Tropic of Darkness (2 page)

Frank was sitting naked on the edge of the bathtub, his pajama pants in a soaked ball by his feet. In his right hand was a chef's knife, the blade more red than silver.

His whole body from neck to knees was striped with flowing cuts, so that he didn't even appear naked. More like he was wearing a shiny, bright red leotard.

Ellen started letting out a frenzied, hysterical wailing. But Leland was ignoring that and managing to raise himself a little higher.

“What?” he croaked. “Frank, why?”

Francis Jackson's blue-gray eyes rolled toward him in that colorless, soft face and focused on him dully.

“Under my skin, Leland.” The man let the words out in a single, rolling breath. “She's under my skin . . 
.
”

His face twisted into a sad, embittered smile.

And then he toppled over to the floor.

*   *   *

Three ambulances were needed, in the end. One for Frank, who'd bled to death by the time it arrived. One for Ellen, who required sedation. And the last for Leland Hague himself, who'd broken his ankle when he'd fallen.

As it sped him to the hospital, a young paramedic gazed down at him uncertainly.

“What was it with that guy? Like, what the hell was
that
? I've seen people cut their wrists plenty of times. Even cut their own throats. But those little cuts all over, trickling your life away like that?”

Hague tried to think it through, but everything seemed muddled. He was going into shock, he realized, and would certainly pass out before much longer. Better make his answer as succinct as possible.

“I'm not entirely sure that he
was
trying to kill himself,” he murmured.

The darkness was starting to close over him, the paramedic's face becoming blurry.

“I think he was trying to . . 
.
” It sounded so insane he paused. “
Rid
himself of something. Just cut something out.”

“Huh . . . ?” the paramedic was asking right before Hague drowned in darkness.

PART TWO

THE QUEEN OF GRAVEYARDS

CHAPTER

THREE

A FEW DAYS LATER

Through the narrow, slatted shutters of his window at the Hotel Portughese, Jack Gilliard could see the ebb and flow of people out in Havana's Parque Central, which in truth did not resemble any kind of park in the slightest.

It was not a great deal larger than a soccer field, and was paved over for the most part with broad flagstones. Planted down the middle were parallel rows of palm trees. Bushier, more shady trees provided shelter at the corners of the square.

There were lots of people sitting underneath them on the concrete benches, trying to stay cool. It was early afternoon and the sun was high and very hot.

Jack gazed down not with a tourist's eye, but with a far more practiced one than that. He could immediately pick out the hustlers and thieves amongst the crowd by the way they moved their heads and hands.

They didn't bother him particularly. You got far worse than these guys in places like Rio and Caracas. And besides, he'd brought with him the only two implements he had ever needed to get along in a Latin American city: his cornet, and his long-bladed gravity knife. The first to provide him with a living. And the second to ensure that he hung onto it.

His surname was from the French, on his father's side. But his mother's family had been Scandinavian, and physically he took more after that branch of the tree. Tall and gaunt, Nordic in appearance with dark blond hair and icy, pale blue eyes. He'd been born in Minnesota–St. Paul in the middle of a blizzard back in 1962 and had never liked cold places very much since then. Never liked his father too much either, since the man had been a violent drunk.

He'd run away at fifteen, southward, fleeing—equally—the beatings and the winters. First to Charleston, South Carolina. Then to Montgomery, Alabama. Then Galveston, Texas.

And finally, by the end of his teens—his skin darkened and his limbs sinewy from years of picking fruit and working on the shrimp boats—he had arrived in New Orleans.

The battered case holding his old Earlham cornet was lying at the foot of his bed like some faithful dog. And the knife, a seven-inch number he had won in a card game in Asunción some years back, was where he always kept it, a familiar narrow pressure by his rump. It had served him well, drawing blood three times since he had gotten it. But always in self-defense. And thankfully, he'd never had to kill with it. Gilliard had traveled down a lot of dark alleys since fleeing the States, but never that one.

He'd owned the Earlham since the age of ten. His father had bought it for him in one of his extremely rare, generous-drunk moods, and Jack had taken to it quickly. But there in the gaslit streets of the French Quarter, he'd met people who had turned his ideas about music upside down.

Most of them were seedy types, failures by regular standards. But they knew and loved their music; it was engraved on their souls. And as he learned from them, he began to make a brand-new living for himself, of sorts.

His present circumstances drifted back. A fine, familiar sweat had started beading him. He hunched forward in his chair and continued to study the park. There was certainly an awful lot of criminal activity under way in Uncle Fidel's workers' paradise.

Jack spotted a pimp with three attractive young girls dressed in what looked like hand-me-down frocks, sitting underneath a flowering tree. He saw two pickpockets following a tourist couple as they walked along obliviously. Young men were propping up the lampposts everywhere he looked. They were watching the front entrance of this very hotel, waiting for foreigners to come out so that they could start their pitches.

“Want to buy cigars, man? Rum? Marijuana? Listen, it's the best.”

Yeah, sure. He'd heard that kind of promise many times before.

“Wanna make some real money?” an acquaintance had asked him in the October of that first year in the Easy.

Jack had been playing a small bar off Decatur, for tips only, and was having trouble paying his room bill and still having enough to eat.

It was between sets. His stomach was grumbling. Jack picked up the bourbon that the man had bought him, nodded.

“Got a package needs delivering, to Houston. I can't go myself, but I can loan you my car. And there's a grand in it for you when you get back.”

He guessed immediately what the package had to contain. The idea of it bothered him, but the way the man described it—hell, it sounded like quick, easy cash and God only knew he needed that. Over and done with and forgotten, that was the way to approach such an enterprise.

Someone must have tipped the cops off. They had flagged him down before he even got to Baton Rouge. And it was only because he was so young and scared and they weren't taking him too seriously that he managed to escape through the roadside bushes.

But they had his wallet by that time. His whole identity, tucked into one neat little leather pouch. It contained his driver's license and his hotel key and the last twenty dollars that he owned.

There was nothing left for him. Jack hitched along the backroads the whole way to the border and slipped over into Mexico like some tall and lanky ghost.

*   *   *

A tall white statue with a bird perched on its head watched over the center of the Parque Central. Jack had no idea whose it was, but the fellow looked rather pleased with himself. And today, it was a feeling that he shared.

He'd been in Buenos Aires for the last three months, played some halfway decent clubs and earned enough to fly out here and book himself into his first respectable hotel in practically a year. God, how long since he'd bedded down in a room this large? There was a TV, a small fridge, and even air-conditioning, although, unused to the latter, he had switched it off.

A pair of cops dressed in short-sleeved shirts and baseball caps came up along the sidewalk below him. The street people drifted out of sight, reappearing again once the coast was clear, like a shoal of smaller fish evading a shark. He was going to have to run the gauntlet when he stepped out there. And there was nothing else to do
but
go out there. Pierre Melville wasn't due here until six, and it was only five after one.

Jack stood up, six foot tall and long limbed, not an ounce of spare fat on him. He wore his hair cropped short and his skin was tanned to a hard hazelnut-brown.

Like many in these parts, he preferred to wear a short-sleeved shirt and chinos rather than a T-shirt and jeans—they were looser, better suited to the climate. And skinny he might be, but definitely not weak.

The knuckles of both hands protruded in sharp ridges. The muscles in his forearms were like cable. Not the kind of man to pick a fight with, any fool could see.

Maybe if he hid his hair and eyes he'd have a middling chance of sightseeing without the hustlers bothering him. His skin didn't announce him as a Yanqui, after all.

He paused a moment, reaching for the items that he needed. He got the feeling, suddenly, that there was someone watching him. Perhaps more than one person. He had developed strong instincts in that line since he'd left the States, and they were rarely wrong.

But Jack couldn't see how that was possible. There was no one overlooking his window. And the door was shut, and there was no one but him in the room.

He shrugged, slipped on a straw hat and a pair of shades. Snatched up his room key from beside the television, and went out.

*   *   *

For the hundredth time that day, Manuel Cruz stopped scribbling and glanced at the phone on his desk at the Ministry of Trade. His eyes went sad and his mouth pursed with disappointment. Frank Jackson had struck him as such an honest man during the five days they had spent together.

Call you tomorrow,
the Canadian had said, shaking Manuel's hand before he'd gone to board his plane.

Manuel had risen especially early that morning to drive him to the airport.

As soon as I get the okay from my superiors, I'll call you and confirm it. We can do the rest by fax. It's been a pleasure.

Mitchelson Technologies of Toronto, a subsidiary of Mitchelson Holdings International, was about to supply Cuba with modern industrial plants, not in return for dollars—which they didn't have—but for sites on which to build more of the new beachfront hotels that were springing up along the coast. It would get Manuel a promotion, almost certainly. But more than that, he thought of how desperately they needed new machines.

Except three days had passed and Jackson hadn't phoned. Didn't the man understand how much this meant to them?

It wasn't as though he hadn't made the fellow welcome. Each evening—on expenses, naturally—he had taken the man out to the city's plushest restaurants and finest clubs. The kinds of venues Manuel hadn't been able to afford in years. The Floridita and the Bodeguita del Medio. That floating nightclub that sailed around the bay, El Galeon. And, best and most famous of all, the Karibe nightclub. Three times to the Karibe, in fact. Jackson had been drawn there like a bee to honey.

And now, after so much hospitality, this. This utter ingratitude. A silent phone.

Manuel listened to the murmur of activity from the offices around him and frowned sullenly. Was this what
La Revolución
had been reduced to? Waiting on some pudgy gringo's whim? Perhaps he was a far worse judge of character than he'd supposed, and Jackson's honest air had simply been a front.

Damn it to hell!

The phone pealed suddenly. Manuel almost jumped, it caught him so much by surprise.

He found himself, to his delight, on an echoing overseas line.

“Señor Cruz?” someone was asking at the other end.

But it wasn't Jackson.

“Yes.” His heart was pounding. “This is he.”

“Hi. My name's Tom Burlington of Mitchelson Technologies. I'm taking over from the man who you first met.”

“I see. And what's happened to Francis?” Manuel asked.

“Uh—I'm afraid to say that Mr. Jackson's suffered a mishap. I'm sure you don't want to be bothered with the details.”

It astonished him just how cold North Americans could be at times. Was this because they had no wish to admit that a spanner had fallen in the works, a matter of corporate image?

“Is he ill?” Manuel asked.

“Señor Cruz, that's a private matter. What's important to
you
is that we're still running with the deal. Everything that Frank provisionally agreed has been approved—there's nothing to stop us going ahead. That's what you wanted to hear, isn't it?”

Manuel began to notice a slight edge of embarrassment in the fellow's tone. And something else began to dawn on him, partly suspicion and partly memory.

“How ill?” he found the nerve to ask.

The extended pause on the far end of the line was the only answer that he needed.

“Dead?” Manuel's head had begun to reel a little. “Was it suicide?”

“Ah . . . what makes you ask that, Señor Cruz?”

“Because if it was—” Manuel replied, and then could not finish the sentence.

It had happened before.

*   *   *

Maybe it was his height or his gait, the way he held himself. But despite the hat and the shades, Jack found himself a target the moment he stepped outside.

Typically, it was the little kids who rushed up first, a gang of half a dozen of them. They circled him, their grimy hands outstretched.

“Dinero, Señor?”

Jack smiled, shook his head.

“Chicle?”
they implored him.
“Chicle, chicle?”

If they were not getting money, then they at least wanted chewing gum.

“No tengo,”
he told them.

But they wouldn't be put off. Jack patted his pockets flat to show them they were empty.

The eldest kid pointed at the front of his shirt, his breast pocket. Looking down, Jack saw that he still had the ballpoint pen that a flight attendant had given him to fill in his immigration form. He plucked it out and flipped it through the air.

The kid caught it. And an instant later, the whole gang of them was scuttling away down the sidewalk, each of them trying to grab it.

They were obviously dirt poor and behaved like street kids anywhere in this part of the world, Jack considered as he watched them go. But they seemed reasonably healthy. That was something to be grateful for.

But by this time, older and hungrier eyes had been drawn to his presence. Jack crossed the street, and started off across the square in the direction of the Old Town. At which point, a man approached him.

“Hello, my friend.” He stretched out a hand. “Where are you from?”

“China.”

The fellow dropped away, looking puzzled.

The next two were as easy to put off. But not the fourth. Dressed in a bright pink T-shirt and a Sea World baseball cap, he would not be persuaded to go away. His eyes kept darting to Jack's pockets as he talked, doubtless trying to figure out which one held the wallet. Which was fine, because Jack never carried one, not since the attempted arrest near Baton Rouge. He had twenty bucks in each of his pants pockets, another twenty tucked inside his shoe, and this fool wasn't going to get any of them without knocking him unconscious first.

But the man persisted, following him away from the square and up a narrow lane, obviously marking time till there was no one else around. And then . . . it didn't take much guessing.

“I like the look of you, man,” the guy kept saying. “I think we could be good friends. I'm the best friend you could have in a city like this. I can get you anything you want. These damn Communists, they don't know shit. Anything your heart desires, tell me and it's yours.”

Jack kept hoping against hope the man would get tired and give up. But there was no sign of that happening.

“Why are you ignoring me, huh? Tell me what you'd really like. Weed? Coke? Girls? Really young ones? Come on, don't be shy. I'm like a priest—you can tell me all your secrets.”