A Brief History of Seven Killings (23 page)

He take off his knapsack and jog down almost to the end of the road. He go from car to car, pausing at some, frowning at others. Some of them he even stoop down but I couldn’t tell if he was checking tire, fender, whatever the fuck he was looking for. I wonder why I come out in the first place. He hop from a red Volkswagen, to a white Cortina, to a white Escort and a black Camaro. He keep stooping down but he was on the other side of the car. I couldn’t tell what he was doing. If he did think me wake up early to come down in war territory just to see how Norway-educated Cuban rob car or slash tire he was about to deal with one very mad Jamaican. He jump up from the last one and trot over to me like some school girl. He tie his hair back into a ponytail and have on dark glasses and t-shirt saying Welcome Back Kotter.

—
Amigo
, I have a word for you.

—What? What word? What the fuck you talking—

—Duck.

—What?

—Duck, he said and push me down.

The red Volkswagen roof blow off right up into the sky before the rest of the car explode sideways. The road start shaking like an earthquake—waves in the road like wind fucking up sea—then the Cortina explode. The Escort explode with two booms which lift it up straight into the sky, where it flip back on what did leave of the Cortina. The Camaro had to sit there while its face blow off, tire in the sky like flying saucer.

Doctor Love laugh at each explosion, yelling like a little boy with each boom. I couldn’t tell if people get kill, but I don’t think so. Glass all around shatter and people screaming. The whole time I’m flat in the road with this laughing Cuban on top of me.

—You impressed yet,
amigo
?

—If anybody see me, them going think is me behind this, fool.

—Then let them think it. You want to impress Medellín or not? You John the Baptist? Let me know quick so I can go search for Jesus.

Luis Hernán Rodrigo de las Casas. Doctor Love. Two month ago in Barbados a Cubana plane take off from Sewell Airport heading for Jamaica. Twelve minutes and eighteen thousand feet later two bomb explode. Plane crash killing everybody including the entire Cuban fencing team and five people from North Korea. There are things that Doctor Love learn from the CIA ever since he join Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, another one of those group that seem to form every month to get rid of Castro. Give the Doctor this, he was the first man not to arch an eyebrow when he realize that I know all this shit. Louis Johnson still don’t really believe I can read, which might be why he keep showing me grocery list upside down and saying it’s a classified document. Anyway, Doctor Love learn a lot of things from The School of the Americas, one was to blow things to kingdom come. And then he start teaching it. He said he wasn’t even in Barbados when the Cubana blow up, but here. And now he back
again, probably because somebody in Colombia need an extra set of eye in Jamaica today.

I leave Weeper on the couch, him sleeping in his red brief. I leave him now sleeping on his back, hand resting on balls, which just make sense. I want to pick up his glasses and put them on, maybe see the world how he see it, but something stop me and no, I’m not even going to think that it was fear. I pick up his pants because my woman not tolerating such facetiness on her floor and feel a bulge in the back pocket. A book with no cover and no back pages. I wonder if they was plain like in most book and Weeper was writing letters on them to the man in prison. I turn a few pages and there the title be: Bertrand Russell,
The Problems of Philosophy
. I ask Doctor Love if he ever read Bertrand Russell. He say yes, but after Heidegger, Russell is just a pansy with a Nobel prize. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, but I know I’m waiting for the moment to spring that on Weeper. Anyway, he was fast asleep when I leave him, good too because I didn’t want him to follow.

When you come into the real truth about yourself, you realize that the only person equipped to handle it is you. Some men can’t even handle that, which is why Bellevue always full. Some men can’t handle knowing what they are capable of. I thought I know it until Doctor Love teach me, not even a year ago. Orange Street, the tenement yard full of nothing but PNP pussyhole.

—You want to impress bigger . . . how you say this, shark?

—Bigger fish.

—Yes, this is so. Bigger fish than Peter Nasser?

—You mean the head, I already—

—Bigger than that. Bigger than this country,
chico
. We’ve been using the Puerto Ricans and the Bahamians, but both are full of shitters.

—Don’t know what you talking about, Luis.

—Yes, you do. But let us say it is as you say, you don’t know. That gift that you don’t know about that America needs so much, that gift from Bogotá needs a new how do you say it? Santa Claus. Because the Santa in
Puerto Rico got too fat the fuck, and the ones in Bahamas too stupid. Besides, our efforts to liberate Cuba from that impotent Catholic school boy,
hijo de puta
, stand best to succeed if it comes from here, because Jamaica and Cuba kissing cousins, no?

Peter Nasser think the CIA send Doctor Love to teach me how to better serve him. Peter Nasser is the kind of man who don’t know the difference between fucking his wife good and not caring if he fuck her bad. The CIA look like they know too much, but maybe they just don’t care. I like a man who don’t care what his enemy’s enemy do as long as he remain his enemy’s enemy. Doctor Love come to Jamaica on the CIA plane ticket but with order from Medellín. That night at the Orange Street tenement he showed me what to do with C-4.

—
Hola, mi amigo
.

—Josef! Long time my friend!

He say even though it’s only two months since I see him last. It didn’t take long to drive to Half Moon Bay, but you have to look for it to find it. An old dock use by first the Spaniard, then the British in slavery days, even the pirates at one time. It’s one of those place where things can come in or ship out and is nobody business. I can see him from up here on the top of the cliff. By the time I get down to the shore Doctor Love run up to me and kiss me on the cheek. That’s what these Latino men do so I don’t take it no way, though if somebody else was around that would be a different story. Louis Johnson off in the bush doing a fuck-up job of keeping his green Ford Cortina out of sight. Or out of sound since he don’t switch the engine off. Good thing he staying in the car. I wonder if Doctor Love have been saying too much. This is a
hermano
who love to fucking chat.

—Things are tighter than a fat woman’s asshole,
mi amigo
, he says.

—Serious business in Barbados.

—
Madre de Dios
. Though from technical standpoint it was already international waters. The struggle for liberation cannot proceed without sacrifice,
chico
.

—Was that to impress Medellín?

—Nah, one bomb was to impress Medellín, two was to impress myself. But what do I know, I was in Venezuela at the time, ha.

—Magic.

—You need to do the same,
hermano
.

—I need to blow up a plane?

—I told you I know nothing about no blowing up of planes.

—What do I need to do?

—You need to make it so that you don’t call them, they call you. Don’t make me doubt you, Josef.

—Nobody doubting me after tonight.

—Impress them,
hermano
.

—Brethren, I goin’ impress the world. How long you staying?

—For as long as the threat of communism is real and approaching, Josef.

—The man said he was a democratic socialist.

—Socialism is theory, communism is practice. You need some kabooms,
hermano
. Those boys are watching.

—Not looking to take down all of Hope Road with—

—Don’t want to know. But I have some presents in the car,
hermano
, just three or four C-4s. I already taught you.

—No bombocloth bomb, Luis. How much time me to tell you that?

—I’m just laying it on the table, Josef.

—Him know you have bombs in him car?

—That idiot doesn’t know if he shit through his dick or piss through his ass.

—Anyway, I prefer one on one. That pussyhole going see where judgment coming from when I come give it.

—Never did like up close and personal. I stay over here and take you down, no? Do what you have to do, my brother. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll drink mojitos and spit on the picture of that impotent Catholic school boy.

—Call me the day after. Going be too busy tomorrow.

Barry Diflorio

I
had no idea
that fucking Cuban was in Jamaica. And just after that shit he pulled in Barbados two months ago, I have to say the bastard has nerve. I’ll bet this was Louis Johnson’s idea. Ever since he left Chile to join me in Ecuador he has a convenient way of forgetting he works for me.

It was only twenty minutes or so from the Singer’s house to the hairdresser in Mona, but thanks to the wife it felt like two hours. Now I’m at my office at the embassy waiting for the events of December 3, 1976, to happen. Today is the day we revoke the Singer’s visa because he’s suspected of trafficking drugs into the United States of America. Shouldn’t be hard to prove really, just check his back pocket. We’re supposed to make a big, public show of it, a sign that we, as a friend of Jamaica, will not sit by and allow lawlessness to take control of our gracious ally. I already wrote the press release, signed off by higher up. We also have proof that he has consorted with known drug traffickers in Miami and New York and has aligned himself with men of questionable character in Jamaica and abroad, including at least two local terrorists. This has already been documented. One of them, calling himself Shotta Sherrif, twice tried for murder, is even closely linked to the present government.

Documents in order, arrangements made, pretty much all of them myself, especially after that son of a bitch Bill Adler started singing with that two-faced mouth of his. I mean, really, the nerve of that fucking guy. It’s one thing to disavow everything you ever did—I get it, you’re just one of those fags who signed on for something you couldn’t handle. But don’t fucking act like half the stuff you wrote about you didn’t fucking cause. At least I didn’t pick up his shitty technique for bugging a place. He’s probably still joking in whichever country will have him about that time in Ecuador,
when the Villa Hilda Hotel maids walked in on him on top of that dinner table trying to bug Manuel Araujo. Or the time he tried to convince those Indian guards at the Czechoslovakian embassy that yes,
hombres
, repairmen do show up at five a.m., even in Latin America.

Anyway, because of his facilitating a quick exit for ten on the ground, seven more had to step in, pronto. We didn’t even have time for full clearance, or else I would have never okayed Louis Johnson, not when he and the Cuban came as a package deal. The island is swarming with fucking Cubans, and I’m not even talking the communists.

Yes, I can imagine why he would be here, even on his own. What I don’t get is why he’s making such a public spectacle of it—public for us anyway, unlike Carlos the Jackal, who’s been here too, laying low, rubbing his belly while whores suck him off. Those two have a history. I’m paid to know these things. Word was that Luis Hernán Rodrigo de las Casas taught Carlos how to use C-4. Dynamite too, but las Casas always had a serious hard-on for C-4. This is not his first trip to Jamaica this year. In both cases, as soon as he got here things started to blow up.

My office has four walls and one window with a view of an empty lot across the road where Jamaicans huddle before joining the line at six a.m. for visas. Manley told them there were six flights to Miami every day and everybody has been getting a move on with that. The line has been lapping around the entire block ever since Pan Am suspended services between Kingston and the mainland. Weak gesture right on the same level as Jamaica’s women vowing to hold back their sexual services until the government made concrete changes. But you try to teach people little gestures and hope they seed big ones.

This file on Luis Hernán Rodrigo de las Casas is a short one. Short is of course relative. To really read up on Casas you have to access five files, not one. I pick one up from my desk, having asked Sally for it the second I saw him walking off with Louis Johnson. The folder is blue. I open it and recognize so many names. Freddy Lugo, Hernán Ricardo Lozano from Alpha 66, Orlando Bosch, a shifty Venezuelan asshole of no mean order, two men known only as Gael and Freddy, possibly from Omega 7, and de las Casas.
All from the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, all AMBLOOD agents and all Bay of Pigs alum. They have had a busy year, beginning with them all coming together in the Dominican Republic to form this
Coordination
, a meeting of which the Company of course has no knowledge.

In July a red suitcase for a BWIA flight leaving Kingston’s airport for Cuba explodes on the tarmac. Offices of the BWIA in Barbados, Air Panama in Colombia, Iberia and Nanaco Line in Costa Rica, all with links to Cubana, are all bombed. A Cuban official in Mexico and two in Argentina are murdered. Then in September Orlando Letelier is assassinated in D.C. Pinochet’s DINA in that case, but there are those names, those same fucking names, which come up whenever the topic is Latin America. Then there was that fire in Guyana, that only destroyed Cuban fishing equipment. In June this year, the fourteenth actually, the Peruvian ambassador Fernando Rodriguez was stabbed in his living room, this before this Jamaican government declared a state of emergency.

Crime here is out of control, it has been for most of the year, but the trick about Jamaican crime is that it is localized for the most part. Every time it travels uptown you get the sense somebody is trying to make a very unsubtle point. I’ve met people on both parties, dozens of bulls let loose in a china shop. But even by their standards, even by gunmen standards, hell, even by Chilean secret police standards, Rodriguez’s death was just a little too planned, too metic ulous, too strained to appear random for it to be so. Explosives are the Cuban’s MO, everybody knows that, but something about that death stinks of him, it just fucking stinks. Of course the United States government to our best knowledge was not aware of any action to terminate the ambassador but hopes the perpetrators of this unspeakable crime and the powers that be that encourages, provides for or protects them will be brought to justice.