Hour of the Assassins (43 page)

She was sitting by herself at a corner table next to the panoramic window that overlooked the bright moving lights along La Colmena, twenty stories below. She wore a simple navy-blue dress, her golden arms and shoulders gleaming in the candlelight. Her shining flaxen hair was pinned up to highlight her long slender neck, encircled by a single strand of pearls, and women around the room nudged their husbands with annoyance because there wasn't a man in the restaurant who could take his eyes off her. If she was aware of the effect she was having, she gave no sign of it as she nervously toyed with the pearl necklace. After all that had happened, Caine could scarcely bring himself to approach her. She was the loveliest woman he had ever seen.

He had staked out the lobby of the Crillon for three days, using standard surveillance techniques to avoid the appearance of loitering. He hadn't approached her when she checked in that afternoon because he wanted to be certain she wasn't being tailed. When he was sure she was clean, he waited till the evening, when he spotted her in the lobby, heading for the elevator. She was dressed for dinner and he figured she was going to the Sky Room restaurant on the top floor. She was absentmindedly looking out the window at the lights of the city below as he approached her table. He waited till she spotted his reflection in the shiny glass and turned to him with a start.

“Hello, C.J.,” Caine said.

“It's you, Johnny. It's really you,” she said, her eyes wide and watery.

“It's been too long,” he said.

“For God's sake, sit down. You've got me all jumpy,” she said brightly and nervously touched her hand to her hair. He sat down and leaned forward, clumsily kissing her on the mouth. He cursed himself. It wasn't at all the way he had planned it.

“My God, what have they done to you?” she said, her eyes brimming as she stared at him. She bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling. He shook his head with a wry grimace.

“It's okay. It's all over now. From now on it's just you and me,” he said, and took her hand. For a moment she looked away.

“You don't know what it's been like, these past weeks. Couldn't you have called or written, or something? I didn't know if you were dead or alive or what.”

“No, I couldn't,” he said simply.

“Jesus, Johnny. What's happening?”

“I told you. It's all over now. You and I are going back to L.A. tomorrow. Wasserman owes me a lot of money. Then we're off to Switzerland and we're both through with the life back there for good. That's what you want too, isn't it?”

“Oh, yes, more than you know,” she replied happily, and taking his hand in hers, she bent forward and gently kissed his hand.

The waiter came over and Caine ordered two pisco sours. She looked away again, then turned to him and began gaily.

“Karl gave me a passport for you and ten thousand dollars. Is it all right?”

Caine nodded. Maybe it was just that she was nervous at seeing him again, but there was something wrong and he couldn't put his finger on it. He couldn't help remembering something Koenig had said, that women were an agent's Achilles' heel. It was bad if you needed one, and worse if you loved her.

“You don't know how glad I was to see your message in the
Times
. ‘Don't be mean, Lima bean,' indeed. Although it took me a while to figure that ‘Hot Crillon' was the Hotel Crillon in Lima. Cute, mister, very cute,” she chattered brightly and his sense of her forced gaiety was beginning to get to him. What the hell is it? he wondered.

“What's the matter, C.J.? Has Karl or anybody been pressuring you?”

Tears began to roll down her cheeks, leaving a thin black trail of mascara. She sniffed, trying to choke them back.

“It's been awful,” she said. “I was followed everywhere in L.A. And I think the phone is being tapped. Then last week a man from the FBI showed up at the beach house, wanting to know if I had heard from you. He asked me all kinds of questions about something called ‘the Starfish.' Over and over. It was terrifying, Johnny. My God, what are you mixed up in?”

“I don't know all the pieces. Maybe I never will. But you have to believe me. Our part in all this is over; but the sooner we get out of the States, the better for both of us. Now for God's sake, stop crying. Anyone would think you weren't happy to see me,” he said.

She forced a smile and muttered, “Oh, shit. I must be a mess”—wiping her eyes with a handkerchief.

“You're the prettiest mess I ever saw,” he said.

“Talk like that can get a man into trouble, mister,” she said, a silly grin painted on her face, as though on a doll's face. Things were going wrong and he didn't know why it was happening or how to stop it. Their love was trickling through his hands like water.

“Damn,” she said. “Look, give me a minute to go to the powder room and pull myself together. Then let's start again, like we're just meeting. Please, Johnny,” she pleaded, and he knew that whatever it was, it was important to her. He nodded and she got up and walked shakily toward the ladies' room.

He lit a cigarette, his first since the jungle, and waited for her to come back. He waited a long time. He was about to go after her when he saw her coming back, looking more composed. She might have pulled it off except that her color was high and her eyes were bright and feverish. She put her hand on the back of his neck, bent down, and kissed him.

“Forget the food, handsome. Let's go down to my room and get reacquainted,” she whispered in his ear.

“Don't get cute with me, sailor. I'm cheap, but I'm not easy,” he said and finally won a smile from her.

She kept his hand clenched tightly in hers as they made their way to the elevator and down to her room. As soon as she closed the door, she threw her arms around him and hugged him desperately for what seemed like hours.

“Don't talk. For God's sake, don't say anything? Just take off your clothes and make love to me. Make it matter,” she whispered and kissed him tremulously on the mouth.

She unzipped her dress and wriggled out of it. Then she stripped off her bra and panty hose and hugged herself for an instant before diving under the bedcover. Her eyes, which were bluer than the Mediterranean, never left him as he sat down on the edge of the bed and began to undress. As he pulled off his shirt, he vowed to get to the bottom of this. He wasn't going to lose her because of the Starfish, or Wasserman, or the Company, or any damn thing else.

He was just pulling off his shoes when suddenly the door crashed open and five uniformed Peruvian security policemen rushed in, their guns drawn. As they clamped the handcuffs on Caine, his gaze desperately sought C.J.'s face. She was cowering under the bedcover, drawn up to her chin, her eyes wild and anguished, like those of a trapped animal.

PART III

Starfish and sea star are names given to radially symmetrical, more or less star-shaped, bottom-dwelling animals found on the margins of almost all seas. They constitute the class Asteroidea of the phylum Echinodermata.… The body is more or less flattened, with the mouth located centrally on the underside. From the body project a number of radially arranged arms, usually 5.… Their power to regenerate missing arms is spectacular, some sea stars being able to re-form completely from as little original tissue as the mouth framework (
see
Regeneration). Where fishnets are left untended for any length of time, sea stars may move in and devour a large amount of the catch; they are also known to enter lobster pots and eat the bait. Sea stars are acceptable as food only to a few animals. For man they are utterly useless…

—Encyclopaedia Britannica

CHAPTER 18

For a long while Caine couldn't tell whether he was awake or not. Normally it isn't very difficult to distinguish between sleep and waking. There is a sensation of returning consciousness, sounds begin to filter in, you start to stretch, open your eyes, and there you are, back in the world again. But when Caine felt consciousness returning, there was no sound, and when he opened his eyes, nothing happened. It was still pitch dark. He had no idea where he was.

So he tried it again, stretching and opening his eyes, but still there was nothing. He began to panic. Suppose he couldn't wake up. Suppose he was dead, or in a coma. His body ached unmercifully, yet he felt the pain strangely comforting. I feel pain, therefore I am, he remembered. He couldn't be dead. The dead feel nothing, the old Gypsy had told him, and after what the Gypsy had been through, he surely knew.

Then he began to remember. They had taken him directly to the old city prison and had begun to question him about Mendoza. He wasn't sure what had infuriated them the most, his refusal to talk, or their anger when they found the vial with Mengele's thumb in his pocket. Whatever it was, they had set to work with the rubber truncheons with a vengeance. His last memory was of being curled on the floor, his arms covering his head to protect it, while they flailed at him. But why couldn't he see? My God, suppose he was blind! he thought, terror-stricken.

He touched his eyes with trembling fingers, but there was no physical damage he could feel. Then he began to explore his body carefully. He was lying on a concrete floor of what had to be a solitary cell. That could explain the darkness. His body felt like a mass of bruises, but there were no broken bones so far as he could tell. He staggered to his hands and knees and began to crawl around, exploring the darkness with one hand extended before him. His fingertips soon touched a smooth stone wall and he painfully stood up. He felt his way along the wall, counting his steps carefully, until he reached a corner. He felt along that wall, his hands caressing the coolness of a solid steel door, which provided the only opening to the cell. There was a small hinge on the bottom of the door, which he assumed was for food. He managed to lift it slightly and a barely discernible shaft of light crawled a few inches along the floor. Well, at least he wasn't blind, he comforted himself.

He continued his circuit around the cell. Besides the door there was absolutely nothing else of note, except for a small, foul hole in the center of the floor, which was obviously supposed to be used for a toilet. Tiny scurrying sounds came from the hole and he really didn't feel like investigating it further. The smell was nauseating and he wondered if anybody ever got used to it. By the time he completed his circuit, he had a fairly good idea of his prison.

He was in a rectangular cell, about six by eight feet, with stone and concrete walls and floor. He had no idea how high the ceiling was, but it was too high for him to reach. Except for the hole, the cell was completely empty, and the only way in or out was the steel door. They had taken his belt and shoelaces and everything he had had in his pockets. He had no idea how long he had been in there and absolutely no way of judging time. The darkness had a completely disorienting effect that way. It could have been hours—or days. There was no way to know. Still, it could be worse, much worse, he thought. Like the tiger cages Smiley Gallagher had taken him to see outside Hué. That was worse, all right.

There were hundreds of them, mostly captured VC, according to Smiley; but then he never entirely trusted anything Smiley ever said. From a distance it looked like a giant monkey cage at the zoo, but when he got closer, he realized that these prisoners would have sold their souls to get into a monkey cage.

The “tiger cages” were rectangular pits dug into the ground and covered by heavy wooden bars.
Pits
was the term Smiley used, but they were more like vertical graves. It was impossible to lie down or sit in them and they were too short to stand up in. The ground at the bottom was marshy and filled with snakes, scorpions, and centipedes, so that you couldn't even stand squatting on it. Most of the prisoners tried to hang by their arms from the bars for as long as they could. That's why it looked, at first, like a big monkey cage. The cages were open to the sun and the heat was intense. The air was filled with insane screaming and moaning. Most of them were covered with blood from head wounds, caused when they tried to kill themselves by pounding their heads against the wooden bars. It was like nothing Caine had ever seen. It was hell on earth.

“Why don't you at least give the poor devils some water?” Caine had asked Smiley.

“Why bother? Most of them will be dead in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Nobody ever lasts longer than that in a tiger cage, anyway,” Smiley said.

“Forty-eight hours! Jesus Christ!” Caine exploded.

“Now, wait a minute! These are VC in there. Besides, we have nothing to do with it It's under ARVN control. We're just advisers, remember?” Smiley said defensively, a hurt expression in his piggy eyes.

“Well, why don't you advise our gooks to give their gooks some goddamn water, Smiley? Why don't you just do that?” Caine said carefully, trying to control his voice.

“I can't do that, Johnny. It's out of my hands. Besides, these are VC, goddamnit!”

“You bastard,” Caine hissed. “You fucking degenerate bastard!”

Smiley stood there in the hot sun, blinking unhappily.

“I'm afraid you just don't understand what this war is all about, Johnny. That's your trouble,” Smiley said.

It was still there, he thought. The war would never go away for any of them. “You never came back,” C.J. had told him. And then she betrayed him. Well, he was coming back, all right, Caine thought grimly. He had a few scores to settle.

The thought that it had been C.J. who had betrayed him gnawed at him like a cancer. There wasn't even a shadow of a doubt that it had been her. There was no way to connect the oilman McClure in Pucallpa, with the mysterious Señor Smith in Lima. The only ones who could have fingered him were Father José, Fong, and Sam and he doubted that any one of them would have informed the authorities. And even if they had, they had no idea where he was in Lima or what name he was using. Besides, he had been clean as a whistle in Lima. He was sure of it. There was no one else. It had to be C.J. She must have made a call when she went to the ladies' room. That was why she had been so nervous. She needed practice, Caine thought grimly. Well, give her time and she'd get better at it, he thought.