NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
It is 99 degrees outside with humidity hanging in the willow oaks like monstrous cobwebs illuminated by street lights above the Hadron Shopping Center parking lot. What a relief it is to get downstairs to the basement and The Emperor Babur restaurant with the Bose Gallery opposite. Strange to say, it is under a Subway franchise featuring ‘Fabulous Five Foot Long Subs’. Daisy, who has yet to arrive, tells me Babur’s biryanis get five stars on Yelp. Lark is already sitting at a large table under a picture of ‘The Emperor’ overseeing his gardeners. She is anxious about Juanita, and Gale Trip still doesn’t know where she is detained.
“It doesn’t make sense. They ought to be able to get her out of there.”
“How, if even the Trips don’t know where she is held?”
“Jake has connections through Macadamia going way back.
Macadamia sold his estate in Chile to one of Pinochet’s generals a few years after Allende was murdered.”
“I thought he committed suicide.”
“No way.”
“Oh! What’s the connection with Juanita?”
“It’s all about money. Most people don’t know it, but Jake and Armon Macadamia are close.”
“They are secretive alright, but you seem to know something about it.”
“Juanita used to work for us when Boyd was growing up. As I got to know her I could tell she was deeply upset about something. She told me part of her story over the first few months. Then, suddenly, she wouldn’t go any further.”
“Do you think some one frightened her off?”
“I often wondered about that. I meant to follow up too. We don’t see much of each other since she has been with the Trips and I have been away, all over the place. Haven’t got to know the Trips either.”
“Gale told me Juanita’s husband, Hector was killed by leftists during the Coup.”
“Fred, that’s what might be called the, ‘official story’ but it’s not what Juanita told me! In fact Hector was a go-between for the CIA and one of the drug cartels. What they call a ‘cut out’. That’s why he got killed.”
“You mean she told you that outright?”
“Hector’s American friend Stan who helped him get a truck turned out to be CIA, and Hector’s contacts with the cartels were through his extended family. She said they once slept on sacks of hundred dollar bills.”
“So it was drugs more than politics. Is that what Juanita told you? Where did you get that story Lark?”
“Not from Juanita, I was still writing for Shrink Rap and researched a piece on Macadamia. I caught scent of something while talking to Chilean émigrés, and one of them had had a falling out with the General involved in the coup. Well, her husband had. I guess that’s why they were living in this area, and living very well too. She was bitter about the mystery of her son’s disappearance on a drug mission with the Chilean army. She talked to me in the hope … huh! … that I might find out something. Maybe he was running some drugs himself, maybe not. She mentioned the Macadamia deal in passing. She said she overheard a fifty million figure discussed by her husband and a group of men he had invited to their home in secret. She said one sounded American but couldn’t confirm it was Stan. She didn’t recognize any of them. Well, I didn’t find out anything helpful to her, but she helped me.”
“I didn’t see this, looking through the back issues of Shrink Rap Diddlie loaned me. What was your article about?”
“For one thing, I asked how did he get the fifty million dollars out of Chile and pointed out that was the same amount as the fifty million he gave to Prestige U. when they first opened in 1979.”
“So did you cause a stir?”
“No, no one followed up and the story died. Even my colleague Foulton Furay wouldn’t touch it. I think some one got to him.”
“Who?”
“He won’t say much about it but I know he was doing a piece about BCCI and the CIA and I am sure he found Macadamia had accounts there too. Any way he didn’t deny it when I put it to him.”
“I didn’t see his article either.”
“You won’t. It was never published.”
“So that’s how he got his money out! I have read that the Bank of Credit and Commerce was an intelligence operation itself.”
“Fred a lot of people were betrayed by that BCCI bankruptcy. The whole thing reeks of hidden transactions.”
I can see through the stair railings from where we are sitting. Two long thin calf muscles are moving below long black Bermuda shorts. Daisy’s distinctive arms appear draped in dark purple voile to the elbow, with forearms loaded in bracelets. She takes off her bowler to duck under the low arch at the bottom of the stairs, and walks over pulling out a chair with a jangle of jeweled metals.
Daisy doesn’t sit down, but stops in an awkward posture half way down with a hand on the back of the chair for support. She notices the picture above our table.
“Have you two looked at that picture? Isn’t it gorgeous! I love those Moghul paradise gardens!”
“I have Daisy, look at the abundant fruit on those trees!”
“Fred, I know … are they pomegranates? …
I’m ready to eat … I hope you have ordered … sorry I am so late … my car broke down by Higgs Field. I called the ‘Light House’ and they got it towed and ran me down here.” Daisy sits down facing the picture. Lark and I face each other to her left and right.
“Isn’t Boyd coming Daisy?”
“No, let’s not go there.”
The waiter serves bottles of Rosy Pelican beer with quiet murmurs of ‘Sah’ and Mam.
Another comes with murmurs of his own, and serves papadoms and chutneys, grated coconut, sliced banana, pickles, cucumbers, raita, lemon pickle, and more, all in triangular glass sections on the wide wheel of a lazy Susan. Daisy gazes at the picture in silence. Lark slowly turns the lazy susan looking carefully at each section. The piped sitar music, suddenly intrudes on this lull in our conversation. I wonder if I will be moved to hear the ‘unstuck sound’, or Anahata Nad of the Yogis, by this evening raga. I am not. Daisy is still preoccupied by the picture.
“You know that picture is all about water.”
“Irrigation you mean Daisy?”
“Yeah Lark, see those cute little rills around each bed, like frames making each garden a painting within the painting. That’s just part of a complex network that spreads water all over these gardens.”
“It’s geometric, kind of like a rug!”
“Same theme Lark, Persian influence. Check the curvy Persian script.”
The waiter in a blue gray jacket positions a folding table at her side with one dexterous motion and lowers the tray held aloft in his other hand with ease.
He distributes numerous covered dishes around the lazy susan. Now it is obvious why we have an outsized table. Then lifts the shiny metal tops with a slight flourish which brings forth the scented Moghul genies. Clove, mint, garlic, and turmeric, dance their aromatic turns through the atmosphere. A pale coriander pod rolls out of the saffron yellow rice and lodges in a crease of the tablecloth.
“Daisy, in fact we have been discussing some one as wealthy as a Moghul emperor, and he’s a gardener too.”
“Oh Lark, have you told him about Armond?”
“Daisy I have been telling him about Macadamia and Prestige U. You know those stories that came out in the seventies about the money for that campus.”
“Yes Lark, you wrote them!” Daisy orders cardamom tea and Lark and I split her Rosy Pelican.
“No I didn’t write them all. There were pieces in the Post about that whole group who gave money at the beginning and their common Latin American connections and …”
“I remember Lark, the CIA connection. They supposedly had students and faculty there.”
“They were called scholarship students, and that’s what they were, but favoring certain people in certain governments they wanted to reward and influence.”
“Well, if you have to recycle drug money a University is a nice benign way of doing so!”
“Oh Fred, it stinks!, and it has all been covered up.”
“But of course! You know I did see an article in Diddlie’s back issues about a truck load of money that spilled into the jungle some where after a crash, and Macadamia was involved.”
“You know who else is involved Fred? Rank Majors.”
“I don’t know about that Lark.”
“No, I am convinced because I found the records showing he was an attaché at our embassy in Chile in the late seventies. He was coordinating flights in and out.”
“You mean secret flights Lark.”
“They weren’t commercial that’s for sure!”
“How can you be so sure.”
“I was with Juanita one day years ago when we ran into Rank on the street, and she turned as pale as marble, and I asked her what was wrong. All she’d say was that he’d got them out.”
“You mean Rank got them out of Chile and up here to Washington?”
“Fred, I don’t know how they ended up here but Juanita’s first job was working for Macadamias here.
“Does she have relatives here?”
“They are all in Troy.”
“Has she any children?”
“Two, they are both grown up.”
“Did the rest of the family come north with Hector?”
“I think they may have come years before, quite separately. I suspect that CIA found them in Troy. Juanita and I never got to that.”
