The Informant (11 page)

In narcotics, buyers and sellers were cautious to the extreme and paranoid as a way of life. They sensed surveillance where there was none, they read betrayal where it didn’t exist. Buyers and sellers lived on the edge of an abyss that was both imaginary and real.

Surveillance, arrest, ripoff, violence, did exist; they were as much a part of dope as glassine envelopes and dirty hypodermic needles. The fear of these things, however, was an even bigger part of dope.

It was not this customary wariness that made Rolando and Barbara Pomal stroll arm-in-arm in the cool noon Paris sun. They were not suffering from the rampant paranoia that touched the lives of everyone who touched narcotics.

Both knew what they stood to lose if they were being followed by police, rival dealers, informants. This morning they had handed an aluminum suitcase containing two million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Jules Berry, a top lieutenant for Jacquard in Marseilles. This was the second of three cash payments due the Corsican Jacquard for Mas Betancourt’s five hundred kilos of white heroin.

The aluminum suitcase, similar to those now used by Arabian oil-rich sheikhs to carry jewels and money, had four key locks and two combination locks. Without keys or combinations, the suitcase could be opened only with a blowtorch. The priest and the Cuban woman had turned the suitcase over to Berry and the two men with him just before nine this morning, in front of a deserted Champs Élysées sidewalk café that was just opening for breakfast.

The sightseeing that followed, though a precaution, was enjoyable. Rolando, an ordained Catholic priest who had left the church four years ago, knew Paris well, spoke fluent French, was an excellent guide. At thirty-one, he was tall and stoop-shouldered. He had a long, sad, houndlike face and wore all black, hat and overcoat included, except for the tiny patch of white at his throat on his Roman collar. Reading from a guidebook written in French, Rolando spoke softly to his companion, in Spanish, of the city’s glorious history.

Barbara Pomal inhaled the air, grateful for this respite in their European mission. She was thirty-five, tall, with shiny black hair pulled back, parted, and tied in a bun on her neck. She dressed well, preferring expensive pantsuits and blue diamonds. She was not pretty; her nose was too long, jutting out over a receding chin.

But because she was intelligent, strong, and self-controlled, men found her attractive. She was one of Mas Betancourt’s three trusted lieutenants, handling negotiations for the dope he bought, seeing that certain moneys reached banks and people in Europe, South America, Mexico, anywhere Mas Betancourt made a buy.

She was tough, an excellent businesswoman experienced in all phases of top-level narcotics dealing. She had one child, a sixteen-year-old son still living in Havana with the husband who had sent Barbara out of Cuba when the boy was a year old, telling her he and the boy would meet her in Miami.

The husband never reached Miami; he changed his mind and decided to remain in Cuba with the boy. In fifteen years, Barbara Pomal had seen only photographs of her son.

Rolando was Mas Betancourt’s nephew, in charge of arranging for huge amounts of cut and mixes that Mas sometimes sold to the distributors who bought dope from him. Rolando also traveled to South America and Mexico, arranging payments for whatever cocaine and brown heroin Mas Betancourt bought. It was the priest’s job to handle money going to South America and Mexico, reporting to Barbara Pomal when the transactions were finalized.

Rolando, the only child of Mas Betancourt’s now-dead sister, had been a brilliant scholar, educated in Cuba and in America. He had joined the priesthood with the thought of isolating himself from the world and devoting himself to scholarship and mystic studies. But the world had changed since medieval scholars like Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine could cloister themselves in monasteries, spending hours sipping wine made by brother monks and reading hand-lettered manuscripts.

Then, too, Rolando’s intelligence came with a sense of irony that made him critical of God and church, that made him want to challenge both. If the changing church refused to allow Rolando to be entirely a scholar and student, then he would return to life, but on his own terms. If life was changing so rapidly, Rolando wanted to be a part of it, to drown himself in it, thoroughly immerse himself in it.

He left the church and embraced the most exciting existence possible. He went to work for his uncle, Mas Betancourt, where danger, power, life, death, and intense satisfaction were one and the same. Rolando’s keen intelligence demanded faster living and more danger than anyone else. And he got it.

Dope was an incredible game to him, intricate and Byzantine, and because, in his heart, he didn’t care if he won or lost, he played the game of dope well. He would play the game to the fullest, because that’s what he wanted life to be, a maximum use of mind, spirit, body. The gray, pathetic existence endured by most of humanity was not for him. Like Lucifer, Rolando preferred to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven.

At a café on the Rue de Rivoli, and now certain that they were not being followed, Rolando ordered a carafe of
vin rosé
for himself and Barbara, then left the table. Barbara relaxed, filing her nails while watching a young French couple hold hands across a table. All the love in Barbara’s life was painful.

She loved her son, whom she never saw, and she desperately loved Rolando, the priest, who was a homosexual. Right now, he was telephoning Mas Betancourt in New York, telling him that the second payment had been made, that all had gone well, that they would leave Paris tonight and land at Kennedy Airport early tomorrow morning.

Rolando, using a public telephone, spoke in Spanish to Mas Betancourt.

“It went well. The delivery was made, and we did not attract attention.”

“Good, good.” Mas’s voice blended with the crackle of transatlantic static. His words echoed and reechoed in Rolando’s ear.

Mas said, “Anything more?”

“No. She did nothing, spoke to no one, went nowhere. We had separate rooms, but I paid a clerk to tell me if she left to meet anyone. The clerk says she didn’t and I believe him.” Rolando could not understand why Mas had asked him to watch Barbara Pomal. It was unthinkable for Barbara to betray Mas.

Mas did not explain why he had ordered Rolando to watch her carefully and report back.

“She saw no one, spoke to no one?”

“No. Except for sleeping in separate rooms, I have been with her every single moment.”

“No signals, nothing you might have missed?”

Rolando laughed, shifting the receiver to another ear. On the street in front of him, Parisians on bicycles, motorbikes, and in tiny gray cars waited for a red light to change to green.

“My beloved uncle, the woman is as Caesar’s wife. She is above reproach. What is this suspicion? She’s worked for you for over ten years. Hasn’t cheated you out of a dime. What’s going on?”

“Nothing, nothing. You’re sure? She spoke only to you and our friends, right?”

The priest’s eyes followed two blond Scandinavian teenage boys with bright orange rucksacks on their backs. “No one but me and our friends. Yes, uncle.” What was Mas worried about? Why was he suddenly suspicious of Barbara? Another puzzle to unravel.

Rolando frowned. “Has this got anything to do with—”

“And you haven’t mentioned anything to Barbara? She doesn’t know you’re watching her?”

“No. She is doing her job. I can see her from here, and all she’s doing is filing her nails and drinking wine. I took her all over Paris, didn’t tell her where we were going, so she had no idea when we’d stop. It was impossible for her to set up anything. Believe me, uncle, I’d know. I have one of the better minds in your employ, correct?”

“
Sí, sí
. Okay, I see you tomorrow. Don’t come to me from the airport. Go home, wait. I call you.”

“And Barbara?”

“I take care of Barbara. Thank you, Rolando. Take care of yourself.”

At the table, Rolando sipped wine, observed Barbara closely, and wondered if she knew that powerful women must always be careful. Even queens are toppled and destroyed.

At their hotel, he left her in the lobby.

Her face showed that she knew where he was going. Why did she love him? Nothing would ever come of it. He had told her so again and again. But still she loved him. For her, it was only the priest, which Rolando thought was piling pain on top of pain. She loved her son and could not have him, and she loved Rolando and would never have him.

But the priest treated her gently, knowing that the detachment he felt toward women gave him an advantage over her.

She touched his arm, her eyes searching his face, wanting to ask him why he did it, why he had to go now, and knowing he would smile and give her no answer. Why was he wearing his Roman collar? Because he wanted to, because it fitted his ironical view of life, himself, God. Why was he now going to find sex with a stranger? Because he wanted to.

Looking quickly around the lobby, she leaned forward, kissing him gently on the cheek.

“I don’t care if people see.”

He smiled, his sad brown eyes looking deeply into hers. “People see very little. Notice, we haven’t been stoned or whipped. I’ll call you when I get back.”

The pain of his leaving, of his going to a stranger, hit her hard. She nodded, quickly turning her back to him and walking away before he saw the tears.

In a small, dark, smoke-filled Pigalle nightclub, the priest sat alone at a table, staring up. Above him, in a large net suspended from the ceiling, two slim young men and a girl made love to one another, to the eerie, droning sounds of Gregorian chants. The bodies of the young lovers rolled from side to side, and the patrons beneath them stared unblinkingly, turning their heads to follow the lovers as they writhed across the net.

Rolando smiled, enjoying the irony of watching sex to sacred music, wondering which of the two young boys he would buy when the show was over.

W
HEN MAS BETANCOURT PUT
down the receiver and turned to speak to his wife, she knew something was wrong.

“He’s dead.”

Pilar Betancourt bowed her head, made the sign of the cross, frowning and deepening the lines in her forehead. “The telephone call just now …”

“
Sí
.” Mas sat on a dark red velvet couch, thick, walnut-brown hands folded in his lap. “He died this morning.”

Adiós, mi padre.
The
babalawo,
old, sick, and mortal after all, had closed his eyes in death less than an hour ago. The tiny black man would see no more. His eyes were now blind to this world and to all worlds.

The
babalawo
had died without saying anything more about the woman who might betray Mas Betancourt, the woman who was a dark, deadly shadow. And still waiting.

Pilar Betancourt sat down on the couch, her hands reaching for his.

“God’s will,” she said, and she believed it. She was a woman born for sorrow, accepting, though never fully understanding, the horrors of life. She was thirty-six, her beauty fading, her gentle, aristocratic face lined by years of emotional and physical pain, her always slim body now too thin.

God always takes, thought Mas. My sons, my legs, my wife’s breast. And now the
babalawo.
When I need the priest more than ever, God calls him, and the priest goes. Mas was too stunned to be enraged.

He would have to find another
babalawo
, though it wouldn’t be easy. The relationship between man and priest was special, and to find a priest to trust, to feel comfortable with …

It wouldn’t be easy.

Pilar Betancourt, in a long-sleeved gray woolen dress, her long auburn hair piled around her head like a soft woolen cap, fingered a tiny gold cross around her neck. “What happens to the priest now?”

“The ceremony begins almost at once. They must contact his spirit to find out what they should do with his possessions, the things he uses for his magic. Usually everything is buried with him. A black chicken must be killed and also buried with him.”

Mas Betancourt sighed, gently squeezing his wife’s hand. “At the funeral parlor, there is a special ceremony. Dancing, chanting. Nine days after death, there must be a Catholic mass, then a spiritual mass with flowers and candles being offered. One year later, there will be another ceremony. This one completely cuts his ties with this world and makes him free. Free.”

Mas Betancourt said the word with envy.

Pilar’s hand was cool on his neck, and he leaned back into her touch.

“I am sorry,
querido.
” Her words were for him, not for the priest on whom he had depended. Pilar Betancourt’s intense love for her husband matched his love for her.

She had been born into a Havana family of wealth and status, raised to defer to the strength and wisdom of men, as all Latin women were, and in Mas Betancourt she had found the man she would serve all of her life. He’d married her when he was thirty-seven and she seventeen and a virgin, one of the most beautiful women in Havana.

Their time of total happiness together was brief. Late in 1959, Castro’s revolution triumphed, costing her family and most of Cuba’s upper class all of its wealth. Shortly after that, her parents were killed, and so were her two infant sons. Then Mas was crippled, his legs crushed.

She had nursed him, and he could now get around, dragging himself on crutches. But he was no longer the strong athlete, the skilled boxer and jai alai player who had thrilled her and other Cubans with his physical excellence.

She knew he dealt in narcotics, that he had men killed. She knew because they discussed what he did. Business with lieutenants and distributors was never conducted in their home or in front of her. She left the room when certain telephone calls came in, waiting for Mas to discuss what had been said.

Pilar Betancourt was a Cuban wife, a Catholic, raised to obey husband and church, to raise no questions or obstacles. But she loved Mas, not because it was expected of her, but because of a tenderness she found in his strength. He was leaving dope, he had promised her that, and Mas was a man of his word.