Wally Scales stood looking at the television screen. He turned, shaking his head, and adjusted his glasses as he came over to the room-service table. He picked a shrimp from the platter resting in a bed of cracked ice.
“We possibly could’ve save Ferdinand’s ass, but the man’s time was up. Even the president had to swallow hard and admit it. But that fucking slope knew how to live, didn’t he?”
“I was saying to Crispin,” Dagoberto said, “yes, is fine to enjoy yourself if your people aren’ starving. But to take what he did, all that money, and put it in this country is a shameful thing to do. Here…” He pulled a bottle of champagne from the bucket stand next to his chair and poured Wally Scales a glass. “I look at this table I think, yes, here I am also enjoying myself. Ah, but there is a difference. It could be my last meal of this kind. In a few days I’m in the mountains again eating C rations, fighting for freedom.” He raised his glass. “Who knows but this could be the last champagne I drink in my life.”
“You better have a few more then,” Wally Scales said. “Do it up good your last night. Hey, but don’t forget to pay your bill when you leave.” He looked at the five canvas bank sacks lying on the sofa, three of them full, two folded empty. “What’d you say you scored, two and a half million?”
“No, Wally, two million, one hundred sixty-four thousand,” Dagoberto said. “Enough maybe to buy one gunship. Unless we get one for half price. You know we offering Sandino pilots a million dollars to bring us an Mi-24.”
“And you understand why you haven’t had any takers, don’t you? They know they’ll get shot in the head.”
“No, no, we wouldn’ do that, Wally.”
“I know where you could get about a half million M-16s cheap. The Filipina army, they got all kinds of weapon systems and shit.” Wally Scales finished his champagne and looked at the bank sacks again. “You think it’s safe to leave it there all night?”
“We’re going to guard it,” Dagoberto said, “with our lives.” He raised the champagne bottle, offering it.
Wally Scales put his glass on the table. “Uh-unh, I have to go. But you’re gonna call me tomorrow from Gulfport, right? Before you get on the boat. Call me on my secure line and then eat the piece of paper with the number on it.” Wally Scales watched the colonel’s expression change to a dumb stare and said, “I’m kidding, Bertie; little spook humor. Everybody knows what we’re doing. Some of the local Nicaraguans, I might add, are pissed off you didn’t call them to help out.”
Dagoberto leaned his head toward Crispin. “I use who I trust. Sure, there people here I use to know, but people can change their mind. Crispin, I know his family, I know is loyal.”
“You trust Franklin?”
“Yes, of course. He does what we tell him.”
“Well, he isn’t too sure about you guys, the way you’re acting.”
“What, he told you this?”
“He said all you talk about is Miami, what a great town it is, full of blond-haired quiff.”
“Franklin said that?”
“I’ll tell you fellas two things. One, you got somebody watching you, boy I took a keen interest in and loves me like his white brother. You understand the implication there? Boy is dedicated, eats his rais and bins during the trabil and never complains. Two, I think you should know Franklin’s lonely. I think the only reason he’s got a hard-on for you guys is because you don’t talk to him enough. You dig? Invite him up and give him some drinks, for Christ sake, it isn’t your money. What do you say?”
Dagoberto shrugged. “Of course. Why not?”
Wally Scales started to turn, looked over at the television set, and paused. “You know what I think was most interesting about this whole Filipina show? I mean about the way they threw Marcos out? I thought of it yesterday when I was reading about that guy Jerry Boylan getting murdered in the Men’s room-I mean assassinated; excuse me. Way back when his people, the Irish Republican Army, rebelled against the Brits in 1916-the Rising, they call it-they stormed and took the post office in Dublin. But when the Filipinas revolted against Marcos, what’d they take? The fucking TV station. Times have changed, gentlemen; we live in an age of instant electronic intelligence. If the video camera doesn’t get you the computer will.”
Now the Nicaraguan colonel and the Cuban Nicaraguan from Miami were again speaking in Spanish and drinking champagne but only picking at the shrimp. Dagoberto frowned at the television screen. He thought for a moment they were showing more home movies from the Malacanang Palace, but it was “Wheel of Fortune” that was on now.
Crispin said, “You think Franklin tells him things?”
“I think Wally made it up,” Dagoberto said, “so we’ll think the CIA is watching us. I should have told him it was an insult. I should have been offended, perhaps gone into a rage.”
“Forget it,” Crispin said. “Today in the newspaper a man writing about aid to the contras asked the question, will it go to anti-Communist patriots or to bank accounts in Miami? I say don’t protest, give them something to think about.”
“Tomorrow, I’ll tell him I was insulted.”
“You have only one thing to tell Wally tomorrow. ‘I’ve been robbed!’ With feeling. Practice it. ‘The son of a whore took all the money!’ Like that.”
Dagoberto was thinking, staring at the window that framed in faint evening light a balcony of the Royal Sonesta Hotel across the street. “Tomorrow, Nacio will pick up a ticket at the airport issued in the name of Franklin de Dios.” Thinking aloud now. “At 9:10 a.m. he boards the flight to Atlanta. There, he changes flights to go to Miami.”
“Nacio doesn’t resemble Franklin in the least.”
“It’s all right. Nacio calls us from Atlanta when he’s certain the Miami flight is leaving. Just before.”
“As long as you can trust him.”
“Nacio was in the Guard, my aide until 1979, when he came here. He asks no questions… All right. Franklin goes to the airport tomorrow at the same time to return the automobile…”
“He doesn’t know Nacio,” Crispin said, “if he were to see him?”
“There is no possibility they could know each other. Nacio is from Managua. All right. Franklin comes back to the hotel in a taxi and we leave in the new Mercedes. Yes,” Dagoberto said, “yes, before Franklin goes to the airport I could call Wally and tell him he insulted me.”
“You’re crazy if you don’t forget it,” Crispin said. He was relaxed, his leg over the arm of his chair. “Listen, the only thing you tell him, Franklin was in this room guarding the money during the time we went downstairs for breakfast. We came back and he was gone and the money was gone. And the automobile, the Chrysler.”
“I don’t tell him Franklin returned it to the rental company at the airport.”
“Mother of God,” Crispin said. “You don’t mention the airport, you say he took the money and the Chrysler, the trusted friend of the CIA man, it’s marvelous, and we’re going now to look for him.”