Authors: Season of the Machete
James Patterson (20 page)
Peter stopped in front of a coffin with a place card: JANE FRANCES COOKE.
He looked down the line of U.S. embassy and police officials. Praying? Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance? … The scene reminded him of the aftermath of some large tragedy he’d seen in some news clip. Hundreds of bodies laid out in a grammar school cafeteria. Mourners searching for friends and relatives. Violated in their grief by television cameras.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” he finally said to the priest. “I’d like to see her once more, please.”
“We haven’t been doing that,” the priest said in a whisper. “These aren’t the best conditions, Peter.”
“I’d like to see her. I think we can all take it.”
“Will you take off your hat?” the priest asked again.
Peter took off the baseball hat, and the oblate consented to lift the lid for a brief viewing. It wasn’t what he thought best—but the police chief said yes; the American ambassador said yes; and the young American man seemed to know what he wanted….
With a loud tearing noise, the lid came off.
Peter looked down and saw a young-looking woman, only vaguely recognizable, surprisingly small now…. Jane had been prepared with what looked like an old lady’s face powder and rouge. Her long blond curls looked brittle and stiff, like the artificial hair on a child’s doll. They hadn’t even used one of her own dresses….
Oh, my God, no,
Peter said over and over to himself.
Oh, God, Jesus. Goddammit. Goddammit.
If all those bastards hadn’t been watching him, he would have let himself cry.
At the same time, Damian was watching the English killer, high up in the church’s choir loft. He was just three aisles behind Clive Lawson. No more than twelve feet away.
The expensive killer had had one opportunity, but he’d resisted it. Basically a good decision, Rose was thinking, calculating. This church was an interesting place for a shot, spectacular and unexpected—a thrill till—but maybe it wasn’t the best place. Nonetheless, I would have done it here, Damian thought. Maybe on the way out….
He studied Peter Macdonald standing in front of his girlfriend’s coffin; he watched Brooks Campbell, Hill—ducks on a pond.
Soon, however, he saw Clive Lawson quietly leave the choir loft, then the church altogether. The English killer had on a dark, contemporary rug that made him look like many of the news reporters. Like the Secret Service men, for that matter. Not bad for a traveling disguise.
It appeared that the grand finale, the coup de grace, was going to have to wait just a little bit longer.
Damian left the Church of Angels with the main body of the crowd. He was an odd-looking sight with his baggy yellow trousers; his parasol; his jester’s cap held respectfully in one hand.
Almost instantly he was accosted by a mob of kids who wanted to play with Basil, the Children’s Minstrel.
Thursday Evening.
All Thursday, San Dominica had been overturned and researched as desperately as it should have been the very night of the Elizabeth’s Fancy massacre.
Owners of stores, cafes, taverns, and private homes were badgered by agents with the photokit drawing made from Peter’s description.
Each and every motel, hotel, inn, chalet, hacienda, villa, lodge, casa, caravansary
—
black or white in clientele
—
all were assaulted by marauding teams of local police and U.S. federal marshals. Rude Boys were hired to go out and mine for information in the larger city underworlds; among the cocaine and ganja dealers. Thousands of ordinary people were held up at the airports and boat docks, as well as at the major roadblocks set all over the island.
Neither Damian Rose nor Clive Lawson turned up in any of the searches, however. Like a Martin Bormann, a Mengele
—
they were simply not the type of fish that wind up in a police dragnet.
Bay of Pigs II was fast becoming Bay of Panic.
At 7:00
P.M.
that night, a communications expert, Harvey Epstein, thought that he’d lucked into the first gold strike of the entire manhunt.
At the time of the discovery, Epstein was playing Canfield solitaire on the floor of a VW van. The van was parked about three hundred yards behind a large villa owned by the Charles Forlenza Family (Sunasta Hotels) on San Dominica. Inside the van, Epstein was illegally bugging the Forlenza phones.
For two straight days now the only thing he’d heard was the Forlenza cook calling in her giggly orders for groceries at a place called the Coastown Gourmet Market. When the phone rang at seven, Harvey had a hunger attack.
He pressed his earphones to one ear only, uncovered a club ace. Listened.
“Hello.”
The first voice he recorded was a hood named Duane Nicholson. Nicholson was the man Isadore Goldman had brought with him to Government House on May 6.
Epstein assumed that the second voice was that of Damian Rose.
“I’m going to need those favors done for me,”
Rose said. “Put your part of things into operation.”
“Tomorrow, right?” Nicholson asked.
Click. Buzz.
“Son of a bitch. Harvey! Son of a bitch!”
In less than an hour Campbell and Harold Hill were listening to the tape in Coastown.
“Interesting.” Campbell recognized the silky voice. “It was Rose.”
Still under guard at the Golf and Racquet Club, Peter sat in front of the San Dominican Broadcasting Corporation’s blurry evening news.
For the first time in two days he was clear-headed enough to consider the effect of a sniper’s bullet. Every president’s daydream … your car windshield splattered against a bug. Half an ounce of steel entering your forehead at three thousand feet per second. Insane and nauseating.
Around 8:30 he made a phone call to his family in Grand Rapids.
His mother couldn’t understand why air force one hadn’t flown him home already. “Make them put you on the first plane out of that place,” Betsy Macdonald told Peter. “My God, they’ve put you through enough already. They can come right up here to ask you any more questions they have. Tell them that, Peter…. ”
Peter’s father wanted to know what the real story was. He’d talked to his friend Senator Pflanzer, and Pflanzer wanted to know, too. “Pete, don’t take any chances for those sorry bastards,” Colonel Edward Macdonald said—Big Mac. “They’re not doing shit for us anymore—the whole damn government. They don’t deserve anything back from us. I mean it.”
As he listened, occasionally talked, Peter tried to picture Big Mac and Little Betsy. He saw them maybe ten years younger than they really were now. He saw the Super Six posing like some roughneck hockey team.
“I’ll try to get home real soon,” he said to his father. “Tell that to Mom. Tell my brothers, too. Miss the hell out of all of you. I really do.”
After the call, Peter just sat in the dark pseu-dotropics condominium bedroom. Thinking.
He imagined a slow-motion pistol shot to a man’s forehead. Like the famous Vietnamese execution photograph. The tall blond man’s head actually vaporizing.
At 1:30 in the morning one of the CIA agents came into the bedroom—a little Italian guy who was always imitating Peter Falk.
“We’re going to move you, Pete. Get ready, will you?”
Getting dressed, Peter prepared himself mentally. No point in getting scared now. Scared or stupid … maybe there was, but fuck it.
Three agents with automatic rifles walked him to a station wagon waiting outside with the motor running.
A quick breath of fresh air. Appropriately fishy smell of the sea. No
ca-rack
of a rifle from the dark palm trees.
They rode to the Dorcas Hotel in Coastown in eerie silence. No questions asked; no information volunteered. No phony-baloney bullshit on their side or his.
The gray-haired CIA man—Harold Hill—was waiting for him inside the new hotel suite. A pleasant enough place—like a Holiday Inn.
“My family has put in a formal complaint to the State Department.” Peter lied simply and effectively. “It went through Senator Pflanzer,” he announced to Hill and to Brooks Campbell, who were sitting in the living room. “If you don’t give me a crack at the blond mystery man, I’m going to force you to send me home. You know the tune—’War Hero Claims CIA Monkeyshines!’”
“All right all right.” The gray-haired man nodded. A very sober professor type, Peter noticed. “Let’s sit down and talk, Peter.”
By 2:00
A.M.
Peter Macdonald was officially part of the manhunt for Damian and Carrie Rose.
Shortly afterward the fat black police chief arrived at the Dorcas. Strange man! Dr Johnson just sat around talking with Peter. About the initial mistake by his constable at Turtle Bay; his own mistakes during the difficult case; the night he’d spent with Jane at Mandeville Hospital.
“I couldn’t sleep at home,” the likable San Dominican finally said. “I thought you might understand.”
“I understand.” Peter smiled. “I think this is going to be an awfully long night. Glad you’re here, Dr. Johnson.”
Damian had gotten uncharacteristically grubby—vacant-eyed and distracted during the last months of our preparation for San Dominica. His hair was hardly ever combed. He spent entire days inside the house, wandering in wrinkled silk pajamas. He was obsessed with the idea of master criminals…. I came home one night to find him reading a book called
On Aggression
, babbling about brown rats and piebald eagles. Another time he was reading
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. Lots of Nazi books after that. The Master Criminal Race, he called them….
The Rose Diary
Trelawney, San Dominica
In a small den lit by a black-and-white TV, Damian sat cleaning an M-21 sniper’s rifle.
First he pressed out the rear pin and opened the rifle. Then he withdrew the bolt and bolt carrier assembly. He withdrew the thin firing retaining pin. Withdrew the cam pin, the bolt from the bolt carrier.
On and off he watched Alfred Hitchcock’s
Notorious
coming over the island’s erratic TV network. Overall, Damian decided, he could have been a much better performer than the very one-dimensional Cary Grant. He wasn’t certain if he could have been as good as a Claude Rains or an Ingrid Bergman, though. Those two were perfectionists. They could have made something out of Basil, the Children’s Minstrel.
When the rifle was cleaned, when the M-21 was all back together, he went into the bathroom, where he worked for another hour or so. Using a mixture of Quiet Touch and Miss Clairol) he dyed his hair what the package called “blue black,” with gray highlights. Damian’s own hair color.
Now there was only one tall blond Englishman: Clive Lawson.
And only one more day.
Before Damian Rose called it a night, he took a new field machete out of its cheesecloth wrapping. He laid the knife out carefully by his rifle.
Then the tall black-haired American went off to sleep.
The Perfect Ending
May 11, 1979, Friday
Shoot-Out! 4 Die
May 11, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica
Friday. Morning. The Last Day of the Season.
Dr. Johnson broke open a croissant, dabbed half of the crisp roll with guava jelly, watched Peter out of the corner of his eye.
“What a damn wonderful time for living it could have been.” Peter shook his head as he spoke to the fat black policeman.
The young American man was looking
especially
American in the bright light of morning. He was wearing a forest green (holey, punky) SEE BEAR MOUNTAIN T-shirt; wrinkled athletic shorts; no shoes or socks; his ratty old baseball hat.
He was rubbing his bare feet together like sticks trying to make a fire.
“Swimming.” He continued on with his spiel. “Sailing. Playing basketball, if you’re a recidivist like me … running around in a baseball cap like you’re ten years old again and don’t care … all kinds of wonderful, life-wasting crap. Nothing too serious, you know, R and R.”
The middle-aged police chief was beginning to feel very tired, depressed. He kept remembering the night he spent in the hospital with the blond girl. Moreover he was beginning to feel paternal toward the young American. He liked Peter. Sometimes he felt it was them against all the rest.
“This island used to be that way. When I was a boy. I don’t know if the world will let you do that anymore. Be carefree.”
Peter nodded without saying anything.
He and the police chief were sitting under a striped yellow umbrella on a sixteenth-floor terrace of the Dorcas Hotel. Across the terrace from them, two CIA men stood by the railing with their suit jackets off, old-fashioned shoulder holsters strapped across their white shirts. Behind them, Coastown stretched out like a giant, glittering carnival. One story above, the roof of the Dorcas was yellow, the color of gold teeth. The sloping roof was too steep for anyone to climb on, someone who knew about such things had decided.
Peter threw back his head and looked around and around a cloudless, china blue skyscape. He started to think about heroes, leaders, inspiration…. Once, when he was a plebe, he remembered going to a humanities symposium: “Is the Hero Dead in Western Civilization?” Four history and classics professors answered—shouted to the rafters— “Yes! Yes! Dead and buried!”
Well, dammit, people still needed heroes. He did, anyway … Ulysses, Churchill, Lincoln … whoever! Somebody! That unbelievable ass Nixon. Gerry Ford. Jesus! Didn’t they know anything about being leaders? Heroes? … If Kissinger could get to be a sex object, Richard Nixon could have at least gotten up to the level of human being.
“Man, oh, man, oh, man,” he said in rhythm with his neck and head circles. “It’s so damn unbelievable, isn’t it? Worse than Vietnam, and that really sucked. Bad, Meral, bad…. I keep fantasizing that Janie is going to be alive again.”
Trelawney, San Dominica
