Havana Read online

  “Yeah. The roads are okay. No problem. And you should be all right all the way down the island. I’d watch out as you get close to Santiago. It’s very mountainous down there. And be careful in Ciego de Avila province. It’s mostly empty marshlands. They don’t see Americans very often. Dark, jungly, you know. Sort of like the Pacific jungles.”

  “I was there for a little while.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I got some idea. Thanks, pal. Sorry for the harsh words earlier.”

  “Forget it, Sarge. Hey, I know you were in the Pacific. I know what medal you won. But I can tell, it ain’t gone to your head.”

  “It ain’t my way.”

  He winked at his new pal and headed back into the main building, to get familiar with the route via maps.

  Chapter 20

  Speshnev first began to hear of it in the barber’s chair, his face swaddled in towels full of steam heat. He’d come to this place on the morning of every day—one in four, usually—when he’d had to slide by a casino at night, to pick up some of his improvised operational budget at the blackjack tables.

  So he wasn’t thinking of much except numbers. The numbers had to stick like glue, never falling out, always in place, as if on a big board which he could scan instantaneously if necessary. But it was beyond thought, as most games were to him. He had a game mind; his imagination thrilled at the boundaries, the rules, the strategies, as he sought to know, always, how to crack it.

  So he was dillydallying with that so-necessary state when, seemingly from nowhere, he heard a single phrase in Spanish.

  “They say it will be big.”

  Sometimes he missed these things, as the Spanish he’d learned was pure Castillian, and the Cubans spoke more briskly than anyone in that motherland. They also pronounced their Z’s and C’s without the Castillian lisp, hard and brisk, like Andalusians. Worse still, their diction was frequently lazy and unclear, as if they had picked up the jangled rhythms of the Americans, particularly in the way they dropped their S’s and sometimes even the entire last syllables of words.

  But he heard it clearly: “They say it will be big.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They always say that.”

  “No, this time it is real. It is said that young man is associated with it.”

  He whispered the name to his companion, and Speshnev could not make it out, but he could tell it was a two-syllable name with the emphasis on the first syllable.

  It could be. Possibly, yes, it might be.

  But then the conversation stopped, and when the towels came away, the shop was empty. The two had left already.

  “Sir,” he asked the barber, as that man lathered him up, then stropped the razor, “I am provoked. Those two men? Their conversation? Did it have some meaning?”

  The barber eyed him suspiciously, even though he came in so often.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t listen to what idle gossipers say.”

  “Ah, I understand,” Speshnev said, and then endured torture as the man shaved him over the next ten or twelve hours.

  Well, of course, it was but ten or twelve minutes, but it dragged so for the Russian he began to shudder with anticipation toward the end.

  “Sir, if you don’t relax, I will cut you badly.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered.

  At last finished, he rose, paid, and exited quickly. Where to now? Possibly the open-air market at Plaza de la Catedral, a gathering spot for other idlers, as well as self-styled radicals and reformers. As he rushed down the crowded narrow crinkle that was the Emperado, he had the ridiculous impression that everywhere people were muttering the same thing.

  Finally, he could stand it no longer, and headed into a large cafe, well short of the Catedral. It was crowded and as he bumped along, trying to reach the espresso behind the bar, he heard snippets.

  Finding a man who also appeared to be alone and listening, he said to him, “Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “You know…about it. They say tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow. I heard this afternoon late, if not early in the evening.”

  “Possibly such things cannot be planned with precision.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that. But if it doesn’t happen today, then the rumors, you know, about the speaker tonight, they will be ridiculous, no?”

  “I suppose. I just heard that fellow talks but does nothing.”

  “But if he is involved, then maybe it has moved beyond nothing.”

  “He is a good speaker.”

  “His radio speech when Chiba died”—Castro!—“it was good, but nothing ever came of it. Possibly this time it will be different.”

  But Speshnev was already gone.

  Where was the young bastard? Of course, not in any of his usual haunts. He wasn’t in the park of San Francisco, where the chess players gathered, indulging in his pastime. He wasn’t in any of the coffeehouses around the hill that was crowned by the university, or on its glorious splurge of steps, or among the yakkers in the law school cafeteria. He wasn’t anywhere except…it was hard to believe, hard to understand, but could he actually be…working?

  So Speshnev rose in the rotten old apartment building, entering through a dark corridor, wending up a dark stairway, following his way around the balcony engulfing the narrow courtyard, reading the numbers on the battered pastel doors, until at last he came to his destination.

  He knocked.

  After a time, there came rustling noises, the sounds of a baby stirring, and finally, the door cracked but a bit. An exceptionally pretty face glared at him suspiciously. What a beautiful young girl!

  “Ah, is he here?”

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “A friend. He knows me. We talk in the park.”

  “He is writing his speech.”

  “For tomorrow?”

  “For tonight, he says. Can you come back?”

  “It’s important that I see him.”

  “And why?”

  “Young lady—Maria, isn’t that it?”

  “Mirta. But how could you know? He never takes me anywhere.”

  “He talks of you often.”

  “Ha! He never talks of me. I do not exist for him, except when he is in a certain mood. He—”

  Before she sailed off on the seas of inconsolable bitterness, Speshnev reseized the momentum.

  “Mirta, you do not want policemen visiting, do you? That would be even worse. Arrests, beatings, the scandal. Think of the parents, the family honor. Therefore it is important that I see him.”

  Mirta continued to eye him.

  “Where are you from? You speak like a Spaniard.”

  “I am of Spanish experience, yes, extensive. That is where I learned the language. I am not one of these excitable Cubans.”

  “All right. But if he yells at me, I’ll be so mad.”

  “He will kiss you.”

  “That I doubt.”

  He walked through the apartment, not that it was far to go, and heard the baby stirring restively, saw the fight between the woman’s tidiness and the man’s contempt for tidiness—that is, books in piles and gewgaws in rows, in continual battle.

  He arrived at a back bedroom where, in his flaccid, shirtless condition, his eyes shielded by thick glasses, Castro scribbled away furiously by the bald light of a lamp whose shade was somewhere else.

  He looked up, saw Speshnev, and did not pause even a second to remark on the incongruity of that man’s presence in his home, a phenomenon which had not occurred before and was not remotely conceivable to him.

  “Listen to this, and tell me what you think,” he said. He cleared his throat. “‘History will absolve us. Our cause is that just. We seek not profit but freedom, not mastery but equality. Freedom, however, cannot be won without sacrifice.’”

  “Idiotic,” said Speshnev. “You are a young f
ool who will get yourself killed.”

  “No, no,” Castro said. “I think not. This is a very fine opportunity and I must seize it. It will win me followers on a grand scale. In grand scale is power. And so it is that—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  But the weirdness of the situation suddenly made itself known to the young man.

  “What are you doing here? How did you find me? I never told you where I lived. It’s supposed to be a secret. I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know your name.”

  “You know perfectly well who I am. You know why I am here, so names are not important. What is important is to get you to the next stage. Now, everywhere I go, I hear big things are coming and that they involve you. I insist that you tell me what all this is about.”

  “Opportunity. An alliance—your idea, incidentally—has produced a wondrous chance. Listen to this, and tell me I am not wise to grab this with everything I have.”

  He then proceeded to narrate the previous day’s adventures, the shrewd council of El Colorado, the raid on the casino, the democracy of giving the people all the money, his own ability to stand forth in the moment and take command and—

  “Oh, you fool! You blind, stupid young fool! God, you are so lucky. There might even still be time.” Speshnev looked at his watch, saw that it was nearly eleven.

  “I don’t…. Why are you angry? This is a wonderful opportunity to embarrass the Americans and the regime, without any harm being done. It redounds with honor and glory. It speaks to a glorious future. It—”

  “Stop with your pap. How many men did you see in Colorado’s cellar.”

  “Why, four or five. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  “Of course you weren’t. Lesson number one: always pay attention. How many, idiot? Four or five?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No, but you don’t understand why, do you?”

  The young man looked at him. Speshnev could see confusion on his face.

  “Well, I—”

  “Well you nothing. You could not possibly rob a big American casino with five men. There are too many hidden guns. It would be a slaughter. The American gangsters do not yield on such things easily, and they always have their revenge. Their whole culture depends upon revenge. No, El Colorado could not conceive of such a thing.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Idiot! Fool! Is your brain a raisin?”

  He clenched his brow, then hit himself in the head with his fist.

  “Think! Think!” he ordered himself. “Five, you say. With machine guns.”

  “Thompsons. Like the police.”

  “The same. Hmmm. A bank? But he doesn’t need money, he has money? What? What?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Four or five men, machine guns. What else?”

  “Negroes. Possibly foreign.”

  “Foreign?”

  “Darker than our negroes. Almost black. You never see that here, especially five times over. A dark one, yes, once in a while, but not five of them in one—”

  “Did you speak to them?”

  “I saluted them. They didn’t respond. I thought it odd.”

  “They didn’t understand you. Of course, now I see. You are right, at last. They are foreigners, and can’t stay with the quickness of the Cuban tongue and its lazy ways of working. Foreigners. Poor, desperate, dark men, brought in to…well, to what?”

  “Rob?”

  “No.”

  “Kill?”

  “Yes, you would use such men to handle killing chores. They would be expendable, courageous, nameless. Perfect. But who? El Presidente? No, don’t be absurd. He’s too well protected. What about some ambassador? But for what reason—”

  It suddenly dawned on him.

  “Of course. Of course!”

  But if his wisdom illuminated him, it did not animate him. Instead, a terrible weariness set over him. He had so much to do, so little time, so few weapons. Melancholy seeped through him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The American congressman. They’ll kill him and his party for violating the inviolate rules of the brothel. Of course; it’s pimp’s honor at stake. And from his point of view, there’s no negative attached. It’ll make the government look bad, it’ll terrify the American government, but it won’t enrage and engage the American crime syndicate.”

  “Perhaps it will send a message.”

  “Fool. You have no instincts at all. More likely it’ll produce invasion.”

  “Mother of God,” said Castro. “And I—”

  “And you have gone all over town affiliating yourself with it. Your mission is now to disaffiliate yourself. These stories you have spread must now be denounced as lies and slander. Go even to the police and tell them that El Colorado is the one.”

  “I—”

  “Meanwhile, I must stop this. Do you have a machine gun?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Hmmm, I need a machine gun fast. Now where does one get a machine gun?”

  Chapter 21

  The sergeant laid his ambush well. He was not without experience, having fought in Argentina, Peru, Colombia and the Dominican Republic at different times in his career, in some cases escaping just ahead of the firing squad. But that was another story.

  He did not select the first, or even the second, bend in the road that ran down Ciego de Avila province, about five miles inland from the sea, in the sudden burst of mangrove swamps. He knew that if his target had any security, security would be at its highest at that first bend, and again at the second bend. By the third bend, they would have settled down and grown used to the closeness of the trees, the sudden sense of impinging jungle after so long on sparse scrublands where cattle fed randomly.

  He also needed two trees, unusually tall for the vegetation.

  One tree was not enough.

  It was a question of timing. The car had to slow to round the bend, and as it cleared the turn, but before it began to accelerate, the first tree had to be downed. It would take any driver three seconds to respond. By the time he had braked, and begun to turn around, or back up if he were clever, the second tree would come down, trapping the vehicle.

  That’s when his gunners would fire. He had three Thompsons, each with a fifty-round drum, and it was important that all three fire at once and that they lay down continuous fire. The car had to be still. He did not think these men were well enough trained to efficiently engage a moving target, even with the fast-firing Thompsons. He wanted the guns blazing for a good three to five seconds. He wanted the Cadillac ripped by three machine guns. Then he himself, on the other side of the road where the car would almost certainly stop, would raise up and quickly close the distance from the other side. He would pull his Star 9mm from his holster, advance to the automobile, and quickly fire a head shot into each of the four men, living or dead. Then it was only a matter of pulling their own automobile out and heading toward Cabanas Los Pinos, where a boat awaited them with their money aboard and orders to sail to Florida.

  The sergeant was pleased. He had five good men besides himself. The innards of the two chickens he had slain last night had revealed by the sacred laws of Santeria that prospects were excellent. He had prayed hard to Odudua, mistress of the darkness of that blend of Bantu religion and Catholicism, and knew that she favored him, for she favored all killers. Her mission was to harvest their bounty and take it with her across the river to her dark land. The blood of the chickens, their squawking as their guts were pulled living from them, merely excited her.

  The sergeant found his two trees without difficulty, an exceedingly good omen. He had examined the cuts his men had made in the trees and saw that the trunks had been expertly brought to the brink of collapse and one or two more ax strokes would deposit them exactly where he wanted them. The men with the Thompson guns knew how to shoot them well enough. He knew his Star intimately, and knew it
would not fail him.

  He checked his watch. It was nearly six; he knew the time was close but that he had a good hour before sundown.

  “Sergeanto,” came an excited cry from the man who’d just come sprinting around the bend, “I can see the big black car with the American flags on its fenders.”

  “Be ready, my boys. It is time and then we will be gone from this godforsaken country.”

  The men scattered to find their positions.

  “My, my, my, my,” said the congressman, “at last we git to look at something different. Not better, mind you, but different. Trees, or what they might call trees in some primitive place like Mississippi or Alabama.”

  “Yes, sir, Harry,” agreed Lane Brodgins. “That flat land was damned boring. Like Kansas, only no damned cowboys or Indians to make it interesting.”

  “Lane, I ever tell you ’bout the time Joe Phillips of Montana’s 13th and I got in a hell of a row over a navy typewriter reconditioning installation I had all sewn up for Fort Smith, but he had his heart set on setting up somewhere way the Sam Hill out there?”

  “No, sir, don’t believe you did,” said poor Lane, whose capacity for eating Boss Harry’s shit was beyond legendary and near to entering mythical.

  “Well, I don’t know how that fella got it in his mind the United States Navy needed to fix up its old typewriters way out yonder in the purple west. But I decided…”

  Earl tried to close it out and concentrate. He saw the low dark trees suddenly rising up to swallow the Cadillac and nudged his elbow into Pepe’s subtly, then with his hand pressing flatly downward signaled the driver to slow down.

  “We slowing down, Pepe?” asked Boss Harry.

  “Señor, I think is a curve coming up.”

  “Let’s just take it easy through here,” said Earl. He knew that nothing would happen on a road so straight and open that you could see a man three-hundred yards ahead and there wasn’t a stick of cover anywhere. He supposed a sniper could take a long shot but doubted if anybody down here had that skill. He also worried about a mine or a command-detonated bomb of some sort, but again, nothing in Cuba had communicated the possibility of that kind of sophistication.