Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

In July a red suitcase for a BWIA flight leaving Kingston’s airport for Cuba explodes on the tarmac. Offices of the BWIA in Barbados, Air Panama in Colombia, Iberia and Nanaco Line in Costa Rica, all with links to Cubana, are all bombed. A Cuban official in Mexico and two in Argentina are murdered. Then in September Orlando Letelier is assassinated in D.C. Pinochet’s DINA in that case, but there are those names, those same fucking names, which come up whenever the topic is Latin America. Then there was that fire in Guyana, that only destroyed Cuban fishing equipment. In June this year, the fourteenth actually, the Peruvian ambassador Fernando Rodriguez was stabbed in his living room, this before this Jamaican government declared a state of emergency.

Crime here is out of control, it has been for most of the year, but the trick about Jamaican crime is that it is localized for the most part. Every time it travels uptown you get the sense somebody is trying to make a very unsubtle point. I’ve met people on both parties, dozens of bulls let loose in a china shop. But even by their standards, even by gunmen standards, hell, even by Chilean secret police standards, Rodriguez’s death was just a little too planned, too metic ulous, too strained to appear random for it to be so. Explosives are the Cuban’s MO, everybody knows that, but something about that death stinks of him, it just fucking stinks. Of course the United States government to our best knowledge was not aware of any action to terminate the ambassador but hopes the perpetrators of this unspeakable crime and the powers that be that encourages, provides for or protects them will be brought to justice.

Jesus, I’m starting to sound like Henry Kissinger more and more every day.

— Sally?

— Yes, sir.

— Can you check where Louis Johnson went?

— At once, sir.

I release the intercom and look at my desk. My wife has never set foot in my office but Kissinger has, so she can kiss my ass. January, days after we moved here, my first job is to babysit Heinrich, which everybody calls him behind his back, who was not having a good week in Jamaica. But today, on the way to the hairdresser after the don’t-call-it-a-fight fight, the wife did something really strange. She looked at me. Well, I think she was looking at me. I was staring at the road in front of me the whole time, heading up Hope Road to Mona, but by now I sure as hell know when a person is staring at me. Anyway, she looked at me and said,

— You know which word I’ve found that I like, that I like quite a bit, well, maybe not like but does make me chuckle when I hear it, Barry?

— No, dear.

— Scurrilous. Scur-ri-lous. It’s one of those words certain people like you use. I never noticed it before, how I’m such an intimate companion to scurrilous. Not a day goes by when I’m not confronted or just annoyed by something scurrilous.

— We get our own dictionary as a goodbye gift from Yale.

— Well, you get your own something. But you know something, Barry, I always burst out laughing as soon as one of you say that word, especially in an interview.

— Kissinger was on TV again or something?

— No, much closer to home, the ambassador that I don’t like. Said it to Nelly Matar’s husband at some business meeting last Tuesday. Said, “The allegations of destabilization are scurrilous and false.”

— I had no idea you lunching ladies talked politics.

— Well, what else are we going to talk about? None of you have any penis size to speak of.

— Excuse me?

— So you are paying attention. Ha. Seriously, what the hell are you doing here anyway? Talk to me seriously for once, Barry. I’d ask Louis Johnson’s wife but poor girl fell down and hit her face again, and—

— We go where the U.S. government sends us.

— Oh I didn’t say we, darling, I said you. I’m here wasting my time and kidding myself. What are you doing here? What have you been doing this past month? I swear to God I would have preferred if you had a mistress.

— Me too.

— Don’t flatter yourself, Barry. Those days are way past you.

— Fuck you too, woman.

— What are you doing here? Give me the blow by blow.

— The blow by blow, huh?

— Well, the traffic isn’t going anywhere. And you haven’t said anything interesting to me in weeks.

— You’re asking me to reveal classified information?

— Barry, you can either tell me, or sleep with one eye open for the next three years because believe me, I’ll find out. You know how I get when I set my mind to something.

— Would you like me to recite the memo?

— I’m one of the ones who can understand big words, remember?

I have a theory that while a man might not always get the wife he wants or needs, he always gets the wife he deserves. I’m not sure the wife feels the same way. But in a perverse way, this was something I always liked about her. I say perverse because any reasonable man, even a passive one, would have slapped her silly by now.

— What do you think we were doing in Ecuador?

— Jesus Christ, Barry, I know the CIA—

— The Company.

— Sheesh. The Company. I know the Company is not some foreign aid division of the White House. If you’re in a country you’re probably up to no good.

— Excuse me?

— Excuse yourself. You’re not the one who always has to pack up the children in a rush.

— Child. We didn’t have Aiden in Ecuador.

— But we did in Argentina. So what were you doing there then, and what the hell does it have to do with your boss telling bullshit to Nelly Matar’s husband?

— He’s not my boss.

— That’s not what he would say.

— You really wanna know?

— Yes, Barry, I really want to know.

— CIA-related Missions directive for Ecuador.

— Uh-huh.

— Priority A.

— Christ, you really are going to recite the memo.

— Priority A: Collect and report intelligence on strength and intentions of communist and other hostile political organizations, including international support, influence in Ecuadoran government. Priority B: Collect and report intelligence on stability of Ecuador on government, strength and intentions of dissident political groups. Maintain high-level agents in government, security, ruling political and opposition political parties, especially opposition military leaders.

— I’ve really heard enough, Barry.

— Priority C: Propaganda and psychological warfare: disseminate information to counteract anti-U.S. propaganda, neutralize communist influence in mass organizations, establish alternative organizations. Support democratic leaders.

— I married an automaton. What has any of this got to do with Jamaica?

— The Company has only one rule book, dear. One size fits all. Maybe you should take a closer look around you.

— I am looking around. That’s why I don’t believe you.

— What do you mean?

— None of that stuff explains what’s going on here.

— On January 12, the Wall Street Journal called Michael Manley’s PNP the most inept of all Western governments. February Miami Herald : Jamaica is building up to showdown. March, Sal Resnick in the New York Times writes that the Jamaican government is allowing Cuba to train its police force and align itself with Black Power elements. July: U.S. News & World Report says Jamaica’s Prime Minister Michael Manley has moved closer to communist Cuba. August, Newsweek says there are three thousand Cubans in Jamaica. Resnick—

— Good Lord, enough about your lapdog Sal Resnick. As for Cubans, I don’t see any Cubans. Mexicans and Venezuelans, sure, but no Cubans.

— The man asked for a hundred million in trade credit then thinks he can just shit in our faces by kissing up to communists? Then don’t ask for any fucking credit. Hell, don’t ask for anything. If only he’d shut his mouth about socialism.