They swung down off Old Cutler, heading east toward the water. The sun had been reduced to a tired thumbnail of reddish orange, sinking beneath the horizon behind them. This far south, the houses were scattered, separated by vast stretches of pines and mango farms. A lonely place to live, Deal found himself thinking.
On the right ran a tall chain-link fence, the wire clad in black vinyl and topped with coils of razor wire. Deal had always assumed it was part of the neighboring agricultural station. Now he knew it marked the boundary of Torreno’s estate.
Osvaldo had called up an aerial map on one of his computer screens—
You want maps? Piece of cake!
—and Deal had seen the whole elaborate place—main house, guest cottages, lake, private marina. They’d also spent enough time manufacturing phone calls in the little man’s office to confirm Torreno’s movements. If their luck held, Torreno would arrive in Miami from the offices of American Sugar within the hour. And if he didn’t, they could always try Plan B.
He wanted to laugh. Plan A was flimsy enough—he couldn’t imagine what might come next. He glanced down at the thick sheaf of paper in his lap, still warm from the bowels of Osvaldo’s speedy printer.
He caught sight of his own feet then, momentarily startling himself. It took him a moment to believe that the wingtip shoes there were on his own feet. He was more accustomed to Top-Siders and tennis shoes. At the same moment, his hand went involuntarily to the tie that formed a strangling knot at his throat. How many years since he’d worn a tie? He’d had to get the salesman at the clothing store to knot it for him. It had taken three stops before they found a place with suits that seemed suitably “Washington” by Driscoll’s standards.
“So let me get this straight,” Driscoll said, his eyes on the road. He reached into a pocket of his coat, withdrew a tiny tape recorder from Osvaldo’s endless cache, and held it up. “We’re going to walk in and tell the guy, ‘We think you stole about thirty mill from your foundation’s treasury, plus killed a few dozen people so you could take over the sugar business in Cuba one day. Could we have your confession now?”
He replaced the recorder and glanced over at Deal.
“You spent the last ten years of your life trying to nail this guy, Driscoll. He’s still walking around, doing all the things he likes to do. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“Yeah,” Driscoll said. “It suggests he’s been awful lucky.”
“Well, it suggests to me we try something different.”
Driscoll glanced at him again. “You don’t have a gun in that suit, do you? That’s one way we’re not going to do it.”
Deal shook his head. Driscoll reached over, opened Deal’s coat. “Good,” the ex-cop said.
“I’m surprised, Driscoll,” Deal said.
“What surprises you?” Driscoll drove past a break in the tall wire fence where a massive wooden gate had been set between two coral-rock pillars.
“That you wouldn’t want to just blow him away, throw a gun down, take care of things that way. You’ve been telling me all along you know he’s guilty.”
“I want this guy so bad I can taste it,” Driscoll said. “I know he’s guilty, but I’m not the judge, and I’m sure as shit not the executioner.” He drove another hundred yards down the tree-shrouded road, made a U-turn, pulled off in the shadow of a huge banyan tree. A screen of tendrils hung down from the limbs, draping over the windshield like a veil of tiny roots flourishing in the air. In the fading light, the Ford would be hidden from anyone approaching the gates.
Driscoll killed the engine and turned, giving him an uncharacteristically harsh stare. “That’s one thing too many of my compadres down at City-County forgot about. We’re supposed to
catch
the bad guys, that’s all.” He stared off, a forlorn expression on his face. “I dunno what makes some cops do the kinds of things you were talking about. Maybe it’s the heat. You stay around too long, it finally fries all the good sense out of you.”
“Well, I’m with you, Vernon,” Deal said. “Let’s catch a bad guy, then.”
Driscoll nodded. “There’s just one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m still wondering why it took you so long to see this scumbag for what he is.”
Deal stared at him. He wanted to say “Because you’re the detective, Driscoll. Because you’re used to seeing murderous intent behind the appearance of simple tragedy. I’m just a citizen.” But Deal didn’t say that because he knew it wasn’t true. Instead, he took a deep breath.
“My old man was a crook, Driscoll. You’ve been around this town long enough to know.”
“Hey…” Driscoll started to protest, but Deal cut him off.
“He called himself a builder, but he was really a crook. A crook, and a boozer, and a ladies’ man. He was a wonderful character, my mother loved him, everybody loved him, even I loved him, but that doesn’t change the facts.”
Driscoll shifted in his seat, clearly sorry he’d started this.
“The point is,” Deal said, “I saw how he threw his whole life away, how he had an excuse for every bad break he ever got, how that ruined him. What I think is”—Deal drew himself up—“I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to do just the opposite. Make your choices, put your head down, do your work, take what comes.” He stared hard at Driscoll. “When my place burned down, I had no choice but to take the blame for it. I
wanted
to take the blame for it.”
Driscoll stared back at him for a moment, finally nodded.
“So how’s it feel, now you decided to stop whipping yourself?”
Deal smiled and shrugged. “Of course we don’t know I’ve stopped, do we?”
Driscoll grunted in amusement, was about to respond when he seemed to notice something out of the corner of his eye. He sat up in his seat, pointing tensely out over the hood of the Ford.
Deal followed his gesture, saw a white limousine, its headlights glowing softly in the twilight as it approached in the distance. The limo slowed, turned into the graveled entryway. The driver’s window slid down and a man in a visored cap leaned out, spoke into a speaker box mounted by the drive. After a moment the big gates swung open and the limo eased on inside.
“Sure, let’s do it,” Driscoll echoed, and eased the Ford out toward the gates.
Deal and Driscoll stood in the marble foyer of the main house while the servant who’d admitted them, a wizened Hispanic man who might have been seventy or eighty or one hundred, limped off down a hallway, his footsteps echoing arrhythmically off the stone floor toward the lofty ceiling above.
Deal gazed up at the stained-glass rotunda that capped the immense entryway. The thing was either backlit, or was catching the last rays of the sun: It depicted a scene that looked suspiciously like Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, only this showed a dashing Hispanic man at the prow of the boat, a sword in hand, pointing the way into a tropical harbor.
Deal shook his head. It was like standing in a mock-up of some public building. He’d built entire houses you could fit into the space this guy used for stepping in out of the weather. “Where in the hell do you go from here?” he found himself wondering.
“What’s that?” Driscoll asked. He’d been examining an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand near the doorway.
“To have all this, and still want more,” Deal said. “I can’t figure it out.”
“It’s all relative, isn’t it?” Driscoll shrugged. “A guy who lived on the street might see your place, say the same thing.”
“Who said I wasn’t happy where I was?” Deal said, an edge in his voice. “I don’t recall asking to leave.”
“You got a point,” Driscoll said. He nodded down the hallway where the old servant had reappeared, hobbling as briskly as he could toward them.
“He’s not aiming a gun at us,” Driscoll said cheerily.
“So far, so good,” Deal said.
“This way,
señores
,” the servant said, and they followed.
***
Deal had the manuscript tucked under his arm as he leaned across the gleaming amber desk, handed Torreno his card. “James Ferrington,” he said. “Department of State.” Torreno inspected the card, his eyes flicking neutrally from it to Deal to Driscoll, who stood at military ease, his hands behind his back, the model of a disciplined goon. Deal had to marvel—he’d never seen the ex-cop in an erect posture before.
Osvaldo had pulled the design out of the State Department’s computer. A half-hour later, Deal was holding half a dozen business cards, the gold seal embossed, the lettering raised. “This is Agent Dowd,” Deal added. He watched, aghast, as Driscoll nodded, reached in his pocket, flashed his phony shield.
Torreno had barely noticed. His gaze was fixed on Deal. Deal had slicked his hair back in the men’s room of the clothing store, borrowed a spritz from the bottle of styling gel there. At the time he’d thought he looked lawyerly, but under Torreno’s scrutiny, he felt more like a clown. The man’s suit was impeccably tailored, his nails glistened from a recent manicure, his skin glowed with health.
Deal was conscious of the hundred little construction man’s nicks on his own hands, the telltale ring of a working man’s tan at his neckline. They’d hemmed his pants with duct tape. Any second now, Vicente Luis Torreno was going to lean forward, press a button, and send them to oblivion. What had ever made him think this would work, he wondered. The whole thing was madness. But there wasn’t much point in second-guessing himself at this pass.
“You received our fax,” Deal heard himself saying. His voice sounded surprisingly confident in his own ears.
Torreno glanced at the machine on a credenza behind him. A secure, unidentified line. It had taken Osvaldo nearly an hour to find it in the Southern Bell records, distinguish it from the several other phone lines in the house by dint of the usage patterns: “A few hundred one-minute toll calls a month? Gotta be a fax line.” It had seemed a reasonable guess, but the receiving tray was empty.
Torreno turned back to Deal, impatient. “Who
are
you, Mr. Ferrington?”
Deal felt sweat slick in his armpits, his groin. He’d forgotten how miserable it was to wear a suit.
He stared back at Torreno, who was clearly jacking himself into his intimidation mode. He’d encountered it before, from prime suppliers threatening to hold up delivery unless he’d agree to a kickback, from major developers trying to squeeze him into a lowball bid: “We’ve got a half-dozen outfits want to build homes on our properties, Mr. Deal. Every one of them twenty percent under your prices. Why would we want to do business with you?”
And how had he handled it all his workday life? What other choice was there? He’d simply had to trump them.
“Who I am is not important,” he said to Torreno. “
This
is what’s important.” He took a breath, pulled the banded manuscript from the envelope under his arm, tossed it onto the burled walnut surface between them. It landed with a thud that sent a desk pen rattling out of its tortoiseshell holder.
Torreno gave him an uncertain look, then glanced down at the cover sheet, the very one they’d pulled from the water near the Marquez gallery. Deal could see a muscle begin to twitch in Torreno’s jaw.
Let the sight of that rumpled cover be enough, he prayed. If he opened it up, Torreno would find himself reading volume A of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, courtesy of Osvaldo’s CD-ROM library. At least he might have had the foresight to suggest printing out the S’s, Deal was thinking. At least there would have been something about sugar inside…
Torreno pushed himself away from the desk, as if that would distance him from what the manuscript might contain. “What do you mean by this?” he said, indignant. “What do you intend, bringing this into my house?”
Torreno was good, but Deal had seen that momentary look of fear in the man’s eyes, and now he could feel it, the tiniest tilt of balance.
And then, as if it was a sign, the fax machine chirped, then stuttered into life. Deal folded his hands behind his back and gave a meaningful look at the document that was unfolding from the green-haloed slot. Just let it be the one, he prayed. The machine gave a final chatter and clipped the sheet into the tray.
Torreno reached for the message, his eyes still on Deal, then bent to read the type. After a moment, his eyes flicked back to the manuscript that still lay untouched on the desk. Finally he looked up at Deal. “Why did you not say this to begin with?” he said. Deal felt relief flood over him. Torreno’s voice was still gruff, but the suspicion seemed to have vanished.
“I was about to,” Deal replied.
And thank God for Osvaldo
, he thought.
“Then let us go outside and talk,” Torreno said with a magnanimous gesture. “The grounds are much more congenial.”
Deal signaled his agreement with a nod, scooping the manuscript up in the same smooth motion, then followed Torreno out into the night.
Coco Morales had hesitated upon leaving the hospital. It was a puzzling sensation, hesitating, feeling the willingness to waste time. He had stood outside on the curb in the balmy evening, watching the visitors stream into the hospital, carrying bunches of flowers, boxes of candy, tightly rolled coils of magazines and newspapers.
He tried to discern from the looks on the faces of those entering how severe were the cases of those they had come to visit, but it was a difficult task. Most of them seemed inordinately cheery, given their destination. Then again, they were not the ones lying ill or dying.
He left off these thoughts, reminding himself that he should not be lingering. This normal world was not his arena. He had already seen a few uncertain glances come his way. He functioned here well enough when there was work to be completed. After that, it was best to retire to his domain, to his tiny TV set, and the quarters where he had learned to be comfortable, where he knew he had a place.
And yet this night he hesitated, drawn by the sight of all those cheery people rushing to comfort those whom they loved, or professed to love, perhaps a bit saddened by his realization that his work was in fact nearly completed. Of course, there would be a mission here and there, surely. But soon, whether in a few weeks or months, a year or two at most, his employer would realize his dream, and they would return.…
And Coco knew he would not go. Could not return, no matter what it might mean. For his employer had been correct. Home, for Coco, was where he hung his hat. Whatever he had become, he had become that by doing what he had done and going where he had gone, and it did not seem to him possible to transport this self back again.
To touch his foot upon that soil would be fatal. He could not survive it. He could not explain the reason for it, but he knew it to be true, just as he knew that a witch would die when plunged into water, just as he knew that his employer would return and thrive, thrive and flourish like some strange jungle creature taken to a place where nothing existed to prey upon it.
It would be difficult to remain behind, of course. As it was difficult to imagine an existence apart from his employer, after all this time, after all the deeds he had done in his service. But he could not go back, that much he knew. Coco could not go back.
“Look at the man, Mommy,” a distant voice said.
Coco blinked, came back from his thoughts, saw a little girl in a sailor’s dress being dragged over the curb by her embarrassed mother. The mother had averted her face and hissed something at her, but the mask of concern on the little girl’s face was not affected.
“What’s wrong with that
man
?” Coco heard her insist as they disappeared inside the hospital doors.
A perfectly acceptable question, he was thinking. And turned to make his way home.