Yarnell had had his detractors in those days, too, Owens stopped a moment to explain. There were a few early voices who thought he was too big for his britches, that he was going too far too fast, and that when the fall came Yarnell, for all his youthful enthusiasm and foolishness, would take a lot of good people with him. When he married this young girl, a member of a good family, his critics claimed he had finally gone too far. The girl was just a baby, still in her teens! What could he be thinking?
“But then none of us really knew Yarnell’s measure then, not yet, and none of us had met Evita. If Darby Yarnell was a force to be reckoned with, if he was the sun, then Evita Yarnell was a super nova. All of Mexico City was at their feet.”
CESTA was pals with bureaucrats at every level of the Mexican government. Yarnell’s Operation Limelight was the counteraction; our answer to something that had been in place since the forties. Not so easy a task. His first step was to gain the love and respect of the Mexican people, which had been hurried along by his marriage, and then he could come in with his sweeping gestures to capture the hearts of the men who ran the country.
Owens was a natural storyteller, but he was an old, lonely man who was happy for the company and meant to string out every little detail for as long as he could get away with it. McGarvey had no real objections, for often the kernel of truth you were looking for came in the offhand remarks of some garrulous storyteller. But he wanted the man to at least stay within the main framework of the story — Yarnell’s life.
“I still don’t get a sense of what Yarnell’s program was all about,” McGarvey said. “I understand what he was trying to do, and I certainly understand why, but I’m not quite sure I see the how.”
“Yarnell has always had money. He was raised by his grandparents, as I recall, and they died when he was quite young, leaving him a bundle in trust, which came under his sole control when he turned twenty-five. He hasn’t lost money, from what I heard.”
Yarnell bought himself a house on the outskirts of Mexico City … possibly one of the largest, finest palaces in the capital. He staffed it with a lot of his friends — God knows how he got them so quickly, but he was always surrounded by them — and he began to throw parties.
“I saw the house only once,” Owens said, smiling at the memory. “Let me tell you, McGarvey, the place was a palace. He had one of everything there and perhaps two of some things.”
“Who were his targets in those days? I mean, how were they picked out of the crowd?” McGarvey asked.
“He had a governmental directory, of course. He went through it with a red pencil for everyone he figured was committed to CESTA, and a blue pencil for everyone committed to us. In those days the reds outnumbered the blues two to one.”
“He invited the unmarked … uncommitted ones to his house?”
“To his house, to a hunting lodge he rented, to a little retreat on the ocean. He bought them presents, gave them weekends with beautiful women if need be, but mostly he gave himself; his free, helpful advice on how to solve any problem they might have, from love to engineering, from business to bureaucracy. He became their banker as well as their father confessor. For the entire government.”
“CESTA had more money than Yarnell,” McGarvey said. “Even rich Americans couldn’t possibly compete with an entire governmental network …. From what you’re telling me CESTA was the entire Warsaw Pact’s organization.”
“Of course there was no competition, at least not for money. But CESTA was indiscriminate. They went in for quantity, while Darby Yarnell went for quality. CESTA, for example, might manage to turn five out of the six men running the water utility for Mexico City. But Yarnell would pick the one man on whom the department was most dependent. The one indispensable man. He’d put that man into the limelight so that the entire world could see that he was numero uno, that he loved Mexico above all other nations, that his loyalty could never come into question, and that there would never be another man half as good as he for the job.
“Yarnell knew how to make a man feel good about himself, but he also knew how to make everyone else feel the same way about that man. It was an art.
“But then the Bay of Pigs fiasco came along, Yarnell was assigned to the planning team in Guatemala City, and when it all fell apart he was lucky to get off the beach alive.”
17
Houses seemed to take on the personality of those who lived in them, McGarvey had always heard. He wondered, mightn’t it also work the other way around? After lunch Owens said it was his custom to walk along the beach every afternoon. Kept his mind fresh, he explained, his juices flowing, and demon constipation, the absolute bane of an old man’s existence, from rearing its ugly head. Looking back now as they walked at water’s edge, McGarvey could see that the house was a lot like its master; old, a bit on the worn side, but with a grace and wisdom that pressed you to come back again and again. That part, McGarvey suspected, Owens had inherited from the building, which was comforting in a Victorian way, yet demanding of nearly constant attention and care lest the entire fabric of its structure unravel because of careless handling. Clouds had begun to form out to sea, but they didn’t look very threatening although McGarvey could tell there was wind in them because already the surf was up from when he had first arrived. Owens wore an old navy pea coat, its broad round collar up around his blue-tinged ears, and a woolen watch cap on the back of his head, a few strands of wispy white hair sticking out in back. His hands were stuffed deeply in his pockets as they walked, and from time to time he would spit into the water. They headed up the beach at a fairly good pace. No one else was in sight in either direction.
“Does the name Roger Harris ring any bells with you, Mr. Owens?” McGarvey asked, keeping up.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“He was stationed in Havana until Castro took over. In the fifties.”
“He might have been one of them in charge of the recruitment medical exams down in Miami. If he’s the same one.”
“Was he a medical doctor?”
“No, just another idiot with ambitions like the rest of us.” Owens looked back without breaking stride. “Wasn’t he one of the ones who bought it in Girón?”
“Yes, sir,” McGarvey said. “And I think there is a very real possibility that Darby Yarnell murdered him.”
This time Owens did stop. He studied McGarvey’s face. “Are you trying to pull my goddamned leg, or what?”
“No.”
“Where the hell did you come up with such a notion as that? Did someone feed you that line of crap? Is that why you’re here? Was Harris something to you, then?” Owens came a little closer. “That was a long time ago, mister. I suspect you weren’t even out of college by then.”
“High school.”
Owens laughed. “I don’t think you know shit-from-Shineola. You’re guessing.”
“But you’re not. It’s why I came here like this.”
“For what? For whom?”
“I wanted to know about Yarnell. You called him a prick; you couldn’t have liked him.”
“I’ve got no ax to grind,” Owens said. He turned as if to continue up the beach but then came back. “People could get themselves dead, dredging up old business. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. You should know.” He looked out to sea. “Dark clouds on the horizon,” he muttered. “When the grim reaper is standing next to you, it makes you want to think out your next moves pretty carefully, if you catch my drift.”