“Yeah, sure,” Tighe said. “In a second.”
The only other passengers on Tucaereo Flight 9 to the capital, Ciudad Tucamondo, were a thirty-four-year-old American and a young, drably dressed Venezuelan woman who tried to make herself invisible and who, Haere suspected, was a mule for some cocaine smuggler now homeward bound.
The American and the Venezuelan woman had thriftily bought tourist seats, but were promptly moved up into the first-class section once the plane was in the air. There, all five passengers were cosseted by the purser and the five flight attendants until they could eat and drink no more. Finally convinced they could do nothing else for their passengers, the crew gathered in the front of the first-class section and either slept or gossiped among themselves for the rest of the four-hour flight.
After his opening conversational gambit was rebuffed by the young Venezuelan woman, the American went looking for someone else to talk to. His glance fell on the face of the melancholy saint who sat by himself across the aisle from the remaining two passengers, the man and the woman who slept leaning against each other. The American moved down the aisle and stopped at the seat of the saint, who was staring out the window into the dark.
The American cleared his throat. Draper Haere looked up at him.
“First trip down here?” the American said.
“Very first.”
“Mine, too,” the man said and slid into the seat next to Haere. He held out his hand. As Haere reached for it, the man said, “I’m Jim Blaine.”
Haere brightened. “Any relation to James G. Blaine?”
“That’s my full name, all right. Where’s the James G. you know from?”
“From Maine,” Haere said. “A long time ago. He wanted to be President but never quite made it.”
“All my relatives are from Kansas. Not too many Blaines in Wichita, where I’m from, but there’re a lot over in Kansas City, except most of that’s in Missouri, you know.”
Haere nodded his understanding and asked, “What takes you down to Tucamondo?”
“Well, it’s sort of a funny story. I’m a doctor, an M.D., and I’m going down there for the Friends — you know, the Quakers?” Haere nodded again.
“The folks down there need doctors,” Blaine said. “They need’em real bad from what I hear.” He shook his head regretfully. It was a largish head with a high forehead, made even higher by a rapidly retreating hairline. Blaine had grown a blond mustache beneath his snub nose, and under the mustache was a small, almost prim mouth that rested uneasily on a sledgehammer chin. Blaine’s eyes went with the chin rather than the mouth. The eyes were sky-blue, almost unblinking, or perhaps just steady, and curiously skeptical. Haere wondered what Blaine specialized in and decided that whatever it was, he must be good at it.
“Are you going to work in a hospital?” he asked.
Blaine gave his big head a decisive shake. “A clinic out in the boonies. The Friends set it up a couple of years back. It did okay until about two months ago when somebody disappeared the guy who was running it.” He shook his head almost angrily and the big chin seemed to take an apparently fearless swipe at the world. “He was a friend of mine,” Blaine continued. “Joe Rice. We started out in the first grade and went through med school together. So when they disappeared him, I thought, well, the hell with it. I got in touch with the Friends, farmed out my patients to some other guys, kissed the wife and kids goodbye, and here I am.” He smiled. “Damn fool thing to do, I guess.”
“It sounds more dangerous than foolish,” Haere said.
“I’m not a Quaker, you understand,” Blaine said, then paused. “Hell, I don’t guess I’m anything. Haven’t seen the inside of a church in twenty years. Didn’t even get married in one. But Joe Rice, he was a Quaker.” Blaine smiled. “When we were kids, real little kids, I used to try and knock it out of him.” He chuckled. “He’d beat the shit out of me. Some Quaker.”
“There’s no word about what happened to him?” Haere asked.
“Nothing. One day he started off for the clinic in his car, and zap. That was it. They never even found the car. There’s no law down there, you know. I mean, they got soldiers and what they call federal police, but there’s no law.”
“So I hear.”
“Well, maybe I can cure a few sick folks. Set a few broken bones. Deliver a few babies. Old Jim wrote me once that he was getting to be a specialist in gunshot wounds. Maybe that’s why they took him. He patched up the wrong people.”
“Maybe.”
Blaine cocked his head as he examined Haere. “You’re not a missionary, are you?”
Haere shook his head.
“When I first saw you, I thought you might be. You sort of look like what I think a missionary would look like. What line’re you in?”
“Direct mail,” Haere said.
“Well, that must be pretty interesting,” Blaine said and even managed to put some conviction into his tone. He yawned then, covered it with a hand, looked at his watch, and said, “I guess maybe I’d better try and get some sleep.” He rose. “Been nice talking to you.”
“And to you,” Haere said.
The plane landed one hour and thirty-five minutes later at Tucamondo International Airport. The Venezuelan woman was first off the plane. Next down the ramp went Dr. James Blaine, followed by Velveeta Keats, Morgan Citron, and Draper Haere.
When Dr. Blaine reached the bottom of the ramp he was confronted by four men in civilian clothes, questioned briefly, and led away in handcuffs.
Chapter 27
Because Draper Haere’s Spanish was at best rudimentary, consisting of two or three hundred disjointed words that enabled him to rent a room, order food and drink, flatter a woman, and get a car repaired, he let Morgan Citron take over at the immigration and customs counter.
Citron collected the passports from Velveeta Keats and Haere, glanced through them, walked over to a window as if to examine them in a better light, and then moved up to the counter, where a sullen, baldheaded man in a green uniform eyed him with either boredom or contempt or both.
Citron tapped the three United States passports on the counter and shook his head regretfully. “I’m afraid there is a problem.”
The baldheaded man brightened and nearly beamed. “A problem, you say.”
“Yes. With our visas.” Citron turned to indicate Haere and Velveeta Keats.
“You are traveling together?”
Citron nodded. “The three of us.”
“What is the problem, may I ask?”
“As I said, it lies with our visas.”
“I see. Continue, please.”
“We obtained them, the visas, at your consulate in Los Angeles.”
“I know their work.”
“Is it sometimes inaccurate?”
The baldheaded man now stared at Citron with something akin to respect. “It happens,” he said slowly, “although not often.”
“My visa, for example,” Citron said and slid his passport across the counter to the baldheaded man, who picked it up, looked left, then right, peeked inside, glimpsed the folded-up $100 bill, placed the passport back on the counter, and covered it with the palm of his hand.
“Are the other two passports the same?” he said.
“Exactly the same.”
“Then there is, as you say, a problem,” the baldheaded man agreed. “But it may be only minor. I will have to confer with my chief.”
He picked up the three passports, turned, and disappeared through a door. Haere moved over to Citron. “See if you can find out about the guy who got arrested,” he said. “The doctor.”