Because it wouldn’t be smart.
7
At the time she left San José she did not yet know that her father was dead but there were certain things she did already know. Some of what she already knew at the time she left San José she had learned before she ever got to Costa Rica, had known in fact since the afternoon the sky went dark and the lightning forked on the horizon outside Dick McMahon’s room at Jackson Memorial and he began to tell her who it was he had to see and what it was he had to do. Some of what she already knew she had learned the day she brought him home from Jackson Memorial to the house in Sweetwater and managed to deflect his intention to drive down to where the Kitty Rex was berthed and Barry Sedlow was waiting for him. Some of what she already knew she believed to be true and some of what she already knew she believed to be delusion, but since this was a business in which truth and delusion appeared equally doubtful she was left to proceed as if even the most apparently straightforward piece of information could at any time explode.
Any piece of information was a potential fragmentation mine.
Fragmentation mines came immediately to mind because of one of the things she already knew.
This was one of the things she already knew: the shipment on the L-100 that left Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport at one-thirty on the morning of June 26 was composed exclusively of fragmentation mines, three hundred and twenty-four pallets, each pallet loaded with twelve crates, each crate containing between ten and two hundred mines depending upon their type and size. Some of these mines were antitank and some antipersonnel. There were the forty-seven-inch L-9 antitanks made by British Aerospace and there were the thirteen-inch PT-MI-BA III antitanks made by the Czechs. There were the POMZ-2 antipersonnels and there were the Chinese Type 72A antipersonnels and there were the Italian Valmara 69 antipersonnels.
69s.
Epperson had floated a figure of three dollars per for 69s and now he was claiming the market had dropped to two per.
When the pallets of 69s had finally been unloaded on the runway that morning she had been handed a hammer by the man with the shaved head and cutoff jeans and told to open a crate so that he could verify the merchandise.
Open it yourself, she had said, offering him back the hammer.
It doesn’t work that way, he had said, not taking the hammer.
She had hesitated.
He had unknotted a T-shirt from his belt and pulled it over his bare chest. The T-shirt was printed with an American flag and the legend THESE COLORS DON’T RUN.
I got nowhere particular to go, he had said, so it’s your call.
She had pried open the crate and indicated the contents.
He had extracted one of the small plastic devices, examined it, walked away and placed it on the ground halfway between Elena and the concrete structure. When he returned to Elena he was singing tunelessly, snatches of the theme from Bonanza.
He had moved back, and motioned her to do the same.
Then he had aimed a remote at the plastic device and whistled.
When she saw the dog burst from the open door of the concrete structure she had closed her eyes. The explosion had occurred between We got a right to pick a little fight and Bo-nan-za. The silence that followed was broken only by the long diminishing shriek of the dog.
“Guaranteed sixty-foot-diameter kill zone,” the man who was on his way from Angola to Tulsa had said then.
Here was the second thing she already knew: this June 26 shipment was not the first such shipment her father had arranged. He had been arranging such shipments all through the spring and into the summer of 1984, a minimum of two and usually three or four a month, C-123s, Convair 440s, L-100s, whatever they sent up to be filled, rusty big bellies sitting on the back runways at Lauderdale-Hollywood and West Palm and Opa-Locka and MIA waiting to be loaded with AK-47s, M-16s, MAC-10s, C-4, whatever was on the street, whatever was out there, whatever Dick McMahon could still promote on the strength of his connections, his contacts, his fifty years of doing a little business in Miami and in Houston and in Las Vegas and in Phoenix and in the piney woods of Alabama and Georgia.
These had not been easy shipments to assemble.
He had put these shipments together on credit, on goodwill, on a shared drink here and a promise there and a tale told at the Miami Springs Holiday Inn at two in the morning, on the shared yearning among what he called “these fellows I know for a long time” for one last score.
He had called in all his markers.
He had put himself on the line, spread paper all over the Southeast, thrown the dice just this one last time, one last bet on the million-dollar payday.
The million-dollar payday that was due to come with the delivery of the June 26 shipment.
The million-dollar payday that was scheduled to occur on the runway in Costa Rica where the June 26 shipment had just been unloaded.
One million American in Citibank traveler’s checks, good as gold.
Of course I have to turn around half to these fellows I know a long time who advanced me the stuff.
Which complicates the position I’m in now.
Elite. You see the position I’m in.
Five, ten years ago I might never have gotten out on a limb this way, I paid up front and got paid up front, did it clean, that was my strict motto, do it clean, cash and carry, maybe I’m getting old, maybe I played this wrong, but hell, Ellie, think about it, when was I going to see another shot like this one.
Don’t give me goddamn hindsight.
Hindsight is for shoe clerks.
Five, ten years ago, sure, I might have done it another way, but five, ten years ago we weren’t in the middle of the goddamnest hot market anybody ever saw. So what can you do. Strike while the iron is hot, so you run a little risk, so you get out on a limb for a change, it’s all you can do as I figure it.
So anyway.
So what.
You can see I need this deal.
You can see I’m in a position where I need to go down there and make the collection.
It was the figure that broke her heart.
The evenness of the figure.
The size of the figure.
The figure that was part of what she believed to be a delusion, the figure that had been the bel canto of her childhood, the figure that was now a memory, an echo, a dream, a romance, an old man’s fairy tale.
The million-dollar score, the million-dollar pop, the million-dollar payday.
The pop that was already half owed to other people, the payday that was already garnisheed.
The score that was not even a score anymore.
I’m in for a unit, my father’s doing two, Wynn Janklow would say to indicate investments of one and two hundred million dollars.
Million-dollar score, million-dollar payday.
She had gone her own way.
She had made her own life.
She had married a man who did not count money in millions but in units.
She had turned a deaf ear, she had turned her back.
It might be you’d just called from wherever.
In the creased snapshot she had taken from her mother’s bedroom her father was holding a bottle of beer and her mother was wearing a barbecue apron printed with pitchforks and the words OUT OF THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE.