Thunder in the Blood (31 page)

The headline, in capitals, read:
‘FRANÇOIS GHATTAN: THE CORONARY THAT NEVER WAS?’
Intrigued, I read further. This material wasn’t as well-sourced as the stuff I’d read earlier and
there was a handwritten note of apology at the end, promising more collateral, but the drift of the story was very obvious. Ghattan had been suffering for a number of years from a condition similar to angina. The blood vessels of his heart had narrowed to the point where any exertion or excitement could become life-threatening. Drugs had kept the problem more or less under control, but in June he’d finally submitted to a heart bypass, a perfectly routine piece of surgery which replaced the worst-affected blood vessels with lengths of healthy vein from the inside of his leg. This procedure, naturally enough, had been carried out at the Harold J. Beckermann Cardiothoracic Center, in Dallas, the hi-tech facility funded by his friend and business partner. The operation itself, according to the surgeons, had gone well. Yet within a week, under puzzling circumstances, Ghattan had died.

I read the final paragraph again. On 10 June, just four days after the Extec plane crash, Ghattan had been found dead in a private room at the Cardiothoracic Center. He was out of intensive care. His vital signs had all been excellent. His convalescence was utterly routine. Yet there he was, dead.

The hospital, at Beckermann’s insistence, had opened an enquiry and the post-mortem had revealed evidence of a massive heart attack, yet Ghattan’s abrupt exit was still – according to Raoul – a talking point amongst the Dallas medical set. Raoul was too good a journalist to build conclusions on speculation, but after the scribbled apology, at the very end of the piece, there was a final line. I peered at it in the fading light. It read: ‘Injection? Thalium?’

I looked at Luis. Thalium was a particularly nasty poison, a favourite for political assassinations. It was lethal in minute amounts but left no trace in the body.

‘Thalium?’ I queried. ‘Raoul’s serious?’

Luis stared at me, uncomprehending. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I never heard that name.’

‘You’ve read this?’ I held it up.

‘No.’

‘But you knew where to find it?’

‘Yeah. Raoul told me. He’d hidden it. He told me to give it to you if you called round.’

‘
Called round?
He said that?’

‘Yeah.’ He paused, and then, for the first time, he smiled. ‘I don’t think he believed everything you told him. He was sure you knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘Where he lived.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Wrong.’

There was a long silence. A skinny dog padded slowly up the road from the beach, nose to the ground. I looked at the other envelope. ‘What’s in there?’ I said.

Luis shrugged. ‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘It came last night. To the house. There’s a note from Raoul on it. Here.’

He passed me the envelope. It was a thick, heavy-duty envelope, the kind you use for sending photographs. Scrawled on the outside, in Raoul’s hand, were two brief lines. I tried hard to read them. His handwriting was even more unformed than usual. ‘Don’t bother making sense of it all,’ I think it read. ‘Happy Christmas, and take care.’

Don’t bother making sense of it all?
I glanced up, frowning. Luis was looking at the envelope. Something appeared to be troubling him, something on the other side. I turned it over. There were fingerprints around the flap. The fingerprints were a browny, ochre colour. I blinked, looking up again.

‘Blood?’

Luis nodded. ‘
Sí
,’ he said,
‘sangre.’

I hesitated a moment, then opened the envelope. There were three photographs inside, enlargements, full colour. I shook them out on to the table. The old man from the café was standing there, two more coffees in his hand. Seeing the photos, he turned on his heel and walked away. I picked the top one up. It showed a man lying on the ground. He was naked above the waist, and where his throat had once been there was a gaping hole. His eyes were open, his mouth too, and his face, like his upper chest, was covered in blood.

I stood up, sickened, watching Luis reaching for the photographs, his face darkening as he recognized the body in the dirt. Raoul Delahunty. He picked up the second photo, same scene, close-up this time, head and shoulders, the inside of Raoul’s windpipe clearly visible. I sat down again, shaking my head, feeling the hot gusts of vomit in my mouth. Luis was studying
the third photo. He seemed, suddenly, quite calm, under control again. He showed me the photograph, Raoul’s torso, the head missing completely, the blade of a new spade visible in the corner of the shot, fresh blood darkening the shiny metal.

I indicated the first two photos, the torn throat, the ripped flesh. ‘Could a dog do that?’ I said.

Luis nodded, saying nothing. Then, very slowly, he rolled up the sleeve of the shirt he was wearing. He had thick, muscled forearms, completely hairless. Deep scars wound around them, purple tracks, the suture marks still clearly visible. There must have been four separate wounds. Maybe five. Luis looked up at me.

‘Beckermann’s place?’ I said.

‘Sí.’

I hesitated a moment, remembering Raoul’s story in the hotel room, how far he’d taken me, the rumours that Beckermann was arranging fights to the death,
mano a mano,
hand to hand. Luis, I thought. Luis must have been one of them, a Mexican, a wetback, desperate for citizenship, driven to wager his life against a stake in this rich, cruel, hideous society across the Rio Grande.

‘You fought?’ I said. ‘You fought for Beckermann?’

‘Sí.’

‘Man to man?’

‘No,’ he paused, buttoning his cuff again, ‘I was lucky.’

‘What then? What happened?’

He said nothing for a moment. Then he collected the photos in a neat pile, giving me the answer I wanted.

‘You fought the dogs? They made you fight the dogs?’

Luis nodded, examining the photos for a final time, his own fate, somehow avoided. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

‘And you won?’

‘Yes. I killed the dog.’

I nodded, sitting back, turning away, looking down the road, out towards the Gulf. A moment later, Luis was beside me, putting on his leather jacket. I peered up at him.

‘Just tell me,’ I said, ‘what makes them do it?’

‘Who?’

‘Beckermann, these friends of his.’ I nodded at the photos, now under his arm. ‘Why?’

Luis said nothing. I stood up. Then he lifted his nose in the air, sniffing, an almost animal gesture.

‘You smell anything?’

‘Yes,’ I said, recognizing that same sickly sweet smell, carried on the night wind from the Gulf.

‘You know what it is?’

‘Yes, of course.’

I glanced up at him, expecting more, but he was already walking away, back towards the car.

29

We met again back in the hotel. Luis came up to my room. I offered him a Sol from my private supplies but he said he didn’t drink. He stood by the door, looking uncomfortable. He plainly wanted to go. I still had the photographs, and the report that Raoul had put together.

‘What happens now?’ I said.

Luis shrugged. ‘I’m going back,’ he said, ‘to Dallas.’

‘And?’

He looked at me for a long moment. He had very black eyes. Then he shrugged again. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he said, ‘maybe the next day.’

‘Maybe what?’

‘Simple,’ he half turned, wanting the conversation over, reaching for the door handle, ‘I kill him.’

‘Beckermann?’

‘Sí.’

‘How?’ I said. ‘How are you going to kill him?’

He thought about the question for a moment. ‘I haven’t figured it out,’ he said at last, ‘yet.’

‘From a car? Will you need a car?’

Luis hesitated, the door half open now. Finally, he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a car.’

‘And a driver? Back-up?’ I paused. ‘Help?’

Slowly, it began to dawn on Luis what I was really saying. The realization stole across his face. He looked surprised. Then amused. Then extremely grave. ‘You?’ he said softly.
‘You
want to help?’

I crossed the Rio Grande at three o’clock next morning, forty miles west of Matamoros, a deserted stretch of riverbank that
Luis had used himself, only three years earlier. Luis dropped me half a mile from the river, showing me a path that led down through the scrub to the water. The river, he said, was wide. There was a current of sorts and I’d hit the further bank maybe a quarter of a mile downstream. There, I’d find an area of marsh grass. Beyond the marsh grass, back on dry land, I was to look for a broken-down old shack. The shack was occasionally used by hunters and fishermen. He’d meet me there in an hour, time enough for him to backtrack to the bridge at Reynosa and then drive down Route 83.

I repeated the instructions and he listened hard, nodding, before getting back in the car. I watched the tail-lights disappearing down the road, and then set off through the scrub towards the river. It was a warm, windless night, nothing moving except the odd bird I managed to disturb. I watched one flapping away into the darkness. I could see the river now, inky black, and I could smell it, too, the dank, muddy smell of rotting vegetation.

On the riverbank, I stripped off the clothes I was wearing – jeans, sweatshirt – and sealed them inside a polythene laundry bag I’d found in the hotel wardrobe. The rest of my luggage I’d left with Luis, including the photos and the report that Raoul had done on Ghattan. Wearing only the bathing costume I’d bought that day, plus a belt I’d fastened round my waist, I slipped into the water, surprised at how cold it was. The current was stronger than I’d expected and I struck out for the further bank, feeling myself drifting sideways. I’d tied the laundry bag to my belt but it turned out not to be waterproof after all. It filled quickly and hung down beneath me like a kind of anchor, slowing my progress.

I’m normally a very strong swimmer, but after five minutes or so I knew that I’d have to make a decision about the bag. It was dragging me down, reducing my progress to a very slow crawl. At this rate, I thought, I’d be back in Matamoros by daybreak, a sitting duck for my uniformed friends on the other side. Finally, knowing there was no alternative, I trod water for a minute or so, wrestling with the tightly knotted plastic, untying it from my belt, letting the bag sink beneath me. Minutes later my feet found the riverbed and I was wading out of the water, on to US soil.

By the time I found the shack, Luis was already there. I
approached it from the north, taking no chances, keeping my body low, moving very slowly across the baked earth. I saw Luis before he saw me and I was within touching distance when he spun round, dropping into a crouch, a small handgun levelled at my chest.

‘Buenas noches,’
I whispered, beginning to shiver with cold, glad of the towel he’d brought from the car.

We drove north for the rest of the night, and by the time it was light enough to see, we were pushing into the outskirts of San Antonio, the flat, brown landscape dotted with new developments, the towers of the downtown area visible up ahead. Luis, as inscrutable as ever, had said very little, but my performance on the riverbank had definitely warmed the atmosphere between us. Women weren’t meant to take him by surprise the way I’d done. It simply wasn’t in the script.

We stopped for breakfast north of Austin, a beaten-up café in the middle of nowhere, ringed by huge trucks. Back by the car, still wet from the river, I’d changed into a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a tight cotton singlet that didn’t leave much to the imagination. Conversation stopped when we picked our way through the tables towards the counter and I could tell by the expression on his face that Luis loved it. He was a good three inches shorter than me and the physical difference between us clearly made a powerful statement about his
machismo.
We stayed longer than we needed to, a double helping of waffles with maple syrup, and by the time we left we had the makings of a plan.

It was, to my astonishment, Christmas Eve. Every Christmas Eve, Beckermann hosted a huge party at one of the big Dallas hotels. Luis had even attended one, accompanying Raoul the previous year, delivering his boss at eight in the evening and returning past midnight to pick him up. At the party’s end, Beckermann always drove back to the ranch at Fairwater. There, with his family, he’d celebrate Christmas itself.

The plan, therefore, was simple. I’d check on the party arrangements by phone. We’d wait for Beckermann to leave. We’d tail him south, out along the road to Corsicana, and when the time was right we’d draw alongside and Luis would kill him. When I wondered aloud about armour plating and toughened glass, Luis
said it would be no problem. We’d be making a call en route to Dallas. Amongst the hardware we’d pick up was a weapon that was, in Luis’s phrase,
‘fantástico’.
Beckermann, Luis promised, would be history. As would anyone else foolish enough to be sharing his car. His kids, I murmured, his friends? Luis looked at me and shrugged. I’d seen the photos, the evidence of what he was prepared to do. That, in his view, closed the argument.

Later, mid-afternoon, we discussed what would happen afterwards. Beckermann dead, we’d swop cars in Dallas, picking up Raoul’s big Mazda, and head south again, back to the Rio Grande. Checks going into Mexico were no problem at all, especially on Christmas Day, and I would cross the toll bridge in the boot of the Mazda. Given a little luck and good connections at the airport, Luis said I could be back in the UK while there was still a little meat left on the turkey. The latter expression made me laugh out loud, a reaction which, for some reason, made Luis acutely embarrassed.

A hundred miles short of Dallas, we stopped in a city called Waco. Luis drove around for a while, plainly lost, then saw a gas station he evidently recognized. He pulled the Oldsmobile into a sharp U-turn, and stopped outside a modest clapboard house beside a timber yard. He grunted something at me in Spanish and left the car. He was in the house maybe five minutes. When he came out, he was carrying something wrapped in hessian sacking. It looked heavy. He signalled me to open the boot and I did so, feeling the car rock on its springs as he dropped the package in. Luis disappeared again, returning this time with a large cardboard box. This, too, went into the boot.

An hour later, at a wayside Dunkin’ Do-Nuts, I phoned the Dallas hotel where, according to Luis, Beckermann traditionally celebrated Christmas Eve. The woman on the switchboard confirmed the function. Mr Beckermann would be entertaining his guests in the hotel’s Galleywood Suite from six o’clock onwards. The function was scheduled to end around 1 a.m. I thanked her for the information and, as an afterthought, booked a room. We’d need somewhere to rest up while the party was in full swing. Where better than the hotel itself?

Back in the car, I gave the news to Luis. A grunt or two
signalled what I took to be approval. He had the cardboard box beside him on the front seat now. He opened it, taking out an automatic pistol, passing it across to me.

‘You ever seen one of these?’

The question was voiced with a certain respect. I looked at him a moment. I think he was getting to like me.

‘Yes,’ I nodded, ‘I have.’

‘Know how to use it?’

‘Yes.’

I slid back the firing mechanism a couple of times, then checked the magazine. The gun was Swiss, a Sig Sauer P226. I’d handled them a number of times in Northern Ireland. It’s a beautifully made weapon, reliable, accurate, with a fifteen-round magazine. The SAS swear by them. Luis was rummaging inside the box again. I glimpsed a length of belt ammunition.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

Luis looked at me, then glanced out of the window, checking that we weren’t being watched. Opening the box properly, he let me look inside. There were layers and layers of the belt ammunition, hundreds of rounds. It must have weighed a ton. I looked at Luis. For the first time since we’d met, he was grinning. He extracted one of the bullets from the belt and gave it to me. It was full metal jacket, the nose tipped in blue dye.

‘Specially adapted,’ he said. ‘Goes through most of everything.’

‘Including whatever Beckermann drives?’

‘Sure.’ The grin widened. ‘The kind of range we’ll be at.’

‘And the gun? That thing in the back? The one we picked up?’

‘M60.
Ex-Marine Corps. You can buy them most places round here. All you need’s a driver’s licence and a signature.’ He shrugged. ‘Easy.’

I nodded, taking in the technical details, sobered by the implications. The M60 is the standard-issue US Army heavy machine gun. The GIs call it ‘the Pig’, and you see them in all the classic Vietnam clips. For our purposes, to be honest, it was a little excessive. An act of simple revenge was fast becoming a major military encounter. At point-blank range, even through a layer or two of sheet metal, the M60 would tear Beckermann apart. I lay back against the seat, smiling at the thought, a helping or two of primitive American justice, with love from Grant and Raoul. I
glanced across at Luis. He was repacking the ammunition.

‘Won’t you miss the States?’ I said. ‘Afterwards?’

Luis shrugged, letting the line of shiny brass bullets slither through his fingers. He must have paid for the stuff upfront, because he was counting the rounds, ten at a time. When he got to four hundred, he stopped, closing the box.

‘No,’ he said flatly.

We got to the Dallas hotel at seven in the evening after yet another stop for me to raid my case for something half-respectable to wear. In the end I settled for trousers and a simple top, and while Luis put the Olds in the underground car park, I booked in. They wanted ID, so I used my own name, showing my UK driving licence, but paid with traveller’s cheques. If the FBI were any good, they, like MI5, would have a direct line to American Express. Using my credit card could see me behind bars well before midnight.

I sat in the lobby for a couple of minutes, discreetly shielded by an enormous yucca plant, waiting for Luis. Guests were already arriving for Beckermann’s party, late middle-aged couples, the men in tuxedoes with armfuls of presents, the women exquisitely turned out, the kind of dresses I’d been ogling in the Niemann-Marcus catalogue. The atmosphere was loud and cheerful, big smiles, hugs, kisses and I told myself I’d seen one or two of the faces already, out at Beckermann’s ranch, the day we saw the dogs fight. Watching the couples ambling towards the huge function room, arm in arm, I could smell the river smell again, and hear the snarl of the pit-bulls, and taste the hot, sour bite of Priddy’s bourbon. I smiled at the line of retreating backs, thinking of the contents of Luis’s hessian sack, our own little Christmas surprise, the line of full stops we’d stitch across the end of this hideous story.

Upstairs, we settled in for the evening. The room was enormous. I ordered shrimp and fries from room service, and a large steak for Luis. He’d already stationed one of the armchairs in front of the television, and was checking out the offerings on cable. I retreated to the other side of the room, reaching for the phone and dialling the Exmouth number. In the UK, as far as I could judge, it was Christmas Day. The least I owed Wesley was a phone call.

Pete answered the phone. I could hear music in the background, someone playing the piano. It sounded like a rag of some kind, maybe Scott Joplin, but much slower than usual.

‘Happy Christmas,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry it’s so late.’

‘Hi.’ Pete’s voice dropped at once. ‘Where are you?’

‘Dallas.’

‘Ah.’

‘Why?’

There was a pause. I glanced across the room at Luis, signalling him to turn down the volume on the television. He did so, pulling the armchair closer to the set.

‘Why?’ I said again.

Pete came back to the phone. Wesley, evidently, had rallied. Against all expectations, he was back on his feet. He wasn’t better, in fact he was still very ill, but he’d insisted on joining the Christmas Eve expedition to midnight mass, and now he was back again, two in the morning, still celebrating.

‘Mass?’
I said. ‘You mean church?’

‘Yeah.’

I blinked. Wesley had never been anything but caustic about religion. He thought of God as a chat-up opportunity for closet gays in dog collars, and regarded concepts like salvation and the after-life as a cop-out. Yet here he was, half dead, attending midnight mass. Was he hedging his bets at last? Or was it something deeper?

‘How is he?’ I said, returning to the phone.

‘Drunk,’ Pete hesitated, ‘I think.’

‘But happy?’

‘Dunno.’ He paused again. ‘You wanna talk to him?’

‘Yes. Please.’

Pete left the phone and I heard his voice again, very low, the other side of the room. The piano stopped and there was more conversation, and then Pete was back on the phone again. He sounded awkward, almost apologetic.

‘There’s a problem,’ he began, ‘it’s not a good time. This is all a bit complicated. What’s happened is—’