The Consummata (3 page)

“Yeah, well, whatever works for them.” I swallowed more beer. “How did
you
work it, Pedro?”

Navarro’s shrug was a masterpiece of understatement. “Heroes are recognized...by police and populace alike. There was one of our people...he was in Nuevo Cadiz, when you staged your small revolution,
señor
, and when he saw you on the street here he recognized you...knew you at once.”

“A break for me.”

“And he saw those who followed you, too, and when you headed our way, we were called...and called to
action
. In just a few minutes, several things were planned for coming to your assistance.”

I let out a little laugh. They sure had done a great job on the fly like that.

“You see, we are good Americans,
Señor
Morgan, but we know that police, those with badges, don’t always work for... what is the phrase? The public interest. And American or not, we are still Cubans. And the hero of Nuevo Cadiz, well ...we have more loyalty to him than to
any
militia.”

I had to laugh again. “My God, were those kids really in on it from the start?”

“Ah, yes, the children. The police didn’t believe the little ones could be organized like that. They forgot one thing. These
muchachos
grew up in the knowledge of much injustice. Only because of lessons learned in the streets of Havana are these children here in America with the rest of us.”

Well, Sherlock Holmes had his Baker Street Irregulars. Now Morgan the Raider had his own little Cuban pirates to thank.

I shook my head. “How in the hell do I find a way to say
gracias
, Pedro? For what you and your people have done?”

That shrug again. “There is no need. You may thank us by not being caught, and by remaining an inspiration to a beaten-down people...and perhaps to keep in your mind that there are such people, and that they need you.”

“They can look up to me if they like. There’s no accounting for taste. But there isn’t much chance of me helping anybody out. A guy in a hole has enough trouble digging himself out.”

“But,
señor
, people in the premature grave, they...what is the expression? Perhaps they should stick together. It is a thought, no?”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “If it pleases you.”

He stared at me a long moment, then said, “Tell me,
Señor
Morgan, is it true you stole forty million dollars from your government, and have it hidden in some safe place?”

I chuckled. “That would buy a nice little invasion army, wouldn’t it, Pedro?”

He laughed, too, shook his head, and finally sipped his own beer. “A
very
nice army, possibly even a successful one...but we are content to raise our own funds through our own efforts.”

“If you’re not asking for a handout, from that forty mil, why do you bring it up?”

“I am a curious man,
señor
.”

Apparently he hadn’t heard about the cat.

“Sorry, Pedro, I hate to disappoint you. It’s true the... militia...thinks I pulled that job. But I never did. Hope it doesn’t spoil my image, buddy.”

His teeth gleamed brightly under his mustache. “I wouldn’t have believed you,
señor
, if you told me that you
did
do this thing.”

“Why not?”

“
Señor
...surely you know the stories about you, they say you are the robbing hood.”

I almost choked on my beer. “Yeah. I’m a robbin’ hood, all right. I never took any spoils from anybody who didn’t have it coming. Criminals, bad people in general with money and jewels and other goodies that they didn’t earn or deserve...I took it from them.”

“And gave to the poor,
señor
?”

“Well...sort of. At first,
I
was poor, remember. But no,
Pedro, I’m no saint. I’m the raider they say I am. I just don’t knock over solid citizens, much less Uncle Whiskers.”

“Uncle...?”

“Uncle Sugar. Uncle Sam?”

“Ah!” He pointed at me. “He wants you!”

“Doesn’t he, though.”

He stood. “We will serve you a meal now,
señor
, if you will so honor us.”

“That growling you hear is my stomach thanking you in advance.”

I got up and stuck my hand out and he shook it. Stood there just looking down at this little guy who was, as far as I was concerned, seven feet tall.

“After we eat,
Señor
Morgan, we must prepare you for your departure. The militia are still about, so you will remain here until we are sure it is safe for you to leave.”

“You’re sticking your neck out pretty far.”

“That is not a new experience,
señor
,” he said with his smile turned sideways. “Your accommodations will not be lavish, I am sorry to say—simply a secret space off the bedroom of my wife and me...but quite safe. They have already searched there twice and have not found it. And it will be more spacious than your other hiding place.”

That wouldn’t be tough.

“Mind answering me something, Pedro?”

“Most certainly.”

“Why the necessity for all these hiding places?”

For a moment he said nothing—he had his own secrets.

But then he shrugged again. “We, too, are fighting an
enemy. We are not pursued, and yet, in our way, we are fugitives.”

I nodded. “Chased from your homes.”

“Our homeland has been ravaged, our properties confiscated, friends and relatives executed. Even in this country, the enemy has ways of getting to those it considers a threat. At such times,
señor
, a hiding place is most necessary. The place where you were housed before? That was previously used to keep our limited treasury.”

My eyebrows went up. “Your treasury’s pretty damn empty, if you can fit me in there.”

Now the smile disappeared. His face grew tight, his eyes black with hatred. “Once it was...what is the word? Flush. A small treasure a pirate such as yourself might find well worth...raiding. Treasure that would have bought the safety of many lives.”

“What happened to it?”

“Money that can be the source of much good is often a lure for evil. It was stolen,
señor
.”

“Who did it?”

“His name is Jaimie Halaquez. A bad man,
señor
. A devil that walks the earth. A man I would kill with these hands, if I had the chance, with no fear of losing my place in Heaven.”

He held his hands before him and strangled the air.

Then his grip loosened into fingers and the bitterness that etched his face disappeared and he smiled again.

“Come,
Señor
Morgan—you must eat. It has been a long time for you, between meals, no? But there was no other way. You need to seem to be gone. Vanished. And we need
to appear as simple, unknowing peasants, not harborers of fugitives. And I do apologize for you having to stay for so long in that...that coffin.”

“It’s okay, Pedro.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. Any coffin you can crawl back out of? That’s one of your better coffins.”

This joke he got, and he led me into the next room, where a small feast awaited. I may not have been the hero they made me out to be, but I wasn’t about to turn down this delicious a hero’s welcome.

The federal prosecutors had not been shy about discussing the criminal-style activities I’d conducted for my country during the war. That was the heart of their case against me, after all. The shipment of currency from the Washington mint to New York consisted of forty million dollars in common bills, a paper volume that filled a medium-sized armored truck.

Why the G had made me for the heist was simple—I had pulled similar scores twice, during the war, getting troopmovement plans and coordinates on German blockhouses from their armored cars—utilizing booby-trap gimmicks to stop vehicles at given points, D-Y gas to knock out the drivers and passengers, with the means of entry a compact torch unit the Allied command had executed for me from my schematics. Complicated heists, requiring six-man teams.

Those two hits provided the template for the money truck score, right down to the torch.

So all these years later, a grateful government sent me to maximum security...only they hadn’t been able to keep me there; and the next time the “militia” had caught up with me had been dumb luck on their part, and rotten luck on mine.

They’d tried to do it through know-how and technology— first the NYPD, because the Big Apple was where the hijacking
went down, then every great government agency you ever heard of and several you haven’t, and all the resources that implies.

And they hadn’t been alone—private investigators lured by the reward got in the fray, and Mob types who figured they could slam me in a chair, give me a blow-torch refresher, and get the location of the hidden loot out of me.

Nobody had succeeded.

Luck had prevailed where skill had failed. Luck in the form of a coked-up kid in a stolen heap in a high-speed chase with a squad car that spooked the driver into making too wide and wild a turn, sending himself over the curb and the heap onto its skidding side, taking one not-so-innocent bystander along for the ride through a store window in a shower of glass.

Luck.

You can’t buy it. And you can’t avoid it. It finds you, and does its capricious thing, a coin flip coming up tails and giving you the bad luck of getting clipped by that coke freak, only to come up heads and let you survive, with just a minor concussion, cuts, abrasions, and a couple broken ribs. No internal injuries at all.

Luck.

The coin flips again, comes up tails, and an intern looking for a gold star goes to the trouble of fingerprinting an accident victim whose I.D. somehow got lost in the shuffle, and those prints get sent to a local precinct house and on to Washington, and you? You’re not even awake yet.

And when you do wake up, that coin has come up tails
again, and you’re back in the less than loving arms of your Uncle Sam.

So I’d agreed to take on the Nuevo Cadiz mission. The end game was getting a top research scientist out of a supposedly impenetrable prison called the Rose Castle. My ability to break out of prisons suggested to the federal boys that I might be able to just as effectively break into one.

The deal was I’d get fifteen years off my thirty-year sentence. And as deals went, it stunk. But I liked the idea of the government paying for a Caribbean vacation, and I also liked the odds of me slipping their grip at the end of the mission....

Nuevo Cadiz was Cuba before the revolution, a dictatorship flush with the dough brought in by casino-driven tourist trade. A good number of those tourists were hoodlums on the run, paying for the privilege of sanctuary, and mobsters using the casinos as money laundries. I went in as one of those shady tourists, a guy who maybe had forty mil to fence. My CIA handlers teamed me with one Kimberly Stacy, an agent who would travel along as my wife. To keep the cover authentic, Kim Stacy and I got married in Georgia by a justice of the peace.

We were still married, Kim and me.

My lovely doll of a bride would never have made it in the fashion mags—not tall enough, and way too many curves... long dark sun-streaked hair tumbling to her shoulders, her face an oval blessed with large almond eyes, as violet as Liz Taylor’s, a small, well-carved nose, and a lush mouth that could convey wry amusement with just the slightest rise at either corner.

I could close my eyes and see her in our Nuevo Cadiz hotel room, staring up at me from the bed, lounging in that sheer black negligee, its nylon hugging her with static insistence, a bottle of champagne nearby, the radio whispering Latin rhythms.

But all for show. To make the honeymoon look good.

On an early meeting, in the planning stages, I’d asked her casually if there were any “special instructions” on this assignment.

“What do you mean?” Her voice throaty, sultry.

“I mean, are we going to consummate this marriage?”

The burn started at her sweet throat and rose to her cheeks. “When I have a man, it’s at my choosing.”

I’d told her that was smart.

Smart?
she’d asked.

Yeah
, I said,
the Company knows non-consummation makes perfect grounds for annulment or divorce. But they forgot one thing.

Oh?

Yeah
, I said, grinning,
it’s damn hard to charge a husband for raping his wife.

That was when she showed me the little gun.

And I remembered what one of the feds had told me about her: that Kim Stacy had shot and killed five men on previous assignments, that she was trained in all the martial arts and weaponry, and that her skills got her rated as one of the company’s best operatives.

But as the mission progressed, she warmed to me, and my warped sense of humor. By the time I was putting that
scientist on that little plane on a runway whipped with gusts announcing a coming hurricane, Kim loved me. And I loved her.

We’d gone through hell together, in just a few days, but the heaven of consummating that love, and our marriage, hadn’t happened. Just the same, we were man and wife now.

Before I jumped into the sky over the ocean, I told her. Told her that even though she now knew I hadn’t pulled that heist, I would never be able to clear myself with her bosses till I recovered that missing forty mil.

“You’ll have to wait for me,” I told her.

“Forever if I have to,” she’d said.

But now I could only wonder...
would I ever see my wife again?

Pedro’s wife Maria was the one with the powerful lungs whose screaming complaints had made the militia’s life so miserable, not long ago.

Sitting across from her, my belly bursting with black beans, rice and Ropa Viela—beef that to me looked like Carolina pulled pork—I could make out the voluptuous beauty she’d once been, before her own good cooking got away from her.

She was still a handsome woman, towering over her husband, with liquid brown eyes buried in happy folds of fat that gave her face the appearance of a big baby’s. When she was sure the two men at her table had both had their fill, she was content to sit back and watch us placidly smoke Cuban cigars and drink cold beer. Now and again, she would nod as
Pedro recounted their years together, before Castro.