“About a month later, Cal Tomberlin came back on the boat again. What I think he was doing, he was just trying to put some pressure on Carlos to make a deal with him. Maybe he knew how much trouble he was causing. Maybe he was just trying to get even with Carlos for turning him down. But he brought a Cuban man with him, and the Cuban man stayed sort of hidden on the boat until there was a big party and Cal Tomberlin went down and got the man and smuggled him into the party. I was there when Carlos saw him. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I didn’t know anything could terrify Carlos so much.
“He never talked to me about such things, but that night in bed he had to talk to somebody I guess. He said that he had been in a business deal in Havana with that man’s brother. It had gone wrong somehow, and the brother had killed his wife and himself, and then their son had tried to kill Carlos and had been arrested and had died of sickness in prison. He kept saying he would have to leave Mexico and go somewhere else. But after a few days he quieted down. He stopped going outside the walls for anything. I guess he couldn’t think of a place where he would be safer.
“About two weeks later, that boat came down, that Columbine N out of Oceanside. It anchored out. That same man was on it, and two other men. They looked Cuban. I saw them in the village. They called me a filthy name. Carlos had Sam find out everything he could about them. The boat was chartered, and they were running it themselves. It was small enough so they could have tied up at the docks, but they anchored out. They didn’t do anything. It made Carlos very nervous. He’d watch it with binoculars. The other two men were younger. I guess they could have been friends of the one who died in prison. They just seemed to be waiting for something.
“Then one night they tried to kill Carlos. When they ran, they left the ladder against the wall. They’d fired at him, he thought with a rifle, from the top of the wall, from a place where you could see into his bedroom. It ripped through his smoking jacket and made a little red line across his belly, and just barely broke the skin. Instead of going all to pieces about it, he got very calm and thoughtful. I said he should get the police, but he said there were political reasons why he couldn’t ask for that kind of protection. He had to make do with the people he had brought from Cuba.
“I think it was two nights later he came to my room as I was going to bed and told me he knew all about me and Sam. He knew I’d been cheating on him with Sam from just about the second time I’d come down to visit. He said it had amused him. I made some smart remark and he gave me a hell of a slap across the face and knocked me down. He wanted me to work on Sam to get Sam to do what Carlos wanted him to do. He told me the lie he had told Sam. He had told Sam that the men on the boat were Castro agents, and that for several years Carlos had been financing underground activities against Castro, and those men were assigned to kill him so it would stop.
“I guess Sam never thought much about that sort of thing. I guess it would sound reasonable to him. He offered Sam a hundred thousand dollars in cash to get rid of those men on the boat. Carlos had it all worked out how it could be done. But Sam didn’t want to kill anybody. It made me feel funny to think of Sam killing anybody. With Carlos not going out in his own boat any more, not since Cal had brought that Cuban man around, Sam didn’t have much to do. The man who helped him on Carlos’ boat is named Miguel. He’s still at the house.
“When I was with Sam, it was usually on Carlos’ boat, and sometimes in Sam’s room. It wasn’t anything important with us. It was just something to do. And I enjoy it. Unless there were parties, it was quiet around there. Sort of sleepy. Siestas in the afternoon. I don’t like to sleep in the day. Maybe I’d be by the pool and Sam would give me a look and go away and I’d stay there and think about him, and then I’d have to go find him. I thought the servants probably knew. I didn’t know Carlos knew.
“Anyway I made Sam tell me about it, not letting on I knew, and then I worked on him to do it. I told him if he didn’t have any guts, I wasn’t interested any more. And besides, it was sort of patriotic. I said if he did it, I’d arrange to go away with him for a while. He was always a little more eager than I was. I guess guys always are. I didn’t tell him Carlos had promised me a little money for talking him into it. And I wouldn’t do anything with him until he said yes. I told him when he said yes, it would be the most special thing that ever happened to him. It did get me pretty excited, thinking of him killing those men in the way Carlos had it all figured out.
“They did it. Sam and Miguel. On the first calm dark night. They went out in the dinghy from Carlos’ boat, I guess about three in the morning, making no sound at all. They went aboard barefoot. Sam told me all about it. He held onto me, shivering like a little kid. He was too sick to make love. Twice he got up and he went and he was sick. It wasn’t like he thought it was going to be. One of the men was sleeping on deck. Miguel sneaked over to him and cut his throat. Sam said the man flopped and thumped around while he was dying. But it didn’t wake the others. They went below. One of the men was easy. The other one put up a terrible fight. He knocked some of Sam’s teeth out, hitting him with something. Sam strangled him. Then there was the woman. Nobody had known anything about the woman. She’d stayed below the whole time. There was some kind of little light on below. She came out of the front of the boat somewhere, and flew at Sam. He got her by the wrists. He said she was dark and pretty. He said that holding her, he could feel Miguel putting the knife into her back, and he could see her face changing as she knew she was dead. That was what made him so sick. He cried in my arms like a little kid.
“The dinghy was tied astern. They cut the anchor lines. Sam started the boat up and they went out the main pass, dead slow, without lights, heading southwest. Once they were pretty well out, Sam put the boat on automatic pilot. Miguel had taken the other body below. Sam disconnected the automatic bilge pumps and opened a sea cock. He said Miguel had been scrambling around with a sack, getting money and watches and rings and cameras and things like that. He made Miguel quit and got into the dinghy. Sam closed it up below.
“He went to the controls then and yelled to Miguel to cast off, and he put it up to cruising speed, and ran and dived over the rail and swam back to the dinghy. They sat in the dinghy. He said they could see the boat for just a little while, and then they could hear it for a lot longer. When they couldn’t hear it any more, they started the little outboard on the dinghy and came on back. They were about five or six miles out. They stopped the motor and rowed the last mile in.
“Sam said he estimated that the cruiser would run for maybe an hour before the bilge got full enough to stop the engines. Then it would go down pretty fast, and it would be nearly twenty miles out by then. About two or three days later we heard they were hunting for a boat. There were some search planes. Some men came and asked questions at the hotel. But all they could say was that the boat had left one night. That was about two months ago. After he did it, Sam wanted the money right away so he could leave. But Carlos stalled him. He said he had to make a trip to Mexico City to get it. He said he would go soon. I guess I was going to go with him. I don’t know. Maybe I was partly to blame. He wanted to shove some of the blame off on me, so he could feel a little better about it.
“Then one morning Carlos was sitting by the pool and I was swimming. I heard a woman scream. I climbed out and I asked Carlos if he heard it. I was looking around. He didn’t answer me. I looked at him again, and I realized he had made that sound. The doctor came up from Mazatlan by float plane. At first he thought Carlos would die. He was unconscious for four days. Then he was conscious, with his whole left side paralyzed and he couldn’t talk. The doctor said there might be some future improvement, but probably not much. Dead brain cells don’t come back. Sam was drunk for days.