The Marchand Woman

Cielo wasn’t the name he’d been born with; the nom de guerre had been chosen mainly for its meaninglessness. Cielo: sky. Only two of the nine men in his band knew his real name, not that it mattered; Rodriguez was not so astonishing a surname.

No one was in sight; that was in obeisance to the discipline of the camp—there was no knowing what sort of high-altitude equipment might be in search of them; the rule was to stay under cover at all times. Cielo entered the camp from tree to tree until he reached the covered walkway.

The camp had been built long ago by a Dutch oil company as quarters for its men during an exploration for petroleum in the river delta. When they found no oil they’d floated their rigs away to try again farther down the coast; they’d left the camp behind, as they usually did—it was cheaper to prefabricate a new one than to dismantle the old one and haul it away.

Cielo had left it all untouched; when he was gone he wanted to leave behind no sign of his presence. Nothing had been disturbed; machetes were forbidden—not even twigs were allowed to be broken.

He found Vargas and the big Draga boy in the money hut standing well away from the cage and looking expectantly toward him; he had interrupted their colloquy, startled them, and there was no way for Cielo to know whether they had been discussing the weather, the subject of sex, or the possibility of stealing the ten million dollars from Cielo.

He said, “It’ll rain soon.”

Vargas had a terrifying smile; it went with his size. It was said Vargas had broken a man’s back with his hands but Cielo knew the story to be false. Vargas was as gentle as he was massive; a man that big rarely needed to lose his temper. Cielo had known him twenty years. That was part of the trouble, he thought: We’re too old to believe in this nonsense. It takes children.

No, the money wouldn’t tempt Vargas; and as for the Draga boy, the idea might amuse him but in the end he would not steal because he did not need to steal. Emil Draga was the heir to his grandfather’s fortune, which would be enough to discourage him from taking suicidal risks. The lad wasn’t in this for money. He was in it, in an atavistic sense, for the adventure—he was a clever youth, big and muscular, ugly, stuffed with Draga legends of machismo and arrogance and financial bucaneering: Through determined rapacity the Dragas had acquired empires of cane and rum. Left to himself the hard and ruthless young Emil probably would become a corporate-takeover pirate, a Wall Street raider; if and when the old man died, Emil probably would move instantly to New York. Cielo had no illusions that The Movement could survive old Draga.

For the moment Emil would stay at Cielo’s right hand until the old man ordered him elsewhere or he saw an opportunity to flex his brutal muscles again.

In the cage with the money the squirrel and the parakeet showed no signs of illness. It had been long enough. Cielo said, “You can pack up the money and give their freedom back to the bird and the squirrel.”

Vargas showed his chilling smile. “It’s our day for being magnanimous. Today we give freedom back to everybody.”

“Don’t forget your hoods.” Cielo went toward the door wondering if he’d neglected anything. The parakeet and the squirrel had been caged forty-eight hours with the ransom money because Cielo had heard once about a rigged payment of money that had been radioactively treated so as to infect anyone who handled it. During the past days they also had studied the money under infrared and ultraviolet lights to make sure it hadn’t been dyed; they had sifted laboriously through the $50 and $100 notes looking for evidences of serial-number sequences or counterfeiting; they had subjected the money to every test they could think of. So far as Cielo could determine, it was clean. No doubt there’d been giveaway devices attached to the canister in which the money had been dropped from the helicopter, but they hadn’t even bothered to search it for transmitters. They’d left it where it had fallen until fourteen hours after the drop, when they’d moved it under cover of rain and transferred the money into the canvas sacks and gone out the way they’d come in—by canoe part of the way, outboard motorboat the rest.

He always preferred boats when it was possible. He was an island man, that was part of it, but also there was the fact that a boat left no footprints.

He said, “We’ll go in half an hour,” and left the hut.

He pushed the camouflage net aside and went aboard the ketch, stooping to clear his head when he went below. He cranked up the receiver and put on the headphones and consulted the dashboard chronograph; Julio was due to broadcast in three minutes. He waited with relaxed patience. He had learned patience long ago and practiced it all his life. In Sierra Maestra of the Cuban civil war, on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs waiting for the air cover that didn’t come, in Castro’s prison, in all the slow years since his escape from Cuba in 1964—the nondescript demeaning jobs, the secrecy, the undercover work for old Draga. The slow acquisition and equally slow disintegration of the hard tight determined cell of Free Cubans. After the Bay of Pigs and the softening of U.S. relations with the Castro regime old Draga had lost any trust he might have had in the American government; he had gone it alone, trusting no one outside his own household and Cielo’s tight little band. They had practiced a conscious and businesslike paranoia—Cielo’s, alone among the movements, had successfully avoided infiltration by agents of Washington and Langley. Draga kept them isolated from all the other exile armies; Cielo had admitted to membership no new recruits—the commando was ma

Until now. Emil Draga; he couldn’t be certain of Emil. The hothead had already exploded once. It was, he felt, another sign of the rot that had infected the group surreptitiously for years.

The radio crackled in his earphones. Good dependable Julio, the best of all possible brothers: mercurial, given to fits of gloom and sunshine, macho spirit and great lusty laughter and deep brooding sorrows. The loves of Cielo’s life were few: his three daughters, his wife, his brother. He cherished them—there was nothing else. The dream of glory had faded beyond recall.

“Merida to Constellation Three. Merida to Constellation Three.” Julio’s big voice, its boom thi

Cielo switched it off. We’ve succeeded, then, he thought. The irony of it: empty gestures to placate a rich old man’s obsessions.

For a time it had been all right. He hadn’t minded; it was something to do. But no one was supposed to have been killed.

In his quarters he packed everything neatly into the B-4 bag, set it by the door and went around meticulously wiping everything with a damp towel to obscure prints, searching and searching again: Nothing must be left behind.

He went outside with the bag and set it on the pile of satchels and valises and knapsacks. Luz was there, his face an utter blank. “Put your mask on,” Cielo said, and went along under the covered walkway to the third hut. The last thing he did before reaching for the door’s latch was to press the heavy beard against his cheeks to make sure it was fixed in place. By now he was used to the pillow-stuffing under his belt. They’d remember him as a big man with a soft belly and all sorts of beard. It was what he wanted them to remember.

He unlocked the big padlock and put it in his pocket; it wouldn’t be needed again and he could not leave it here—it was remotely possible it might be traced: Locks had serial numbers.