White Cargo (16 page)

“Come with me then.”

They got a taxi at the front of the hotel. Cat's mind was racing. Finally, a link to Denny and Pedro, something concrete.

“My name is Meg Garcia,” the woman said.

“Bob Ellis,” Cat replied. “Tell me about this kid.”

She shrugged. “He's one of the bunch I've been filming. They're lost, these children. They've no families, no schooling. They hardly know the name of the country they live in. They're like a pack of little animals, except that they take care of their own. It's quite touching, really. But, like animals, they can be very mean in
packs or when cornered. Has your friend found Rodrigo?”

“He's at a bar called Rosita's. Apparently, the boy comes there regularly selling stuff.”

“I know the place. Look, if we see the boy, let me talk to him. It's important that you don't try to take the watch from him. He won't let you have it without a fight. He's very proud of it.”

“Do you think he might sell it?”

“Maybe. I'll talk to him about it. How will you know if it's yours?”

“There's engraving on the back. I have to know exactly how he got it. I'm looking for the people who stole it from me.”

The cab pulled up in front of Rosita's, and they got out. It seemed an ordinary enough place. There were some sparsely populated tables along the sidewalk, and inside, more tables and a bar. Bluey was nowhere to be seen.

Cat turned to the woman. “Will you ask the bartender where my friend is? He's a big, heavy fellow, an Anglo.”

She spoke briefly to the bartender, then turned and ran from the place. She stopped and whipped off her high heels as Cat caught up with her. “He chased Rodrigo this way.” She started running down the street.

Cat was unprepared for how quickly she could run in the tight dress, but he managed to stay close behind her. Ahead half a block, across the street, he could see a small crowd of people gathered, looking into an alley. Suddenly they were moving back, away from the alley, and there was a woman's scream. As Cat and Meg Garcia reached the spot, Bluey staggered out of the alley into the street, holding both hands against his chest.

Horrified, Cat watched as, with a great effort, Bluey pulled his hands away. In his right hand was a knife, and the front of his shirt was red and shiny. As Cat reached him the Australian sank into a sitting position, one leg collapsed under him. Cat grabbed his shoulder and took Bluey's weight against him. With his other hand he ripped open the sodden shirt to find a spurting wound.

“Quick,” he said to the Garcia woman, “get an ambulance.” At that moment, a police car pulled up, and she began talking rapidly to the policeman, who said something into a radio. Cat got a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it against the wound, trying to stop the bleeding.

Bluey wore a look of astonishment. “Cat,” he managed to say, “I wasn't expecting . . .”

“Shhh, Bluey, it's going to be all right. An ambulance is on the way. We'll get you patched up in a hurry.” Cat knew it was a lie, even as he said it. The wound was near the center of the chest and was spurting. It had to be the aorta.

“Cat,” Bluey was saying, but more weakly, “Cat, Marisa—it goes to Marisa, she's the only . . .” He stopped in mid-sentence, coughed up some blood, and stopped. There was a streetlamp above them, and as Cat looked into Bluey's eyes, he clearly saw the pupils dilate. He removed the handkerchief from the wound; it had stopped spurting. He felt at the neck for a pulse; there was none. Cat closed Bluey's eyes and stayed there, holding him until the ambulance came.

•   •   •

Cat was at the police station until midnight, numbly answering questions translated by Meg Garcia. Bluey's body was placed on a bench in a back room until an undertaker came and took it away.

“I must send the passport with a report to the American
Consul in Barranquilla,” the policeman was saying. “Is there a next of kin?”

Cat nodded. “He has a daughter in Miami, Florida.”

“Will you act for her?”

“Yes, I'll see that she receives his personal effects.”

The policeman handed him a brown paper bag. “Do you have the address?” he asked.

“No,” Cat replied.

“Do you think it might be with his effects?” Meg Garcia asked.

Cat emptied the bag onto the desk. There were a fat wallet, the keys to the car and the airplane, some coins, and a small notebook. Cat leafed through the notebook. He wanted to leave this place.

“Here it is,” he said. “Marisa Holland, in care of Mrs. Imelda Thomas.” He read out the address in Miami.

The policeman duly noted it in his report. He handed Cat a sheet of paper. “Here is the name of the undertaker, and the telephone number of the American Consul. You must make arrangements tomorrow.”

Cat nodded. “Yes, of course. May we go now?”

“There is nothing more to do.”

“Will you catch the boy who did this?”

The policeman shrugged. “No one actually saw the stabbing occur, no one who will say so, anyway. It will be very difficult.”

They didn't talk much on the way back to the hotel. When they parted she said, “You look exhausted. Try and get some sleep and I'll meet you here tomorrow morning and help you make the arrangements,” she said.

“Thank you, I appreciate that,” he replied. “Do you think you might still be able to get the watch?” It was his last shred of hope. He had to have it.

“I'll try. It may not be possible now. We'll talk about it tomorrow.”

Cat's body and mind cried out for rest. He managed to get to sleep without thinking.

C
AT MOVED, TRANCE-LIKE, THROUGH THE HORRORS OF DEALING
with the undertaker and the American Consul. The undertaker was professionally sorrowful, the Consul, on the telephone, was brisk. It was not the first American corpse he had dealt with.

“Do you have any reason to suppose there is anyone in the United States who would want Mr. Holland's body returned there?” he asked.

“No, I don't believe I do.”

“Well, then, my advice is to have the undertaker bury him in Santa Marta. This is a hot climate, and even with embalming, well . . .”

“I see your point. I'll make the arrangements.”

“Was there anything of value among his effects?”

“There was some money.”

“Do you want me to send it to the daughter, or will you?”

“I'll take care of that.”

“Good.” The man sounded relieved.

The undertaker found a priest, and there was a brief, graveside service attended by Cat, Meg Garcia, the undertaker, and two gravediggers. When it was over she said, “That's it, there's nothing more to do.”

“There's the watch,” Cat said. “Will you try?”

“Do you have a thousand dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me. I'll try to find him. Wait for me at the hotel.”

•   •   •

Lying on his bed with the air-conditioning turned up high, Cat tried to think. Everything depended on the wristwatch; he couldn't leave Santa Marta without knowing about that. If the Garcia woman could find out where the boy had gotten it, there might be a thread to follow, although he was ill-equipped to follow it.

He kept expecting to hear Bluey's voice from the next room—gruff, cheerful, practical, knowledgeable—always with an idea of what to do next. Cat didn't know what to do next. He got up and went into Bluey's room. The clothes he had bought in Atlanta were neatly hung in the closet and tucked into drawers. He collected them and packed them into the single canvas bag Bluey had brought with him. There was about seven thousand dollars in the jacket, the remainder of the ten thousand Cat had paid Bluey in Atlanta.

In Bluey's wallet he found a school photograph of a small, dark little girl, very pretty. Except for a few hundred dollars, the new wallet was strangely empty—no credit cards, no driver's license, just a few scraps of paper with unfamiliar phone numbers and incomprehensible jottings. He tossed all of it, except the photograph, the money, and Bluey's .357 magnum, into the bag and zipped it shut. There was nothing worth sending back to the States; he'd give it all to the porter. He staggered back to his bed and slept.

•   •   •

There was a soft knock on the door. Cat struggled up, glancing at his bedside clock. Early evening. He had slept the whole afternoon away. He went to the door.

“May I come in?” the Garcia woman asked.

“Sure, have a seat. Did you have any luck?”

She sat down on the living-room sofa, opened her handbag, and handed him a Rolex wristwatch. “He took your thousand dollars,” she said.

Cat turned over the watch, holding his breath, and read the inscription on the back. “For Cat and
Catbird,
with love, Katie & Jinx.” He swallowed hard. “Did you find out where he got it?”

“Yes. He stole it from a man, a man with an eye patch. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yes, yes, it does,” Cat said, growing excited. “Does he have any idea where the man is now?”

“He's dead. The
gamines
killed him for the watch. A dozen of them trapped him in an alley, and . . . well, he wasn't the first, and your friend, Holland, won't be the last.”

“Did the boy know anything about the man? Anything at all?”

She shook her head. “Nothing at all. He was drinking at one of the cantinas, sitting near the sidewalk. They saw the wristwatch. When he left, drunk, they followed him. That was it.”

Cat sank into a chair. This was the end of it all. If Pedro the Pirate was dead, he had nowhere else to go in this thing, not without Bluey Holland. He felt stripped of his power to do anything about anything. In his mind, he listened once again to the voice on the telephone and the one word it spoke, and he was no longer sure. He had mounted this expedition on a wisp of a hope that his mind
had conjured up, just as it had conjured up Jinx's face on the girl in Riohacha. He had gotten a good man killed for a mindless compulsion and a wristwatch. He tried not to weep.

“What will you do now?” she asked.

“I'm going home,” he said wearily. “I've got all there is to get, I'm afraid.” He looked up at her. “You've been very kind to me. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes, you can buy me dinner tonight and tell me the whole story.” She paused. “I know who you are, Mr. Catledge. The inscription on the watch told me. I read all about it at the time. You've changed a lot from the pictures I saw.”

Cat nodded. “Of course I'll buy you dinner. I owe you a great deal more than that.”

“An hour then? At the pool bar?”

“Yes, fine. I could use a shower, and I want to make some travel arrangements and call home.”

She left, and Cat called the front desk and asked about flights to Miami.

“There is a flight from Cartagena the day after tomorrow, señor, or there is the daily Eastern flight from Bogotá. There is a connecting flight from Santa Marta tomorrow morning at ten o'clock.”

“Will you try and get me on the flight from Santa Marta, please? And will you ask Eastern to get me on a connecting flight from Miami to Atlanta, Georgia?” He'd leave the Cessna; maybe there would be some way to get it back later.

“Of course, señor.”

“And I'd like to make a call to Atlanta.” He gave her Ben's number. “I will have to place the call with the international operator,
and that will probably take at least an hour,” she said.

“Fine, I'll either be at the pool bar or in the dining room.” He hung up and got into a shower.

•   •   •

She was wearing a white silk sheath this time, and she looked even better, the whites of her eyes startling against her tanned skin. “Let's go straight to the dining room, shall we?” he said, taking her arm. “It suddenly occurs to me that I haven't eaten since lunch yesterday, with all that's happened.” He took her arm and guided her to a table, noticing how pleasant her cool skin felt to his touch.

When they had ordered drinks and dinner, she took a sip of her martini and put it down. “Before you tell me what's happened, there's something I must tell you,” she said.

“I'm all ears.”

“I'm a television journalist—free-lance. I sell my stuff to the American networks. My proper name is Maria Eugenia Garcia-Greville, but I use Meg Greville for my work.”

A light went on in Cat's head. “Of course, I've seen some of your stuff—on the
Today
show, wasn't it? Something about Central American guerrillas?”

“That's me.”

“But you never appear on camera, do you?”

“No. I was working at a local television station in Los Angeles during the early seventies, and I talked them into sending me to Vietnam with a cameraman and sound man—not for war reporting, but for human-interest stuff—talking to kids from L.A. in hospitals—‘Hi, Mom'—that sort of thing. We had hardly arrived when
there was an attack on Saigon. My cameraman and sound man and I took a mortar shell behind a wall where we were hiding. Both my crew were killed, but I wasn't badly hurt. I salvaged some of the gear and did my own shooting, narrating it as I went. I kept it up through the whole attack, and when I got back to L.A. it ran—first on the local station, then on the network. I got a Peabody for it.

“After that, I never worked any other way. The subjective camera, voice-over, turned into a personal trademark for me, and over the years the equipment has shrunk and gotten a lot lighter, so it's easier than it used to be.”

“You're free-lance, you say? You don't work for a network?”

“Nope, I like my independence. It pays well, and I can pursue whatever interests me. Mostly I've reported from South and Central America and from the Philippines. I came down here the first time to do a story about an Indian family in the Amazon who run their own little cocaine factory—just a man, his wife, and two sons. I met some people, established some sources, fell in love with the country. I bought a little piece of property near Cartagena and built a beach house. I keep an apartment in New York, but the house is where I come when I'm tired. I heard about the
gamines
in Santa Marta, and I've been up here for a little over a week, shooting stuff on them. It'll make a good piece for the
Today
show, I think. I'm all wrapped up now; I was shooting my last footage when I ran into you yesterday on the street.”