Season of the Machete

  After that, she was sure the blond man was following her. Keeping her in sight, anyway. Well, he seemed to be….

  Jane looked down at her watch. Glowing red numbers in the dark bedroom: 10:43. An hour and ten minutes had passed since Peter had called. Usually the ride from Coastown took just over an hour. Add five minutes more from Trelawney.

  Standing there beside the dark front window, she heard another onslaught of apples on the roof. More blasted rose apples.

  Then footsteps.

  Then a young woman was outside, calling her name at the front door….

  And then one of the shuttered windows was being broken down with something sharp and powerful like an ax.

  May 7, 1979, Monday

  Massacre at Elizabeth’s Fancy

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The planning is usually interesting. Getting close to the final time is interesting. But the climax, the big kill, was usually something of an anti climax … not to the victims, of course.

  The Rose Diary

  May 7, 1979; Mandeville, San Dominica

  Monday Morning. The Seventh Day of the Season.

  At 4:00 A.M. on the seventh day, Jane’s eyes popped open wide.

  She saw nothing at first. Then the long shadow of a man sitting by her bed. Then bright afterimages of running men and machetes. And a tall woman who spoke very sweetly, as if she were Jane’s best friend.

  As she began to scream, a night lamp clicked on.A shiny aluminum lamp nailed to the wall. The man sitting underneath the light was the chief of police. He had a small black pipe stuck in his mouth. A holster and gun were slung over his short-sleeved white shirt.

  “Shhhhhhh … you’re in the Mandeville Hospital,” he whispered to the blond girl. “You’re all right. Everything is all right now.”

  The black man smiled and winked at her, then he clicked the light off.

  Jane lay in the dark, shivering badly. Her teeth began chattering, and she started to cry. Thought about Peter. Just wanted to hold tight. Hold tight.

  “What is happening?”

  She wasn’t sure whether she’d said the words out loud or just thought them loud. She started to shiver; then to cry; then to hug herself because it was so damn awful.

  Then she was asleep again.

  In her dreams they came to the hospital for her. They came somewhere for her. The two black men. The tall blond man with the wraparound sunglasses. The young woman…. They kept screaming at her to tell them where Peter was. … “I don’t know! I don’t know! Please don’t hurt me.”

  The heavyset black police chief smiled at her. He put his forefinger to his lips. Made a little fire in the bowl of his black pipe.

  “Shhhh. Shhhh. No one can hurt you now,” Dr. Johnson said.

  Even though the worst day of the season of the machete had begun.

  Capejohn, San Dominica

  Monday Afternoon.

  Like a white kite in the wind, a seagull swung back and forth high over his head.

  Aaaaa! Aaaaa! Aaaaa!

  Lying in a buttery midday sun, Damian felt a wonderful calm begin to drift over him. He and Carrie were approaching a definite benchmark now. The last of the island’s terrors.

  Ah—there was nothing like being in the sun for reviving one’s prospects.

  He could feel the salt water drying on his face and legs. The hot sun broiled him in a way that made it seem rather fun.

  For perhaps the five hundredth time, Damian reviewed the final details in his mind.

  The massacree.

  Carrie’s, then his own, escape.

  There would be no Nickie Handy-style double crosses this time out. No meeting up with Brooks Campbell or Harold Hill in dark, deserted alleyways. All that was left for him now was to set out a last tasty morsel of bait for Great Western Air Transport. Something for King Rat Brooks Campbell to nibble on.

  Then a check on the plot’s final playing piece— a tricky strong-arm killer named Clive Lawson.

  Then it was home again, home again, jiggity jog.

  Mandeville, San Dominica

  At 1:00 P.M. a man in a summer sports coat and white hat took a deep breath, then approached an old woman wearing a Red Cross hat who sat at the first-floor reception desk inside the Mandeville Hospital.

  “My name is Max Westerhuis,” the man announced in an impatient, self-important tone. “I’m told I have to come to this desk to get a pass to see Miss Cooke.”

  The elderly nurse reached into her desk drawer. She took out a plain brown clipboard. She checked a list of visitors cleared to see hospital patients that was written on sheets of paper attached to the board. There was only one visitor cleared for Miss J. Cooke in room 206.

  The nurse wrote out a slip for Maximilian Westerhuis, manager of the Plantation Inn.

  As the policeman posted at room 206 opened the door for him, the man in the white hat put a finger to his lips. “Miss Cooke,” he said in the same official tone he’d used at the front desk.

  “Peter,” Jane whispered as soon as he’d closed the door behind him.

  She looked very pale and shaken to him. Large gauze bandages were wrapped around her neck and both arms; an intravenous bottle hung over the bed.

  Peter went to her and they held each other tightly, saying things that should have been said long before then, expressing feelings they’d both been afraid of.

  As they finally pulled apart, Jane began to tell him about the three people who’d come to their cottage at the Plantation Inn. How they’d wanted to know where he was hiding. All the things they’d done to try to make her talk…. For his part, Peter told Jane about his surprise visit at Brooks Campbell’s; the Mafia connection; the big blowup that was apparently coming soon.

  “Well, what do we do now?”

  “The first thing—I want to get you out of this hospital. We must be dealing with a black version of the Keystone Kops here. Look at how easily I got in.”

  “Peter, if they’d been after me—they had me last night. All they wanted to know was where you were.”

  “That doesn’t make complete sense. If you did see him yesterday, they’d want you, too. Wouldn’t they? Oh, hell, I don’t know what’s going on around here.”

  The young man sat down on the hospital bed. His shoulders began to sag. His neck muscles felt unbelievably tense and twisted.

  “Peter, did you see anything that day besides the blond man?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I did…. The best solution I can come up with,” Peter finally said, “is that we both have to get off San Dominica. I want to try Washington.” He looked at Jane. “Will you meet me there? In a day—a few days. There’s a hotel in Washington called the Hay-Adams. It’s right across from the White House.”

  For the first time that afternoon, Jane smiled. “Good. Then we can take this thing right to the top. We can’t do any worse than at the U.S. embassy, right?” She kissed him hard, then rested her head on his shoulder. “Darling Max.”

  “Somebody’s going to listen to us. It can’t be this unbelievably fucked-up everywhere.”

  Jane smiled again. “Maximilian Westerhuis! God, Peter.”

  They both started to laugh, hushing each other so the guard wouldn’t come in. Then they hugged again, secured their pact to meet in Washington by Wednesday. Peter left the hospital the very same way he’d originally come in.

  Much, much too easily.

  Coastown, San Dominica

  Inside the Princess Hotel, meanwhile, Carrie sat with the gleaming white doors to her loggia flung open wide. Bright sunshine and a sympathetic breeze drifted in. Smells of fresh flowers came up from a pretty glen two stories below.

  Carrie stared hard at the garish face looking back at her from the dressing room mirror. She was marginally, begrudgingly satisfied that her face looked about right for what it had to do. A subtle touch of razzle-dazzle. Real-hair half-lashes. Close attention to detail, right down to her silver slippers.

  Carrie checked her wristw
atch. If everything went well, she was about six hours away from Washington now. All she had to do was slip quietly past the police, the CIA, and half the army of San Dominica.

  At 1:30 on the dot, Carrie Rose left for Robert Kennedy Airport with her fingers, legs, and eyes crossed. And when she walked into the airport terminal, she discovered that her dressing room preparation had really been quite thorough. She needn’t have worried.

  She looked like just about every other woman there.

  By 2:30 Carrie Rose was on a Pan Am flight out of the Caribbean.

  When the three o’clock news from Puerto Rico came on the brassy transistor radio nearby, Damian ‘ started to gather up his clothes. The tall blond man put on dark sunglasses, a white deckhand’s hat, a white cotton-madras shirt.

  At 3:10 he walked into a shabby open-air cafe. The outdoor restaurant ran the length of Cape John Beach on thin, crusty gray pilings—pelican’s legs.

  From the cafe pay phone, Rose called the American embassy.

  Receptionist.

  Male secretary.

  Put on hold.

  Three-seventeen.

  Three twenty-one. Getting slightly humorous.

  Brooks Campbell finally spoke. “Hello, this is Campbell.”

  Damian said, “Listen very carefully and don’t say a fucking word until I’m finished … In fifty-four minutes, at four-fifteen, Colonel Dred is going to commit his first major act of violence. This will be the final act we’ve planned for you….”

  “Rose! …”

  “Shut the fuck up! … We expect you to try to stop us from leaving San Dominica after this. But if you do, I’m going to kill you. I promise you, Campbell. Here’s to poor Nickie Handy, chump.”

  “Rose.”

  Click.

  “Goddammit, stop playing games!” Brooks Campbell screamed into the loud buzzing of the telephone.

  Shortly after Rose’s call, Campbell contacted Harold Hill in Washington.

  “All hell is about to break loose here. I’m going to need a lot of help now. But I’m going to get them, Harry.”

  “I think you will. I really do,” said Harry the Hack.

  Click.

  At 5:30, feeling desperate and confused, Peter Macdonald telephoned Campbell at the U.S. embassy. He was informed by a very official-sounding American man that Mr. Campbell had left for the day. Peter was then told that all Americans were being asked to stay off the streets.

  There’d been a massacre.

  Click.

  Elizabeth’s Fancy, San Dominica

  Tyndall’s Goat Highway goes nowhere except to a restored nineteenth-century sugar-cane plantation called Elizabeth’s Fancy—and when Elizabeth’s Fancy closes at four each afternoon, the Goat Highway goes nowhere.

  The last bus from the plantation carried the final tour groups back to their hotels. It also brought back a woman ticket taker, a forty-two-year-old Bartender-manager from Liverpool, England, and three security guards from Tanner Men.

  The bus was a tongue-red-and-black double-decker manufactured by Rolls-Royce in 1953. Its nickname was Grasshopper.

  Grasshopper had a maximum speed of forty-four MPH and misaligned springs that made it appear to hop down the bumpy Goat Highway. Because its second deck was so much higher than the jungle brush, Grasshopper could be seen from five miles away.

  In this case, however, the red top half of the bus was being observed from just two miles off.

  The three black men standing at the edge of the Goat Highway all held high-powered M-16 rifles manufactured in Detroit, Michigan. Just behind them stood a line of teenage boys. Each boy held a sharp machete knife.

  “How’d you compaare dis M-16 an th’ old M-14?” Colonel Died was saying to the African.

  Kingfish Toone’s eyes didn’t move away from the dirt road. Right beside him, the Cuban was toeing dust like a stubborn or angry horse. He was looking forward to shooting Dred very much now.

  “There is no comparison.” The African’s deep voice finally came. “The M-16 will strike any target with three times the impact of a conventional rifle. It would shoot straight through a line of five men.” The mercenary took a silver bullet out of his shirt pocket. He held the bullet lengthwise between thick, coal-black fingers.

  “Still another war toy. Invented by the Americans, I suppose. The shell is coated with plastic. It leaves no stains. Impossible to find with a medical X-ray. Quite diabolical, really. Think about it, Colonel Dred.”

  “Dey cost?” the guerrilla asked. “Th’ guns, nan dose bullet. Diabolik bullet you have.”

  “I don’t follow costs very closely.” Toone shrugged. “Perhaps five hundred apiece for the rifles.”

  “Hyiuuu.” The guerrilla chief shrieked and laughed. Then Dred walked away to make a last check on his soldiers.

  In the back of his mind was the delicious thought that within hours he would be more important than Che, maybe even than Fidel Castro. Something like a black Arafat … holding the sun for ransom instead of oil.

  The driver of the red bus, forty-nine-year-old Franklin James, was feeling sweaty and itchy and most of all malcontent, this particularly sweaty afternoon. As the antique double-decker bumped along, he could feel the whole Goat Highway in the palm of his hand. In the shivering black knob of the stick shift.

  Jus’ what is th’ problem now? James talked to himself. Tired of drivin’ dis funny-time bus. Earnin’ yo’ money too easy, hey, mon? What to break yo’ ass for it lak nigger? Admit it, mon, yo’ got it easy. Admit to yo’self, truth, Franklin….

  Just to break the everyday monotony, though, the driver thought he would do something revolutionary today: go left instead of right at the vee in the road about a quarter of a mile ahead. He would take the scenic route instead of the Goat Highway this day. Through the old sugar-cane fields.

  Franklin James looked in his rearview mirror and saw straw beach hats and lobster red faces. A pretty blond bitch in a halter top was playing with her tittie straps. There were a few empty seats for a change, too.

  At the vee in the road, the bus driver took a left instead of the usual Goat Highway route. As he made the wrong turn, the red-faced manager of Elizabeth’s Fancy jumped up in the third seat of the bus.

  “This is the wrong road, you idiot bastard. Back it up, boy. Get on the Goat road.”

  Which Franklin James did with a subservient smile and not a word of protest. Admit it, mon, yo’ got it easy.

  Most of Dred’s men were lying on their stomachs back twenty to forty yards from the dirt road. A few bare-chested boys had shimmied up into coconut trees.

  Colonel Dred was paying no attention. Instead the twenty-seven-year-old man watched the burly African and the Cuban.

  A man smoking a cigarette and wearing a striped woolen hat shouted to Dred from out of a tree. “Dey comin’ ‘round in ‘bout annudder minute.” The soldier slipped his cigarette butt down out of the tree.

  Monkey Dred turned and gave a hand gesture to the rest of his guerrillas. The sound of rifles clicked off echoes on both sides of the Goat Highway.

  Then Dred put the sleek M-16 to his own cheek. He sighted it very carefully.

  Squeezed.

  Squeezed.

  The whole top half of the Cuban’s head splattered. Blood splashed onto tall stalks of grass as far as thirty feet away. Kingfish Toone was thrown forward with his huge black arms stretched out wide, a big dark hole in the back of his khaki shirt.

  “Bad kind a niggers,” Monkey Dred shouted to the soldier in the tree. “Drivin’ Cadillac. Warin’ perfuume, yo’ know.”

  Besides, the executions had been well paid for by Damian Rose. They’d earned Dred two more precious machine guns.

  Speckles of red splashed through a latticework of jungle green. Then Colonel Dred could see the upper deck of the bus again. Sun rays ricocheted off the scaling red roof. Some banana wrens passed by. Every window in the old bus was flung open wide. Americans, Germans, English, and South Americans looked out on handsome m
ahogany trees, blooming wild lilies, parakeets.

  Jungle, mahn, jungle.

  “Ay pretty!” Dred shouted to the treetop birds. Jacamars. Parrots. His adrenaline was flowing like the teeming streets of Trenchtown. The juices made him feel like a Rastafarian superman. Jah. A walking, fast-talking contradiction.

  The teetering double-decker bus had turned down a narrow straightaway less than a hundred yards away. It was coming straight at them, down a tunnel of coconut and fir trees.

  Dred’s men began to talk to one another. Enthusiastic shouts. Hypertense babble.

  The red bus was fuzzy and just a little unreal through shimmering waves of heat. High blond weeds fanned away from it like flying hair. Palms and ferns loudly scraped the roof and windows.

  Dred was staring so hard, anticipating so very much, that the bus seemed to stop moving. To freeze on the straightaway.

  “Ro-bert,” he screamed. “Ro-bert!”

  A tiny rifleman with sick yellow eyes and a yellow Che beret came running up beside him. The man’s big M-16 rifle made him seem like a child.

  “Stay by me, Robert. Now watch closely. I want you to shoot it.”

  As if the red bus were a charging elephant.

  Up ahead, Franklin James watched a young woman and boy step into the Goat Highway. Barefoot, dressed in sun-bleached rags, they stood in the middle of the road, both of them waving excitedly at the bus.

  James cursed to himself, but he touched his foot to the brakes. He shifted gears and, before the bus stopped fully, had the folding doors crashing open. “Hey, what is it, woman?” the fat black man shouted angrily.

  “Yo’ can take us to main road?” the woman screamed through the open bus door. “Bway is bahd sick, mon.”

  The bus driver’s face took on a pained look.’ ‘Oh, lay-dy! I can’t ride no-body not fram dat plantation, yo’ know.”

  “My bway is sick!” the black woman screamed.