“Oh no!”
“Oh yes.”
Now there were two faces hovering over her, one black and indifferent, one thin and fierce. The thin man was sneering. He tore the blanket away and saw that Renee was dressed only in her panties.
“Don’t hurt me!” Renee cried.
The thin man brandished a shiny knife.
“Oh please no,” Renee cried.
The black man ferociously seized the thin man by the wrist and twisted his arm. The thin man yelped and the knife fell into the bedding.
“Hay-zoose, don’t ever try that shit again,” Viceroy Wilson said. He was thinking to himself: This is the problem when you work with Cuban lunatics. They can’t go five minutes without pulling a pistol or a blade. They couldn’t help it—it was something in their DNA molecules.
“Renee, my name is Mr. Wilson. This here is Mr. Bernal.”
Renee said, “How do you do?”
Wilson sighed. “We need the name of your boyfriend, and we need it now.”
“I’m not telling. I don’t want you to hurt him.”
“Girl, we don’t want to hurt him. We want to let him know what happened to you.”
Puzzled, Renee asked, “What did happen to me?”
“You’ve been kidnapped by a group of dangerous radicals.”
“God! But I’m nobody.”
“That’s true,” said Jesus Bernal, fishing through the bed for his blade.
“Why me? I’m just a tourist.”
“Did you enjoy the porpoise show?” Bernal asked.
Renee nodded apprehensively. “Yes, very much. And the trained whale.”
“Shamu,” Bernal said. “That’s the whale’s name.”
This guy was sickening, Wilson thought. He might even be worth killing someday.
“Did you ride the monorail?” Bernal went on mockingly. He wore a mean smile.
“No, David wanted to see the shark moat instead.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Wilson muttered. “David who?”
“I won’t tell you!”
Wilson slipped one hand around Renee’s freckled neck. It felt soft and cool. He gave a sharp, tennis-ball squeeze; that was plenty.
“David Richaud,” Renee said, starting to sob. “R-i-c-h-a-u-d.”
Viceroy Wilson carefully wrote down the name. “And where are you staying?”
“At the Royal Sonesta.”
“Thank you, Renee, my sweet,” said Jesus Bernal, bobbing at the foot of the bed.
“Shut up and type,” said Wilson, shoving the paper at his companion. Bernal bounced over to the kitchen table and sat down at a portable electric typewriter.
Viceroy Wilson turned to his victim and said, “Do you believe that fuckhead went to Dartmouth?”
Jesus Bernal may have come to the cause with impressive credentials, but he was not highly regarded by Viceroy Wilson. Jesus Bernal had once held the title of defense minister for a rabid anti-Castro terrorist group called the Seventh of July Movement. The group was named for the day in 1972 when its founders had launched a costly and ill-fated attack on a Cuban gunboat off the Isle of Pines. In later years an acrimonious dispute had arisen over the name of the group, with some members claiming that the Isle of Pines attack had actually occurred on the sixth of July, and demanding that the group should be renamed. A compromise was reached and eventually the terrorists became known as the First Weekend in July Movement.
Throughout the late 1970s this organization took credit for a large number of bombings, shootings, and assassination attempts in Miami and New York. According to the Indian, Bernal was named defense minister chiefly because of his Ivy League typing skills. As Viceroy Wilson knew, one of the most vital roles in any terrorist group was the composing of letters to take credit for the violence. The letters had to be ominous, oblique, and neatly typed. Jesus Bernal was very good in this assignment.
He had been recruited to Las Noches de Diciembre after a bitter falling-out with his comrades in the First Weekend in July Movement. Actually Bernal had been purged from the group, but he never talked about why, and Viceroy Wilson had been warned not to ask. He tolerated Bernal, but he had no instinctive fear whatsoever of the Cuban. And he was getting awful damn tired of this macho switchblade bullshit.
“We’re moving out soon,” Wilson told Renee LeVoux. He bailed up the towel and started to stuff it back in her mouth.