The Marchand Woman

“You’ve found the hiding place, haven’t you?”

“It’s being searched. Every lead is being pursued.” Something—possibly the coldness of her face—prompted him to add, “This gang seems to be some sort of wild-card outfit. None of the known Cuban exile groups knows anything about them. We’ll come up with results, I think I can promise you that, but it’s going to take time.”

“If a crime isn’t solved in the first forty-eight hours it probably never will be solved. Statistical fact, Mr. O’Hillary.” One of Robert’s statistical facts. “I’m not a supplicant begging for scraps. I’m a citizen. I’m the one who pays your salary.”

O’Hillary’s face colored a bit. “Of course I understand how upset you are. But we’re on the same side, aren’t we.”

“I don’t think we are.”

“Isn’t that a bit—well, paranoid?”

“It’s consistent with the facts.”

“Consistent? You could say that about a cathartic. We’re doing our jobs, Mrs. Marchand, as best we know how to do them. There’s no massive conspiracy to cover up the facts about your son’s death. I think you must be careful to make sure your anxieties don’t drive you into emotional difficulties. I know this is an excruciating cliché, but nothing any of us can do about this can bring your son back or make up for your loss.”

“I haven’t entirely taken leave of my senses,” she said. “I simply want to be able to face myself when I think of my son. Never mind, Mr. O’Hillary.” She saw it was no good; there was no getting through to the apparatchiks; she got up and left.

It wasn’t much of a walk back to the hotel. An old woman went by walking an infinitesimal dog, and somewhere a siren shrieked; a young man came along bearing cut flowers in white tissue wrappings, beamed at her and went on by with a spring in his step. She nearly snarled at him. She knew she was going to have to do something about this rage before it destroyed her.

At the desk she found a message from Dwiggins; in the room she dialed with the eraser end of a pencil and sat tapping the pencil against her teeth, listening to it ring. Dwiggins answered on the fifth ring and said, “Call me matchmaker. Have I got a boy for you.”

“Good grief. You’re drunk.”

“Do you want to hear this or not? You’ll love the guy. He’s this big lug, got his nose right next to his ear, hairy all over. Just like a movie star.”

“Yeah,” she said. “King Kong.”

Dwiggins laughed uproariously.

“All right,” she said. “Who and what is he?”

“Crobey. Harry Crobey. I knew him in the highlands. Listen, the guy’s a creature of clandestine warfare the way a tiger’s a creature of the jungle. He’s the kind of guy you’re looking for.” She heard the sound of ice in a glass.

She said impatiently, “Tell me about him.”

“Who?”

“Crobey. Harry Crobey. For God’s sake.”

“Oh yeah, him.” The phone seemed to drop from Dwiggins’ mouth. She vaguely heard him muttering, then after a moment his voice came back on the line. “Sorry, I dropped the phone. You still there?”

“I’m still here.”

“Tell you about Crobey,” he said. “He used to fly in and out of the highlands on this old Air America plane, DC-3.I went in with him a couple times.”

“He’s a pilot?”

“Yeah, he was then. He’d take off with a six-pack of beer by the seat. Drink the beer, refill the empties by urinating in them, drop them out the window on Cong villages. I mean the guy’s beautiful. A top-grade infidel.”

“You do make him sound attractive,” she said.

Dwiggins’ belch sounded cavernous. “I talked to him. He’s between jobs right now. He’s willing to listen to your proposition.”

“Where and when?”

“Nassau. If you want to talk to him you have to go there. He can’t come to Washington right now.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe he ought to tell you that. I don’t like telling tales out of school. You haven’t had second thoughts, have you?”

“No.”

She heard him drink—sucking swallows. “I hope they don’t write this up as Dwiggins’ folly,” he said. “I hope you don’t get killed or something.”

“Tell me about this Crobey person.”

“Well there are people who like him. And then there are people who find him a thoroughly poisonous creep. You mustn’t trust any of these guys. They can be trusted to obey the laws of their own existence—they’d never walk into a potential trap without reco

“All right, you’ve forewarned me. What about Crobey?”

“You ask him. He’ll tell you whatever he wants you to know about himself. It’s better that way.”

Hooting pedestrians out of the way, the taxi carried her along a stifling narrow passage. Black people occasionally stooped to peer at her through the open window of the cab. Their faces were sullen like thunderheads.

The driver kept up a ru

She paid him twelve dollars: the fare from the airport—exorbitant but not worth a quarrel. She slung the overnight bag by its strap over her shoulder and clipped up the worn steps. Hunks of stucco had peeled off the walls leaving concave gray scars. Once there’d been a front door but the powdered remains of its frame testified to the earnestness of the termites that had demolished it. A child startled her, bursting out of the darkness and rushing past her with a leap to clear the steps; another child followed, giving chase, whooping in mock anger. Urchins, both of them in rags. She might have been in Harlem.

A wooden sign hung on chains from the corridor ceiling above a door on the right, letters painted in a fading crescent legend: Manager—Ring Bell. She rang.

A black woman opened it. Very fat and, from the smell and the eyes, a little drunk—cheerfully high: She smiled beatifically in Carole’s face. “Yes mom?”

“I’m looking for Harry Crobey.”

“Oh, you the lady from the States. Crobey expecting you. He gone down Paradise Bar.” The fat woman squeezed past her and waddled to the porch. She wore a sleeveless dress, patterns of red and gold; when she pointed up the street the flab dangled under her arm and billowed like a sail. “You go up that corner and turn the left, mom, you see Paradise Bar up there.”

“Thank you.”

“Yes mom.” The woman gri

Walking around the corner she felt dark eyes on her and was u

The bar was vast and low-ceilinged, stinking of beer and pounding with jukebox regurgitations of steel-drum band music. A group of young men in T-shirts stood at a pin-bowling table sliding the chuck around with boisterous violence; five or six men were ranged along the bar and the only white in the place was a man at a tiny three-legged table by the wall. He watched her with no expression until she walked toward him. Then he stood up. Not excessively tall; not King Kong at all. He looked as if he had once been presentable enough but had gone a bit to seed. He had a lot of sable hair thatched over his forehead; his white shirt, open down to the third button and with the sleeves rolled up, was clean enough but needed ironing—perhaps it had been too long in a suitcase. She put him at more than forty but the more defeated her.