Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

HAVANA, MARCH 12, 1957

Quinn met Renata the same night he summoned the courage to talk to Hemingway. She too had come to El Floridita to see the great writer, in part because Alejo Carpentier, who was beginning to fall in love with her, spoke well of the man from their days in Paris and thought The Sun Also Rises was masterful. Renata had read much literature and believed she might one day write a novel and would feel stupid if she could have talked to a major living novelist but had not. She had seen Hemingway looking at paintings in the Palacio de Bellas Artes where she worked with artists, studied art, and served as a tour guide, a volunteer. She had no need for salaried work; her family owned two sugar mills on her father’s side and tobacco on her mother’s. Renata was twenty-three and for more than a year had been living a dual life: as an haute bourgeoise in the heady Cuban social swirl, and, clandestinely, as an associate of revolutionaries who were working to overthrow the government of Fulgencio Batista. One of her revolutionary friends had fought with the Republicans in Spain and later with the American army in World War Two; and he admired Hemingway for being unafraid to dodge bombs in the streets of Madrid. Her brother-in-law, Max, knew Hemingway and Max told her yes, if you approach him at the Floridita in the right way he may talk seriously to you, but it would be better if he was a few daiquiris in before you approached, for the rum brings out his friendly side; he has other sides and it’s better to wait for the rum to do its work so you can avoid those.

Quinn had been in the Floridita almost two hours. He’d been in Havana a week and had come to the Floridita three nights in a row to wait for Hemingway, who never turned up. Then tonight here came the man, alone. He sat on a barstool in his corner, a bronze bust of himself on a high shelf over the end of the bar, and he chatted with the bartender. But he also turned his back on two people who approached him. Quinn waited, and when he saw him smile and wave at someone across the room he decided this was the moment. He stood up and made eye contact and by the time he was standing in front of Hemingway he was saying, “I’m Daniel Quinn. I just quit the Miami Herald to write a novel and you’re responsible for me being out of a job. Does it bother you how many reporters you’ve led into poverty?”

“Did you eat today?” Hemingway asked, frowning with his eyes.

“I had breakfast.”

“You had breakfast and you’re drinking rum at the best bar in Havana and you’re crying poverty?”

“I was exaggerating to make a point.”

“Keep it up and soon you’ll have a novel,” Hemingway said.

His beard was white and so was what was left of his hair, and he wore a white guayabera with long sleeves. He still had his stomach but he was thinner than his photos and no longer the robust fisherman with the great chest and big shoulders.

“I may overcome my poverty,” Quinn said. “The Time correspondent here may use me as a stringer. You think I can get an interview with Batista?”

“El Presidente hijo de la gran puta,” said Hemingway.

“You know him?”

“No thank you.”

“Will you write about him?”

“Not in this lifetime. What are you writing?”

“Grim stories about political exiles in Miami buying guns to send to Cuba,” Quinn said. “The grimness is redeemed by my simple declarative sentences.”

“Remove the colon and semicolon keys from your typewriter,” said Hemingway. “Shun adverbs, strenuously. What do you think of the woman who’s sitting at that far table?”

Quinn looked at the young brunette sitting at one of the square wooden tables, sharp nose, large black eyes, full lips in a curvaceous smile that was radiant, her black hair falling just below her shoulders and with a natural wildness in its curl. She was slender, in a white blouse, tan skirt, and sandals.

“She is spectacularly beautiful,” Quinn said. “I could fall in love with her right now. I might marry her.”

“The young man was last seen charging into the unknown at full speed,” Hemingway said, “a valiant but rash course of action. If you marry a woman like that, when do you write your novel?”

“After the honeymoon,” Quinn said.

“Who do you think she looks like?”

“Your daughter Ava Gardner.”

“You are clearly a born novelist,” Hemingway said.

The beautiful brunette had come in with a man maybe twenty years her senior and they were talking head to head. He was tall and thin, well-tailored in a tan cord suit that his shoulders filled out, white shoes, and yellow tie, a handsome figure who seemed overdressed for the very warm and humid night. He was giving close attention to the young beauty, and it was these two who had drawn the wave from Hemingway.

“What is her relationship to the man?” Hemingway asked.

“Close, but he wants it closer.”

“You are closing in on chapter six.”

“You know her? I saw you wave to her.”

“I waved at the man, Max Osborne,” Hemingway said. “He works in your abandoned profession — an editor at the Havana Post, very smart and also an American spy who talks about his spying to everybody. Some consider him a political buffoon but that seems to be his cover. I know a great deal about spying. I was a spy for several years and they called me a buffoon. They didn’t know twiddle about the Nazis I hunted. Soon Max will come over to talk to us.”

“Will he bring the girl?”

“Yes.”

“Then I won’t have to contrive how to meet her.”

“A lucky day for Mr. Quinn. While we wait we’ll continue our analysis elsewhere. Tell me, who is the biggest jerk in this place?”

Quinn scanned the room and focused on three noisy American men standing at the bar, which was filling up, all tables already occupied. “The man in the sailor straw hat and the orange shirt,” he said.

“We’ll drink a daiquiri and then test out your intuition,” Hemingway said. He ordered the drinks and told the bartender to ask the man in the sailor straw to come over. The three Americans stared at Hemingway and then the man in the orange shirt came down the bar with a two-day growth of beard and a panatela between his teeth.

“How ya doin’, bub?” he said through the cigar. “You wanna talk to me?”

“Just admiring your hat and wondering why you’re in Cuba,” Hemingway said.

“My wife thinks I’m at a sales convention in Miami. But we came down here on an airplane to gamble and check out the women.”

“You’re a sly devil. But this isn’t the best place in Havana to gamble or to find women either.”

“We already found them. Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Hemingstein and this is my son Daniel. And you?”

“Joe Cooney from Baltimore. What kind of a sawbones are you, Dr. Hemingstein?”

“I’m a doctor of writing. I also actually write stuff.”

“A writer. Hey, I’m a writer too. I write new lyrics for old songs.”

“Could you write a new lyric for Daniel and myself?”

“Sure. Any particular song you like?”

“You know ‘Sliding Down Your Cellar Door’? I learned it as a boy.”

“Sure, I know it. You want me to do new lyrics for it?”

“You think you can?”

“Give me a few minutes I’ll sing ’em for you.”

Joe Cooney went away and everybody smiled.

“So far your intuition is getting high marks,” Hemingway said to Quinn.

The man and the beautiful brunette got up from their table.

“Here comes the bride,” Hemingway said.

Max made his hello and introduced his sister-in-law, Renata Suárez Otero. Hemingway introduced Quinn as his nephew. Quinn stared at Renata to engrave her beauty in his memory. He felt the impulse to take her face in his hand and kiss her before he spoke one word to her. He restrained himself and said only, “Hola.”

“Is she a real sister-in-law, Max, or just cover for your spying on us here?” Hemingway asked.

“I retired from spying last year,” Max said. “You can’t trust anybody anymore.”

“We are related,” Renata said. “Max married my sister, Esme.”

“Esme Suárez. I know Esme,” Hemingway said. “She sang for the troops in Europe during the war.”

“That’s where she met Max.”

“I’ve heard her sing. She has a large talent. Isn’t she in New York?”

“She was working on Broadway,” Renata said, “but she’s back here now.”

“Are you married yourself?”

“I am wondering about it,” she said.

“My nephew Daniel here is also wondering. In fact he was wondering as he looked over at you a few minutes ago. In between his wonderments he’s writing a novel about Cuban gunrunners. He quit the Miami Herald to write his novel and a splendid work it is, with twelve chapters so far.”

“Did you meet the gunrunners, Daniel?” Renata asked.

“I’ve met a few.”

“Are they brave?”

“They seem fearless, sometimes mindless.”

“Do you think they believe in something?” she asked.

“Yes. They believe in death. Do you know any gunrunners?”

“I read about them in the newspapers.”

“Are you an actress? You are so beautiful.”

“I’m learning to be a painter,” she said.

“I would buy several tickets to see your paintings. Where would I do that?”

“I work at Bellas Artes.”

“I’ll come and see you,” Quinn said. “I would like your reaction to my stories on the gunrunners.”

“All right,” said Hemingway, “that’s settled.”

“I have a friend who knew you in Spain,” Renata said to Hemingway. “Carlos Sosa Prieto.”

“The last I saw Carlos government troops were chasing the fascists out of Teruel. A good man. Where is he now?”

“In Havana.”

“I would be glad to see him. Send him mis saludos.”

Joe Cooney came back with a song in his heart. “Are you ready for my lyrics, Dr. Hemingstein?”

“Let me introduce you all to Joseph Cooney, the Baltimore thrush,” Hemingway said. “He’s going to sing an old song with new lyrics he just created for us. Fire away, Maestro.”

Cooney sang enthusiastically and with bounce:“Sliding down your cellar door,

What a thrill I had in store,

Sliding down into the grass,

Twenty slivers in my ass.

Thinking of those days gone by

Brings a teardrop to my eye,

Wond’ring if I’ll ever see

Cellar door that beckons me.

Beckons me forever more,

Slivers from your dear old door.”

Quinn watched Renata, who did not smile at the lyrics. She sees dementia in the man, he decided. Max was amused.

Hemingway leaned over to Quinn and whispered, “You’re right about gooney-Cooney. We’re going to put him away.”

“How so?”

“We’ll have him sing it again and at the finish I’ll throw him a right and cross with a left.”

“You’re a harsh critic,” Quinn said. “Maybe we should just temper our applause.”

Hemingway smiled and spoke to Cooney. “You write lyrics like a poet, like T. S. Eliot. But do it once more with emphasis. It needs emphasis.”

Cooney sang it again and on “Slivers from your dear old door” he took off his hat, raised both arms upward in an embrace of public lyricism, and finished on an emphatic note that turned all heads in the bar. Hemingway hit him according to plan, a right and then a looping left, launching him backward until his head hit the wall near the door, and he slid to the floor. As Hemingway was throwing the left Max saw it rising, ducked sideways, and lost his balance.

“Jesus, Ernest,” Max said, “what was that?”

“Sorry, Max,” Hemingway said, helping him to his feet. “Didn’t have you in mind. That’s two knockdowns with one left.”

Renata’s face registered confusion. “¿Qué es esto? ¿Estás bien?” she said to Max, and took his arm.

“Bien, bien,” Max said, brushing dust off his coat and trousers. “He never laid a glove on me.”

Renata stared at Hemingway. “So brutal,” she said. “¿Serás estúpido?” and she left at a brisk pace. Max followed her.

Joe Cooney had not moved. His head was cocked against the wall. His two friends went to him and eased him down to lie flat, and a waiter put a towel under his head to blot his blood.

“Get that man to the casa de socorros,” Hemingway said to the bartender. “Está herido. And bring me a filet mignon.”

“¿Crudo?” asked the bartender.

“Raw.”

The waiter went to the street to hail a passing car that would take Cooney to a first aid center. Cooney’s friends were standing over him, staring at Hemingway.

The bartender put a white plate with a raw steak in front of Hemingway, who wrapped it around his right hand. He lifted up the steak and showed his bleeding knuckles to Quinn.

“See this? I’ve been out fishing, and the skin is dry from the salt and the sun. Otro doble,” he said to the bartender.

“I thought you were joking,” Quinn said to Hemingway.

“Jerks are no joke,” he said. “Jerks should not be given houseroom. He said he was a writer. What kind of a jerk says that to a writer and he doesn’t even know who he’s talking to? Jerks and fools are a form of death when they turn up in your face. Singing that song in public is like writing a suicide note. I spent my life looking death in the eye and fighting it.” He paused. “I didn’t tell you what I was writing, did I?”

“No, you didn’t,” Quinn said.

“It’s not a suicide note. I’m reinventing my past in Paris, and I’m coming back with my trilogy,” and he emptied his new double daiquiri with one uptip of the glass. “The land, the sea and the air, and most of it’s been written for years. But there’s a future to think about, and if I put it out all at once we could die of taxation from publication. They’ll get it in time and it’ll knock them all on their ass. You’ll be very proud of me, Mr. Quinn.”

“Didn’t you do the sea in the Old Man?”

“Only part of it. I did that for a woman. There’s more to come, kid. Let’s have two more dobles here. Dos más.”

When Quinn began publishing his own novels in later years he looked at the notes he had made about Hemingway and about himself after this improbable night, and he understood there were important things he had left out, just as Hemingway had left things out when they talked. But as Hemingway had said, you can’t leave out what you don’t know, and in these years he had three novels in progress and could not stop writing them, or make them come together with meaning the way he could in the old days; because now everything had unendingly equal meaning, equal value. And he had left that out when he talked about it. Yet one must persevere. One must defy the forces that try to kill the spirit. One must not only persevere, one must prevail. And so Hemingway kept writing about what it was that was trying to ruin him, and the work became a love song to that. His one-two punches were part of it, just as Joe Cooney’s cellar door was the Cooney love song to his own lack of talent. Witness my absent gift. See how well I apply it.

Failure can also be a creative act, Quinn decided. One must look straight ahead as one makes the forced march backward into used history. The death of ambition, gentlemen, is a great impetus for grasping this, and soon you will thrill to how urgently you are moving, how truly exciting this quest for failure can be. What you do not know at this point is that your quest for failure may also fail.

The waiter came in from the street and said he had found a car to take Cooney. One of the friends pointed to Hemingway as he talked to the waiter, and the waiter nodded. A brawny young black man came in and Hemingway introduced him to Quinn as his driver, Juan. Juan was alert to hostile possibility and stood by Hemingway, monitoring the crowd. Cooney was conscious and talking with his friends, who helped him stand, then walked him to the street.

The crowd in the restaurant stopped watching Hemingway and the tableau he had created, and went back to drinking. A trio of black street singers with guitars came into the bar but a waiter said they weren’t welcome. One of them said they knew Hemingway was here and had written a song for him, “Soy Como Soy” (I am what I am), about a whore who can’t be the woman Hemingway wants her to be. The waiter asked Hemingway if he wanted to hear the song and he said he did. Quinn listened and drank his daiquiri. When the singers finished, Quinn asked them, “Conoce la canción, ‘Sliding Down My Cellar Door’?”

“No, señor,” one singer said.

“Just as well,” Quinn said. “It’s a very sad song.”

Hemingway gave the trio a five-dollar bill.

El Palacio de Bellas Artes was in old Havana, across Parque Zayas from the Presidential Palace, and at late morning Quinn asked for Renata at the information desk. They directed him to a second-floor gallery where he found her with forty high school children, explaining a new exhibit to them — a triptych of paintings inspired by one of the myths of Santeria, the religious cult of the African slaves the Spaniards had brought to Cuba. Quinn only partly understood Renata’s rapid Spanish, but the paintings impressed him, and in days to come he would learn about the long-haired woman and the warrior who were their focus. The woman was Obba, and in the first painting her face was obscured by a white mask with only eyeholes. In the second painting her hair and a scarf covered the left side of her head, because, Renata explained, Obba had cut off her ear to make a meal for her husband — Changó, the warrior king of kings. When Changó realized what Obba had done he rejected her, for he could not live with a mutilated woman. Obba cried for so long and so hard at losing him that her tears created a river, which coursed through the third painting. This Changó was one exalted son of a bitch, Quinn concluded, but Renata made no such judgment. Tragedy was inherent in power, she tried to tell the students, whom she wanted to charm, shock, and instruct in the cruelty of these peculiar-looking gods.

Renata saw Quinn arrive and she smiled at him, not a large smile, and kept talking. She wore a white blouse and black skirt, pedestrian uniform of the museum guides; but she enhanced the uniform, and Quinn decided there was no garment she would not enhance if she wrapped herself in it. The student tour moved on through Spanish, French and Dutch paintings, and at its end Quinn said to her, “Art is long but life is short. Have lunch with me,” and she took him to the American Café near the museum where, she said, she went often. She wanted only coffee.

“I don’t like your friend Hemingway,” she said.

“I can’t blame you for that. He didn’t behave well last night.”

“He hit that man for nothing. The man was singing.”

“That’s why he hit him.”

“You shoot a bird when it sings?”

“He felt insulted by the man’s stupidity.”

“I am insulted by his stupidity.”

“I can’t blame you, but he’s not well, and he thrives on aggression. I don’t want to talk about Hemingway. I want to talk about you. I want to go out with you. Take you to the beach, or dinner, go dancing at some nightclub, anything.”

“I hate to dance.”

“Why?”

“I do it badly. What I do badly I do not do. My mother loves to dance. She won prizes for her dancing.”

“My father was a great dancer. He won prizes for his waltzing.”

“My mother won a prize for waltzing.”

“This is fate. We are children of prize waltzers. We are meant to dance together.”

“I don’t dance.”

“I’ll teach you. I’m a pretty fair dancer.”

“I don’t want to learn dancing. I am learning other things.”

“What things?”

“I’m learning to be in love.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I wish I could say it was with me.”

“It is others.”

“Others? More than one others?”

“Two others. One is a diplomat in the Argentine embassy. The other teaches anthropology at the university. He is very fine, the finest man I can imagine.”

“You love the fine one.”

“I love them both.”

“You have a busy love life.”

“It is a curse. They have discovered that I love them both and they are crazy jealous. They are both mad to marry me. The diplomat wants to take me to Europe, but I can’t do that. My mother would kill me.”

“You love the anthropologist more than the diplomat.”

“He needs me more. He’s married.”

“What do you do for him?”

“I drive him and his friends. He has a car but sometimes doesn’t want to drive. I listen when he talks. People call him ‘El Rey,’ the king, because he owns the world wherever he is. He excites me like nobody ever has. But because he is jealous we have a big fight. I don’t know where he is.”

“Why are you sitting here talking to me when you could be with your diplomat or out looking for your fine and powerful king to patch things up?”

“I am fond of you. Instantly. Anoche. You have a manner. You seem to be different.”

“From your lovers?”

“Yes. I think so. You have a way. How you look at a woman. It is possible I could marry you some day, but it is too soon to know.”

“Your mother would kill you. Besides, you don’t want to get married, especially to three men. Or do you?”

“Marriage is exactly what I want.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed it.”

“I think you can be angry. You look angry with me. You looked at Hemingway in anger.”

“Mostly I’m angry with myself. Would you really like to have three lovers at the same time?”

“It is possible. Many women do it. Men have many women, some women have many men.”

“I only need one woman.”

“You are a rare man.”

“You are a rare woman to think I’m rare for needing only one.”

“Men are liars.”

“Women are greater liars and they are better at it than men. Do you want some more coffee?”

“I have to go back to work.”

“I’ll meet you later. We can go to dinner.”

“Maybe another night.”

“Am I on the way to being your third lover?”

“Quizás. But not today. It is too confusing today.”

“I’m going to see your brother-in-law Max and ask if I can write for his newspaper.”

“He is very much in love with me but I don’t read his newspaper, which is for the tourists who do not need much news. But he is very intelligent and he seems to know everybody in Cuba. He talks literature with my friend Alejo Carpentier, he plays golf with Bing Crosby, and he has lunch with the gangster Trafficante.”

“Will you ask him to hire me?”

“He will hire you without my asking. He always needs writers. They come and go like gypsies.”

“Will you reconsider dinner with me tonight?”

“I think it’s not the best night.”

“Maybe it will turn out to be the best.”

“You are persistent, but I must go back.”

Quinn walked her into the museum and to an office where the guides gathered between tours. He was about to say he would come back to see her later in the day, but she saw something behind him and her face registered dark surprise. She walked away from Quinn and toward a man entering the museum. She stopped and talked into the man’s face, intimate talk. Then she shook her head. The man talked while she listened and she nodded yes. She looked around the museum to see if they were being watched, and they were. He put his arms around her and kissed her, held her, then went out the way he came. Renata saw that people had seen the kiss. How could they not? She came back to Quinn and said, “I cannot talk any more.”

“That was the lover who is the king?” Quinn said.

“Yes,” she said. Tears came to her eyes and she went into the office.

Quinn had been reading the Havana Post for a week, thinking its twelve pages did not leave much room for him, but maybe he’d make room. It was a brisk, pop sheet with Earl Wilson and Winchell, Blondie and Alley Oop, ship arrivals, an Anglo-American social calendar, headline stories from the AP, and whatever local, sports, and social news the rest of the space could handle. When Quinn entered the city room only four people were at work: a barrel-chested old man with white hair and brown skin reading galley proofs at a long table; a fine-featured brunette in her forties, alone on the rim of the copy desk editing wire copy; a tall black man who with two-fingered typing seemed to be translating a story from a Spanish-language newspaper; and Max Osborne, with open-collared shirt and tie, reading that same newspaper at his desk in a glass cubicle. Quinn crossed the room, tapped on Max’s glass and stood in his doorway.

“I asked Renata to urge you to hire me,” Quinn said, “but she said you’d hire me without her. Is that true?”

“Hemingway likes your writing, is that true?”

“He’s never seen a word of it. His praise of my novel was fiction.”

“We don’t publish fiction here.”

“I brought you some clips.” Quinn put an envelope on Max’s desk.

“Are you any good?”

“I’m uniquely talented. Read me.”

Max opened the envelope of clips, a few feature pieces Quinn had written for the Albany Times Union, and a dozen articles about Cubans for the Miami Herald, one on the two pro-Castro factions, one faction without money, one flush and probably CIA; also an interview with Carlos Prío, the president ousted by Batista’s 1952 coup. Prío fled to Miami with millions in public money, but denied to Quinn that he was spending it on guns for rebels to bring down Batista.

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“Suficiente. I can get along.”

“You talked to Prío.”

“I saw him handing out cash in his hotel suite. People were lined up in the hallway waiting to beg money to feed the family, or get out of debt, or bring a relative off the island, or hire on for the next invasion. His assistant had a stack of cash on a table and if Prío liked what he heard he’d say, ‘Give him an inch,’ and the assistant with his six-inch ruler would measure off a bit of the pile and send the beggar away with a smile.”

“I like your sentences,” Max said after skimming the clips. “I’ll hire you if you write something valuable.”

“About what?”

“That’s your problem.”

“I can do maybe two pieces a week. I’ve got a novel to write.”

“Two pieces will do if they’re good.”

“What about my press credentials?”

“You move fast.”

“Get your story in the first paragraph.”

“You’ll get a press card if I buy your story.”

“I may need a card to get the story.”

“I’ll give you a note.” And Max typed on a Post letterhead: “The bearer is a reporter on a three-day news assignment for this newspaper. Please grant him all normal courtesies.” He dated it and typed his name and signed it illegibly.

“Why are you in Havana?”

“It’s closer than Paris,” Quinn said. “I followed my nose, and it led here. I thought Miami would be exotic, but it’s pointless. Havana has a point. In Albany they merely steal elections. Here they put a pistol in the president’s ear while they show him the door.”

“I know Albany. It had very entertaining corruption, and it was wide open, like Havana. I went there on weekends with a classmate.”

“Albany’s corruption is still in bloom and its sin is eternal.”

“That’s comforting. You know Alex Fitzgibbon?”

“Everybody knows the Mayor.”

“We were at New Haven together. He comes here now and then.”

“Wait a minute. Were you at Alex’s house when Bing Crosby was there? Nineteen thirty-six?”

“I was.”

“So was I. I was a kid.”

“Sure. And your father got Bing a piano and he and Cody Mason sang ‘Shine.’”

“Right. My father now works for Alex in the court system.”

“And here you are, trying to work for me. Yale runs in your family.”

“I don’t work for you yet.”

“But you’re trying. My daughter, Gloria, goes to convent school in Albany.”

“If we talk long enough it’ll turn out we’re first cousins.”

“Coincidence isn’t all that coincidental. How do you know Hemingway?”

“I introduced myself last night. He ever behave like that before?”

“Not quite like that, but yes. That fellow he punched out called this morning and wants us to tell his story. But Hemingway’s not news when he punches somebody. If they arrest him, maybe, but now it’s a dogbite story.”

“Renata didn’t think so.”

“Renata. I saw how she got to you. Everybody goes ga-ga. She’s easy to love, but she’s not easy. She’s tough.”

“I told her I was ready to marry her. She’s thinking it over.”

“You do get your story in the first paragraph.”

“That fellow who sang for us, Papa’s punching bag, where’s he staying?”

“Cooney? He’s at the Regis.”

“Maybe I’ll go apologize to him for Papa.”

“He’s not a story either.”

“I could interview him as a composer.”

“Dog bites composer. It’s still not a story.”

Renata could not find Diego, her fine and dangerous lover, for good reason: he had been acuartelado in an apartment house in the Vedado with fifty-two other men for four days, waiting for the signal to attack the Presidential Palace and kill the dictator. Simultaneously fifteen other attackers led by José Antonio Echevarría, the leader of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, would leave from another apartment to take over Radio Reloj and announce to all Cuba that Batista was dead. Days and nights passed, the cool moon yielding to new morning and the return of smothering heat in the apartment, for no windows could be opened. Whispers, no other sounds, were permitted, for the young men’s presence here was secret. Read, don’t talk. Sleep, don’t snore. Only five at a time can smoke, and only by the window in the back room. Nobody goes out except Carlos, the leader of the attack, and Diego, who will drive the streets of Old Havana in Carlos’ car to estimate the presence of soldiers.

The attack had been set for the twelfth until Diego and Carlos, on the morning of the eleventh, found Calle Colón blocked to all traffic. Only the Colón entrance to the south wing of the Palace offered a door to be breached. That south wing faced Bellas Artes across Zayas Park. On the early morning of the thirteenth the street was still blocked, but an inside informant said the dictator had stayed the night in the Palace, and was there now. At eleven o’clock the barriers were gone, traffic was again moving, and Carlos and Diego drove onto Colón. A soldier with a machine gun was monitoring a car as it entered the south wing’s driveway; so yes, access was possible. That soldier could be the first to die.

“We should go to Bellas Artes now,” Diego said to Carlos as they moved. They saw Military Intelligence cars parked nearby. Diego went into the museum and found no troops, no SIM agents. Renata was talking to an Americano. She saw Diego and came to him.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“Don’t talk. Today you must work here all day.”

“I’m supposed to finish at two,” she said.

“Work till six. We may need you to drive someone.”

“What are you talking about? What is happening?”

“Don’t go out of the museum. Stay inside and work all day, do you hear me?”

“I hear.”

“Do you have your mother’s car?”

“No.”

“My car is on Agramonte. The key is in the ashtray. If you don’t see me later drive it someplace safe and leave it. Someone will call you about where you put it.”

“Why won’t you drive it? Won’t I see you later?”

“Who can say?”

He kissed her with a fierce mouth and squeezed the life in her body. Then he said good-bye my love, and went back to Carlos in the car.

At two that afternoon the fifty-three Palace attackers who had been acuartelados wrapped their Thompsons and Garands into the bedding they had slept on, came down the stairs silently in pairs, and climbed into the Fast Delivery panel truck parked by the side door. Four men, including the leaders, would ride in each of two cars. As the vehicles were being loaded two men turned coward. Carlos said he couldn’t shoot them now because of the noise, but they would be held in the apartment at gunpoint by a comrade wounded in an earlier shooting. Maybe he would shoot them later. They knew this was a suicidal mission. We can kill Batista or they can kill us all.

The attack proceeded: Carlos driving the lead car, with Diego and two others, and the Fast Delivery truck following with forty-two men. The truck was unbearably hot, without light, and so overloaded that its six tires were nearly flat. The second car, driven by Aurelio, second in command, with three others, followed the truck. The plan was that once the three vehicles had breached the entrance, another hundred fighters in trucks and cars would arrive shooting heavy weapons, certain to demoralize Palace guards into flight. If the first wave found Palace access impossible, the attack would move against a secondary target — the Cuartel Maestre, the armory of the police — where they would seize its arms, then move to another police station for more arms. There would be no going back. The vehicles moved at inchworm pace through dense traffic. Menelao Mora, at fifty-three the oldest man in the truck, and an ex-legislator in the Cámara and former ally of Prío, told his young comrades what to expect, how to move and never stop. Machadito, holding the rope that kept the rear door from flapping open, saw his girlfriend crossing Aguila and said, “Mi amor, allí está,” and his comrades stared at him.

The truck turned onto Ánimas, the driver’s mistake, and separated from the two cars. Carlos and Aurelio both waited for it to catch up at the Prado, and when the three vehicles were again in tandem they moved onto Colón, and there it was. Carlos very suddenly careened into the Palace driveway, hit the brakes and bolted from the car firing his M-1, running under the arcade of the Palace’s gate, his surprise so perfect that the guards did not slam the gate shut or realize it was time to do that, or even see who was firing the machine gun that was killing them. Diego was behind Carlos, and Aurelio, leaping from the second car, took out the two guards shooting at Carlos’ back. Then others jumped out of the truck — Machadito and Carbó and Menelao setting the pace, the rest in twos and threes shooting, remembering Menelao’s advice — don’t crouch, don’t stop — run to the Palace wall out of the line of high fire from the upper terraces. But those machine guns roared, riddling the truck and pavement with such a hail of bullets that clouds of stone dust rose around the men who instinctively sought cover or stasis in the face of the impenetrable and died throwing a grenade or shooting at the sky. Carlos opened the gate and yelled, “Arriba, muchachos, it’s ours!” Diego moved through the gate after him and the Palace was breached according to plan.

On the third floor of Bellas Artes, Renata was explaining to seventy American and English tourists that the young woman in the painting was named Sikan and she had met the sacred fish, Tanze, quite by accident. But for both it was a fateful meeting, for young Sikan would be kidnapped and dismembered as a sacrifice in order to recover the lost voice of the gods which was the voice of the fish. Why it was also fateful for the fish Renata did not have time to explain for the bullets came in through the front windows and then the screaming and warning yells — they’re shooting! Renata now realized Diego would die.

She yelled to the tourists, Get down, somebody’s shooting. Who’s shooting? What does it matter who’s shooting if they shoot you, get down you fool get down, and the fool got down. Renata knew Diego was now shooting at somebody and somebody was shooting at him. He was saying, We will kill the devil, we will butcher the butcher, as he entered the Palace with his M-1. That young man of such culture and knowledge and courage and beauty would be a sacrifice today. Renata listened as he whispered to her: Be careful, they will know I love you and will remember I kissed you, I shouldn’t have, but now they will question you about me and you must tell them we only talked about painting and Santeria and of course they will believe you, for you look so innocent. He was shooting now and he will kill before he is killed. The guardia at the Palace will also deliver sacrifices today. She could see Diego shooting on the Palace stairs, so agile, so alert to the living instant, and she crawled to the museum’s stairs to see everybody below, all crouching or flattened by the guns, which stopped, began, stopped, began. Why are they firing at Bellas Artes? We have no guns.

Diego saw Aurelio hit and lifted backward into the air and saw his pistol and grenades fly out from his belt. He saw Hernández, a year away from being a doctor, run toward the gate and die in a sprawl. Castellanos came yelling, “Lo logramos,” we got it, and shot a guard who had left his machine gun and was running back into the Palace.

The Fast Delivery was full of holes and Gómez sat behind it, waving his arms, already dead, the cement dust billowing around him. Diego saw Aurelio shake himself and stand up, without a weapon. The ground floor was empty of guards but bullets kept raining down across the open patio. Diego moved upstairs onto the left wing of the Palace’s second floor with four others — Carlos, Almeida, Goicoechea, and Castellanos.

Five others had made their way up and along the second floor’s right wing and from there Machadito lit the fuse of a seven-stick dynamite bomb and threw it to the soldiers on the third floor — who thought it was artillery, and their firing stopped, momentarily.

The five on the left moved along corridors and when the phone rang in an empty room Diego answered it. The caller asked was it true as José Antonio announced on Radio Reloj that Batista was dead? And Diego answered, “Yes it is true, we have seized the Palace and killed Batista. Viva el Directorio!” Then he followed Carlos across a corridor toward Batista’s office. But the map from Prío showed an opening where now there was a locked door.

Carlos shot the door, which opened into a dining room — dirty dishes on a table and three servants crouching in a corner. Goicoechea wanted to martyr them, but Carlos said no. He asked where was Batista? They said he’d just had lunch but they didn’t know where he went.

“A singar,” Diego said, fuck! — and he ran toward the Hall of Mirrors and to the glass door into Batista’s antechamber. Diego heard voices beyond the door and called to them to surrender and a gunshot shattered the glass door in reply. Carlos tossed a grenade through the broken glass but it did not explode; he threw another, then a third, duds all. Diego dropped in a grenade that blew off the door and they entered the Batista sanctum shooting at two corpses.

The butcher has fled.

They looked on Prío’s map for the secret passage to the third floor but found nothing. From the Hall of Mirrors balustrade they looked down at a dozen patrol cars on the Avenida de las Misiones where police, shielded by trees, fired up at them. They found their way across to the right wing to meet the five who were now four: Menelao shot, unable to get up, Machadito, Carbó and Prieto all firing upward, and Brinas dead in front of them.

Carlos tested the stairs going up but fell back from the shooting and said we need our backup men, I’ll get them, and before Carbó could stop him he went toward the down stairway where Brinas had been shot and ran under the fusillade that was the last thing to touch his life.

Diego was hit but running. “I’ll cover your retreat,” said Machadito, and his machine gun silenced the troops above while Carbó and Prieto and Goicoechea made their way down, and then the last five were out of the Palace, all bleeding and running from the guns on the Palace roof.

Carbó was running with Diego toward Bellas Artes, but the gunners on the roof hit both — Carbó’s arm, yet he kept running, and Diego, his shirt covered with the blood of others, who went facedown into the water of the Zayas fountain. The others kept on toward Montserrate, shooting at anything coming after them, anything ahead of them that impeded their way to someplace else.

Quinn sat in a fifth-floor mini-suite at the Hotel Regis, studying the shape of Cooney’s head bandage, which looked like a turban wrapped by a one-handed Arab, absurd enough to match the cause of the injury, large enough to match the reputation of the man who caused it. Cooney wasn’t clear on Quinn’s purpose in coming here, nor was Quinn. Cooney doubtless paired Quinn with Hemingway as the enemy, but Quinn had apologized in his call from the house phone, asking for a meeting to explain what he was not sure he could explain. He would not claim illness or pathological aggression for Hemingway; but the subject needed examination. It still might turn into an article for Max, but Quinn didn’t need that either. He was out to affix reality onto experience for himself, maybe also for Cooney, and rescue the event from drift into fistic barroom legend that would otherwise end with a whimper as the stretcher exits the Floridita and another right cross and a left hook from Hemingway become a footnote in the archive. There was more to it than that.

One of Cooney’s pals from Jersey sat beside him with narrow eyes and a pushed-out lip, keeping watch on this visitor who might be bringing new trouble. Quinn remembered the man from the bar. He didn’t speak and Cooney didn’t introduce him.

“How’s your head?” Quinn asked.

“They say the skull’s not cracked, just cut and swelled up,” Cooney said. “But that son of a pup ain’t heard the last of Joe Cooney, I kid you not.”

“Are you a vengeful man, Mr. Cooney?”

“Revenge? I’m sure as hell gonna get me some.”

“You’ve got a right. But I should warn you — he’s got money and power down here. And he’s very famous, and well-loved.”

“They love him? Don’t he punch out any Cubans?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s no stranger to fights. But he’s king of the Floridita. That’s his domain.”

“King of a barroom.”

“And of everybody who walks into it.”

“How’d he get to be such a big shot?”

“He wrote some great books.”

“That don’t seem enough.”

“He also fights in all the wars.”

“I fought in the Pacific. Got a Silver Star.”

“If he knew that he wouldn’t have hit you.”

“Why’d he hit me?”

“He had a problem with your song. He also likes power and thinks you get it with your fists or your gun. He’s a serious hunter.”

“So am I.”

“You and he have a lot in common.”

“He send you here to see what I’m gonna do?”

“No. I only met him for the first time myself last night.”

“Hit me a sucker punch, for what?”

“I agree it was barbaric.”

“Whatever the hell that means.”

“It means savage, uncivilized. The primitive arrogance of force. Crude exercise of the ego. Everybody’s an enemy who isn’t himself. Nothing personal, now, but he sees you as a cipher, a zero, a cliché, a mark. Fair game for lofty thinkers.”

“Shit,” said Cooney’s friend, and he stood up from his chair.

Quinn heard the fireworks outside, then explosions. Cooney’s friend opened the louvered screen doors and went onto the balcony overlooking the street and Zayas Park.

“They’re shootin’ down there,” the friend said. “Cops or soldiers looks like.”

Quinn and Cooney stood up to look out. Uniformed men were shooting at people near the Palace. The street was chaotic, people running, crouching behind cars, in doorways, traffic stopped, police firing at civilians who were shooting machine guns. Machine-gun fire strafed a bus and shattered its windshield, and the bus driver climbed the sidewalk. A soldier in the turret of a tanqueta, an armored truck, looked up at the front of the Regis, then turned his machine gun and raised it. Quinn said, “Look out!” and instinctively backed inside and hit the floor as the soldier fired. Cooney’s friend fell backward across the threshold with bullets in his chest. Cooney, splattered with blood, stood staring at his friend but Quinn grabbed his wrist and said, “Down, Cooney, down,” and pulled him to the floor. Quinn crawled toward the door as more bullets came through the louvered doors and hit the wall, and plaster showered onto Quinn and Cooney.

“What is this Cuba for chrissake?” Cooney said. “They hit you for nothin’ and they shoot you for standin’ outside, even inside, and you didn’t do a goddamn thing to them, this is fucking rotten hell if I ever saw it.”

“Good reason to keep your head down,” Quinn said. “Maybe they think you’re a sniper. They don’t know you’re a tourist. Crawl to the hallway, head down. What’s your friend’s name who was shot?”

“Chet Looby.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Baltimore, same as me. Why you askin’ me questions?”

“I keep track of stuff,” Quinn said.

He crawled past a room where loud music was playing, a Cuban song he recognized, one of the few he could name, a son, “Lágrimas Negras.” He equated it with old death in Cuba as announced on the Miami Herald’s newswire, or rebels dead in the street trying to get rid of Machado, or the distant slaughter in the Mambí revolution his grandfather had written about — slaves and rebels on horseback, hacking out a mythic path with their machetes, a prelude to today’s diorama of corpses baking on sidewalks in the park, a newly blooming garden of rebel death. In his historical memory these warriors fell without bleeding but now the gore was personal for Quinn, its splatter visible on his trousers, and he could hear its music. On the streets below, the attack wave of the new sacrificial generation was becoming aware that bleeding to death was its destiny and that suicide-in-arms is a noble choice of exit from a righteous war. And Black Tears from on high fell onto these very necessary corpses.

The hundred young rebels in the second wave, now sitting in cars, trucks or houses, waiting, could hear no music. Some heard on Radio Reloj that the attack had begun, some could hear the calamity of the Palace machine guns, but their leader, struck with indecision, could give no signal to attack those guns. And so the first wave was massacred and the president preserved.

The force of survival is as unconsciously fierce as the charge toward fatal heroism is willful. In the land of perpetual revolution, one never knows toward what one moves.

As Quinn and Cooney came down the stairs into the lobby a woman in hysterics ran in from the street, a bellman moved to lock the doors, but another half dozen squeezed through after her; and then the doors were sealed against further sanctuary. People pounded the door in vain. Quinn saw two dozen people already sheltered in corridors off the lobby, away from windows and stray or not-so-stray bullets. Quinn and Cooney walked down the hallway past the refugees, and behind a half-open door found a man of managerial air venting anguish into the telephone. Quinn pushed Cooney toward the man and said, “An American tourist, name of Chet Looby from Baltimore, was just shot dead by street fire in five-oh-three, and this man is his friend and saw it happen.” The manager’s face registered panic as Quinn turned toward the corridor and said, “See you later, Mr. Cooney.” Cooney gave a don’t-go gesture, but Quinn was already gone.

When the police came to talk to Cooney they would advise him to say a random shot killed his friend; but Cooney would insist, “They pointed guns up at us, two soldiers did, and then they machine-gunned us. Wasn’t nothin’ random about it.” The American embassy and the Cuban government both vowed to investigate Cooney’s view of events. The day’s early death count would be forty-seven rebels, six soldiers, and maybe a half a dozen civilians: the Chinese bus driver, who would die while his head wound was being treated at a military hospital, two of his twelve wounded passengers, both children, also Chet Looby, and who knows who else? Joe Cooney would find his blue seersucker sports coat riddled in his closet by machine gun fire. A painting in Bellas Artes, A Faun and a Young Girl by Rubens, would be cut in half by a blast from a fifty-caliber gun on the tanqueta, and the façade of the museum would be so ravaged by gunfire it would close for fifteen days.

Rebels and Palace guards would shoot each other for forty-five minutes. Firing from rooftops and streets, echoing from sites remote from the Palace, would go on for three hours, and Renata would keep her tourist visitors on the floor of the museum for more than two hours. One man in her charge would suffer a heart attack, four others would be cut by flying glass, and two women would faint and be slapped awake by Renata. After the third hour’s final silence the museum’s director would tell Renata that Diego’s corpse had been found in the fountain of Zayas Park, and that the Military Intelligence Service, SIM, had been asking if anyone in the museum knew Diego, and someone said that Renata did.

“I knew him only through painting and sculpture, as a man of the arts,” Renata told the director.

“Of course,” he said. “Now go home and stay there and don’t talk about Diego.”

Quinn called Max four times from a pay phone to update the attack, the street scene, the sprawl of corpses. He dictated a story on the sudden death of Cooney’s friend and Max told him he was hired. When the shooting fell away to single sporadic shots in the distance, Quinn walked toward Bellas Artes to find Renata, but was stopped half a block away by soldiers. He explained his work and showed his letter from Max, which the soldier could not read. A woman came out of the museum and Quinn asked her if she’d carry a message to Renata, and she agreed. Two men from SIM came out and took Quinn into the museum and asked how he knew Renata, this woman who knows rebels. Did Quinn know any rebels? He showed them his passport and Max’s letter, and one of the men telephoned Max, who vouched for Quinn.

Quinn’s first-person story of death at the Palace and death on a hotel balcony would be carried internationally with his byline by the Associated Press, in the week ahead Time would hire him as a stringer, and Quinn the newcomer would suddenly be a Havana newsman with cachet.

“Diego was in the attack. He’s dead,” Renata said, her first words as they left the museum. “Now, because I know him, they don’t trust me.”

“They don’t trust me because I know you. But they didn’t arrest either of us. Here you are. Here I am.”

“You came to see me. You are a thoughtful man.”

“I thought I’d take you home. I know they’ve been shooting at you.”

“My mother is in collapse. She thinks I’m dead. But I can’t go home. I have to know if Diego is truly dead. I want to go to the necrocomio, where they take the bodies.”

“Don’t tempt the police to arrest you. They’re very, very nervous. I saw them kill a friend of that guy who sang for Hemingway.”

“Oh no, oh the poor man. So many innocents killed. I’m sure I know many, many of the dead. I’m sure of it.”

“I wrote the story of that man, and of the whole attack, for Max. He hired me.”

“I knew he would.”

They walked toward Agramonte.

“Do you have a car?” she asked.

“No. But I’ll find us a taxi,” Quinn said.

“I have a car.”

They walked, and when she saw Diego’s car she opened the door and sat at the wheel. She took the key from the ashtray as Quinn got into the 1952 Oldsmobile four-door with stains on its carpet. It smelled of oil.

“Is this your car?” Quinn asked.

“It is sometimes my car.” She put her head on the wheel and sobbed.

“I can drive,” Quinn said.

“Better if a woman is driving.” She raised her head and started the car. “This is Diego’s car.”

“Diego’s? Jesus, Renata, are you crazy? They’ll be looking for it. They’re probably looking for it now.”

“It really isn’t his,” she said. “It’s a stolen car.”

“Oh, then there’s no problem. They never look for stolen cars.”

“He said to park it someplace safe and wait for a call to tell someone where it is.”

“You’re in serious danger in this car.”

“I’ve been in serious danger for many months. Get out if you like.”

“I said I’d take you home. Let’s go home. Your home.”

“I can’t take this car home.”

“Then take it someplace and let’s park it.”

She pulled out into traffic, which was just beginning to move again. Hundreds were coming out of stores and offices, slowly and with curiosity, street vendors were back selling peanuts and peeled oranges, and two overfull buses were moving. People were walking backward in the street hailing rides.

“I can’t give anybody a ride,” Renata said. “They might be killed if the police stop us.”

“No point in getting anybody else killed,” Quinn said.

She turned onto the Prado, still in tears. But the mood of her eyes was different from the rest of her face, less sad, more on edge, and he saw her capacity for dualities. Of course. Two lovers going on three, minus one.

“How were you in serious danger for many months?” Quinn asked.

“Riding with Diego. We would rent rooms for his friends to hide in, or to use for hiding guns. We said we were man and wife. I think we would have been.”

“Then you’re a genuine gunrunner,” Quinn said.

“Yes, and so are you. There are guns in this car. I knew as soon as I saw it. The rear end is very low.”

Her passion had dried her tears and her eyes were evaluating how this sudden complicity with guns would change Quinn’s expression.

“Do you like being a gunrunner?” she asked.

“It’s delightful. I didn’t know how beautiful my fellow gunrunners could be.”

“Are you afraid of dying if the police catch us?”

“Not at all. I’ll explain I’m writing a story about gunrunning.”

“They will kill you anyway. They kill anybody with guns, anybody.”

Quinn the gunrunner had fallen in love before he’d said hello to this woman, who seemed as guileful as she was innocent, primal polarities. She had offhandedly exposed him to intimate elements of her love affair with living-and-dead rebels, and had speculated aloud that Quinn might be on a waiting list. Her legs and thighs were on exhibition, skirt riding high as she drove, that skirt soiled from her time on the museum floor with seventy tourists. How had she kept them horizontal and alive? A persuasive presence. Now she confesses her clandestine movement of arms and turns him into an accomplice. Was this sudden inadvertence, willful intent, an inevitable truth she feels they should share? Who is he to be her confessor? Forces are in play, Quinn, which you are only beginning to confront. No American women in your life like this one, who’s taken up residence in your soul overnight: invasive onset by a creature who commandeers the imagination: exotic, perhaps deadly. What did you get yourself into?

“You are ready to die,” he said to her. “Do you know why?”

“Because I believe in the people I’ve been with. And because it is a form of love. It is not death you love but the nearness of death to the people you love and to yourself. And because it thrills me.”

“You know what would thrill me?”

“Tell me.”

“If you parked this goddamn car.”

“I know the perfect place,” she said. “They will never look there for guns. A beautiful house and it is closed. The owner is a very rich American woman who comes here only in winter. My sister lives nearby and we can borrow one of her cars.”

They rode out Fifth Avenue and past the Havana Yacht Club, where Renata was a star golfer. They moved through Country Club Park where the American, British and Cuban social elites for decades had built their homes on rolling acres and great lawns that were emulations of the fairways of the Country Club’s golf course. Renata turned into a driveway bordering a fairway and toward an elegant white-stucco Spanish villa with a half-dozen adjoining buildings.

“They had many parties here,” she said. “I came as a child and watched them at night on that hill, dancing the conga with torches.”

“Who was this woman?”

“Rene Fellows. She painted and wrote things and had money from her husband who ran a shipping line. She was one of Hemingway’s mistresses and she was beautiful. People say she had many men.”

“That seems to be a popular pastime.”

She drove to the rear of Rene Fellows’ house and parked in the covered driveway of a secondary building. She faced the car outward so anyone picking it up would not have to waste time turning it around. They were out of the sight line of neighboring houses. She put the keys in the ashtray.

“Esme lives beyond those trees.”

“I’d like to see the guns.”

Renata retrieved the key and opened the trunk on one Browning automatic and tripod, six machine guns, several belts of cartridges, and six.45 caliber pistols.

“I remember the Browning and the.45s from the army,” Quinn said, “but I never dealt with those machine guns.”

“They are old Thompsons, and they fit under the front seat of this car. I’ll tell you a story about that some day.” She closed the trunk and put the key back in the ashtray.

“How much do you pay for this many guns?”

“Thousands. I never do that part of it.”

She led Quinn through a stand of banyans and flamboyans, laurels and coconut palms and a heavy growth of manigua, and when they came out on the crest of a hill she pointed toward a spectacle: an Italian Renaissance mansion with stairs and terraces sculpted into a hillside that ran to the beach.

“My big sister’s ugly palace,” Renata said. “It is so big she had to put in an elevator. She married a rich Spaniard who died in a plane crash and left her a fortune. Her house has fourteen bedrooms. And Batista. She loves Batista because of his power. I think she would make sex with him if she could. I wonder if she has. I try very hard to love her the way I used to. Her second husband Moncho I love very much. They were only married six months and she left him because he was never home. He is a lawyer and a crazy person and is one of my favorite in-laws. He visits Esme all the time, and they get along better than when they were married.”

“Where does Max come into this? I thought he was your brother-in-law.”

“Max was her first husband but she divorced him in 1953. He moved back in when the Spaniard died. But they aren’t married.”

“Your sister thinks in multiples, like you. What will you tell her about how we got here?”

“I will think of a lie. I am a very good liar and I am smarter than she is. She is older and more beautiful, but she is so beautiful I think she is ugly like her house.”

Renata rang the bell and Felix the gardener opened the great wooden gates and greeted them. He said he’d let Esme know they were here, and then Renata and Quinn went into the main salon, which was dominated by what Quinn assumed was a portrait of Esme, standing on a seven-foot easel. Quinn looked for the beautiful ugliness that Renata had suggested, but he found only beauty and a strong resemblance to Renata. Esme had been married only six months when she sat for the portrait by the Spanish painter Berenguer, who had come to Cuba and expressed fascination with her provocative beauty. He made many sketches of her and asked her to come to Spain for a sitting. The finished portrait placed Esme in a spectral mode, a regal, standing presence, wearing a vexed expression and with her left hand pointing to the center of herself in an ambiguously sensual gesture. Berenguer said she wears her persona like a weapon, aggressive behavior for a great beauty. It was the most popular work in the artist’s subsequent exhibition and Berenguer did not want to sell it. Esme’s husband offered twenty-five thousand but Berenguer refused to sell. After months of persuasion he finally yielded the painting to Esme as a gift. How did Esme persuade him?

That is my secret, Esme always says.

It is no secret, Renata always says.

Esme came into the room four steps ahead of Moncho. She kissed and embraced her sister, greeted Quinn with an odd gesture of elevated fingers and pursed lips, with her breasts rising from excited inbreathing, a gesture of concern.

“So, you’re alive,” Esme said. “Mother called me five times. All that shooting she thought you were dead.”

“I called her from the museum,” Renata said. “All afternoon you could not use a telephone. If you stood up you’d be shot.”

Esme looked to Quinn, and Moncho offered him a handshake. “Ramón Quevedo,” he said.

“Daniel Quinn,” said Quinn. “A pleasure to meet you. I understand you don’t live here.”

“Only historically,” Moncho said. “It is not possible to separate from Esme. No husband should be asked such a thing.”

“Husbands seem to play a peculiar role in Cuba,” Quinn said.

“Husbands are extinct,” said Moncho. “Wives are eternal.”

“I may refuse to become a Cuban husband,” Quinn said. “I’ve already proposed to Renata, but maybe I’ll postpone the wedding.”

“You proposed?” said Esme. “When?”

“This morning.”

“When did you meet?”

“Last night.”

“What took you so long?” Moncho asked.

“Daniel rescued me after the attack,” Renata said. “He found a taxi to bring us here when no one else could. He’s a reporter and Max just hired him to write for the Post. He was near the Palace all during the attack.”

“How intrepid,” Esme said, and she sat in the Peacock cane chair in front of her portrait. “You really proposed?” she said to Quinn.

“He suggested the possibility,” Renata said. “He wrote the story of the Palace attack for Max.”

“A pity they did not kill the puta,” Moncho said.

“Be quiet or they’ll arrest you,” Esme said. “Did you see the shooting, Daniel?”

“I did, but my luck seems to be running,” Quinn said. “I didn’t get shot and I found the gorgeous Renata when the shooting stopped.”

“You can do two things at once,” said Esme.

“I do covet beauty,” Quinn said. “That portrait of you is very beautiful, and it does you justice.”

“The artist said he made me too beautiful,” Esme said.

“There is no such thing. An artist can only imitate the exquisite beauty that runs in your family.”

“Such a charmer. Please sit down, Daniel. Would you like a drink?”

“As my uncle once said, the last time I refused a drink I didn’t understand the question.”

Moncho exploded with laughter. “I understand the question and I will make you a drink,” he said, and he left the room.

“Very droll,” Esme said. And she asked Renata, “Nena, what brings you here on such a day?”

“I need a car. After today I absolutely must go away, anyplace, Cárdenas, perhaps, but I can’t take Mother’s car from her. You don’t know, Esme, you don’t know.”

“Of course I know, dear. Take the Buick. Those hateful people trying to kill the president, shooting all over the city, nobody is safe anywhere, what’s wrong with them? They’re all insane and lower class. As soon as I heard the news I tried to get a flight to New York, but they closed the airport. Americans will be afraid to come to Havana now.”

“Soldiers killed an American tourist,” Quinn said. “I was in his suite at the Regis Hotel when they shot him.”

“You weren’t.”

“An armored truck and a foot soldier both fired at us. I saved another man by pulling him to the floor when the shooting started.”

“You saved someone? You are a clever person. What are you doing in Cuba?”

“I’m trying to figure that out. My grandfather wrote a book about the Mambí revolution and he put Cuba into my head. Now you’ve got another revolution going and it pulled me in.”

“Did you come to write about Castro?” Renata asked.

“He’s a good subject, don’t you think?”

“Batista says Castro is dead or gone away,” Esme said. “Batista should know.”

“Of course,” Renata said. “Batista knows everything.”

“He knows nothing, he knows less than nothing,” Moncho said, reentering the room. Oliva, a housemaid, followed him in, wheeling a serving cart with a bottle of white rum, a bucket brimming with ice, a bowl of powdered sugar, a plate of cut limes, four cocktail glasses and a silver shaker. When Oliva left the room, Esme said, “If the servants repeat what you say you’ll be shot.”

“She is right,” Renata said.

“Of course she’s right. Tell the truth they shoot you.” Moncho squeezed the limes. “Batista’s planes bomb the Sierra and kill guajiros but they find no rebel corpses. Fidel is not gone.”

“Where is he?” Quinn asked.

“In the Sierra.”

“How do you get to see him?”

“By invitation,” Moncho said. “Without invitation they will shoot you as a spy.”

“How do you get an invitation?”

“No one knows.”

Moncho poured a cascade of rum into the shaker, added sugar and the lime juice. “I was in law school at the University with Fidel. He was a wild schemer with the political gangs, never went to class. But he learned something. He’s outthinking Batista’s army.”

“We will change the subject, Moncho,” Esme said. “Daniel’s grandfather wrote a book about Cuba.”

“Ah,” said Moncho, shaking the shaker.

“He came looking for Céspedes, the revolutionary, and he found him.”

“Céspedes!” Moncho said. “In 1948 I went to Manzanillo with Fidel to get the Demajagua bell, the one Céspedes rang to start the revolution. Like your Liberty Bell, Señor Quinn, a three-hundred-pound symbol of our rebellion.”

“I know the bell,” Quinn said.

Moncho poured daiquiris from the shaker and passed them around.

“We brought it to Havana to confront Grau, the president,” he said, “but the police stole it from us. Fidel made a speech at the University about the bell and about Grau betraying the revolution he promised the people, and thousands came. He repeated Céspedes’ words the day he rang the bell to summon his slaves — Céspedes called them citizens and said they had been his slaves until today but now you are as free as I am. He was launching the revolution and said the slaves could join him in the fight or go wherever they wanted, but all were free. Fidel knew how to use these words. He was very powerful. He lit a fire in their minds.”

“They will put us all in jail if you don’t shut up,” Esme said.

Moncho raised his daiquiri glass.

“I drink to Fidel.”

“You will be a prisoner,” Esme said.

Quinn drank and Renata crossed the room and turned on the radio to a news broadcast. The Palace was circled with tanks and a newsman was saying that scores were dead and Batista had survived the attack on the third floor of the Palace with his wife, their ten-year-old son, forty soldiers, and an army colonel with a Tommy gun. The president rode out the attack with a pistol in one hand and a telephone in the other. The attackers never reached the third floor. The camera showed shooting, then the corpses piled in the street and the park. Corpses, corpses. Renata tried to hide her weeping. Batista praised his courageous soldiers and blamed Prío for the attack. Not Castro? asked a newsman. No, said the president, Castro is nothing, of no significance.

The bell on the entrance gates rang. Oliva came into the room and whispered to Esme, who then went to the door. She came back to say that the police were asking about a car abandoned nearby. “They want to know if anyone here has seen strangers coming or going.”

“What did you tell them?” Renata asked.

“I said I saw no strangers, today or yesterday. Did you see anyone when you came in your taxi?”

“There was a man hiding behind a tree,” Renata said. “He looked like Fidel Castro.”

“Don’t joke about such a thing,” Esme said. “They will arrest you.”

Renata drove Esme’s Buick in a way that Quinn decided was more dangerous than traveling with machine guns in the trunk, and more liable to get them arrested on this day of assassins on wheels.

“Let me drive,” he said. “You’re too distracted.”

“I am not distracted.”

“You’re speeding.”

“They’re not arresting speeders today.”

“Let me drive.”

“Later.”

“Later we’ll be at your house.”

“I can’t park this car at my house.”

“Are you saying we have another parking problem?”

“I cannot do anything strange that will attract the police.”

“Everything you do is strange. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I’m falling in love with you because of your bizarre turn of mind.”

“Thank you, Daniel.”

“Thank me? For falling in love?”

“I love it when men love me.”

“You have so many. How many is enough?”

“I don’t think of it that way.”

“How do you think of it?”

“I can’t think of it. I have Diego in my mind. I can’t think of other people’s love.”

“I don’t want to be considered other people.”

“Diego was my love.”

“He was one of them. You can lose two or three and still have loves to spare.”

“I don’t like your attitude.”

“I’m sorry for Diego but I can’t grieve as you do. He was a very, very brave man and I’m sad a warrior of the revolution was killed. Yours is another kind of sorrow from mine.”

“You must stop talking or I’ll start to hate you and I don’t want to hate someone who is falling in love with me.”

“What are you going to do with this car?”

“Esme will tell my mother I have it. But if I park at my house and the police come, Esme will be involved.”

“She’s already involved. The police came to see her. They may even think she parked Diego’s car.”

“Never. She is too close to Batista.”

“I can park it someplace.”

“Yes, you can, can’t you.”

“I can park it by my apartment.”

“Where is your apartment?”

“In the Vedado. Near the Nacional. I could even leave the car in the hotel parking lot.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Take me home — Twenty-second Street.” She stopped the car and changed seats with Quinn. They were on Fifth Avenue in Miramar.

“Did your parents know Diego?”

“They heard his name, but they can’t keep track of my life. I tell so many lies I can’t keep track myself.”

“I would like to meet them without lies.”

“They will like it that you’re an Americano. They will assume you have money. Do you?”

“I can pay my rent and still have some left over for the laundry.”

“Pobrecito.”

On Twenty-second Street Renata said her house was on the right. Two Oldsmobile sedans, nobody in either one, were parked in front and every light in the house seemed to be lit.

“Keep going,” she said. “Those cars are the SIM. They’re probably talking to my parents. God, how my father will hate this. He hates all politics since Machado. My mother will be dying of anxiety.”

“Which way do we go?”

“I have to talk to somebody. I know nothing. I want to see Diego.”

“Diego can’t help you. What about Max? He’ll know what’s happening.”

“Max knows nothing I want to know. But I can use his telephone, yes, good. I so want to go to Diego.”

Renata wanted to love a dead man. The living man next to her would not do. She needed love that was no longer available and she needed it now. Maybe they could find a dead man somewhere. There were many in Havana today. It impressed him that she was broiling at organ central, a woman questing to love death. If I take her to the morgue she will fall on the corpse. Usually you don’t need to die to get laid in Cuba, but tonight it would help. She’s from another dimension, perhaps nature itself, equally ready for life or death.

In the city room Max was in his cubicle, his shirt wilted. He looked weary, and bored with whoever was on the other end of the telephone. Quinn watched him stare at Renata who was sitting at a desk in a far corner, next to a tall black man he’d seen on his first visit and who now was making up pages for the next edition. Renata was on the phone. She’s close to Max and he’s red hot for her and she likes it. She likes it hot. Max would, beyond hotness, also be gallant and suave with women. Quinn didn’t trust him.

“We came for the news,” Quinn said when Max ended his call. “Renata can’t live without the small detail of what’s happening. She’s obsessed with knowing who’s dead. I think somebody from the museum may have been killed.”

“How did you hook up with her today?”

“I saved her from solitude after the attack.”

“You move as fast as a sex tourist.”

“Havana accelerates the blood.”

Max preened and said he’d had a ten-minute exclusive interview with Batista after the attack, a bit of a scoop.

“What’s exclusive in it?” Quinn asked.

“Nothing except he said it in English.”

Batista had whetted Max’s appetite for an interview with Castro. “I don’t think he’s dead and I don’t think Batista thinks so either. He’s sure the army’s going to deliver his corpse. You want to try for an interview? Matthews’ story in the Times opened him up but there’s a lot more to get.”

“Why me?” Quinn asked.

“You’re on a roll. You go someplace and things happen. Is it always like this with you?”

“I try to keep the status quo at arm’s length.”

“I have a Santiago contact who may or may not get you started. But he can pass the word and then it’s all whether they trust you. Fidel will trust an American newsman before a Cuban. Some Cuban newspapers are with Batista and the rest are monitored by censors.”

“Not this one?”

“We are sometimes independent. You’re from the Herald and you’re a Time stringer, no? Those are definite pluses.”

“Assistant stringer.”

“But you did make the connection to Time.”

“They didn’t pay me yet and I didn’t write anything for them yet. Otherwise it’s a deal.”

Renata came weeping to Max’s office, blotting her tears.

“My friend’s entire family was arrested,” she said. “Seven people.”

“Everybody was arrested today,” Max said. “Anybody who wasn’t will be arrested tomorrow. They’re leaving bodies all over Havana, one hanging from a tree. Anybody linked to the Directorio is a target. A dozen attackers were students and they found some of their guns in an apartment near the University.”

“Did all the attackers die?” Renata asked.

“Two or three got away, so the army says. You know any?”

“I may, but I don’t know who was killed.”

“We have a few names,” he said, and he pushed a paper with six names on it toward Renata. “They’re compiling the full list. We’ll get it. What can I do to help?”

“Nothing.” She was almost weeping again.

“I can take you to dinner, with your friend here, if you like. We can even pick up your parents.”

“I couldn’t eat,” she said.

“Eating goes with grief,” Max said. “You always have lunch after a funeral, then think of the Last Supper.”

Renata smiled a very small and silent thank you but no, and stood up.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Max said.

“I may go away,” she said.

“I’m here whenever you need me.”

In the car she said, “My friend said to stay away from the necrocomio.”

“Good. You should,” Quinn said.

“And he says I shouldn’t go to Diego’s funeral. Diego had two children. He never mentioned them. My friend doesn’t want me connected to anybody in the attack. He thinks I should go away until things calm down. I want to go to a babalawo. Do you know about the babalawo?”

“No.”

“A wise man who reads the language of the soul. Narciso Figueroa. He’s over ninety. He will know how my soul is damaged and will help me.”

“You believe this?”

“The babalawo has visions. Do you ever have visions?”

“Not since grammar school when I saw myself playing the banjo in heaven. When I got older I gave up on heaven, also the banjo. I don’t trust religion anymore.”

“Then you don’t trust me.”

“You’re a mysterious being.”

“I’m a simple woman. The world is complex and Narciso is brilliant. He talks with the dead and with the gods. He has saved people.”

“You really think he talks to the gods?”

“I do.”

“I’d like to see him do that.”

“Come with me.”

“Where is this Narciso?”

“El Rincón, a very poor place. We will go in the morning.”

“The morning? Where are you going to spend the night?”

“At your apartment. Is that all right?”

“Let me think about it.”

“Yes, you should.”

“I’ll lend you a shirt to wear to bed.”

“That will add to your laundry bill.”

“Some laundry is more important than other laundry.”

“I will sleep with you but we will not do anything together.”

“Of course not. Not on the first date in bed.”

“Do you love me?”

“More than I love guns.”

“Sex is not love.”

“It’s something like love. Having sex is often called making love. Will you wear my shirt?”

“Yes. But we will only sleep. I must think of Diego.”

“Who?”

“And I should get my beads at my house.”

“Tonight?”

“In the morning.”

“What if the police are there?”

“I will go in the back way.”

“The police sometimes know about back doors. If they arrest you I’ll lose you for a string of beads. What beads are you talking about?”

“My Changó and my Oshun beads.”

“Changó. Right. The guy whose wife had no food so she fed him her ear for dinner and he killed her for it.”

“Changó is a warrior who helps people in trouble. I am in trouble.”

“His wife was in trouble with only one ear.”

“I am in more trouble than that.”

“I suppose you are. I think I am too.”

“You will be in trouble as long as you are with me.”

“Then that’s that. I’ll always be in trouble.”

In her family’s eyes Renata still lived as she had been raised, a strict Catholic who went to mass and communion. But in childhood she was introduced to Santeria by Olguita, a mulata who was first the housemaid, later Renata’s nana and, through enduring closeness, her spiritual godmother. Renata listened when Olguita talked about Santeria. She gave the child Renata holy artifacts which Renata the young woman added to in abundance — statues, flowers, herbs, amulets that fended off maleficent forces, paintings of the Orishas, necklaces and bracelets with the colored beads of each Orisha — so many objects that they filled a dresser drawer and covered two walls of her bedroom.

When she began studying art she filled another wall with her own paintings of the Orishas, and came to prefer their mystical lives and miracles to Jesus and the assorted Holy Ghosts, and those ascetic virgins who keep finding the Blessed Mother in a French meadow. The Catholic saints and their divinely nebulous arguments toward redemption offered some mystery, but they bored her. The Orishas’ mysteries arose from jealousy, disgust, pride, womanizing, love, hatred, inability to keep a secret, their powers were earthly and practical, and their miracles embraced life.

Renata called a close friend and asked her to tell Renata’s mother in person that she was well but wouldn’t be home tonight, that she would stay at a friend’s house and they would talk tomorrow. Then Renata, clad only in pantaletas and Quinn’s short-sleeved blue shirt, which she left unbuttoned, it was hot, came to Quinn’s bed and let herself be held in his uninvasive embrace. She sobbed openly over Diego, retelling herself that he truly was dead and she would never again feel his arms around her as she now felt a stranger’s arms, offering comfort and perhaps love. She closed her eyes against this uninvited truth and as she burrowed toward sleep she was invaded by a vision of the violent struggle between Changó’s women: Obba, his wife, who cut off her ear because Oshun told her this would win Changó’s heart, and Oshun, the duplicitous Venus who controls love, money, and the river.

Renata saw them dueling with thunderbolts and herself as both wife and mistress, traitor and betrayed — very fickle of you to admit this, Renata — but she sensed, perhaps for the first time, that this was the true way of the world. She understood it better in the morning when she awoke without tears, Quinn’s head on the pillow, his eyes on her, his arm comfortably under her shoulder blades. His fingers were curled lightly on her upper arm and she thought, he is protecting me from my dreams. “It’s a comfort the way you hold me,” she said. “You know how to hold a woman. Have you had many loves?”

“Not when it was really love. Half a dozen? Make that two. Three. One felt like love but it was only narcissism. Serious love did arrive, but it went away.”

“Where is she now?”

“We don’t stay in touch.”

“What happened?”

“She belongs to my cousin. He’s a lunatic, but that’s no excuse.”

“You are guilty.”

“Is that out of fashion?”

“Love is the fashion. Nothing else matters.”

“Very reckless. You will do damage.”

“Love damaged me. I never feel guilty. I believe love will save us. I learned that through San Lázaro. We will see him today.”

They were half an hour out of Havana, Quinn driving, en route to the home of Narciso Figueroa. They had gone through Santiago de Las Vegas and were on a ragged road that Quinn feared would snag the Buick’s low-slung undercarriage. He moved slowly past scattered clusters of wooden shacks and small concrete slab houses that seemed built in a swamp.

“I came here when I was fifteen,” she said. “It was in December, tens of thousands of pilgrims walking to the church of San Lázaro. Olguita said San Lázaro will get rid of your trouble. I told her I didn’t have any trouble. ‘You will,’ she said.”

“You certainly learned how to acquire it.”

San Lázaro, Renata said, the Catholic saint resurrected from his tomb by Jesus, is also the Orisha called Babalu Aye, brother of Changó. Babalu Aye was young and handsome and trying to make love to every woman in the world. Olodumare, the owner of Heaven, told him to slow down, but he kept it up, so Olodumare turned him into a leprous beggar with leg sores that put him on crutches. Two dogs followed him, licking his sores clean as they all walked the world.

“There he is,” Renata said, interrupting herself to point out a shack with an altar displaying Lázaro-Babalu on crutches. They passed another shack, another Lázaro. “He is all over Havana, but this is his road.”

“How did Lázaro convince you love would save you?” he asked.

“Olguita walked me three miles to the church with the pilgrims, some on crutches like Lázaro. One barefoot man carried a sack of rocks on his back, women crawled on hands and knees, a girl no more than six moved forward on the gravel road, on her bottom, her mother saying, ‘Ven, mi hija, ven,’ and the child slid toward Mama, leaving blood on the gravel.

“‘Why is she making her do that?’ I asked. ‘For the child’s health, she is sick,’ Olguita said. ‘Won’t she get sicker from her bleeding?’ ‘San Lázaro will heal her all over,’ Olguita said.

“I saw a man without a shirt sliding toward the church on his back, gripping a holy rag, one ankle chained to a concrete block. When he slid backward his leg pulled the block a few inches, and he had miles to go. His back looked raw and very scarred from years of this and when I asked why he did it he looked at the sky and said, ‘My wife is alive, San Lázaro, and you did it, twenty years ago. I promised you I would wound myself if you saved her, and you did. I love you, beggar man.’ He cried terribly, and then shouted to the sky, ‘San Lázaro will never die.’”

“And this is what you call love?” Quinn said.

“Cure my legs, Babalu. Don’t let my child die, Lázaro. Give a brain to my idiot son. Bring my wife back from the grave. Let me see daylight again. Cure my pox, my pain, my sores, my terror, my cancer, my nightmares. Give me back my breath, Babalu. Let me walk the world like you, Lázaro. Love will save us and remake us. Love will do what parents and doctors and spouses cannot do. Love will do it all if you take it into your soul and caress it. I wonder if I had true love with Diego. I look at you and think maybe we will have love, but maybe we are liars and neither of us knows love. In the church I asked San Lázaro how love lived in the heart of that man pulling the concrete block and he told me.”

“San Lázaro talked to you?”

“Yes. He said, your love can be the beggar on crutches with the dogs of love trying to heal your sickness, and still you will perish. Nobody can know what love means, or how it arrives or how it lasts, or even if it exists, because we are never free of doubt. Since I was fifteen I have practiced love and I am good at it. I create love by making it, by believing in it even when it doesn’t exist. Love can make love exist, but love cannot make itself last. All I can do is try to make love exist, and sometimes I succeed. That’s what I do.”

Narciso lived in the smallest house Quinn had seen on this road. Renata entered without knocking and Quinn followed her into a room with paintings of godly abstractions, masks, necklaces made with the Orishas’ colored beads, jars of kola nuts, cowrie shells, coconut fragments, icons dangling from the ceiling. Shelves were full of trinkets, cigar stubs and bits of paper that Quinn decided must be venerable trash. The room exuded ancient complexity, urging him to bow before its absurd mysteries.

Narciso, with an unlit cigar at the corner of his mouth, made an effort to rise from his wooden rocking chair and failed. He tried again, pulled himself into a standing crouch, shuffled with baby steps and trembling arms to greet Renata. His skin was a deep black, his hair tight to his head and totally white, most of his teeth absent, and he did indeed look ninety, or beyond. He glanced at Quinn and then said to Renata, “Who is this? He is carrying fire.”

Then, with sudden agility unimaginable in that worn body, he straightened his back and lifted over his head one of six necklaces he was wearing. He waved it in front of Renata and dropped it onto a table. The necklace was four feet in circumference and strung with sixteen oval-shaped, tortoise-shell disks.

“The fire,” he said, pointing to the disks.

“What are you saying?” Renata asked. “This is my friend, a writer. I wanted him to see San Lázaro.”

“He is a carrier,” Narciso said, and he spoke to Renata in a chant:“He is carrying fire and fire does burn,

He is bearing fire and the ashes it makes,

The dead surround and claim him as their own,

He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.”

Renata’s face was blank and pale, but Quinn read her blankness as cogency, concealed under a mask of innocence. She was the carrier of the dead, all those dying rebels in the forefront of her memory. She was shamming for Narciso, passing her dead on to Quinn. He watched Narciso reading Renata, and he sensed the man really might be reading the thought of another, which Quinn did not want to believe. But it has been done, hasn’t it? Telepathy isn’t quite so disreputable anymore. Somebody might legitimize it any minute.

“What have you been doing?” Narciso asked Renata.

“Nothing at all,” she said, “nothing.”

Narciso threw the shells again and spoke in a language Quinn did not understand. Renata translated: “He says you are in danger and that you must avoid the murderers walking the streets.”

“Convey my thanks and say I’ll be cautious,” Quinn said. “Does he know which streets?”

“I give you this necklace as a shield,” Narciso said to Renata. He took from around his neck a silvery chain with miniature cast-iron tools and weapons — hammer, anvil, pick and shovel, bow and arrow, machete, two-bladed axe — and circled it around Renata’s neck. “Show these tools of the Orishas to your enemy and tell him if he harms you Changó will plunge him into a long and painful death.”

“Changó will help and we will fight,” Renata said in the rhythm of Narciso’s fire chant:“Changó will protect me

And we will fire the days.”

“Changó is listening,” Narciso said.

“My friend needs Changó’s help,” Renata said. “I would give him my beads but I cannot get to where they are. Can you give Changó to my friend?”

Narciso stared at Quinn, who saw himself being scrutinized as a skeptic. Does Changó help skeptics? Why help you if you don’t believe in him? Narciso took another necklace of small red and white beads from around his neck, put them on Quinn and said, “He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.” Then with abrupt finality he waved them toward the door and shuffled back to his chair.

So the theme for today will continue to be the dead, not enough of them yet. When Quinn decided to come to Cuba and write about revolution in two centuries he accepted the likelihood of corpses, but at a distance; not in the air around him, not as mental transients. Renata was flummoxed not by death but by the death of what she thought was love. Fair enough. Quinn would not face such loss unless the relationship he was creating with her melted into sorrowful time. She is driven to track what was lost, follow where it leads; and Quinn silently signed on for the ride.

“You’re the one who wears the dead like Changó’s beads,” he said to her. “You sent me images of those corpses at the Palace and Narciso saw them, which I consider a boffo performance. I may have to start believing in something.”

“He says to get rid of the dead. I can’t.”

“They’ll leave when they’re ready.”

“I don’t want them to go. They’re with me for a reason.”

At a farmacia she called her mother who told her everybody was in nervous collapse because of her, her father was furious and hoped it had nothing to do with politics, the police wanted her to call them, and someone called twice but left only a number. Renata took the number and said, I am all right, Mama, and I will be home soon and I do not want to see the police because Changó told me this was not a good week for seeing police.

She called the number and recognized Aurelio and he said they must find Felipe Holtz and he knew how close Renata and Felipe were. Holtz, son of sugar baron Julio Holtz, was involved in a gun deal for the Directorio but it was aborted the day of the Palace attack. Holtz is the only one who knows the gun dealer and Aurelio has no one else to send, for all who survived the Palace are known, and traitors are riding with police looking for us all. Could Renata track down Holtz? Renata said she would.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Quinn asked. “They might kill you for revealing so much, and kill me for knowing it.”

“They will not kill you unless I tell them to.”

“Well that’s a comfort.”

She called the Holtz home in Santiago and talked to Natalia, her cousin, who said Felipe was in Mexico or Caracas, expected home next week. Renata didn’t believe her.

“If your friends are in such a hurry,” Quinn said, “I know somebody who might help.”

“You know somebody with guns?”

“I told you I was writing about that in Miami.”

“Who is this person?”

“Alfie Rivero. You ever hear of him?”

“Never. Can he be American intelligence?”

“Anybody can be American intelligence. Alfie’s Cuban from New York with a tie to the Trafficante mob in Tampa, which means he can get you any gun you can pay for. I dated his cousin and I met him with her. He’s the real thing.”

“Is he in Miami?”

“I saw him at the Nacional two days ago. He’s staying there.”

“He will talk to you about guns? He trusts you?”

“He won’t trust me, but I can ask a question for you. I wouldn’t do it for anyone else.”

“Will he take a woman seriously?”

“You’re an unlikely buyer, but you seem trustworthy. If you aren’t then you’re a brilliant actress and a serious liar. But don’t even think about lying to Alfie.”

Quinn drove to El Vedado where the Hotel Nacional had been standing in its eminence since it opened in 1930. It was one of the elite addresses in Havana and the walls of its bar were covered with photomontages of celebrated guests — Churchill, the Windsors, Spanish royalty, Chaplin, Garbo, Gable, John Wayne. Since 1946, when Batista returned to Havana from Florida with Meyer Lansky in tow, Havana and its major hotel had become mob-hospitable, and Lansky and his brother Jake now ran its casino, which was probably Alfie’s reason for staying there.

Quinn and Renata crossed the marble lobby under lofty ceilings and chandeliers and Renata said, “My father was shot here in 1933 in the civil war — after Machado’s exile. Many Americans in Havana took refuge here from anti-American mobs, and a thousand army officers retreated here to protest Batista taking over the army. Batista shelled the hotel all day and many officers died. When they surrendered many more were killed by mobs for being with Machado. My father was shot in the chest but did not die. Batista sent him to prison in the Castillo del Principe and for a week my mother thought he was dead.”

“Revolution haunts your family. I see where you get it,” Quinn said.

“My father would have a stroke if he knew what I was doing here.”

They went to the patio garden with its sculpted shrubbery and its long and beautiful lawn that rolled down toward the water. They took a table and watched two peacocks move imperially under the palms near the bottom of the garden. Beyond that you looked out at the Malecón, and then the sea.

“Order me a rum on ice. I’ll see if Alfie is around.”

Quinn knew from Alfie’s rap sheet that he’d been arrested twice on burglary charges that didn’t stick and had done ten months for a botched dope robbery. He had no convictions after that and when Quinn met him he heard his name linked to an armed excursion by two dozen young Cuban rebels full of invasion bravado who one day disappeared from Miami and turned up on Havana’s front pages, faces and chests caked with blood, eyes wide or shot away, lying alongside their rifles on a rocky beach like a fisherman’s catch, Batista’s catch.

Quinn found Alfie at the pool with a long-legged middle-aged blonde, his catch of the day, who was rubbing suntan oil on his deeply tanned back and shoulders. Quinn sent a note with a waiter and Alfie came over.

“A business matter, Alfie. You still selling avocados?”

“In season.”

“I’m not the one talking here, I’m just a writer.”

“You write about avocados.”

“Don’t trust me.”

“When did I ever trust you?”

“I have somebody who wants to talk.”

“I sometimes talk to people who talk.”

“Do we go someplace?”

“We are someplace. Where’s your man?”

“My man is a woman, out in the patio.”

“Bring her in. Has she got money?”

“I think so. And she’s in a hurry.”

“I’ll talk with her in the pool.”

“She doesn’t have a bathing suit.”

“Buy her one.”

Quinn went back to the patio but Renata was not at the table. Their drinks were there, untouched. She was not in the garden that the peacocks ruled. He found a waiter who had not seen her, took a swallow of his rum and left money for the drinks. She wasn’t in the lobby or by the public phones. At the front desk he asked about messages. None. He saw her coming from the far end of the lobby carrying a paper bag. She had followed him out to the pool and had seen him with Alfie. She read their lips about the bathing suit so she bought one at the boutique.

“Narciso reads minds and you read lips,” Quinn said. “There’s no privacy in Cuba.”

They went to the pool bar and Renata changed into her new suit, dove into the pool, and swam like a dolphin before pausing in neck-deep water. Alfie stepped into the shallow end and swam on his back until he bumped into her. They then discussed avocados.

A panel truck with two young men pulled into the driveway of Garage Miami in Miramar and parked in front of one of the two bays. A few yards back from the two gas pumps Alfie’s blonde from the swimming pool was sitting in a folding chair alongside a pile of tires, her elegant legs crossed, a streetside attraction. Quinn did not think she belonged in a garage. The garage sign advertised PLANTA DE ENGRASE, SE COGEN PONCHES, ABIERTO 24 HORAS. Esme’s Buick was parked in one bay and a pickup truck full of toys, lamps, and pots was on the runners of the grease pit’s lift. The two young men in suitcoats came through the open garage door and Renata introduced the older one to Alfie as her friend Pedrito.

“And who is his friend?” Alfie said.

“My name is Javier,” the friend said. “I am buying your guns.”

“Pedrito is buying them, no?”

“We are buying them together. We are friends,” Javier said. “Who is this?” And he gestured with his head toward Quinn.

“He’s the one who started this,” Alfie said. “He came to me. You don’t trust your own contact?”

“I am grateful for the contact but I don’t know him.”

“This is Quinn,” Renata said. “He is my friend, and he helped me and I trust him. You don’t worry about him.”

“I worry,” Javier said.

“I would like to see las cosas,” Pedrito said.

“I would like to see the money,” said Alfie.

Pedrito took a fold of cash from his pocket and fanned it.

“Where do you want to make the transfer?” Alfie asked.

“Are you making a joke?” Pedrito said. “Where are they?”

“We can unload wherever you want.”

Javier walked outside and looked up and down the street.

“We can do it here,” he said. “There is little traffic. Take these vehicles out, we will pull in, then you bring in the guns.”

“I don’t bring them in,” Alfie said. He lowered the tailgate of the pickup revealing three wooden boxes with toys, pots, rugs. He lifted off a pot and a rug and guns were visible. “Open your truck’s back doors, I’ll load them in.”

“You want to load guns on the street?” Pedrito said.

“Load guns on the street?” Alfie said. “Who would do such a thing? We are moving pots and toys.”

“You are very smart or very stupid,” Javier said.

“Yes. I never know which.”

“He is crazy, but smart,” Pedrito said. “Do it.”

Pedrito counted out four thousand dollars for Alfie as Javier climbed into Alfie’s truck. He picked up an automatic rifle, removed the magazine. “Thompson,” he said, “nice,” and he snapped the magazine back in place, removed it.

“If you want to check every weapon,” Alfie said, “we can go down to the beach, fire them all to see if they work.”

Javier smiled at the maniac, then picked up a.45 caliber Spanish machine pistol and snapped in a loaded clip and put it in his belt under his coat.

“Open your truck,” Alfie said and he lifted the box with dolls from his pickup and carried it to the panel truck. He slid it into the back and came in and said to Quinn, “I need a hand with the big one.”

Quinn lifted one end of the box that was topped with a large model airplane and carried it out with Alfie. Javier monitored the loading while Pedrito talked quietly to Renata. Alfie loaded the third box alone and closed the truck doors. A car pulled up to a gas pump and the driver spoke to the blonde, who pumped gas for him while Pedrito and Javier pulled away in their truck. The blonde came into the garage and put money in the register. Quinn saw a triangle and five numbers tattooed on her left forearm.

“That Pedrito,” she said to Alfie. “He is Aurelio from the Directorio. He was with Holtz when Gustavo and I met them on the dock.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“I doubt it. Gustavo and Holtz did the talking. I sat in the car.”

Alfie looked at Renata. “You’re with the Directorio,” he said.

“I have nothing to do with it,” she said.

“Your friend Pedrito-Aurelio doesn’t know he just bought the guns I brought in for him. He and his friend Holtz made the deal with my partner but they never came to get them. You don’t know Holtz either.”

“I know nobody named Holtz. I know Pedrito from the university. I did this as a personal favor to him.”

“Aurelio paid too much,” Alfie said. “Our price to Holtz was thirty-five hundred, not four thousand.” He took out his cash and held out five hundred to Renata. “Give this to Aurelio.”

“Why should I take this?”

“Aurelio will be angry they overpaid. You can do him another favor.”

Renata put the money in her brassiere. “I will see if Pedrito takes this. If he doesn’t, I’ll return it. He will be grateful if it is as you say.”

“The Directorio people are mostly dead,” the blonde said. “That Aurelio now has more guns than people to use them.”

“I don’t know anything about the Directorio,” Renata said.

“You should listen to the radio,” said the blonde. “They are mostly dead.”

“We should go,” Renata said to Quinn.

“I want to take you both to dinner,” Alfie said. “This was a good day for business.”

“I’m sorry,” Renata said. “I have to go.” She got into the Buick.

“Dinner is a fine idea,” Quinn said to Alfie. “Where do you want to go?”

“The Montmartre. The owner is a friend of mine. Their steaks are as good as the floor show.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Quinn said, and in the Buick he said to Renata, “We have to let him thank us, and I want to know more about him. He’s unusual.”

“He is a gangster.”

“Some gangsters are unusual. It’s the Montmartre. They have good steaks. I told you not to lie to him. He knows who Pedrito is and you even took the money. I thought you were a good liar. You’re a terrible liar.”

“He knows I’m lying. He also knows I did not betray the Directorio. Are you so stupid?”

Quinn considered this. “It’s possible I’m stupid,” he said.

“I think Inez is a whore,” Renata said. “She has the whore’s manner, the coldness.”

“You can’t know that about her.”

“I don’t like what she said about the Directorio.”

“She may be conditioned to be cold. Did you see that tattoo on her arm?”

“Yes.”

“The Nazis did that to Jews.”

“I never saw one before.”

He backed the car out. Alfie carried the tires inside and locked the garage and Inez padlocked the gas pumps. Then they got into the backseat.

“So we’re on for the Montmartre, you’re both my guests. And we’ll take Inez, who works in the casino there.”

“That’s fine,” Quinn said. “Isn’t that fine, Renata?”

“Yes, it’s fine.”

“Inez used to be a dancer,” Alfie said. “She danced all over Spain and France in the war years.”

“And in Havana,” Inez said.

“Where in Havana?” Renata asked.

“Many places. The Sevilla-Biltmore, the Savoy, the Sans Souci. I was very young.”

“The Sans Souci — I went often when my sister sang there,” Renata said. “The dancers in those places always became whores. Customers offered them so much money.”

“Is that what happened to you?” Inez asked.

“I was not a dancer,” Renata said, “I would never take money for that.”

“You only do it for love,” Inez said.

“Exactly. Do you know the owner, Trafficante?”

“I do.”

“My sister is a good friend of his.”

“He is a generous man.”

“We’re going to the Montmartre, not the Sans Souci,” Alfie said. “Lansky owns the Montmartre casino.”

“I cannot like him,” Renata said. “I dislike his eyes.”

“He’s a sweetheart,” Alfie said.

“Who do you think that Javier is?” Quinn asked. “I think he’s with Fidel.”

“You may be right,” Alfie said.

“I would love to work with Fidel,” Renata said.

“I’m going to try for an interview with him,” Quinn said.

“The New York Times just did that,” Alfie said.

“Fidel can’t have too many interviews. Batista’s army kills him every day in the papers. He has to keep proving he’s still alive.”

“Everybody wants Fidel,” Inez said.

“He’s got momentum,” Quinn said.

“He’s the only game in town,” Alfie said.

“Maybe you should move your store to Santiago,” Quinn said to Alfie.

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I am going to Santiago,” Renata said. “Definitely. I’ve said it before but now I’m going to do it. I am.”

“I’ll do the driving,” Quinn said. “Can we keep this car?”

The Montmartre was at O and Twenty-fifth and they dropped Inez at the door on Twenty-fifth that led directly up to the second-floor casino. After she was out of the car Quinn said, “She has a Nazi tattoo.”

“She was in a camp,” Alfie said. “Worked with her father in French nightclubs until someone betrayed them as Jews. She weighed seventy pounds when I met her in Europe after the liberation. She wanted to go to New York but they wouldn’t let her in — Commie Jew. Then Trafficante gave her a job down here.”

“Why did he do that?”

“I asked him to,” Alfie said.

“I owe her an apology,” Renata said. “I thought she was a whore.”

“She was a whore. Her father pimped for her. Then they used her that way in the camp. She was gorgeous. Her father died in the camp and when she got well she survived as a whore. She couldn’t dance anymore. They ruined her knees.”

“Is she still a whore?”

“Yes,” Alfie said, “but only for me.”

When Renata said she would not go to dinner in the tour guide’s blouse and skirt she’d been wearing for two days, Alfie went into the club to arrange for the table and Quinn dropped Renata at a fashion boutique on Twenty-first Street that specialized in Paris imports. He felt obligated to call Max at the newspaper and find out what part of Cuba was erupting in blood, and should he be covering the spatter?

“Cooney’s looking for you,” Max said. “He called twice and then came in person and left you a letter. And Hemingway called you. Big day for you and Hemingway. Cooney’s challenging him to a duel and wants you to set it up.”

“A duel? Really? Rapiers or flintlocks?”

“That’s up to Hemingway.”

“Did Hemingway mention the duel?”

“He didn’t even mention his name. He just asked for you and hung up. I recognized his voice. Cooney’s letter is short. ‘Dear Mr. Quinn, you’re a friend of that bum Hemingway. Tell him I think he’s a bum and I challenge him to a duel, any kind of gun or whatever he likes, I ain’t particular. I’m not kidding here. I’m taking this public. You can write the story but if you don’t want to I’ll get somebody else. He’s a bum to hit me like he did and I want everybody to know what a cheap coward trick it was. He’s a bum and a cheap coward. I hear he’s a good shot but so am I. Tell him to wear his soldier medals. I’ll be wearing mine. Yours truly, Joseph X. Cooney.’”

“Good letter,” Quinn said. “We can sell tickets.”

“You know how to reach Hemingway?”

“Hang around the Floridita.”

“I’ll draw you a map to his house. Out near San Francisco de Paula. You should tell him in person.”

“You mean now he’s a story?”

“Dog shoots man. I’ll print that.”

“Get me his phone number.”

“Have you seen Renata?”

“We eloped last night.”

“Have you been sucking on the rum bottle?”

“That’s my next assignment.”

“How is she?”

“She’s shopping for the honeymoon.”

Max drew a long breath. “Are you up for this story or are you piped?”

“Get me his phone.”

“Dial oh-five and ask the operator for five-four-four. The phone is listed under José C. Alemán.”

“I’ll let you know what he says tomorrow.”

“Call him tonight.”

“Would you interrupt your honeymoon to talk to a writer?”

Another long breath. “How is she?”

“Erratic but it doesn’t interfere with her sensuality.”

“You better do right by that girl.”

“You can’t believe how hard I’m trying.”

Renata emerged from the store transformed into a denizen of the beau monde, stunning in a white off-the-shoulder sheath, white high-heeled pumps, white earrings and white sunglasses, blond hair upswept, and the necklace of the Orishas stylishly pendant on her bosom. She also carried a new suitcase that promised additional transformations.

“Guapísima,” Quinn said. “I don’t recognize you. Gorgeous.”

“I am never the same, even when I am not somebody else.”

“I think I may have to memorize that. You’re a blonde.”

“It’s a wig.”

“It’s a good one. I thought you had gotten it bleached.”

“Now we must get you a necktie.”

Newly garbed, they rode the elevator to the Montmartre’s second floor and stepped into a foyer of full-length mirrors, the vitalizing rhythm of a mambo drifting in from the nightclub on the right, and the clicks and bells of slot machines on the left beckoning arrivals toward the roulette and blackjack tables in the casino beyond. Renata took Quinn’s arm as they went into the nightclub, which shimmered in black and chrome, its mauve curtains billowing on the elevated stage, its tables filling up. When Quinn pointed to Alfie at a center table two tiers up from ringside, the maître d’ led them to him. Before they were seated Alfie had a waiter filling their champagne glasses.

“Hey-soos Maria,” Alfie said as the newly designed Renata sat down; and his eyes said the rest. Another scalp in her saddlebag.

“Good table,” Quinn said, changing the subject.

“They know me. The place will be packed by eight and it stays that way till four a.m.”

“I always liked this club,” Renata said. “I’m sure I sat at this table when my sister sang here.”

The lights and the piped-in mambo went down abruptly and a voice boomed through the speakers, “Damas y caballeros, ladies and gentlemen, el club Montmartre presenta la Orquestra de Bebo Valdés!” Billowing curtains receded, twenty musicians on stage erupted with a magnified mambo that was quickly joined by twenty mulata dancers moving to the feverish beat with their feathers, flounces, ruffles, spangles and vast expanses of flesh, and the pulse of nighttime Havana skipped a syncopated beat.

Quinn was still finding it difficult to realize that he was actually a player in this manic culture — across the table from him a woman of hyperventilating beauty with rebellion running in her veins, and a loner hoodlum who peddles tools of psychotic vengeance to suicidal rebels. Keeping with this improbable beat he told them about Cooney’s challenge to Hemingway.

“Viva Cooney,” Renata said. “I’m on his team.”

“I’ve read Hemingway,” Alfie said. “He knows guns. Cooney’s in trouble.”

“Would you really arrange it?” Renata asked.

“Why would Hemingway even consider this? And why involve me? He’s got a brigade of acolytes. But if he really does ask me to arrange the duel of the century, I’ll do it, and put you both on the weapons committee.”

“You should set it up in Madison Square Garden,” Alfie said.

“Cooney’s not a contender,” Quinn said.

The steaks arrived and at mid-meal the headwaiter came over to Alfie to whisper the buzz in the room — Colonel Fermín Quesada had arrived in the casino fifteen minutes ago. Quesada, the army commander in the city of Holguín, the latest of Batista’s avengers, had become the most hated figure in Cuba to the rebels. Alfie passed the news of his presence to Renata and Quinn on the chance they would consider it a threat. Quinn and Alfie agreed they had done a bit of gun handling, but who knew that? Quinn looked at Renata in her new whites. Did she look like a quarry of the army or police? With that wig she didn’t even look like she looked yesterday. Renata said she was fine; they all felt remote from official scrutiny.

“I don’t have sides in this revolution,” Alfie said, “but that puke of a man, I could empty a pistol into his face right here. Last Christmas Eve everybody in Cuba is with the family, right? Noche Buena. And he arrests twenty-five men, one with seven kids, Twenty-sixth of July people mostly. A union leader, one from Prío’s party, young guys, couple of commies. The soldiers are friendly, just come with us for a few questions, and they take them out of the houses and on the road they break their ribs, strangle them, hang them, shoot them, dump them. Two sons of my cousin Arsenio, an old outlaw who helped Fidel from the beginning, the army wouldn’t tell him anything. Then a taxi driver tells him they found two bodies. They’d cut half the face off one of his sons. The other son they machine-gunned his crotch. Somebody heard a lieutenant say, ‘He won’t fuck anymore.’ I’m looking for that lieutenant.”

Noche Buena stopped revolutionary activity in Holguín for weeks, and overnight Quesada was the army’s exemplar of Cuban peace through death. The army promoted him to colonel, Batista gave him a dinner at the Palace, and suddenly he was a candidate to lead the battle against Fidel in the Sierra. Now here he is playing roulette with the commander of Cuban intelligence.

Quinn saw Inez coming along the aisle toward them, in heels and a dark blue dress, her hair in a tight coif, a new image, not glamorous, but smart and sleek, befitting a casino hostess. She smiled at them all and said through her teeth, “Get out of the club now. Right now. Something is happening. Go. Go.”

And so the three stood and walked casually out of the nightclub and Quinn pressed the elevator button in the foyer where two men in suits and neckties, one of them Javier from the garage, were playing slot machines. Javier saw them and turned his back, dropped a coin into the slot, and pulled the handle. As the elevator door opened, the slot machine rang its bell and delivered a rattle of coins which Javier made no move to retrieve. He popped another coin. Then the elevator door closed on the trio.

Did five minutes pass? Ten?

They were in the Buick when Colonel Quesada and Lieutenant Colonel López from the SIM, with his aide Captain Godoy, and their three wives, the men in civilian clothes, the wives in dinner gowns, entered the foyer from the casino. As the captain summoned the elevator, Javier and his comrade took machine pistols from under their suit coats and shot Quesada first, then López, also hitting both women who, in terrorized flight, collided with their own mirror images and slumped. One bullet grazed the necktie of the captain, who snatched the pistol from López’s shoulder holster and fired at the shooters. But by then they were out of sight, on the run toward the casino’s rear exit onto Calle 25.

When they reached the Nacional Alfie called Inez to find out what Javier and his comrade had wrought. It was chaos: López and the women wounded, Colonel Quesada executed with such extreme suddenness that he did not yet know he was dead.

At the hotel bar Alfie toasted Javier with daiquiris and Renata recapitulated the killing — carried out by Javier of the 26th but with guns from the Directorio — a refreshed alliance of the groups that had been working for the same cause, warily independent of each other. If the Directorio had killed Batista, Fidel would now be irrelevant. At the garage Aurelio had said the guns he was buying would go mostly to Fidel, a gift from the Directorio in exile. Renata had asked him then, “What of all the guns Diego and I put in the Sixteenth Street apartment?”

“Still there, but we have nobody to get them.”

Renata remembered how Alfie’s mouth had tightened with functional hatred when he said he would shoot Quesada in the face. Alfie was a crazy one, and he might help us bring out the guns. She would find money somewhere to pay him. She would give the guns to Fidel as another gift. Yes, Alfie would do this and Quinn would help. They would all talk about it. There was a bond among the three of them. Quinn did not seem afraid. They left the hotel and she watched him as he drove, memorizing his face.

“You must find a place to stop, out of the light,” she said.

“Are you all right? Are you ill?”

“No, just stop.”

Quinn parked on a dark street and looked at her staring at him. She leaned toward him.

“Love me, Quinn,” she said.

“I will,” he said, “I do.”

Then, with their first touch of love since they’d met, he embraced and kissed her, and she crawled inside him.

“Love me,” she said.

“I will. I will love you. I love, I love Renata.”

“Love me, lléname, fill me.”

“Yes,” he said, “I can do that.”

Struck by the brilliant light of the enabling moon, Quinn spiraled everything he knew about love into the center of this divine woman. At this sudden onset of joy he heard Narciso chanting:

“The dead surround him and claim him as their own.

He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.”

Quinn received the music and his pulse skipped a syncopated beat.

At Quinn’s apartment they stopped making love at three in the morning, not because they were finished, they were only beginning; but it came to Quinn that if Renata really did want to go home for her own Changó beads and to see her parents, this was the time. Checking out the home of a museum guide who knew a dead rebel would be low priority on the night the police and the army were out in major numbers tracking the two killers of Fermín Quesada. Renata said Quinn’s suggestion was perfect and they would not even have to park near her house. They could park on the next street and keep hidden by tall bougainvillea the whole length of her garden, and go in through the French doors to the house.

From the bougainvillea they saw no one, only the light in Renata’s kitchen, and just before four o’clock they entered her home like burglars. She took Quinn to the living room and he sat alone with the light from a street lamp glinting on the crystal chandelier, the huge silver punch bowl, and large silver-framed photos he could barely see but presumed were her parents. As he gained power over the darkness he saw a painting that demanded his gaze — a full-length albino figure, faceless except for cutout eyes, embracing a black figure with a hidden face, the albino holding a fish that was grinning like a devil. The figures were overlain with strands of seaweed, and the image haunted Quinn. He remembered a similar painting in the Bellas Artes, obviously by the same artist, illuminating the grisly myth of Sikan, who was beheaded for revealing the secret of the god Tanze; and in days to come Renata would tell him the grislier tale of the painter herself, dead of suicide.

Renata had gone quietly upstairs to her mother’s bed, knelt beside it and whispered “Mami,” then shushed her mother and held her arm so she would not move it and wake her sleeping husband. She backed away, beckoning her mother, and they retreated to Renata’s room where she delivered a capsule history of two days of death, terror, and fear of the police who wanted to interrogate her as the friend of a Palace attacker. I knew him only through his painting, Mamita, it is such a tragedy. I am all right, as you can see and I have Esme’s car and I have a friend downstairs, an americano who helped me, and we’re going to Cárdenas to stay with Tía Gabriela, but you must tell no one where I am or they will come and arrest me. I need clothes and money, Mamita, and don’t tell Papa or he will be furious and think I’m in politics. But the politics are not mine; they belong to an artist I knew who is dead.

While her mother went to get money Renata pulled from under her bed the large cardboard box where she kept valuables and letters. She took out the red and white Changó beads and put them around her neck. She uncovered the three pistols she kept in the box, put two back and kept the Colt Cobra.38, which she wrapped in her underwear and put in the suitcase along with blouses, skirts, makeup, hairbrush, toiletries, and the bottle of perfume, Gardenia, that Alejo Carpentier gave her.

Her mother sat on the bed by the suitcase and handed Renata six hundred dollars in cash, all she had in the house. Renata said that’s wonderful, tell Papa I love him and I will call, or maybe someone else will call and say the clock is fixed, which will mean I am all right.

“Natita,” said her mother, “you are a problem child and you do not tell the truth. I won’t ask what this is about for it will kill me if it is what I think it is, and kill your father before it kills me. You have a second life. One life is not enough for you. You are the strangest child and I love you for that, but be careful with your precious life and do not be crazy. Now take me down to meet your American. Is he Catholic? Does he have money?”

Quinn instantly recognized Renata in her mother’s beauty, obviously a genetic gift to this family. Even in her tightly clutched silk robe she had the elegant, lustrous look of a silent movie vamp — Dolores del Rio came to mind.

“My mother, Celia,” Renata said. “Mama, this is Daniel.”

Quinn took Celia’s fingers in his hand and kissed them and said he was incredibly happy to meet the mother of Renata, whom he valued beyond words and whom he wanted to marry as soon as possible.

“Marry?” said Celia.

“The first time he saw me he told Hemingway he would marry me,” Renata said.

“Hemingway? What does he have to do with you?”

“It is a long story, no, a short story, Mamita, but I have grown fond of Daniel very quickly. He is from New York.”

“And that makes everything all right?”

“I knew you would like him.”

“I don’t even know his full name.”

“Quinn,” said Quinn. “Daniel Quinn. And I really believe it’s fated that I’m in Cuba and fated that I met Renata. I’m tracking my grandfather who came here in the last century to write a book about your national hero Céspedes. I read that book in high school and dreamed of coming to a place like Cuba and writing about battles and heroes and villains in a war like your Ten Years War. Now there’s a war in the streets of Havana, and in the mountains of Oriente, and I’m here and I’ve started writing about it.”

“Why do you want to write about war?”

“To tell something to myself, and to keep myself from boredom.”

“Do not get my daughter into this.”

“It’s the last thing on my mind. I want to save her from everything.”

“You are impetuous, asking to marry her so soon.”

“It’s the sanest judgment I’ve ever made.”

“Daniel is a new friend but a great friend,” Renata said, taking Quinn’s hand. “I don’t know how it happened so fast but it is very real.”

“All her life she was an incredibly loving child,” Celia said. “Everyone loves her.”

“I’m finding that out,” said Quinn.

“We have to go,” Renata said. “The police may return.”

“I’m sorry to leave,” Quinn said. “I wanted to talk about your dancing. Renata said you won prizes.”

“You want to talk about my dancing?”

“My father won prizes for his dancing. He was a prize waltzer. You were too, no?”

“I was.”

“You see? Another stroke of fate — Renata and I, children of prize waltzers.”

“You are as strange as my daughter. Another time we will talk about dancing. Protect this child of mine.”

“With my life,” said Quinn.

He remembered that his grandfather wrote about Céspedes’ child — his son Oscar. The Spaniards captured Oscar in battle and threatened to kill him if Céspedes and his followers did not surrender. Céspedes told the Spaniards Oscar was not his only son, that he was the father of all Cubans who died for their country. A firing squad then executed his son.

They went to the Ali Bar, where Renata called her contact number and spoke with a voice she recognized, and said have Pedrito call me here. They drank mojitos because she always drank them here for breakfast after all-nighters.

“Beny Moré sang to me here one night,” she said. “He comes all the time. Everybody comes here. Gary Cooper sat right there.”

“Do you see anyone who knows you?” Quinn asked.

“Nobody would know me with my blond wig.”

“I’d recognize your mouth no matter what color hair you had.”

They drank their mojitos and in twenty minutes Aurelio called. Renata told him Alfie could bring out las cosas from the Vedado apartment because he is shrewd and fearless and she trusts him and will pay him herself to do it. Aurelio said he’d call Alfie.

“I will go see Alfie now,” she said, “but you must do the rest because I’m going to Santiago.”

It was dawn when they left the Ali Bar and Quinn considered calling Hemingway about the Cooney challenge. He would be up and writing. He gets up with the birds. But does he answer the phone during birdsong? So they woke up Alfie and he met them on the Nacional’s patio, which was empty of people. They walked down the garden path and stood under a royal palm with their backs to the hotel and Renata told him of the guns. He said he’d think about it after he talked to Pedrito, who, she admitted, was really Aurelio. But if the police were watching that apartment it would be dangerous.

“I will give you five hundred dollars now and another five hundred when I get back from Santiago. Is that enough? We are not buying these weapons, just reclaiming them,” she said.

“These are Directorio guns?”

“Yes, but they will go to Fidel now.”

“Is this Fidel’s money?”

“No, it is mine.”

“You’re the new Directorio, all by yourself?”

“I worry the police will take the guns I put there. Fidel needs them badly.”

“How will you get them to Fidel?”

“Maybe by yacht, or truck, maybe airplane. A car is impossible, there are too many guns. Aurelio will figure a way. Maybe you can help him. I won’t be here.” She handed him five of the six hundred dollars her mother had given her.

“Keep your money,” he said. “Wait till I get the guns.”

“You don’t behave like a gangster. Gangsters like money.”

“You don’t behave like a debutante. Debutantes don’t know anything about money.”

“Fidel will be pleased if you get him these guns.”

“I think I knew that.”

“We’ll be staying at the Casa Granda hotel in Santiago,” Quinn said. “I’m covering an army press conference about Fidel.”

“Are you going into the Sierra?”

“If I’m invited.”

“If you see my cousin, drop my name.”

“Who’s your cousin?”

“Arsenio Zamora. Quesada murdered two of his boys. He is close to Fidel.”

What Quinn said when he telephoned Hemingway was, “Max took a call from somebody asking for me and he thought he recognized your voice.”

“Max’s ear is working,” Hemingway said. “There may be hope for him as a spy. I read your story about the killing of Cooney’s friend.”

“Cooney just missed getting it and so did I. Pretty hairy.”

“I’ll pick up Cooney’s doctor bills. Maybe you could work that out. But don’t connect me to it.”

“It’ll go into the archive of lost history. Actually Cooney wants to reach you. He wrote me a letter. You know about this?”

“No.”

“I should give you his letter in person.”

“Sounds like top secret.”

“I’ll meet you if you come to Havana. Or I can bring it to you.”

“Does this go into your novel?”

“Chapter seven.”

“I’m here, but right now I’ve got a funeral to go to.”

“Who died?”

“My dog.”

Hemingway’s home, Finca Vigía, was twenty minutes southeast of the Floridita, a long, formidably handsome one-story white limestone Spanish Colonial built in 1882, uphill from the town of San Francisco de Paula. From an adjacent four-story white tower where Hemingway famously wrote and kept his cats, there is a distant view of the sea he made famous. Since he moved into the Finca in 1939 it had become a place where the grand and the great among writers, generals, movie stars, journalists, baseball players, sailors, drinkers, and women queued on the front steps to talk, swim, party, flirt with, or just shimmer in the waves of mythic glow that emanated from this maestro of the word, the hunt, the deep sea, the saloon, the bull-ring, the wars, the self. The crowd pilgrimaged to this American hero in the way Lázaro’s throng of beseechers crawl on their backs to him. Renata said she’d rather stay in the Buick.

“Nonsense,” Quinn said. “He’ll be good to talk to. He’s already sorry about Cooney. There’s a whole lot more to him than you saw at the bar.”

“I dislike him.”

“You said that. Try again.”

“I have no reason to try.”

“How about his link to Santeria? He gave his Nobel medal to the Virgen del Cobre — in Santiago.”

“He gave the medal to la Virgen? Why?”

“He didn’t trust Batista and his thieves, so he gave it to the Cuban people through their patron saint.”

A great and ancient ceiba tree spreading itself magnificently at the front entrance welcomed Quinn and Renata to the Finca, and a middle-aged Cuban woman opened the door and said el señor was on the porch. She walked them toward Hemingway, who was sitting in a wooden Adirondack chair, wearing a long sport shirt, shorts, sandals, and making notes on a pad. He stood up.

“Mr. Quinn. Señorita Suárez. I’m sorry I frightened you the other night.”

“You didn’t frighten me,” Renata said.

“I upset you.”

“You were cruel to Mr. Cooney.”

“I wasn’t in my best form. I apologize.”

“You should apologize to Mr. Cooney.”

“Did you go to your dog’s funeral?” Quinn asked.

“I was the funeral,” Hemingway said.

“An old dog?”

“Not so old, still full of hell. Black Dog. One of Batista’s goons bashed in his head with a rifle butt. They were chasing a rebel they thought had guns hidden near my pool. Black Dog didn’t like the soldiers and bit one on the thigh, going for the money. Smartest damn dog in the western hemisphere and he’s dead, a casualty of the revolution. Let’s go inside.”

He led them to the living room and gestured them to the sofa, then sat in an overstuffed armchair. The room had full bookcases on every wall and two hunting trophies, the mounted heads of a black-horned gazelle and a seven-point red deer. Rum, gin, bourbon and scotch bottles clustered on a table by his chair. “Too early to drink,” he said, “and my doctor won’t let me have a goddamn thing.”

“I thought I detected you drinking daiquiris the other night.”

“I was on shore leave.”

“Did the soldiers find those guns by your pool?” Renata asked.

“I hope not.”

“Do you know the rebels?”

“I fish with them.”

“Are they with the Twenty-sixth?”

“I wouldn’t ask them that question.”

“I ask because I had friends killed in the Palace attack,” Renata said.

“So did I,” said Hemingway.

“We were at the Montmartre last night,” Quinn said. “Ten minutes after we left they killed an army colonel at the casino, Fermín Quesada.”

“You people know where the action is.”

“We’re heading for Oriente,” Quinn said. “Climb the hills and see Fidel. I know your friend Matthews just did that, but Fidel is worth another interview, don’t you think? Batista’s people kill him every day in the papers.”

“Batista’s finished. Those Directorio kids at the Palace proved that. When fifty or sixty of the best young people in the country give up their lives to kill you, you’re all done. Can you get to Fidel?”

“I’m working on it.”

“You have to get past the army and their barricades. They’re mean sonsabitches.”

“There’s an army press conference tomorrow in La Plata. I’m going.”

“You ever cover a war?”

“The cold war in Germany, Fourth Division, your old outfit.”

“Did they teach you how to climb mountains in a tropical rain forest when you’re dodging hostile fire?”

“I missed that lecture. I’ll have to wing it. I was writing sports for the Division weekly. But my grandfather came down here to find Céspedes during the Mambí war and wrote a book about it. He called it Going to Meet the Hero. Ever hear of it?”

“I read hundreds of books for a war anthology I edited, and I remember some Americans wrote well about Cuba back then. What was his name?”

“Daniel Quinn.”

“Ah. Recycling family history.”

“Why not? He covered the Civil War for the Herald, and rode with the Fenians when they invaded Canada. He got around. But his book on going to see Céspedes got to me. He walked the swamps, the jungle, and the mountains in Oriente, and he got to his man. The Spaniards starved him in jail and he damn near died, but he got out and wrote the story and then wrote the book.”

“Now you’re looking for jail time.”

“I was in a saloon in Greenwich Village with a friend of mine who thinks his fame is just around the corner, either as a writer or an artist. He pointed to a Lindbergh poster behind the bar and said, ‘Quinn, when are you making your solo to Paris?’ I told him, ‘I’ve got a train ticket to Albany.’ Actually I took a job in Miami, and then Havana was just a short hop.”

“Is your friend famous yet?”

“He’s still in the saloon, monitoring Lindbergh.”

Hemingway smiled, but somberly. He breathed deeply, then again, and his torso seemed to deflate. That exuberance and assurance, so in evidence at the Floridita, was missing.

“Were you writing your Paris book when we barged in?”

“Twenty-six words today,” he said. “Twenty-six.”

“It’s only noon,” Quinn said.

“I got up at six. I should be fishing by now, but I can’t do that either.”

“Here’s something that’ll cheer you up,” Quinn said, and he handed him Cooney’s letter.

Hemingway put on his glasses and Quinn and Renata watched him read. He finished, took off the glasses and squinted at Quinn.

“The Baltimore thrush is a throwback, and I’m a bum. It’s a publicity stunt. What’s this stuff about medals?”

“He was a Marine. He got a Silver Star in the Pacific.”

“Silver Star. We should never underestimate thrushes.”

“Cooney blames you for his friend’s death. He said his head injury from that left hook was why they were still in their hotel room when the soldiers shot at them.”

“Screw that, every inch of it,” Hemingway said, and his exuberance was back. He sat upright and his face tightened. “Am I supposed to get weepy over these tourists who don’t know when to duck? A duel? How about five rounds bareknuckle?”

“Bareknuckle. Are you serious?”

“How do you get serious about the Cooneys of this world?”

“I’m not sure, but he says he’s going public with this.”

“And you’re writing about it.”

“Only if you take him up on it.”

“I couldn’t win a duel with him, even if I killed him.”

“You’ve been challenged to a duel before?”

“Half my life. Cooney says I’m a coward. I spent years facing that one down. But the question is, Doctor Hemingstein, are you afraid to face down a Marine war hero? It’s the cliché of the western. ’Hey, Wild Bill, they say you’re a fast draw. Go for your gun.’ If I back out I was always yellow and I only shoot guns to get it up. I’m very brave when I shoot unarmed ducks. But the truth is everybody’s yellow till they get over it. They’re going to shoot you or shell you or bomb you, so you organize your coward maneuvers and you go AWOL the night before battle, or you run the other way when they start shooting, or you shoot yourself in the foot and they send you on sick call. You know how to get rid of a yellow streak? Stop thinking about what’s next. Think about right now and that you aren’t dead and probably won’t be. You got your weapon. They’re not shooting at you this minute and if they start they may not hit you. If they hit you you’re dead. But who gives a goddamn at that point? Not you. You’re dead. Fuck it. Fuck death. It’s just another goddamn thing you can’t do anything about. Have a drink, climb a tree, shoot a duck, fuck somebody. Don’t worry about it. You’re dead or you’re not, and either way it’s not up to you. Stroke your weapon.”

“Will you duel with Mr. Cooney?” Renata asked him.

“What do you think I should do?”

“I think you shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s beneath you.”

“Thank you. What about you, Mr. Quinn?”

“I like five rounds of bareknuckle. I think you’d take him in three.”

“Two.”

“Then again, maybe one. He does have a glass jaw.”

“Challenge him with a song,” Renata said.

“I’d lose. He’d sing the Marine Hymn.”

“What shall I tell him?” Quinn asked.

“Tell him I’ll pay his doctor bills and buy him a round-trip ticket to Paris. Tell him to stay out of the Floridita. Tell him to watch out for slivers in his ass. Tell him to fuck off, and that I really liked his song.”

“Never apologize, never explain,” Quinn said.

“John Wayne said that, a hell of a writer.”

“What if Cooney won’t go away?”

“Tell him if I wanted to die I wouldn’t let him do it, I’d do it myself. This is a suicidal country, does he know that?”

“I’ll try to send your message.”

“Tell him I don’t want to kill anybody. Tell him my dog died.”

Quinn wanted to see Demajagua, where Céspedes rang the bell and freed his slaves, but there was no time. He had to get to Santiago, settle Renata in at the Casa Granda where she’d stay until she made contact with Felipe Holtz, and then he’d board an army plane ferrying newsmen to the press conference at El Macho, a temporary army base on the south coast. Some forty reporters and photographers would be converging there for this theatrical army venture that had been in the works for weeks, its focus La Plata — the army outpost that Fidel, risen from the dead, had attacked in January. Fidel’s death was old news. His look-alike corpse, which the army took credit for, had been on front pages in December after the disastrous landing of his boat Granma—less a landing than a shipwreck — in a swamp at Playa de Las Coloradas near Niquero. The eighty-two seasick invaders made their way to Alegría de Pío, where the army cornered and killed two-thirds of them, even after surrender, and the survivors fled in chaos into the Sierra Maestra. Silence followed.

Then came dead Fidel and other photogenic corpses.

Then came La Plata, a new army outpost on the Magdalena River near the sea. Two new barracks were being built on a vast estate owned by the Domech family (bordering the Holtz family estate). The barracks were built next to the living quarters of three Mayorales — overseers who as a cadre policed most of the major estates in Oriente (not the Holtz estate), and whose main job was to drive off the Precarista peasants who perennially squatted on the estates. War was perpetual between the Mayorales and Precaristas.

Fifteen soldiers had been assigned to La Plata to track the ragtag Castro rebels, wherever they might be in the Sierra. But the rebels moved first, proving to the world and Batista that they were not dead, attacking the barracks January 16. The army said two soldiers and eight rebels were killed. Six weeks later the army said well, actually, forty rebels died, twenty were taken prisoner, and twelve of our soldiers died.

Now at El Macho Quinn listened as Colonel Pedro Barreras, the commander in Oriente, told reporters that the seriously final count at La Plata was five soldiers killed with knives while they slept, three wounded and left for dead, and three who escaped the rebel knifing. No rebels died. Castro led the attack, so he obviously didn’t die in December, and we think after Niquero he joined a gang of Precaristas in the Sierra, the murderous outlaws who have lived up there for decades, a law unto themselves. They even keep harems, five to ten women for each man.

The army, the Colonel said, now has 566 troops in the Sierra plus 250 intelligence agents in disguise among the peasants. There is no doubt whatever that Castro is no longer in these mountains. Our patrols and planes are covering an area eighteen by nine by nine miles, from Las Mercedes to Manacal to Aji de Guani, “the critical triangle” where Castro has been operating. We have seen no movement and are certain he’s not there. His famous interview with Matthews of The New York Times may have taken place in Cuba but not in the Sierra. And the photo of him holding a rifle with a telescopic sight while Matthews takes notes is obviously a fake.

Quinn asked the Colonel: Who are those outlaws with harems?

Julio Guerrero, said Barreras. Chichi Mendoza, Sergio and Manuel Acuna, and Arsenio Zamora.

Arsenio.

Barreras announced that the army would fly reporters over the critical triangle to prove how serene and rebel-free it was. They would also drive everybody to La Plata. Quinn, with triple credentials—The Havana Post, Time magazine, and The Miami Herald—rode in the second jeep with a Lieutenant Cordero, behind the jeep of Colonel Barreras, who guided the tour over steep and narrow mountain roads. The forest was so dense with an overgrowth of leaves, hanging flora, and a waist-high undergrowth of plants and vines, that sunlight could never reach the ground; so what pilot could see a nest of dug-in rebels through such natural cover?

“Do you find anybody trying to join Castro’s force?” someone asked.

“Nobody is that stupid,” Barreras said. “The army has cut off all traffic to the mountains.”

The Barreras convoy of jeeps and chain-driven lumber trucks, the only vehicles that could navigate these wretched roads, stopped at tiny settlements, none with electricity, to let the press hear peasants talk about their loyalty to Batista (not Castro, as the myth of the day had it), these grateful souls all but genuflecting before the Colonel in praise of the food, medicine, money, and new houses the army had given them.

At the tiny village of La Marea del Portillo Quinn fell back from the press cluster and studied the forest, looking for his grandfather who, in 1870, also set out from Santiago on his journey into rebel domain. A Spanish colonel had told him he could go anywhere in Cuba within Spanish lines; but added with a smile that the army will shoot you with great pleasure as a spy if you cross into Céspedes territory. The officers staging this La Plata playlet today will do the same for anybody trying to see Fidel. But like his grandfather, who made it to Céspedes without getting shot, Quinn was obligated to be here, convinced by a capricious education that he should track what was fundamental; and the fundamentality that was Fidel was now at large in these mountains. That Herbert Matthews of the Times had just been here did not diminish what Quinn was doing. Hemingway might think of it as the left hook after the right cross to prove twice that the hero is alive. Quinn felt exhilarated doing what was in his blood to do. He saw his grandfather — the Cubans called him El Quin — on horseback moving through a plain of high guinea grasses and climbing into these hills.

He was following a trail written out in detail in an anonymous letter to him at his hotel saying, we heard you want to enter Cuba Libre. Was the letter a trap by the Spanish army, or by thieves who knew he traveled with gold? Perhaps, but he was driven to find Céspedes, talk to him and prove his existence, give the lie to the Spaniards who said he was dead, and confront personally this singular fellow who anointed himself as the Cuban messiah and who courted death, avenged it, surrounded himself with the dead, created the dead.

Quinn’s grandfather wore tall boots, a palm-leaf hat, and carried two revolvers and a machete to fend off the marauding robbers the Spaniards warned him about. The warnings were an effort to discourage his daily expeditions toward Cuba Libre; runaway niggers the Spaniards called them, brutal savages, little more than cannibals. He rode four hours to the destination given in the letter, a ceiba tree so large it might have been part of primordial Cuba, and he waited near it till darkness, ready to fight highwaymen with his machete, ready to be shot and found with his pockets inside out. He dismounted and sat in the desolate darkness, nothing to do but trust that all his conversations had made his purpose known and his message had reached the Mambí leaders, who desperately craved the worldwide publicity for their movement that he represented. He could give the lie to the Spaniards’ claim that they had killed most of the rebels and there was no serious war.

Quinn heard a whisper and movement and saw, indistinctly, a man on foot, then, as clouds moved beyond the moon, saw he was brown-skinned, with a straw hat, shirtless, a fragment of tattered linen on his loins. He wore a machete on his side, a cartouche, and a rifle was slung on his back. Quinn spoke the code word mentioned in the letter and then they moved together toward Quinn knew not what — the beginning of something that had taken shape in him long before he ever heard of Céspedes.

Colonel Barreras was telling the news people at La Marea del Portillo about the Batista government’s generosity toward a family of six, and reporters followed him into a rebuilt shack. Quinn walked toward a peasant in tattered clothes who was sitting crosslegged in front of his house, a bohío with thatched roof, earthen floor and two chickens visible inside; and Quinn read in the man’s face something other than gratitude to the army. This house had not been rebuilt. Behind the man sat a near-toothless crone holding a child with what Quinn took to be rickets. The child was drinking water out of a tin can.

“Hola, amigos,” Quinn said to the peasant and his woman. “What did the army do for you?” He spoke in Spanish.

“They gave me beans and rice.”

“What work do you do up here?”

“There is no work.”

“How do you earn money?”

“There is no money.”

“How do you live, how do you eat?”

“I eat what grows. I cut cane last year and I drove a cane truck, worked in the coffee harvest last year, but not this year.”

“I have a relative who drives a truck up here,” Quinn said. “Arsenio Zamora. Do you know him?”

The man cocked an eye with surprise in it, but said nothing.

“Arsenio Zamora is my wife’s cousin. Renata Rivero from Holguín. Her brother is Alfie Rivero. Renata has not seen Arsenio in two years. She very much wants to see him. They are cousins.”

“Arsenio Zamora has five thousand cousins.”

“My wife would stand out among ten thousand. She is called Renata. She is beautiful and Arsenio will remember her. He has an eye for women. If anybody sees Arsenio please tell him Renata, the sister of Alfie Rivero, wants to see him.”

“I do not know people who see Arsenio.”

“If you do, tell them Renata married a reporter from the Miami Herald.”

“What is reporter?”

“Newpaper man. A writer. Miami newspaper.”

“Newspaper?”

“Okay, olvídalo. My wife is a cousin of Alfie Rivera. Se llama Renata. Prima de Arsenio. ¿Entiende?”

“Prima. She want to see Arsenio?”

“Exactamente. Renata. Cousin of Arsenio.”

Lieutenant Cordero came over to them and asked the man, “What are you telling him?”

“He’s telling me,” Quinn said, “how he cuts sugar cane and harvests coffee for a living, but he didn’t work this month because the army helped him and gave him free food. Él está muy feliz, very happy, verdad, señor?”

The man shrugged an ambiguous yes.

“He is very grateful to the army,” Quinn said.

“We’re moving on,” the lieutenant said to Quinn.

Quinn saluted the cross-legged man and went with the lieutenant.

In the forest El Quin and the brown rebel, both on foot, chopped vines and briars with their machetes as they moved, the horse moving with them. They rested in a dry streambed, faces bloody with scratches from trees and thorny overgrowth, and ate berries they had picked. El Quin sipped from his canteen and asked the rebel why he had joined Céspedes as a Mambí warrior. He said if he had not become a warrior he would still be a slave. Whether warrior or slave he would die, but it was better to die as a killer of Spaniards than to let the slave drivers kill you. Quinn wanted to tell the man he had lunch with three slave drivers in a sugar mill at Villa Clara, pretending to seek work as one of them. But then he decided that the warrior might misunderstand his ruse and would only hear this stranger saying he wanted to be a slave driver. He would then swing his machete and slice off Quinn’s head.

Renata heard the drum in a dream, a Santeria drum, and was moved by it. She opened her eyes and the drum was not a dream. She opened the window of her hotel room and as she listened she moved to its beat without willing the movement. It entered her, took charge, and reminded her of her mother dancing at the Biltmore Yacht Club, moving in a way that she herself had never moved, nor wanted to; but the beat was as old as Cuba. She had heard the Santeria drum so often, but this seemed new, and she was dancing. She looked out to find the source of the drum but saw only a few army cars parked on the empty edges of Céspedes Park. Then she saw women in black dresses, dozens of them streaming out of the cathedral in what was clearly a planned demonstration. They immediately raised placards, CESEN LOS ASESINATOS DE NUESTROS HIJOS — MADRES CUBANAS — Stop killing our children — and walked from the cathedral to the park; but a dozen soldiers with rifles blocked their way and more soldiers moved across the park as backup. The women took a new direction and the troops followed them in a moving blockade. A military car stopped on the edge of the park near San Pedro and an army lieutenant colonel stepped out to watch what was unfolding.

Renata was dressed for driving, flared gray skirt, powder blue blouse with buttons. She put on her blond wig and pinned it, pushed into her shoes. She found a black scarf and put it in her skirt pocket. She went down the stairs to the lobby, crossed the park to where the women, three dozen at least, had been halted. She spoke to a heavy woman at mid-throng, but with only partial knowledge of the reason for this protest. She had heard on the radio that two bloodied bodies of young men who had disappeared from their homes or cars in recent nights had been found on the beach horribly abused; but she was not yet aware of the official madness of the past three nights, a terror unleashed against the people of Santiago, none of it reported on the radio.

“Did you lose someone?” she asked the heavy woman.

“The son of my sister.”

“I lost my greatest friend.”

“Here?”

“In Havana.”

“Everybody is losing,” the woman said. “The disease. I am old enough to remember Machado when I lost two uncles, and my mother remembers the war with Spain when the beast Weyler killed whole villages.”

“My father was shot in Machado’s time,” Renata said.

“The soldiers will come after us now,” the woman said. “They will beat and rape us.”

“Do you want to kill them?”

“I don’t kill things,” the woman said. “I would make them disappear back up into the cursed stomachs of their mothers.”

“What are you doing here?”

“The new American ambassador, he is in the Ayuntamiento just there,” and she pointed toward City Hall where three cars and a limousine were parked. The lead women moved down Calle San Pedro but they did not get far. The troops held them back with rifles. “Libertad,” one woman yelled and many echoed her.

Renata wondered: Why am I talking with strangers under siege? Is it true I’m in love with death? Diego was in love with death and killed himself out of love. Am I a child of suicide? If I die the revolution loses a soldier. She tied the black scarf around her arm in solidarity with the women. She could still hear the drum but faintly, moving away, and she did not understand its source. But she felt the beat and still felt the impulse not only to dance but to dance well. This was strange and now she had the thought that all this came with Quinn, who is new and rare and a bit mad.

The women in front were arguing with the soldiers. Why can’t we go down San Pedro? A lieutenant said, nobody goes, an answer as arbitrary as the new military violence that had been terrorizing the city in recent nights — reprisal for work stoppages, for the growing public support of the Santiago underground and for Castro’s rebels. Three rebel bombs had gone off this week, one on the patio of navy headquarters. Military jeeps now patrolled the streets and the central highway, and the roads to Ciudamar, El Caney, El Morro, and the airport were all barricaded, with checkpoint guards stopping every car. Most businesses were closed, and pedestrians few.

Three nights earlier packs of army, navy, and police raiders invaded public plazas and parks, clubbed pedestrians with gun butts, slashed them with whips, overturned tables in cantinas, yanked people out of cars or off porches of their homes in random attacks against all classes of the population who might or might not be guilty of rebellion, or thinking about rebellion. The raiders picked up one youth who had grown a beard, which was the black flag of the revolutionaries, for Fidel wore a black beard. The raiders crucified the youth, spreadeagled him on top of a police car and drove him through the city with eight other police cars blowing their horns to show the town what happens to rebels who let their hair grow. People locked their doors and windows and stayed home. The count of men who had disappeared rose to seven, then to eighteen, but no one thought that was the end of it. Of these very new events Renata knew almost nothing when she started talking to the woman protester.

Renata felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Felipe Holtz with a great new shock of black hair, he had let it grow, and a substantial new mustache, well shaped and deep black, more handsome than ever. He wore a tan linen sport coat and she thought him very attractive; but she was not in love with him. She knew that immediately. She had loved many things about him for years. She did not think he would ever become involved with the rebel cause. He was smart and serious but he did not seem drawn to this danger like Diego. He seemed a man for whom danger was déclassé.

He said to her in English, “We’ll go now, my dear,” and squeezing her arm firmly he pulled her away from the woman and toward Calle Heredia that bordered the Hotel Casa Granda. He put his arm on Renata’s shoulder as they walked and with deft fingers untied the knot in her black scarf, pulled it off her arm and palmed it. Renata stopped to look back and saw the women yelling at the soldiers as two fire trucks and four police vans arrived. A lieutenant colonel was shouting orders to the fire trucks and troops. The women broke ranks and moved singly into the park and stood on sidewalks, watching City Hall. The troops separated to widen their blockade of the dispersed women.

Holtz led Renata into the open entrance walkway to an apartment building and said, “That is a wig you’re wearing, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Give it to me,” and he stuffed the wig flat under his shirt and buttoned his sport coat. He rolled her scarf into a ball and pushed it into a crevice in the brick wall of the walkway. Then he led her back to the street and made her walk ahead of him.

She had not expected to see him. She had left him messages and knew if he got them he would call and invite her to his home. She tried to tell him this but he said don’t talk, just walk, you must be a crazy person to stand in the middle of a protest with soldiers about to pounce.

“You are correct,” she said. “I am a crazy person.”

“That’s no excuse. Do you think you will get up to see Fidel by being arrested?”

“Why do you say I want to see Fidel?”

“Because everybody wants to see Fidel. I also talked to Moncho who talked to Max who talks to everybody. You’ll come to my house.”

“Of course I’ll come to your house. That’s why I’m here. Where is Moncho? I saw him at Esme’s house after the Palace attack.”

“He’s in Palma Soriano. You’ll see him. He thinks the SIM may be after him and it’s possible, but he also may be bragging.”

“Moncho is very beautiful when he is angry. His words are beautiful.”

“And you are more beautiful than ever,” Holtz said.

“Are you still in love with me?”

“No. I’ve known you too long and you live in Havana. Also you are too beautiful to love.”

“I’m traveling with an American who loves me.”

“I know. In spite of that we will bring him along.”

“Why are those soldiers surrounding the women?”

“The women are very important today. They have a message for the ambassador.”

“Am I in trouble for being with the women?”

“It’s possible. The military has big eyes. They trust no one. But at least you’re no longer a blonde.”

A woman screamed and as Renata turned she saw a soldier striking the screaming woman with the butt of his rifle. Other women broke through the ranks of soldiers and yelled things Renata could not understand as they ran toward the men coming out of City Hall. Firemen opened their hoses and the force of the water knocked down many of the women, drove them against buildings. Still they came running, and soldiers clubbed a few. Two women, both drenched, reached the limousine and were yelling to the man Renata took to be the ambassador, and they shook their flyers at him. The man took one flyer and waved his hands to the troops to stop the water cannons. He spoke inaudibly. Soldiers were dragging and pushing most of the women into vans. Renata counted two dozen arrested and saw the lieutenant colonel approaching the ambassador.

She and Holtz were now past her hotel and out of sight of the women and soldiers.

“Those brave women,” she said.

“They are ready to die for their anger. We have to get you away from Santiago and out to my house,” Holtz said. “We don’t want you dead.”

“I must go to the hotel.”

“Not now. They have chivatos spying on people like you, and they monitor the phones. One of them may have seen you at the protest. You’re out, so stay out.”

“I have no clothes.”

“You can wear Natalia’s. You’re the same size. Later we’ll find a way to get your clothes.”

“I have a gun in my suitcase.”

“What kind of gun?”

“A Colt.38. A Cobra.”

“What do you want with a gun?”

“I want to give it to Fidel.”

“Then we must get it. Give me your key. They’re not looking for me yet.”

“Bring my chartreuse blouse and black skirt. The pistol is wrapped in my underwear. Bring my underwear. And the bottle of Gardenia perfume. And my Changó and Oshun beads. You know the Changó and Oshun beads, don’t you? Of course you do.”

“I will carry what I can hide on my body. I can’t come out bulging in unusual places.”

“Then just the blouse, the gun, and the underwear. You can wear the beads. I do.”

“Don’t tell me how to behave, Renata. You are insane and insane people do not give good counsel. Go sit in that café and have a coffee. I’ll come by on the other side of the street and then you follow me at a distance.”

“Where will we meet Quinn?”

“Moncho will contact him at the hotel or he’ll find where he is from Max. Don’t worry about Quinn.”

“I do worry. I met him two days ago and he wants to marry me.”

“Smart americano. I’m glad to see you, Renata.”

“I am very happy to be rescued by you, Felipe. You are a dear man.”

“I’m trying to get over that. We also rescued your guns from the apartment on Sixteenth Street, your friend Alfie and I.”

“You got them? Maravilloso. Where are they?”

“On the way to Fidel.”

“How did you do it?”

“Alfie was superb, I’ll tell you all about it. He’s quite clever, and fearless.”

“He seems to be a first-class criminal.”

“It’s nice to meet one who isn’t in politics.”

The army flew the press back to Santiago airport from El Macho’s landing field, and Quinn took a taxi to the Casa Granda to call in his story. It was mid-afternoon when he got to the room and he found Renata gone. His phone message that he’d be here in an hour had been delivered but lay unopened on the floor. Her purse and all her clothes were here, no note. He called Max with his story and told him Hemingway wasn’t interested in the duel, so it was back to Cooney — go public if that’s what you want.

“If he does go public Hemingway will have to come up with some sort of reply.”

“No, he won’t. He’s Hemingway.”

“He’ll look like he’s afraid.”

“He’s in mourning for his dog. And his writing isn’t going well. He said if he wanted to die he’d do it himself.”

“Is that his statement?”

“Not really. But he said it, and a lot more. But no.”

“I’ll tell Cooney.”

Quinn dictated his army story to the desk man he had seen on his first visits to the Post, a black Americano named Julian Stewart, a New York actor and aspiring playwright with a Cuban wife, who edited copy and did layout. He laughed at Quinn’s paragraph on the fluctuating army death tolls in the battle with Fidel and he told Quinn, “You should go to Fidel and get the real total.” Quinn agreed that was a good idea. “Tell him I said hello,” Julian said, “and I’m available if he needs help.”

Quinn flopped on the bed, nothing to do till Renata connected to the Holtzes. He raised his memory of her at their first meeting in El Floridita with Hemingway. Amazing, stunning, incomparable. Quinn now decided he would marry her before they left Oriente province. He was absolutely firm on this, but he also decided he would not tell her. He would make his plan public only when necessary; yet it was real in his imagination and now he needed only to actualize it. The ceremony would require no priest to sanctify it, no judge to make it legal. A babalawo would do, even if the union was legitimate only in Yoruba; for Renata saw the babalawo as a comfort figure. Quinn believed she was not yet aware how ready she was to marry him. The intensity of what he felt for her was without precedent, and her reaction to him certainly seemed strong. Her grief at losing Diego was enormous, but in its freshest hours she slept alongside Quinn in his bed; and in the wake of the Quesada murder she took revenge on the caprice that killed her love and gave herself to Quinn, transforming them both. She is a creature of perpetual intensity and mystical need, a nymph who could betray you in a blink with a stranger, if that act lit the flame that lights her days. You have an aberration wrapped into your life, Quinn, a walking, loving astonishment. Marry her quickly. She will understand your perception and will accept. Twice in the brief time you’ve known her she has admitted the possibility of marrying you someday, and she will accept now because of your persuasively absurd insistence. She is love insatiable but she has never accepted long life with her other lovers, who have all had the life expectancy of mayflies, products of her youthful misjudgment, her proclivity for fractured dreams, and her co-conspiracy in creating wrenching separations. You are a gift from an Orisha that arrived during her craving for something beyond the sexual fadeaways of her commonplace book of love, and your impromptu marriage scheme looms as a gesture any Orisha would respect, bespeaking your fluency in the language of the soul.

But be aware, Quinn — Renata does not yet know she knows these things, and you certainly should not push her to premature awareness, for she may make a hasty mess and bend everything to her adorational needs of the moment. Let her discovery arrive during your next eureka moment together, which should be soon. Do not tell her that she wants to marry you above all her other lovers past or present. Do not spoil her surprise.

Renata waiting for Felipe: another of the Holtz family taking in another of the Otero women. He would soon drive her to his mansion where her mother, Celia, had been taken in and raised, and where Renata visited as a child, never quite understanding back then why this had happened. But she had exotic memories of vacations here with her cousins, of games played in their vast house and in the stables and outbuildings, with secret hiding places and cuddling until they found you, early intimations of romance, which seemed to be what they called it. Whatever it was those visits were always too brief, always interrupted, and always with that hovering mystery no one talked about but everyone (except Renata) knew — the secret life of her grandmother.

She sat at the first table in the café, near the door, and ordered a coffee. The waiter had a large scar on his neck, a rope burn from being hanged? Remnant of a murderous throat-slitting? But, Renata, might it not have been accidental? No. Something so egregious is rarely accidental in Cuba. She saw her Grandmother Margaret’s hooded eyes, and her scarred eyelids, and don’t try to tell Renata that was accidental. She conjured the face she knew from young photographs before the eyes were attacked. Such a wild creature, Margarita Lastra Pujol de Otero, who came to Cuba on a tidal wave of passion, unable to live without her husband of a few months, Jaime, who had left her in Spain in 1896 to join the war against Cuban rebels, also to elevate his military status, war can do that for a privileged young prince of a wealthy family.

Renata was now sitting a few blocks from where Margarita, with her year-old Celia, had first lived in this city while Jaime was making forays into rebel territory. Her townhouse belonged to Jaime’s uncle, Sebastian Holtz Otero, who derived his wealth from one of the few sugar mills to survive three wars in Oriente Province. Jaime came there twice to be with her, brief visits but wild with conjugal frenzy and bliss and such emotional consummation that he composed a will against the day he might die in war, giving her all he owned or might inherit. What he asked in return was her eternal love and fidelity, which she granted with the first blink of her eye, her worship of his penstroke and sexual fury, his teardrop on the letter, his mouth on her own and on her body and on the spiritual lips of her love. You will kiss me everywhere and forever, she wrote him. In these days he sent her three letters, all he could manage, but they were very like the twenty-seven he’d written when courting her: passionate, even shocking. They burned her imagination; she thrived on their heat.

Renata wanted to receive letters like those. As she grew older she heard her parents talk of them, then found the key to the strongbox where Celia had hidden them, because such things were not fit for young eyes. Renata sat and read them all, her first schooling in the language of sex and the thrilling persiflage of love. She wanted to own the letters but her mother discovered her reading them and put them in a bank vault, telling her: When you are ready.

Renata was ready now. She wanted to read them again, see farther into those words that had shaped an obsession in her grandmother. She wanted to walk to the town house, which was still there, for it would put flesh on her memory. Here is where it all happened, here the point of tragedy of the solitary young mother who one day hears Uncle Sebastian say Jaime has died in battle, nobly. In fact his head had been split in half by a machete stroke. Renata imagined the fall of her grandmother’s spirit, her instantly cracked heart, her life suddenly without meaning. Margarita did withdraw, her agony turning to delirious flights of conversation with the dead; and she seemed to have forgotten that the baby Celia existed. Jaime’s uncle, whom she rarely saw and who lived on the Holtz estate in Palma Soriano, monitored her condition through daily briefings from the nana he sent to care for mother and child.

A modest fortune accrued to Margarita, sent as income to her from Spain by the executor of Jaime’s estate, a friend of the Holtz-Otero family. The inheritance came with the proviso that Margarita not remarry, and if she did the inheritance would go to Jaime’s daughter with her, Celia. Margarita was oblivious of such detail, victim of the single-minded disease of love. She dwelt in grief and took pleasure only in the historic passion and memorious fantasy the love letters aroused in her.

Jaime’s uncle tried to reverse her withdrawal by sending his son Evelio, like Jaime a Spanish lieutenant, to comfort and restore her, a gesture so naive that his family thought him demented. Margarita was twenty-nine, Evelio thirty-four. Evelio visited her, offering comfort; returned the next day and the next with new comfort, which begat the word, the soft stroke, the fervor of immediacy. And there you have it.

They began in secret and were interrupted when Evelio was sent into unequal combat against the invading American forces. She welcomed the defeat of the Spanish military by the Americans for it meant the restoration of a lover to her life, a lover who banished all her guilt over the swift relegation of Jaime to memory, just as he banished her melancholy with his passion. Three months after Evelio’s release from the army Evelio secretly married Margarita.

Renata, remembering this, wondered, am I my grandmother? She saw the parallel to Diego and Quinn just as she looked to the doorway and saw Quinn coming toward her.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I just met your cousin Felipe.”

“My coffee,” she said.

“I’ll get you another one.”

“I didn’t pay for it.”

Quinn put money on the table and led her out to the street.

“Those guns of yours,” Felipe told Renata as they moved out of Santiago in his car, “we loaded them into a truck with fake floorboards that made room for them all. There were six Thompsons. Alfie found the truck. He knows how to get things.”

Holtz had been quietly supporting the Directorio with cash infusions until the previous week when two fourteen-year-olds he knew, neither with any connection to the rebels, were tortured and killed by police; and his outrage escalated. He flew to Havana and told his friend Aurelio he wanted to do more. Aurelio took him to a boat basin to meet a gun dealer, since Holtz had offered to buy guns. But neither money nor guns changed hands that day, the transaction aborted by a cruising police car. The transfer was to be the next day, but that afternoon the Palace attack was launched and Holtz went underground, surfacing only when he knew Aurelio had survived the attack; and by then Alfie, through Renata’s and Quinn’s intercession, had delivered the guns to Aurelio and Javier at the gas station.

When Renata mentioned yet more guns in the Sixteenth Street apartment that she and Diego had rented, Aurelio put Holtz together with Alfie to find a way to rescue them. Two nights later Fidel’s people were poised to bomb a major electrical grid; and if it succeeded, much of Havana would go dark, a propitious time for burglary. The weapons’ preliminary destination was an empty warehouse where they would be put on a commercial truck bound for Oriente. But then Holtz said to Aurelio and Alfie, if there are no guards at the Santa Fe landing field, and usually there are not, I could fly them to my father’s airstrip in Palma Soriano and Fidel’s people will unload them.

“So we put them on my plane and took off at dawn,” Holtz said to Quinn and Renata. “Four of Fidel’s peasants met us and took them. Fifteen minutes after our landing the army showed up to search the plane, but there was no contraband to be found.”

“Where is Alfie now?” Quinn asked.

“At the house,” Holtz said. “He’s waiting for us.”

On the road to the Holtz estate, going north out of Santiago, they faced a major army checkpoint with a tanqueta at the ready, a dozen armed soldiers at the barricade, and four cars ready to pursue any vehicle that would try to crash the barrier. Holtz told the soldiers that Renata was his cousin and Quinn her fiancé, and they were visiting at his home. The lieutenant recognized Holtz’s famous name and let them pass.

“These checkpoints are all over the Sierra Maestra,” Holtz said. “If we do go to see Fidel we must have a reason or they’ll turn us back.” Holtz said he’d brought one americano up to meet the rebels, presenting him as a businessman buying land from a defunct sugar mill.

“Can we go as a family, having a reunion?” Renata asked.

“I’d like something more specific. We have an americano here.”

“What if the reunion is a wedding?” Quinn asked.

“Whose?”

“Renata’s and mine. You and Alfie can be cousins in the wedding party. Do you want to get married, Renata?”

“Is this a proposal or just a way to fool the army?”

“One reason is as good as another for marrying you.”

“Do you mean a wedding in a church?” Holtz asked.

“That’s too complicated. Just have a babalawo do it.”

“You are crazy,” Renata said.

“Do babalawos do weddings?” Holtz asked.

“I never heard of it,” Renata said.

“Babalawos do everything,” Quinn said. “If I marry you I want a babalawo. They read minds, they predict futures, they heal your soul.”

“But they don’t do weddings,” she said.

“All right, we’ll get a priest too,” Quinn said.

“I like this,” Holtz said. “It’s oddball, which makes it real.”

“It will be real. All we need is a babalawo and a priest.”

“A crazy man wants to marry me,” Renata said.

Felipe’s sister Natalia, who had grown plump since Renata last saw her, she is eating for her pleasure instead of having sex, met them in the foyer, the only family member in the house, her parents en route to Mexico. Holtz took Quinn to find Alfie, and Natalia gushed over Renata looking so lovely, and why haven’t you called? Renata said I called three times for Felipe.

“Ah, but that is different,” Natalia said. “Who is this man Quinn?”

“I just met him,” Renata said. “He wants to marry me.”

“Another one?”

“Yes, another. What year did Margarita die? I was thinking of her,” Renata said.

“Of course you were,” Natalia said, “another marriage maniac. I don’t know the year but she lived too long — for her. I don’t want to die like she did.”

“You should worry about not living like she did,” Renata said.

Natalia went to the kitchen to have the cook prepare late lunch for the visitors and Renata roamed the parlors and dining room, loving to feel again the grandness of this house with all its historical elegance, although she now sees decline. It isn’t crumbling, just aging visibly, yet with grace and formidability — its baroque floor-to-ceiling mirrors, the Carrara marble on the floors, walls, and staircase; the chandelier with eighteen globes and uncountable strands of crystal beads, a creation of high elegance made in emulation of the one in the Captain-General’s Palace in Havana; and, in the music room, the grand piano on a small, elegant stage where the music of civilization, written in the old world, was performed in the new.

The house was called a palace when they built it in the 1850s, the Holtz Palace, and how it must have dazzled the elite society of Oriente. Celia grew up amid it all, coming here as an infant when the maddened Margarita stopped functioning as a mother and became the pure enamorada—who lived only for love with her secret second husband, her god-sent lover who was wilder at sex than her first husband, and who lived for the bed the way Margarita did.

The marriage secret was short-lived, and when it became gossip in Santiago the word flew to Spain and into the ear of the estate’s executor, who cut off Margarita’s inheritance and the child Celia’s as well. The catastrophe was compounded within weeks when Evelio, discovering that his wealthy new wife was penniless, left her and moved into a small house with a former housemaid from his father’s estate. The executor wrote Margarita that under the terms of Jaime’s will he could give her such support for residency as she might find in a convent, and if such a convent existed in Cuba, she would be free to seek it out. If not then she could return to Madrid and find residence in any of several convents. The child, in any case, will be cared for by the Holtz family in Santiago.

Getting married in order to see Fidel — this may be Quinn’s ultimate sacrifice. Fidel. What would Quinn ask him? Herbert Matthews had confirmed his survival, described him as a demigod, as an intellectual, nationalistic, anti-Yankee, anti-imperialistic, anti-communist revolutionary, a dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, a tough, charismatic hero fighting for a socialistic, democratic Cuba, who has polarized the majority of Cuban youth against Batista and seems invincible.

Can’t top that.

So talk to him about the how of what he did — how he made the La Plata attack and what it achieved. Or a longshot — the link between politics and gangsterism. Wasn’t he a gangster in his university days? That’s a new take on the revolutionary. And Arsenio, the rural gangster, collaborating with the connected Alfie to bring you these guns. Isn’t gangsterism just low-level political pragmatism? Machado with his gangster police — the deadly Porra; Prío as president giving jobs to two thousand gangsters to curb crime; Batista making the Italian mob his partners — likewise partnering with goons, the homegrown Tigers of Rolando Masferrer, your University classmate and now your enemy, Señor Castro — gangster then, gangster now. It’s all very tidy and of the moment, yes, and Fidel might be amused. But why would he talk about any of that? What would Hemingway ask him? Nothing about gangsters. He’d talk about Fidel’s gun. He’d ask about logistics, methods, attitudes, what he thinks about war, what was your first revolutionary act and did anybody die from it? Hemingway wouldn’t talk politics. He’d say if you put politics into the novel, and if the book lasts twenty years, you have to skip the politics when you read it.

Ah, so you are writing a novel about me, Mr. Quinn?

No, just tracking the hero the way my grandfather tracked Céspedes, and you qualify as heroic merely on the basis of your survival. How do you explain not dying in combat at the Moncada barracks? Or when they captured you there? Or when they had you in Batista’s jail? Or when as an invader you shipwrecked in a swamp? Or now, when you’re dodging aerial bombardment and being hunted by half the Cuban army? All this smacks of a scripted life for Fidel Castro — Achilles without the flawed heel.

Renata will love this idea: a new Orisha in control of the mountains, fated to defy death from every angle, too original to die. Originality is an ingenious form of defiance, don’t you think? Or do you have a simpler vision and consider yourself lucky? Was Céspedes lucky? He said his children were beggars, or on the cusp of prostitution. The Spaniards executed his rebel son by firing squad the same year his infant son starved to death among the fugitive Mambí. They got to the man himself in ’74 when his originality failed and he feared he was being eclipsed by his general, Máximo Gómez, and was deposed from the presidency in a leadership coup. He ran out of luck, or was it intuition, and he retreated alone to the mountains where the Spaniards caught up with him, and a Cuban volunteer with the Spaniards pulled the trigger.

But he is still the father of Cuba, El Padre de la Patria, is he not? Was he a chosen figure or did he imagine himself into existence? My grandfather came to Cuba on a bizarre and solitary quest to interview him for a New York newspaper and confirm he was alive — and he later wrote a book about it—Going to See the Hero, have you read it? I’ll send you a copy.

El Quin and the ex-slave, his name was Nicodemo, were moving toward a mountain they could not avoid climbing without exposure to a Spanish fort below. The horse would probably not make it but Nicodemo said they could try and he led the horse upward as they chopped brush to clear their way. Fifty yards up the horse fell twenty feet, rolling, snapping trees, ripping off its harness, rising up, falling and rolling again, you don’t see that every day, scattering El Quin’s belongings and his second pistol and ammunition. The horse righted itself, pushed downhill through the trees and ran onto the guinea-grass plain, gone forever, so long horse.

Nicodemo retrieved pistol and ammo and they rolled up the strewn clothing and carried it on their backs — slipping, falling, slashed by briars, crawling over boulders on all fours — emerging onto a mesa that was a relief from incline but opened them to the punishment of a scorching Cuban sun that could quickly crisp El Quin. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and put on his straw hat and they walked two more hours before seeing Mambí troops. The troops had halted next to a great brick tower, taller than any building Quinn had seen in Cuba outside of Havana and whose function he could not imagine; but he would learn that the tower was all that remained of a sugar mill burned by the rebels. It was topped off by the slaveholder’s crow’s nest where, from daybreak to nightfall, a lookout had watched 360 degrees of fields for trails being made in the high grass by runaway slaves who sometimes chanced death rather than live another day creating sugar for the Spanish swine.

Quinn and Nicodemo walked into the midst of twenty Mambí cavalry soldiers, horses tethered in a grove of trees. An officer with a full beard, wearing a hat, an open, high-collared linen jacket, leggings, and a pistol with belt and bandolier, greeted them.

“Capitán Díaz Rodón,” he said, “I welcome you to Cuba Libre.”

He released Nicodemo from duty and Quinn offered the ex-slave his gratitude, which he acknowledged with a brief nod. The Capitán said Quinn should rest, take water, eat something; my troops will protect you while we are in this territory where Spaniards have been seen. He would send a message to President Céspedes to say Quinn had arrived. Did the Capitán know a Lieutenant Castellón? He did. He is an aide to the president. Quinn had a message for him from his wife in New York who has raised much money for the Mambí cause. Capitán Díaz said they would not go directly to the presidential camp, near Contramestre, but would jog west to cut Spanish telegraph wires between Palma Soriano and Jiguaní. Later they would meet General Máximo Gómez’s battalion and move toward a town with entrenched Spanish troops and try to lure them out from their barricades. President Céspedes thought it might be bracing for Señor Quinn, and good for what he was writing, to see our troops in combat. You can watch from well behind the lines and be safe, if you keep your head down, but not too far down or you will miss the battle.

Natalia found her brother in the library with Quinn and Alfie, who had retreated there hours earlier to wait for Holtz to return. Alfie had been perusing topographical maps of Oriente Province, educating himself on the land, a modest preparation for flying guns into this territory, when Natalia said to her brother, you have a visitor in the casa del ingenio. And Holtz led the visiting pilgrims to the sugar mill where Arsenio Zamora, the charismatic bandit, was standing alone by the great gear of a grinder, a picture of anxiety in process, violating Fidel’s first commandment that thou shalt not stay anywhere that can be surrounded. But the public enemy was here on a mission Fidel had sanctioned. And he stared at Holtz and his entourage of three as they entered the mill.

Arsenio, an essential figure in the revolution’s strategic defense in the Sierra, had accumulated not five to ten wives but twenty, and at last count, seventy-five children. He was forty-one but from the rugged life in the Sierra he looked sixty to Quinn, a long, wrinkled face, a full head of hair whose blackness had survived climate and age, with eyebrows and mustache more gray than black, the tash not cultivated but under control, perhaps a vanity marker, or a less intrusive brush for his harem. He wore a battered black leather hat, not quite a fedora, and smoked a dark brown cigar.

He had been born on the seven-thousand-acre Holtz estate in a small village of Precarista squatters that two generations of Holtzes had never tried to remove. He began as a young cane-cutter and laborer for Holtz padre, became a cane truck driver, grew into a leader of his village by his late twenties. Smart and aggressive, revered and feared as he was, he evolved into an anti-poverty outlaw. Many of the Precaristas were illiterates who lived without electricity or running water, and their villages served as sanctuaries for outlaws. Quinn would hear the region compared to the wild west in America, which his grandfather had written about in the years after the Civil War.

Before Fidel arrived in Oriente with his eighty-two expeditionaries Arsenio was already an ally, and had hunkered down in Niquero for two days with a hundred men, and trucks loaded with guns and supplies for the invaders. But the fate of the invaders was not to land at Niquero but to sink into a swamp near Belic. Most of them were quickly shot on the run by Batista forces, but Fidel eluded the troops and made it to the Sierra with Che Guevara, then his brother Raúl, and in short order a dozen altogether, with Arsenio’s banditry and leadership at his disposal. Arsenio knew every peasant who had food, knew where to find water, knew every road, and roads that were not roads, every impasse and cliff. He offered Fidel a hundred men but without arms, and Fidel was grateful, but who needs the gunless in battle? He accepted a few helpers from Arsenio; and the outlaw chief also put three of his sons to work with shotguns as escopeteros, robbing travelers to feed the rebels.

When Holtz called Moncho to have someone meet his plane with the guns, Arsenio was the man, and he and three others were alongside when the plane stopped on the grass runway. In ten minutes they had offloaded guns and ammo onto an old Dodge truck. Within twelve minutes they were rattling over a narrow road through a cane field into the dense brush of the forest’s edge into a village where a dozen or, if necessary, two dozen human mules would backpack the weapons up to the lofty, new Cuba Libre.

In the sugar mill Holtz told the pilgrims to wait and he walked to Arsenio and asked did he want to talk to the visitors. Arsenio said no, who are they? I heard of a periodista who claimed to be married to my cousin but I have no such cousin.

Holtz, who knew nothing of what Quinn had set in motion in La Marea del Portillo, said no, she’s my cousin, Renata Suárez Otero, very close to the family for years. From Havana, and she worked with the Directorio. Those guns we just flew here, she sent. She had also negotiated with Alfie for guns for the Directorio but now most of her Directorio friends are dead. She wants to join the revolution here. She is a brave woman.

“Women can do some things,” Arsenio said, “but there are few here, very few. I will ask about this.”

“Alfie Rivero is also here and he really is your cousin, no?”

“Yes,” said Arsenio, ”and sometimes I trust my cousins.”

“He says he can get many guns for Fidel,” said Holtz. “He’s connected to Mafia people in Miami and he has airplanes. He knows guns and he will do anything.”

“We will talk with him about the guns,” Arsenio said.

“The periodista Quinn, all he wants is to interview Fidel.”

“Is that all?” said Arsenio.

“Will Fidel see any of them?”

“I will know tomorrow.”

“Is there a plan? Will we go toward the mountains?”

“If the answer is yes then Moncho will know the place. He will tell you.”

“Should all four of us go? Are we too many?”

“It makes no difference. It is dangerous, no matter how many. Not all of this group will go to Fidel.”

“How many army checkpoints where we’re going?”

“Who knows? They keep moving them.”

“I assume we should have a good reason for going.”

“The army asks who you are and why you are here and where you are going.”

“I can say I’m on business, buying land that was part of an old sugar mill.”

“There are no mills where you are going.”

“Then you know where we’re going.”

“I know where you might be going.”

“What about a family gathering? Quinn has the idea of doing an actual wedding celebration to marry Renata and he wants a babalawo and a Catholic priest to perform the ceremony. Alfie and I would be the bride’s relatives, and Moncho actually is a relative — he was married to Renata’s sister. Marriage seems like a good reason for going someplace. I do like the idea.”

“Is this a real marriage?”

“Quinn wants it to be. I don’t know if Renata wants it.”

“I like the marriage.”

“I know. You do it often.”

Arsenio dropped the stub of cigar he was chewing on and took a new one from his shirt. He put it in the corner of his mouth but did not light it. He stared at the pilgrims who all wanted to go to see the hero.

“Moncho will come here tomorrow,” he said. “You follow him in your car. The mafioso will go with me. Your cousin está muy buena.”

“You have a fine eye, Don Arsenio.”

Arsenio nodded at the pilgrims and walked out of the mill.

Quinn may or may not be about to meet with Fidel Castro and is now in the midst of the waiting game Fidel plays with visitors. He is in the main room of a house in Los Negros, a crossroads village near the northern foothills of the Sierra, where Moncho had led him and the other pilgrims from Palma Soriano. They passed two army checkpoints without trouble, Moncho explaining they were going to a wedding and the bride and groom are in the car behind me. The soldier inspected the Buick Quinn was driving and Renata said yes it’s true, and showed him her grandmother’s wedding ring that she would be wed with, and the soldier waved them on.

Quinn, waiting for Fidel — is now into his sixth hour in this house which belongs to one of Arsenio’s fifteen or twenty mujeres, wives of a sort. This wife lives here with two of her four daughters — and Quinn is witnessing an impromptu prelude to his wedding, a Santeria dance ritual, organized for Renata, that will, he hopes, lead into a divination, the calling down of one, maybe two Orishas who might hint at the destiny of the bride and groom, or offer a prognosis of the marriage, or faux marriage, whichever it is. Quinn hasn’t quite got a handle yet on the details of either the divination ritual or the marriage, but he’s getting there.

The ritual is being enacted by two principals brought here by Moncho — Ezequiel, who is playing the tambor beta, or sacred drum, and Floreal, who belongs to Ezequiel and is a Santera, a priestess of lesser station than a babalawo but empowered to invoke the Orishas. Floreal is singing as she dances barefoot, a chanting singsong in Yoruban verse evoking one of the hundreds of mysteries of Ifa, which is a belief system, a method of divination, an all-encompassing myth of the history of the universe. Her song is melodious despite the limited range of the music. She is wearing a head wrap, something like a turban but also like a crown, and she is floating her great blue skirt, another blue skirt beneath it (blue because that is the color associated with Oshun, the Orisha with whom Renata wants to commune). Floreal dances with graceful twirls and revolutions, with arcs of her body and subtle rhythms of hips, arms, and shoulders akin to the moves of the mambo, but a subdued mambo, elegant in twist and thrust.

This is taking place in the main room of this modest wooden house that Arsenio built for his old wife long ago. Chairs have been pushed to one wall. A table, with a white cloth covering it, is serving as an altar and is set out with two coconuts and a hammer, two stones, a glass of water, several bowls, one with water, two with offerings to the Orishas being summoned. Changó’s is the second bowl, which is wooden so it won’t break. Changó can be rowdy. Both these bowls are full — with beads and sunflowers and small cups of honey, plus herbs and other elements Quinn cannot identify. Behind the table a large fabric, red and light blue, has been hung to transform the room, and there is a festive quality here.

Quinn is fixated on Renata, who is totally absorbed by it all; and she is scoring dance points with Quinn by her effective emulation of Floreal’s moves, which isn’t easy. Quinn is reveling in Renata’s aesthetic control of her body. Grace and beauty prevail in all realms of her being, it seems to him. He is exploding with love for her; and immersed as he is in all this mumbo-jumbo, he would not be surprised to see his love materialize somewhere in this room in the shape of an idea, a corporeal rendering of his possibly insane desire. He would not go on record at the moment as to his own sanity.

Renata had told him she did not like to dance and would not dance with him. But she lied, or perhaps she just changed because of the impulse that started her dancing yesterday in her hotel room and took hold of her again here when Ezequiel’s drum began singing to her and Floreal’s chant and elegant movement brought her to her feet.

Quinn is also on his feet now, dancing with Renata at a distance, he too emulating Floreal’s steps; and he feels the power of this dance. He is with its beat, which is a slow mambo, he has definitely decided — you go with what you know. Floreal gave Quinn a small smile because of the way he was swaying his hips, not bad was his reading of her glance. His only exotic dance specialties were the merengue and the rumba, but soon he’d really nail this mambo, and maybe even the salsa, what the hell, he was in Cuba.

Moncho knew all about the involvement of Ezequiel and Floreal in Santeria from his time in Los Negros, and he approached them at their home to do this rite for Quinn and Renata. Moncho first thought he should dissuade Renata from this hasty marriage, she being so young and tempted. But as a believer in irrational love he offered no objection. Also, he had taken a liking to Quinn who is a bit strange, but seems to know what he wants — that fixation of his on babalawos and he doesn’t know anything about them. But there is no babalawo, for babalawos really can’t legally do weddings. And there’s no Catholic priest either. Moncho told Quinn and Renata, You don’t need a priest, I’ll do it.

All-purpose Moncho, a sometime criminal lawyer and public defender, is also a notario público appointed for life by Carlos Prío when he was president, with the power to draw real estate contracts and perform other legal functions, marriage among them. Moncho now sits in a corner and observes, across the room, in motion, the two daughters of the house. Holtz, who dances reasonably well, is focusing on the elder daughter. Arsenio’s old wife, and Moncho’s driver, Epifanio, who works with Arsenio, are all dancing, and the seated Moncho is moving his shoulders to the beat of the beta. Then he rises and gets into it. Is Moncho a believer like Renata? Who cares? Moncho dances, betraying ballroom talent and moving like a Cuban Fred Astaire — he could dance for a living — and he jangles toward those two daughters in long dresses, into a communion, perhaps, sanctified by Ifa, competing with Holtz for their attention.

This readiness of so many to dance, and dance well, astonishes Quinn at the moment, for it certainly isn’t the reason these people are here. Dance has resurfaced in their lives and they are seizing the day. Ezequiel has been drumming nonstop for half an hour at least, and all in the room are dancing. Dance is the Cuban national contagion, as ubiquitous as rum and the cigar — keeping together in time, as somebody put it; and those who dance will bond and rise, will overshadow, maybe even overpower groups that do not dance. The military dance, the march, the goosestep, the cheerleaders’ kick step, the fox trot, the close order drill, the dance of shamans, the dance of sex (George Bernard Shaw said dance was the vertical expression of a horizontal desire), the dance of love, the wedding dance, the aboriginal war dance, the dance of death (Socrates took dancing lessons when he was seventy), the slave dance. Quinn’s grandfather watched a slave dance eighty-five years ago in a Mambí encampment.

“It is time for music,” Céspedes said to El Quin after their dinner together — broiled steak, sweet potatoes, boiled corn and bread made from cassava roots — the second night after bloody Jiguaní, the dead buried, the wounded lying on their couches of twigs. Quinn had talked half a day with the president in his thatched-leaf hut, and the success at Jiguaní had produced ebullience in the leader.

“It is time for the people to dance,” he said after they ended their talk. This was a man who wrote music in the years before he declared war on slavery and Spain, wrote as a youth the words for a love song, “La Bayamesa,” which later gained new lyrics and evolved into a battle anthem of the Mambí rebels. He and Quinn walked from his hut to the broad patch of level ground where two Mambí drummers, plus six musicians with flutes, cornets, a bugle, and a guitar, all captured from Spanish troops, were just sitting down to begin their music, the danza, Céspedes called it. People sat at the edge of the dance turf, and officers and soldiers came forward with their women. They all danced on the same turf, but with wide separation between officers and troops. Most were mulatos (two-thirds of the Mambí army) among some whites, and all moved with vital pleasure in the accumulating darkness, lit by a few torches. The music was brassy but mellowing to Quinn, the drumming alluring, evoking chants and clapping from dancers and others who had come to watch and feel the beat: keeping together in time.

When this music paused, a black drummer staked out a patch of ground closer to the forest, and a dozen black men and women began not a danza but something wilder. Quinn went to watch with Céspedes, who said that only the black Africans danced this way and to this beat, which was mesmerizing to Quinn in its fury — bodies contorting with frenzied invitation but never touching, dancers grunting their communal joy in wild and guttural singing, repetitive and monotonous; but in monotony there is truth. Their joy was echoed by the wildly vocal spectators, all supremely aroused, the entire spectacle looking to Quinn like a warm-up for a hot evening to come.

Nicodemo, the strapping near-giant who had guided Quinn into Cuba Libre — wearing a clean uniform, but still of tatters, his bandaged left arm hanging limp — moved with great vigor and thrust toward two women dancers, first one, then the other, and he spoke to the drum and the women in a language Céspedes said he could not understand. Quinn said it sounded like the universal language of heat. The women received what Nicodemo was sending them and answered with body language of their own, an exotic dialogue in motion. Nicodemo’s slave persona was nowhere in evidence, his movement now obeying memory of an instinctual order, his manic excitement transforming him from machete warrior to warrior of the erotic night.

Quinn, waiting to see another hero of a latter-day revolution, moved in synch with Renata — no need to watch Floreal now, we know the moves — and, as he felt his and Renata’s spirits seriously mingling, he decided this was the corroborating stage of the wedding ceremony.

“It’s time to do the marriage,” he said to Moncho.

“We are still in the dance,” Moncho said.

“We’re getting past it. It seems time. Are you ready to marry me, Renata?”

She broke her trance to throw back her head and laugh, not inclined to stop dancing to be wed. She was in collusion with the chant and the drum, generating the movement of love. “I am getting close,” she said.

“Will you kiss me now?” Quinn said to her. And she danced toward him and took both his hands, then kissed him with a passion that seemed greater and more nervous than when they had last made love; and he decided this was yet another irreversible step toward the ceremony. Renata closed her eyes and danced away to the table. She picked up the red and white beads from Changó’s bowl and put them around Quinn’s neck.

The drumming and the singing stopped.

Floreal, with wide eyes, faced the table, picked up the coconut, and hit it with the hammer. She drained its milk into a dish, broke the coconut into pieces with her hands, and washed the four largest pieces in another dish of water. She threw the four pieces on the floor and stared at how they fell — the white of the meat or the brown of the outer shell facing upward. Ezequiel resumed his drumming, the same beat but slower. Floreal moved toward and then away from Renata and, circling the pieces of the coconut, began to talk to the room. “A woman alone in a room is knitting,” she said, “always knitting, and she knits because she is trying to save you.”

“It is my grandmother,” Renata said. “She did that for years. Is she saving me from marriage?”

“Nothing can save you from marriage,” Floreal said. Then she told Quinn that the Orisha wanted him to speak to Renata what he knows about love.

Quinn said there are fifty million definitions of love and its abortive and deadly and gorgeous and mystifying nature, and he knows quite a bit about it, but he never knew what it felt like before Renata, and that love for her is unbelievably great inside him, and growing, and intoxicating his soul. He said he believes its mystical power will conquer every doubt in Renata’s heart about the speed of this leap into marriage, and he rambled on, full of what he remembered others saying of love — love, the itch, and a cough cannot be hid, love conquers all things, to fear love is to fear life, love lodged in a woman’s breast is but a guest, will you love me in December as you do in May? And when he heard his own babble he stopped talking.

Then the drum resumed, and Floreal spoke of the handsome young Babalu Aye who had many women until he was struck with leprosy by Olodumare because of his disobedience — going with a woman on Holy Thursday, which was forbidden. The woman he went with awoke in his bed to see him covered with sores, and she fled. Babalu Aye went to the house of Olodumare and begged to be restored to what he had been, but Olodumare slammed the door and Babalu Aye died on the street. The women of the world wept and went to Oshun and asked her to help bring Babalu Aye back to life. Oshun was moved by their tears and went to Olodumare, who had been her lover years ago. She brought with her a gourd with the special honey Olodumare had loved to kiss off her lips. She put it on his door and when he came home he recognized its aroma as Oshun’s, but she had turned herself into a crone with running sores. When Olodumare saw her he wept. When you gave leprosy to Babalu Aye, she said, he gave it to me, for I was with him on Holy Thursday. Olodumare said he would restore her to health but she said not unless you resurrect Babalu Aye. He did this and Oshun also became her beautiful self and smeared honey on her face and parts of her body, which drove Olodumare wild, and he licked all the honey away. Babalu Aye stood up from the grave, but still with his leprosy and putrid odor, and he walked the world with his dogs licking his sores. People loathed him, and his brother Changó did not even recognize him at first, but Changó took pity and bathed Babalu Aye in the river and prayed to the powerful Olofi, and his prayer was so beautiful that Olofi told Babalu Aye that he would become the king of Arara. Babalu walked the world for a lifetime and then one night when the dry earth broke open and great torrents of rain fell, he believed he had reached the end of his journey, so he lay down to die. But the sky dawned bright and he was young again and people were on their knees worshipping his presence, for they knew he was the prophesied king who would arrive after the storm. And the land was called Arara.

“That’s a sad and happy story,” Quinn said to Renata. “Now you must marry me and my Changó beads. Did you just hear what Changó did for your favorite Orisha, Babalu Aye?”

“I heard,” she said, “and will you always do that for me?”

“I will,” he said. “And will you give me such love that the gods will be jealous?”

“I will try.”

“Then it is time to marry,” Quinn said, and he put her arm in his arm and he walked her to the table with the bowls of Oshun and Changó, and he looked to Moncho, who called Epifanio, his driver, and one of Arsenio’s daughters, Encarnita, as witnesses, and then Moncho spoke from memory the civil ritual that made Quinn and Renata man and wife. Felipe Holtz gave the bride away.

Arsenio’s old wife brought many plates of food to the table, and the wedding feast carried on until after midnight when a messenger arrived and talked to Moncho, and together they told Quinn that it was time for him to meet Arsenio in the forest. His bride would not be going with them. She should see a woman in Havana who would find a meaningful connection for her in the revolution, and Moncho would tell her that woman’s name. Quinn passed this on to Renata who said if I go back to Havana they will arrest and kill me. I will go back with Felipe to his house and wait for you. Then she kissed Quinn, her new husband, and went alone to their marriage bed.

Quinn and two of Arsenio’s people went out the back door of the house and walked through a black forest, mostly uphill, and after the first hour Quinn was short of breath, his knees aching, his arches ready to collapse, why the hell did you wear these shoes? Because they’re the only tough shoes I own and what’s more I’m hungry, I should’ve brought a sandwich. At his wedding Quinn had eaten a forkful of tortoise stew (Changó’s favorite), a quarter of an aguacate, and the bread pudding he publicly designated as the wedding cake — one mouthful, with which he kissed Renata, and food then became irrelevant. But, listen, sometimes the only thing the Mambí troops had to eat was sour oranges and tree rats. Quinn blocked the hunger nag and focused on the light of the large, almost full moon (the same moon his grandfather saw — he was with the Mambises in March, and beyond). Its light filtered at times onto the path Arsenio’s men were following through the dense foliage; but when the blackness resumed they still moved with great certainty, eyesight being only one of their navigational tools.

They walked without speaking, not a word. The burlier of the two men was the leader and carried on his back something like a bedroll wrapped in straw, which, Quinn would see when it was delivered to Fidel, was not a bedroll but a Thompson machine gun and cartons of ammunition, a gift to Fidel from Arsenio who got the Thompson and a Garand from two of Batista’s soldiers, killed after they left a whorehouse in Bayamo. The Garand was strapped over the shoulder of the second man, Omar, a son of Arsenio who was joining Fidel, and that was possible only if you brought your own weapon.

Omar had been driven off his land by the army, which was clearing out all villages where Fidel had gotten, or might get, help or supplies, creating a no-man’s-land where friend or foe would be shot on sight, and which opened great areas to the bombing raids the air force was planning. This was a replay of 1896 and ’97 when Capitán-General Valeriano Weyler, the Spanish commander of all Cuba, emptied villages to isolate rebels who lived in them invisibly. He herded 300,000 peasants, maybe more, no one kept count, into reconcentration camps where hundreds of thousands died of hunger and disease, earning Weyler his Cuban sobriquet, “The Butcher,” and establishing his reputation as one of history’s great villains.

In the seventh hour of their journey Quinn and Arsenio’s son waited at a small creek while the burly man went ahead to confirm that they were near their destination. He returned and they walked thirty more minutes into the sunrise, feeling the onset of the intense morning heat, and found the Comandante at his headquarters of the moment, a primitive hut whose occupants had been evacuated by the army. He was sitting on a stool, two men with him and four more circulating around the hut watching for danger. Quinn would count another twenty-some men at rest among the trees.

“Mr. Quinn,” said Fidel, standing up and confirming that he was six-feet-three, three inches closer to the moon than Quinn, “they tell me you interrupted your honeymoon to come here.” There was that noted beard, black as the forest night, and an amiable smile. He wore fatigues and a cap he kept on throughout the interview.

“They are right,” said Quinn, “but my pilgrimage here is part of the honeymoon. Without coming to talk to you about revolution I wouldn’t be married.”

“Then you are in my debt. You are wearing beads of Santeria. Are you a follower?”

“My bride is, but I am learning. A babalawo gave me these beads. They represent Changó.”

“My mother was a Catholic but also followed the Santeria. When she was pregnant a babalawo told her I was the son of a warrior god. She initiated me with a ceremony when I was still in the womb and she said Changó put in an appearance.”

“Wherever I go in Cuba I run into Changó. But the womb is new.”

Fidel was thirty-one, a year and a half up on Quinn, and he looked fit, sanguine, and on edge, which Quinn thought was probably his permanent condition. He talked softly and told Quinn to do likewise, for the moisture of the morning carries words great distances and who knows who might be passing by out there? He spoke in Spanish, with one of his soldiers interpreting in English. Quinn identified himself as Daniel Quinn the Second, grandson of Daniel Quinn the First who came to Cuba to prove Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was not dead, as the Spaniards were claiming; and Herbert Matthews did the same for you. Now you’re famous for not being dead; and Fidel agreed. Quinn said he would point out in his story that during an interview one month after Matthews, the Comandante still showed no symptoms of death.

Fidel thought he remembered the americano Quinn’s book on Céspedes from his University days. Quinn said the Cubans called his grandfather El Quin. Fidel remembered an American called El Inglesito, fellow named Reeve, who had been a Union soldier in the Civil War and then came down and fought four hundred battles with the Mambises.

Quinn said he had found parallels between Fidel and Céspedes, who told El Quin, We survive off the enemy. We take their guns, their food, their clothes, their horses, even their guitars and bugles. “You did that at La Plata, no?”

“Yes, but only a few guns, some shoes,” said Fidel. “We need many more guns.”

“My wife sent you that batch of weapons Arsenio delivered yesterday,” Quinn said.

“Your wife?”

“Renata Suárez Otero. She runs guns in her spare time. She was close to the Directorio but most of them are dead from the Palace attack.”

“You must send her my deep, deep gratitude. That attack, it was useless bloodshed. We don’t want to assassinate Batista. We want to abolish the system. We are fighting against reactionary ideas, not individuals.”

“Spain sent six sets of assassins to kill Céspedes,” said Quinn, “and all of them failed. He survived the war for five years.”

“Assassination is at large on the streets of Cuba,” Fidel said. “When Grau was president there were a hundred political assassination attempts in four years, and more than sixty of them succeeded. I was at the University and I survived one myself.”

“Your survival,” Quinn said. “How do you explain it? You didn’t die in combat at the Moncada barracks, or in Batista’s jail, or shipwrecked in the swamp, or being hunted up here by half the Cuban army? This smacks of a scripted life, Achilles without a fatal heel, your mother giving birth to a divinity. Do you think that’s the reason you don’t die? Or are you just lucky?”

“Luck reduces the merits of a man,” Fidel said. “When I was captured at Moncada they were ready to cut me in pieces and fry me, but a lieutenant in Batista’s army would not let his men shoot me. He even refused to give me to his superior, who was a famous killer. ‘You can’t kill ideas,’ the lieutenant said, and he turned me over to the police for trial. Batista tried to poison me in jail but people handling the food sent me warning notes, so I went on a hunger strike. Later I got food from elsewhere.

“When Batista visited the prison, I sang the Twenty-sixth of July marching song to him, and he put me in solitary for forty days without light. He is not a music lover. I read books by the light of a liquid olive oil candle with a match for a wick and it lasted three hours. Then I had to get out from the mosquito net to make another candle, and the mosquitoes would follow me back under and torture me until I killed them all. People sent me books and I also asked the jailers for José Martí’s writings, but they said he was too revolutionary. So I asked for Marx’s Das Kapital. I told them I wanted to become a capitalist when I got out of prison, and they gave it to me. Until then I had read Marx only to page 380.

“Also, this wonderful peasant bandit, a Precarista who helped us survive when we first came up here, went home to see his mother and betrayed us to the army, taking ten thousand dollars to kill me. He rejoined us, and that day I decided we should move our camp. Why? Not because of luck, but because he had asked questions about where we posted our sentries. I still trusted him, but nevertheless we moved to a higher point that we could control and conceal. That night the traitor slept with his pistol under a blanket, right alongside me. He could have killed me but his cojones had shriveled. The next morning B-26 bombers and F-47 fighters bombed and strafed the area we had abandoned. We survived, but not by chance. My moving us was instinctive, not lucky.”

“What happened to the traitor?”

“He died with lightning. We shot him during a thunderstorm.”

Quinn made coded notes on all that was said, as brief as possible. He would rely on memory for reconstituting this talk, for if he was caught by the army, explicit notes could be a death warrant.

Fidel offered him a plate of congri—rice and beans cooked together — but Quinn said he could not take food out of the mouths of the rebel army. Fidel insisted and said there was plenty for today, that the men had eaten their fill; and so Quinn ate with great relish. He brought up Hemingway, a perennial soldier and man of the gun, and told of Cooney’s song and Hemingway’s one-two, and the challenge. Should Hemingway fight such a duel?

“Yes, of course,” said Fidel. “He is too important to refuse a challenge. He loves war, and a duel is war on a scale of one to one. Cubans love duels. Prío, when he was president, passed a law making duels illegal, as if that would stop them. It’s like passing a law against war. Tell Hemingway he must find a way not to lose. If he can wait until we defeat Batista I will organize the duel and see that he wins. He is too valuable to lose his life for such a thing. I like the way he writes, how he has conversations with himself. His novel on the Spanish civil war can teach you about battle.”

So now Quinn would pass along the Comandante’s advice to Papa: take ten paces, turn, and put a bullet in Cooney’s heart, but shoot first and not into the air. Do not turn away as a gesture of contempt that invites him to shoot you in the back. Above all, don’t allow him to shoot you just because of your acute sense of irony. Papa always went to war for the macho thing — drink and fuck and fish and hunt and fight and kill and put yourself in mortal danger and prove your courage and be a hero of the just cause. Quinn is going through a little of this in the here-and-now, and Hemingway is watching from the sidelines. But it isn’t simple emulation by Quinn, who doesn’t hunt or fish, but he drinks and fucks and here he is in danger in a war zone because he has come to see the hero. He’s not doing it because he thinks he’s a coward, or because of a personality disorder, or a love affair with war such as Hemingway has had. He’s doing it because it’s a continuation of an earlier life choice: to be a witness, a writer, something to do while he’s dying that isn’t boring; and he will write about that, which seems his primary motive. He has a strong impulse to salvage history, which is so fragile, so prismatic, so easily twisted, so often lost and forgotten. Right now a full moon is rising on the revolution, rising on a day like none other and, if Quinn doesn’t report on it, who will? It will fade into the memory bank of those here, and if they survive they’ll tell what they remember, fragments of the actuality which they’ll skew with their prejudices (and so will you, Señor Quinn). Yet monitoring the whatness of the previous unknown, that seems to be Quinn’s job: I was there and then he said this, then this happened, and then they went that way — following the path of the machete, you might say.

Why bother?

Well, Quinn is young and his motives may be more opaque than they seem, but he has no interest in gaining power for himself. He’s fascinated by those who want to transform the day, the town, the nation for other than venal or megalomaniacal reasons. Is working for the just cause one of his motives? It seems to be on his agenda. He intuits that it’s worth his time to bear witness to people living for something they think is worth dying for. He also has another reason: he wants to escalate himself in his grandfather’s dead eyes.

“That peasant who helped you before he betrayed you, it seems bandits and gangsters become valuable players in a war,” Quinn said.

“I knew a few who were trying to make a revolution when it was not possible,” said Fidel, “and they were killed as gangsters. Today they would be heroes.”

“What makes a man a revolutionary?”

Fidel sat down on a rock outcropping beside the hut. “What a question.” He puffed his cigar and exhaled his answer.

“The passionate embrace of the vocation,” he said. “The obsession with changing the order of existence. Reading Martí, my early hero, the poet who organized a war. Listening to the voices from the French and American revolutions. The insights of Milton, Calvin, Luther, Thomas Paine, Montesquieu. I read Marx and I studied Roosevelt’s New Deal in prison. Also I was always awed and horrified by Cuba’s wars, and by the parade of tyrants who oppressed us. And then there is the absolutism of belief.”

“In what?”

“In the possibility of revolution.”

“So much revolution in Cuba,” Quinn said. “If it’s not erupting it’s being planned. It’s like Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution.”

“We are still fighting the wars of ’68 and ’95 that Céspedes and Agramonte and Gómez and Maceo and Martí waged,” said Fidel. “But we have never in our history gotten near Trotsky’s idea of taking the country from the bourgeoisie and putting it into the hands of the workers. We are always fighting another hijo de la gran puta—Spanish villains like Valeriano Weyler, or our own despots, Machado and Batista. And we are always weakened or betrayed by Cubans who fear they’ll lose their wealth if there is a revolution. The cockroaches! Coño! They turned away from Céspedes because he had so many black Mambí leaders that they feared a black takeover. Many Cuban plantation owners would not give up their slaves. They had fought Spain in the past, not for independence but to annex Cuba to the U.S. as a slave state. De pinga!”

“But when the tyrant is impregnable,” Quinn said, “the Cuban revolutionary seems to turn suicidal. Eduardo Chibás shooting himself during his own political radio speech. All those Directorio youths facing down Batista’s machine guns. José Antonio Echevarría walking toward a police car firing his pistol. And Martí charging into battle on horseback as if his leadership skills in bringing an army together were nothing compared with the damage he’d do by galloping into the blasts of Spanish guns. He needed to die. They all needed to die.”

“I would differentiate among them,” said Fidel, “and also between suicide and challenging danger. There is a moment of transcendence, and when it rises up in you, then sudden death can be a mundane fate of no consequence. I am sure José Antonio was in that sort of moment when he walked toward the police car, shooting at it. I see him as totally unafraid to fail.

“With Martí it may have been the opposite — death becoming more important than life. Distance had come between him and the two major military leaders of his war. He had been given the rank of major general, and people were also calling him ‘EI Presidente’ of Cuba Libre. But Máximo Gómez, who made him a general, said that as long as he himself lived, Martí would never be president. And Maceo, a negro general of great intelligence, told Martí to his face that he was not a fighter and not fit to be called a general.

“An unverified but enduring part of this legend is that Maceo pulled the general’s epaulets off Martí’s shoulders. If that was how it was for Martí—and we may never know the truth of this alienation — then his galloping into the Spanish guns very soon afterward can be read as a tactical stroke of recreating himself as a martyr. And revolutions need martyrs. Leaders plan the revolution, but the force grows from the tyrant’s oppression, and then come the argument and the ideas, and when you are in the season of insurrection, the momentum will overcome very great resistance. The leader sometimes realizes how minuscule he is, another energetic figure, but just a small gust of wind moving with the hurricane.”

“The palace attack,” Quinn said, “if it had succeeded would that have started the hurricane?”

“Even if they had killed Batista,” said Fidel, “it would only have been a beginning. Their backup force failed them. They did not have unity. They would have been easily defeated by the army.”

The Comandante’s tone was suddenly abrupt, edgy. He needed Batista alive for his revolution. He took two cigars from his shirt pocket.

“Do you smoke cigars, Señor Quinn?” He offered Quinn one. “A Punch Double Corona, a very old brand owned by a tobacco baron I knew in Havana, an old reactionary who made great cigars. A box of them arrived yesterday, a gift from a Santiago lawyer who supports us. I view it as a gift from the gods, perhaps from Changó, although Changó hates cigars.”

Quinn accepted the cigar and said, “I smoked my first at age eleven and spat for half an hour. In 1945 I was working a Christmas job in the post office and a mailman gave me a Headline, a sweet nickel cigar and I loved it. I graduated to ten-cent White Owls, but I know nothing of serious cigars. I’m ready to learn.”

“Cuba will teach you, and about many other things also,” Fidel said. “It has already taught you about women.”

“I’m not quite sure what I’ve learned,” said Quinn.

“You learned how to take a wife.”

“That was a miracle.”

“Yes, they sometimes happen in Cuba.”

Fidel led Quinn outside and they walked from the hut to the edge of the woods and back with all the men watching them, the interpreter at Quinn’s side speaking into his ear. Fidel lit Quinn’s and his own Double Coronas with a Zippo and Quinn puffed his alive, savored it, and between puffs gestured his approval to the Comandante.

“They are truly great,” said Fidel. “And the smoke also repels mosquitoes.”

“To get back to revolution,” said Quinn. “My grandfather quoted Maceo that you don’t beg for liberty, you win it with the blow of a machete. He was awed by it. Do you know the battle of Jiguaní?”

“I know the machete. Battles were encounters in that war, not designed. Armies came upon each other and fought.”

“That was Jiguaní,” said Quinn. “Gómez had tried to lure the Spaniards out of their barracks, but failed, so he sent troops to burn Jiguaní’s cattle farm and kill the Spanish herd, and sent hundreds of former slaves, convoyeros, to bring back the meat. The unarmed convoyeros were carrying great slabs of beef back toward Gómez when Spanish foot soldiers ambushed them. Gómez heard the firing and moved with his six hundred white-shirted troops — the charge of the whispering machetes — and the Spanish front disintegrated. Mambí horsemen cut off their arms, or split them in half, a great slaughter. The wounded crawled into the woods to hide, but the Mambí soldiers followed. Nicodemo, the slave who had guided my grandfather into Cuba Libre, was shot in the left arm, but with machete in hand listened for moans from the wounded and beheaded eighteen. He piled their heads at the forest’s edge.”

“First,” said Fidel, “I want you to know that we do not execute enemy wounded. At La Plata we treated them with our medicine. And second, if the troops had formed their Spanish square, those charging machetes would have fallen from Spanish volleys. The machete was effective when the war began, for the surprised Spaniards could not match it with their single-shot rifles and bayonets. It was a weapon for close combat, not attack. The machete was still used in ’95, but when Gómez ordered a machete charge in a battle at Cascorro the Spaniards had repeating rifles, Mausers, and they slaughtered the Cubans, dead horses everywhere. That legendary charge of the machete had come to an end.”

Quinn and the Comandante had been sitting elbow-to-elbow on the outcropping, Quinn’s cigar down to a stub. Fidel stood up and two of his men moved closer to him.

“I would like to explain in detail to you,” he said, “just how we are waging our war on Batista’s army, but that would give him the edge. He has three thousand troops in Oriente. We do not have so many. But I can tell you this, that the way into the Sierra Maestra is not easy. Every entrance is like the pass at Thermopylae, where fourteen hundred Greeks held off a hundred thousand Persians for seven days, slaughtering a multitude until a traitor showed the Persians a path where they were able to outflank the Greeks.”

“The traitor is eternal.”

“Yes, but sometimes he does not prevail.”

With a smile and body language Fidel moved the interview toward closure. He extended his hand and Quinn shook it.

“Señor Quinn,” he said, “I thank you for making the journey here. The interview has been a good one. You did not try to entrap me in political conundrums. We must continue another day. But now I have an appointment with President Batista’s armed forces.”

“Thank you for your words, and the congri, and the cigar,” said Quinn.

“Hasta luego,” said Fidel.

“Buena suerte,” said Quinn. Good luck.

Quinn and Omar, heading back to meet Moncho at Arsenio’s wife’s house, were both on their stomachs in a sparse growth of young trees, small bushes, and tall grass, not moving, for Omar had seen four Cuban army soldiers below in a jeep and he waved Quinn to the ground and hissed “Abajo,” then dropped himself into the bushes. Lying on his side looking through the grass Quinn saw no soldiers. He saw a woman’s painted face looming large before him, oval, pale-blue and off-white with very red lips, and she hovered, so vivid that he was about to ask who sent you when she vanished, and all he could see was the undergrowth he was lying in and wishing it were deeper.

Omar lay thirty yards ahead which, Quinn would come to know, was Fidel’s method of moving troops — one by one, a hundred yards between them, not thirty. Omar kept Quinn closer than a hundred for he did not want to lose him; but Fidel’s method was one man in the lead and if they take him down the second one is aware, and new directions are taken. One dead is a big loss but not as big as when one squad leader, ignoring Fidel’s standing order, piled his men into a truck to get there faster and was blown to fragments by an army bazooka, ten gone. Batista’s troops took home nothing from this about the liability of togetherness and they continued moving in a column on the principle of power and safety in numbers, and were shot in multiples by hidden rebels as they came into range. They could then either die returning fire at the invisible foe or survive in retreat.

Quinn and Omar were another hour getting to the rendezvous house, a seven-and-a-half-hour trek. Quinn was desperately tired, soaked in sweat, and all he wanted was sleep. The painted woman’s face returned above him as he walked, her forehead and nose powder blue, eyes rimmed with the same blue, her cheeks, chin, and neck all off-white and her hair a bright yellow. What brings you here, lovely lady, creature from an exotic realm? Is your painted face an enticement to love? Your place or mine? Where is your place? I’ll need a nap first. She didn’t answer, just stared over his head, an aloof one. Maybe she’s the mime of Oshun, isn’t blue her color? Or Renata’s grandmother, desolate spirit, love clown in grief coming late to our wedding. Was she Sikan, about to be sacrificed for capturing the sacred fish, or was this what Renata would look like in ten years? She abandoned Quinn when the sun grew brighter and he was left with a sense of urgency to do something, but what? He could not say, and his urgency turned to anxiety.

He recapitulated his three hours of conversation with the Comandante, trying to fix on a lead for the story he would write. He liked the line about luck but that wasn’t news. The Comandante’s “appointment” with the president’s armed forces was newsy, if it happened and Quinn could get it into print before or on the same day the appointment was kept. What would it be? A modest attack like La Plata? Fidel did not seem to have many men. Quinn had counted about thirty visible around the hut. Quinn you are thinking like a beat reporter. Forget news and profile the revolutionary who doesn’t die. Yes, that was how to do it.

Quinn was as deceived as Matthews about the real number of the rebel force. Matthews guessed two hundred when they were twenty, Quinn counted thirty but they were sixty. Four hours after Quinn had wished him luck the Comandante moved his troops out, a ten-mile march to the army outpost at EI Uvero, a wooden garrison on a lake with fifty-three soldiers. The rebels approached at a crawl for half an hour and took attack positions forty yards from the garrison. Fidel fired first at two o’clock under a genuinely full moon and army rifles flashed with return fire. The fight lasted three hours until the rebels had the garrison in crossfire from two.30 caliber machine guns on tripods, and the army raised the white flag. The rebels counted six dead, the army fourteen, and fourteen taken prisoner, the bloodiest encounter in this war. The rebels loaded an army truck with forty-six rifles, two machine guns, six thousand rounds of ammunition, medicine, clothes, food. The victory proved the value of Fidel’s tactics and the vulnerability of army outposts. All were closed and the troops moved to Oriente’s main military bases.

Moncho and Alfie were waiting for Quinn at the house of Arsenio’s old wife. Quinn briefed them on his interview and his cigar and said he needed to sleep before he could utter another word. They put him in the backseat of Moncho’s car with a pillow and Moncho drove to Palma Soriano where Renata and Quinn would resume their honeymoon.

But Renata was not there.

Holtz said he had driven her back from Moncho’s in the Buick an hour after Quinn’s departure for Fidel. She said she did not want to sleep in that house, and when they got to Holtz’s she immediately went to her room. Holtz woke at eight this morning to find that she and the Buick were gone, and no message left.

Quinn was baffled. She knew she was a target for the police or the SIM through her link to Diego, and maybe because she joined the protesting women in Céspedes Park. Was she angry at not seeing Fidel? She knew it was unlikely. Punishing Quinn for going without her? And how does vanishing compensate for being left out? Isolating herself to cool down? Going off alone to affirm her intrepidity, self-sufficiency, guts, and defiance — making a willful leap into rebel-fugitive status?

They checked airlines to see if she flew to Havana. Would she take a train? Drive? They checked hospitals for accidents. Would she go home? Unlikely. Her mother said the police had come to the house looking for her. Should we call the police in Santiago to see if she’s in custody? No. Retrace her steps — follow the road back to Santiago to see if the car had a breakdown, or was abandoned. Check city streets, restaurants, the Yacht Club. Check the hotel — she’s still registered and has clothes in the room. Have Holtz call anybody left in the Directorio to see if she made contact. Call Esme. Call her aunt in Cárdenas, the one she lied about going to see. Natalia would call Renata’s friends in Oriente, but she only knew a few. Moncho called people in the 26th underground in Santiago. He sent a message to Fidel’s people to be on the watch, also to Arsenio. Moncho had family contacts to call. Holtz and his sister got nowhere. Moncho turned up nothing. Quinn called Max who instantly blamed Quinn for letting her go off alone. He said the Post couldn’t run his Fidel interview because of new censorship pressure. Max said he’d pass the word to his spies in high places, the Buro, the police. “If anything happens to that girl, Quinn. .” and he hung up.

She would call. She would come back to Holtz’s. She would get a message to Quinn, her husband. She was so wildly in love that she had married him before she got to know him. She was a resourceful woman. Savvy. A good driver. Didn’t drink much. Knew how to protect herself. Wouldn’t willfully put herself in jeopardy. Smart as they come. Brilliant. A survivor. Narciso said danger lay ahead for her and gave her that necklace, told her to show it to her enemy and tell him if he harms her Changó will kill him. She took that seriously. Narciso said Quinn was in danger from murderers. The police? The SIM? Batista’s freelance gangsters? Alfie said he’d put his friends on the case. Alfie was worried. He really liked Renata. He’d look for her with Quinn, wherever, however long it took.

Quinn entered the hall, his hair thick in a casual torsion to the right, and very black. He smiled at the group, mostly men, though he could not be sure whether women were among them. Their number seemed to diminish, which was of no matter. He was ready to speak, and did, text in hand which he did not look at or need, and what he said evoked laughter from all, and he knew the audience was ready for him and he grew confident. He spoke about faces and masks, how we need them to survive, which was a gaffe. He suddenly realized he knew several of the men and they were dead. To his left sat an old colleague, dead, but full of smiles that seemed earnest, which was unlikely, for there was bad history here. Perhaps it was a welcoming, glad to see you here among the dead.

The reason Quinn was speaking of surviving to dead men would become clear, he was sure. He talked on but the audience was now lost to him, vanishing rather quickly. The old colleague stood up and smiled, not speaking, but giving enthusiastic gestures for all Quinn was saying. Then he left and Quinn turned and spoke his next words to half a dozen listeners, his hair moving and then flung back in a manner that suggested a brilliant British film actor whose name he could not remember. He wondered if any in the audience would recognize the dramatic effect of the thrown hair, which was a bodily gesture of completion, confidence, singularity. It was a most dramatic effect for any actor. It did not matter that the audience was gone. Quinn knew how witty, how meaningful his remarks were.

“The arc of justice,” he said to the empty room, “the arc of justice. .”