“Who?”
“I can hear your abuela saying, ‘Carlos, you have to learn not to interrupt your betters when they’re talking, otherwise people won’t like you.’”
“My abuela was talking about adults, Juan Carlos, and if you recall, I’m three weeks older than you are.”
“As I was saying, when I heard General Jesus Manuel Cosada, who became DGI after Raúl moved up to be president when ol’ Fidel retired from public life, was here, the really wild thought that it might be connected with you just sort of popped into my mind.
“Then, when Paul told me he’d seen several DGI heavyweights in addition to the general, and happened to mention you were planning to tie the knot here, things that were happening began to make sense.”
“What sort of things were happening?”
“Well, the DGI guys immediately began finding employment at the Cruise Ship Terminal and several of the hotels, including the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, which seemed a little odd.”
“The Grand Cozumel hired some of them?”
“The Grand Cozumel hired seven Cubans and the Terminal six.”
“That’s surprising.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know who runs the Terminal for Aleksandr Pevsner, but Sweaty told me that the guy who runs the Grand Cozumel learned the hotel trade running the SVR dachas in Sochi.”
“The what, where?”
“Sochi, on the Black Sea, is sort of the Mexican Cozumel. I don’t know about the czars, but important Russians from Stalin down—”
“It goes back to the later czars,” Sweaty said. Charley looked at her and saw she had her CaseyBerry to her ear.
Where the hell did she have that phone? There’s not enough material in her bikini to safely blow her nose!
“Starting in the 1860s,” Sweaty went on, “they started developing it as a place for sanatoriums; tuberculosis was a big problem then.”
“Hey, Red, how are you?” Juan Carlos inquired.
“I’m well and my Carlito’s right, Juan Carlos,” Sweaty said. “Pietr Urbanovsky, the general manager of the Grand Cozumel, is ex-SVR. He’s going to be — or should be — very careful about who he hires.”
“Let me tell you how I think that could have happened, Red,” Juan Carlos said. “The Cubans are tight with the drug cartels. So some cartel people went to the barrio where, for example, the people who pick up trash on the beach, polish the marble in the lobby, work in the laundry, people like that, live. They said, ‘Hey, Jose. You’ve been working too hard. Take a vacation. Go to your village. Stay there for a month. Here’s three months’ pay and a bus ticket.’ Then if Jose or Pedro says, ‘Thank you very much, but I like my job and don’t want to risk losing it by not showing up for work,’ Pasquale, the cartel guy, says, ‘Pedro, you either accept our generosity, or we’ll cut your head off and hang it from a bridge over the highway. And then we’ll go to your village and rape your wife, mother, and any daughters you happen to have.’ Then when Pedro and Jose and everybody else doesn’t show up for work, no problem for your pal… What did you say his name was?”
“Pietr Urbanovsky,” Sweaty furnished.
“Your pal Pietr had no trouble filling his vacancies because the Cubans — who probably said they were Mexican — were looking for employment. Getting the picture, Red?”
“I don’t think you’re getting the picture, Pancho Villa,” Sweaty said sweetly. “My Carlito told you Pietr is not stupid.”
“I didn’t say he was, Red. I didn’t mean to imply that he was taken in. What I think your pal Pietr will do is watch the Cubans closely as they pick trash off the beach, polish the marble, et cetera — which of course gets those necessary tasks accomplished — while he looks into his new employees and what happened to the ones who didn’t show up for work.
“Sooner or later, most likely sooner, he will know all. And then he will get rid of his new employees the way he gets rid of employees foolish enough to think they can take home hams and roasts of beef and things they have stolen from the rooms of Grand Cozumel guests by dropping them into garbage cans.”
“How does he do that, Juan Carlos?” Charley asked.
“The rumor going around is that he retrieves the hams and roasts and whatever from the garbage cans and then puts the thieves in them. Then they are loaded aboard one of Señor Pevsner’s cruise ships for disposal with the other garbage on the high seas.”
“Does the Service Employees International Union know about this?” Charley asked.
“The rumor going around is that the union organizers they sent down here also went for a cruise in garbage cans,” Juan Carlos said.
“The reason we called, Charley,” Paul Sieno said, “was to ask whether we should just let things take their natural course, or whether you want to tell Señor Urbanovsky not to put the Cubans in garbage cans right away, so we can keep an eye on them.”
“Keep them alive,” Sweaty answered for him.
“Yeah,” Castillo agreed thoughtfully, after a moment.
“And I called, as I said before, to beg you to join yourselves in holy matrimony in the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel in Vegas,” Juan Carlos said. “If you try to get married here, there will be bodies and rivers of blood all over the streets, which will greatly distress the Greater Cozumel Area Chamber of Tourism.”
Again, Sweaty answered for Castillo: “We can’t get married until this nonsense with President Clendennen is over. But when it is, I intend to be married in the Grand Ballroom of the Grand Cozumel by His Eminence Archbishop Valentin, assisted by Archimandrite Boris. I don’t think His Eminence would be willing to conduct the service in the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel.”
“I don’t see it as a problem,” Charley said. “I don’t know how long it will take to dissuade President Clendennen of his notions I should get rid of the Somali pirates and seize Drug Cartel International, but it’s not going to be anytime soon. Another month or six weeks at a minimum, during which I have no intention of going anywhere near the North American continent.”
“I hear and obey, Master,” Paul Sieno said.
“Pancho,” Sweaty said, “as soon as we get off the line, I’ll call my brother and tell him to call Pietr and explain the situation to him.”
“Take care, Red,” Juan Carlos said, and the green LEDs on their CaseyBerrys stopped glowing.
[SEVEN]
“Nice breakfast, Frank,” FBI Director Mark Schmidt said to DCI Lammelle. “Really nice ham!”
“We do it all here on the farm,” Lammelle replied. “Breed the pigs, slaughter them, and cure the hams and bacon in our own smokehouse. We had a Russian — an SVR biological warfare chemist we turned in Africa — in here a couple of years ago who showed us how to do that. Before him, we used to sell the live pigs to an Amish farmer.”
“May I suggest we get started?” General Allan B. Naylor asked, with an unmistakable tone of annoyance in his voice.
As someone once suggested, the best-laid plans of mice and men “gang aft agley,” which meant they often don’t come to pass. In this case, not everyone who was to participate in what Secretary Cohen was diplomatically calling “the conversation” was able to make it to Green Acres Farm as early as Secretary Cohen had hoped.
The first delayed arrival, that of DCI Lammelle, had been caused by the motion picture star Shawn Ohio, whose portrayal of CIA agent Dirk Eastwood in a series of films had made him the thirty-fourth-highest-paid actor in Hollywood. In his private life Mr. Ohio was somewhat to the left of his screen persona. He was a great admirer of Hugo Chávez, and deeply convinced that Mr. Chávez had been grossly wronged by the CIA.