The Marchand Woman

When the tedium of ordering was concluded he gave Rosalia his full attention. In the jaundiced light her skin seemed pale and velvety. She had an emphatic way of returning his gaze. Then she screwed up her nose at him. “You’re a big shambling teddy bear, aren’t you.”

That made him laugh. “I think I’m falling in love with you.” Immediately it sounded lame; he’d meant it to be light, but not facetious: a joke to cover the fact that he meant it.

“Shucks, all the guys say that.”

“I believe that,” he agreed. “A backtrail crowded with broken hearts.”

She said, “I broke up with my boy friend three months ago. I moved out. I cried for a week and went numb for a week but I’m great at bouncing back. I’m telling you that because I didn’t want you to waste half an hour groping around for a way to ask me if there were any other serious men in my life. Or men seriously in my life, or whatever—I majored in English lit but it’s still my second language. I was going to be a teacher,” she explained, “but then I realized I hate teaching. I don’t have the patience to deal with people who don’t learn everything right the first time. Anyway I’m more useful here, you know. My father was very important in the Cuban exile movement. He died a few years ago but I’ve still got the family contacts.”

“Don’t you feel you’re selling them out?”

“Sometimes,” she conceded. “You have to decide where your loyalties are, don’t you. We left Cuba when I was four. I’m a citizen of the United States. I don’t picture any scenario in which the exiles will ever recover the properties they lost to Castro, do you?”

“I don’t think the restoration of confiscated properties is the motive. I give these folks a bit more credit than that.”

“They don’t like Castro—they don’t like Communism. I don’t think much of Castro or Communism either. But then I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought much of Batista either. You know it’s not easy when you’re born into the middle of a squabble like this. Whatever I do, I’m a traitor to somebody. I’ve spent my whole life arguing these things with my family and friends.”

“And?”

“I can’t see how war and killing will solve the problem. The counterrevolutionary movements want war. They’re wrong. So I’m against them.”

He envied her. She’d managed to make clear simple sense out of a complex muddle.

She said, “This Lundquist thing—what do you think will happen?”

“It’s foregone. We haven’t had a prayer of getting close to these guys in time to do any good. The ransom’s been paid, the political prisoners are on their way to B.A. and I expect either the Ambassador will be turned loose in a few days or the bodies will turn up in a common grave in the jungle. Probably they’ll turn ’em loose because that way the thing will die down sooner.”

“And then?”

“We’ll interview the survivors and maybe we’ll be able to identify the terrorists from that, but I get a feeling it won’t work out that way—they haven’t been stupid up to now. I’m not confident. Either way it’ll be forgotten. Nothing stays in the headlines. Another crisis will come up.”

“They’ve got ten million dollars for making war.”

“The terrorists? Maybe. They can’t overthrow Castro with dollar bills. It’s got to be a pretty small group.”

“They can make a lot of trouble.”

“There’s always trouble,” Anders said.

“Have you had any experience with hijackers before?”

“Sure. That’s why I was assigned to this one.”

“These are brighter than most, aren’t they?”

“Cool and careful. That’s worth worrying about. Terrorists are usually neurotic kids without sense—suicidal fanatics. They throw tantrums and smash toys to get attention—they’re too immature to think about consequences. Mostly they end up killed. But these guys have kept the rear exit open, nobody’s touched them and I won’t be surprised if they disappear with the ransom money. We’ll pick up a trail somewhere but it may be too cold to do us any good. Here come the lobsters.”

His mind had jumped off the straight track and he listened with only half attention to Rosalia’s bursts of talk while he pursued this new line of thought. Over coffee he broke into her monologue with an abrupt rhetorical question: “What if the setup was a false front? What if they’re a little gang of ingenious crooks who’ve found a clever way to steal ten million dollars?”

“What?”

“Suppose they’re not politicals at all. It fits,” he said. “It’s starting to look as if they don’t belong to the known Cuban exile movements.”

“But then why would they bother with the propaganda ransom notes and demanding the release of the political prisoners and all?”

“There’d be reasons enough. A smokescreen to throw us off the track. And everybody knows governments treat political agitators more gingerly than common crooks. And in this case there’s the anti-Castro aspect—we’d have committed more resources to the hunt if they’d been Communist terrorists.”

“Is that really how you see it?”

“I don’t know. The theory fits a lot of the facts. It’d be a daring risky kind of crime but it’s not much more dangerous than knocking over a bank and it’s a little bit more lucrative. And if they’re not politicals that would help explain why we haven’t tumbled any leads. For all we know they could be a gang of Mexican bandits out of a Pedro Armendariz movie.”

Rosalia had a flat in a two-story apartment court with its own pool and palm trees. The furniture was a reflection of her hectic person: busy fabrics but clean shapes. The Parsons tables were black plastic, the lamps were stark and the end tables were clear lucite cubes. There was a profusion of potted house-plants. On the walls were matted enlargements of high-contrast photographs—winter birch forests, a rocky coast that looked like Maine, something that looked at first like an abstract but turned out to be a shot of wood grain in close-up. When she turned on the stereo he was surprised by the selection: a jazz quintet coolly psychoanalyzing Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.

She said, “Drinkie?”

“Got any rum?”

“That’s very diplomatic.”

“Not really. I like it.”

“It’s not Cuban,” she said drily and went clipping into the kitchenette, speedy and practical and sure of herself.

He liked her. He thought perhaps he loved her but he had thought that a few times before and his ex had crashed into an overpass abutment at eighty miles an hour with a blood-alcohol content later measured at near comatose levels; now he was wary because he felt he’d driven her to it. In any case he wasn’t sure what women saw in him. He’d always been just a little overweight; he had the square face of a vacuum-cleaner salesman; and the Anders hair, a product of Danish genes, was pale and thin—it flowed in the air like seaweed, he thought. He had confidence in one thing: He did his work well. That was a reason to feel close to Rosalia. She understood the work. But then it didn’t make sense looking for reasons for such things.

She said, “What’s on for tomorrow?”

“I’d better get down to Mexico.”

“Oh.”

He said, “Your Spanish is better than mine.”

“Anybody’s is. Yours is atrocious.” Her eyes wandered away.

“Look,” he said, “how would you like to fly down to Mexico with me?”

Her smile was as good as a kiss.

Chapter 4

A fish jumped through the surface of the river: broached, shook foam, dived. Cielo watched for a while but it didn’t leap again. He listened to the birds and then finally went back along the riverbank reluctantly; it was time to put things in motion.

There were clouds; steam in the air; soon there’d be rain. It was what he had waited for—a safe time to move the hostages out. Later if someone tried to backtrack them with dogs or infrared the rain would protect them by washing away clues between the camp and the dock. The whole thing, he thought, was a quixotic farce; but one might as well maintain security. He slapped at a mosquito.