Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War

CUBA LIBRE ^{BY KATHERINE NEVILLE}

He felt them rubbing the cold grease onto his temples. He kept his eyes shut against what he knew was coming. They were doing it again; no one could stop them, the shock of volts would slam through his head like a railroad car—and then, oblivion. They’d got him good now, hadn’t they? Sucker punched, and down for the count. How had this happened? It was his own fault. He should have been warned, all the signs were there, he should have seen it coming: Mea maxima, maxima culpa. But whenever he said “they” were after him, they were following him, they were spying on him, it was dismissed as paranoia. Well, paranoia or none, he knew what they were after: they were after his memory. He knew what men could do, what their actions could lead to. And now they wanted to erase his memory, kill it. They could kill him too. They would kill him. They were killing him. His job, his only job now—before the next deadly lightning bolt hit—was to hold on to what he knew. Hold on to truth. He forced himself to go down into those dangerous, dark pools of his past, descending deeper and deeper and darker, moving down until all the muted light surrounding him was slowly swallowed into darkness, despairing, despairing… then suddenly he thought he glimpsed it—just a quick flash!—like that trout lurking against the pebbled bottom of a riverbed.

And then he knew what he must communicate; he just prayed it was not too late.

My name is Paloma Perez. I am twenty-three years old, I’m so-called “mestizo” (part Anglo/Spanish, part Native American), of the Catholic faith, born in New Mexico of parents who separated shortly after my birth. I am a graduate student in History of Journalism. I am currently on an exchange grant between New Mexico State and University of Idaho. The latter place has an archive containing many very important papers of the famous writer who is the subject of my dissertation. I’ve been working on this project for almost two years. Though all my professors except one think it’s a humongous waste of time to cross that tundra again.

I’m sitting in the living room of my cabin along the Big Wood River, hundreds of miles south of the campus at Moscow, Idaho. The Big Wood is a fast river that runs from the Galena summit, 9,000 feet up in the Sawtooth Mountains, down to the reservoir below my cabin, where it joins other rivers. It is a great trout-fishing stream. I decided to live in this cabin, on this river, because it is just across the river from the place where, fifty years ago, my subject took his own life.

I mention these facts about myself and my project, because two months ago I took leave from the university and moved here so I could get closer to resolving an enigma about this man that I still cannot quite understand. One way to understand it, I thought, was to try to bond with him in some way. To understand the role that his later journalism played, I believed I needed to figure out what he was thinking just before he died. But now I’m not so sure.

Because tonight, as I was sitting here with a cold plate of uneaten macaroni on the coffee table before me and my notes scattered around me on sofas and chairs, something unexpected happened: I was browsing my subject on my laptop and I somehow got pulled into the back door of a website, where I read something that frightened me. On a black screen background, these words came up: “SECURITY, CONFIDENTIAL: Apply through the Freedom of Information Act through proper channels.”

It was a scam, I thought—so I shut down for the moment.

But that was when I got my first inkling, a premonition that something in my factual research didn’t fit, that something was very wrong. And that little idea, that small piece of doubt, began to rub at me like a burr under my saddle; it was making me more than uncomfortable, more than wary. I felt like I just had to dig it out.

Still, I always take all the security precautions that Leo taught me: I’ve switched my computer onto “private browsing,” so no one can follow my path, trying to track my train of thought; I’ve glued a sticky star onto my laptop’s camera aperture so no one can see me at work; I’ve stripped off the cookies that were left there as tracers by others; I’ve checked the antivirus data… though I cannot shake the certain conviction that I’m being watched. Maybe I’m getting as paranoid as he was. I don’t really care.

I flipped open my laptop and started to write down the facts of what I actually knew. That was four hours ago. And I’m still writing. And it still irritates me, and it still doesn’t fit.

It’s midnight now, I can hear the crickets chirping along the river, a twig snaps outside and I flinch; I go to the window; my motion-detector light is on, flooding the band of guilty culprits that are nightly huddled there at the edge of my gravel drive. A small cluster of white-tailed deer: undeterred by the glaring light, they are peacefully munching my landlord’s blueberry bushes.

I take my cold macaroni plate to the kitchen and I make a pot of black coffee—just the way my subject once famously described doing it, where you boil the grounds and water together right in the pot. (Leo says I’m sick to try to bond with my subject this way, but I hope that maybe tonight, drinking this sludgy muck will clear my brain.)

I get back to the sofa and shuffle my papers into a stack—stuff that I’d earlier culled from the web and half-covered with my own scribbled notes—and I leaf through these as I look on my screen at what I’ve just written tonight:

His name, of course, was Ernest Hemingway.

Even though thousands of books and essays and dissertations have been written on Hemingway’s life and literature they mostly stress the influence that his early journalism training had on him, and how it in turn created his breathtaking impact on American fiction. These are the “facts” that everyone knows. My thesis is very different:

Though Hemingway claimed to despise journalism, he never stopped being a journalist. He wrote hundreds of thousands of words on current events for magazines that paid him very well, scribbling his observations on every conceivable topic from barbershops to boxing, from bullfights to bullshit, from picadors to pecadillos—while decade after decade, he produced less and less fiction, and even then, only under “literary duress.” In the end, if you weighed his fiction against nonfiction, on word count alone, fiction was less than that one-eighth of his total output: the “tip of the iceberg” syndrome.

There was one place that my subject—over a period of thirty years, almost half his life span—had visited, frequented, and finally lived in. Yet he never wrote much about it until late in his life. And even then, it wasn’t reportage, it was just a sketch, a short story, a simple vignette that he crashed out in a matter of weeks, and which he somehow with effort managed to stretch into a brief novel.

It sold five million copies in magazine form, and another million in books. It was made into a movie, it landed him a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. It’s still found in libraries all over the world and taught in schools. It made him rich. Maybe it also made him dangerous. It was—oddly, for a man who hated symbolism—the only allegory he ever wrote: The Old Man and the Sea.

If that simple allegory was the tip of the iceberg, then what exactly was the vast, deep mass of “subaquatic facts” lurking beneath the surface?

It was the place where he’d set the allegory, the place that was almost a character in the story—the place where Hemingway lived from World War II to the very height of the Cold War—the place he loved so much that he refused to leave it, even when he knew he had to, even when his property was about to be seized by the local State, even when he had been warned repeatedly to leave by the U.S. State Department, even when he was being haunted by the FBI, had been threatened by the CIA.

Cuba.

Less than a year after his return to the U.S.—to his house here across this very river, near Ketchum, Idaho—the world’s most famous living writer, Ernest Hemingway, was dead.

That was precisely the burr I’d been struggling to dislodge all night. But now I thought I knew: all the signs had been there all along, hadn’t they? All the numbers now added up. I knew that if I’d figured it out, then whoever was watching me (and I was sure by now that it was not just my imagination) was not likely to hit the “pause” button any time soon. And it really terrified me.

I checked the clock: it was four o’clock in the morning. Yanking some tiny digital memory cards out of a plastic bag I always carried in my jeans pocket, I frantically jammed these, one after another, into my laptop and started downloading my data with links. I left a little jingle as my own calling-card on each. If I couldn’t reach Leo, maybe he could reach me. I would hide these each in ways that he’d be sure to find them. Then I would hit the road just before dawn, and cover my tracks—as he’d taught me, so long ago, to do.

For I’d suddenly guessed why Ernest Hemingway took so long to leave Cuba—even after the revolution was over, after the Castro takeover—why he’d never written about it, why he’d felt he had to encrypt what he knew in an allegory, why right afterward, he’d been in two plane crashes in a row that looked like accidents, why he was so depressed by the huge success of his book—the awards, the money, the spotlight of fame—that he couldn’t go to the Nobel ceremony, could barely bring himself to write his brief acceptance speech.

Less than six months after Hemingway moved back to America, he was secretly flown out of Idaho and slapped, by surprise, into the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he was submitted to electroconvulsive shock therapy: month after excruciating month, over and over, they’d fried his brains. Whatever it was that Hemingway discovered at the height of the Cold War, was something deadly dangerous that had to be erased from his mind—a process that quickly and surely drove him to suicide. The cold, frightening thought even entered my own mind, that he may have been murdered.

This was why I had to reach Leo at once: whatever it was I’d stumbled onto involving Cuba—whatever I was being watched for, paranoia or not—was something that seemed about to raise its ugly head again. Right now.

When Paloma vanished, I was the one who was in trouble with everybody.

Our parents were livid—the only thing they’d agreed on in years was that it was my fault Palo was missing. After all, I’d encouraged her in this crazy idea about Investigative Journalism. Didn’t I know that those kinds of journalists got themselves killed? (Actually, though our dad taught History of Journalism, it involved nothing more recent nor dangerous than Carlyle’s reports on the French Revolution. While mom couldn’t figure out how her gorgeous daughter, at age twenty-three, was still in school and unmarried.)

Not to mention that The Company, my employer, was equally miffed with me. My sister had apparently stumbled in the back door of an “eyes-only” website, sending up incipient-terrorist flags. They thought I’d given her the link (I hadn’t) and they put me on temporary leave, saying I was mucking about in the wrong backyard: Who do you think you are, Leo?—you’re an analyst, not a field operative. (Well actually, I am a field operative—been one for ages—my employer just doesn’t know it!) This break in my routine, however, afforded me the opportunity to do some investigations of my own.

In this entire scenario, my beautiful and brilliant sister, Paloma, seemed to be the only one with a grain of sense in her head. At least, she had the sense to get out of town before the yapping dogs got on her trail. (Well actually, they don’t use yapping dogs in the Rocky Mountains, that’s the Deep South, I believe.)

And she had the presence of mind, just before decamping, to send me that frozen trout: the one with the teeny digital card embedded inside its head. As soon as I got it, I knew she was gone, and why. Despite her fears she’d expressed on that disk, I felt sure my sister was okay. I did not yet know what had spooked her so much that she’d taken the drastic measure of using a dead cutthroat trout as bubble wrap for her communiqué. But since I was now on leave, I didn’t feel it necessary to share that communiqué, at least not yet, with my employer.

I waited with bated (or was it baited?) breath to learn more.

Meanwhile, I dropped by New Mexico State University in Santa Fe to pay a visit to Professor Livia Madachy—“PM” as Palo called her—Palo’s advisor, the one who’d first encouraged her to branch out and study something other than (what everyone else had voted for, due to Palo’s good looks) being a weather girl or a TV anchor.

PM was a middle-aged Anglo lady with tanned skin and leathery wrinkles that outdid even Georgia O’Keeffe’s. Soon, I gathered that Professor Madachy had also received a frozen trout. But hers just had a note that said thanks for supporting an unusual thesis: seems everyone other than PM was down on Hemingway as a topic altogether, and not just here at the university.

According to PM, the Hemingway bashing was nearly universal throughout all of Academia, e.g.: the feminists said he was a machismo misogynist for having four wives he cheated on with each successor, and mistresses on the side; the gay professors called him a sexually insecure homophobe with a penis-gun fetish; the sociologists said he used the “N” word for black persons, and looked down on folks of Indian roots, like Palo and me. In psychology classes they said he suffered from depression exacerbated by alcohol and a long history of familial suicide; even in Palo’s journalism courses they played podcasts from a noted “literary” writer, harping on how boring Hemingway was, and how he’d destroyed American literature. While in literature departments, Hemingway was apparently total anathema. And why not?—after all, the guy got to be a Nobel laureate, while packing nothing by way of credentials but a midwestern public high school diploma.

I could certainly see how Palo had a problem finding a thesis advisor who had accepted her general concept. Now I just had the problem of finding Paloma herself.

Maybe a wolf always returns to its known haunts, but my sister had only one haunt that I ever knew of. And that was the late, great Ernest Hemingway. He seemed the one and only key to my next move.

My little sister was perhaps Hemingway’s first official girl “camp follower.” Palo had been obsessed with Hemingway even as a child. By the age of ten, she’d read everything he ever wrote—his fiction, nonfiction, journalism, letters—and she hankered to go everywhere he’d ever been, so she could experience him in the three dimensions of Life with a capital L, as the legendary, larger-than-life writer had experienced it himself. I confess, whatever one thought of his work, Hemingway was one of the best-looking bastards who ever graced a page of literature.

Because our parents were separated, Palo knew how to torture them into her service in different ways, and she marked them out accordingly: Mom got to suffer through the “Two-Hearted River” phase, where, for month after month, Palo would eat nothing but sandwiches of raw onion slabs, washed down with canned apricots in syrup, and she’d make coffee by boiling the grounds right in the pot, because that’s how Nick Adams, Hemingway’s alter ego, ate when he went fishing alone in the wild, just after the Great War.

Then too, Palo tagged along with our dad at every conference he’d allow—from Venice to Paris to Wyoming—even to Lago Maggiore—consuming along the way everything that our Great White Hunter had eaten, from roast baby pig in Madrid to wild marlin in the Florida Keys.

There was only one place she couldn’t get to, due to “Cold War Hangover” as she put it: the restriction printed into our passports against travel to Cuba. But now—based on her cryptic notes on that fish-scented flash drive she’d sent me—I was pretty sure that was right where Palo would be headed. And though restrictions had started to lift, of late, she’d still need my help and connections to get there. I knew of some private strings I might pull, and I was just checking flights through Miami and Mexico, when the message popped up on my screen from a private, unlisted server. A missive that changed everything.

It was signed simply: The Company.

When it came to “family,” The Company usually got there first: cowboys to the rescue and all.

But apparently, not this time.

I was absolutely miserable. Okay, I’d flunked a major intelligence test, and in doing so, I had maybe killed my own sister. Because one thing was as transparent as a martini glass right now: Palo’s death on that river could be no “accident.”

And yet, during all my rickety flights through the Rockies, from Albuquerque to Salt Lake to Ketchum, and with as many times as I’d read and re-read Palo’s notes on that digital card plugged into my cell phone—again and again and again—they still didn’t add up to her death.

Where was the underbelly of the iceberg? What was I missing?

Even now, out here on the Big Wood River, as the Blaine county sheriff and I moved against the icy current to reach the spot where my sister had last been seen before she vanished beneath the waters, it was all pretty tough for me to visualize. What was she doing on this river all by herself before dawn? Especially since, by now, her paranoia seemed to have had a strong basis in reality.

I had to get to the bottom of it. And fast, before this wild river claimed me, too. Why had I even asked to see this place?

I was wending my way around the downed cottonwoods along the shore, struggling to keep my balance on the slippery, rocky floor wearing these unwieldy rubber suspender waders that the department had loaned me; they encased my lower body and came all the way up to my chest.

Over the rush of waters, the sheriff—I’ll call him “Ted”—was asking me: “You or your Sis ever come hereabouts, before, to visit our ‘fly-caster’s paradise’?”

“Idaho, yes; Ketchum, no,” I told him.

Despite our disdain toward the exotic technicalities and trappings of fly-fishing that Palo and I had historically shared, at the moment I thought it prudent to try a bit of fish-bonding, myself:

“As kids, though,” I added, “our dad used to take us to a place on Redfish Lake, to watch the Rainbows hatch out.”

“So you’re from fishing stock! I thought so!” Ted beamed appreciatively, as he navigated his bulk along the shoals with surprising ease. “It’s our biggest Idaho industry, you know: fishing and hunting. We got 26,000 miles of rivers in our state, almost more than anybody on the planet, I guess…”

As I followed Ted downstream to the place where Palo had last been sighted, he launched into a verbal tangent, casting details back to me over his shoulder about rods and reels, bait and tackle, hooks, lines, and sinkers… until I tuned out.

I realized glumly, with my legs stuck in these unwieldy waders and my butt bashed by fast water, that this scenario was destined to go on for quite awhile with no possible chance of escape.

Palo would be laughing her ass off at my predicament—that is, I thought in abject misery, if she weren’t dead as a minnow, and washed ten miles downstream by now. And worst of all, I was still no closer to finding out exactly what happened to her. Palo was right, she had been in danger, and I kicked myself for not seeing, much sooner, how real it was.

Ted had worked his diatribe all the way up to the esoteric dangers posed by “ghost gear”—those yards of line and hooks strewed around by irresponsible Out-of-State fishermen, which had endangered the local sturgeon population nearly out of all existence—when all at once I thought that I’d caught an important non sequitur:

“… until we found your sister’s waders, where they were floating…”

“My sister’s what?” I said, as calmly as possible.

“Well, not real waders like you got on now, but her foot gear, you know—them lightweight-type wading booties, more like rubber shoes, that the ladies all wear…”

Now my heart was thumping. This bit of news gave me my first glimmer of hope: what was wrong with this picture? A gaping hole had just appeared smack in the middle of the jigsaw, and I thought I knew exactly what was missing.

Sure, Paloma knew how to catch a fish—as her recent frozen-trout “messenger” had demonstrated. But when it came to the art of fishing, she was a Nick Adams girl: simplicity before all. Her “technical equipment” of choice was a safety pin for a hook, a grasshopper for bait, a pair of dungarees for attire, and a boardwalk to sit on. She’d always left the rest—the “ties and flies and waders and wrist-posturing”—to the “Weekend Sportsmen,” as she liked to call them.

No, if those shoes they’d fished out downstream were indeed Paloma’s, as I very much doubted, she’d certainly never have worn them; the very idea was against her religion. She’d tossed those “booties” into the drink herself: a messenger wending its way downstream into my waiting arms—just like that trout—and likely bearing the very same kind of message.

“Where did you find those wading boots?” I asked Sheriff Ted, adding carefully: “And how were you able to discover, so soon and with such certainty, that they belonged to my sister?”

“The right boot was found yesterday, stuck in a trap,” he told me. “They cleaned it out down near the Magic Reservoir. The other was hung up, upstream here, on a cottonwood branch—right near the accident. At least, near where your Sis was last spotted. But as for how we knew that them booties was hers—that part was a real no-brainer: the shoes had her name printed on them, each one—in waterproof ink!”

I tried not to show a reaction. I just hoped to God I was right. It would fit more than neatly into that hole in the jigsaw puzzle. And it would explain something else, as well. So I had to risk it.

“Which of these boots that you located was found the nearest to the spot where you found my sister’s body?” I asked the sheriff.

Though by now, I’d guessed what his answer would likely be.

“Oh, the body, as to that we’re still waiting,” Ted told me. “We figure she hit a deep pool and got sucked down under the current. And here’s the place, right here.” He tapped one of the large, downed cottonwood trees along the bank, its dead branches drifting out into the river, and he added,

“It was right here on this spot that your Sis was last seen. That’s where the trout always like to hole up, down in those hollows under all them trees along the banks; them downed cottonwoods been there forever, all along the river; that’s why we call this river the ‘Big Wood.’ When folks goes down in spots like that, there’s no way we can troll, the current’s too fast and those hollows are too narrow and they go too deep: sometimes we don’t find the missing for months or years. Might even be never.”

“Ah, I see. Well, many thanks for explaining all this, sheriff,” I said politely, retaining my sober expression, while privately I was doing cartwheels in my head. How amazingly perfect! I had to give Palo credit for more brains than I ever realized.

There was no body around, and Palo had left the “handwriting on the wall,” on a pair of shoes. Why would she do that, unless she was planning on remaining alive and in hiding—camouflaged like a trout holed up beneath the cottonwoods—just as, after all, she’d told me she would do, hadn’t she? Now I was dying to crawl out of the icy water myself, rip off this damned rubber skin, and go try to find her.

But there was one thing that I’d nearly overlooked.

“I’d like to see those wading boots that you found,” I told sheriff Ted, “and also any of my sister’s other effects you can show me. And by the way, Sheriff,” I added casually, “who was it that actually sighted Paloma out here on the river that morning? Was it a local resident? Someone who knew her?”

Sheriff Ted was clambering up the bank by now. Perhaps it was my imagination, but he seemed to be avoiding a reply. He got to the top and stuck out his big, meaty mitt to help pull me and my rubber casing out of the water. Once on dry land, I still felt like I’d been embalmed.

“Sheriff?” I repeated, with a raised eyebrow, once we stood eye-to-eye.

Sheriff Ted looked down and shuffled his big foot in the pine needles.

“Not sure I can tell you that,” he said. When he glanced up and saw my expression of innocent surprise, he added, “I’ll check with the department as soon as we get back there. But even though you’re kin of the dead woman, this may be too confidential…” He tailed off with a look of uncertainty.

“My, this is turning mysterious,” I said. And I waited.

But when it came, I was really unprepared.

“I can tell you this much—but when we’re back at the department, you never heard this from me,” the sheriff said under his breath, glancing around, though no one was within miles of this spot. “You won’t find any ‘other effects’ of your sister’s, except maybe her clothes and whatever food was in the fridge. He confiscated the rest—her papers, computer, and everything—from her cabin. The fella who saw her wading out on the river that morning did know her, but he was no fisherman. He was Official, showed us his government badge, said he’d been keeping an eye on your Sis for her own protection. Seems like your little Sis was doing something important, up here in these parts, for the U.S. government. Mine not to guess at just what, naturally.”

I swallowed hard. I felt dizzy. My mouth had gone drier than the pit of the seventh olive. This was worse than I thought. Confiscating Palo’s possessions before they even found a body? What on earth could she have been up to, that might call for such swift action to suppress it? Who was this “Official” lying bastard, who’d grabbed her stuff?

“Sheriff,” I said, choosing my words as carefully as possible, so they wouldn’t come back later to bite me in the butt, “I’m sure you’ll understand if I say that I, also, am not at liberty to share everything about this affair nor to speculate about my sister’s untimely death. But I thank you for your confidence, which will remain safe with me. Since we are speaking in confidence, though—could you tell me what ‘official badge’ it was that her colleague showed you, which has inspired your department to support those actions of his?”

But before the sheriff could reply, or even blink, I had whipped out my own ID from The Company, which I knew trumped most others in the security field, and I flashed it before him.

Now he could blink. And he did.

“Yes sir, Officer Perez,” he said. And he actually saluted me, as if I were his military superior. “I can tell you, though, that fella’s badge was genuine: from the FBI. But it wasn’t no straight FBI case that he was on, none of that ‘Safe House’ witness protection stuff, he said. He told us that your sister was involved doing research in a case involving Homeland Security…”

I went down to the sheriff’s office in Hailey. The wading boots weren’t needed by the sheriff as evidence, since the FBI had trumped everyone and taken charge of what they wanted. But thanks to that spurious cover, no one (except me!) suspected foul play in Palo’s “accidental death.” I tucked the bag with the boots under my arm, accepted the keys to Palo’s cabin, and I hit the road in my rental Jeep, heading back up Route 75, toward Ketchum and Sun Valley.

I needed one more piece of the puzzle. This time, I knew where to find it.

Even before I’d had the chance, alone, to pull those wading shoes from their plastic bag, I’d already glimpsed the clue she’d left me (in addition to plastering her name on the sides of the floaters in indelible ink, so that everyone would know they were hers.) I kept glancing at the bag lying beside me in the Jeep.

On the top tab of each rubbery shoe, she’d tightly glued a cute little plastic sticky label that was hard to miss: a tag, about an inch long, in blue, green and yellow, with a stylized drawing of an exotic young woman with ruffled sleeves, sporting a basket of fruit on her head; she seemed to be dancing a samba. At the top, the label read: ORGANIC. And beneath the young woman’s lithe, dancing form, in large letters, it read “CHIQUITA.”

Where had I—quite recently—seen that reference?

I pulled my jeep off the road, yanked out my iPad, powered it up, stuffed Palo’s stinky, fish-smelling digital card into the port, and clicked it open. There it was, it had been staring me in the face all this time, even before I’d ever left New Mexico: A jingle!

I clicked the black box with the cheery musical quarter-notes on the front, and out blared the opening bars of one of the oldest, and at one time, most famous advertising jingles. Hearing it now made my blood run cold:

I turned it off at once, before I got to the end. I knew that in this newer version of the jingle, they’d modernized the lyrics to stress nutrition and heath, but I still remembered how the jingle used to go, back in the old days. Mom liked it so much that she used to sing it to us when we were little.

That memory was what Palo was counting on.

And I knew where my sister had hidden the goods that she needed me to find.

I found the critical mass—the bunch of bananas. Naturally, they were tucked into the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator in my sister’s abandoned cabin. Inside a single banana that still had its symbolic label affixed to it, I located the digital chip that Palo had buried there.

Once again, smelly fish and browning bananas seemed to have triumphed over state-of-the-art security forces (or whoever they were) and their much vaunted superiority in data harvesting through space-age digital technology.

Now that I’d gotten back inside my Jeep with the loot, and I’d powered up my iPad again, I could begin to connect the previous links she’d sent me (in the fish) with the conclusions she had drawn from them (in the banana). It didn’t take as long as I thought it might, for me to piece together the following:

1. What Palo had found out that had lit up somebody’s mega-Bunsen burner.

2. What it all had to do with Ernest Hemingway’s rapport with icebergs, fish, bananas, Cuba.

And more importantly:

3. Where my sister was hiding out—which, if my intuition was correct, was not very far away.

Now that I knew, though, I needed to get to the Horse’s Mouth and let him know that I knew. I pulled out my Company-issued satellite phone and dialed the personal private number I’d learned by heart.

It didn’t take long to get the Director himself on the line. Word must have gotten out pretty fast, that I was asking strange questions for a bereaved guy whose sister was in an accidental drowning. The first words out of the Director’s mouth confirmed this.

“Sorry about your sister, Leo,” he said. “But you’re supposed to be on leave. Now I hear you’re mucking about in Idaho, crossing swords with our close compatriots in the FBI—even trying to dig into your sister’s attempt to resuscitate the image of late Nobel laureates. While others, as you know, might prefer to leave the past under the ground.”

“You got a false report on me, sir,” I said. “Exhumation from the grave, even for noted writers, would seem tasteless, especially this near to Easter. But as I recall, that Nobel guy did dub those compatriots of ours in the Bureau: ‘Franco’s Bastard Irish’ for their support of the right-wing Spanish fascists who’d infiltrated the Americas, all throughout World War II.”

The Director sighed.

The message: he was a nice guy with a tough job, and I—the loose cannon—was making it tougher.

“Leo, you’re an analyst, and a good one,” he informed me. “But what you’re regurgitating here, that was all in the Dark Ages. Long before even the Cold War. May I ask you, what is the purpose of this call?”

“Well gee, let me bring things more up-to-date for you then, sir,” I said. “I have a proposal I’d like you to consider…”

“A proposal?” the Director cut in, with ice in his voice. “Your tone makes it sound more like an ultimatum. Leo, may I remind you I have a pretty full plate right now. Please don’t try to yank my chain.”

“Far be it, sir,” I said. “I’ll get to my point at once. But first, I wanted us to discuss that second fish.”

The Director had the grace to be silent.

So I pressed my full court advantage:

“You remember,” I told him. “The fish with the ‘note’ attached? The fish that poor, innocent Professor Livia Madachy received in Santa Fe? Paloma didn’t send that one, did she? You knew I’d go there first. You sent it yourself, to use as bait and trawl me in. That was right after you trawled for my sister Paloma—luring her into that spurious ‘Freedom of Information Act’ website; and then you turned around and used her ‘blunder’ as an excuse to send me on leave from my job.”

“And your point would be?” asked the Director. Though his tone now was more guarded than icy.

“It’s not a point,” I said. “It’s just an observation: but it appears that ‘Homeland Security’ is not quite as chummy between agencies as it’s supposed to be. You set me up, and you endangered my sister’s life—you used us as bait—just so you could find out exactly how much the FBI knows about what’s about to happen down there.”

After a long pause, the Director said, “All right, granted. But tell me, Leo: if you’re not our analyst or working undercover for the Bureau, then who are you working for?”

“It’s ‘whom,’ sir,” I corrected him. “I’m working ‘for whom’ I have always worked. If you want to know the truth, I’m working for my tribe.”

“Tribe?” said the Director, as if he’d never heard the term.

“The locals—the Indians, the Hopi, Zuni, Apache, Navajo—the Mestizo, whatever you call us: the natives, the indigenous, the peasants. Your Cold War means nothing to us. Whether communism or capitalism is better is something of a moot point to folks who’ve been used as fodder for your ongoing battles, these past fifty or sixty years. That’s really what it’s all about—that’s what is just about to happen—isn’t it?”

The Director was silent again; after awhile, he sighed.

“Yes, that’s what it is all about, Leo. And you’ve demonstrated that the Bureau does not yet know as much as they’d wish to: that’s clear. Otherwise they would hardly have been watching your sister and appropriating her files the moment she vanished—before we could get at them. So tell me, Leo: what’s this proposal of yours?”

I was relieved that he couldn’t see my smile from two thousand miles away.

“I think the Company needs to fund an important fellowship program,” I told him. “One that would encourage young scholars to share their research. Not a surfing exercise or ‘leaks’-type thing, but something officially sponsored by us, along with others. It would aid the State Department by consolidating our historical wisdom to help focus on specific events, even dangerous events, that are about to repeat themselves.

“And,” I added casually, “I believe I know just where to begin, and who might write the first of such reports, based on events set in motion more than one hundred years ago…”

I found Palo seated beneath the pagoda in the “Garden of Infinite Compassion,” just outside of Sun Valley.

I’d guessed she’d be here, when I learned that this part of the Sawtooth Botanical Gardens, just downstream from her disappearance, was created for the Dalai Lama’s 2005 visit, here to Sun Valley. What with prayer wheels and water wheels silently spinning, it seemed the perfect spot to recall what peace and harmony once must have looked like in the world.

She was pretty unrecognizable, with her waterfall of silky black hair all twisted up and tucked underneath her baseball cap, the dark mirrored glasses, and her bulky sweatshirt covering layers of padded clothes. I sat down beside her on the bench and put my arm around her shoulders.

She took off her dark glasses and looked at me seriously with those silvery eyes. “Leo, I think maybe you saved my life,” were her first words. “I don’t know who was watching me or what their motivation was. But since you found me, I’m assuming you’ve figured it out.”

“I can answer that,” I said. “The FBI was watching you, and The Company was watching them. But lucky for you, I was watching them both.”

“And were you able to figure out from my cryptic notes and links why Hemingway was so hunted and haunted?” she said. “Why they wanted to blot out his memory altogether, before he remembered too much?”

“Yep,” I assured her. “He was Mr. antifascist, and he’d figured out what was going to happen, at any moment, in Cuba. Just as you figured out how it’s connected with what is about to happen right now, just next door.”

She looked at me for a moment, then she grinned a wide grin. I was so happy to see her smile like that.

“So were you able to do it—what I suggested?” she asked.

“The Company seems to think it’s a real peachy idea,” I assured her. “You’ll get the first fellowship grant. So you’d better get it written from those notes pretty fast. After all, the trials are going to begin next week.”

“I don’t have equipment to type it on,” she said. “The asshole took my computer.”

“There’s a new invention called pencil and paper,” I told her. “If you play your cards right, I think I can get you some. From what I can tell of your prior efforts, it seems safer than surfing the web. Why not try it? After all, my dear sister, as Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember their own past are condemned to repeat it.’”

When she agreed, I added:

“But tit for tat, my dear Paloma. I just want a couple of answers by way of payment. A symbolic translation: If, as you say, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea at the height of the Cold War, and if it really was an allegory about Cuba—then who was Santiago, the old man who was named for a saint? What does the marlin, the giant fish that got eaten by sharks, represent? And who were the sharks?”

“You’ll have to figure it out when you read my report,” she told me, still smiling.

And I did.

1899 was a very big year:

• The Spanish-American War has just ended: The U.S., having helped Cuba attain independence from Spain with the rallying cry “Cuba Libre,” now occupies Cuba.

• The United Fruit Company is incorporated, merging with several other importers; it now controls 75% of banana imports to the U.S.

• The first dictator to take over Guatemala with a gun, Manuel Estrada Cabrera seizes control of that country.

• Ernest Hemingway is born in Illinois.

1901: Guatemala hires United Fruit to manage its postal service.

1903: Guatemala grants United Fruit a ninety-nine-year concession to build and maintain a railroad, with land in exchange; U.S. intervenes in Panama; U.S. intervenes in Honduras; U.S. intervenes in Dominican Republic.

1904: Author O. Henry coins the term “Banana Republic” for countries with one main product like bananas, ruled by a small rich military-elite of landowners at the tip and a vast impoverished populace crushed beneath like an iceberg.

1912: U.S. intervenes in Cuba, Panama, Honduras. United Fruit now gets land concessions in Honduras to build another railroad; the poor are pressed into service as banana workers, the cash crop.

1914–19 WWI

1917–1933: U.S. Army invades and occupies Cuba until 1933.

1928: “Banana Massacre” in Columbia: United Fruit workers pressed into service now strike and are killed by government militia.

1936–39: Spanish Civil War against elected government (loyalists) and General Franco (fascists); Hemingway sides with the former, but the latter prevail.

1937: Hemingway speaks against fascism at Carnegie Hall (1937) while his Spanish friend in Paris, Pablo Picasso, paints Guernica to protest the fascist bombing destruction of the small Basque city (1937); both men are labeled by Western governments as possible communists for their antifascist stance.

1941–45 WWII: German submarines in the Caribbean reduce United Fruit banana exports; Hemingway and his “Crook Factory” of ex-Loyalist Spaniards hunt German subs off the coast of Cuba; “Chiquita Banana” icon styled after Carmen Miranda, invented to use after war.

1942: J. Edgar Hoover has the FBI open a file on Hemingway as possible communist; file remains active until Hemingway’s death in 1961.

1945: Chiquita Banana jingle copyrighted; bananas promoted as the healthiest and most useful food as breakfast for babies, women.

1947: Guatemala begins support of labor laws to protect peasant workers against foreign multinational firms.

1951: Jacobo Arbenz elected Guatemala president, begins agrarian reform; Hemingway writes The Old Man and the Sea in Cuba, about a fisherman from Canary Islands, Spain, living in Cuba, who captures a huge marlin, fights it for days, calls it “brother,” defeats it, and ties it to his boat, and it is eaten by sharks before he returns to port. The old man dies.

1952: Guatemala Decree 900 passed, a reform act to redistribute unused land that had been given in ninety-nine-year leases to foreign companies like United Fruit; young Argentine med student Ernesto “Che” Guevara assists in reform moves; The Old Man and the Sea published to universal success and acclaim.

1953: Guatemala president redistributes 210,000 acres of United Fruit’s unused land to peasants for cultivation; pays United Fruit their own appraisal value (low for tax-free purposes) for land; John Foster Dulles (U.S. Secretary of State) and brother Allen Dulles (director of CIA)—both shareholders of United Fruit—back a successful coup against Guatemala; Eisenhower instantly recognizes new military government; Che Guevara, appalled, vows to retaliate; The Old Man and the Sea wins Pulitzer, Hemingway’s first major award.

1954: Banana workers strike across Honduras, U.S. investigates United Fruit’s monopoly; Che joins Raul and Fidel Castro to launch revolution against U.S.-backed Cuban government; from Cuba, Hemingway opposes U.S. Senate hearings on un-American activities, says the only thing to stop senator Joseph McCarthy is “a .577 Solid” (Elephant bullet); Hemingway in two successive plane crashes in Africa, wins Nobel prize in literature, returns to Cuba.

1958: Fidel Castro takes power in Cuba, U.S.-backed president Batista leaves; Castro seizes United Fruit properties, says “Cuba is no Guatemala.”

1960: Banana workers strike in Panama; Hemingway leaves Cuba for Ketchum, Idaho (July); John Kennedy elected U.S. president (November); Hemingway sent to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, undergoes two months of electroconvulsive shock therapy (December–January), while still privately being investigated closely by the FBI. Guatemala begins civil war between (U.S.-backed) military governments and (Cuba-backed) peasant-guerrilla fighters; the war will drag on for thirty-six years.

1961: John Kennedy inaugurated (January); CIA Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (April); Hemingway receives two more months of shock therapy (April–June); FBI follow Hemingway inside the hospital for observation and tap his phone; Hemingway commits suicide (July)

1962: Cuban Missile Crisis (October); USSR agrees to withdraw missiles if U.S. agrees not to invade Cuba (again); United Fruit creates small blue Chiquita sticker to promote its bananas.

1967: Che Guevara killed in Bolivia, backed by U.S. Special Forces and CIA.

1972: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover dies in Washington, D.C.; his secret files are removed from FBI headquarters, and some destroyed, by his longtime assistant and confidante, Helen Gandy; Miss Gandy immediately retires from FBI.

1974: FBI finally closes posthumous file on Hemingway.

1988: Former FBI employee Helen Gandy dies, and her knowledge of Hoover’s secret files dies with her; the Washington Post reports that Miss Gandy’s “favorite passion” was trout fishing.

1996: Guatemala civil war ends after thirty-six years; the conflict has resulted in 200,000+ persons missing or killed—“disappeared”—in what is later called genocide against the indigenous Mayans and rural peasants.

2013: In Guatemala, genocide trials have just begun against the military, former government officials, and powerful landholders; it is unclear whether the recently elected president of Guatemala will support their continuation, or what the official U.S. stance will prove to be.