Ascension Day (81 page)

One consolation, Nel-M thought: it looked doubtful that Ayliss would have got anything either – but when he’d asked Amparo if anyone had called earlier asking for the same information, she’d shook her head,
No
, despite the flicker of recognition in her face he thought he’d seen when he’d first mentioned Durrant and death-row.

As Nel-M headed down the steps of the Sancti Spiritus
correos
, he had much the same feeling,
nothing left to do
, that Jac had had in that same spot four hours earlier – but then that nagging doubt pinched again, and he looked back thoughtfully. He wondered whether, however much he’d tried to shield it, Amparo had sensed how frantic he was. Certainly, that’s how he
felt
: the nightmare in Vancouver, the run-around with Truelle and the long flight to Cuba, now the breakneck drive to Sancti Spiritus; the three-day fly-kill holiday from hell. But, aware of that, he thought he’d covered with his best warm and gracious smile, the cool and collected DA official trying to get information, rather than the patience-long-gone, bubbling-acid-nerves hit-man.  

Nel-M’s eyes shifted to a bar across the road. One way he might get to know.

A dead-and-alive town, Sancti Spiritus’s ramshackle buildings looked like they’d been slowly crumbling since the 50s, with a hotchpotch of blue and pink shutters that tried, but failed, to offer some relief. Apart from the post office, the bar’s blue shutters appeared to be the only ones in the street to have received a recent lick of paint.

Over a beer, Nel-M talked to the barman, and – after a lot of finger-pointing and juggling between the barman’s basic English and the few Spanish words that Nel-M was able to translate – he got some idea of who’d visited the post office earlier that day.

Americanos
,
Nuevo coches
, Nel-M quickly picked up were the key words. He’d noticed that there were very few new cars on the road apart from his own. The barman explained that nearly all new cars were rental cars for tourists or taxis; the rest of Cuba either didn’t have a car or relied on old relics, most of them left over from the Batista days.

Nel-M nodded and sipped at his beer. That explained the Buddy Holly time-warp when it came to cars. But that also meant, as with his own BMW series-5 now parked in front, Ayliss’s car would have been one of the few new ones to have pulled up outside the post office earlier. 

Nel-M stood up from his bar stool as he described Ayliss. ‘Big man… quite fat.
Gordo
. Black hair oiled back.’ Nel-M swept one hand over his own hair. He didn’t know the Spanish for cream suit, so tugged at his own light-grey jacket and said, ‘
Blanco
… white suit. New car.
Nuevo coche
. Four hours ago…
cuatro horas
!’

And finally there was a gleam of recognition in the barman’s eyes. ‘
Si
…
si
. Car like yours.
Muy similar
.’ He pointed to Nel-M’s car outside, then frowned as he tried to remember the make. He took a beer mat and drew a few interlocking circles.

Audi
! That would at least narrow it down, Nel-M thought. But as the barman continued, with something about the man in the white suit hugging a woman, Nel-M began to think that maybe it wasn’t Ayliss after all. As he looked towards where the barman was gesticulating, Nel-M suddenly jolted, his expression as if he’d seen a ghost. He held one hand up towards the barman. No need for further explanation.

Nel-M squinted sharper as a man across the road took the last step and entered the post office.
Truelle
!

Nel-M kept the same hand held in the air as he moved closer to the window, as if he was a conductor holding an orchestra in silence; a pregnant, expectant pause as they waited for it to come down again for the crescendo finale.

And a minute later, as he saw Truelle emerge holding a padded buff envelope, walk thirty yards down the road and get in a white classic Corvette, that hand did finally come down, as with an, ‘Old friend…
amigo
!’ he rushed out to his car to follow.

When Jac arrived at the door of Villa Delarcos at just before 2 p.m., Brent Calbrey, a tall gaunt man in his early sixties with a heavy tan and wavy grey hair, informed him that he’d just missed ‘Lenny’.

‘By about half an hour. He’s headed into town.’

‘Sancti Spiritus?’

‘Yeah. Few things he wanted to pick up. Things he likes that I didn’t already have in the fridge. Oh, and he said he was also going to the post office.’

‘Oh, right.’
Post office
. Jac looked back down the road. ‘I… I probably passed him on my way up. What’s he driving?’

‘My car.’ Calbrey smiled tightly. ‘White Corvette, ’71 classic.’

Jac couldn’t remember if he’d passed one or not. There were a lot of old American cars on the roads. ‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

‘A couple of hours, he said.’ Calbrey raised an eyebrow. ‘Can I give him a message?’

‘No, it’s okay. I’ll try and catch him later.’ Jac didn’t want to leave a name, possibly frighten Truelle off. He turned away.

‘Old friend?’

‘Yeah, old friend,’ Jac said over his shoulder, smiling wanly.

And, as he was a few paces away, Calbrey called after him, explaining that ‘Lenny’ might return direct to the ‘casita’ rather than the main house itself. ‘Its entrance is forty yards along.’

Jac looked towards where Calbrey pointed and the white Moorish-style bungalow, a smaller version of the main house, on a small promontory with panoramic views over the sea lapping fifteen yards its other side. Everything was white, Jac thought: the villa and ‘casitas’, Calbrey’s Bermudas and cheese-cloth top, the Corvette. Jac nodded his thanks and, as he got back into his car, looked anxiously at his watch.

He couldn’t just sit there for two hours, knowing that meanwhile Larry’s life was ticking away. He started up, heading back to Sancti Spiritus. But halfway there, his foot suddenly eased from the pedal.
Two hours
? Hardly would he have arrived there before Truelle was heading back out to the villa. And if Truelle heard that meanwhile someone had called for him, he might rush off again, go to ground.

No
, the only safe thing was to wait there and watch. At the next side road, he did a hasty three-point turn, headed back; and, eighty yards along from the bungalow, with a clear view of it and the main house, he parked and waited. Watching hawkishly every car that approached and passed, though there weren’t many: seven in the past hour.

But as an hour became an hour and a half –
two hours
– he found himself looking repeatedly at his watch, tapping his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel in rhythm with his pulse and mounting tension, the constant tremor in his body becoming heavier.

Waves of tiredness were again swilling over him as he watched the unchanging scene ahead punctuated by the occasional car. Three times he’d shook himself back awake as he felt himself close to the brink.

He put the radio on again as a precaution; though he’d have thought that with the tension running through him and his constant finger-tapping, that alone would have kept him awake.

But that rhythm after a while formed its own soporific monotony, along with the long spells of static vista, the occasional passing car, the hum and click of cicadas, the surf lapping gently fifty yards away; and as that rhythm finally combined with the music from the radio, became one medley, it dragged him gently towards what, for the past twenty-four hours, he’d been staving off with raw tension and adrenalin, caffeine, mambo and salsa. A deep, satisfying sleep.

44

Last meal.

Lockdowns one… two. Breakfast, lunch, supper, exercise hour… final lockdown
. Life at Libreville. Except it had been no life; just various regimented stages towards death, Larry now realized.

And now there were only a few stages left: medical examination, last eighteen paces to the death-chamber, strap-down and final injection.

He’d already had an extra-curricular examination from the infirmary medic who’d put fourteen stitches in his shiv wound the night before. Flesh wound, nothing internal damaged. But Torvald had asked the medic down to check it again two hours ago, just to be sure.  

Larry only ate half of his last meal. Not only because he didn’t feel like it, but because in the end it didn’t bring back old days in the Ninth; it just reminded him all the more that he was here at Libreville, with cooks who didn’t have the slightest idea how to make a good P0’Boy. Libreville had steadily eroded most of his good memories over the years; he didn’t want to spoil more with his last meal.

The night before when he’d said his last goodbyes, Roddy had started to tell him a joke, but had broken down halfway through; and as they’d hugged, Larry had muttered in his ear: ‘
You know that Ayliss… it’s actually Jac.
’ Thinking, as he gave a quick, hushed explanation and saw Roddy’s incredulous expression, that all the years Roddy had told him jokes, the last surprise and punchline had been his. 

‘Has he called yet?’ Roddy had asked.

‘No, not yet. He’s apparently still chasing down some last minute things.’ Larry shrugged. ‘You know what he’s like… never say die.’

‘He
will
call. I know it.’

‘Maybe.’ Larry shrugged again, his eyes shifting uncomfortably to one side. ‘But, you know, it’s not right for me to keep clinging on to hope till the last hour, when –’

Rodriguez clasped one of his hands in both of his, shaking gently. ‘I meant either way, Larry.
Either
way.’

And at that moment, Roddy was one of the few people left who could still look him in the eye. The guards called out ‘Dead Man Walking’ as they escorted him along, but their eyes had already said it: ‘
You’re already dead, I can hardly bear to look at you
.’ Torvald, Fran and Josh the day before, the two guards outside his open-bar ‘last-night’ cell – in case he attempted suicide – the guard that had brought him his last meal; none of them could meet his eye.

The only other person who had been able to had been Father Kennard that morning when, after having prayed with him, asked, ‘Do you want to deal at all with what you did all those years ago, Larry? Ask God’s forgiveness?’

And it was Larry then who was looking away uneasily, unable to meet Kennard’s eye. ‘I… I don’t think I can, Father. When even now, I can’t rightly say whether I killed her or not.’

‘I understand.’ Father Kennard nodded thoughtfully, pursing his lips. ‘But I had to ask, Larry.’

Either way
. Larry wondered if that was why Jac hadn’t yet called. Because, as with everyone else who could no longer look him in the eye, he couldn’t bear to give him bad news.

Larry had tried to avoid looking at the clock too frequently, expectantly, that morning. But after his last meal, he began to look at the clock increasingly: two o’clock, two-thirty, three… By the time it got to 4 p.m. and Torvald came to his cell to tell him that it was time for his final medical examination, Larry knew then that Jac wouldn’t call.

Jac couldn’t face telling him what Larry could already see in everyone’s eyes: he was already a dead man.

Bob Stratton finally got the breakthrough he’d been frantically chasing for half the day at 2.14 p.m.

Roland Cole had ditched his two credit cards shortly after he left his last address; both of them left hanging with big bills and no forwarding address, no possible link-0n. Cole had covered his tracks well.

But Stratton decided to check new credit card applications over the past ten months, when Cole might have applied for a new one; and out of eight R. Coles processed in that period in Louisiana, he hit gold with an exact birth-date match:
Roland T. Cole, Verret Street, Algiers
.