Authors: Season of the Machete
James Patterson (3 page)
After perusing
The Boys from Brazil,
then glancing at the opening stories in the
Enquirer,
the overseas edition of
Time
magazine, and
Soldier of Fortune,
the elegant man rolled out of the hammock. Inside his and Carrie’s apartment, he got out of a lamb’s-wool pullover and expensive cream gabardines. Then he started to piece together the international costume of American students abroad.
He put on faded blue jeans, a police blue work-shirt, lop-heeled Frye boots, and, finally, a red cowboy neckerchief. He applied light makeup to his eyes. Fitted a long dark wig over his own shorter hair.
Today Damian Rose was going to play the part of a professor from the Sorbonne.
He had to buy a small supply of drugs in Les Halles: amphetamines, cocaine, Thai sticks. Then off to meet with a mercenary soldier who called himself the Cuban.
Tucking the workshirt tightly into Jockey shorts and zipping up his jeans, Damian walked through a living room overflowing with Broadway and Haymarket theater paraphernalia.
Then out the apartment’s front door with a bang.
“Bonjour,”
he said to an
emmerdeuse
named Marie, an ancient woman who was always reading newspapers in the light of the hallway window.
Then boots clomped down marble stairs to a circular courtyard inside the building itself.
Damian climbed into a small black convertible in the courtyard. He left the convertible’s top up. Windows partially up. Visors down. He put on blue air force-style sunglasses.
The sports car rolled out of the yard’s black ironwork gates, and Rose started to hum an old song he liked very much—sweet “Lili Marlene.”
It was a brilliantly clear and warm spring day now. White as paper.
The sweet smell of French bread baking filled the air on the narrow side streets.
As the shiny black car turned onto the boulevard St.-Germain, a bicyclist—a healthy-looking girl in an oatmeal tank top—strained her long, swanlike neck to see the face of the young man behind the sun-dappled windshield.
The pretty girl wasn’t quite fast enough.
As of June 1979, no one who shouldn’t would know what the face of Damian Rose looked like.
April 24, 1979, Tuesday
Machete 3 Guilty!
Bookkeeping … over the course of the year, we had to hire over a hundred different people. We paid out nearly $600,000 in overhead expenses. We paid forgers from Brussels, counterfeiters, gun salesmen from East Germany and the United States, informers, dope peddlers, whores, pickpockets, American intelligence men, top mercenaries like Kingfish Toone, Blinkie Tomas (the Cuban), Clive Lawson. And not one of these people was ever told exactly what it was that we were putting together in the Caribbean….
The Rose Diary
The saying “Mad dogs and Englishmen” refers obliquely to the fact that our sun will cook you like bacon. Beware!
Sign on beach at Turtle Bay
April 24, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica
Tuesday. The First Day of the Season.
Not by coincidence, April 24 marked the end of the most spectacularly newsworthy trial ever held on the eighty-one-by-thirty-nine-mile Caribbean island of San Dominica.
Parts of the pyrotechnic high court scene were hard to imagine or describe.
For a beginning, the tiny, plain courtroom was packed to its high, square beam rafters. The room was as noisy as a sporting event. The slow-turning fans on the ceiling, like the ones in the movie
Casablanca,
were a sharp contrast to the frenzied atmosphere. The most perversely interesting of the defendants was fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet.
The five-foot-six-inch teenager had a slate black, intelligent face that was at the same time piggy and cruel. He had long black cornbraids that were sopping wet all through the trial, dripping at the ends like frayed rope hanging in the rain.
Every five minutes the boy’s grandmother, his guardian, punctuated the final proceedings with a loud, pitiful scream from her seat in the courtroom gallery. “Leon!” she shouted. “My bway Leon! Oh, no, son!”
“You are murdering curs without any shame.” The seventy-year-old judge, Andre Dowdy, lectured the teenager and the two grown men standing beside him.
“I feel no mercy toward any of you. Not even toward you, boy. I consider you all mad dogs….”
Flanking Rachet, thirty-year-old Franklin Smith aimlessly shifted his weight from one orange work-boot to the other; Chicki Holt—father of fourteen children by five women, the local newspaper liked to reprint with every new story on the trial—just stared up at the plain white ceiling and watched the slow fans. Frankly Chicki was bored.
Eight months earlier the same three men had stood outside a stammering Volkswagen Superbug one mile from the country town of New Burg. They’d robbed an American tourist, Francis Ci-choski, a fireman from Waltham, Massachusetts, on a golfing vacation.
At the end of the broad-daylight holdup, one of the three blacks had knocked the white man down with the business side of a sugar-cane machete. The blow had killed Cichoski instantly. Then the man’s crew-cut head had been chopped off and left lying on its cheek on the blacktop road.
In the eight months that followed, the motivation for the murder had been described as racial unrest; economic unrest; sex unrest; blood lust; obeah; soul music and kinky reggae; insanity; and, finally, the unsubtle beginning of a terrifying Pan-Caribbean revolution. These were not mutually exclusive, it was understood.
Recently, however, San Dominican’s prime minister, Joe Walthey, had simplified the sociological aspects of the crime.
“No matter what else,” the dictatorial black said over rolling, blipping island TV, “these men must hang, or this island shall never find peace with itself again. Mark my words on this.
“The life of Francis Cichoski must be avenged,” Walthey repeated three times before he finally faded from the television screen.
At 10:30
A.M.
Judge Andre Dowdy read his verdict in an unsteady, emotion-packed voice.
“All three of you men—Franklin Smith, Donald ‘Chicki’ Holt, Leon Elmore Rachet,” he read, “are found guilty of the murder as presented in evidence before me and this court. All of you will be taken to the Russville jail, and there be hanged no more than one week from today. May God have mercy on your souls. And on my own.”
“An’ on yo’ ahss, too!” young Leon Rachet suddenly screamed out in the hushed courtroom. “An’ on yo’ ahss, Dowdy mon.”
Franklin Smith turned to the teenager, winced, and said, “Oohh, Leon, mon.”
At 10:40 the dull gray roof of the Potts Rum Factory blew off like a slapstick comedian’s hat; then flashes of leaping flames of orange and red fired up into the balmy clear blue sky.
Literally within minutes, the Coastown factory was gone; an entire block of the capital was hopelessly ablaze.
At precisely 11:00 two white foremen were beaten senseless with ball bats at the Cow Park Bauxite Mines.
A hundred car windows were smashed in an executive parking lot.
The executive dining room was rushed, and all the prime ribs and hot fried chicken were either taken away or destroyed.
Inside the courtroom in Coastown, meanwhile, Franklin Smith and Chicki Holt screamed obscenely at Judge Dowdy. Their already hoarse, long-haired American lawyer screamed at the elderly judge, too. They called him “mama’s man”; “runny ass”; “shit pussy”; “blood clot.”
Young Leon Rachet stood by quietly, simply watching. He reached inside his back pocket and produced a black beret for his sweaty head. At fifteen he fancied himself part Huey P. Newton, part Selassie, part Che.
During the mad courtroom screaming, he turned to Franklin Smith and told the older man to shut his “black nager-boy mout.”
Strangely, the thirty-year-old man did as he was told.
Outside the cigar-box courthouse, the reggae singer Bob Marley was being blasted from loudspeakers on top of a rainbow-colored VW van.
Marley and his Wailers also yelled out of oversize transistor radios along the crowded palm-tree-lined sidewalks.
Angry black faces screamed at the courthouse building as if it were alive. Rude boys in the crowd carried posters promoting the cause of the revolutionary colonel Monkey Dred, and also of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Pretty, innocent-faced schoolchildren waved beautiful hand-painted banners—
GO HOME ADMIRAL NELSON, GO HOME LAURENCE ROCKEFELLER; SAN DOMINICA A BLACK REPUBLIC.
Shiny-faced city policemen marched up Court Street behind see-through riot shields. People threw ripe fruit at the police. Mangoes, green coconuts, small melons.
A nut-skinned man in army fatigues ran up to a TV camera and made a bizarre, contorted face into the lens. “Aaahh deangerous!” he shouted, and became famous across the world.
At 11:15 a row of five Hertz rentals was blown up with plastique at Robert F. Kennedy Airport outside Coastown.
At 11:30 the three black murderers were led out onto the shiny white courthouse porch.
The San Dominican terrors were about to begin in earnest.
Fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet had on a Day-Glo flowered shirt and dark Tonton Macoute sunglasses. His black beret was tipped slightly over one eye. Deangerously.
At first Rachet smiled broadly as he waved his handcuffed hands high over his head like a prizefight winner. Then, as the police shoved him down the glaring white steps, the boy began literally to scream at the sky.
“Dred kill yo’, mon! Monkey kill al you’! Slit al yo’ troats.” Over and over the boy screamed out the name of an island revolutionary.
“Monkey Dred slit me own auntie’s troat. Ay-ee! Ay-ee!”
Suddenly a well-dressed black man in the crowd screamed out above all the other noise. “Gee-zass, mon. Oh, Gee-zass Ky-rist!”
Someone had thrown a sun-catching, silver Fris-bee high up into the air. It curved down into the crowd around the handcuffed murderers.
As fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet reached the bottom of the courthouse steps, where the back door of a black police Rover was flung open to receive him, his eyes turned up toward the suddenly descending silver Frisbee—and a white man in a Panama suit and hat stepped out of the crowd and fired three shots into the mad boy’s face.
Carrie Rose watched the strange, possessed teenager crumple up and fall. She was among the large group of white tourists behind police lines. She hoped the rest of the terrors would go as smoothly as this one had.
Robert F. Kennedy Airport; Coastown, SanDominica
Tuesday Evening.
At 9:45 that night, an American Airlines Boeing 727 began its light, feathery approach down into San Dominica’s Robert F. Kennedy Airport.
The massive silver plane glided in amazingly low over the blue-black Caribbean.
Big red lights blinked at one-second intervals on the plane’s wings and tail. The red lights reflected beautifully off the dark blue sea.
Hidden in blackness beside a filling station near runway two, Damian Rose watched the pretty landing with considerable interest. He ran through his final plan one more time.
Meanwhile, out on runway one, the tires of the 727 were already touching down with the slightest bump and grind. A half-stoned calypso band began to play up near the main terminal.
The airplane’s wheels screeched as its brakes and thrust-reversal system took hold.
As the plane reached a point halfway to its landing mark, Damian Rose was forced to make a decision. Raising an expensive German-made rifle to his cheek, he got a small dark box on the runway into the clear greenish light of his nightscope.
He fired three times.
The unsophisticated bomb on the runway went off, drowning out the rifle explosions, and blew away a large section of the airplane’s belly.
As the 727 rolled to a stop, flames burst from its midsection, then out the windows over its wings.
Doors flew open, and emergency escape equipment tumbled outside. Screaming passengers started to come out of the airplane, some of them on fire.
The airport’s two emergency trucks headed out toward the burning plane, slowly at first, their inexperienced drivers not believing what they were seeing.
A person’s burning head was in one of the plane’s tiny windows.
A white woman on fire ran across the dark tarmac, looking like a burning cross.
A stewardess stood at one door with her fingers buried in her frosted blond hair, screaming for help.
Four hours later—when the fire was finally out— six people from the 727 were dead, more than fifty others had been burned, and nobody on the island had a clue why it happened.
The next day the puzzle seemed to become a bit clearer.
April 25, 1979, Wednesday Couple Slain On Beach
In 1967, when we were selling fifty- and hundred-milligram bags of heroin, Damian told me that he aspired to be the greatest criminal mind in the world. He said that the world was ripe for a criminal hero: brilliant, with a little raffish touch of William Henry Bonney—a little Butch Cassidy gilding…. I liked that idea very much. I got to be Katharine Ross in the fantasy.
The Rose Diary
April 25, 1979; Turtle Bay, San Dominica
Wednesday Afternoon. The Second Day of the Season
On the macadam highway that sliced through Turtle Bay, Peter Macdonald—a young man who was to play a large part in things to come—made his daily bicycle ride through the lush, sun-streaked paradise.
As he pedaled a ten-speed Peugeot, Macdonald was enjoying the extra luxury of recalling several foolish glories out of his past.
Nearly twenty-nine years old, Peter rode well enough. He looked healthy. Physically he was an attention getter. A pleasantly muscular six feet one, he rode in holey gray gym shorts with
Property of USMA West Point
printed in gold on one leg.
