Authors: Season of the Machete
Which was about the time Peter finally heard what Meral Johnson was saying to him.
Running in a low infantry crouch, Damian moved forward, his trooper boots squishing across a slippery wooden ramp at the Tryall Club’s yacht basin. He climbed movable stairs down onto the floating dock, stepped into the lurching Bertram Sportsman, and began to smile in spite of himself.
Then he began to laugh. A chilly, unnatural laugh.
He could barely distinguish voices in the distant, babbling commotion coming from up around the main clubhouse. He saw the thousand-watt floodlights flashing through swaying palm and banana trees up and down the first fairway.
Then the bouncing red lights of two ambulances turned a corner of the clubhouse building. Siren screams cut through the rain and wind like sharp knives.
Finally, after more than a year, after the most insanely exhausting ordeal he’d ever put himself through, it was over and done with.
Up on the Tryall Club’s veranda, the ex-Green Beret, all-American boy, unimpeachable witness, had identified Clive Lawson as the tall blond man from Turtle Bay…. The English killer’s hair, his hairstyle, height, facial features, were nearly identical with the man Macdonald had seen April 25. At a quick glance, Rose and Lawson were look-alikes—and a glance was all Peter had ever had. Fifteen seconds on a bicycle.
Moreover, the way Lawson’s face wound up, it was academic anyway.
The great Damian Rose was officially dead. Killed on his most audacious tympanic contract. The psychological logic of the ploy was classic. Hubris struck again. Precisely the end they all would have predicted from him. Like Evel Knievel dying on a motorcycle.
Now, if Carrie succeeded in Washington, they were home free. No one would come looking for the Roses for quite some time. Maybe not ever.
Another smile drifted over Damian’s thin, pretty lips. The pure satisfaction of playing the game well. The absolute, spine-tingling beauty of it. Like having built one’s own cathedral in this slapdash age.
Moving quickly but quietly, Rose started the blowers, then untied the Dacron stern line that held the Sportsman to San Dominica. The twenty-five-foot speedboat was shaking like mere flotsam in the unsteady sea; the rain continued to teem.
As he unlooped a final knot in the bowline, a man appeared in the hatchway, coming from the sleeping cabin below. The man was tall and thin, dressed in a gray slicker with a hood. He threw back the hood, and his silver-gray hair completed the perfect yacht clubber image.
“Hello, there,” the dark figure said. “My name is Harold Hill. I thought we should meet.”
The director of Great Western Air Transport hoisted himself into the stormy cockpit. Harry the Hack. Dependable Harry.
“Actually, you do nice work.” He continued to speak as he climbed up top. “Stay put, now. Don’t get up on my account. Don’t move a fucking muscle.”
Pointing a dark Walther at the younger man’s heart, Hill rested his bottom on the back of a swivel chair.
“Hair dyed a nice shade of black.” He showed his teeth in an appreciative smile. “Cut to look like some goober from Lithuania. That’s nice. What did you plan to do from here?”
Damian tried to keep himself calm. Icy. Think straight lines. Think nothing but straight lines. As he spoke, his mind raced back and forth through his alternatives, through all the possibilities for this situation.
“I was going to take a commercial flight off the island.” He spoke softly. At the same time, he was thinking that something about Harold Hill was bothering him; he couldn’t put his finger on it exactly. “Now that I’m officially dead, you know.”
“Macdonald isn’t, you know,” Harold Hill said. “I’m curious—why didn’t you kill Macdonald, too? The famous last shoot-out scenario?”
“I thought a live witness would be more convincing in the long run. Don’t you think? … Macdonald was part of all this from the start, you know.”
Hill seemed a bit confused. “Macdonald was working for you? …”
Don’t laugh at him, Damian thought. Don’t laugh in his face….
“No. No … but right from the beginning we knew we’d need a witness to identify Lawson. To make our escape work right … we knew that Peter Macdonald rode around Turtle Bay every afternoon. So we planned a murder right there.
C’ est ca.
Macdonald saw me because he was meant to see me. We even went to great lengths to strengthen his credibility afterward…. Tell me something. Did Carrie do this?”
Harold Hill shook his head from side to side. “I ask the questions.” The CIA director smiled and motioned for the younger man to get up. Slowly.
As he stood, Hill knocked Rose back down with a gun-butt blow to the cheek. A vicious hit.
“Best I can do right now,” Hill said through clenched teeth. “For Carole. My wife…. Get up now. I won’t hit you anymore. I have lots of questions before I kill you, Rose. I have an interesting idea for that, too.”
His mouth all bloody, Damian got up again. He held his hands high, in plain sight. Like a magician about to do a trick.
At Hill’s direction, Rose took hold of the ladder going up to the dock. “On our way across the lawn”—he spoke in calm, measured tones—“I want you to listen carefully to what I have to offer you. We can renew our partnership.”
As the tall dark-haired man put both hands on the metal ladder the right side of his head exploded.
His face crashed forward against the aluminum slats. His chin bounced down two rungs, then he fell over backward into the boat.
Harold Hill looked up to find the black police chief standing on the wooden ramp. Beside him was Macdonald, slightly bent over, holding a Walther pointed down at the boat.
“We followed you,” Meral Johnson said simply. Peter Macdonald said nothing.
As Hill started to climb past the dead or dying man, he saw the sugar-cane machete lying across a leather seat. The most obscene murder weapon. The cleaver they’d used on Carole in Virginia.
In one unbelievable stroke, he brought it down powerfully across Rose’s face. The hacking blow made a noise like a butcher’s cleaver. Damian snorted like a horse.
The field machete came down again. A clumsy guillotine.
Finally Hill kicked the head and it sloshed up against a sideboard. Floated in a dark pool of rainwater.
Then Harold Hill climbed up the movable ladder. He said nothing to the black policeman; nothing to Peter.
“What partnership was that?” Peter said. Then he let it go … let the sentence evaporate in the night air. It didn’t matter. Of course the CIA was in on it…
For a long-moment they all stood on the wet ramp. The black man and the young white man close together. None of them speaking…. Then Hill untied the last restraining rope. It doesn’t end, the CIA man was thinking. Now these two have to be taken care of….
As the Sportsman slowly drifted away, Meral Johnson fired several shots into the boat’s bottom and sides. “Let the fish have him,” the black man said.
At first Harold Hill’s hands were trembling. Then, very slowly, the director began to feel rather good. In a way, he supposed, he was the hero of it all: the man who saved Central Intelligence.
Or maybe it was Carrie Rose who was the heroine.
After all, it was Carrie who’d phoned the embassy to tell him how to get Damian; who’d revealed the last details of the monster plot…. He should have told Rose that, Hill thought too late. He should have told Damian that, in the end, Carrie had turned on him and set him up. How very fucking pathetic. The woman he’d slept with for nine years—loved, presumably. His protegee, among other things…. Well, she was going to get hers, too … a perfect ending.
For a long time the three men stood in the rain, watching the speedboat drift away. Listening to the gulps of the bobbing, sinking boat.
“Peter asked you a question before,” Meral Johnson said. “What kind of partnership did you have with him?”
Suddenly Peter raised the Walther again. Sideways. Almost without looking, it seemed, the force of the single pistol shot knocked Hill ten feet out onto the water.
“Let the fish have both of them,” Peter said.
He and the short, fat policeman walked slowly back to the clubhouse.
May 12, 1979, Saturday
Raid St. James
May 12, 1979; Washington, D.C.
Saturday Morning.
At quarter past six on the morning of the twelfth, two heavyweights from Langley—twenty-seven-year-old Alex Fletcher and Deputy John Dever-eaux—stepped out of a white Pontiac Le Mans, then ran across the dewy back lawns of the sedate, prohibitively expensive St. James Hotel.
Inside the fancy hotel, some of America’s richer and more noted personages were fast asleep on the already pretty, blue-skied spring morning. Outside on the manicured back lawns, blackbirds were just beginning to make their little peeps and tuwitts. One hale fellow disappeared over the garden fence as if he were going to fetch the morning’s
Post.
Alex Fletcher was wearing a film director’s bush jacket and brushed corduroys, with a Smith & Wesson .38 strapped across a cotton workshirt.
Devereaux, fifty-six years old, wore a dark suit with an open-necked white shirt. A cigarette hung from his lower lip like a piece of white tape.
The two men sneaked inside the gray metal door rarely used by anyone but St. James’s maintenance men. Behind the door they found a security guard asleep with a white Siamese cat on his belly. The man had passed out on a folding beach chair and was snoring like broken-down machinery.
“Good morning.” Devereaux grinned. “Monsieur Le Chat.”
“Some fucking joint,” Fletcher whispered. “No wonder the D.C. police have such a big, throbbing dick of a job.”
The two men proceeded up battleship gray back stairs, uncarpeted and unexpectedly dreary. A smelly cat litter box sat on one stairwell. They came out into an elegant hallway marked with a big pink five on powder blue walls.
Fletcher whistled under his breath. “Now this is more like it.”
The young agent tapped a real crystal chandelier with his fingernail. “Class, Devereaux, class,”
“I’ll buy it for you and your, girlfriend,” John Devereaux growled. “Right after we finish our business here. Present arms!”
The two men stopped in front of room 502. Big gold numbers on the softest powder blue. Tasteful molding. Escarping.
Alex Fletcher took a deep breath, whispered a cynical ejaculation, then slowly slid a hotel passkey into the lock.
The deputy brought a .44 Magnum out from under his sports jacket, a loud, dangerous cannon young Fletcher disapproved of entirely. “Nuclear warfare,” he’d nicknamed the long black pistol.
He gave Devereaux a funny little smile. “Try not to blow me up by mistake. Just a passing thought. Ready?”
“For Harold Hill and Carole.”
“Mmm.”
The elaborate door swung over thick mauve carpeting. The two agents looked in on a light-haired woman sitting up in a rumpled double bed. A big room full of morning sun.
“Who are you?” the long-haired woman said. She reached toward her night table.
“No!” Fletcher screamed—the absolute top volume of his voice.
Then Devereaux’s .44 detonated in the doorway.
The astonished woman literally flew against the red velvet wall, the brass headrails of her bed. She gave out one small groan, and her green eyes rolled back. Then Betsy Port-Smithe slowly slid down to the floor.
Young Fletcher frowned and shook his head. “No questions. No answers.” The ambitious agent kicked over an end table. “Shit. Shit, Devereaux.”
Devereaux shrugged. He sniffed the air. A funny combination of Joy perfume and smoky cordite.
The deputy threw open a window on Rock Creek Park, then stood there going through the woman’s suede pocketbook. Inside he found letters from a man named Damian; he found cards and papers that identified Carrie Rose…. Inside the night table drawer he found a small .38 revolver.
“Better call them.” Devereaux smiled. “Tell them they can stop worrying about this shitty bastard Mrs. Rose. No scandals in the White House for today.”
Like Harold Hill, fifty-six-year-old John Devereaux was thinking that he was a hero, too. They’d told him not to bring her back alive.
The Season of the Machete was finally over.
The Summer Season
I am Superwoman … SuperRat…Superscuz … Damian trained me so that I was capable of anything—then he let me do nothing. Stagnate. He would have never even let me sell my diary. When his own obsessions became impossible—a liability to both of us—I had to kill him. No choice in the matter. Had to … now I’m all alone at the top of the heap. The first Public Enemy on the loose in decades…. My prices start at $1,000,000, and I’m worth it. I’m like a Paris original, a one-of-a-kind operation. Hiring me is like being able to hire Manson, Speck, Himmler, Bormann … I’ll do anything you can think of, and I’ll think of things you wouldn’t. The Season of the Machete was a preamble—as primitive as its name. It was just a beginning. The Tool Age of violence and disruption … now comes the interesting part. We’re just entering the Machine Age, I believe.
The Rose Diary
June 13, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica
Feeling like a national hero, Prime Minister Joseph Walthey paraded through large, enthusiastic crowds in Coastown’s Horseshoe Beach District.
Paid admirers—civil servants, especially—circled him like birds. They patted his cream suede suit jacket, reached out for his curly, slicked-down hair, reached to touch his round, black Santa Claus face.
Thirty-five-millimeter news footage was shot for special release to San Dominica’s thirteen movie theaters. Hundreds of publicity photographs were taken for the world’s newspapers.
At a high, colorful dais built over the boardwalk, over the shimmering Caribbean, Walthey announced that an era of new prosperity was dawning for San Dominica. The smiling, affable prime minister didn’t elaborate, however.
July 14, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica