Brett Halliday - Six Seconds to Kill

“Are you sure we want to call it an organization?” Vega replied bitterly. “For three years I haven’t seen a penny of funds, and now all at once, when apparently you want something, what I have in the way of a cadre is myself, my brother and a couple of cousins. But I still have a following! The point I’m making, I can’t get them to come to meetings on a regular basis when I have nothing in the way of patronage, know what I mean?”

“What about your paper?”

“I have no paper any more, Mr. Robinson. What I have is a printer’s bill, six months overdue, and this, I regret, I am unable to pay.”

“How much?”

Vega hesitated for a tiny tick. “Approximately five thousand dollars.”

The agent laughed. “One other thing you have, Lorenzo, is a sense of humor. Here’s what we want, and if you can’t do it we’ll just have to go into the files and get somebody else.”

“Those others. They’re big on flowery promises, but can they deliver? When I say I will do something, you can rely on it.”

“Yeah, yeah. We’re thinking about Saturday.”

“Crowther?” Vega said alertly.

“You know that Galvez and his NLS crowd are going to run a demonstration in front of the St. Albans. ‘American imperialist bandits,’ kind of thing. That we don’t care about, it’s par for the course. Did you know Gil Ruiz is in Miami?”

Vega sat forward, genuinely surprised. Gil Ruiz was a Brazilian, a professional revolutionary, he called himself-a professional phony, in Vega’s opinion. He had been in on the overthrow of a very stupid, very backward, very corrupt military regime, but the day-to-day business of running a government had bored him. Ever since, he had been sneaking around from one underground movement to another, stirring up trouble and getting his followers killed and jailed. He was a man of gesture, with an aura of spurious romance which appealed to susceptible teenagers. He had no business being in the United States.

“Gil Ruiz is definitely not in Miami,” Vega said flatly. “You are misinformed.”

“Somebody who looked like him landed on Pepper Key two nights ago. One of your local Communists picked him up in a Volkswagen camper. Unfortunately we lost track of him coming into Miami. Perhaps you also aren’t aware that an ad-hoc committee of leading leftists is calling for a rival demonstration Saturday?”

“I have heard something, but how many can they influence, after all? A handful.”

“Considerably more than a handful,” Mr. Robinson said dryly. “You haven’t been keeping up. Our estimate is four hundred. Galvez will have twenty or thirty at the most, walkers not fighters. The so-called militants will elbow them out of the way and take over the demonstration. And that won’t mean peaceful picketing. We think they’re going to try to storm the hotel. Ruiz, we believe, has been brought in to organize this, which indicates that they’re shooting for something big. It’s an easy scenario to write. Take over the St. Albans, cut off the electric power, disrupt the luncheon, kidnap Crowther-”

“Kidnap Crowther! Maria! That would be an impressive thing. On American soil!”

“They’ll settle for less. We won’t know till it happens. Luckily, we know about Ruiz, so they won’t be taking us by surprise. There’s going to be heavy media coverage, and purely for propaganda reasons, we don’t want to call out the National Guard. We would prefer to have the Latin community handle the problem in its own way.”

“But I had no idea-four hundred! Students, probably. I assure you, four hundred militant students are no joke. I can’t produce an effective counterdemonstration out of thin air. The paramilitary organizations are dissolved. The cadres stay home watching Jackie Gleason on television. Saturday afternoon there will be football games. I can predict that no one will feel ambitious about being cracked over the head on behalf of Eliot Crowther, a person of so little magnetism. I dislike him myself. Tell me exactly what it is you want. I would like to help you because of our past associations. It will take money, you know.”

“We want you to get out a special edition of your paper, what’s its name again-”

“Libertad. Three years ago it would have been on the tip of your tongue.”

“A lot has changed in three years. If your regular printer won’t cooperate, go to somebody else. Leaflets would be just as good. Don’t mention Crowther. Or Ruiz, naturally. The Commies and Castroites want to give the impression that the refugee community is opposed to United States policy, so on and so forth, so let’s come out on the streets to show our gratitude for American hospitality, the American way of life, the greatest country in the world et cetera-you’re the writer, put it in your own words. Then get on the phone and start calling people. You used to be considered quite a fair organizer.”

“In those days, I will remind you, I had money in my pocket. I could buy a person a glass of rum. If he needed a new shirt-”

“We understand that you’ll have expenses. A thousand dollars should cover it.”

“Including the printing? Some people will be working Saturday, putting in overtime, I will have to recompense them for taking time off. I say it with regret, but in this day and age, ideology is not enough. Even five thousand would be inadequate, but I would try to manage.”

Vega, as they both knew, wasn’t going to end up saying no, and they settled on $1,750.

“And I don’t even know what I’m buying,” Mr. Robinson complained. “How many people? You don’t seem able to tell me. This had better work, or it’s my ass. Tell them to take guns, just in case. If it looks too tough, do some shooting and then the cops can move in.”

So that was what it was all about! Penniless, Vega had allowed himself to be outmaneuvered. If guns had been mentioned earlier, he wouldn’t have agreed to do it for a measly $1,750. These North Americans were businessmen, after all.

“Yes, Mr. Robinson,” he said sadly. “I understand the situation. I will do what I can for you because I am grateful for American hospitality, and I assure you I really do mean that.”

Sometime in the early hours of Thursday morning, thieves broke into the Emerson Sporting Goods outlet on North Miami Avenue. A partial list of the missing merchandise, supplied to the police the following day, included tennis rackets, cameras, fly rods and golf clubs, hunting rifles, shotguns, an assortment of handguns, including a window display of unusual European pistols.

The detective division of the Miami police department, which as yet had not been officially informed of the security preparations for the visit of the U.S. attorney general two days later, treated it routinely. They called their informants and asked if they had heard anything. No one had. There it would have stopped, except for a lady who lived over a restaurant on the same block. Seeing an account of the break in the morning paper, she called in to say that she had gone to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and had happened to observe a light blue panel truck, unmarked, come out of a delivery alley. Nothing more important was happening at the moment, and two detectives were assigned to see what they could turn up.

The state motor vehicle bureau had recently installed a cardsorting machine. A clerk ran the truck registrations through the machine, which in a matter of moments kicked out all the blue panel trucks in Dade County. Most were the property of stores or delivery services, and were clearly identified. Only four were unlabeled. One of these was registered to a Guillamo Delgado, at an address on 15th Court in Southwest Miami.

The detectives were hurrying to get back so they could wind up their paperwork without running into the dinner hour. Delgado operated a small moving business and did light junking. His truck was up on blocks, and the oil pan had been pulled. The detectives nosed around, without really expecting to find any stolen tennis rackets or shotguns at this point. They knocked on the back door and were admitted to the kitchen.