Conspiracy (20 page)

11

Along the ninety-four mile drive to Biloxi, Mississippi, Groves recalled his vow to make this one his last job, and it struck him that he had had the same idea before, back in Utah. Stay put, he had told himself, without knowing why. Now he knew. No more jobs.

But the thing was, he wasn’t free to stay put. Ever since he had been forced to kill a laboratory guard while on a job in Chicago, the
Patrón
had had a hold on him. From that day until now, he had worked whenever the
Patrón
wished. True, between jobs he lived well, far from the inquiries of American police, in his beachfront home on the Costa del Sol. But was that kind of luxury enough to compensate him for the kind of fear he had just been through? And the knowledge that at any day in the future he might be called on to endanger himself once again?

The only solution he could see was to expose the
Patrón
to the authorities. Considering that Groves knew nothing of the man’s looks or whereabouts, it would not be easy, but Groves did have one advantage. He knew that the Cobor was destined for the final World Cup game in Madrid. 

Of course, they had not told him, but he knew it had to be; there was no other possible reason for bringing it back to Spain. Groves was to rendezvous with the Thin One on the night of Friday, July 2, no later. The final game was scheduled for Sunday, the eleventh. Nothing else in Spain at that time was of enough importance to justify this kind of risk, and the kind of money the
Patrón
had promised him.

So. He would make his rendezvous, collect his pay, and then, a day or two before the final game, when he had had time to get a new passport and new ID, Groves would call the Madrid police. Look for poison gas in Bernabeau Stadium, he would say. The police would find it, and a disaster would be averted. More importantly for Groves, the
Patrón
would be removed from the picture. The police would not get him, unless someone had made a very uncharacteristic mistake that the police could trace. But whoever was employing the
Patrón
would be most displeased at the discovery of the Cobor. And such people, Groves knew, did not tolerate failure.

Thus, Groves would have his freedom.

The prospect of betraying the
Patrón
gave Groves new spirit. When he stopped at the Biloxi Harbor Club to pick up the twenty-four-foot cabin cruiser he had bought on his last visit, his step was jaunty. He tipped the boat attendant ten dollars over the three weeks’ maintenance charges, verified that he had a full tank of fuel and a fully stocked refrigerator, and then started the engines, cast loose the mooring ropes, and steered carefully past the other boats into the Mississippi Sound. He stayed within sight of land, heading east, the sun at his back and the warm Gulf winds in his face. 

For the first time in three days he felt really hungry. He put in and dropped anchor about thirty miles east of Pascagoula, in Alabama waters. There he made himself scrambled eggs, sausage, and toast in the galley. When he had cleaned up his dishes, he transferred the Cobor cylinders from the engineer’s suitcase into his gray Samsonite, packing the rest of the gear around them. There was plenty of room—that had been one detail he had checked out earlier. Then he raised anchor and headed east again. When he was out of sight of land, he opened the engineer’s suitcase and the spare from the train station, and threw them both overboard.

At nine-fifteen the next morning, at the mouth of Mobile Bay, he signaled the
Benghazi
, a sixty-thousand-ton Libyan tanker that had emptied her “light and sweet” Libyan crude into the Gulf Oil refinery tanks in Mobile, twenty-one miles north, and was now heading home. The Libyan captain of the vessel saw Groves’s signal and lowered a dinghy with a man inside. The man watched as Groves hefted his gray Samsonite suitcase into the dinghy, and held the ladder while Groves climbed down to stand beside it. Without saying a word, the man then climbed up the ladder onto Groves’s cruiser and signaled the crane operator to winch up the dinghy thirty-four feet above the water to the
Benghazi’s
deck. 

Dangling in mid-air, Groves watched his cruiser roar away. To where, he did not know, but the cruiser had been part of the payment for his voyage.

On board, he paid two thousand dollars to the
Benghazi’s
captain. Then he was shown to his quarters: a small, gray-painted cabin with a narrow bunk and washstand, one level up from the main deck and far astern. No one spoke to him. From his suitcase Groves removed the book he had brought along for the voyage—Holbrook’s
The Age of the Moguls
— and settled down on his bunk.

12

At seven-fifteen that evening, Alec Conroy was drinking a scotch and water in the bar of his hotel, the Palace. To drink at the Palace Bar, a civilized haven mentioned in Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
, had become one of Alec’s Things to Do several years previously, when he had found himself with time on his hands and decided to fill it with what one of his women of the period described as “super reading.” 

The actual Palace Bar was something of a disappointment to Alec at first. It was full of tourists in the evenings, and appeared to have been redecorated in the fifties with fake oriental tables and barstools. The ebony stools were too small, and tended to tip over. So did the chairs, which had orientally low backs. A massive dark wood carving of an oriental hunting scene hung on the wall like a tapestry, dominating the room. At first glance he thought the carving was artless; to Alec, the faces all had a sameness, the oriental equivalent of American Barbie dolls. Mass-produced rot, he thought. His days in the haberdashery had given Alec a sense of style and elegance, and the Palace Bar did not have either.

In time, though, he came to like the place. He would go there—before he met Helen—at six-thirty or so, ahead of the tourist crowd, and perch at the end of the bar and sip a scotch. Sweet and melancholy thoughts would come to him. The failed effort of the Palace Bar to modernize with proper grace seemed to take on larger proportions. Spain’s failure to defeat England hundreds of years ago. Spain’s failure to modernize after World War II. Alec’s own records, now unsold and unappreciated. 

At times, sitting at the bar with his whiskey and ice, he thought of writing his own songs, and hummed snatches of melody when no one else could hear.

Thursday evening, Alec had come into the bar to think ahead, to make up his mind about something. As he liked to do before starting heavy brain work, he had taken a good snort of cocaine upstairs in his room before coming down. As he sat at the bar, he felt ten feet tall. He had plenty of energy to mull over what he ought to do about Helen—in fact, it seemed absurdly clear, not even worth coking up for. 

He would just have to find another hotel room. If he was going to convince Rachel that he had given Helen up, he couldn’t go to her room anymore or have her come to his, for Rachel would be certain to find out. On the other hand, if he wanted to drop Rachel, take the money Farber had given him, and try to start a new life, he could not very well expect to stay in an adjoining hotel room that she was paying for. So either way it meant a new room.

The main issue, then, was clear. Find a room, then decide what to do about Rachel. He was about to ask the barman to step over and give some opinions about the other hotels in town, when his thoughts were interrupted by a voice behind him.

“Alec Conroy, right?”

It wasn’t a new situation by any means. People were always coming up to him that way; even though he hadn’t cut a record in five years, they remembered his posters and photographs from the fan magazines. Alec encouraged it, in fact, by continuing to wear the white suit that had once been his trademark as a performer. So when he turned around, it was with a smile, expecting to maybe get a free drink and hear about a concert years ago in Philly or Birmingham or somewhere.

He saw a faded blue rugby shirt stretched by a barrel chest and heavily muscled arms, and then looked up into the pig-eyed Neanderthal features of Derek Bates. If Alec hadn’t had the cocaine in him, very probably he would have tried to make a run for it. But the drug made him fearless. He greeted Bates as a fellow countryman.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “You’re supposed to be scoring goals for merry old England.”

“They tell me you’re screwing my wife,” said Bates, taking a step closer.

“Don’t crowd me,” Alec replied, coolly sipping scotch. “Who’s ‘they’?”

Later, Bates would tell of his call from Bill Brautigam, but now he was in no mood to answer questions. His frustrations over Helen had been building ever since their wedding night four months earlier, when she had rejected his choice of hotels, informing him that even though she had married beneath herself, she did not intend to live beneath herself. She was beautiful, elegant, and he was eager for bed, so he had accepted the rebuff and changed hotels. 

But since that night he had felt differently about her. Though he did not admit it even to himself, in his mind she became a kind of overseer, taking on the same emotional coloration he felt for Rowlands, the principal owner of Bates’s soccer club, and others of his class. He began bringing Helen flowers on Fridays and tried to persuade her to come to watch him at a Saturday game. She refused to mingle with “hooligans.” He felt the urge to blacken both her eyes when she put on those airs, but she was too good in bed and too attractive a decoration at social occasions for him to harm her. 

He told himself that Helen had been brought up wealthy and was only acting according to her background. But knowing that she would probably never change for him increased his sense of subjugation and fueled his resentment. The call from the TV reporter had let loose those feelings. 

In a way, Bates was glad of the excuse to get angry; he knew no man was expected to keep his temper with an unfaithful wife, no matter how well bred either of them was or wasn’t. He had come to Madrid ready to have it out with her, but she was not in her room and he didn’t know where to look. Conroy, Brautigam had said, was at the Palace. Bates went there straight from Helen’s empty room. To fortify himself with a drink before he faced what might be the pair of them in Conroy’s quarters, he had stopped at the bar.

Now, hearing this blond-haired degenerate take the same arrogant tone as Helen, Derek Bates felt a great cleansing rage. Conroy’s insolent, pampered face seemed to leer at him, inviting a pounding. Bates balled his hands into fists and loosed a roundhouse right that would have shattered Alec’s cheekbone if it had landed.

But Alec, cocaine-high, was on his guard. To him, Bates seemed a dangerous but predictable animal. Alec had been in enough barroom brawls to know the best moves, and with his heightened perceptions he felt completely in command. It was as though he knew Bates’s punch seconds before it was thrown, from the instant he saw the muscles in Bates’s thick neck tense up as Alec said “Who’s ‘they’?” So he pushed himself back, tilting his stool, and as Bates’s huge arm flashed by, Alec stood clear and dashed the contents of his tumbler of scotch straight into the man’s eyes.

A bellow of pain came from the blinded soccer star. He charged at where Alec had been when last he could see. His eyes felt on fire from the alcohol. The humiliation of being tricked in a fight by the same man who had bedded his wife drove him berserk. His hands clawed out for his tormenter and caught hold, not of Alec, who had dodged nimbly out of the line of attack, but of a white-jacketed waiter who had correctly perceived that a fight was about to erupt and had come over to try to keep it from happening at the bar. 

Bates slammed the waiter to the floor. Not hearing the man’s cries, seeing only the white cloth of his coat, and that none too well, he tried to batter the man in the face. Some of the blows hit the floor as the waiter twisted; others landed. Permanent damage might have been done had not Alec picked up the barstool he had been sitting on and broken it over the back of Bates’s head.

Bates slumped over his unintended victim, unconscious. In a short while he was in the hands of the Madrid police, trying to explain himself. American television, he said, had driven him to what he had done, which prompted the police to call the American TV people they knew best: UBC. The officer in charge insisted on speaking with the “top” UBC person immediately, and Molly, keeping Spanish hours at her switchboard and unable to locate Sharon, acted on her boss’s instructions and put the call through to Cantrell. She listened in, of course.

The indignation that she heard in Cantrell’s voice gave her pause. As she heard the Madrid policeman describe Derek Bates’s allegations of UBC libel against his wife and UBC provocation against Bates himself, Molly expected her boss to come to a strong defense of his people. 

Instead, Cantrell seemed incensed that UBC had had anything to do with this kind of thing. “We don’t deal in smut,” Cantrell declared with vehemence. “Give me the name of whoever this man says is responsible. If he’s proved correct, I’ll fire the son of a bitch on the spot.”

Molly waited out the pause while the policeman found the name. “A Senõr Bill Brautigam.” And she shared the relief in Cantrell’s voice when he responded, “Hell, Brautigam ain’t with us. He works for NBC!”

Still, Molly was nervous. Like the rest of the UBC staff, she knew about the Conroy tape. From the tone her boss had taken, he was going to be pretty upset when he found out that UBC people had been involved after all.

Several events occurred before Cantrell found out. 

First, the Madrid police, checking Bates’s story, located Bill Brautigam and asked him for answers. Brautigam, knowing his rights as a reporter were not as liberal under Spanish law as in the States, claimed he had been acting on a tip acquired at a Madrid bar from an American, name and Madrid address unknown, who claimed to work for another network that had a tape of Alec Conroy. The police thanked Brautigam for his cooperation and let him go in time for him to make a few phone calls.