James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (44 page)

He was six-eight. He ran 140. He had a Fu Manchu stash. He wore a purple porkpie and a madras suit. Two .45's, two emerald rings, a crystal neck pendant filled with blood.

Froggy braked. The jig beamed and tossed rose petals in the Jeep. They were scented. They drifted down and perfumed up the Krew.

“I am Luc Duhamel. Welcome to my kingdom, baby boys.”

His palace was a stone hut with a BAR placement and a barbed-wire fence. A speedboat was moored in the water. A golf cart was tethered to a flagpole. Three voodoo-sect flags flew. The yard was strewn with dead rodents. Carnivore birds swooped and gorged.

Luc sat them down inside. The walls were sequined. Everyone got their own faux-mink chair. Luc served klerin liquor in rhinestone goblets. Everyone sipped hesitant and swallowed it intact.

Luc took his coat off. His skinny arms were needle-tracked. Crutch got big-eyed. Mesplede and the Cubans deadpanned it.

Mesplede said, “
En français
?”

Luc shook his head. “English, baby boy. There is no challenge in speaking one's native tongue.”

Saldívar said, “Heroin.” Gómez-Sloan said, “Smack.” Morales said, “The beast from the East.”

Canestel rubbed a fake beard—the kill-Castro code. Luc said, “Yes, Colonel Smith informed me. He said these men will become your
bons frères
.”

Froggy sipped klerin liquor. “We are purchasing a PT boat. It can do forty knots.”

Saldívar sipped klerin liquor. “Colonel Smith said you have a heroin source in Puerto Rico.”

Morales gagged on klerin. “It is a U.S. protectorate, but
Tiger Klaw
will be very fast.”

Gómez-Sloan said, “We understand that President Duvalier must be compensated.”

Canestel
sniffed
his klerin. “It is a three-island parlay. We will profit and Cuban Communists will die.”

Luc looked at Crutch and pointed to his goblet. Crutch guzzled the whole thing and saw stars.

“And you, baby boy? Have you anything to say?”

“Sir, I'm just happy to be here.”

The Krew ate dinner in Gazcue. Ivar Smith and Terry Brundage joined them. Dominicans dined late. It was pushing midnight. Crutch was achy from the ride back. He was amphetamized. He kept brain-screening the dead kids. Three gunshots, no hands and feet.

The restaurant was open-air and right off the Malecón. Salt air had the wallpaper withered down to strips. The other guys talked death shit and chowed with gusto. Crutch poked at a squid and eyed women.

They were dining upscale. It was light-skin turf. He had a good range of Spanish land-grant types. His daily rev was incessant. Late-night uppers weirdly re-volted him and put certain women in slow motion. His brain camera clicked for stills and panned for sensuous movement. Women ate, talked, laughed and touched their friends or escorts. He knew when to look and how to go with the swirl.

A La Banda dude dropped by the table. Ivar Smith palmed an envelope. The dude said, “From Bebe Rebozo.” Smith rubbed his fake beard. Crutch zoned them out. Morales nudged Gómez-Sloan. They said, “
Pariguayo
” in sync.

Crutch smiled and played with his food. The swirl re-adjusted peripherally. A woman crushed out a cigarette, tossed her head and exhaled. Her hair flew. A ceiling fan churned her smoke. She wore buckled high-heel shoes and a pale green dress. She raised her arms and tied her hair up. Dark stubble, beaded sweat. She was pale, with brown freckles. She wore a man's wristwatch.

Crutch walked to the john. The woman adios'd her friends and went out the front door. Crutch ducked through the kitchen, cut down an alley and hit the street ten yards behind her.

She took Calle Pasteur to Avenida Independencia. She took Máximo Gómez to the Malecón bluffs. A sea breeze tossed her dress up. She pushed it down like it was funny. Crutch fell back to twenty yards and reframed his shot. She walked
fast
. His head processed it
slow
.

She turned back on a no-name street. The sea breeze evaporated. The turf went residential. She smoked. Window light caught her plumes on the updraft.

Crutch fell back five yards. The neighborhood was swank—ancient houses, eggshell white, no loud colors. She cut left on Avenida Bolívar. She unlocked the door of a slick two-story pad.

Crutch stood across the street and framed window lights. A blond woman tidied books on a shelf. His woman walked up behind her. The blond woman turned around. They smiled at the same moment and fell into a kiss.

The moment went fluid and held. Crutch watched. Their bodies merged and filled the window frame. Their hands went here and there and enhanced the embrace. The kiss
held
. They made it go
faster
, he made it go
slow
.

The light went off. His woman hit a switch. He strained to hear voices and heard none.

• • •

He called in sick. Froggy said, “
Ça va
” and “bad timing.” “
Tiger Klaw
is in dry dock at St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica. You will miss her arrival.”

He laid in supplies: uppers, coffee, scratch pads and pens. He brought in three auxiliary fans. He attacked the code.

He started with the letters
S
and K. He gleaned them from CIA substitution-code study. Three-number designations announced each
S
and K. Each number required subtraction and multiplication tolls. Sums designated letters of the alphabet. It was arbitrary. The sum stages varied at different tabulation points. The code-breaker's job: form words and letters from number gibberish.

Numbers, letters,
symbols
. Let's assault the symbols first.

They were squiggles, stick figures and
X
marks. They dotted Gretchen/Celia's address book at irregular intervals. The CIA codebook listed them as voodoo-derived. “The voodoo priest's depiction of spiritual chaos while a victim is hexed.”

Symbols—go. Do not move on to letter numbers until you know
.

He ate uppers, he drank coffee, he ran three fans plus the AC. He stared at the forty-nine symbols in Gretchen/Celia's book. He poured sweat in an igloo.

Three symbols repeated: squiggle, stick figure,
X
mark. They had to have the same
repeated
meaning. He stared at the book for nine straight hours. His brain jumped to this:

Repetition meant banality. It meant boredom on Gretchen/Celia's part. She spiced her narrative up to amuse herself and to confuse potential readers. The symbols did not bode portent. They were innocuous.

His second jump: they were abbreviations. His third jump: the explicated text would be coherent, but shorthanded. Gretchen/Celia's cursive writing was fevered. She was anxious, she composed in haste, the code work absorbed her energy. His fourth jump: the symbols were substitutes for
and, the
and
to
.

He crossed the symbols out and added those words on his copy sheet. It felt coherent. The placement felt correct.

His chest hurt. His heart banged blood to his rib cage. He heard voices in his head. He saw
THE EYE
and the
SEVERED HANDS AND FEET
without conjuring them. He hemorrhaged weight and felt his trousers go slack.

Two days in. Additions, subtractions and multiplications brain-broiling. He passed out, despite the uppers. He woke up seeing numbers. He developed a tremor in his writing hand. He wasn't sure of what he had. He decided to call repeated sums vowels. He thought he got
L
and
T
. He kept getting the sum 14. His world went tilt.

The Fourteenth of June Movement, aka 6/14. Castro-backed Reds invade the D.R.

And:

The
preceded each 14. His code break was valid so far.

That gave him the
O
and the
F
. That gave him the
J
, the
U
and the
N
. Re-tilt: the vowel
E
was always in the right place.

He ate more uppers, he drank more coffee, his piss turned near brown. His skin hugged his bones like a junkie's. He got six more number-letter sums that felt right on. He passed out for five hours. He woke up woozy and
prayed
. He forced himself to eat an apple. He chased it with a handful of ups. He got re-re-re-re-re-re-vitalized and started building words on code work and instinct.

It took eleven hours. It confirmed Managua. Yes, it's a paper curse and a book of the dead. No, it's much more.

Abbreviations, omitted words, fractured text. Fully coherent despite it. The story of 6/14/59 inside out.

It's 6/13/59. The movement is Castro-backed and based in the Beard's captive Cuba. Two converted yachts sail the Windward Passage to the north D.R. shore. Two hundred rebels are aboard. They've got M1 Garands, bazookas and machine guns. It's all men minus two: Joan Klein and Celia Reyes.

The force lands at Estero Hondo and Maimón. Dominican Army sharpshooters are waiting. All the rebels are captured or killed.

It's 6/14/59. A DC-3 departs from Cuba's Red Shore. Eighty armed men are poised. They wear the armbands of the Unión Patriótica Dominicana. The plane flies under-radar low and lands outside Constanza. The rebels kill soldiers guarding the airfield and steal their vehicles. They race into town, kill more soldiers, run to nearby mountain ravines and hide.

Army patrols scoured the hills and captured or killed the rebels. Seaborne and airborne rebels were held at the San Isidro Air Force Base and at Trujillo's torture chamber, La Cuarenta. Trujillo's personal goon squad hacked them with machetes and fried them in electric chairs. The Goat ordered huge roundups of suspected 6/14 sympathizers. Simpatico government figures were assassinated. Comsymps were tortured, killed, reluctantly released. The 6/14 Movement was truly born in the Goat's prisons. The Beard brooded over the gone-bust invasion. Anti-Fidel sentiment swept the D.R. Right. The Goat was offed in '61. The Beard staged a second invasion on 11/29/63. This group was formally called the Agrupación Política Catorce de Junio. The rebels numbered 125 this time. They landed at six north-shore locations, shot some soldiers and fled to the hills. Interim prez Juan Bosch ordered a “rabbit hunt.” Soldiers combed the hills and wiped out the rebels. A few survived.
They infiltrated the D.R. Left and made revolutionary woo-woo anonymously.

Crutch read Gretchen/Celia's pages. He kept jumping ahead of the decoded text. He was voodoo-vexed and amphetamized. His head banged blood to his rib cage.

The base narrative stopped. An “Expression of Solidarity” with slaughtered Haitians followed. The Goat and the Midget were accused of genocide.

Lists: the Trujillo Haitian dead, the Balaguer Haitian dead, 6/14 sympathizers abducted and killed by La Banda. List: “Excommunicated” 6/14 traitors killed by the members themselves. Lists: names, dates and death locations.

There's a single name at the bottom: María Rodríguez Fontonette.

Her monicker/nickname/political alias is “Tattoo.”

Her date of
disappearance
is June '68. She
vanished
in Los Angeles.

The tattoo, the skin color, the location/date.

It's that night.

It's Horror House.

It's the night he saw Joan and Gretchen/Celia kiss.

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 3/29/69. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

March 29, 1969

Eleanora rules my days. She is a mighty empress and imperious ruler of my heart, as well as an exhausting bundle of ceaseless energy and need. She focuses me and deflects my actions and thoughts not directly related to her. My husband is back in Philadelphia now; his months-long presence here amounted to indentured servitude, as well as assisted me in the prosaic tasks of new motherhood and kept me away from Dwight. Now, I am alone with Eleanora—and, in fact, besieged by her—and Dwight is back with a besieging force.

Our fight at Echo Park was horrible; I have no right to question his actions with Joan, for our very union is duplicitous and a grave misdeed in and of itself. One difference between Dwight and me: adultery is hardly as onerous as spawning political chaos. Another difference: I wish to skate by with my misdeeds, while Dwight harbors the buried urge to be punished for his. That is a succinct primer on my love for him.

I see political misdeeds escalating and find myself reflexively attributing them to the FBI, Mr. Hoover and, by extension, Dwight. Two Panthers were shot and killed at UCLA in January. The killings allegedly derived from a long-standing Panther-US grievance and came to a head over the creation of an Afro-American Studies Center on campus. I know that the Bureau has double agents in both organizations and is committed to spawning inter-group discord. A Panther spokesman called the killings “political assassinations carried out by US on orders by the pig power structure.” I have come to hate the word
pig
as much as I hate the word
nigger
and find myself damning Dwight for his perception of ingrained criminality in the black-nationalist movement. Indictments are pending against numerous Panthers in New York City for an alleged plot to dynamite-bomb the Penn Central tracks at rush hour. Are they insane? Don't they know
black people
would have been killed? I bomb monuments and have never physically damaged a human being. Am
I
insane to be doing this under Dwight Holly's sanction? What horrible price will I pay for
my role in assuaging this man's guilt, and where does that guilt specifically come from?

Mr. Hoover seems determined to go out in a psychotically hateful blaze of glory, and he has found an unrelenting minion in Dwight, who now has Joan Klein to aid and abet and perhaps comfort him. I am afraid that Dwight will passively permit or actively suborn the BTA and MMLF in the sale of narcotics and that he has found a willing accomplice in Joan. Joan understands the concept of narcotics as a tool of revolution and has deployed it before. I fear that Joan and Dwight seek the same physical end for antithetical political motives. They want to bring the BTA and MMLF to a point of public censure and blithely underestimate the human cost.