Little Dog Laughed (20 page)

“I’d like him to escort me home,” Dave said.

Zorn offered a hand. “Let me introduce myself.”

“Colonel Lothrop Zorn.” Dave ignored the hand. “U.S. Marine Corps, retired. Only not quite.”

Zorn drew back his hand. “Not while my country needs me.

“You embarrassed your country by mining that harbor in Los Inocentes,” Dave said. “Your country doesn’t need you. Your country doesn’t want you. That’s why you’re here.”

“Congress is full of communists,” Zorn said. “Calling themselves Democrats and Republicans doesn’t change that. I don’t care what traitors want. The enemy is at our gates. They know that as well as I do. The difference is, they want to fling the gates open. I want to defend the gates. To the last drop of American blood.”

“Or Inocentian blood,” Dave said.

“We’re all Americans in this hemisphere. President Monroe understood that.” Zorn turned away. “Breakfast’s at seven. Don’t be late.” He moved out of sight down the hall. Dave leaned out the doorway. Zorn’s scruffy head disappeared down a staircase, watched by a young brown-skinned soldier with a semi-automatic .45 in a holster on his hip. Dave looked up the hall. Another brown-skinned soldier with a gun smiled at him from beside an open bathroom door. “Towels, razor, everything you need is inside,
señor
,” he said.

He wanted to be late, so he took his time showering and shaving. The fixtures in this bathroom were old, a claw-footed bathtub, nicks in its graying enamel, fitted up with a shower of raw pipe, the shower head a recent buy. The washbasin was gray and chipped as the tub but the faucets were new, if cheap. The toilet had a high water tank, the flush activated by a much-painted handle on the end of a chain. Oiled paper made the panes of the window opaque. Maybe the maids who’d lived up here when the house was somebody’s had worried about hikers on the slopes using binoculars to watch them.

Clean clothes had been left for him. They lay on a hamper, a big, raveling basket. The clothes were much-washed army fatigues—army underwear first, olive drab. He didn’t want to wear these, but he’d sweated his own clothes. He didn’t want to put on yesterday’s underwear. As to his suit—who knew what kind of day Zorn had planned for him? He checked his watch. Five past seven. He flapped into the clean clothes, slowly, put his wallet and other possessions into the pockets, lit a cigarette, and stepped into the hall. The soldier there looked worried, read his own watch, a ten-dollar digital, and said in Spanish:

“He hates for his guests to be late for meals.”

“I’ll take the blame,” Dave said.

The soldier only gave a sharp tilt to his head, meaning Dave was to go ahead of him to the stairs. The soldier’s hand rested on the butt of his pistol. Dave went ahead of him to the stairs and down the stairs. They were of bare wood and narrow. Here and there, thin brass rods showed they had once been carpeted—not for comfort but to dampen the noise of the maids’ shoes running up and down. What lunatic had built this monster Spanish Mediterranean up here back of nowhere? Why? This kind of house belonged in La Jolla, Beverly Hills, San Marino. Just to haul the red tiles for the roofs up here must have cost a mint.

The soldier nodded him down a hallway past half a dozen bedrooms. The doors stood open. Locker room smells came out. He glimpsed rows of cots like the one he’d slept on, all neatly made up, a footlocker under each one. Upright lockers of brown metal lined the walls. He saw no nude photographs clipped from magazines and taped to the walls—an American flag now and then, the flag of Los Inocentes, with its Lamb of God. A photo of El Presidente chatting with the U.S. President. The U.S. President grinning and waving from a helicopter on the White House lawn. They reached the front staircase, its steps of flower-painted tile, railings of black wrought iron. Faded rectangles in the stairwell showed where big paintings must have hung long ago.

From the entryway at the foot of the stairs, what had once been a handsome and very large living room was half armory, half gym—racks of guns, exercise equipment, gray floor mats, a howitzer sitting in the fireplace. The smell of neatsfoot oil hung in the air, mixed with the smells of the old house, mold, mildew, dust, dry rot, neglect. Floorboards creaked under his shoes as he moved past the stairway, past a long refectory where, under high hand-hewn rafters, soldiers messed at a long plank table, laughed, smoked, argued. In Spanish. Utensils rattled metal plates. A drinking glass broke.

The soldier nodded Dave through a vast, steamy kitchen where young men in skivvy shirts and wrap-around aprons washed dishes at deep metal sinks, and where other young men with their heads wrapped in white thumped bread dough on butcher-block counters, arms coated in flour. Behind the kitchen was a breakfast room with windows all around. Clear morning mountain sunlight slanted through these windows and touched two men who ate at a round table with a white cloth and china plates and cups and saucers. One of the men was Lothrop Zorn, who held his fork in his right hand. The other, who held his fork in his left hand, was General Cortez-Ortiz.

D
AVE SAID, “GENERAL? DO
you miss your dog?”

Zorn snapped, “You’re late. Sit down.” Zorn looked at the soldier. “Mr. Brandstetter’s breakfast is on a plate in a warming oven. If you can find it, bring it to him.”

The soldier saluted and went back into the kitchen. Dave sat down. Cortez-Ortiz smiled with those white, ferocious teeth. “Which dog is that,
señor
?”

“A young Doberman bitch I saw you playing with in a television film clip. On a patio. In Tegucigalpa.”

“Ah.” Cortez-Ortiz nodded. “That was the dog of my generous host, the Guatemalan ambassador. A splendid beast.” He stretched a hand across the table. “You see what she did to me the moment the cameras stopped?” A long scar ran white across the back of the hand. “They have teeth like razors, those dogs.”

“Did you shoot her,” Dave said, “or kick her to death?”

Zorn cut in hastily, “What do you think of my layout here, Brandstetter? Not bad, considering I get no support from Washington, right? All private donations.”

“I hope you’ll show me around,” Dave said.

“The dog,
señor
,” Cortez-Ortiz said, “is alive and well.”

“It’s a sad commentary on American life today,” Zorn said, “that the men we elect to lead us are prevented from doing that by the very voters who put them into office.” The soldier came back, set a plate in front of Dave, pulled aluminum foil off it, and went away with the foil. “Only private citizens are free to act on their convictions.”

“If they’re rich enough.” The scrambled eggs were moist and tasted real. The bacon was just right. The toast was limp, but he was hungry. He slathered it with marmalade and devoured it and the rest greedily.
The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast
. “But your supporters are losing heart, I hear. They think it’s time the President got to doing what they bought him the office to do.”

“Clean our backyard of Soviet influence,” Zorn said. “What do you mean, ‘rich enough’? You’re rich. Plenty.”

Dave stared. “Surely you didn’t bring me here to coax a donation out of me.” It hadn’t crossed his mind, but maybe Zorn was crazy enough for it to have crossed his. “I’m afraid it’s not the charity of my choice, colonel.”

“I don’t want your money,” Zorn said.

Dave swallowed coffee. “In that case, there’s no need for me to stay.” He ate with attention, expecting no answer and getting none. He finished his food, wiped his mouth, laid the napkin beside his plate, lit a cigarette, tucked pack and lighter away, and told Zorn, “I want to go home.”

“I am with you in this,” Cortez-Ortiz said. He drew smoke from a long slim brown cigar and sighed. “Exile is painful. I miss my wife, my daughters. Lovely girls,
señor
. Flowers. A pity you cannot meet them.”

“You think I like being stalled here?” Zorn said. “I have work to do in the world. Work nobody else has the balls for. We’ve got to wait, that’s all. No choice.”

“What if they never show up?” Dave said.

Zorn eyed him coldly. “Who are you talking about?”

“The rebels from Los Inocentes, who you made sure know you’ve got the general here, and who want to try him for the deaths he ordered—of three or four hundred farmers, villagers, Indians, grandmothers, politicians, and little children.”

“Lies,
señor
,” Cortez-Ortiz said. “Propaganda. These communists—lying is part of their system, their atheistic philosophy. The end justifies the means. How an archbishop could sanction such godlessness is incredible.”

“He had to be killed, right?” Dave said.

“Our people are deeply religious,” Cortez-Ortiz said. “They could not allow such blasphemy to go unpunished.”

“Wanting to feed the poor?” Dave said.

Cortez-Ortiz laughed. “You are a sentimentalist,
señor
. Our Lord said, ‘The poor you have always with you’—remember?”

Zorn still glared at Dave. Dave said, “What’s wrong? You knew I knew. That’s why you brought me here. So I couldn’t spoil your game—what’s it called, ‘Bang, you’re dead’?”

Zorn snorted, “Name me another game worth a man’s time.”

“It wasn’t worth Rafael’s time,” Dave said.

“He didn’t play by the rules,” Zorn said. “He deserted.”

“You didn’t have him executed for desertion,” Dave said. “He was going to give away your plans. You should have caught him sooner and brought him back here. Then you wouldn’t have had to kill him—and Adam Streeter too.”

“Rafael was killed in a family fight,” Zorn said. “Streeter was killed by his legman, Underhill. For a hundred thousand dollars cash. What’s the matter with you, Brandstetter? Where’s your perspective? Isn’t a hundred thousand enough motive for you? It’s enough for the police.”

“Half a million sounds better to me,” Dave said.

Zorn’s creased, hollowed-out face didn’t have much color. Now even that left it. “What does that mean?”

Dave opened his mouth to answer, and gunfire stuttered outside in the woods. The sound was flat, like shingles slapping together. Zorn scraped his chair back, went to a window, picked up binoculars from the sill, and set them to his eyes. Dave said, “Was I wrong? Are they here?”

“They won’t come by day.” Zorn didn’t lower the binoculars. His breath fogged the glass. “I’ve got a trainee out there. Survival exercise. Each man gets a week. On his own. To find out what he’s made of. Gun, the clothes on his back—that’s about it.”

“And hunted all the time?” Dave said.

“All the time,” Zorn said. “You don’t sleep. You forage but you don’t cook—you can’t show smoke. And it gets cold at night—you still can’t light a fire. You keep moving.”

“They’re big mountains,” Dave said. “Lots of room to run. Hikers die up here when search parties can’t find them.”

“It’s not like that.” The gunfire spattered again. Zorn wiped vapor from the glass with his sleeve. A steel jacket button clicked, clicked. He raised the binoculars once more. “They’ve got to stay within sight of the flagpole here. We can run a signal flag up any time, which means they’re to get back down here on the double.”

“What if they’re hurt out there alone?”

“They’ve had first aid training—tear up a shirt, use a stick to make a tourniquet. Or a belt. There’s no ‘what if’ about it. I booby-trap the area—bushes with edible berries, springs, the best-worn pathways. Not mines, of course. A little surprise is what they get—maybe a piece of flack, a powder burn. Nobody comes back unhurt.”

“Making the game worth playing?” Dave said.

Zorn grunted, set the glasses back on the sill. “What did you mean about half a million dollars?” He came again to the table in his clumsy boots. Not to sit. To stand gripping the back of his chair and glaring at Dave. “No, don’t answer that. I know what you meant. How did you find out about it?”

Cortez-Ortiz cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, if you will excuse me?” He rubbed out his cigar in his saucer and got to his feet. He was lithe. They had treated him well, his kidnappers. He wore a white dress uniform with braid and a chest full of ribbons. He looked handsomer than in the television films. He gave Zorn a nod, Dave a nod, each a small smile. “We will meet again, later.” He went away from them through the kitchen.

Dave told Zorn, “When your men came to leave the airline ticket in Underhill’s house in Venice, they passed up the hundred thousand. It was required, of course, to make the frame-up work. Still, it struck me as self-denial on a large scale. I’ve been an insurance investigator all my life. You see a lot of human frailty that way. And almost always connected to money. It figured if someone would use a sum like that as mere window-dressing, they were expecting to collect a great deal more in the end.”

Zorn went into the kitchen and came back with a glass coffee urn. Without saying anything, he filled Dave’s cup and his own, set the pot down, set himself down. He picked up his coffee cup, blew at it, sipped it with withered lips. “I never had any men at Underhill’s house in Venice,” he said. “But go on.”

“I have a witness.” Dave tried his own coffee, lit a fresh cigarette, and thought of Cecil, and hoped what the kid meant when he said “out of town” was Nome, Alaska. Dave said to Zorn, “I have another witness who saw your men climb over the roofs of Streeter’s condominium, drop into his office on the third floor, and kill him.”

“Never happened,” Zorn said.

“They cleared every paper out of Streeter’s files,” Dave said, “so no one could read about what you’re up to.”

“You’re digging your grave,” Zorn said.

“I’ll leave that to you, thanks,” Dave said.

“I used to smoke three, four packs a day,” Zorn said. “Now I’ve got lung cancer. It’s killing me. That’s why I wish those commie sons of bitches would get here. I haven’t got time to fart around. This country is—”

“In grave danger,” Dave said. “You told me.”

Zorn grunted and held out a skeletal hand. “Let me have one of your cigarettes.”

Dave said, “The Surgeon General has determined—”

“That’s another thing wrong with this country,” Zorn said. He took a cigarette from the pack Dave held out to him, set it in his mouth, sucked a light from Dave’s lighter. And coughed. Hard. Bending forward, pressing a fist to his chest. Dave had never heard a cough to equal it. But the man recovered, sat straight, wiped away tears. “Turned into an old woman, the government has,” he said. “Minding everybody’s business, trying to protect everybody from everything. Seat belts. Fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit.” He got up from the table again and left the room. When he came back, he had a bottle of no-name whiskey. He unscrewed the black plastic top and laced his coffee. He raised eyebrows at Dave. Dave didn’t know what to do in this situation sober, maybe a drink would help. He nodded and watched the whiskey go into his own cup. “If you drink, don’t drive.” Zorn sat down again, set the bottle handy. “If you don’t drink, how the hell do you work up your nerve to drive? Leash your dog. Hire the handicapped. Goddamned handicapped have got us by the throat. Can’t build steps anymore—only wheelchair ramps. And TV? You seen TV? Every week it’s a new play about some cripple, or somebody with a crazy disease nobody ever heard of. You know what I did to my TV?”