Wooooo-six Singapore Slings and still on!

There’s a small town on the north D.R.-Haiti shore. A corrupt Tonton Macoute man runs it. It’s a good Cuban-ops staging point. Secluded inlets up the wazoo.

Smith segued to those eeeeevil Cubans. They were in Managua now. They were all stone killers. They’ve got a boocoo heroin CV. They conduit stolen pharmacy dope through a group of UF stockholders in Miami. There’s some ex-CIA in the group. A big member: Dick Nixon’s pal, Bebe Rebozo.

Bad apples. They target pharmacies owned by comsymps. They pulled jobs in Guatemala and Honduras. They’re allegedly ripping off a pharmacy here tonight.

Smith faded out talk-wise. His face went rumdum red. Mesplede took over.

I want to meet the Cubans. I can get them construction-boss jobs. I have heroin credentials. I want to stage anti-Castro ops.

Smith staggered out of the bar. He pulled a banana off a waitress’s head and bit in, peel and all.

The phone book was en espaсol. Crutch pulled out the page listing farmacias. Managua was Podunk-size. Six drugstores, no mбs. The city was laid out grid-style. Calles and avenidas crossed. He’d never seen a pharmacy rip-off. Froggy was snoozing. Let’s check out the Cubans at work.

The desk clerk gave him a street map. Downtown Managua was small and walkable quicksville. It was peon-packed. Mamacitas cooked meat pies on bar-b-q’s built from chain links and trash cans. It was pigeon meat. Pigeons perched everywhere. Kids shot them with BB guns and tossed them in paper sacks.

Some nice trees, a lake breeze, garish-colored buildings. Jackbooted cops with barbed wire-wrapped saps.

The grid made it easy. Crutch found four pharmacies fast. They looked innocuous: bright walls, narrow aisles, white-coat spies at back counters. Big cardboard ads for Listerine and Pepsodent. No rob-me vibes.

Crutch schlepped down Calle Central to Avenida Bolivar. Little spic-lets waved dead pigeons. Crutch tossed them American dimes and watched the brawls that ensued.

Nъmero 5: a joint with a big red cross and a jumbo Coke machine. No vibe. It was pushing 6:00, closing time-trabajo, finito.

Crutch turned down an alley. Eye magnet: Gonzalvo Farmacia. A quiet little place with a big, loud poster.

Diseased kids begging. Nixon with fangs. Bright red Commie slogans. Mucho exclamation points.

Four cholos across the street, in a ‘55 Merc. Yeah, they look eeeevil. Their sled looks satanic. Lake pipes, fender skirts, car-antenna scalps.

The reeeeall thing. Dark Latin hair, rawhide-cured, stitching on the skin flaps.

Crutch cut back to the main drag. He reconnoitered and found a walk path behind the building row. Four down to the pharmacy, maybe a side window loose.

He got low and crouch-walked. He hit the rear of the pharmacy and peeped windows. The back ones were barred. He saw the dope shelves and three pharmacists working. The side windows were un-barred. One was air-cracked. A big cardboard sign on an easel covered it.

Crawl space, hiding place.

Crutch cracked the window two more inches and vaulted in. His knees banged the sign. He grabbed the easel part and kept it upright.

He peered around it. The sign was for Noxzema skin cream. A good-looking chiquita salved her bare arms and went ooh-la-la. A boss type shooed out two customers. The three pharmacists stood at the counter and tallied receipts.

Prime view. There’s the clock, it’s 5:58, the four bandidos walk in.

The boss type looks pissed. The guys fan out. One guy scopes the Brylcreem, three guys walk to the rear. The boss type turns his back and tidies the candy shelf. The Brylcreem guy pulls a silencered revolver and walks straight up. The boss type turns around and goes “Oh.” The Brylcreem guy sticks the barrel in his mouth and blows off the top of his head. Silencer thud, brain and skull spray. No crash-the boss type just slides down the shelf row and dies.

The pharmacists keep working. One guy walks up with Ipana toothpaste. One guy walks up with Clearasil. One guy walks up with Vick’s VapoRub. The pharmacists catch the drift. One man starts weeping. One man clutches his saint’s medal. One man tries to run.

The Ipana guy pulled his piece and shot them all twice. They fell in a clump. Their shrieks and gurgles got jumbled up. The Clearasil guy jumped the counter and made for the heavy-dope vault.

Blood dripped off a shelf of asthma products. The VapoRub guy dipped his finger in. He found a white wall space. He wrote “MATAR TODOS PUTOS ROJOS.”

Crutch walked back to the Lido Palace. Wobble legs got him there. The heist guys were in and out quick. He left his hiding spot shaky and sobbing. He stole a Coke and some Bromo and chugged it to keep his bile down. He wobble-walked to the bar, had three scotches and weaved up to his room.

Someone had placed a brown-wrapped box on the bed. The postmark was Langley, Virginia. He unwrapped it. Froggy delivered-here’s the code-breaking book.

He got out his pix of Gretchen/Celia’s address book. He arrayed them on the desk. He skimmed the codebook and turned to the table of contents. He saw a “Symbol Index” listed. He turned to it. Lots of fucking symbols, alphabetically described. The geographic and political distinction in bracketed text.

Crutch scanned his Minox pix. Gretchen/Celia’s symbols: stick figures circled with X marks and artful slashing backgrounds. He skimmed the codebook. No numbers or letters corresponded to Gretchen/Celia’s numbers and letters. He went back to the “Symbol Index” and started at A

He hit the H listings. He saw “Hexes” and “Haitian Voodoo.” He saw numbers linked to drawings linked to letters. A few of the numbers and letters matched Gretchen/Celia’s shit. He saw variants of her stick figures and X marks. He read the text: “The voodoo priest’s depiction of spiritual chaos while a subject/victim is hexed.”

Horror House, last summer. The markings there, the symbols here, the derivation expressed.

Call it: Gretchen/Celia’s pages were a paper curse and a voodoo book of the dead.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 1/29/69-2/8/69. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Los Angeles

It was a minor knife fight with major political implications for two extremely minor political groups. But, I facilitated it and it occurred on Wayne Tedrow’s first day as my cutout.

Jomo suffered minor lacerations and Leander received chest bruises when Jomo’s knife blade snapped off. Wayne got Jomo to Daniel Freeman Hospital; he was stitched up and released within a few hours. I got Leander to Morningside Hospital. He confounded the doctors by swallowing several Haitian herb pills in the emergency room. The placebos calmed him down somewhat. Jomo is MMLF; Leander is BTA. Which way do I jump? My personal dilemma, certainly. As always, I abut that maddening disjuncture: the viable construction of black identity and the dubious construction of revolution, as implemented by criminal scum seeking to cash in on legitimate social grievance and cultural trend.

I now sense this: Mr. Holly knew I would succeed as his infiltrator because I am too smart to accede to the rhetoric of revolution and too hip to buy the simpleminded reactionary response. Mr. Holly understands that ambivalence shapes performance and that actors are, in the end, self-centered and solely concerned with their performing context. He’ll let me walk a thin ideological line and actually risk a black-militant conversion, because he knows how selfishly motivated I am. Brilliant Mr. Holly. A nonpareil talent scout with a superb eye for acting ensembles. Casting Wayne Tedrow as my cutout plays to my strengths and Wayne’s strengths and has paid off immediately. An ex-cop with enormous racial baggage is overseeing Tiger Kab; the brothers think he’s rogue and rather dig him. And nobody suspects that he’s FBI-adjunct.