“Why?”
“Why’d Jimmy want to kill him?”
“Right.”
“Because he found me in bed with Papa.”
She blew on her fingers, held her left hand out to admire her work, picked up the bottle of nail polish, recapped it, put it back on the table, and stared at Citron. He found her gaze cold, hostile, but not altogether mad. “Does that turn you on?” she asked in a flat tone.
“No.”
“It does some guys. Women, too.”
Citron sat up on the edge of the bed and looked at her carefully. She stared back, the hostility in her gaze slowly diminishing. He nodded slowly and said, “You’re really telling the truth this time, aren’t you?”
“The truth,” she said. “Well, sugar, the real truth is that we’ve been fuckin’ each other ever since I was thirteen.” She looked away, and although her cold expression and flat tone didn’t change, the tears began to trickle down toward the corners of her mouth. “So maybe,” she said, “just maybe that’s why I’m a little bit spacey sometimes. What d’you think?”
Citron lay back down on the bed, folded his arms behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling, suspecting that he had just been spooned a large dose of truth. As usual, lies were more palatable. “I don’t know,” he said in a carefully neutral reply to her question. “Maybe it is.”
The United States embassy, located on a wide curving avenue that bore the name of Simon Bolivar, was a large sprawling two-story building some twenty or twenty-five years old and decorated with a series of pastel masonry screens that testified to the influence of Edward Durell Stone.
Apparently as an afterthought, the embassy had surrounded itself on all four sides by an eight-foot-high concrete brick wall of such crude design that it spoke of hasty, perhaps even panicky construction. As if to compensate, all the pieces of broken glass imbedded in the wall’s top were brightly colored. The wall was also capped by concentric coils of very sharp-looking barbed wire whose only conceivable function was to produce deep painful cuts.
The American diplomats were flanked on the left by the French and on the right by the British. The French had put up an elegant fence of black iron bars that ended in rather sharp-looking arrowlike points. Through the iron bars one could admire the three-story chateau that might have been transported stone by stone from the Loire. The British had not bothered to put up a fence at all, and apparently had spent their money instead on magnificent landscaping, which almost compensated for the uninspired architecture of their rather slapdash two-story stucco structure.
Citron pulled up and stopped across the street from the U.S. embassy in the Ford Fiesta that Haere had rented through the hotel. Both men examined the embassy.
“Hell of a wall,” Haere said.
Citron agreed with a nod. He looked at his gold Rolex. “It’s nine-fifteen now. When do you think you’ll be back at the hotel?”
“By noon anyway. One at the latest.”
“Let’s meet for lunch.”
“What about Velveeta?” Haere said.
“She’s going sight-seeing and shopping around ten or ten-thirty and won’t be back until two.”
“I’ll either come by your room or call,” Haere said, got out of the car, and watched Citron drive off. Wearing his light-weight dark-blue three-piece pinstripe suit, his white shirt and striped red-and-blue tie, Haere walked quickly across the broad avenue toward the marine guard who waited behind the obviously locked gates that were made out of thick steel bars. In his blue suit and gleaming black shoes, Haere knew what he must look like to the marine: like ancient history.
When he reached the gate, he stared through the bars at the embassy building. He ignored the marine, who was a twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old corporal with one hashmark, a hand-carved Mexican Indian face, and surprisingly light gray eyes that were too old for the face.
The marine let a minute go by until he said, “Yes, sir. Can I help you?”
Still staring at the embassy building, Haere said, “Anybody in there up and about yet?”
“Yes, sir. Everybody.”
“I’d like to see whoever’s in charge of lost or strayed American citizens.”
“Male or female, sir?”
“Why?”
“Well, sir, we usually let Miss Steadman handle misplaced wives. They get down here, the wives, and they meet some guy with real white teeth and his shirt open down to here and well, sir, they get, you know, like you said, lost or strayed.”
“Miss Steadman handles them, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who handles people who step off the plane and get led off by the cops?”
The marine unlocked the gate and swung it open. “That’d be Mr. Merry like in Merry Christmas.”
“And what does Mr. Merry do?” Haere said once he was through the gate and the marine had relocked it.
“He’s a counselor.”
“Of what?”
The marine almost smiled. “Of people in trouble, sir.”
After he talked to the marine sergeant at the reception desk and signed in, Haere waited a minute or two until a brown-haired woman in her thirties appeared, examined him briefly, introduced herself as Mrs. Crane, and asked him to please come this way. He followed her down the hall, up a flight of stairs, down another hall, and through a door into a reception room with a small desk that had her name on it. She knocked on a closed door, opened it, said, “Mr. Haere is here,” and stood aside, indicating that Haere should go in.
The man who rose from behind the almost bare metal desk wore a seersucker jacket, a tie, and a smile. It was one of those wide white almost blinding smiles that immediately generate suspicion. Haere saw that the blue eyes above the smile seemed to be smiling, too, perhaps even grinning, although with all that crinkling it was hard to tell.
The man with the smile stuck out his hand as he leaned over the desk and said, “I’m Don Merry, Mr. Haere.”
Haere shook Merry’s hand. Merry waved him to a chair, sat back down, kept on smiling, and said, “Well, now. How can I help you?”
“I arrived on the flight from Houston last night.”
Merry nodded.
“I met a doctor on the flight, a medical doctor named Blaine. James G. Blaine.”
Merry chuckled. “From Maine?”
“Kansas. He was coming down here to take over a clinic for the Friends, the Quakers.”
Again, Merry nodded. “Joe Rice’s clinic.”
“He mentioned Rice. He said they were old friends, but that Rice had disappeared.”
The smile went away and Merry looked grave, but said nothing.
“There were only five passengers on the flight,” Haere continued. “Dr. Blaine was the second one off. He was arrested when he reached the bottom of the ramp and led away by four men who looked like cops to me.” Haere paused. “I thought you should know. I might add that I find it extremely disturbing that an American medical missionary should be whisked away by the police the moment he steps off the plane. Extremely disturbing.” Listening to himself, Haere was almost satisfied with the level of his indignation.
“Excuse me a minute,” Merry said, picked up the phone, and dialed a single number. When it was answered with a faint yes, he said, “The name is James G. Blaine, supposedly a medical doctor from Kansas.” Merry looked at Haere and raised an eyebrow.
“Wichita,” Haere said.
“Wichita, Kansas,” Merry said into the phone. “You’ve got the number of the Quaker clinic over on the eastern slope, don’t you? Well, call them and see if they’re expecting the arrival of Dr. Blaine, or if he has, in fact, already arrived safe and sound. If not, call Tucaereo and see if they had a J. Blaine on yesterday’s manifest. If they did, then call our friend Suro and see if his people got their sticky mitts on the doctor and, if so, find out where they’ve stashed him. Then come tell Mr. Haere and me all about it.”