Havana (15 page)

He spun around, hunting another weapon, but saw his own slayer standing above him. So this is what the guy would look like. A black, wild negro in khakis, with dusty boots and a lined face that had seen several hundred battles. Dead eyes, no curiosity, no light. Gray shot through the wool of tightly knitted hair. Sweat circles under the arm. A uniform of no army on earth save the universal one of desperate men good with guns, for hire cheap for any work at all.

“Choo fucked, man,” the fellow said to him.

“Fuck you, Jack,” said Earl.

“Yah, fuck
choo,
man, that's who eez fucked, no? I kill you then chase down those fat pigs and kill them. Ha! You so brave, but it comes to this, poor fucker.”

The man was too experienced to come close enough for Earl to kick him in the nuts. He had the gun, the advantage and all the time in the world. He would make no foolish mistakes. It wouldn't be like a bad movie, where the hero kicks dust in the bad guy's eyes. He'd just shoot Earl, reload, finish the job and move on. By tomorrow the memory would be vague and by Friday gone forever.

He raised the pistol.

Then he lowered it to study a curious phenomenon.

His chest was spurting blood. Wasn't this an odd development? He couldn't believe it. Where had such a terrible atrocity come from?

He went to his knees, finding the Star pistol immensely heavy, letting it drop to the ground. His ears were filled with pounding, so much so that he did not hear the second burst that cut into him either. A presence loomed suddenly before him. He reached out and touched the face of Odudua, who gathered him to her dark bosom, a former servant and now, alas, just another john.

Earl watched him die. He lay babylike in the mud. His eyes were blank, his shirt red with new blood, lots of it. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

Earl thought he'd heard the shots, especially the second burst. He thought they came from the right. He pulled himself up and looked over the car's trunk, then scanned left and right, hoping to spot the shooter. But there was no shooter. Dust hung in the air and a quiet breeze stirred the leaves of the low trees.

“Hey!” Earl called, and there was no answer, no sound, no indication of another human being on the face of the earth.

They would not stop screaming. It wasn't that you could blame them. The secret police worked first on the fingernails, with a specialized device, then on the toes, with knives. But it wasn't until the specialist arrived that progress was made.

His name was Captain Ramon Latavistada. He was called Ojos Bellos, “Beautiful Eyes.” Not that his were beautiful, but that, as a high officer in SIM, the Sevicio de Inteligencia Militar, at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, he worked on the eyes. He knew that eyes were the key to a man's soul. His reputation was mighty. He worked quickly, with passion and skill; it was never pretty but it was always effective.

The prisoners screamed and screamed and screamed. There were three: the man Earl had shot immediately at the tree; another tommy-gunner he'd wounded across the road; and a third, unwounded, who'd been positioned at the far tree, had never brought fire to bear in the fight, and had escaped only to be tracked down by a dog team.

It was well after dark. A U.S. Navy generator had been unlimbered and lights strung to allow the crime scene to be examined and the dead to be toe-tagged and body-bagged. Pepe, with his queer, deflated head, rested with several of the men who'd killed him and were now in bags themselves.

First the navy had shown up, then a detachment of security police from Guantanamo and some Cuban soldiers from Santiago, who brought the dogs that had tracked the one escapee. Now, a few hours later, the scene bustled with dark purpose and energy, as soldiers guarded, investigators investigated, detectives detected, Americans worked on their earnest looks, and the Cubans smoked and joked and tortured.

Earl still lay on a gurney next to the ambulance, a bottle of plasma hung on a prong above his head. A corpsman had cut his pants away, and now a U.S. Navy doctor worked on him, and told him that he would not die.

“You were lucky, sir,” the young man said. “He hit you flush in the hipbone with a pistol bullet, but you must have bones like concrete. Or maybe it was the angle. The bullet didn't shatter the bone, it glanced off. It tore up some gluteus maximus but no arteries were hit, and you got the wound stanched right away, so you're going to be okay. I take it you've been shot before?”

“Once or twice,” was all Earl said.

“Well, you are a tough old coot. You get to walk away from another one.”

“I am going to run out of luck sooner or later, though.”

They tried to load him into the navy ambulance, but Earl would not leave until finally the last of his charges was found. This was Lane Brodgins, who had taken off on a tangent from the congressman as they fled through the jungle and gotten himself completely lost, until a squad of marines uncovered him in a bog. Now he was back, wrapped in a blanket, drinking coffee, unseeing and uncaring, trying to fight the shock that warped his brain.

As for Boss Harry, he didn't miss a beat. He'd already shaken hands with each of his rescuers, American naval or Cuban security personnel, glad-handed, backslapped, hee-hawed, guffawed, and managed to find the one PFC—there's one in every squad—with a pint of hooch aboard, and he'd had a few hard swallows and was mellow again. His hair wasn't even mussed.

“Well, Earl,” he said, “you done fought 'em off and saved my worthless old hide again, this time from killers.”

One of the prisoners screamed.

“Woo,” said the congressman, “bet he don't like that a bit.”

“No, sir, I don't expect he does.”

“You let them take you to Gitmo, son. You relax and the United States Congress will take care of this one, this one's on us. And I will call Governor Becker myself and demand that the State of Arkansas confer on you the highest damn medal it can. I know you've got every damned medal there is and it's pointless, but still I insist, son. You'da made a lot of Republicans happy if you hadn't gotten us through this.”

“I was just—”

A shot rang out.

“God, what was that?” Harry said, wincing and ducking. “Are they attacking again?”

“I'd bet the Cuban interrogator made a point for prisoners A and B by shooting prisoner C in the head.”

“Earl!”

It was Roger, rushing over, having just arrived on the long haul from the Havana embassy. “Good god, are you all right? Lord, we came as soon as we heard. We have been driving like fools. Congressman, you're safe. I heard about the driver. Oh, lord, you're so lucky there's only one dead.”

“It ain't luck, it's old Earl,” said Congressman Etheridge.

Roger closed with Earl, who smoked a cigarette and lay on the gurney.

The congressman drifted away, and Roger leaned close.

“Earl, again—fabulous work. You have any idea what would have happened if they'd managed to kill an American congressman? Jesus, I hate to think. It would scuttle the Cuban economy for months to come, it would get us militarily involved in a way we cannot afford to be, it would have unsettled the whole Caribbean, it would have pissed off the president, and it would have cost a lot of us our careers!”

“Well, thank god nobody's career got wrecked,” Earl said, taking a draw on his Lucky.

“Okay, poke fun at me. That's all right.”

“Mr. Evans—”

“Earl, please,
Roger,
dammit, you saved my career tonight, you should at least call me
Roger.
”

“Roger. I just want to knit up and git out of here. Every time I end up on an island, I almost get clipped.”

“Well, now, let's not—”

“Sir, I have had it with your damn island. I am too old by far for this kind of thing.”

“Of course, of course. But have you—”

“No. No, don't say a thing. Just send me home, for Christ's sake!”

Roger's eyes clicked through disappointment to hurt to numbness. Then he turned to the corpsmen.

“Okay,” he said, “load him up, get him to the hospital.”

“Wait,” Earl said, “is Frenchy here?”

“Yes, I sent him to talk with the Cuban Secret Police. His Spanish is actually pretty good, and he gets on better with—”

A fusillade of shots rang out, and men flinched and ducked, and turned toward the source.

“Well,” said Earl, “I think that's it for them boys they caught.”

“You can't tell them how to do things,” Roger said.

“I want to talk to Frenchy. I got a job for him. You boys”—he addressed the corpsmen—“y'all give me another few minutes, okay?”

“Sir, you need bed rest, a dressing change, a more substantial examination, a…”

But undirected, Frenchy stepped out of the dark.

“Well, there he is, the man himself,” he said.

“What did you find out?” Roger asked.

“Uh, the Cuban ‘specialist' broke the last one. Scalpels, eyes, you don't want to know more. I never saw
anything
like that. Anyway, before they shot him, he told them who's behind all this. He gave them a name. They wouldn't share it with me. Goddammit, I handed out smokes and everything. They just seemed exceedingly happy and somebody got on the radio to
El Presidente.
Somebody's going to get roasted tomorrow!”

“Lord,” said Roger, wincing at the prospect of yet more distasteful violence. He turned and left to go tend to the congressman.

Earl gestured, and Frenchy bent close.

“What is it?”

“I ain't said nothing yet, but somebody else was here. Someone with a burp gun nailed that bastard who was about to finish me.”

“What are you saying, Earl?”

“Listen here. Not tonight, when all these bastards are around, but tomorrow you stop off. Mark a tree or something so you can stay oriented. About forty yards up the road, maybe ten yards in, that's where whoever was shooting set up. I want you to get your Princeton trousers all muddy by getting down on them hands and knees, and don't you get up till you find a cartridge casing. I have to know who this guy is, and why he done what he done.”

Roger played three hard sets with Lt. Commander Tom Carruthers—not only a Harvard teammate but a member of his same dining club—and only won in the third, six–four. Even he had to admit he was slipping; he had not played singles in some years, he had not lifted a tennis racket since this whole Big Noise thing had started, and he was creaky and slow through the first set—he actually lost it on a double-fault!—and only got a wind up and found his form halfway through the second.

“Good show, old man!” he said, when he drilled Tommy's last service down the line, puffing up dust, to take the match. “Damn, that felt good.”

“Roge, must say, you've played better. I don't believe I ever took a set off you before.”

“Haven't had a racket in my hand in weeks, you know,” said Roger. “They keep us hopping in the America house.”

“I imagine it'll get worse, what with these Juan Lopez types now shooting up the U.S. Congress!”

“This may be the last tennis I play this year, Tommy!”

“Come on, let's shower and hit the Officer's Club for mojitos.”

“Actually, yes to the shower but no to the bar. I've got some house-setting-in-order to do. You know. Ugly, but necessary. A certain slippery assistant needs to be straightened out.”

“Ugh, hate that stuff. That's what bosun's mates are for.”

“Unfortunately in our little outfit, there are no sergeants to kick tail when necessary. One must do it oneself. Melancholy work, but character building, I think.”

The two old pals showered and changed, shared a quick Coke out of the nickel machine, and then Roger went off in search of Frenchy.

He had to admit, Guantanamo felt like home. Everywhere you looked, Americans. No Latin chaos and sultriness, no squalor, no pathos, no endless parade of numbers-sellers, whores and cigar-rollers, no pale tropic paints off that whole different sun-soaked palette, no ratty beggars or starving, swollen-bellied children. Instead, order, tidiness, cleanliness, safety, security. The sailors were crisp in their whites, the marines crisp in their olive fatigues, everyone was clean and everyone saluted or nodded. They didn't know him, except that his suit and pressed blue shirt and rep stripe tie proclaimed him, immediately and totally, Important, and as he walked from the tennis courts at the Officer's Club to the Naval Intelligence offices where he was temporarily headquartered, he must have passed a hundred smiling faces, none of them, fortunately, brown.

The trees were well tended, the gardens sharp—oh, yes, the gardeners, he could tell, were all Cuban—and a topiary at the Officer's Club proclaimed the initials USN in dense, immaculately trimmed bushes, under a flagpole, where the American flag waved eternally vigilant against the azure sky. And beyond—he could see, because they were on a slope—he observed a bustling harbor where sleek gray ships under the same proud banner either put out to sea or returned from sea, always on duty, always on the ramparts.

This is what we're offering the world,
he thought, adoring the order, the cleanliness, the sense of high purpose everywhere evident,
if only they aren't so stupid as to turn it down.

He reached the Naval Intelligence offices, in a tempo that seemed to have become a permanto, shaded in palms and guarded by marines. But he was known by this time, and walked by and through the casual security of a place securely American and went upstairs and down halls past rooms of decoders and yeomen typists and WAVE secretaries, and found at last the rooms he had been assigned, stepped in, was saluted by two enlisted men and had his hand shaken by another officer, a lieutenant from Yale, who was his official liaison.

“This way, Roger. He's back now.”

“Excellent.”

“Good match?”

“Tommy still has some moves. My treachery prevailed over his youth and athleticism in the end, however.”

“Not how I hear it, Roge. They say you're the tops.”

“Well—”

“Just a thought, Roge. I'm coming to Havana next weekend, possibly we could get together for a drink? My service is up in a couple of months. Dad wants me in law school and all that crap, but I don't know if I'm cut out for it. I might be thinking about moving laterally in your direction.”

What was the guy's name?
Yale, football. Oh, yeah: Dan, Dan Benning, he thought.

“Dan, yes, we must. Yes, with your experience, you could be vital. The only thing is, things are a little hectic with all this.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Let me take care of this, and we
must
get together.”

“I'll count on it.”

At last he entered the last door, his temporary office, formerly belonging to a marine colonel who had been hastily evacuated to make room for the Agency hotshot of whom so many spoke so well, and what he found, sitting at
his
desk, feet up, was Walter—
Frenchy!
—in shirtsleeves, tie down, soaked in sweat, reading reports.

“Well,” he said.

“Oh, hi, Roge, how are you?”

Frenchy rose—though just a bit slow, Roger thought—and made room, waited for him to sit, then took a seat on the sofa under photos of the marine colonel's fabulous career stops in Okinawa, Seoul and Panama.

“Fine,” Roger said.

“The match?”

“Fine, fine. So what did you find out?”

It had been Frenchy's idea to return to the crime scene this morning to look for whatever had to be looked for, to talk with the Cuban security police who handled the “investigation,” such as it was, while Roge played tennis.

“Well, no new physical evidence has been uncovered. The Cubans are pretty sure, though, that they have their man. I did find out who. Oh, this is rich. It's some gangster named El Colorado. How cowboy-movie is that? I think we'll see something happening very soon.”

“El Colorado? That does sound Republic Pictures.”

“An ex-socialist. Now a pimp master. He owned the brothel where the congressman acted up. Furthermore, it appears he tried to have Earl killed in prison but was mysteriously thwarted. But these Latin types: you play by their rules or the hammer comes down. I believe the Cubans will hammer the hammer very quickly. Certain messages must be sent.”

“And you got the traffic out?”

“Yes, Roge, last night, after we got in. And I checked for incoming, but there was nothing. I put out another report this morning before I left for the site, in your name, of course. I haven't told them about impending action against El Colorado. Should I?”

“It might look good if we're predicting it. You might even tell them we suggested the action.”

“Yes. Yes, that's good.”

“Short-term, but good.”

“Uh? Meaning?”

“Meaning I am worrying about long-term.”

“Long-term?”

“You see, that's your flaw, Walter. You're a good nuts-and-bolts man, I give you that. But you have to see a larger picture, see where it's all going.”

“I can never seem to remember that.”

“It is this Earl. He said last night he just wanted to go home.”

“Well, Roge, I mean, he'd just been in a gunfight, he'd just gotten
shot.
Possibly he was a little, you know,
down.
You know, his pep dipstick was reading a quart low.”

But Roger didn't see a joke.

“Look, I'm worried that this is not shaping up the way we anticipated. We've invested a lot in this man. I want something to happen. This isn't the Big Noise we wanted to make. This was someone else's Big Noise and it will upset a lot of people at United Fruit and Domino Sugar and Bacardi and Hershey's and Curtis. We need to make
our
Big Noise.”

“Roge, I think it's going swell. Look, he's going to be in that hospital another week, he'll rest up, his morale will improve, his sense of duty become clear again. And when he gets out we can put a full-court press on him. We've got this assassination attempt as proof of subversion and guerilla activity. We link it to Castro, we make the case to Earl, and we are all set. It's in the bag and—”

“
Stop it!
”

Roger hated emotional outbursts, loss of control, anger, the quiver in the voice, the tremble in the fingers, the dryness in the lips, the secret thump of an agitated heart. He hated all that. But now he could not stop himself.

“I am tired of your con-job answers. You always have an answer. You're never at a loss for words. You always pretend to
know.
I'm tired of it. You assist. You make sure that what policies I set, you make certain they happen.”

“Of course, Roge, I merely—”

“You merely were doing your hustle again. I hate it. I'm sick of it. This Earl thing—it's your hustle. Let me make that clear. We have a responsibility. We have something we have to do and it's got to be done soon, and with Earl, and it has to be a permanent, total solution to our problem, a successful conclusion to our mission. The Big Noise. Do you get it?”

“Of course, Roger.”

“My next ticket is West Berlin. That is the real action. I need a feather in my cap. Now the question is, are you coming, or do you go onto the Langley scrap heap of failed assistants, of young promising fellows who just didn't quite work out and ended up in analysis or training or admin? Which is it, Walter? You can come with me, you can stay behind. It's up to you.”

“Roger, I'll deliver. Earl will deliver.”

There was an urgent rap at the door.

The two men exchanged looks, then Frenchy rose and opened it, to admit Lt. Dan Benning, in an agitated state.

“You really ought to have a radio on.”

“What's going on?”

“The Cuban army has attacked a gangster named El Colorado at his house in Centro Havana. Tanks, armored cars, machine guns. There's a battle going on downtown right now!”