water was only to his waist. He had a very hairy chest: brown hair that seemed to turn black in wet tufts.

  Through the powerful Zeiss sight, Walter Marks seemed close enough to reach out and touch.

  Rose saw the Cuban waving from high weeds not far behind the beach. “Shooting goldfish in a bowl”: he remembered a strange, wonderful saying.

  Damian squeezed off just one shot.

  Walter Marks fell over backward in the three-foot-high water. He looked as if he were trying to step back over a wave to amuse his children.

  The bullet had gone through the center of his forehead, spitting out brain like a corkscrew.

  The children began to scream at once. They hugged each other and seemed to be dancing in the suddenly pinkish water.

  Kingfish and the Cuban appeared with the machete. The Roses’ inspired buck-and-wing team. Wading out into the sea.

  Fortunately, but at the same time unfortunately for the Marks children, there had to be witnesses this time. The witnesses were to be the children themselves.

  Too bad, Rose thought for a split second. And yet perfect.

  The cold-blooded murder of the president of ASTA. The public execution of the president of the American Society of Travel Agents.

  Who deserved it for being such a pompous fool. For ignoring all the warnings.

  Turtle Bay, San Dominica

  Somewhere in the U.S. Marine annals, it says that “a Marine on Embassy Duty is an Ambassador in uniform.”

  Clearly out of uniform—dressed in gray insignia shorts and nothing else—twenty-four embassy duty marines spent the morning of May 3 conducting a dreaded sector search of the beach at Turtle Bay.