Cat sank into a chair. This was the end of it all. If Pedro the Pirate was dead, he had nowhere else to go in this thing, not without Bluey Holland. He felt stripped of his power to do anything about anything. In his mind, he listened once again to the voice on the telephone and the one word it spoke, and he was no longer sure. He had mounted this expedition on a wisp of a hope that his mind had conjured up, just as it had conjured up Jinx’s face on the girl in Riohacha. He had gotten a good man killed for a mindless compulsion and a wristwatch. He tried not to weep.
“What will you do now?” she asked.
“I’m going home,” he said wearily. “I’ve got all there is to get, I’m afraid.” He looked up at her. “You’ve been very kind to me. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yes, you can buy me dinner tonight and tell me the whole story.” She paused. “I know who you are, Mr. Catledge. The inscription on the watch told me. I read all about it at the time. You’ve changed a lot from the pictures I saw.”
Cat nodded. “Of course I’ll buy you dinner. I owe you a great deal more than that.”
“An hour then? At the pool bar?”
“Yes, fine. I could use a shower, and I want to make some travel arrangements and call home.”
She left, and Cat called the front desk and asked about flights to Miami.
“There is a flight from Cartagena the day after tomorrow, señor, or there is the daily Eastern flight from Bogotá. There is a connecting flight from Santa Marta tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”
“Will you try and get me on the flight from Santa Marta, please? And will you ask Eastern to get me on a connecting flight from Miami to Atlanta, Georgia?” He’d leave the Cessna; maybe there would be some way to get it back later.
“Of course, señor.”
“And I’d like to make a call to Atlanta.” He gave her Ben’s number. “I will have to place the call with the international operator, and that will probably take at least an hour,” she said.
“Fine, I’ll either be at the pool bar or in the dining room.” He hung up and got into a shower.
She was wearing a white silk sheath this time, and she looked even better, the whites of her eyes startling against her tanned skin. “Let’s go straight to the dining room, shall we?” he said, taking her arm. “It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday, with all that’s happened.” He took her arm and guided her to a table, noticing how pleasant her cool skin felt to his touch.
When they had ordered drinks and dinner, she took a sip of her martini and put it down. “Before you tell me what’s happened, there’s something I must tell you,” she said.
“I’m all ears.”
“I’m a television journalist — free-lance. I sell my stuff to the American networks. My proper name is Maria Eugenia Garcia-Greville, but I use Meg Greville for my work.”
A light went on in Cat’s head. “Of course, I’ve seen some of your stuff — on the Today show, wasn’t it? Something about Central American guerrillas?”
“That’s me.”
“But you never appear on camera, do you?”
“No. I was working at a local television station in Los Angeles during the early seventies, and I talked them into sending me to Vietnam with a cameraman and sound man — not for war reporting, but for human-interest stuff — talking to kids from L.A. in hospitals — ‘Hi, Mom’ — that sort of thing. We had hardly arrived when there was an attack on Saigon. My cameraman and sound man and I took a mortar shell behind a wall where we were hiding. Both my crew were killed, but I wasn’t badly hurt. I salvaged some of the gear and did my own shooting, narrating it as I went. I kept it up through the whole attack, and when I got back to L.A. it ran — first on the local station, then on the network. I got a Peabody for it.
“After that, I never worked any other way. The subjective camera, voice-over, turned into a personal trademark for me, and over the years the equipment has shrunk and gotten a lot lighter, so it’s easier than it used to be.”
“You’re free-lance, you say? You don’t work for a network?”
“Nope, I like my independence. It pays well, and I can pursue whatever interests me. Mostly I’ve reported from South and Central America and from the Philippines. I came down here the first time to do a story about an Indian family in the Amazon who run their own little cocaine factory — just a man, his wife, and two sons. I met some people, established some sources, fell in love with the country. I bought a little piece of property near Cartagena and built a beach house. I keep an apartment in New York, but the house is where I come when I’m tired. I heard about the gamines in Santa Marta, and I’ve been up here for a little over a week, shooting stuff on them. It’ll make a good piece for the Today show, I think. I’m all wrapped up now; I was shooting my last footage when I ran into you yesterday on the street.”
“Sounds like an interesting life.”
She nodded. “It is.” She paused. “I like to be up front on a story. I wanted you to know, going in, that I’m a reporter.”
“You want to do a story on what I’m doing here?”
She shook her head. “No, I wasn’t around to shoot any tape, so for me there’s no story. You’re going home, anyway, you said. No, I’m just curious, having landed in the middle of all this. But I am a reporter, and I want you to know that if you tell me something, it might end up in a story sometime.”
“Fair enough. I’ll skip the part about losing the yacht, since you’ve read the reports on that, anyway.”
“What I read was the Time story. I was in Honduras at the time.”
“That was accurate reporting, so I’ll start a few months after that, in fact, less than a month ago.” Cat took her from the phone call to the present, giving her as much detail as he could, remaining vague about his contact with Jim. He found that telling her the story was helping to put the whole thing into perspective. If he had had any doubts that he was at the end of his rope, they dissolved as he recounted the details.
“And exactly how did you meet Bluey Holland?”
“Friend of a friend. I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more than that.”
“And now you feel that your daughter is really dead?”
Cat sighed. “I’m not sure about the voice on the phone anymore,” he said, “and apart from that, I don’t have the slightest shred of evidence that she might be alive. I do know, thanks to you, that one of her murderers is dead, though, and that’s half the job done.”
“Would you finish the job if you could find Denny?”
A little flash of anger went through him as he thought about Denny. “If he were sitting here right now, I don’t think I could answer for myself. But I wouldn’t know where to start looking for him. Would you, in the circumstances?”
She shook her head. “It’s a big country, and he might not even be in it. I wish I could suggest something.”
Dinner came, and they ate slowly, making small talk about Central America and Colombia. As the busboy took away the plates, a waiter appeared.
“A telephone call, Señor Ellis,” he said.
Cat rose. “Excuse me, I placed a call to my brother-in-law earlier. I’ll be right back.” He followed the waiter to a phone. The connection was excellent.
“Jesus, I’m glad you’re alive,” Ben said. “We’ve been worried sick.”
“I’m just fine, Ben, and I’m coming home tomorrow. Everything here has come to a dead end.”
There was a short silence, then Ben said, “Listen, a guy in Senator Carr’s office called here a couple of days after you left.”