Dance with the Dragon (32 page)

Marti shook his head. “I still have contacts in and around Havana. I’d have known if something like that had happened.”

“Maybe she was dead. Killed in a car crash. Run over by a bus.”

Marti said nothing.

“The CIA or the Bureau would have found her for you if you’d asked,” McGarvey said. “But you never did. Why?”

“By then my daughter had become a resourceful woman.”

“She’d just graduated from high school—”

Marti held up a hand. “I’m a lousy father. Without Maria—my wife—I was nothing except for my work.” He looked away for a moment. “Unlike my daughter, or my wife, I knew about poverty firsthand, because I was born and raised in one of Havana’s barrios. My father died when I was just a baby, leaving my mother to care for seven children. We lived in a cardboard box covered with a tin roof and tar paper. The floor was dirt, and when I got older it was my job to bring our drinking water from the open sewer.

“By the time I reached high school age, my mother was dead along with everyone else except for an older sister who went away to the other side of the island, to San Francisco, where she worked as a nanny.

“I never saw her again. She was raped and murdered by the man of the house, who was later shot to death by his wife.” Marti shrugged. “I was alone, but my scores in the boarding high school were good enough that I was sent to officers’ school outside Havana, Antonio Maceo, where I studied mechanical engineering, business administration, and English.”

“An odd combination.”

“Yes, but Cuba has always needed everything.”

The man had been driven to succeed at all costs, as many young men coming from his situation might have been. But it made no sense to McGarvey why he had apparently turned his back on his daughter when she may have needed him the most.

“Why didn’t you try to find her? At least to make sure that she was okay.”

“I did fine on my own; now it was Gloria’s turn. It was up to her if she took hold of her own life and did something with it.”

“How did she pay for college? How did she live?”

“I don’t know. But she never asked me for money.”

“I’m sorry, General, but you were even less than a lousy father,” McGarvey said strongly, in part because he had abandoned his wife and daughter. But he had come back.

Marti nodded. “That’s what she told me a few years ago, and both of you are right, but still she calls from time to time when she needs something.”

McGarvey could see at least one very good reason for Gloria to have attitude. Who wouldn’t with her background?

“Did you go to her graduation?”

“Of course.”

“Was anyone else there? Her aunt or uncle, or any of the cousins?”

“Only me, and some of her friends who were graduating with her.”

“Did she introduce you to them?” McGarvey wanted to know. He was having a tough time comprehending the relationship.

“No, though I told her that I wanted to meet them. But they all had family with them, and right after the ceremony Gloria and I went to a little seafood restaurant in St. Pete Beach for an early dinner.”

“How was she toward you?” McGarvey asked.

“Pleasant. Distant. I hadn’t expected anything other than that.”

“Were you proud of her?”

An odd expression came over Marti’s face. “Proud that she was finally standing on her own two feet, yes, of course. But I think I was a little worried too. She was leaving with some friends to spend the summer in Europe, and when she got back she was enrolling at Stetson Law School, right there, near Tampa.”

“I saw that in her file,” McGarvey said. “Did you go to that graduation?”

“I wasn’t invited.”

“Christ,” McGarvey muttered.

Marti looked at him coolly. “I want you to understand something, Mr. McGarvey. Our family have been strict Catholics. It was Maria’s doing. Gloria’s pregnancy was a sin that she made worse by the abortion. But what hurt the most was when she turned her back on us. We were willing to forgive and get on with our lives, but she wasn’t.”

If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a very big one, and chances are someone will believe it. But in this case McGarvey wondered if the general even realized what he had just said.

FIFTY-TWO

THE APARTMENT

After that everything changed. In late September she showed up in Washington and telephoned her father to have lunch at the Watergate. She was already at a table overlooking the Potomac when he arrived, and she got up and embraced him warmly.

“Hola, Papá,”
she said.

She was dressed in an obviously expensive, fashionable dark suit and medium business heels, with her hair done nicely and her makeup minimal but perfect. She had transformed from a rough-and-tumble young woman with attitude to a beautiful grown woman with a million-watt smile.

“You look marvelous, sweetheart,” Marti told her. “But what has happened to you? Where have you been? We’ve heard nothing for three years.”

“I know, and I’m sorry, but I’ve been a busy girl,” she said. “I graduated in June from Stetson and sat for my bar exams in Florida and here in D.C., and then a bunch of us spent the summer skiing in Chile.”

“I thought you hated snow.”

She brushed it off. “Hate’s a little too strong a word,” she said. “Anyway, I’m a full-fledged lawyer now with a job at the Navy’s JAG office in the Pentagon. How about that?”

Marti nodded. “How about that,” he said. “When do you start?”

“I started two weeks ago. I wanted to get settled into the new job and my apartment before I saw you.” She reached out for her father’s hand. “It’s been too long,
Papá.
I’ve missed you.”

Marti started to tell her that he had missed her too, but she held him off.

“I blamed you for uprooting us from our wonderful life in Cuba, and for mother’s death. For a long time I was sure you had done it on purpose to get rid of us, so I rebelled.” She lowered her eyes contritely for a moment. “I was horribly wrong,” she admitted. “And I’m truly sorry. It’s all I can say.”

“It’s enough,” Marti told her, his heart swelling.

Marti had made them another drink, and when he came back to the table he gave McGarvey a wan smile. “You asked if I had been proud of my daughter. I was on that day. She had disappeared as a troubled girl and had returned in triumph.”

“That must have been a relief for you,” McGarvey said.

Marti nodded. “It was, at first,” he said. “For a while it was like the old days when we’d first come to Washington, after she’d gotten over her mother’s death. At least outwardly. We had lunch a couple times a week, even though she was very busy. Some weekends she’d come over and bunk with me. We’d go to movie, maybe have a pizza afterward. I’d bought a new barbecue grill, and we had a few cookouts on the balcony of my apartment.”

“Did she ever bring any of her friends or co-workers over to introduce you?” McGarvey asked.

“No. She always said that she wanted to make her mark with the JAG before she branched out with personal issues.”

“Her words?”

Marti nodded. “More or less.”

“No boyfriends?”

“Not until her husband, Raul,” Marti said. “Or at least none that she ever mentioned.”

“But she was still up, happy, pleasant to be around?”

“For the most part. Once in a while if she was tired, she might snap at me, but she always apologized immediately. She’d tell me that she was ‘working on it.’ She was busy in those days, more often than not putting in seventy- and eighty-hour weeks.”

“How about you?” McGarvey asked.

“Oh, I was scaling back, the calls out to Langley were getting less frequent and certainly a lot less urgent, so in the spring I packed up, sold the Georgetown apartment, and moved down here.” Marti smiled suddenly. “Gloria took the better part of a week to help me pack. It was great.” He looked away. “I’d held the hope, even though I knew it was utterly impossible, that she would quit her job, move down here, and open a law practice in Little Havana.”

“Did you ever mention it to her?”

Marti shook his head. “In the fall I learned that she had been recruited by the CIA, and for the first time I was frightened for her safety.”

McGarvey knew the answer but he asked anyway. “Why?”

“She was going to be sent back to Cuba—it would have been a waste of a valuable resource otherwise. But she was the daughter of General Marti, a traitor to Uncle Fidel. The DGI would have moved heaven and earth to get its hands on her. I would have been forced to return.”

Would you have returned? McGarvey wanted to ask, but he didn’t. He figured that whatever answer Marti gave him would be a lie. The relationship between the general and his daughter was as complex as it was odd. It wasn’t as if they simply disliked each other; there was something deeper than that going on, but McGarvey didn’t know what it was yet.

“In the end there was nothing I could say or do that would have had any effect on her decision,” Marti said. “She had turned into a thoughtful, pleasant daughter, but she was still headstrong—if anything, more than when she was a difficult child. So in the end I said nothing to her, and decided to do nothing until she was sent to Cuba.”

“How long was it after she’d joined the Company before she was sent to Cuba?”

“About a year, maybe a little longer, but by then she was married and I was a little less worried.”

His name was Raul Ibenez. He was an instructor at the Farm when Gloria took her training. Within the first two weeks they had fallen head over heels in love with each other, and Gloria blossomed like never before.

“She called me every time she could to tell me about him,” Marti said. “His parents had defected when he was an infant, so he had no direct memory of Cuba, only what he’d been told. And she said that’s all they ever talked about at first. He wanted to know everything about her life as a kid, and together they were going back to help topple Fidel’s regime.

“When she graduated from the field operations course, she was assigned to the Cuban section of the Latin American desk, which was no surprise. But within three months she and Raul were married in a civil ceremony in the Falls Church courthouse.”

“Did you approve?” McGarvey asked.

“Of course. It was at least half a dream come true. She was marrying a nice Cuban boy. I checked him out. He was three years older than Gloria, he had his degree in foreign studies right there at Georgetown University, and his supervisors all gave him top marks.

“His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress, and in fact they’re still here in Little Havana. But they closed their shop after their son was killed. I do what I can to help.”

“Does Gloria ever come to see them?” McGarvey asked.

“Just the once when she got out of Cuba, but since then, no.”

“Did you go to the wedding?”

Marti shook his head. “I didn’t know anything about it until two weeks later when they came down to Miami and invited me to lunch. They’d gone to Monaco for their honeymoon, and they looked like they had the world by the tail. They were young, beautiful, intelligent, and invincible.” Marti smiled with the memory. “They were something to behold. I didn’t even ask them about a proper church wedding. If I had, Gloria would have told me that they were too busy to fool with anything like that.”

“What about his parents?”

“They’d already broken the news, so they were going back to work the very next day.”

“To get ready for Cuba,” McGarvey said.

“Yes,” Marti said. “They divided their time between the Cuban desk at headquarters, and advanced tradecraft training at the Farm. They were working seven days a week by then, so after lunch that day I didn’t hear much from them.”

“You knew they would be assigned to go back.”

“As sure as the sun rises,” Marti said.

“When did it finally happen?”

“Not for a whole year,” Marti said. “I was even beginning to hope that maybe it wouldn’t happen. But they showed up here one night, all excited. They were on their way, and pumped up. They even refused to speak any English, although Raul’s accent wasn’t right, and I told him so. His controllers had built a legend around a small-town boy from up around Santa Clara. They all talked funny up there, so he figured he’d be safe in Havana.”

“Then what?”

“They left that night,” Marti said. He got up and went into the living room, brought back a humidor of cigars, and offered one to McGarvey.

“No thanks,” McGarvey said. “What happened in Havana?”

“Nothing much for maybe six months. My contact at Langley wouldn’t give me anything, in fact he wouldn’t even admit where they were. But I was sure that if anything were to happen, or if they were in any grave danger, he would have let me know.”

“What about the people you knew in Havana?”

A pained expression came into Marti’s eyes. He was lighting a cigar, and looked up. “I asked some friends to look out for my daughter, I’ll admit that, though Langley ordered me not to do it.”

“And?” McGarvey prompted.

Marti finished lighting his cigar. “In retrospect I’m sorry I did.”

“Why?”

“I learned something about my daughter that I wished I’d never learned.”

FIFTY-THREE

THE APARTMENT

Marti smoked his cigar in silence for a minute, looking out across the city. He was a man who was obviously wrestling with a difficult decision, but McGarvey couldn’t find much sympathy for him. He was worried about his daughter. That much was obvious. But he’d never had any idea of what it was to be a father.

“What was it that you learned?” McGarvey prompted.

Marti took a moment before he turned his attention back to McGarvey, and he suddenly seemed ten years older than just a minute before. “Would you like another drink?”

McGarvey shook his head, and Marti looked away again.

“I found out that they had been made by the DGI within the first day or two after they got to Havana,” the general said. “But the word didn’t get out to me until six months later, and by then there wasn’t much I could do.”

“How did you find out?” McGarvey prompted.

“I have friends there.”

“Yes, I know. But exactly how do you hear things from Cuba?”