Havana

Chapter 53

Frenchy had taken down all the Harvard crap. Out went the tennis rackets, the pennants, the photos of the '47 tennis squad clustered smiling and blond around that stupid trophy. He threw out all messages from Roger, who wanted his personal goods back. He had a certain police detective visit Roger and suggest, unsubtly, that Roger get the hell out of Cuba. Word reached him that Roger had obeyed his order.

Frenchy no longer wore boola-boola blue blazers and tennis flannels but instead dark tropical suits, bespeaking a man of gravitas and intensity. He fired Roger's secretary in an ungentle fashion, and promoted a new girl from the pool who would be loyal entirely and absolutely to him. To make sure of that, he proposed that night, and the next started screwing her hard. He changed the locks on all the file cabinets and the security vault. He had the carpenters nail down the windows. He forbade the janitor to come in unannounced. He directed that all correspondence to Roger St. John Evans be destroyed immediately.

Frenchy was now on the move. He at last had a budget he controlled, an agenda he believed in and no one to suck up to-people, including the ambassador, now sucked up to him. He could give free rein to all his impulses toward destruction and conquest. He had wasted no time, and, using as leverage his ability to arrange extremely profitable grants from the Agency to various factotums in the Cuban security apparatus, directed a general closing down of all radical elements of society. Several newspapers and magazines were raided, their staff members carried off to unforgettably rough treatment in cells in the Morro Fortress. All reports on interrogations were forwarded to Frenchy, and he read them with concentration, looking for connections and cross-links, points of weakness, methods of attack. In very short order he developed a superior working knowledge of the Cuban radical underground. And, of course, he ordered surveillance of the Soviet Trade Legation doubled.

And, again in astonishingly short order, he became beloved and feared. The businessmen were not used to directness, instantaneous results and the pure aggression that was Frenchy's style. But they were practical men, and they got it; secretly, they'd been sick of Roger's airy, aristocratic manner and offhanded laziness, and had long since caught on he didn't know or do a goddamned thing. Frenchy came to each corporation, made an intimate pact with its security officers, and provided a special gift of intelligence to each powerful executive, all without destroying anyone's ego on the tennis court.

But now he had the first crisis of his young career.

He had no time for rage or recriminations. He simply marked it down as a bad operating principle, using ill-disciplined, untrained workers, while at the same time realizing that he was more or less committed to them.

"You find him again, you kill him. That's what those two bozos have to do now, and if they fail, Mr. Lansky, it will upset me. Believe me, you do not want to upset me, do you understand?"

Lansky, who had faced some of the most brazen gangsters of all time, was contrite in the face of Frenchy's newly emergent power personality. He was a shrewd enough judge to realize that this was who Frenchy had been all along, and that his true essence was simply coming out. And of course, it was true: his men had blown it.

"They'll succeed this time. I am as upset as you."

"I'm not upset, Mr. Lansky."

"Meyer."

"I'm not upset, Mr. Lansky. I don't get upset; I get things done. Now I need answers. Can these two find him on their own?"

"Truth is: probably not. Give them guns or knives, let them loose, and they'll get a job done. This New York fellow once sprayed a cop in Times Square. He even killed a police horse. The Cuban is known as a torturer."

"I know Captain Latavistada's reputation. I saw him operate at Moncada after the attack. Even the other men in SIM fear him. But the question is: are they clever enough to find Earl Swagger, for your sake and mine? You say no."

"The Cuban has formerly worked out of Santiago. He knows that city. Here, he's like an Iowa boy in New York. As for Frankie Carbine, a smart one he's never been. He was used in New York for jobs with guns or fists. He was a soldier. He never would have become more than a soldier."

"All right. I will find Earl. You get these clowns off the street. Right now, they're doing more harm than good. When I find Swagger, you have them ready to move. I want them hot and loaded for bear with a full tank of gas. I'll give you an address, and they will do the thing. And they will succeed this time. This is a very dangerous man, but on aggression alone they will succeed. Even this man is made of flesh, not steel."

"I will set it up."

"Thank you. Now I have some calls to make."

He quickly arranged to meet the heads of the Cuban Internal Security Ministry and its action arm, the Cuban Secret Police, at the well-appointed Internal Security headquarters in the beautiful Capitolio building, that mock version of the U.S. Capitol set amid gardens in Old Havana.

"Gentlemen," he said gravely, "I want you to understand that a lie has been told. It is a good lie, a lie in obedience to noble principles. I told it."

The two man stared at him, surrounded by their staff members. Cigar smoke hung heavy in the air. Old campaigners and battlers, formed in the gangsterismo politics of the thirties and forties, believers in the presidente who had rejoiced in his return in 1952, the two weren't quite sure what to make of this supremely confident young American who was said to be so highly connected to American power that the ambassador himself feared him. They would wait and see what the young fellow had to say.

Frenchy blazed ahead.

"The lie was that the American who escaped yesterday from two state policemen was a simple tourist with a visa problem. We told you this. We lied."

"And, what," asked the chief of the secret police, "was he then?"

"He was a spy. He was a traitor. We had caught on to his activities, had him arrested on a technicality and were in the process, with the help of your state police, of returning him to America for interrogation."

"If this is such a dangerous man, why weren't we informed, Senor Short?"

"I could tell you another lie, but I won't. The lying is no good. It was my decision. Everything was meant to be low-key, unnoticed. He himself did not even understand that we were on to him, or so we thought. But he was far cleverer than I gave him credit for, and he understood what fate awaited him. Thus he assaulted your men and managed to escape."

"Well, then, we must begin a manhunt. He is almost certainly still in Havana. Why, we can blanket the city with his picture. We can put it on the television. We can describe him on the radio. Our Cubans are patriots and they will hunt for him if so instructed. He won't be able to move ten feet without being spotted. Our departments stand at the ready to prevent the spread of the communist plague."

"Yes, I knew you'd say that, and that I could count on you. And I request your efforts in helping me locate him. I request your intelligence networks, your spies, your connections in the underworld. But I would prefer nothing of a large public nature to happen. We don't need more outrages of the sort that scare our businessmen and harm the investment climate. If your people can locate this man, I'd prefer if they hold off once they spot him. I have a team, a very special team, well trained and highly experienced, who will handle the actual details of the arrest. So I want no all-points bulletins and no television or radio announcements and no posters. No, I want it done on the hush-hush; that is, by word of mouth, by description, by interrogation, by observation-but not with a raid. I will handle the raid."

"This is a very unique situation," said the secret police chief.

"Yes, it is," said Frenchy. "And if it helps, I'd be happy to tell certain people how cooperative you've been. I'm sure that if I whispered certain things in certain ears, certain forms of aid could be forthcoming to each of your departments. Our budgets for fighting subversion are quite large. I have no problem citing the names of those men and departments who have shown special zeal in their duties. Those who hurt my enemies become my friends and I pay my friends in generous ways."

"Then tell us what you require."