Chapter 11

Glenn Anders slouched in an uncomfortable wooden chair while Perez flipped through the photo cards with the repetitive efficiency of a bank teller counting money. Perez had been through mug-shot canvasses before; just the same Anders was dubious—Perez flipped them over so quickly. After a while there was a danger of forgetting what one was looking for. One’s eyes began to go out of focus and one might flip right past the vital one.

A girl in an Afro natural hairdo and bone earrings came in. She put a paper bag on the table and smiled brightly and left.

Anders removed two capped Styrofoam cups from the bag.

“Yes. Black please, with two sugars, yes?”

The room was prim and sinister, the windows set high. The tile floor sloped to a center drain and the walls were slick with high-gloss green paint. This was police headquarters: a washable room designed for interrogations.

Anders stirred sugar into the coffee with the wooden tongue-depressor stick and pushed the cup across the table to Perez. “Take a break. Tell me again what he looked like.”

Perez—slight, birdy, poplin suit, fake silk tie—had a cocky way of narrowing his eyes and dropping his voice near a whisper, as confidential as a desk clerk pimping for a girl on the third floor. As it happened he was neither pimp nor pusher; Perez was a plainclothes police detective.

Perez said, “I wasn’t so close to see him clearly,” and ended the sentence with a nervous meaningless laugh that sounded like a telephone’s busy signal. The habit irritated Anders. Perez, proud of his English, said, “I was tired to sit waiting in the car, I was getting out for walk, then I hear the footsteps, yes? In the open he startled me and I went up in a doorway to look like I’m ringing the bell of the house. I am afraid he spotted me. I think so, yes?” And another honk of laughter, this one to cover his shame. It was another point against him that he still hadn’t understood Anders’ question.

Anders contained his irritation. None of it meant much anyhow. Likely the whole thing was a false lead. The Volkswagen had provoked the attention of the bureaucracy and Anders was obliged to follow up dutifully but he wasn’t sure it would take him anywhere.

Reasoning that Rodrigo Rodriguez might spend part of the ten million dollars’ ransom on armaments, Anders had activated the clumsy apparatus. Inquiries were made in seventeen ports. The report that flagged Anders’ attention came from Fajardo, the port town at the northeast tip of the island of Puerto Rico.

The dealer was a regular police informant who ran a small import business in molasses and wine and occasionally cocaine. He had reported a visit from a Cuban who went by the name of Cielo, was unfamiliar to the dealer and had visited him to inquire obliquely into the possibility of purchasing certain arms—mainly mortars and rocket launchers, not hip-pocket stuff. The dealer informed his visitor that he did not traffic in such items. When the visitor left the dealer made a note of the plate number of the Volkswagen and telephoned to his contact on the police.

It was tenuous but it had drawn Anders’ eye because of the locale and the nature of the request. Not just anyone had much interest in mortars and rockets; and Crobey’s clue had given him a reason to be interested in Puerto Rico.

Anders had flown into San Juan and exercised a few quiet pressures to set in motion a search for the Volkswagen. The dealer from Fajardo had gone through the same photo files that Perez had before him now; the dealer hadn’t singled out a face but he was an odd vague sort and a simple experiment had proved he had an almost nonexistent memory for faces. Under repeated questioning he’d proved uncertain about nearly everything. He couldn’t remember what clothes Cielo had worn; yes, Cielo might have been older, might have been heavier—it was hard to say. The dealer had gone home bewildered and Rosalia, her hand on Anders’ shoulder, had exhaled with a slumping sag of disappointment.

The name Cielo clearly was not so much an alias as a nom de guerre, a code name; You can call me Cielo, it meant nothing to the police or the agency; quite possibly it was a name adopted for one operation, as disposable as a paper wrapper.

But then the Volkswagen had been identified by its license number and the police had sent Perez to cover it. Now Perez had seen the man who drove the car and Perez had been trained to identify faces.

Anders said, “He didn’t have a belly or a beard.”

“No. No beard. Big in the shoulders and as tall as you, yes? But no heavier than you are. One-ninety, perhaps two hundred. No more.”

“The face? Tell me again now.”

“Comó se dice, square, yes? Latino but not too dark. Not Indio. Short hair, not crew-cut but short and neat, and not bald. A, how do you say, widow’s peak, yes?”

“Then he didn’t wear a hat.”

“No, no hat.” Perez scowled. “The face, yes. I have a good picture here.” He tapped his temple. “A square face, heavy bones, is hard but not stupid, you understand? Wide face, very wide.”

“And the clothes?”

“Khaki jeans, a light windbreaker jacket, faded gray. Work boots like a car mechanic. Your clothes would fit him.”

“When you first saw him he wasn’t coming out of a house, you’re sure of that?”

“He came out a driveway between two houses. From behind, the next street I think, yes?”

If it was Rodriguez, Anders thought, he’d have been smart enough to leave his car parked several blocks from his destination. It made for the dreary prospect of house-to-house inquiries.

Perez said, “If he is in these pictures I’ll find him. It’s a promise, yes?”

“All right. I’ll check back with you.” Anders left the second cup of coffee for him.

The federal building looked like something the Spaniards might have constructed to contain lunatics and violent offenders. The agency had borrowed a desk for him in an office attached to the Department of Agriculture; officially he was out-of-bounds on U.S. soil. At least the office had a scrambler phone. He found Rosalia there—she gripped his tie and pulled him down, licking his mouth lasciviously.

Anders poked both fists into his kidneys and reared far back. “You yank at me like that again, you’ll have me in traction for a week.”

Rosalia leaned leeringly forward, straining cloth with breasts. “Your place or mine?” She was in a springy droll mood.

“You’ve got fabulous boobs,” he told her. “But it’s the wrong time of day to be caressing each other’s erogenous zones. Did George Wilkins call in?”

“Not yet. If we got married could we still work together?”

“I doubt it. Against regulations.”

“Then we won’t get married until you retire.”

“Got it all worked out, I see.”

From the beginning she had amused him with her cub-reporter bounce and cuddly lovability; she’d inculcated in him a kind of playfulness he thought he’d lost. It was beginning to occur to him that perhaps she was the girl to whom he wanted to be faithful: Despite her overt sexuality she possessed the soft nesty instincts of a purring kitten.

“Oh dear. I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.” She rummaged through papers. “Here it is. Mr. O’Hillary wants you to call him.”

“God.” He fixed his glance on the phone as if he expected it to serve a subpoena on him.

“Also there was a call from Harry Crobey.”

“How the hell did he know where to find me?”

“I gather he called the FBI and they transferred him to the Justice Department and they transferred him to—”

“No. I mean how’d he know I’d be in San Juan at all?”

“Are you asking me?” She ripped the page off her pad. “He’d like to meet you tonight at half past seven for dinner at the Tres Candelas in Old Town. He said he’d be bringing a guest.”

“Carole Marchand?”

“He didn’t mention a name.”

“All right. Why don’t you come along?”

“Love to. I’ll put on something slinky.”

He regarded her husky ripe shape. “Sure. You’d better ring O’Hillary for me and put it on the scrambler.”

O’Hillary—smooth, avuncular, elegant: “Glenn, how are you? Any fix on Rodriguez?”

“Not yet.”

“Can you be overheard?”

“Only by my assistant.”

“Ask her to leave, will you?”

Anders cupped the mouthpiece. “He wants privacy.”

With genial disgust Rosalia lifted her nose into the air and went out, pulling the door shut with a quiet reproachful click.

“All right. I’m alone.”

O’Hillary said, “This project of yours has consumed a lot of time in briefings and meetings. It’s becoming a tedious football.”

“What am I supposed to do about that? Drop the ball?”

“It’s not quite that simple, as I’m sure you appreciate. As you know, Glenn, there are varying factions of opinion on this issue. There is, not to put too fine a point on it, an ambivalence in the Administration’s attitude. On the one hand an Ambassador was victimized, an American murdered, and the Administration can’t be seen to condone terrorism—”

Can’t be seen to. That summed up O’Hillary all right.

“At the same time,” O’Hillary went on, “there’s also the matter of the current efforts to ameliorate relations with Cuba.”

Anders could picture him tipped back in his wingback swivel chair with his silk-clad ankles crossed, gently palming the distinguished wave in his silver hair and staring whimsically at a point about a yard above the President’s official photograph.

O’Hillary said, “Conversely Castro is still, in an unofficial way, the enemy. There’s the sticky affairs in Somalia and Ethiopia—and we have people among us who still haven’t forgotten the history of the Angola affair. In certain eyes Fidel Castro remains the bad guy. In regard to the Rodriguez group, there’s still a faction here that takes the understandable position that he who is my enemy’s enemy is perforce my friend. To be blunt, this faction—numbering not an inconsequential few persons in high places—is engaged in the attempt to persuade the Administration to let Rodriguez run and see if perhaps he won’t take care of Castro for them. As a result we’re in dubious straits, my friend. We’re in grave danger of being short-circuited by conflicting orders.”

Whenever O’Hillary turned pedantic and longwinded it meant he was preparing a smoke screen. O’Hillary had an abstract fondness for intrigue as an end rather than a means. He had an infallible intuition for gothic complexities—he thrived on deceptions even when they were superfluous; he was a success in his profession because he had mastered the skill of trick marksmanship—shoot first, then draw a bull’s-eye around the bullet hole.

The principal of survival in Langley was Cover Your Ass; ultimately the decision would come down on one side or the other and O’Hillary would be ready, either way, to end the match with a perfect bull’s-eye—a neat trick and one that might require the sacrifice of a subordinate or two.

Anders knew he had to listen very carefully to O’Hillary now: It wasn’t what O’Hillary said but what he didn’t say.

“I do hope you’re not recording this, Glenn. If things backfire we mustn’t make the error of leaving tape-recorded evidence of our misstatements about, must we.” Like a disagreeable schoolmaster, Anders thought, O’Hillary selected his tone for its prim offensiveness.

“It’s not being recorded.”

“Good. Your instructions—from me, not from above me, and not in writing—are to proceed with the investigation, to locate this man Rodriguez and his little Sherwood Forest band, and to report personally and directly to me and to no one else. You’ll consult with me before taking action of any kind. And you will not take the police or anyone else into your confidence. In other words you must proceed henceforth without police assistance.”

“Then how am I supposed to find them?”

“Wits. Ingenuity.”

“And what am I supposed to tell the police?”

“Tell them the leads proved false. Pull them off the case.”

“You honestly expect me to find Rodriguez without any help?”

“I do. If there’s a man who can do it it’s you.”

“You can butter me up all you want,” Anders said, “but you can’t have me for breakfast. This opens up a provocative can of beans. You want me to find Rodriguez but then keep hands off him. That’s pointless.”

“We must be prepared for whatever decision comes down, mustn’t we. We can do that only by performing thoroughly the task to which we’re officially assigned—the task of intelligence-gathering. Once we fix Rodriguez’s location we can then take whatever action we’re ordered to take. In the meantime nothing is to be filed through normal channels. You’re on your own and I’m your only contact with the company. Understood?”

“In other words if the Administration decides to let him run you don’t want the record to show we knew where to lay hands on him. You want to keep it private because you don’t intend to produce it until it’s absolutely clear you’ll be applauded for producing it. Christ—what a grisly waste,”

“Regardless of provocation you’re to take no action that might jeopardize security. You understand your instructions, don’t you? You’re to find Rodriguez. But you’re to do it in such a way that no one except me knows you’ve done it. Not Rodriguez, not the police, not the agency. No one.”

“We’ll see.” Anders smiled, anticipating the response.

“Don’t give me evasive answers!” He could have heard O’Hillary without a telephone.

It made him laugh aloud. “You’re so easy to string along. Mind your blood pressure. I understand the orders—we may have an argument about it when I get back but I understand them. Anything else on your mind?”

“As long as you’re on the phone you may as well bring me up to date.”