Authors: Season of the Machete
The Rose Diary
Coastown, San Dominica
In the middle of a world of hack-arounds—fruit and straw vendors, fruits, package-rate tourists, cabdrivers by the gross, beeping double-decker buses—Carrie Rose looked around Politician Square and tried to single out one poor bugger who had to be sacrificed that morning.
She concentrated on ten or so long-haired dopers grazing near the entrance to Wahoo Public Beach.
Here pure white trash floated down from the United States … semiacceptable bums in tie-dyed
REGGAE
T-shirts. In
LOVE RASTAFARI
T-shirts. Drinking out of Blue Label beer cans. Chewing gum to a man. Eating fresh coconut.
Beyond choosing the comatose group, it was all too disturbingly arbitrary, Carrie couldn’t help thinking. Depressing. Damian’s sort of game.
Finally she settled on a short, skinny one. A freak’s freak among the idle young Americans. Carrie named him the Loner.
The Loner appeared to be nineteen or twenty. Dirty jeans and a buckskin vest over his bare, sunken chest. Long, stringy blond hair. Wide moon eyes.
The Loner was also smoking island marijuana like a morning’s first cup of Maxwell House coffee.
Carrie Rose stopped a schoolboy walking on her side of the triangular street section. A pretty brown boy of eight or nine. Books all neat and nice, held together in a red rubber sling. She asked him if-he had time to earn fifty cents before his classes started that morning.
When the boy said that he did, Carrie pointed through the crowds. She directed his eyes until he saw the long-haired white man in the gold vest.
The Loner had moved up against the wall of a paint-scabbing boathouse. “Holding up the walls,” they used to say back in her hometown, Lincoln, Nebraska.
“All you have to do,” Carrie explained to the schoolboy, “is take this letter to that man. Give him this five dollars here. Tell him he has to deliver my letter to Fifty Bath Street.
Fifty Bath Street.
…
“Now tell me what you have to do for your fifty cents.”
The little black boy was very serious and bright. He repeated her instructions exactly. Then the boy’s face lit up.
“Hey, missus, I could deliver yo’ letter myself.”
Carrie’s hand sunk deep into her wallet for the money. “No, no.” She shook her head. “That man over there will do it. And you should tell him that a big black man is watching him. Tell him the letter is going to the black man’s girlfriend.”
“All right. All right. Give me everything. I take it to him all right.”
The boy disappeared while crossing the square in the hectic, colorful crowd. Carrie panicked. Started to cross the street herself.
Then the boy suddenly resurfaced near the lounging hippies. He approached the Loner, grinning a mile, waving the long yellow envelope.
The long-haired man and the boy negotiated m front of the boathouse.
A buttery sun was rising up just over the building’s buckling tin roof,
SAN DOMINICA—BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD
was painted in red on the shack.
Finally the Loner accepted the letter.
Carrie sat on a bench and took out the morning
Gleaner,
COUPLE SLAIN ON BEACH
. Cross-legged, wearing her large horn-rimmed glasses, she was among twenty or thirty tourists reading books and newspapers down a long line of sagging white benches.
The Loner looked up and down the crowded street for his benefactor. Very paranoid, apparently. Then the man did an odd little bebop step for whoever was watching. “Dyno-mite.” They would find out his nickname later that day.
Finally the Loner headed off in the direction of Trenchtown District.
To deliver a soon-to-be-famous letter at 50 Bath Street.
The American embassy in Coastown was wonderfully quiet, Macdonald was thinking.
A little like West Point’s Thaver Hall in the lull of summertime. Like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he’d spent one lonely, lazy summer after the army.
Green-uniformed security men walked up and down long corridors on the balls of their spongy cordovans. Whispejy receptionists whispered to messengers about the latest machete murder. Friendly casuarina trees waved at everybody through rows of bay windows in the library.
Peter passed the plush wood and dark leather furniture in every room and hallway. Heavy brass ashtrays and cuspidors left over from the Teddy Roosevelt era. The smell of furniture polish was everywhere. Lemon Pledge furniture polish and fresh-cut hibiscus and oleander.
Peter decided that it was all very official and impressive—very American, in some ways—but also very cold and funereal.
And frightening.
Dressed in a neatly pressed Henry Truman sports shirt—windblown palm trees and sailboats on a powder blue background—with a permanent flush in his cheeks, Peter was led up to his hearing by a starchy butler type. A haughty black in a blue holy communion suit.
Up thick-carpeted stairways. Down deserted passageways with nicely done oil portraits of recent presidents on all the wall space. Up a winding, creaking, wooden stairway.
Finally, into the doorway of a cozy third-floor office. A neat room where some teenager could have had the bedroom of his dreams.
A young man, a public safety adviser, was sitting • at a trendy, refinished desk inside the attic room. Very suntanned and handsome, the man struck Peter as a case study favoring the pseudoscience of reincarnation. The subconsul was an exact lookalike for the dead American actor Montgomery Clift.
“Mr. Campbell.” The snippy black literally clicked his heels. “A Mr. Peter Macdonald to see you, sir.”
“Hi,” Peter said. “I’m sorry to bother you like this.”
“No bother. Sit down. Have a seat.”
Peter sat on a wine red settee across from Campbell. Then, talking with a soft midwestern accent— vaguely aware of the
Helter-Skelter
horrors and dangers he was officially associating himself with—he began to tell Brooks Campbell what he’d seen….
The two black men chugging up through high bush from the beach at Turtle Bay.
The blood so bright, stop -sign red, it looked as if it had to be paint.
The striking blond man forever framed among sea grapes and royal palms in his mind.
The expensive German-made rifle. The green sedan.The jacket from London… all of it happening roughly parallel with the place where the two nineteen-year-olds had been killed and mutilated, had their corpses desecrated beyond belief.
By the end of the strange, appalling story, a new, wonderful sensation: Peter felt that he’d actually been listened to.
Campbell was leaning way back on his swivel chair, smoking a True Blue cigarette down to the filter, looking very serious and interested. Looking like a young, troubled senator in his starchy blue shirt with the rolled-up sleeves.
“You said you’d gone around another bend in the Shore Highway.” Campbell spoke in a deep orator’s voice. A hint of wealth in it; a slight lockjaw tendency. “Did you see the black men actually join up with this other man? The blond man?”
That was a good point, Peter considered. Not a bad start. He had never seen the men actually get together.
“No. I was really going on the bike by then. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to stop and … well, you know … the whole thing lasted about thirty seconds.”
Peter began to smile. An involuntary, nervous smile. A serious moment of doubt and vulnerability. He caught himself twisting his sports shirt between his thumb and forefinger.
Campbell sat forward on his swivel chair. He crushed out his cigarette. “I’ve got to ask you to take my word about something, Peter.” He leveled Macdonald with a stare.
“I’II try. Shoot.”
“Turtle Bay
was
an isolated incident. It was retribution for a harsh Supreme Court decision here in Coastown…. Except for the fact that some Americans were killed, it’s a local affair. I don’t know if you’ve read anything about the murders at Fountain Valley golf course on St. Croix—”
“Okay. That theory is all well and good,” Peter broke in. “But what about this blond monkey? Seriously. Can you tell me what a white man was doing there with a sniper’s rifle? Kind of gun you use to blow John Kennedy’s Adam’s apple out with. Tell me something comforting about that guy and I’ll go home happy. Won’t bother you ever again.”
Brooks Campbell got up from his desk. He made a tiny crack in the drapes, and bright sunlight pierced into the attic room. “You know what, Peter?” he said, giving just a hint of a slick politician’s smile. “I
don’t know
what in hell a white man was doing up there.
“Let me tell you a little state secret, though. I’ve listened to over, oh, fifty people who have
clues
about Turtle Bay. I’ve listened to the police, the army … and
everything I’ve
heard so far points to Colonel Dassie Dred. I don’t know what else to tell you here, Peter.”
Campbell stopped his pacing. His mind had been wandering back to a meeting one year ago in the Nevada desert. To slick projections made about Damian and Carrie Rose.
Christ! They’d screwed up already. Rose was blown wide open. The great mysterious Damian Rose—whom even they had never been able to see.
Campbell looked across the small attic room at Peter Macdonald. His eyes fell to the Hawaiian shirt. “Trust me, Peter.” He smiled halfheartedly, his mind still on the Roses. “Leave my secretary a number where I can reach you.”
Peter didn’t answer right away. Mind going a little crazy on him. In God we trust. All others pay cash, Brooks…. He had the sudden nauseating feeling that he was all by himself again.
“Jesus,” slipped out of his mouth.
Then the surly black secretary came back, and the interview was over.
Peter left the big white mansion in a sweat. He couldn’t remember feeling so alone and down in a long, long time. Not since the march into Cambodia.
As he walked through the pretty embassy grounds, he nodded at the well-scrubbed marines on guard duty, smiled at the Walt Disney World tourists—but he kept thinking back to the government actor Brooks Campbell.
Who, meanwhile, stood behind a big dormer window up on the third floor. Smoking a cigarette, watching Macdonald go out the front gates.
The Witness.
Just before noon the Loner shuffled down Bath Street in Coastown.
The long-haired man, “Dyno-mite,” was holding Carrie Rose’s letter as if it were a birthday party invitation his mother had told him to keep nice and clean.
Chachalacas and a cockatoo chatted up and down the pretty, quiet side street. A few pariah dogs barked at him, and the Loner barked back. Some goats were lunching mindlessly on garbage and scruffy back lawns—and the Loner remembered that he was hungry, too.
And stoned out of his mind. Wasted. Blown away. Feeling rather nice on the balmy afternoon.
Fifty Bath turned out to be the office of the
Evening Star
newspaper.
The Loner rang a bell hanging loose by its own electrical wires. Then he waited.
In a few minutes a black girl with hibiscus in her hair appeared in the doorway. The girl was laughing as if she’d just been told a joke. She accepted the manila envelope. Then suddenly, unbelievably, loud shotgun blasts shattered the quiet of the side street.
The Loner was thrown hard against the doorjamb and wall. His skinny, needle-tracked arms flew up, palms out flat. His hair flew like a dirty mop being shaken out. Bullets held him against the wall, stitching his chest and face. He was dead before he slid to the ground.
A few minutes later the
Evening Star’s
flabbergasted black editor was trying to read the letter the man had brought. The letter appeared to be from Colonel Dassie Dred—Monkey Dred.
It promised the most severe and unusual punishments if the white foreigners didn’t leave San Dominica.
It promised that if the letter itself wasn’t printed for all to see in the evening news, a similar delivery would be made at 50 Bath Street the following morning.
At 12:30 Dr. Meral Johnson arrived at the tiny newspaper office. The black police chief examined the gaping hole in the newspaper office’s front door. He looked at the dead man. Talked with the young girl who had accepted the letter. Sent his men to scour the neighborhood, to try to find out if anyone had witnessed the shooting.
Then it was Meral Johnson himself who came up with the name “Dead Letter” to describe the delivery. Thus far, Dr. Johnson realized sadly, it was just about his only contribution to the extraordinary case.
The crÈme de la crÈme of the Intelligence people are the plodding bureaucrats. The worst of them are the Ivy League and Eton boys. And in this case, the crÈme didn’t necessarily rise to the top.
The Rose Diary
Fairfax Station, Virginia
That afternoon and evening, Washington, D.C., was filled with ironic talk about the failure of Vietnamese and.Chinese negotiators to agree on a peace settlement. Speechwriters for Jimmy Carter were already busy preparing a vow that America would keep its pledge abroad; that America would not turn back to isolationism.
Thirteen miles southwest of the capital was Harold Hill’s Old Virginny Home on six neat acres in Fairfax Station. The land was closed in by green rolling hills and white picket fences. It was rich in honeysuckle, boxwoods, dogwoods, and full-bred domestic animals. On one of the white fence gates was the hand-painted sign OUR OLD VIRGINNY HOME.
Perhaps! But when Harold Hill was away from home, he sometimes referred to the place as “Vanilla Wafer.”
From every vantage point, the Hill homestead seemed innocent and indistinctly sweet. The most secretive thing anyone might even associate with the normal-looking place was the presence of one of A. C. Nielsen’s famous survey TVs.
But never murder, or mayhem, or Intelligence.
Which is more or less the way Harry the Hack wanted it.
On most weekday evenings during the spring and early summer, Hill was in the habit of playing hardball with his son, Mark. Mark was fourteen, a budding star in Babe Ruth league baseball. Every night that there was no game, Mark had to throw his father one hundred strikes or be damned.