Season of the Machete Read online

  Carrie Rose slipped her arm around her husband’s firm waist. “I want you to leave with me. I think it will be better that way. Will you do that, Damian? Leave with me?”

  “If I leave”—Damian started to raise his voice—“then Campbell and Harold Hill will come looking for us. Sooner or later they’ll find us. Suddenly a big black car will arrive at our villa somewhere or other. Their short-haired killers will come down on us like little Nazis. Kill us. Become heroes. Write books and make movies like The French Connection.

  “Look at how it’s growing.” Damian suddenly changed moods, smiled unexpectedly. “Irreverent little beast. Big beast.”

  As he was talking, his penis had extended itself straight out and to the left. Blood had gone to its tip—which was just touching Carrie’s bare leg.

  She pushed it away. “If I have to tell you everything explicitly, I’m frightened this time. You’re playing too many games this time. I don’t want us to end like this…. You mentioned little Nazis before. Well, we’re going to be searched for like Nazis.”

  Damian threw up his arms like a Frenchman. “Let them search. Let them search. They looked for Eichmann for twenty years. They’re stupid, Carrie. Remember that. They are all stupid, bumbling idiots.”

  Carrie just bowed her head. She let her long hair swing from side to side, brushing over her breasts.

  For the next few minutes they walked along the lip of the cove in silence.

  “If I were to lie down in the water there?” She finally spoke….

  The two beautiful people walked to where the white sand was slicked-over wet. Damian put down the expensive terry-cloth suit, and Carrie lay on it. Damian kneeled over her—began to lower himself slowly. For a fleeting moment his clear blue eyes seemed almost gentle to her.

  “So tell me, Carrie,” he said, “how was your handsome stockbroker?”

  Saturday Evening.

  The main coup de theatre was staged that night, Saturday, May 5.

  At eleven o’clock automobile headlights appeared at Mercury Landing’s high, silver-painted front gates. Emerging from the shadowy gates, the Cuban waved the first car on.

  Standing at the other end of the driveway, Damian Rose could hear gravel being crushed under heavy automobile tires.

  One hour late, but they were coming, anyway.

  The tall blond man checked a Smith & Wesson revolver under his suit jacket. A small snub-nosed .38. A very appropriate weapon for the evening’s performance, Rose thought… Tonight he was going to play Hammett for the locals.

  As he continued to watch down the hill, a second and third set of headlights turned onto the pitch-black driveway. One pair of lights was outrageously cross-eyed. It exposed tall Bermuda grass on one side of the car, palm trees and purplish sky on the other.

  The three cars completely disappeared for a moment. They passed behind bay trees and bushes called fire-of-the-forest, where six local gunmen had been told to wait. Just wait.

  Then bright headlights sprayed all over the vined walls and windows of the whitewashed main house. The cars began to park in a glen of casuarinas in front of the villa.

  Ready or not, Damian thought to himself, this is it. Curtain time.

  He rehearsed all his lines one final time before he had to go on.

  Out on a large flagstone terrace at the rear of the villa, Kingfish Toone could be heard speaking pidgin English with a French-Congolese accent.

  “We are prepare to offer you cash only,” the broad-shouldered mercenary explained to the four guerrilla leaders who had just arrived. “One hundred twenty-five thousand. You could buy whatever you like with the money. Guns. Whatever you like. That is my final offer, Colonel.”

  Dassie “Monkey” Dred let his pretty chocolate face fall between his long legs. His long cornbraids fell. He began to laugh in a loud, crude voice.

  Then he started making bird noises out oh the terrace.

  “Ayeee! S’mady take dis monkey-mahn away fram me,” Dred said to no one in particular. “Dis Africahn smell lak hairdresser fram Americah.”

  Kingfish Toone smiled along with Dred’s men. The African had met and dealt with this type of madman before.

  Across the terrace, the Cuban sat on a small wicker rocking chair, saying nothing at all.

  “That smell is something called soap. You’ve never smelled soap before, have you?”

  A tall white man spoke from the doorway leading back into the house. His blond hair was all wet, slicked back close to the scalp, like something out of Esquire or Gentlemen’s Quarterly. He was wearing an expensively tailored cream gabardine suit. Appropriate accoutrements, perfectly matched. An inlaid ivory watch. An ivory ring. A black Gucci belt and Gucci loafers.

  Damian Rose ran his hand back over his wet hair once again. Then he crossed the patio to the young, bearded revolutionary. As he walked, his jacket swung open, revealing a fancy belt holster and the Smith & Wesson.

  “Colonel Dred.” Damian smiled like a Clint Eastwood character. “Your work is admired far off this island. In Europe, I’m talking about. In black America.”

  The guerrilla soldier’s face softened for a split second that wasn’t lost on Rose. Then Dred dismissed the compliment with a wave of his hand. He spit on the terrace.

  “Yo’ very well-train ape”—he indicated King fish Toone sitting across the terrace—“has offered me—what is it?—cash…. I don’t need dat. I have all kind cash from ganja sellin’.”

  Rose’s soft blue eyes never left the much darker eyes of the San Dominican. “First of all, my ‘well-trained ape’ could rip off your coconuts in abaut five seconds’ time, Colonel. Secondly, whatever your problem is, we can find a solution.”

  “He wants the guns used in this raid.” The Cuban spoke in Spanish from his seat across the terrace. “He has trouble buying guns.”

  “For obvious reasons.” Damian turned back to Dred. “I don’t want to arm you that well, Colonel…. You may have the guns, however. We’ll give you two hundred fifty M-16’s. Plus handguns.”

  “Fifty t’ousan’ rounds of ammunition. At least fifty machine guns,” Dred shouted. His three officers smiled and clapped their hands like Barnum and Bailey chimps.

  The lips of the tall blond man parted in a slight smile. He slid his hands back over the wet hair again. He took out a pack of English cigarettes.

  “I can’t give you the machine guns,” Damian said flatly.

  Suddenly Monkey Dred was on his feet, shouting at the top of his lungs. His cornbraids shook like a hundred dancing black snakes. A U.S. Army ammunition belt around his waist jounced and jangled.

  “Forty machine guns, den! Deliver at least one day before dat massacree.”

  Damian Rose picked up a camphor candle from a patio table. He lit his cigarette with it. The word massacree rolled over his tongue. Massacree.

  “One fifty-millimeter machine gun. For you!” Rose let the cigarette dangle. “But the other guns to be distributed right now. Plus a bonus of twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition…. If I could offer you more, I would. It’s not my money, Colonel…. Our friends in Cuba know what you need, and what you don’t.”

  A loud laugh came up from somewhere deep in the black man’s chest. “All right, den!” he shouted.

  Damian Rose smiled. Friends in Cuba indeed… he’d won. Massacree!

  He heaved the red jar and camphor candle far down the hillside toward the Caribbean. The lamp hit a distant, invisible rock. It broke with the pop of a light bulb.

  Just after it hit, lights flashed on and off down on the water. A small motor boat started to come in toward shore.

  Carrie.

  “Your guns, Colonel,” Damian Rose announced. “Enough guns and ammunition to take over the entire island … if you’ll listen to just a bit of advice.”

  As early as 6:00 A.M. on the sixth day, there were bold, unnerving machete murders in the two most expensive hotels in San Dominica’s two principal cities.

  In Coastown, a young fas
hion photographer from Greenwich, Connecticut, was found floating facedown in a pretty courtyard swimming pool in the Princess Hotel. A black-handled sugar-cane machete was sticking out of the man’s back like an exclamation point to the crime.

  In Port Gerry, an English barrister’s wife was hacked to pieces while she was gathering hibiscus in the garden of the exclusive Spice Point Inn. The woman was then bundled up in Spice Point towels and thrown onto the inn’s dining veranda by fleeing, half-naked black men.

  Also very early in the morning, both the Gleaner and the Evening Star received Dead Letters. In these new communications, Colonel Dred claimed responsibility for the morning’s hotel murders.

  Dred also warned that the rate of race killings on San Dominica would escalate by 1,000 percent daily until an interest in all hotels, restaurants, and other major businesses was turned over to the people.

  Someone at the Gleaner calculated that since four people had died so far on the fifth, a minimum of forty people had to die on May 6.

  Then four hundred … then four thousand …

  May 6, 1979, Sunday

  Princess, Spice Point, Hit

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  We’re conditioned to expect things to happen at a certain rate. To have a certain rhythm. What we did on San Dominica was to take all of the prevailing rhythms away.

  The Rose Diary

  May 6, 1979, Coastown, San Dominica

  Sunday Morning. The Sixth Day of the Season.

  At 7:15 the morning of the sixth day, Peter Mac-donald stepped through the kitchen door of Brooks Campbell’s expensive villa in Coastown, shouted, “Scrambled eggs!” and knocked the handsome CIA man down with a hard, right-handed punch to his Greco-Roman nose.

  “You better stay right down there,” Peter yelled as Campbell tried to push himself to his feet. He took out the Colt .44 and pointed the barrel at an imaginary target, one-half inch in circumference, centered between Campbell’s hazel-brown eyes.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “Just the truth,” Peter said quietly. “I’m not going to go into what’s happened to me since the last time you fucked me over—how I came to sleep in your garage last night—but I want to know everything you know about the machete murders. I want to know all your so-called state secrets.”

  Very slowly, cautiously, Campbell got to his feet. “There’s only one problem with what you’re saying,” he said to Peter. “I just don’t believe you’d shoot me. I know you wouldn’t.”

  The next thing Brooks Campbell saw was the big steel handle of the Colt .44. It struck him sideways across the cheekbone, and he crashed down on the yellow tile floor again.

  “You will believe I’ll shoot you in a minute,” he heard dimly. A brown workboot stamped down hard on his chest, then he was pulled up roughly by his hair. Suddenly he felt a hot streak go down the right side of his face.

  “Now, dammit, you better talk to me, mister. I know how to do shit like this. Torturing men. Believe me I do.”

  Campbell was beginning to focus in on the heat burner of his own kitchen stove. The coil was red hot—a glowing orange—and his hair was starting to smoke. Bacon cooking on another burner was spitting all over the other side of his face.

  “I swear to God I’ll fry your goddamn ear!” Macdonald yelled at him, army drill instructor style.

  “We know the Mafia is involved somehow!” Campbell finally screamed out. “Let me up. I’m burning, Macdonald!”

  Peter loosened his stranglehold, but not so much that Campbell could get up. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. The Mafia … the Mafia what?”

  “They’ve been trying to get the assembly here to legalize casino gambling for years…. Now they’re going to get what they want—or they say they’ll destroy this place. Blow up San Dominica and write it off as a tax loss…. That’s all we know. I swear it. Macdonald, I’m on fire!”

  Peter finally let go of Campbell. What he’d heard started to make a little sense. It explained some of the things that had happened.

  “What does Colonel Dred have to do with that? With the Mafia? Casino gambling?”

  The CIA man was holding his ear as if it had been bitten into. He was wearing a gold-and-red dragon kimono, and for once in his life Brooks Campbell looked ridiculous.

  “We don’t know how or even if they got to Dred.” He continued to tell half-truths with some conviction. “Apparently, something big is coming up soon. Those letters in the newspapers are actually warnings to the assembly. Some big horror show is coming. What you don’t understand is that we’re all going wild trying to stop it from happening.”

  “I’m getting a feeling mat you’re lying again,” Peter said. He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. He threw Campbell some ice for the bruise on his-face. Then he took a long, sloppy swig of orange juice from an open jug.

  “All right.” He waved the cowboy pistol at Campbell. “This has been a little better than our first talk, I guess. I’ll be back if I need to know anything else from you. Just don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that I wouldn’t shoot you. I’d shoot you. I don’t even like you.”

  Peter backed out the kitchen door, then ran to the BMW.

  Now what kind of horror show could be coming up? he wondered as he eased the motorcycle down palm-lined lanes and backed out toward the rain forest. Would the Mafia get mixed up in something like this? And how does the blond man fit in? A mercenary? To do what?

  But, Christ, this was a hell of a lot better than being a bartender for a nutty German storm trooper…. Maybe he should become a cop, or a Philip Marlowe-type detective or something. Someday soon….

  After his success with Campbell, Peter was at least feeling alive again. That was a start.

  Coastown, San Dominica

  A seagull flapped up Parmenter Street. Dipped to scrutinize natives setting up a brightly colored fruit mart. Angled right shoulder, wing first, and glided like a clever wooden airplane over the exclusive crimson-roofed Coastown Princess Hotel.

  Sitting pretty with a big supply of steaming coffee, kipper and eggs, fresh rolls and sweet butter, Carrie Rose was out on her loggia at the Princess.

  She was just beginning to compose a long, personal entry in the million-dollar diary. When she wrote, she told about a particular late summer afternoon in Paris. An afternoon that had provided a key to the whole thing.

  August 10, 1978; Paris

  The place was called Atlantic City, and it was a trendy little bistro recently sprung up as a haven for Americans on the avenue Marceau.

  The cafe was already famous for its twelve varieties of le hamburger. And, to a lesser extent, for its big wooden posters illustrating different trivial points about a seedy boardwalk resort in southeastern New Jersey.

  DID YOU KNOW THAT?

  THE FIRST EASTER PARADE IN AMERICA WAS HELD IN ATLANTIC CITY …

  THE FIRST FERRIS WHEEL WAS OPERATED IN ATLANTIC CITY….

  THE FIRST MOTION PICTURE WAS MADE IN ATLANTIC CITY….

  THE FIRST PICTURE POSTCARDS WERE FROM ATLANTIC CITY….

  Floppy white hat covering half of her face, Carrie Rose walked back slowly into the dark bar. She heard “Lady Marmalade” playing on the jukebox. “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? …”

  White butterfly stockings swished softly as she continued until she saw the wheelchair. Then Carrie realized that, for the first time in a long time, she was frightened.

  “The incomparable, infamous Mrs. Rose.” Nickie Handy spoke to her from the corner of a candlelit booth. “Now what could your pleasure be this lovely, shitty afternoon?”

  As Carrie slid into the oaken booth, she kissed the top of Nickie’s head. Her ex-partner. Then, as she settled in across from her old friend, she couldn’t help staring at the crippled man’s face.

  Nickie Handy, still not thirty years old, had no left cheek now. No left side to his face. Just sagging flesh hanging off a cheekbone.

  “I should come see you more than this,” she
said softly. “Both Damian and I are rats, Nickie. We really are bad.”

  A waitress came and Carrie ordered a bottle of pouilly-fuisse. Nickie made a remark about the French girl’s breasts. “Sow’s teats,” he said with a crooked little smile.

  “Let’s have it. Let’s have it.” He turned back to Carrie. “Don’t hand me this visiting-the-local-VFW crap. Buying your hot-shit wines and all that …”

  “All right. I came to talk to you about the shooting. Saigon.”

  A surprised look dropped over Nickie Handy’s sad, Quasimodo face. “Let’s not,” he said. Then suddenly his face twisted up like a pretzel and he raised his voice.

  “You’re looking at me like a fucking cat, Carrie. That disdainful look Siamese cats get. Bee-utiful! I love it, you cunt.”

  “You’re paranoid.” Carrie continued to speak softly, almost lovingly. “Damian and I are doing a job with Harold Hill. Harry the Hack and your very good friend Brooks Campbell. Who would you suggest we go talk to?”

  The cripple took his mug of beer and slowly spilled it out onto the pine-and-sawdust floor. “Bee-utiful!”

  “Hey! Hey! Hey!” a dark-bearded French bartender, called back. “Behave yourself, Nickee!”

  Handy screwed up his face again. Some kind of awful tic, apparently.

  “Brooks Campbell was supposed to be paying me in that alley in Saigon. Blew my head off instead. Hello, Nick. Blam! Blaml Blam! … Left me for a fucking cold stiff in the sewer, Carrie.

  “Dead chink mouse floated past my nose. I thought I was in hell already. Crippled in the sewer. Face messed up like it is. Your new partners, you say?”

  “There was no provocation for what they did, Nickie? Privateering? … It was just a double cross?”

  “Straight double cross! Me and a poor gook bastard. I think he even kept my money for himself. Brooks Campbell. Fucking movie-star face.”

  “Those awful bastards, Nickie.”