Cuba

CHAPTER FIVE

Eighty-four people were packed aboard Angel del Mar as she headed for the mouth of the small bay under a velvet black sky strewn with stars. A sliver of moon cast just enough light to see the sand on the bars at the entrance of the bay.

The boat rode low in the water and seemed to react sluggishly to the small swells that swept down the channel.

“This is insane,” Ocho said to Diego Coca, who was leaning against the wall of the small wheelhouse.

“We’ll make it. We’ll reach the rendezvous in the Florida Keys an hour or two before dawn. Vamos con Dios.”

“God had better be with us,” Ocho muttered, and reached for Dora. The baby didn’t show yet. She was of medium height, with a trim, athletic frame. How well he knew her body.

As far as he knew, he was the only one on the boat who had brought water or food. Oh, the other passengers had things, all right, sacks and boxes of things too precious to leave behind: clothes, pictures, silver, Bibles, rosaries, crucifixes that had decorated the walls of their homes and their parents’ and grandparents’ homes.

Boxes and sacks were stacked around each person, who sat on the deck or on his pile. Men, women, children, some merely babies in arms … It appeared to Ocho as if the Saturday night crowd from an entire section of ballpark bleachers had been miraculously transported to the deck of this small boat.

The breeze smelled of the sea, clean, tangy, crisp. He took a deep breath, wondered if this were his last night of life.

He pulled Dora closer to him, felt the warmth and promise of her body.

Well, this boatload of people would make it to Florida or they wouldn’t, as God willed it. He had never thought much about religion, merely accepted it as part of life, but through the years he had learned about God’s will. He was not one of those athletes who crossed himself every time he went to the plate or prepared to make a crucial pitch, vainly asking God for assistance in trivial matters, but he knew to a certainty that most of the major events of life — be you ballplayer, manager, father, husband, cane worker, whatever — are beyond your control. Events take their own course and humans are swept along with them. Call it God’s will or chance or fate or what have you, all a man could do was throw the ball as well as he could, with all the guile and skill he could muster. What happened after the ball left your fingers was beyond your control. In God’s hands, or so they said. If God cared.

For the first time in his life Ocho wondered if God cared.

He was still thinking along these lines when the boat buried its bow in the first big swell at the harbor entrance. Spray came flying back clear to the wheelhouse. People shrieked, some laughed, all tried to find some bit of shelter.

People were moving, holding up clothing or pieces of cardboard when the next cloud of spray came flying back.

The boat rose somewhat as she met each swell, but she was too heavily loaded.

“We’re not even out of the harbor,” muttered the man beside Ocho. His voice sounded infinitely weary.

Dora hugged Ocho, clung to him as she stared into the night.

She barely came to his armpit. He braced himself against the wall of the wheelhouse, held her close.

The boat labored into the swells, flinging heavy sheets of spray back over the people huddled on the deck.

The door to the wheelhouse opened. A bare head came out, shouted at Diego Coca: “The boat is overloaded, man! It is too dangerous to go on. We must turn back.”

Diego pulled a pistol from his pocket and placed the muzzle against the man’s forehead. He pushed the man back through the door, followed him into the tiny shack and pulled the door shut behind him.

The man next to Ocho said, “We may make it … if the sea gets no rougher. I was a fisherman once, I know of these things.”

The man was in his late sixties perhaps, with a deeply lined face and hair bleached by the sun. Ocho had studied his face in the twilight, before the light completely disappeared. Now the fisherman was merely a shape in the darkness, a remembered face.

“Your father is crazy,” Ocho told Dora, speaking in her ear over the noise of the wind and sea. She said nothing, merely held him tighter.

It was then he realized she was as frightened as he.

Angel del Mar smashed its way northward under a clear, starry sky. The wind seemed steady from the west at twelve or fifteen knots. Already drenched by spray, with no place to shelter themselves, the people on deck huddled where they were. From his position near the wheelhouse Ocho could just see the people between the showers of spray, dark shapes crowding the deck in the faint moonlight, for there were no other lights so that the boat might go unnoticed by Cuban naval patrols.

“When we get to the Gulf Stream,” the fisherman beside Ocho shouted in his ear above the noise of the wind and laboring diesel engine, “ … swells … open the seams … founder in this sea.”

In addition to heaving and pitching, the boat was also rolling heavily since there was so much weight on deck. The roll to starboard seemed most pronounced when the boat crested a swell, when it was naked to the wind.

Ocho Sedano buried his face in Dora’s hair and held her tightly as the boat plunged and reared, turned his body to shield her somewhat from the clouds of spray that swept over them.

He could hear people retching; the vomit smell was swept away on the wind and he caught none of it.

On the boat went into the darkness, bucking and writhing as it fought the sea.

Late in the evening William Henry Chance met his associate at the mahogany bar in El Floridita, one of the flashiest old nightclubs in Old Havana. This monstrosity was the dazzling heart of prerevolutionary Havana in the bad old days; black-and-white photos of Ernest Hemingway, Cary Grant, and Ava Gardner still adorned the walls. The place was full of Americans who had traveled here in defiance of their government’s ban on travel to Cuba. As bands belted out salsa and rhumba, the Americans drank, ate, and scrutinized voluptuous prostitutes clad in tight dresses and high heels.

Chance’s associate was Tommy Carmellini, a Stanford law school graduate in his late twenties. The baggy sportscoat and pleated trousers did nothing to show off Carmellini’s wide shoulders and washboard stomach. Still, a thoughtful observer would conclude he was remarkably fit for a man who spent twelve hours a day at a desk.

“Looks like the Cubans have come full circle,” Chance said when Carmellini joined him at the bar. He had to speak up to be heard above the music coming through the open windows.

“Goes around and comes around,” Tommy Carmellini agreed. “I wonder just how many different social diseases are circulating in this building tonight.”

When they were outside on the sidewalk strolling along, William Henry Chance pulled a cigar from the pocket of his sports jacket, which was folded over his left arm. He bit off the end of the thing, then cupped his hands against the breeze and lit it with a paper match. The wind blew out the first two matches, but he got the cigar going with the third one. After a couple puffs, he sighed.

“Smells delicious,” Carmellini said.

“Cuban cigars are the real deal. Gonna be the new ‘in’ thing. You should try one.”

“Naw. I just might like cigars. I’ve made it this far without smoking, I’m going to try to go all the way.”

They paused outside a nightclub and listened to the music pouring out. “That’s a good band.”

“If you close your eyes, this sorta feels like Miami Beach.”

“Miami del Sud.”

They walked on. “So what do you hear?”

“The pacifiers are working. All three of them. This afternoon Vargas talked to his subordinates about this and that, the minister of finance had phone sex with a girlfriend, and Castro’s top aide talked to the doctors for an hour.”

“How is the old goat doing?”

“Not good, the man said. The doctors talked about how much narcotics to administer to ensure he didn’t suffer.”

“Any guesses when?”

“No.”

“The Cuban exile, El Gato, where does he fit in?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“He’s in the casino now with three Russian gangsters, people he knows apparently, playing for high stakes.”

“El Gato is supposed to be an influential and powerful enemy of the Castro regime,” Chance muttered. “Sure does make you wonder.”

“Yeah,” said Carmellini. He and Chance both knew that the FBI had an agent and three informers in El Gato’s chemical supply business looking for evidence that it was the source of supply for some of the makings of Fidel Castro’s biological warfare program. So far, nothing. Then El Gato unexpectedly swanned off to Havana. Chance and Carmellini were coming anyway, but now they had a new item added to their agenda.

And Castro was dying.

“I’d like to know what the Cat is going to tell all his exile friends when he gets back to Florida,” Tommy Carmellini said. “Maybe if he winds up in the right offices we’ll find out, eh?”

That reference to the executive pacifiers made Chance grin. He puffed the cigar a few times while holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger.

“You don’t really know much about smoking cigars, do you?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Yes, sir.”

Chance put the cigar between his teeth at a jaunty angle and puffed fearlessly three or four times. Then he took the thing from his mouth and held it so he could see it. “Wish I could get the hang of it,” he said. “Cuba seemed like a good place to learn about cigars.”

He tossed the stogie into a gutter on the street.

“Makes me a little light-headed.” Chance grinned sheepishly and wiped a sheen of perspiration from his brow.

He stood listening to the sounds of the crowd and the snatches of music floating from the bars and casinos, thinking about biological weapons.

Angel del Mar was only a half hour past the mouth of the harbor when the fisherman beside Ocho Sedano pulled at his arm to attract his attention. Then he shouted, “We will reach the Gulf Stream soon. The swells will be larger. We are too deeply loaded. We must get rid of what weight we can.”

The boat was corkscrewing viciously. Ocho nodded, passed Dora to the fisherman, pulled open the wheelhouse door and carefully stepped inside.

The captain worked the wheel with an eye on the compass. The faint glow from the binnacle and the engine RPM indicator were the only lights — they cast a faint glow on the captain’s face and that of Diego Coca, who was wedged in beside him, the gun still in his hand. Both men were facing forward, looking through the window at the sheets of spray being flung up when the bow smacked into a swell with an audible thud. The shock of those collisions could be felt through the deck and walls of the wheelhouse.

“You are suicidal,” the captain shouted at Diego. “The sea will get worse when we reach the Gulf Stream. We are only a mile or two from it!”

Diego backed up, braced himself against the aft wall of the tiny compartment, pointed the pistol in the center of the captain’s back. He held up his hand to hold off Ocho.

“You took the money,” Diego said accusingly to the captain.

“Don’t be a fool, man.”

“America! Or I shoot you, as God is my witness.”

“You want to drown out here, in this watery hell?”

“You took the money!” Diego shouted.

Ocho stepped forward and Diego pointed the pistol at him. “Back,” he said. “Get back. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.”

Ocho Sedano leaned forward. “I think they are right, what they say. You are crazy. You will kill every man and woman on this boat. Even the babies.”

“The boat is overloaded,” the captain said without looking at Ocho. “We have to get some weight off. Throw the fishing gear over, the baggage, everything.”

Ocho pulled the door open and stepped out onto the pitching deck. He took Dora from the fisherman, pushed her into the wheelhouse, and pulled the door until it latched.

“We must get rid of some weight. Everything goes overboard but the people.”

The fisherman nodded, took the bags near his feet and threw them into the white foam being thrown out by the bow. Then he grabbed Ocho’s bag and tossed it before the young man could stop him.

Madre mia!

Walking on that bucking deck was difficult. Ocho made his way forward, picking up every sack and box in reach and throwing it into the sea. Some people protested, grabbed their belongings and tried to prevent their loss, but he was too strong. He tore the bags from the women’s grasp and heaved heavy boxes as if they were empty.

Up the deck he went toward the bow, drenched every time the bow went in, throwing everything he could get his hands on into the foam created by the bow’s passage.

Other people were throwing things too. Soon the deck contained only the people, who huddled in small groups, their backs to the spray. The nets hanging on the mast were lowered to the deck, then put into the sea and cut loose.

Near the bow the motion was vicious. The salt sea spray slamming back almost took him off his feet. He caught himself on a line that stabilized the mast, then worked his way aft holding on to the rail.

He thought the boat was riding easier, but maybe it was only his imagination.

Then they got into the Gulf Stream. The swells grew progressively larger, the motion of the boat even more vicious.

How much of this could the boat take?

People cried out, praying aloud, lifted their hands to heaven. He could hear the women wailing over the rumbling of the engine, the pounding of the sea.

He tried the door to the wheelhouse.

Locked!

He rattled the knob, twisted it fiercely, pulled with all his strength.

“Open up, Diego.”

He pounded futilely on the door.

Six people were huddled in the lee of the tiny wheelhouse, blocking the door. One of them was Dora. He leaned over her, pounded futilely on the door with his fist.

He looked down at Dora, who had her head down.

Frustrated, drained, sick of himself and Diego and Dora, he found a spot against the aft wall of the wheelhouse and buried his head in his arms to keep the spray from his face.

He was drifting, thinking of his mother, reviewing scenes from his childhood when Mercedes shook him awake. Still under the influence of the painkilling drugs, Fidel Castro opened his eyes to slits and blinked mightily against the dim light.

“Maximo is here, Fidel, as you asked.”

He tried to chase away the past, to come back to the present. His mouth was dry, his tongue like cotton. “Time?”

“Almost midnight.”

He nodded, looked around the room at the walls, the ceiling, the dark shapes of people and furniture. He couldn’t see faces.

“A light.”

She reached for the switch.

When his eyes adjusted, he saw Maximo standing in the shadows. He motioned with a finger. Yes, it was Maximo: now he could see his features.

“Mi amigo.”

“Señor Presidente,” Maximo said.

“Closer, in the light.”

Maximo Sedano knelt near the bed.

“I don’t have much time left to me,” Castro explained. His mouth was so numb that he was having trouble enunciating his words.

“I want the money brought back.”

“To Cuba?”

“Yes. All of it.”

“You will have to sign and put your thumbprints on the transfer cards.”

“The money was never mine, you understand.”

“I had faith in you, Señor Presidente. We all had faith.”

“Faith …”

“I will go to my office now, then return.”

“Mercedes will admit you.”

Ocho Sedano was soaked to the skin, covered with vomit from the woman beside him, when he heard the cry. Holding onto the wheelhouse wall with one hand and the net boom mast with the other, he levered himself erect, braced himself against the motion of the boat.

Waves were washing over the bow, which seemed to be lower in the water. The bow wasn’t rising to the sea the way it did when he sat down an hour ago, or maybe the waves were just higher.

Someone was against the rail, pointing aft.

“Man overboard!”

“Madre mia, have mercy!”

Another swell came aboard and two people braced against the lee rail were swept into the sea as the boat rolled.

Ocho turned to the wheelhouse, pulled people from against the door and savagely twisted the latch handle. He pounded on the door with his left fist.

“Let me in, Diego! So help me, I will kill you if you don’t turn the boat around.”

The bow began turning to put the wind and swells more astern..

A muffled report came from inside the wheelhouse.

Ocho braced himself, then rammed his left fist against the upper panel of the door. The wood splintered, his fist went through almost to his elbow. He reached down, unlatched the door, jerked it open.

The captain lay on the floor. Diego Coca stood braced against the back wall, his hands covering his face. The pistol was nowhere in sight. The wheel snapped back and forth as the seas slammed at the rudder.

Ocho bent down to check the captain.

He had a wet place in the middle of his back, right between his shoulder blades. No pulse.

At least the boat seemed more stable with the swells behind it.

For how long? How long would the engine keep running?

The fisherman opened the door, saw Ocho at the wheel, the dark shape lying on the floor.

“Is he dead?” the man shouted.

“Yes.”

“We must put out a sea anchor in case the engine stops. If the boat turns broadside to the sea, it will be swamped.”

“Can you do it?”

“I will get men to help,” the fisherman said, and closed what was left of the door.

A great lassitude swept over Ocho Sedano. His sin with the girl had brought all of these people here to die, had brought them to this foundering boat in a rough, windswept night sea with a million cold stars looking down without pity.

Then he realized that the forward deck was empty.

Empty!

The people were gone. Into the sea … that must be it! They were swept overboard.

“Ocho.”

Diego put his hand on the young man’s shoulder, gripped hard.

“I didn’t mean to shoot him. As God is my witness, I did not mean for this to happen. It was an accident.”

Ocho swept the hand away.

He pointed through the glass at the forward deck. “They are gone! Look. The people are gone!”

“I did not mean for this to happen,” Diego repeated mechanically.

“What?” Ocho demanded. “What did you not intend? For the captain to die? For your daughter to drown at sea? For all of those people on that deck to die? What did you not intend, Diego?”

Oh, my God, that this should happen!

“Answer me!” he roared at Diego Coca, who refused to look forward through the wheelhouse windshield.

“Look, you bastard,” Ocho ordered through clenched teeth, and grabbed the smaller man by the neck. He rammed his head forward against the glass.

“See what your greed and stupidity have cost.”

Then he threw Diego Coca to the floor.

The impact of the disaster bowed Ocho’s head, bent his back, emptied his heart. Diego’s guilt did not lessen his, and oh, he knew that well. He, Ocho Sedano, was guilty. His lust had set this chain of events in motion. He felt as if he were trying to support the weight of the earth.

Maximo Sedano’s office in the finance ministry reflected his personal taste. The furniture was simple, deceptively so. The woods were hardwoods from the Amazon rain forest, crafted in Brazil by masters. Little souvenirs from his travels across Europe and Latin America sat on the desk and credenza and hung on the walls, small things of little value because expensive trinkets would be impolitic.

He turned on the light, then walked to the huge floor safe, which he unlocked and opened. He found the drawer he wanted, removed a stiff document envelope, took it to his desk and adjusted the light.

With the contents of the envelope spread out on the highly polished mahogany, Maximo Sedano paused and looked around the room with unseeing eyes. He blinked several times, then leaned back in his chair and stretched.

There were four bank accounts in Switzerland, all controlled by Fidel Castro. The last time Maximo computed the interest, the amount in the accounts totaled $53 million. Castro had been very specific when the accounts were opened years ago; the accounts were to be denominated in United States dollars. This choice had worked out extraordinarily well through the years as the currencies of every other major trading nation underwent major inflation or devaluation. The United States dollar was the modern-day equivalent of gold, although it would certainly be poor politics for any member of the Castro regime to say so publicly.

Fifty-three million dollars.

Quite a sum.

Enough to live extraordinarily well for a millennium or two.

Fidel kept that little nest egg in Switzerland just in case things went wrong here in this communist paradise and he had to skedaddle. No sense living on government charity in some other squalid communist paradise, like Poland or Russia or the Ukraine, when a little prior planning could solve the whole problem. So Fidel rat-holed a fortune where only he could get at it and slept soundly at night.

Now he wanted the money back in Cuba.

Not that the money ever really belonged to the Cuban government. The money came from drug dealers, fees for using Cuban harbors for sanctuary, fees for being able to send shipments directly to Cuba, stockpile the drugs, then ship them on when the time was right.

The money was really just Castro’s personal share of the drug fees. An even larger chunk of the profits had gone to army, navy and law enforcement personnel, all of them, every man in the country who wore a uniform had been paid; another chunk went to Castro’s lieutenants and political allies. Maximo had received almost a half million dollars himself. All in all, the deals with the drug syndicates had been good public policy — the drug business was highly profitable, giving Castro money to buy loyalty and so remain in power, and the business corrupted America, which he hated. Ah, yes, the money came from the United States despite the best efforts of the American government to prevent it. Fidel had savored that irony too.

Fifty-three million.

Maximo pursed his lips as he thought about the life of luxury and privilege that a fortune that size would buy. The money could be invested, some hotels, bank stock, invested to earn a nice income without touching the principal.

He could stay in the George V in Paris, ski in St. Moritz, shop in London and Rome and yacht all over the Mediterranean.

God, it was tempting!

Fifty-three million.

All he had to do was get Castro’s thumbprint on the transfer order. Without that thumbprint, the banks would not move a solitary dollar.

Really, those Swiss banks … Maximo had urged Castro to transfer the money to Spanish and Cuban banks for months, ever since the dictator was diagnosed with cancer. If he died with the money still in Switzerland, prying money out of those banks was going to be like peeling fresh paint from a wall with fingernails. And the drug dealers thought their racket was profitable!

But why be a piker? Why settle for $53 million when there was a lot more, somewhere?

From his pocket he removed a coin, a gold five-peso coin dated 1915. There was a portrait of José Marti on one side and the crest of Cuba on the other.

Gold circulated in Cuba until the revolution, until Fidel and the communists declared it was no longer legal tender and called it in, allowing the peso to float on the world market.

Maximo rubbed the gold coin with his fingers. By his calculations, based upon Ministry of Finance records, almost 1.2 million ounces of gold were surrendered to the government in return for paper money.

One million, two hundred thousand ounces … about thirty-seven tons of gold. On the world market, that thirty-seven tons of gold should be worth about $360 million.

A man who could get his hands on that hoard would be on easy street for the rest of his life. Yes, indeed.

The only problem was finding it. It wasn’t in the Finance Ministry vaults, it wasn’t in the vaults of the Bank of Cuba, on account at banks in Switzerland or London or New York or Mexico City … it was gone!

Thirty-seven tons of gold, vanished into thin air.

If a man could lay hands on that gold … well, Alejo Vargas and Hector Sedano could fight over the presidency of Cuba, and may the better man win. Maximo would take the gold. If he could find it.

He had a few ideas about where it might be. In fact, he had been quietly researching the problem since he took over the Finance Ministry. Eight years of ransacking files, talking to old employees, looking at clues, thinking about the problem — the gold had to be in Cuba, in Havana. Thirty-seven tons of gold.

A life of ease and luxury in the spas of Europe, mingling with the rich and famous, surrounded by beautiful women and the best of everything …

But first the $53 million.

He would type the account numbers on the transfer orders and the accounts the money was to be transferred to. He would use the secretary’s typewriter. He had the account numbers written in the notebook he removed from the safe. He flipped through the notebook now, found the page, stared at the numbers.

How closely would Fidel check the order?

The man is sick, drugged, dying. He is barely conscious. Unless he has the numbers of the accounts in the Bank of Cuba by his bedside, he’ll be none the wiser.

But what if he does? What if he has the numbers written down in a book or diary and hands the transfer order to Mercedes to check? What then?

Fifty-three million. More money than God has.

He remembered the old days when he was young, when Castro walked the earth like Jesus Christ with a Cuban accent. Ah, the fire of the revolution, how the true believers were going to change the world!

Instead, time changed them, America bled them, and life defeated them.

Maximo had been loyal to Fidel and the revolution. No one could ever say he was not. He had been with Fidel since he was twenty-four years old, just back from the university in Spain. He had endured the good times and the bad, never uttered a single word of criticism. He had faith in Fidel, proclaimed it publicly and demanded it of others.

Now Castro was dying. In just a few days he would be beyond regrets.

Fifty-three million.

The pounding the overloaded boat had taken bucking the heavy Gulf Stream swells opened the seams somewhat, and now the fisherman was pumping out the water with the bilge pump, which received its power from the engine-driven generator.

“As long as we can keep the engine running, as long as the seams don’t open any more than they are, we’ll be all right.”

“How much fuel do we have on board?”

The fisherman went to check.

Ocho was at the helm, steering almost due east. With the wind and sea behind her, the Angel del Mar rode better. Now the motion was a rocking as the swells swept under the stern. Very little roll from side to side.

Of the eighty-four people who had been aboard when the boat left the harbor in Cuba, twenty-six remained alive. The captain’s body lay against the wheelhouse wall.

Ocho found Diego’s pistol and put it in his belt. He physically carried Diego from the wheelhouse and tossed him on the deck.

Fifty-seven living human beings, men, women, and babies, had gone into the sea. There was no way in the world to go back to try to rescue them. Even if he and the fisherman could find those people in the water, in the darkness, in this sea, the pounding of heading back into the swells would probably cause the boat to take on more water, endangering the lives of those who remained aboard.

No, the people swept overboard were lost to their fate, whatever that might be.

The living twenty-six would soon join them, Ocho told himself. The boat was heading east, away from Florida.

Perhaps if the sea calmed somewhat, they should bring the boat to a more southerly heading and return to Cuba.

That, he decided, was their only chance.

Cuba. They would have to return.

Why wait? Every sea mile increased the likelihood of the engine quitting or the boat sinking.

He turned the helm a bit, worked the boat’s bow to a more southerly heading. The roll became more pronounced. The wind came more over the right stern quarter.

How long until dawn? An hour or two?

The door to the wheelhouse opened. Diego was standing there, the whites of his eyes glistening in the dim light. “Turn back toward Florida! No one wants to go back to Cuba.”

“It’s the only way. We’ll all die trying to make it to Florida in this sea.”

“I was dead in Cuba all those years,” Diego Coca shouted. “I refuse to go go back! I refuse.”

Ocho hit him in the mouth. One mighty jab with his left hand as he twisted his body, so all his weight was behind the punch. Diego went down backward, hit his head on the deck coaming, and lay still.

Dora wailed, crawled toward her unconscious father.

Ocho closed the door to the wheelhouse, brought the boat back to its southeast heading.

Soon the door opened again and the fisherman stepped inside. “We have fuel for another ten or twelve hours. No more than that.”

“We’ll be back in Cuba then.”

“That’s our only chance.”

The stars in the east were fading when the engine quit. After trying for a minute to start the engine, the fisherman dashed below.

Ocho abandoned the helm. The boat rolled sickeningly in the swells.

At least the swells were smaller than they were earlier in the night, in the middle of the Gulf Stream.

The fisherman came up on deck after fifteen minutes, his clothes soaked in diesel fuel. “It’s no use,” he said. “The engine has had it.”

“What about the water in the bilges? Is it still coming in?”

“We’ll have to take turns on the hand pump.”

“What are we going to do about the engine?” Ocho asked.

The fisherman didn’t reply, merely stood looking at the swells as the sky grew light in the east.