pretty as a Seurat painting this hazy morning.
Lying there in the late spring sun, Rose indulged himself in his one fatuous addiction: the reading of sensationalist newspapers and magazines.
After perusing The Boys_from Brazil, then glancing at the opening stories in the Enquirer, the overseas edition of Time magazine, and Soldier of Fortune, the elegant man rolled out of the hammock. Inside his and Carrie's apartment, he got out of a lamb's-wool pullover and expensive cream gabardines. Then he started to piece together the international costume of American students abroad.
He put on faded blue jeans, a police blue workshirt, lop-heeled Frye boots, and, finally, a red cow~ boy neckerchief. He applied light makeup to his eyes. Fitted a long dark wig over his own shorter hair.
today Damian Rose was going to play the part of a professor from the Sorbonne.
He had to buy a small supply of drugs in Les Halles: amphetamines, cocaine, Thai sticks. Then off to meet with a mercenary soldier who called himself the Cuban.
Tucking the workshirt tightly into Jockey shorts and zipping up his jeans, Damian walked through a living room overflowing with Broadway and Haymarket theater paraphernalia.
Then out the apartment's front door with a bang.
'Bonjour,' he said to an emmerdeuse named Marie, an ancient woman who was always reading newspapers in the light of the hallway window.
Then boots clomped down marble stairs to a circular courtyard inside the building itself.
Damian climbed into a small black convertible in the courtyard. He left the convertible's top up. Windows partially up. Visors down. He put on blue air force-style sunglasses.
The sports car rolled out of the yard's black ironwork gates, and Rose started to hum an old song he liked very much-sweet 'Lili Marlene.'
It was a brilliantly clear and warm spring day now. White as paper.
The sweet smell of French bread baking filled the air on the narrow side streets.
As the shiny black car turned onto the boulevard St.-Germain, a bicyclists healthy-looking girl in an oatmeal @ top-stared her long, swafflike neck to see the face of the young man behind the sun-dappled windshield. The pretty girl wasn't quite fast enough.
As of June 1979, no one who shouldn't would know what the face of Damian Rose looked like.
April 24, 1979, Tuesday
Guilty!
CHAPTERTHREE
Bookkeeping... over the course of the year, we had to hire over a hundred different people. We paid out nearly $600,000 in overhead expenses. We paid forgers from Brussels, counterfeiters, gun salesmen from East Germany and the United States, informers, dope peddlers, whores, pickpockets. American intelligence men, top mercenaries like King Fish Toone, Blinkie Tomas (the Cuban), Clive Lawson. And not one of these people was ever told exactly what it was that we were putting together in the Caribbean....
The Rose Diary
The saying 'Mad dogs and Englishmen' refers obliquely to the fact that our sun will cook you like bacon. Beware Sign on beach at Turtle Bay
April 24, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica
Tuesday. The First Day of the Season.
Not by coincidence, April 24 marked the end of the most spectacularly newsworthy trial ever held on the eighty-one-by-thirty-nine-mile Caribbean island of San Dominica.
Parts of the pyrotechnic high court scene were hard to imagine or describe.
For a beginning, the tiny, plain courtroom was packed to its high, square beam rafters. The room was as noisy as a sporting event. The slow-turning fans on the ceiling, like the ones in the movie Casablanca, were a sharp contrast to the frenzied atmosphere. The most perversely interesting of the defendants was fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet.
The five-foot-six-inch teenager had a slate black, intelligent face that was at the same time piggy and cruel. He had long black cornbraids that were sopping wet all through the trial, dripping at the ends like frayed rope hanging in the rain.
Every five minutes the boy's grandmother, his guardian, punctuated the final proceedings with a loud, pitiful scream from her seat in the courtroom gallery. 'Leon!' she shouted. 'My bway Leon! Oh, no, son! '
'You are murdering curs without any shame.' The seventy-year-old judge, Andre Dowdy, lectured the teenager and the two grown men standing beside him.
'I feel no mercy toward any of you. Not even toward you, boy. I consider you all mad dogs.... '
Flanking Rachet, thirty-year-old Franklin Smith aimlessly shifted his weight from one orange workboot to the other; Chicki Holt-father of fourteen children by five women, the local newspaper liked to reprint with every new story on the trial-just stared up at the plain white ceiling and watched the slow fans. Frankly Chicki was bored.
Eight months earlier the same three men had stood outside a stammering Volkswagen Superbug one mile from the country town of New Burg. They'd robbed an American tourist, Francis Cichoski, a fireman from Waltham, Massachusetts, on a golfing vacation.
At the end of the broad-daylight holdup, one of the three blacks had knocked the white man down with the business side of a sugar-cane machete. The blow had killed Cichoski instantly. Then the man's crew-cut head had been chopped off and left lying on its cheek on the blacktop road.
