Naked Came the Manatee

The bodyguard with the pearl in his nose appeared in the salon with Fay and Britt. Firmly, he placed them on tall stools at the bar. The women still looked queasy.

Mickey Schwartz said, "You missed quite a show."

Promptly, Hector whacked him with the back of his hand. "I told you to shut up.".

Mickey shut up. He felt the yacht begin to rock under a freshening northern breeze. The slap of the waves, grew louder against the hull.

Britt cynically motioned toward the red cooler. "How's the head?"

"What head?" said Hector with a wink. "Nothing but Snapples in there. Kiwi-flavored."

Fay looked up. "Randy, what's going to happen to us?"

Randy was the bodyguard with the nose stud. He furrowed his tan brow and blinked intently at Fay's question.

"Randy doesn't know what's going to happen to us," Britt Montero said wearily. "Randy barely knows how to dress himself."

Randy ambiguously clicked his teeth. Hector sighed.

"Sweetheart, there's lots of things Randy knows how to do, and he'll show you one in particular if you don't shut your fat trap."

Britt fell silent. Fay laid her head on the bar. Mickey Schwartz rubbed his jaw, and Lilia Sands stirred on the couch. Not a word was spoken for a long time, until Juan Carlos Reyes returned in an ebullient glow.

The human head for which Marion McAlister Williams had been paid close to a million dollars, and for which she had eventually been murdered, belonged not to Fidel Castro but to one of his Cuban doubles, a man named Rigoberto Lopez.

The purchaser of the head had been well aware it was not Castro's. The purchaser worked free-lance for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. His first name was Raymond; his last name was unknown, even to his own team.

Raymond and his people had been given to understand that a serious problem threatened the administration's top-secret plan to replace the Cuban dictator. The scheme-dreamed up at the NSC, presented in Havana by former president Carter, and ultimately endorsed by the ailing Castro himself-had been to trick Castro's enemies into believing he was dead by using a fake head. In exchange for leaving Cuba, Fidel had been promised a safe and secret exile, the best cancer specialists in the world, and a cash departure bonus equivalent to that paid to Baby Doc Duvalier, when he fled Haiti.

Raymond had been informed that the Castro plan was in jeopardy, due to a surplus of bogus heads in Greater Miami. Raymond had also been told that the plan was so vital to national security that he was authorized to spend any sum of money to retrieve the extra heads before their existence became a public scandal.

Therefore Raymond had no qualms about giving a million in taxpayer funds to an eccentric old bird in Coconut Grove. The head in her refrigerator had been picked up in its steel canister and transported by a Coast Guard Citation jet to Washington, D.C., where it had been placed in a locked freezer in the basement of the State Department.

It was in no way Raymond's fault that the U.S. government had subsequently closed down because of a petty political squabble, or that a cost-conscious assistant undersecretary at the State Department had shut off electricity to the building's basement, or that the million-dollar head of Rigoberto Lopez was currently decomposing faster than your average wheel of cheap Brie.

Meanwhile Raymond was at the Alexander on Miami Beach, in a suite once occupied by Keith Richards. Raymond was a happy man. The sun was bright, the sky was blue, and he was interviewing a hack actor named Brandon Dash and a skittish makeup artist named Ziff Bodine. And Raymond had become totally convinced that the other surplus Castro head was only a clever movie prop, and that it was now safely suppurating in the belly of a lemon shark at a club named Hell.

Which left one remaining head-the important one, the correct one, the one with the notch in the ear. And that head, according to Raymond's contacts, was exactly where it was supposed to be.

Raymond made a brief, smug phone call to Washington. The man in Washington then made a call to Havana. The man in Havana then telephoned Miami Beach: the Odyssey Motel. Room 105.

Mike Weston grabbed it on the third ring. "What's the good news, compadre?"

A short pause, then: "Everything's fine. We found your lost luggage. Where is Hector?"

"On a seaplane flying home from Bimini."

"It went well?" asked the voice from Havana.

"Perfect. I expect him any minute," Weston said. "I'm already packing for Belize."

"Don't go anywhere until you hear from us. Don't leave the room-you understand?"

"Hey, you're the boss," Weston said.

"You do understand? Stay right where you are."

"I heard you the first time." Weston hung up the phone, stretched out on the starchy motel sheets, dialed up another porny film on Spectravision, and waited for Hector.

That's where Franklin and Marlis found them later, their insides decorating the room.