Havana (21 page)

He lay naked in thornbushes. Every bit of him hurt. His heart would not stop hammering. It was now dark. His mind was still scattered. He was in jungle. He had run naked through jungle for what seemed hours. He had no idea what to do. He yearned for guidance and courage, but none came.

And then a lot came.

He had a moment of perfect clarity. It all fell together: the government had tracked him here. Those were members of the Secret Police. They had come to kill him, so that El Presidente could sleep without fear of his throat being cut in the night.

At last he knew what to do, and what came next, and where his destiny lay. It was not in strikes or speeches or elections.

I shall, he thought, now make a war.

“Well?” said Pashin.

“Well,
what?
” said Speshnev.

“Well, where is he?”

“Where it is safe.”

“Where it is safe. But do you know where it is safe?”

“Actually, I do not.”

They sat in José Martí square in the old town, two men, one elegant in his western banker's clothes, the other rather bohemian, in floppy linens, with a red bandanna about his head and well-worn espadrilles on his crusty feet. This one also wore sunglasses, circular and aesthetic, protecting the poet's delicate eyes from the sun. One might consider it a meeting between T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, if one were so given.

Speshnev took a banana out of his pocket, peeled it, and began to eat it.

“He has run away. He has broken contact,” Pashin explained to him. “You were sent here to manage him and control him, and then to kill a man sent to kill him. Instead, you save that killer—twice,
twice!
—and now the subject has fled your ministrations and I am left to explain all this to Moscow. Possibly he has given up politics altogether, bought a farm and is busy raising babies in the countryside.”

“The banana: fountain of potassium. Have one, Pashin.”

“I am not a monkey. Bananas are for monkeys.”

“Two propositions, both debatable. Anyhow, this one will never give up politics. He's too idiotic. He actually believes in the mumbo-jumbo of destiny. Besides, he loves to practice speeches in the mirror and admire his fabulous heroism and beauty. No, I sent him because after the murder of El Colorado, I feared a general purge. It's how these fascisto-imperialists always work. Relax. Have a banana. Fuck your secretary.”

“Ah! You are so disrespectful. We have a mission and you take better care of an American gangster who was sent here to kill the man you were sent here to protect than you do of the man you are to protect.”

“Actually, I believe I have protected him very well.”

“You are so arrogant, Speshnev. You think you know so much more than we younger men.” Pashin looked away, pinching the bridge of his nose in pain. It was clear he was getting pretty much roasted on a daily basis by blistering memos from Moscow.

Speshnev enjoyed the young bastard's pain. “Have you thought of antacids for that stomach queasiness, Pashin?”

Pashin sighed mightily, with the air of a man resigned to the Roman legionnaires driving in the spikes. It was an unpleasant necessity to be gotten over. But then he turned and stared directly at the older man.

“It may interest you to learn yours is not the only operation in Cuba, and that I believe mine will yield far more bountiful benefits than yours. Mine is professional, disciplined, carefully managed. This shit of yours was dreamed up by some old romantic on the upper floors of Dzerzhinsky Square and it's all very melodramatic, very old Comintern, but utterly useless in a world of jet planes and atom bombs. Mine will be the far greater contribution.”

“And if not, your uncles and brothers and cousins will say so anyway, so what difference does it make?”

“You must find the young man, you must bring him under control, you must reestablish your influence. That is not a romantic quest, that is a hard order, direct from the top. And, you must do it soon, do you understand? Let us say toward the end of the month, by, say, the last week of July. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“I want progress.”

Speshnev swallowed the last third of the banana, mashing its sweetness between his teeth, enjoying the rush of pleasure as both flavor and aroma toasted his palate, then tossed the banana peel into the garbage can.

Of course he knew where Castro was. He knew where he would go exactly but what bothered him he would not say to Pashin. In fact, as he was summoned to the meeting, he had already purchased bus fare to Santiago.

The reason was that he knew Castro would head home to Oriente, where he was a prince. He would not go somewhere he was not known and loved. He wasn't strong enough for anonymity. His vanity was too overwhelming. It would never be a part of his way to disappear quietly. He was too weak for it.

But Speshnev had read an account in that morning's
Havana Post
that upset him profoundly. Police “thwarted a bandit attack in the town of Cueto,” the press reported, and a woman was killed in the gun battle. That was what the newspaper report said, and Speshnev had no doubt it was all lies. Nevertheless, whatever it was, such action was uncomfortably near Castro's home, and it signified that possibly others undreamed of had noted the boy's presence and sought to eliminate him.

Now he reasoned that even if he weren't involved, the shooting so close would spook the boy. But the trip back to Havana would seem too far; he would instead hide in the closest city, that city being Santiago.

But the fear of Castro somehow being caught—he had as yet committed no crimes—wasn't Speshnev's main fear. His main fear could be summed up in one sentence: What will this crazy young asshole do next?

Lansky hated the theater of it. It ate up time for no good reason, when he had a million things to do. It was all so unnecessary, for who down here was really paying much attention?

But the Important Man insisted. The Important Man laid out the rules and Lansky, who always played by the rules until he saw a way to bust them, and the bank too, obeyed.

His driver took him from his apartment in the Sevilla-Biltmore just off the Prado, into the old city, down winding, crowded roads, past houses built by the Spanish and the Creoles. Then the car curved around to the west, passed through grimy industrial neighborhoods, down busy streets, twisting now and then through smaller streets, then found a main concourse around Centro and soon plunged toward Santo Suarez.

While he was in the car, Lansky changed from his well-tailored suit into something awful and cheesy: a loud Hawaiian shirt, a pair of ill-fitting lemon slacks and, most annoying to a man who loved the leather of fine shoes, some ridiculous sandals that exposed his toes to the world. A man of Lansky's dignity and probity should never face the world with his toes exposed. Then, to top it off, a porkpie and a pair of rattly sunglasses. A sleek business executive had gotten into the car, a man of sharp intelligence and subtle tastes, and a low-rent whore-chaser climbed out. It made him quite annoyed.

He was let out near the bus station, where he caught a no. 4 bus all the way out past Santo Suarez, and then got off. He walked among negroes out there, past dives and joints and pool halls all bleached white in the sun, past bodegas and farmacias and lottery agencies, until at last he came to a cheap negro hotel, went in without talking, passed the desk without talking, and took the ancient lift without talking to the fourth floor.

There was a door ajar. Sometimes it was this room, sometimes that, depending, but the door ajar signified which. He approached, knocked, entered without hearing a thing, closed and locked the door behind him. The Important Man sat on the bed or in a chair, again depending on what was available in the room.

This time he was in a shabby chair by a dirty window, in semi-darkness, looking out on Santo Suarez. He barely acknowledged Lansky.

Lansky sat next to him.

There was never any ceremony, as with the old men, no elaborate ritual of politeness and asking after family, not at all. He would remain silent for hours if Lansky didn't, by habit, just get to it.

“What is it this time?” Lansky asked.

“You know what it is,” said the Important Man.

“I don't have any idea.”

“Then your intelligence is very poor. Three days ago in the rural province of Oriente, some cops shot the hell out of a house, killing a woman. She was naked in her own house, they blew the living hell out of her, and shot the house to tatters. I've seen the reports, of course.”

“An American woman?”

“A Cuban woman.”

“What has this to do with me or my enterprise? What has it to do with yours? Why is this important?”

“Because it wasn't a raid, as everyone is saying too loud, but a hit.”

“Hmmm,” said Lansky.

“Yes, hmmm,” said the other. “It was a botched, pathetic, out of control screw-up of a hit. It was bullets flying, the wrong person killed, the neighbors in hysteria, rumors flying, the Secret Police Political Section in a frenzy, and when they go nuts, we hear about it, we have to file reports to Washington, Washington goes nuts and asks more questions, the business climate suffers, the whole goddamned apparatus gets shaky.”

“I don't know a thing about it.”

“Of course you do. You ordered it.”

Lansky didn't say a thing.

“I have sources. I know things. I
told
you to clear anything through me.”

“I was under some pressure from my people after that congressman almost got clipped. They have a lot of money invested down here and more set to come. They don't want to lose it.”

“We don't want them to lose it either. We don't want AT&T or Hilton Hotels or United Fruit or Hershey or Domino Sugar to lose. We cannot allow that to happen.”

“There is a threat. Nobody was doing a thing. We acted.”

“You acted ridiculously and poorly. Was it that weasel New York guy who made a scene at the party? He's more volatile than the usual cheap thugs New York sends down. He'll scare these businesspeople. We don't like that.”

“He has his uses. He is supposedly very good.”

“Well, here's what he accomplished. He failed to hit the target because the whole thing was poorly planned and pitifully executed. He drove the target underground.
Completely
underground. Political Section has no idea where he is. Worse, we have no idea what he'll do now that someone has tried to kill him.”

“He has no organization.”

“But he has leadership skills. He will get an organization fast, and that upsets us a great deal. He can start things that can't be stopped. That's the way it happens sometimes. Now he's beyond reach, unless we turn the island upside down.”

“Nobody was doing a thing!”

“Again, you are misinformed. In fact, the opposite is true. We are very much doing something. We've brought a man down. An excellent, tested, experienced man, not some screwball New York eyetie button. We're tracking it all very carefully, manipulating it quite smoothly, building for the moment. Our man won't miss.”

“I did not know this.”

“You don't have to know it. You have to clear initiatives through me, so I can ascertain whether or not we are working at cross-purposes. If we
are
working at cross-purposes, as we now are, it happens as it has now happened, with each move making it harder, not easier, on the other's move.”

“All right,” said Lansky.

“Yes, all right. So you back way off. You put this New York gunman on the shelf, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Let's be clear: your team, off the field. Our team has operating room. It will happen, and everybody will prosper.”

“For a certain amount of time. You people have to move quickly, as I am under pressure. Pick a date. I give you a month. Say, by late July. You must do this job by then, or I will let my people go at it again. After that time, my man is back on the case, and he may not be tidy, but he will be successful.”

“I will—”

“This happened because you were sleeping and it got too far. So now we may have to clean up after you. My advice: do your job, so that we don't have to do it. It's much better for all of us that way.”

“We will do the job. It's in the cards. We have an expert.”

“Excellent. I'd offer to buy you a drink, but it appears to me you're too young to drink.”

“I look younger than I am,” said Frenchy Short, “but I think older than I am, too.”

For the longest time, nothing happened. A week passed, then another. It seemed Roger and Frenchy were busy each day, coordinating with sources, making plans, contacting Washington, reading reports. That left little for Earl to do, so he just wandered Old Havana most days, enjoying the denseness of it, staying out of bars, sitting on benches, learning the town. It always helped to know the town. He watched the cops too, with their dark green uniforms and their tommy guns carried everywhere, sloppily but meaningfully. He could tell, just by reading bodies: everybody hated the cops.

Then one day it changed. Suddenly, action. Roger and Frenchy acquired a boy's aura of spy mystery in their behavior, telling him what they'd set up Washington absolutely necessary. It turned out to be a trip to the airport, but not the one Earl had imagined. Instead of catching the Air Cubana Connie for New York and then home, he encountered a deep blue Navy Neptune, diverted from sea patrol, its props spinning brightly in the sun. It had landed at one of the lesser strips, far from the big bright commercial jobs that brought the johns to Cuba by the thousands. He climbed aboard without anything by way of ceremony, though with some difficulty, as the pain in his hip was still present and when he wormed up that ladder under the plastic bubble nose, he felt it but good. The flight to Guantanamo lasted two hours, as opposed to the twelve-hour ordeal by car of the original journey. Everyone involved was polite, almost differential, but professionally discreet. He had been stamped with both the mystery and the glamour of the Agency, which meant that the young crewman, even the two young pilots of the Lockheed, regarded him with a certain necessary awe, just a step or two down from trembling in his presence.

This was funny to Earl, who had professionally hated the navy second only to the Japanese for all those years in the Pacific. In fact, his hatred of the navy dated back further than that, to a certain forgotten episode at Norfolk in 1934. But that was nineteen years ago; no need to think of it now.

Instead, he sat back as Cuba rushed by beneath him. It was green and dense, cut by mountains humped up toward the eastern extremes, a kind of endless Guadalcanal.

The plane vectored in through mountains unlike anything he'd seen on the island's jungly flatness, and it came to rest on an airstrip that seemed to be in the middle of America. America was everywhere he looked. Officers awaited him. They were from what he guessed would be called Naval Intelligence, and they took him once again to blank but comfortable officer's quarters in the little America that was the Gitmo. He settled in to a steady barrage of the respect his mystery earned him, had a nice lunch with the two fellows in the Officer's Club, where he was waited on by a marine. Everybody called him Mr. Jones.

One of them, the one called “Dan,” seemed especially curious about Roger Evans. How was Roger? Was Roger all right? Did Mr. Jones know Roger at Harvard? Oh, he knew Mr. Jones couldn't answer that, it's just that at Harvard after the war, Roger was such a piece of work, what with his medals, his war record, his ferocious tennis and his mysterious connections. Dan hoped Mr. Jones would say hello to Roger for him. Dan kept meaning to get to Havana to have a drink with Roger, but his duties—the Cold War, you know—kept him pinned here at Guantanamo.

After lunch, he was issued fatigues, and the two fellows drove him over hills and through glades until at last he was at a place where he knew he'd be home: the sign simply read
COL. MERLE EDSON RIFLE RANGE, USMC.
He knew who Colonel Edson was too, though had never met him: he was called “Red Mike,” was a Nicaragua marine like Earl, and had led Edson's Raiders during the war. He was under a marker somewhere on Hawaii with most of the friends Earl ever made.

But what awaited him was only a gunny and a couple of lance corporals at one shooting pit. Far off, three hundred yards distant in the butts, a single target had been raised like a postage stamp on a pool table.

“Mr. Jones, the sergeant here will take care of you. We'll be back in two hours.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Benning,” he said.

“Dan, please call me Dan, Mr. Jones.”

“Dan, then. Thanks, you've been very helpful.”

“We try to do our part.”

With that the officer smiled mysteriously, climbed back into the Navy Ford, and drove off.

Earl turned to face the gunny.

“Well, Earl, I won't ask how come that boy is calling you ‘Mr. Jones.'”

“Hello, Ray. I thought that was you. Damn, it's good to see you.”

They shook hands with the warmth of men who'd shed and lost blood together in hard places.

“You too, Earl.”

“Last time I saw you was in the triage station on Saipan, right?”

“That's the one. I heard about you on Iwo. I was still in sick bay.”

“You were lucky to miss Iwo, Ray. Wasn't no place for human beings, I'll tell you. So what have you got for me?”

“Well, we were told to get a good rifle ready for a man from Washington.”

“Hell, I'm from Arkansas.”

“Earl, I just know I got orders and so I follow 'em. This has ‘very important' ticketed all over it. They wanted us to mount up a sniper rifle and to take it out of inventory as if it never existed. That ain't no easy thing in the Marine Corps, where we got to watch every last damn penny.”

“Sorry for the trouble, Ray. These boys do business their own way. Can't say I like it much, but I signed on to something and I have to ride it out.”

“Well, I'm glad it's you getting this here rifle, Earl.”

“Ray, I'll get it back to you if I ain't damned dead.”

“Believe you, Earl.”

By this time they'd reached the cover just ahead of the shooting pits, where hundreds of marines gathered each day to zero or practice with their M1s. All training canceled today, of course.

Earl saw a rifle lying on one of the tables, almost like a religious icon presented during high mass.

“It's a Model 70, Earl, a Winchester.”

“Yes, I have one back in the rack at home,” he said. “The barrel on mine is narrower.”

“The Marine Corps rifle team bought a mess of heavy-barreled target models back in the thirties for team high-power. Did right well with them, too. Major Schultz won the Wimbledon Cup in 1938, some big shooting match, very important. Our armorers bedded and adjusted the rifles and put a Unertl 8x scope on. Somehow we ended up with six of them for our rifle team down here. This here's the most accurate.”

Earl looked at the sleek tool, blued steel, wood brightly burnished, the whole dark thing much loved and tended after. It specialized in hitting black paper circles at a thousand yards.

“Well, let's see if it still remembers where the black is,” said Ray.

“Hell,” said Earl, “let's see if
I
still remember where the black is.”

He got into a good prone, and the two lance corporals, evidently armorers, bent to fit the rifle to him. The sling had to be let out some so that he could get it cinched up tight. They coached him, for the intricacies of shooting cinched were something that, once drilled in him, hadn't stuck around. He'd never shot with a sling in combat, but then all his killing had been done up close.

Then there was the issue of getting the scope properly focused so that the crossed wires of the reticule stood out black and precise, yet what lay beyond them was still clear as well. This took some diddling, and the bad news was that Earl's vision had deteriorated some, so that he had to place his eye in a certain way for maximum efficiency of the system.

“You hunt any, Earl?” Ray asked, as Earl cracked a box of 173-grain brown-box ammo from the Frankford Arsenal and threaded the shells in behind the bolt, down into the magazine well.

“I do, and dearly love it. Took my son after his first whitetail this spring, but he decided not to take it.”

“I know he'll be a sure shot like his daddy.”

“I hope he don't never have to fire a rifle at a man,” said Earl.

He shoved the bolt forward and down where it locked like a vault door closing, then squirmed into position to find the rifle after a time—after his muscles quit ticking and stretching—pointing naturally so that the crosshairs bisected the black dot of the target three hundred yards out.

“Any time, Earl.”

Earl settled in, until it was only himself and the rifle, and then the himself part went away and only the rifle existed. He forced all his concentration on the intersection of the two dark lines in the dark of the spot that was the target, waiting for it all to settle. It never would, he knew, but he knew also that you had to read and feel your own breathing, so when the crosshairs fell through absolute center, you were already into your trigger press.

The gun snapped, jerked, rose an inch or two and settled back down. He watched as the target disappeared into the butts and anonymous men put a spindle through the hole. When it popped back into view he saw a white marker, lower left hand quadrant of the circle.

“Good shot. Fire again please, sir,” said the lance corporal hunched on the spotting scope.

Earl sent four more downrange, clustering his hits in that lower left area. Then he relaxed as the rifle was taken from him and the other lance corporal clicked the scope the prescribed amount of windage to the right.

Earl received the corrected rifle back and fired another cluster of five, this over to the right, but still under the bull. The lance corporal worked over the rifle again, and when it was returned with the new corrections, it put the cluster into three inches at the center of the bull.

“That's a good three hundred-yard combat zero. You still shoot a bushel, Earl.”

“I ain't forgot as much as I'd thought.”

For the next hour or so, they diddled. The young men coached Earl through his positions, and he forced reluctant muscles into positions they hadn't assumed in years. He practiced sitting, kneeling and offhand, the latter at a shorter range for snap shots.

“Trigger feel fine, sir?” asked one of the boys.

“Could let off a little more lightly,” Earl said, “but not too lightly.”

“Yes, sir.”

The rifle was taken from him, broken down from its stock, and the tiny twin screws in the mechanism manipulated. Reassembled, a few ounces had vanished from the press. He requested more and it was done and measured to be a two-pound trigger, and was then slopped with shellac to keep the tiny screws from slipping under the pounding of recoil.

“We've made you a sniper, Earl.”

“Next thing you know, you'll be painting my old face green like a bush. Wouldn't that be a thing.”

“Earl, green. What a sight that would be.”

And then at four the Navy Ford returned with its two crisp officers in their tropic khakis, neatly pressed and ironed, a far cry from the sweaty marines who'd been working hard in the sun all afternoon.

The two didn't approach the marines directly. They parked and waited.

Earl waited as the two lance corporals quickly and effectively cleaned and greased the rifle, restoring it to a condition of maximum accuracy. Then after their nod, he placed the rifle and two boxes of the Frankford 173-grain brown-box ammo into a civilian gun case that had been thoughtfully provided, took it, shook hands and turned to go meet his sponsors.

“Earl,” said Ray, behind him, “I hope you know what you're doing, getting mixed up with these birds.”

“I hope I do too,” said Earl.

 

Earl took a shower, changed into his suit and a fresh shirt, and went with the two officers to the Officer's Club, where as “Mr. Jones” he felt himself the secret celebrity of a dull room full of dull naval officers and their dull wives. He saw the odd marine officer here and there, including an old-breed fellow here and there, and felt a longing to go over and say, “Hey, I'm Earl Swagger, USMC, wonder if you'd mind if I joined you.” He knew they'd say, “Hell no, Mr. Swagger, set yourself down and we'll listen to your sea stories and we'll tell you some of our own.” But that didn't happen, couldn't happen, wouldn't happen.

He had good steak and salad and passed on the drinks, though the two officers each belted back a couple of martinis apiece, and, loosened up, began to yap idiotically about “it,” by which he took it they meant the Agency. They didn't say, but their curiosity was overwhelming. “What's it like,” they wanted to know. “How secret is it? How tough to get in?”

He knew the answers to none of their questions and really didn't give a damn about either of them, the kind of dandy, fancy, educated boys who somehow didn't end up in the lines but always wangled intelligence or communications or staff. No, that wasn't true. There were a few who—

But a seaman, clutching his cap, came in and whispered something in Lieutenant Dan's ear, which sobered the young fellow up instantly.

“We heard from Roger,” he said. “Finish up. You aren't getting another night on the navy. They want you in town but fast.”