Leon Uris (11 page)

“That should be novel.”

“There are unpleasant rumblings in both SDECE and the President’s office about your overt pro-American attitude. The entire orientation of your office calls for a drastic change of thinking.”

“Just what kind of change do you have in mind, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur?”

“To certain basic facts. France will not have her life and death dictated to by the Americans. France is the mistress of her own destiny.”

“Or, better spoken, the master of her own destruction.” André held up a hand to halt D’Arcy’s rebuttal. “No nation on this earth with a population of fifty million has the slightest chance of defending itself without an alliance with one of the two major powers. Without NATO and America we have nothing to deter a Soviet move on us.”

“You call our
force de frappe
nothing?”

“France has an atomic popgun,” he answered with disdain, flicking an imaginary fly from his wrist. “It cannot be taken seriously, despite the ill-spent billions.”

“And you call the Western European Alliance nothing!”

“An archaic dream of two old men. A daydream of forming a third power in Europe that calls for us to sleep with the Germans. Are you ready to sleep with Germany after what they have done to France in this century? Ah, Monsieur D’Arcy, but even if we are ready to deceive ourselves into believing that we could control a Franco-German union, the Germans are not so ready to abandon America.”

As André spoke words detested under this roof, his mind suddenly reflected upon Boris Kuznetov. Kuznetov, a Russian who loved his country as he himself loved France. Kuznetov had paid the price for daring to be honest. How long could he, André, continue to hold these unpopular views?

“The return to glory,” André said, “is an illusion. The attempt to break NATO and the medieval mentality of our foreign policy to play one great power against the other with little power pools is establishing exactly the same conditions that led to the destruction of France twice in our lifetime. Oh, yes, President La Croix and company play their cards like masters. I predict they will go as far as to attempt to make France the broker between a union of Russia and Western Europe. And this will keynote tragedy for they don’t understand ... no one plays poker with the Russians. What keeps Soviet ambitions in check is not Pierre La Croix’s international table-hopping but the power of the United States.”

“That’s quite enough, Devereaux,” D’Arcy said, springing to his feet.

“Don’t count on me as a party to the destruction of NATO. As a Frenchman, I say there is no way, no way at all, that Western Europe can survive without the presence of the United States.” André arose and smiled. “You see, in fact, America is our leader.”

D’Arcy’s fist thumped on the desktop and his knuckles hurt. His round face turned apple crimson. “Such treasonous opinions have no place in French life today.”

“You mean, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, that no opinion other than La Croix’s has a place. I beg to differ. That is not my France.”

I
T WAS GOOD TO
capture a moment of romance. Nicole looked radiant tonight in a lacy dressing gown on the other side of a candlelit table.

As the maid cleared the dishes, André leaned over and kissed his wife’s cheek and thanked her, then luxuriated with a Jamaican cigar and a snifter of cognac.

“Darling, is this trip really necessary?” Nicole asked.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Dr. Kaplan doesn’t think it is.”

“He doesn’t run an intelligence establishment.”

In his business few details were shared with his wife. Nicole usually knew better than to ask.

“You’re going to Cuba, aren’t you?”

André grunted a little laugh and pinched her cheek.

“Well?”

“You’ve a good nose for intelligence.”

“Your health is not the only thing that disturbs me. The hostility against you at the Embassy is becoming quite apparent. I hear things and sense things that upset me. They say the Americans are just using you.”

“Indeed they are. However, I’ve always been perfectly willing to be used in the interest of France.”

“You and your twisting words. Lord, how I envy those people who live and breathe around us and who know a day of peace. Do you realize, André, since I’ve known you you’ve never really spent a day that you weren’t in battle? For twenty years, day in and day out, this war you’re in never stops. You bring it home with you, into the dining room, into the bedroom. As often as not I’m made to feel I’m looking at a detached stranger.”

“Well, darling, better luck in your next life. Maybe you’ll find a Tucker Brown IV.”

“Why does it always have to be you who does it? What about the others? Why are you the one always in the middle?”

“President Truman had a little sign on his desk. I’ve always admired its philosophy. It read:
THE BUCK STOPS HERE
. I’ve envied certain people, too, the great majority of my colleagues whose sole mission in life is to attain the goal of mediocrity. They sail into a safe harbor, button up and conveniently and quietly sort their paper clips, avoiding responsibility and decisions. I can’t explain, Nicole, why I was singled out and am unable to avoid conflict, but I can’t run or plug my ears or close my eyes or turn my back. I often envy those who can.”

She looked at him blankly, not drinking in his words, but only feeling their thud as another of his well-phrased rejections.

“I’m going up to see Michele,” she said tersely. “I’m thinking of going off with her on a trip.”

“Where? When?”

“I don’t know. France, to your father’s. Switzerland, Outer Mongolia. Some place where I don’t have to be a daily witness to your demise.”

Coming home these days, he thought, is not my idea of heaven, but I never thought of a home without Nicole. If I don’t know how to quit and if you love me, then, God, woman, accept it for what it is and try to make things a little easier.

“For whatever it means,” André said, “I still love you dearly and I don’t want to go through life without you.”

Nicole took her hand out of his, folded her napkin, and stood. “Give Juanita de Córdoba my regards,” she said.

André watched her leave the room, stinging from the slur. Damn it! Juanita de Córdoba had no place in this conversation! It was the unpredictable quiltwork of a woman’s mind, the determined illogic of ending up with a stab.

Or was it so illogical? André ticked the ash from his cigar and spun his cognac around slowly. Wasn’t this the real heart of the matter and wasn’t Nicole’s intuition perfect?

Lord knows he had tried to keep the affair with

Juanita from his wife and Lord knows he was a fool to think he could. He had intended to live with Nicole forever and let things go on as they were. Yes, even to love Nicole in that certain way that two decades of marriage dictated.

But his real love, though denied and buried, belonged to Juanita de Córdoba. How many days and weeks and months had he gone on without daring to think about her, shutting this longing for her out of his life?

But the thrill and the hunger for Juanita never failed to renew itself.

In this moment of honest appraisal, Nicole understood perfectly.

André had tossed around his decision of whether or not to go to Cuba for the Americans. In the end the scale tipped in favor of the trip because Juanita would be there. And even though he denied it to himself and justified it otherwise, this was the truth.

His lips touched the cognac snifter .... “Juanita ... yes ... I am afraid I love you very much ... I am sorry for that ... for both of us....”

He drew himself from the table and made his way slowly to the head of the steps. A ray of light from Nicole’s room fell over the hallway and down the stairwell. He stood motionless, waiting until her door closed at last.

“Nicole,” he whispered to himself, “please, please understand. Juanita is an unreachable dream ... an illusion ... but I must be allowed to dream. It means nothing between you and me. You are my wife and I love you ... in a different way....”

André found himself standing before Nicole’s door knowing it was not locked. Somehow he could not bring himself to open it and go to her with his thoughts flooded with Juanita de Córdoba and the coming nights with her.

Nicole lay in her bed tensely, listening for his every movement, praying the door would open. Praying to see his shadow move to her, stand over her, sit by the edge of the bed. She wanted the touch of his hand stroking her head, for him to draw back the sheets and come beside her.

Much of it tonight would be a lie, she thought, but God, I want him.

And she fell into despair as the sound came of his door shutting and wet tears formed on her pillow.

It turned midnight. André continued to toss in the dark, unable to sleep. The phone rang. He switched on the lamp and lifted the receiver. “Devereaux.”

“Hello, Daddy.”

“Michele. How are you, darling?”

“I’m fine. I understood you were going away. I just wanted to say good-bye.”

Her voice sounded strange and shaky.

“I mean,” she continued, “we’ve been missing each other and really haven’t had a chance to sit and talk for months.”

“Yes, come to think of it, it has been quite a time. Well, you know how my work goes.”

“Of course, I realize. I’m not complaining.”

“Come now. What’s really bothering you? The quarrel with Tucker?”

“We’re through and I couldn’t care less. I just missed you tonight and wanted to talk to you ... and to say ... I love you very very much.”

“Thanks, Michele. Maybe we’ll be able to get away later.” But these were meaningless words, for he’d promise and disappoint her again as he had done before. How many disappointments did the rules allow him?

He fell back on his pillow with the light on, then went to Nicole’s door and opened it softly and made to the edge of her bed and felt for her hand in the darkness. She was awake, but there was little warmth in her response.

That crazy recurring thought came to him that it would serve him right if some other man took her. He could envision the details of her love-making, her enjoying it madly. For that instant, he did not object to the sensation that swept through him. He wanted it to hurt and he wanted to be punished for Juanita de Córdoba and all the others.

He returned to his room.

André Devereaux and Brigitte Camus made for the National gate as the Miami flight was announced. He mumbled instructions she knew by heart.

She waited until he was in the plane and out of sight before she cried.

For twelve years André had come and gone, and Nicole had always taken him to the gate to see him off. André had looked for her in vain, and when the flight was announced Brigitte saw a desperation seize him. Oh, damn you, Nicole Devereaux! Don’t you know he must do what he must do?

“Cocktail, sir?”

“Bourbon, please.”

He watched land’s end below. The layover in Miami would be a short one until the KLM flight to Havana. It was painful to go there these days. Havana had turned old overnight, like a beautiful woman who had undergone major surgery at the hands of a butcher.

At least, Juanita de Córdoba would be waiting.

Beautiful Juanita ...

F
ROM THE EARLIEST MEMORY
she had been known as La Palomita, “The Little Dove.”

Her name was Juanita Ávila de Córdoba. Her grandfather was Manuel Ávila, foremost among the lieutenants of the national liberator, Marti. During the ten-year war that freed Cuba from Spain, Manuel Ávila was to immortalize himself among his people as “The Poet of the Revolution.”

Juanita Ávila de Córdoba’s father, Jorge Ávila, had become Cuba’s greatest composer and a guitarist of world renown. It was his composition, a lullaby to her, “Don’t Weep, Little Dove,” that was to give her the identity that would remain all of her days.

When Héctor de Córdoba, scion of a great family of landed gentry, took the Little Dove in marriage, it was an event long remembered in Cuba as one akin to a royal wedding. The couple were of the aristocracy, by both fortune and achievement.

Héctor de Córdoba preferred the electricity of life in Havana and the international sparring grounds of diplomacy and the world’s sporting places to the bondage of the family holding near Santiago.

In the mold of a staunch independent thinker and somewhat of a black sheep, Héctor’s interest in family affairs remained nominal, Actually, he was in constant battle with his family, deploring the exploitation of the peasants and the other social injustices upon which the family had been able to build and hold an empire.

The pull and tug of Cuban politics had always been a deadly game. Héctor de Córdoba, a liberal in days of reaction, achieved a stature so great that he rose above that small army of bickerers and became one of Cuba’s foremost diplomats, mainly as a roving ambassador and negotiator. His value was great enough to pass him through seasons of disfavor with Batista, although, over a period, his relations with the dictator turned to ice.

He rejected a Batista attempt to bury him in a remote, obscure diplomatic post and chose to practice law and live in
de facto
political exile in Marianao, a suburb a few miles west of Havana in the hills overlooking the sea.

When Castro swept from the Sierra Maestra Mountains into Havana, it was Héctor de Córdoba who embraced him beneath the monument to Martí. It could now be known that Héctor had been one of Castro’s manipulators and backers in the capital who hastened the collapse of Batista.

A month after the liberation of Havana, Héctor de Córdoba was killed in a tragic airplane crash en route to his first diplomatic mission under Castro.

Raul and Fidel and Che Guevara and Rico Parra all wept openly as the Little Dove was handed the flag of Cuba that adorned her husband’s coffin. In shaken voice, Fidel Castro named Héctor de Córdoba a martyr of the Revolution.

Juanita then retreated with her two sons into mourning in the pink marble villa in Marianao.

In the days that followed Castro’s victory, great estates were broken up ruthlessly, with the former owners receiving a pittance of their true value.