Season of the Machete Read online

  “Okay. That theory is all well and good,” Peter broke in. “But what about this blond monkey? Seriously. Can you tell me what a white man was doing there with a sniper’s rifle? Kind of gun you use to blow John Kennedy’s Adam’s apple out with. Tell me something comforting about that guy and I’ll go home happy. Won’t bother you ever again.”

  Brooks Campbell got up from his desk. He made a tiny crack in the drapes, and bright sunlight pierced into the attic room. “You know what, Peter?” he said, giving just a hint of a slick politician’s smile. “I don’t know what in hell a white man was doing up there.

  “Let me tell you a little state secret, though. I’ve listened to over, oh, fifty people who have clues about Turtle Bay. I’ve listened to the police, the army … and everything I’ve heard so far points to Colonel Dassie Dred. I don’t know what else to tell you here, Peter.”

  Campbell stopped his pacing. His mind had been wandering back to a meeting one year ago in the Nevada desert. To slick projections made about Damian and Carrie Rose.

  Christ! They’d screwed up already. Rose was blown wide open. The great mysterious Damian Rose—whom even they had never been able to see.

  Campbell looked across the small attic room at Peter Macdonald. His eyes fell to the Hawaiian shirt. “Trust me, Peter.” He smiled halfheartedly, his mind still on the Roses. “Leave my secretary a number where I can reach you.”

  Peter didn’t answer right away. Mind going a little crazy on him. In God we trust. All others pay cash, Brooks…. He had the sudden nauseating feeling that he was all by himself again.

  “Jesus,” slipped out of his mouth.

  Then the surly black secretary came back, and the interview was over.

  Peter left the big white mansion in a sweat. He couldn’t remember feeling so alone and down in a long, long time. Not since the march into Cambodia.

  As he walked through the pretty embassy grounds, he nodded at the well-scrubbed marines on guard duty, smiled at the Walt Disney World tourists—but he kept thinking back to the government actor Brooks Campbell.

  Who, meanwhile, stood behind a big dormer window up on the third floor. Smoking a cigarette, watching Macdonald go out the front gates.

  The Witness.

  Just before noon the Loner shuffled down Bath Street in Coastown.

  The long-haired man, “Dyno-mite,” was holding Carrie Rose’s letter as if it were a birthday party invitation his mother had told him to keep nice and clean.

  Chachalacas and a cockatoo chatted up and down the pretty, quiet side street. A few pariah dogs barked at him, and the Loner barked back. Some goats were lunching mindlessly on garbage and scruffy back lawns—and the Loner remembered that he was hungry, too.

  And stoned out of his mind. Wasted. Blown away. Feeling rather nice on the balmy afternoon.

  Fifty Bath turned out to be the office of the Evening Star newspaper.

  The Loner rang a bell hanging loose by its own electrical wires. Then he waited.

  In a few minutes a black girl with hibiscus in her hair appeared in the doorway. The girl was laughing as if she’d just been told a joke. She accepted the manila envelope. Then suddenly, unbelievably, loud shotgun blasts shattered the quiet of the side street.

  The Loner was thrown hard against the doorjamb and wall. His skinny, needle-tracked arms flew up, palms out flat. His hair flew like a dirty mop being shaken out. Bullets held him against the wall, stitching his chest and face. He was dead before he slid to the ground.

  A few minutes later the Evening Star’s flabbergasted black editor was trying to read the letter the man had brought. The letter appeared to be from Colonel Dassie Dred—Monkey Dred.

  It promised the most severe and unusual punishments if the white foreigners didn’t leave San Dominica.

  It promised that if the letter itself wasn’t printed for all to see in the evening news, a similar delivery would be made at 50 Bath Street the following morning.

  At 12:30 Dr. Meral Johnson arrived at the tiny newspaper office. The black police chief examined the gaping hole in the newspaper office’s front door. He looked at the dead man. Talked with the young girl who had accepted the letter. Sent his men to scour the neighborhood, to try to find out if anyone had witnessed the shooting.

  Then it was Meral Johnson himself who came up with the name “Dead Letter” to describe the delivery. Thus far, Dr. Johnson realized sadly, it was just about his only contribution to the extraordinary case.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The crÈme de la crÈme of the Intelligence people are the plodding bureaucrats. The worst of them are the Ivy League and Eton boys. And in this case, the crÈme didn’t necessarily rise to the top.

  The Rose Diary

  Fairfax Station, Virginia

  That afternoon and evening, Washington, D.C., was filled with ironic talk about the failure of Vietnamese and.Chinese negotiators to agree on a peace settlement. Speechwriters for Jimmy Carter were already busy preparing a vow that America would keep its pledge abroad; that America would not turn back to isolationism.

  Thirteen miles southwest of the capital was Harold Hill’s Old Virginny Home on six neat acres in Fairfax Station. The land was closed in by green rolling hills and white picket fences. It was rich in honeysuckle, boxwoods, dogwoods, and full-bred domestic animals. On one of the white fence gates was the hand-painted sign OUR OLD VIRGINNY HOME.

  Perhaps! But when Harold Hill was away from home, he sometimes referred to the place as “Vanilla Wafer.”

  From every vantage point, the Hill homestead seemed innocent and indistinctly sweet. The most secretive thing anyone might even associate with the normal-looking place was the presence of one of A. C. Nielsen’s famous survey TVs.

  But never murder, or mayhem, or Intelligence.

  Which is more or less the way Harry the Hack wanted it.

  On most weekday evenings during the spring and early summer, Hill was in the habit of playing hardball with his son, Mark. Mark was fourteen, a budding star in Babe Ruth league baseball. Every night that there was no game, Mark had to throw his father one hundred strikes or be damned.

  Hill was haunched awkwardly over loose-fitting Top-Siders that night; just sweating nicely; starting to enjoy the exercise—the warm itch in his palm under a Rawlings catcher’s mitt.

  Suddenly he was called to the house by his wife, Carole. “Long distance calling,” she shouted from the porch in an Alabama accent she hadn’t lost while living in eight different countries. “It’s Brooksie Campbell.”

  Hill excused himself to his son, then jogged up toward the big Colonial-style house. On the way inside, forty-four-year-old Harold Hill started to feel a little turmoil in his stomach.

  Brooks Campbell just didn’t call you at home. Not to shoot the bull, anyway. There was something about this terrorism bullshit—Campbell’s so-called specialty—that didn’t sit well with Harold Hill.

  Terrorism was something for the Arabs and Israelis. The Irish. The Symbionese Liberation Army. Something for the little people who had to play dirty. Terrorism just wasn’t something Americans should be getting involved with.

  Inside his den, Hill dialed an eight hundred number on a phone he kept in a locked desk drawer.

  What would happen—he continued his thought from outside—if a major power started playing dirty pool on a regular basis? All-out, no-holds-barred dirty? What would happen if America found a real “guerrilla” war? Shee-it! is what would happen. A return to the Dark Ages.

  Hill punched an extension button, and the call from the Caribbean was switched onto a safe line, a scrambler.

  He could still see Mark outside. Throwing high pop-ups over an old spruce. Catching them basket style like Willie Mays. The boy had an incredible throwing arm. Incredible.

  Just as he began to think that the telephone switch-over was taking too long, he heard Brooks Campbell’s voice.

  “Hello, Harry.” A slightly muffled Campbell— his deep stage voice sounded a little muddy. “Th
e reason I’m calling, Harry—”

  Harold Hill let out a short, snorting laugh meant to slow down the younger man. “I think I’m going to sit down for that. For the reason you’re calling.”

  “Yeah, sit down. It’s not good news…. It turns out, uh, that Rose was seen by a man at Turtle Bay yesterday. How about that? We buy someone even we haven’t seen, a fucking genius, supposedly, and he’s immediately made by somebody else. Shit, Harry, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that somebody is fucking around with us. At any rate, I don’t want to take any chances with this.”

  “Does Rose know he was seen? Tell me the whole thing, Brooks.”

  “Basically, he knows his situation,” Campbell said. “He called us today. At least his wife did. She said they want to take care of it themselves. Cute?”

  “Terrific.”

  “The man who saw him is a nobody, thank God. American, though…. By the way, Rose shot and cut up the president of ASTA this morning. Harry, they’re freelancing like crazy now. I don’t even remember the original plan we were shown. He skipped a meeting with me last night. They’ve gone fucking nuts on us.”

  Harold Hill closed his eyes and visualized Campbell. Brooks Corbett Campbell. Princeton man. WASP from New London, Connecticut. Slated for big things at the Agency. Neo-Nazi, in Hill’s humble opinion. Kind of guy who always thinks he knows what’s best for everybody else.

  “Well, uhhh … I think we have to go along with them a while longer. Don’t you? Maybe you ought to lay hands on this witness. It seems to me that we may need him to identify Rose. Eventually, anyway…. I have no intention of letting them leave the island after this is over. That’s an obvious stroke.”

  “Sounds good.” Brooks Campbell raised his voice above some transatlantic chatter. “That’s pretty much the way I see it right now.”

  Hill paused for a moment. He thought he ought to try to cheer Campbell up a bit. S.O.P.

  “All right. Okay on that,” said Harry the Hack. “Now let me have the bad news.”

  Young Brooks Campbell tried to laugh. Your basic combat camaraderie. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said.

  Coastown, San Dominica

  “Let’s try to look at this shitty mess logically,” Jane suggested.

  Peter didn’t answer. He was way off someplace else. At the artillery range outside Camp Grayling in central Michigan. Shooting tin cans off Brooks Campbell’s head. With a bazooka.

  At ten mat night the two of them were out on the dark patio of Le Hut Restaurant, trying to comprehend mass murder. Occasionally picking through a stew pot of oily bouillabaisse. Both of them about as hungry as the shrimp in the pot.

  Peter finally raised his puppy-dog brown eyes to her and shrugged. “Who could come up with that kind of idea? … Slicing up two nineteen-year-old kids like Jack the Ripper?”

  Jane sat with her chin in the palms of thin hands. Serious, she looked like an older version of Caroline Kennedy. She was catching the eye of all the black waiters.

  “Probably the same kind of creep who would make two little kids watch their own father die,” she answered. “It just makes me feel so awful. Creepy and sick. Really shitty—besides being scared.”

  Thinking back on the scene at the American embassy, Peter began to feel a little useless, motelike. Little Mac fucks it up again…. Maybe he just hadn’t explained himself well enough, he thought. Something sure had gone wrong at the embassy. Because the tall blond man was important one way or the other. He had to be.

  Jane pointed out to the street. Playful grin on her face; premachete smile. “I didn’t know one of your brothers was down on the island. Heh, hen.”

  Right in front of Le Hut a street clown was entertaining a small crowd. The scruffy clown was white. BASIL: A CHILDREN’S MINSTREL said his hand-painted sign.

  Basil was a young man behind all his Indian and clown paints. Around the eyes he seemed very serious about the show, even a little sad. Only dressed the way he was—raggy canary-yellow pantaloons, an outrageous pastel nightcap—the man also seemed pixilated.

  “Love is the answer,” he said to natives and a few tourists walking past him on Front Street. “Love is the answer,” he whispered to the people eating and drinking in Le Hut.

  “Ahhh,” Jane whispered to Peter, winked, talked like Charlie Chan. “But what is question?” She saw that he was still partially lost in his own thoughts. Turtle Bay. What had upset him at the U.S. embassy?

  “Do you know any children’s tricks? Children’s minstrel tricks?” she whispered across the table. “Macduff? Are you there? Are you here with me? Or are you Sherlock Holmes off solving great murders?”

  Peter smiled and blushed. “Sorry. I’m here. Hello!”

  He traveled back to the cafe from faraway places: Vietnam; his parents’ house up on Lake Michigan, where every summer for six straight years Betsy Macdonald came and dropped another brown-haired, brown-eyed baby boy. The Super Six.

  “Children’s tricks?” Peter grinned. Had a rush of feeling for this eccentric plains girl from Dakota.

  He thought for just a second. Remembered something his brother Tommy used to do for his kids.

  Peter picked up his Le Hut paper napkin. Twisted it tight and held it under his nose. The napkin looked like a droopy mustache. Greasy. Full of fish scraps. “You must pay the rent,” Peter said in an obvious villain’s voice.

  He switched the napkin to the side of his hair. It became a girl’s ribbon. “I can’t pay the rent,” he said in the falsetto of a heroine in distress.

  Mustache voice: “You must pay the rent!”

  Ribbon voice: “I can’t pay the rent!”

  He switched the napkin under his chin, where it became a puffy bow tie. Peter spoke in a voice like Dudley Do-Right. “I’ll pay the rent!”

  Ribbon voice: “My hero.”

  Mustache voice: “Curses, foiled again.”

  “I wish it was that easy,” Jane said.

  She kissed his paper mustache. Laurel and Hardy-ha-ha. Neither of them quite full-fledged adults, yet. Not in all ways. Lots of good intentions to grow up, though.

  That night they slept together for the last time. Ever.

  Crafton’s Pond, San Dominica

  Meanwhile, the first meeting between the Roses and Colonel Monkey Dred was close to its very shaky start.

  Motors off, four cars sat on opposite sides of a flat, narrow field near Nate Crafton’s rat-infested pond in the West Hills District. The field’s regular use was for prop planes coming from, and going to, New Orleans with shipments of ganja and cocaine.

  This particular night it was misty up around the pond itself. The wet grass was full of long, husky water rats.

  By mutual agreement each side had brought only two cars. There were to be no more than two passengers in either auto. Since there seemed to be no way to prevent them, guns had been permitted.

  Shortly before starting time, a third vehicle appeared on the horizon on Dred’s side of the field. At 1:00 A.M.

  The first violation of the treaty for this evening.

  As Monkey Dred was driven forward in a noisy, British-made van, the twenty-seven-year-old Jamai can- and Cuban-trained revolutionary saw that the secret airfield was dark, without motion. Quite pretty, with a pale quarter moon set over the surrounding jungle.

  The van stopped with a jolt at the edge of the field. Dred’s driver flashed his headlights on and off. On-and off.

  Across the moonlit darkness, another set of car lights switched on, then off. Rose.

  Watching the scene through a cloudy, bug-smeared windshield, Dred started to nod and smile. Rose was already accepting compromises: the third car. “Goan to be easy, mon,” he said to his driver.

  Two of the five cars then drove halfway out onto the landing field. Once again, the agreed-upon procedure. The Roses were very keen on orderly procedures, Dred was beginning to notice. Like the British in the American Revolution.

  Before his van had fully stopped, the colonel jumped
out and stood at rigid attention in the tall grass. Less than forty yards away, he could see Rose climbing out of some kind of American pleasure car.

  The white man wasn’t as big as Dred had expected. Not bigger than life, certainly…. He was wearing a light-colored suit with a big Panama-style hat. Very flashy. Absurdly so.

  On signal, the headlights of both vehicles were turned off. Then the two started to walk toward each other in the dark. In less than thirty seconds they were only a few feet apart. The smell of some kind of fertilizer met that of a strong French cologne.

  “Yo’ hab dose guns for me?” The revolutionary spoke with a heavy island patois.

  Carrie Rose took off the floppy yellow hat. She smiled at Colonel Dred. “You’re a dead man,” she said. “My husband has you in his sights on an M-21 sniper’s rifle right now. The rifle has a night sighting device, so he’s watching us in a pretty green light. Care to wave?”

  “I don’t believe dat.” The black man remained calm.

  Carrie put her hat back on, and a powerful rifle shot kicked up a clod of grass not three feet away from the guerrilla.

  The lights on all the cars around the field shot back on again. The black man froze. Threw a hand up to keep his people in place.

  “Our intentions are good.” Carrie talked as if nothing at all had happened. “But we wanted you to know that you mustn’t try to do anything other than what we agreed on. We agreed only two cars apiece. Not three. Two.

  “If you’re still interested in guns,” the tall woman continued, “you’ll come to the Charles Codd estate. Tomorrow evening at ten o’clock. Similar arrangements. Two cars.”

  “Why yo’ doin it?” the black man finally asked. He folded his arms; stood his ground.

  “We want to help you take over this island,” Carrie said to him. She shrugged. “We’re being paid to do that. Come to the Codd estate tomorrow. You’ll find out everything you want to know. You’ll even meet Damian.”

  Carrie Rose then turned away. She left the guerrilla leader a little dumbfounded. Beginning to wonder how it happened with Castro up in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Who had come to set him up with guns and bombs?