Dagoberto said, “You want me to tell you the cost of making war? To pay each freedom fighter twenty-three dollars a month before we buy one bullet? A wealthy friend of yours, rich beyond measure, gives me a check for five thousand. I look at it… Do you know what it will buy? It will buy rice for a few weeks and maybe twenty thousand rounds of AK-47 ammunition. You want me to tell you what it is to buy from the Israelis? Arrange a drop shipment to Honduras and all the ones in between you have to pay?”
Dick Nichols said, “Not if it’s gonna depress you, Dagaberta.” That woman at the next table had a pretty face but picked at her dinner and didn’t appear to have much juice in her: the kind would rather go to a club meeting than slip out for a nooner. He said, “Hey, you boys slowing up?” And watched them get busy with their drinks. Couple of macho banana pickers. “I had a geologist look at a piece of land one time, he said, ‘Mr. Nichols, you hit oil on this property I’ll drink it.’ Shortsighted son of a bitch didn’t look deep enough.” Dick Nichols’s gaze slid over to the colonel idly rearranging his silverware. “But I have never forced a man to drink anything he didn’t want.” He looked up at the headwaiter and said, “Robert, you’re just in time.” Waited for the headwaiter to serve them and leave, then turned to the colonel and said, “Dagaberta, my little girl tells me you like to kill people. Is that right?”
The colonel stopped fooling with his silverware and tried to give Dick Nichols a calm, steady look. “Your daughter saw war as a civilian. Naturally she didn’ understand it. In war the purpose is to kill the enemy.”
“She says you killed women and children.”
“And you didn’t when you bombed cities in your wars? It happens.”
“I didn’t know you people had an air force.”
“I mean is the same thing. In guerrilla war you hit and run, hit and run. Without jails you don’t take prisoners. But you can’t let them go free, uh? Or tomorrow they try to kill you.”
Dick Nichols said, “There’s killing and there’s coldblooded murder, two different things.”
“And there is assassination, with a thin line between them in war,” Dagoberto said. “Listen, your own government, the CIA, they instruct us on the selective use of violence to neutralize people against us. What does that mean, neutralize? Your own President Reagan tells us it means, ‘Well, you jus’ say to the fellow who sitting there in the office, you not in the office anymore.’ Isn’t that beautiful, he think is so easy. I wish your president was at Ocotal with us. I see one of my men so afraid he can’t move, he’s shitting his pants, pressing himself to a wall. I say to him, ‘Come on, man, let’s go.’ But he won’t move and there are others behind us watching this. I take his gun, the magazine is still full. ‘Man,’ I yell at him, ‘you haven’t fired a single shot.’ Good grief, what kind of example is this man? I neutralized him with his own gun and neutralized several of the enemy after we tore down the Sandinista flag and set it on fire. What I’m saying to you, Dick, the only thing neutral is the gun. It doesn’t care who it kills.”
“How old was the man you shot?”
“Old enough to die for freedom.”
“Whose freedom?” Dick Nichols said. “My daughter says we’re on the wrong side in Nicaragua and have been for seventy-five years.”
Dagoberto said, “Twenty-first June, 1979, the ABC journalist was killed by a Guardsman in Managua and everyone in the entire fucking world saw it on film. That should never have happen, but it did and is the reason some people don’t like us. Ninth July the Sandinistas took León. Estelí on sixteenth July, the same day they overran the garrison at Jinotepe. I was looking at an M-16 in my face, refusing to close my eyes, and Somoza is flying to Miami with his family and his chiefs of staff and the coffins of his father and his brother. Leaving us to die.”
Dick Nichols watched the Nicaraguan glance at his friend from Miami.
“Just as he left the family of Crispin to die, on their coffee estate, taking the Guards away from there. Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the Supreme Ruler and Commander of the Guard, Inspired and Illustrious Leader, Savior of the Republic… Do you want some more of his titles? How do you think of a son of a fucking whore who left us to die?”
Dick Nichols watched him.
Boy, a little Chivas could stir the man up. Dick Nichols watched him raise his drink, throw his head back to take a macho gulp, and knock over a couple of empty wine glasses putting the drink down again. While his buddy remained impassive. Maybe he was stoned. But now Crispin’s dead expression belonged to a man born of coffee money and had everything handed to him. Dick Nichols would bet Crispy had swung with a sizable amount, now invested in some Miami venture. Wasn’t that interesting?
It got even more interesting when Dagoberto said, “I returned to Nicaragua to fight the war. But I’ll tell you something, Dick, you can understand. You say the business of America is business…”
“I did?”
“You know it if you don’t say it. Okay, is the same with me. What I do is not in the name of nationalism or Somocismo, an allegiance to a dead man. What I do is a matter of economics. I want what you want. And what’s good for you, Dick, is good for me.”
Wally Scales followed Dagoberto into the Men’s room, watched the way the colonel weaved standing at the urinal and had to flatten one hand against the wall to steady himself. Close behind him, Wally Scales said, “You feel somebody breathing down your neck?… Hey, watch where you’re aiming.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come with intelligence of grave importance.” Wally Scales stepped up to the next urinal, not liking the colonel’s glazed look one bit. “You okay?”
“I feel better when I do this. Oh, man.” The colonel shivered, jerking his shoulders.
“You find out about your girl friend?”
“The hell with her. I’m not going to worry about the leprosy.”
“I wouldn’t. I’d worry more about raging social diseases, if you’re gonna entertain French Quarter whores. Or I’d worry about a guy breathing Bushmill down my neck. That’s what they drink over in Ireland. They love it, booze and Guinness stout, that dark stuff. You smell either one in your room you know he’s been in there again. Well, we were in his room, too; he’s staying in your hotel. Found his burglar tools but no gun-unless he packs it. Though I doubt that, being a visitor with an iffy passport. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Shake it but don’t break it. Hey, you’re pissing on your shoes… There you go. Now wash your hands.”
The little Nicaraguan, with his glassy eyes and gigolo mustache, zipped up and pushed off the wall to the washbasin.
Wally Scales said, “You don’t know it but you have an IRA agent on your ass, a Provo living in the same hotel. Checked in through New Orleans Immigration from Shannon by way of Managua, the provisional IRA’s great circle route; stop off to visit with comrades, the Micks now sleeping with the Latin Marxists. Why not? Jerry Boylan would take Khaddafi in his mouth for a rocket launcher. Five years in Long Kesh, the Ulster slam, flies down to the tropics for R and R and what have you, and now makes his appearance in New Orleans. Ask him, he’ll tell you to address Holy Name Societies, raise a few quid for the Sinn Fein and the unification of bloody Ireland. But he follows you all over and goes in your room when you’re out to dinner. Now, what do you suppose he wants, outside of all the freedom dollars you’re raising?”
Dagoberto splashed his face with water, rubbed it hard with a towel, but didn’t look much better than before.
“This guy is irlandés?”