Checkpoint Charlie

“It was organized. They weren’t two-cent stickup men. Two or three private cars were used to bring the passports to an assembly point here in Coral Gables. We nailed one of the hijackers, you know — blind luck but we’ve got him and he’s willing to testify. A deal for a light sentence provided we give him protection. The Bureau’s taken it to the Justice Department and I’m pretty sure they’ll agree to it. Trouble is, he doesn’t know enough to help you.”

“I’ll talk to him anyway if you don’t mind.”

*   *   *

HIS NAME was Julio Torres and he was a sad man — a Cuban, down on his luck. He was heavy, nearly as fat as I am but not so tall. I guessed his age at forty-five. He had a black mustache and calloused hands. In the interrogation cell we both overlapped our wooden chair seats.

“Who recruited you for the robbery?”

“He calls himself Obregon. I never heard his first name.”

“Cuban?”

“No. I think Puerto Rican.”

“What was your job?”

“To follow the van and drug the crew.”

“How?”

“They stopped for lunch in a truckers’ café. I followed them in and put something in their coffee.”

“Chloral hydrate?”

“I don’t know. Obregon gave it to me and told me to put it in the coffee.” He gave me a wry look. “I’m not a pharmacist, you know.”

“Then?”

“Then I drove the car. When we saw the van pull over we waited a few minutes to make sure they were asleep; and then Obregon drilled into the van and one of the others got behind the wheel and started it up, and we convoyed it to the hiding place at the farm.”

“Whose farm was it?”

“I don’t know. Some sharecropper. I think it must have been abandoned for years. The driveway was all overgrown. Anyway I followed the van in my car and Obregon drove another car and there was a third guy in a third car. We transferred the cartons to the trunks of our three cars and drove away separately.”

“So that if one of you were caught, it would only cost one-third of the shipment.”

“I guess that was the idea, yes. I delivered my car in Coral Gables last night.”

“To where?”

“A private house a couple blocks off the Tamiami Trail. I gave the FBI people the address, they already checked it out. I don’t think they found anything. It was just a drop, you know, I guess Obregon or one of the other guys picked up the car from there. I left the keys under the mat and walked away after I collected my money, which was in the mailbox like they said it would be. Then the next day I was arrested because one of the van drivers saw me on the street and recognized me from the truckers’ café — see, I tripped against one of the drivers in the café and spilled a little root beer on him, that was how I distracted them when I dumped the drug in their coffee, so the guy noticed me then and he recognized me the next day. An unbelievable stroke of bad luck, you know, but that’s been my life. But I guess you don’t want the story of my life, do you.”

“Who does Obregon work for?”

“I have no idea.”

“Describe him.”

“Well, he’s thin, let’s see, sort of bald, no chin. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. A mustache — not bushy like mine, a thin neat mustache. He looks like an Indio.”

“Did he speak to you in English?”

“Spanish. His English is poor.”

“Puerto Rican accent?”

“Yes. I think he must live over there. Something he said, I can’t remember what it was, it made me think he only came over to the mainland for this job.”

*   *   *

I CHECKED into the Condado Beach in a rainstorm and had a big meal in the Sheraton’s Penthouse restaurant with a lovely view of the sprawled urban lights of San Juan. From twenty stories high at night you don’t see the poverty.

In the morning I went through the ancient walls into Old San Juan down to the harborfront Federal Building and met for half an hour with FBI and customs men after which we trooped over to police headquarters and I went through mug files with the help of a San Juan detective lieutenant. We turned up a sheet on a man named Jorge Ruiz Orozco, a/k/a José Raoul Obregon, a/k/a Juan R. Ortiz, so forth; his picture met the description I’d had from Julio Torres in Miami and his rap sheet seemed to fit: he’d been arrested several times for smuggling and receiving stolen goods and had taken two falls in prison, once in Florida and once in Mexico.

We sent a bulletin out via the Burea and Interpol and the Agency. There had been no public a

He was sullen and not very talkative. I had to make a few threats. We can be testy about that sort of thing because the Agency doesn’t concern itself with courts and appeals; I didn’t care if they convicted him or not — I wanted information from him. He had a sister in Ponce and a brother in Mayaguez and an elderly mother in San Juan. I mentioned a few things that might start happening to them: the sister could lose her driver’s license, the brother could lose his taxicab in an accident, the aged mother could learn that her social security payments and Medicare were being discontinued because of irregularities in her records — a thousand little harassments like that. After a while Obregon gave me a name.

*   *   *

FROM St. Thomas I flew back to San Juan on a twin-engine Islander and made the co

I said, “Obregon was hired for the job by Parker Dortmunder.”

Myerson blew Havana smoke at me. “Obregon actually gave you Dortmunder’s name?”

“No. Dortmunder wouldn’t be that stupid. Obregon gave me a description and a name. The name’s one of the aliases Bertine has used before and the description fits Bertine. Bertine works for Dortmunder, or did last time I heard. I think if we find Dortmunder we find the passport blanks.”

“Find Bertine,” Myerson said. “Leave Dortmunder alone, Charlie.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “Need-to-know.”

I was a little angry. “Bertine’s just a gopher. Look, Dortmunder doesn’t paint himself into corners. He’s a broker, not an inventory dealer — he doesn’t steal things on spec. He wouldn’t have run this caper if he didn’t have a prearranged buyer for the passports. They were stolen to order. Now the fastest way to find them is to pull him in and find out who he sold them to.”

“I’m sorry, Charlie. We’re using Dortmunder at the moment. We need him.” He jabbed the cigar toward me. “Don’t touch him. Find the passports but don’t a

“If I nail Bertine does that come under the heading of a

“Yes. You can shadow him but don’t touch him.”

“Tell me, how many more obstacles do you intend to toss in front of me?”

“Just get the passports back, Charlie.” I think it was his grin that infuriated me to the point where I resolved to do it — just to show him up.

*   *   *

DORTMUNDER WAS a free-lance espionage middleman; he bought and sold secrets as well as international arms and various clandestine goods like bullion, slaves and narcotics. His stomping ground was the Mediterranean. Despite my anger I could understand Myerson’s point; Dortmunder was a pill but he was a useful one. He sold information to us that we wouldn’t otherwise get. Therefore we tolerated him and let him run. Such is the cynicism of the trade; such is the mechanism by which the Dortmunders survive. All his customers have a vested interest in his survival.

I didn’t care about Dortmunder one way or the other but Myerson’s stricture made the job much harder than it had to be — that was what a