mass murder. Occasionally picking through a stew pot of oily bouillabaisse. Both of them about as hungry as the shrimp in the pot.
Peter finally raised his puppy-dog brown eyes to her and shrugged. 'Who could come up with that kind of idea?... Slicing up two nineteen-year-old kids like Jack the Ripper?'
Jane sat with her chin in the palms of thin hands. Serious, she looked like an older version of Caroline Kennedy. She was catching the eye of all the black waiters.
'Probably the same kind of creep who would make two little kids watch their own father die,' she answered. 'It just makes me feel so awful. Creepy and sick. Really shitty-besides being scared.
Thinking back on the scene at the American embassy, Peter began to feel a little useless, motelike. Little Mac fucks it up again.... Maybe he just hadn't explained himself well enough, he thought. Something sure had gone wrong at the embassy. Because the tall blond man was important one way or the other. He had to be.
Jane pointed out to the street. Playful grin on her face; premachete smile. 'I didn't know one of your brothers was down on the island. Heh, heh. '
Right in front of Le Hut a street clown was entertaining a small crowd. The scruffy clown was white. BASIL: A CHILDREN'S MINSTREL said his hand-painted sign.
Basil was a young man behind all his Indian and clown paints. Around the eyes he seemed very serious about the show, even a little sad. Only dressed the way he was-raggy canary-yellow pantaloons, an outrageous pastel nightcap-the man also seemed pixilated.
'Love is the answer,' he said to natives and a few tourists walking past him on Front Street. 'Love is the answer,' he whispered to the people eating and drinking in Le Hut.
'Ahhh,' Jane whispered to Peter, winked, talked like Charlie Chan. 'But what is question?' She saw that he was still partially lost in his own thoughts. Turtle Bay. What had upset him at the U.S. embassy?
'Do you know any children's tricks? Children's minstrel tricks?' she whispered across the table. 'Macduff? Are you there? Are you here with me?
Or are you Sherlock Holmes off solving great murders?'
Peter smiled and blushed. 'Sorry. I'm here. Hello!
He traveled back to the cafe from faraway places: Vietnam; his parents' house up on Lake Michigan, where every summer for six straight years Betsy Macdonald came and dropped another brownhaired, brown-eyed baby boy. The Super Six.
'Children's tricks?' Peter grinned. Had a rush of feeling for this eccentric plains girl from Dakota. He thought for just a second. Remembered something his brother Tommy used to do for his kids.
Peter picked up his Le Hut paper napkin. Twisted it tight- and held it under his nose. The napkin looked like a droopy mustache. Greasy. Full of fish scraps. 'You must pay the rent,' Peter said in an obvious villain's voice.
He switched the napkin to the side of his hair. It became a girl's ribbon. 'I can't'pay the rent,' he said in the falsetto of a heroine in distress.
Mustache voice: 'You must pay the rent!' Ribbon voice: 'I can't pay the rent!' He switched the napkin under his chin, where it became a puffy bow tie. Peter spoke in a voice like Dudley Do-Right. 'I'll pay the rent!' Ribbon voice: 'My hero.'
Mustache voice: 'Curses, foiled again.'
'I wish it was that easy,' Jane said.
She kissed his paper mustache. Laurel and Hardyha-ha. Neither of them quite full-fledged adults yet. Not in all ways. Lots of good intentions to grow up,though. That night they slept together for the last time. Ever.
Crafton's Pond, San Dominica
Meanwhile, the first meeting between the Roses and Colonel Monkey Dred was close to its very shaky start.
Motors off, four cars sat on opposite sides of a flat, narrow field near Nate Crafton's rat-infested pond in the West Hills District. The field's regular use was for prop planes coming from, and going to, New Orleans with shipments of ganja and cocaine.
This particular night it was misty up around the pond itself. The wet grass was full of long, husky water rats.
By mutual agreement each side had brought only two cars. There were to be no more than two passengers in either auto. Since there seemed to be no way to prevent them, guns had been permitted.
Shortly before starting time, a third vehicle appeared on the horizon on Dred's side of the field.
At 1:00 A.M. The first violation of the treaty for this evening.
As Monkey Dred was driven forward in a noisy, British-made van, the twenty-seven-year-old Jamaican- and Cuban-trained revolutionary saw that the secret airfield was dark, without motion. Quite pretty, with a pale quarter moon set over the surrounding jungle. The van stopped with a jolt at the edge of the field. Dred's driver flashed his headlights on and off. On and off.
Across the moonlit darkness, another set of car lights switched on, then off. Rose.
Watching the scene through a cloudy, bugsmeared windshield, Dred started to nod and smile. Rose was already accepting compromises: the third car. 'Goan to be easy, mon, ' he said to his driver.
Two of the five cars then drove halfway out onto the landing field. Once again, the agreed-upon procedure. The Roses were very keen on orderly procedures, Dred was beginning to notice. Like the British in the American Revolution.
Before his van had fully stopped, the colonel jumped out and stood at rigid attention in the tall grass. Less than forty yards away, he could see Rose climbing out of some kind of American pleasure car.
