Killing Castro

FIVE

Earl Fenton sat with his back against a scrub pine and his Sten gun across his knees. He sat still, very still, and he wished for a cigarette. A little tube of paper filled with rolled tobacco, a little paper-and-tobacco affair that you could light with a match and smoke quickly. In his mind he could taste the brisk jolt of strong smoke taken deep into his sick lungs. He could taste it and feel it.

There was a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his field jacket. There were matches, too. All he had to do was take a cigarette, scratch a match, put the two together and smoke. But you didn’t smoke when the Castristas were less than fifty yards away. You didn’t send up gray clouds to tip your hand. Instead you put your back against the trunk of a tree, set your gun across your knees. And you waited.

The soldiers—five of them, maybe six—were at the shoulder of the road on the other side of a dense growth of shrubbery. They had come in a noisy, gear-grinding Jeep and they were looking for rebels. Fenton could not see them from where he sat, but he had caught glimpses of them before, one with a full Fidel-style beard, one young and crisply smooth-shaven, a driver wearing opaque sunglasses, two or three others. And now it would be very easy to take a step or two and put the Sten gun to use. He could get one, two, maybe three of them before he was shot.

But that wasn’t good enough. Manuel, leader of the group, had explained all that. If you killed three men and then were killed yourself, you had the worst of the bargain. And they didn’t know for sure that the soldiers were looking for these particular rebels. Maybe somebody had tipped them off, maybe not.

“We must first survive,” Manuel had said. “They are many, we are few. To risk a life is not to be a hero. It is enough to be here, to be a hero. They can afford to have fifty, a hundred, five hundred men killed. When they kill a single one of us, it is a big loss.”

So self-protection came first. They would make no move until the soldiers made it necessary. They would sit quietly by and if the Castristas drove away, so much the better. Their job was to kill Castro, not his followers. That’s what they were being paid for. Even the Cubans with them realized this made good sense.

Fenton breathed shallowly and thought about cigarettes. How long had it been? Two days, five days? Somewhere in the middle, and he could not be sure of the time, could not tell because time moved differently here. It was not measured in eight-hour shifts as it had been at the Metropolitan Bank of Lynbrook. It was tricky.

Time. Fenton looked over at Garth, his great bulk crouched in the shadows of twisted, bright-leaved trees. Garth, too, held a Sten gun. Garth had killed before, he knew. And now he, Fenton, was a killer also. They had stumbled into Castristas before and Fenton had killed, had sent bullets screaming into bodies. He still remembered vividly the Sten gun bucking like an unbroken horse in his hands, but in the end the men had gone down with bullets in their flesh. And, by God, Fenton had outlived them. Fenton, Earl Fenton, a dying man—

Footsteps. He heard movement, the soldiers poking at the roadside brush with their rifles, getting ready to move around. Any moment now. He looked from Garth to Manuel, cool and sharp and aware. Then to Taco Sardo, the sixteen-year-old who spoke only Spanish and rarely spoke that. And then the girl, Maria, the one Garth was constantly bothering, the silent broody-eyed girl who accused the world with her voiceless stare. Strange that her name was Maria. Like the girl in the Hemingway novel, the novel about the bridge. She was not at all like that fictional Maria. And yet the exterior trappings were similar.

More footsteps. He saw Garth straighten up, saw Maria raise her gun and brace herself. Manuel was moving to a vantage point and Taco was following his lead. Fenton knew the procedure. Manuel would fire the first shot if the searcher got too close, and then the rest of them would begin. Manuel would wait for the right moment.

The tension was flooding his limbs now, tension and excitement that spread through his cells as cancer had spread through his lungs. Fenton got to his feet silently, crept forward, propped himself up on a boulder and sighted over the top. He could see them now. There were six. Three of them poked at the brush like idiots. The bearded one was looking in another direction through a pair of binoculars. The driver with the dark glasses was behind the wheel of the Jeep. A sixth crouched in the road. He was tying his shoelaces.

Slowly, silently, the rebels moved in. The gap was closed by ten yards, fifteen yards. The Sten gun, handy as it was, worked poorly at long range. You did better in close.

Fenton stopped, dropped to one knee. He sighted in on the driver, the one with the sunglasses. He had to be hit right away, Fenton decided. Or he would simply hit the gas pedal and get away. Why let him get away?

The man in the road finished tying his shoelaces. He straightened up, turned toward the Jeep. Then something stopped him and he turned, his eyes darting like a sparrow. He had spotted movement in the bushes and he rushed forward, his gun at the ready.

Manuel shot him through the chest.

Then all hell broke loose. Fenton squeezed the trigger and let the Sten gun leap and chatter in his hands. His first burst was wide, smashing the Jeep’s windshield, but his second burst took half the driver’s head away. The man slumped over the wheel and died. Garth and Maria had drilled two of the soldiers in their tracks. The bearded one and another were behind the Jeep, returning fire.

Fenton sent a burst at the Jeep, hoping for the gas tank. He missed. A bullet whined over his head and he flattened out, staying close to the ground, holding tight to his gun. Taco Sardo was a short distance to the left. He was trying to circle around, to move in on the two Castristas from the side. Maria was creeping off in the opposite direction. It was a pincer movement, Fenton realized. A spontaneous, intuitive pincer movement, carried out on an individual basis rather than by regiments or battalions.

He heard heavy breathing to one side. It was Garth, moving closer, face flushed with combat fever, eyes stupid but determined. Fenton jammed a fresh clip into the breech of his gun and tried several more rounds on the gas tank of the Jeep. He saw Taco on the left, then heard a quick, sharp rifle shot from the rear of the Jeep. Taco went down, moaning, clutching at his leg. Then a Sten gun, an answering Sten gun. Maria, far on the right, surprising the two soldiers with hot lead. One died with a bullet in his throat. The other, the one with the beard, threw down his rifle and stretched his hands toward the sky.

Now they moved in, all of them. This also called for speed, for guerrilla tactics, for expediency. Manuel and Fenton checked each soldier in turn, made sure the five bodies on the ground were corpses. Maria held her gun on the bearded one. Garth went to check on Taco, then came back.

“The kid’s all right,” he told Manuel. “He got it in the leg. The bleeding ain’t bad and the bone’s okay. I can lug him back and he’ll be walking tomorrow.”

Manuel nodded shortly. Now the bearded soldier was talking, pleading for his life. He did not sound frightened at all. His voice was calm, rational. There were beads of perspiration dotting his forehead but those were the only signs of worry.

“He wishes us to let him to live,” Manuel said in English. “He says he will make no trouble for us. He says not to kill him.”

The bearded man spoke again.

“He says one more death will accomplish nothing,” Manuel translated. “And so we should let him live. So he may return and kill us all.”

The bearded soldier started to protest; evidently he understood English. Manuel’s eyes hardened. He lowered his Sten gun, took a pistol from his cartridge belt. The soldier’s eyes widened and his mouth opened.

Manuel very deliberately placed the mouth of the pistol against the soldier’s forehead and spattered his brains over the trunk of the car.

They piled the six bodies into the Jeep. There was a container of spare gasoline in the trunk. Fenton unscrewed the cap, poured the gasoline over the bodies and over the Jeep. He stepped back, took out a cigarette, scratched a match. He took two long drags on the cigarette and pitched the butt underhand into the Jeep. It was safer that way, easier than tossing a match. The gasoline went up with a roar and the Jeep was transformed into a sheet of flame.

They left in a hurry. They collected weapons, ammunition. Garth shouldered Taco like a sack of dirty laundry and the rest of them followed him into the woods. Fenton brought up the rear, his heart still pounding, the excitement still a living force.

Another victory. Six men dead this time, six corpses baking in a burning Jeep. It was bloody, it was the supreme insult to a corpse, but he knew that it had been necessary.

Fenton walked and death walked with him. Death always walked with him now, a thin pain in the chest that was always close at hand. And it was strange to have death as a companion. Before, when he lived with no fear of death, no sure foreknowledge of doom, it had been enough simply to live, to exist, to go on.

Now it was different. Now he enjoyed killing, killing, killing. It was the only way to prove that he was still alive.

It was a Thursday night and Garrison was eating in the best restaurant in Havana. The restaurant was Le Vendome, on Calle Calzado, and the food was French. Garrison had baked clams, chateaubriand and a small bottle of Bordeaux Rouge. He passed up dessert and had cognac with his coffee.

When he had finished he paid his check, left a tip and walked out of the restaurant. He looked neat and summery in his cord suit. His tie was neatly knotted, his shoes polished. He walked with a sure, easy stride. Outside, he let the doorman summon a cab for him, pressed a coin into the man’s palm, settled into his seat and told the driver to drop him at the Nacional. That was his hotel, the city’s oldest and one of its best, completely air-conditioned, well serviced, with bars and a pool and a night club and a gambling casino. Tourists were still allowed to gamble in Castro’s Cuba, but Cuban nationals were prohibited from doing so. This amused Garrison.

He got out at the Nacional, tipped the driver, strode into the lobby and took an elevator to his room. Inside it, with the door locked and bolted, he made a quick check of the room. It had been searched again, he noted, amused. And once again they had failed to find either gun. The rifle was still in his mattress—he had slashed the mattress cover, wedged the gun into the ticking and sewed the mattress up again. The Beretta was still inside the television set where he had placed it. It didn’t even interfere with the operation of the TV. Not that he cared, he never bothered turning it on. All you ever got were Fidel’s speeches, and it wasn’t hard to get tired of them. He said the same thing all the time and took six hours each time to say it.

Garrison undressed, went into the bathroom and adjusted the shower spray. He showered quickly, shaved, trimmed his mustache. Then he stretched out on his bed and closed his eyes.

This was the easy way. He wondered where the others were, Fenton and Turner and Garth and Hines. Probably crouching in a dirty little room somewhere with a batch of grubby Cubans mumbling at them. And this was so much simpler. Just the direct method, quick and easy.

He’d had to get to Cuba illegally, in Di Angelo’s boat. That much was easy enough. And then there was that shrewd old Cuban on La Avenida Blanca, the one a New Orleans contact had put him wise to. You didn’t need a passport or a visa to stay in Cuba. All you needed was an identification paper and they gave you that as you got off the boat. And that little old man had given him one that couldn’t look more like the real thing. You didn’t even need the damned thing while you were in Cuba—nobody ever asked for it—but you had to have it to leave the country. And Garrison planned to leave the country the day Castro died.

His eyes opened. He grinned, looked at the ceiling, closed his eyes again. The simple way. He was an American businessman on vacation, a real estate speculator who occasionally took a taxi to look at a piece of property. He stayed in a top hotel, ate at good restaurants, tipped a shade too heavily, drank a little too much and didn’t speak a damned word of Spanish. Hardly an assassin, or a secret agent, or anything of the sort. They searched his room, of course, but this happened regularly in every Latin American country. It was a matter of form. Actually, it tended to reassure him, since they searched so clumsily that he knew they were not afraid of him. Otherwise they would take pains to be more subtle.

The simple way. He stood up, naked and hard-muscled, and walked to his window. He’d been careful to get a room with a window facing on the square. The square was La Plaza de la Republica, a small park surrounding the Palace of Justice. Parades with Fidel at their head made their way up a broad avenue to that plaza. Then Fidel would speak, orating wildly and magnificently from the steps of the palace. From his window Garrison could see those steps.

With the rifle properly mounted on the window ledge, he could place a bullet in Fidel’s open mouth.

He drew the window shade and returned to the bed. Maybe he wouldn’t even have to use the gun, he thought. Maybe one of the four idiots—Turner or Hines or Garth or Fenton, wherever the hell they all were—would save him the trouble. He was in no hurry. If one of the others killed Fidel, that was fine. He got his twenty grand just the same, with no risk and no work. If not, then he set up the gun and squeezed the trigger. The rifle would be dismantled and tucked away in the room before Fidel knew he was dead. The Beretta could stay where it was, in the television set. And he would be on the next boat to the mainland.

There was a knock on the door. He sighed, raised himself on one elbow. “Who is it?”

“Estrella. Let me in, ’arper.”

The name on his identification papers was John Harper, a simple enough name which happened to begin with the one letter Estrella couldn’t manage. He stood up, wrapped a bath towel around his middle and opened the door for her. She came inside.

She was very young and very beautiful. She had a tiny waist, solid breasts and hips, a red rosebud of a mouth and deep brown eyes that a man could get lost in. She was a prostitute; Garrison had managed to pick her up without trying very hard one night in the hotel’s bar. Now she came to his room every evening. Sometimes she would tell him that she was in love with him. Other times she would not say a word, would simply make love with him in fiery silence.

Now she ran a soft hand over his chest. “You take a bath,” she said. “All you Yankees, every minute you take another bath. You take too many baths, ’arper.”

“And you don’t take enough.”

She pouted. “You don’t like how I smell?”

His hands cupped her taut buttocks, drew her close. She was a full head shorter than he was. He lowered his face and inhaled the sweet animal fragrance that rose between her breasts.

“I like how you smell,” he said. “You smell of sex. You smell like you want to get into bed.”

“And you? You don’ wan’?”

“I wan’, Estrella.”

“You make fun how I talk. Don’ I talk awright?”

“You talk like a magpie. Come here, Estrella.”

She came into his arms again and he held her close. She wore a thin white cotton dress with nothing under it. He could feel the heat of her body through the thin cloth. She squirmed against him, and her hands found the towel around his waist.

“You don’ need that towel, ’arper.”

“You’re right.”

“So,” she said. The towel dropped to the floor and she stepped back, looked at him, grinned. “You’re naked,” she said. “I love you, ’arper. I love you, you bastard.”

He reached for her, caught her. She squealed with delight as he lifted her into the air and dumped her down on the bed. Then he was on the bed beside her, his hands busy with the white cotton dress. She laughed and giggled, pushed his hands away playfully. He grabbed her and kissed her. His tongue went between her lips and suddenly she moaned out loud; all the playfulness turned instantly to passion now and she was urging her body against his, kissing hard, holding tight.

They took her dress off. His hands went over her body, stroking the silken luxury of perfect skin, rubbing the slightly rounded stomach, cupping full breasts taut with womanliness, then kissing the upthrust nipples while she writhed wantonly on the bed. She said ’arper, ’arper, ’arper, repeated again and again a name that was not really his.

There was no element of time, no sense of space. Reality was suspended momentarily; rather, reality consisted only of Garrison and the girl, only of the meeting of bodies. There was one instant of irony when he realized again that they were making love on top of a high-powered rifle, but the thought was submerged by a wave of passion.

Then he was on his back looking at the ceiling without seeing it, waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal. He breathed deeply, closed his eyes, opened them again. He turned and saw her beside him, her eyes watching him. She looked like a cat by the fireplace, like an infant in the fetal posture. She looked beautiful.

“’arper,” she said, her sleek, naked body arching toward him.

“Mmmmm?”

“When you go back to America?”

“Not tonight. I’ll be busy tonight.”

“Don’t kid aroun’. When you go back?”

“I don’t know. Not for a while.”

“When you go,” she said softly, “you take me with you. No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Because I’m a killer, he thought. Hired killers don’t carry pretty little whores in their suitcases. They travel light.

“’arper? You married, ’arper?”

It was a convenient lie but he passed it up, shaking his head.

“Then why not take me with you? I love you, ’arper. An’ you love me. I get in your blood.”

“And I get in your—”

“Don’t talk dirty. Why not, ’arper?”

“I’m sleepy,” he said. “Stay here tonight. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Right now I want to go to sleep.”

“You wan’ me to stay tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“An’ when you leave Cuba, you take me with you?”

“Maybe,” he said. “We’ll see.”

That seemed to satisfy her. He watched her close her eyes and drift off to sleep almost at once, like the contented little animal she was. He did not fall asleep that quickly. He rolled over onto his side, found a pack of cigarettes, smoked one in the near-darkness. He watched the tip of the cigarette glow with life when he drew on it. When he had finished, he stubbed it out in the ashtray on the bedside table, and closed his eyes again. But sleep didn’t come.

Take her back to the States? That was a cute idea now, wasn’t it? Jesus, he thought, she’s just another little piece and Havana is full of a million sluts just like her. And they would all tell you how much they loved you. So he should bring this one home with him? Like a war bride, he thought. A goddamned war bride. Just another little piece, maybe a little better than most of them, but still nothing special. So why didn’t he hand her her walking papers and get rid of her before she got in his way? Why not?

And it was the damnedest thing. He didn’t like her calling him ’arper. He wished she would call him Ray.

A dry, hot, lazy afternoon. Maria sat by the ashes of the dead campfire. She was cleaning her Sten gun. Only a fool let his gun become dirty. Once she had seen such a fool with a dirty gun. A troup of Castro’s forces had attacked, and one of their men fired his weapon. And it had blown up in his face, had disintegrated it.

She went on cleaning her gun, humming softly to herself. Her mind was busy with thought and she did not hear Garth until he was at her side.

Then she whirled. This big man frightened her; twice already he had put his hands on her, bothering her.

“You be nice to me,” he said now. “You be nice and we’ll have a good time.”

She did not understand the words; they were in English and she didn’t know the language. But the meaning was clear enough even though the words were unintelligible. He wanted her.

She tried to get to her feet. But he put his big hands on her shoulders and pushed. She fell down and he threw himself down beside her. She could smell the strong animal smell of his sweat. He was no man, this Garth. He was a pig.

She cursed him in Spanish and he smiled, not understanding her words. He reached out a massive paw that closed around her breast. He squeezed and she writhed in terror. He was hurting her.

“You and me,” he said. “We’ll have ourselves a ball.”

He was lying on top of her now, his breath strong in her face. She felt one of his hands forcing itself between her thighs, touching her. She twisted, got a hand free, slapped at his face. He only leered at her.

She saw the heat building within him, noticed the way he was breathing faster. She lay there, fighting him, waiting for the rape to begin, knowing he was stronger and she could not resist him. His hands were busy with her full, firm breasts, busy with her groin. She would have screamed but there was no one to hear.

He might have raped her, but he did not. There were sounds of men coming, sounds of the rest of the party returning to the camp. He stopped, listened, grunted.

“We got company,” he said. “Sometime soon, honey. We’ll have to get this finished, you and me.”

“I will kill you,” she told him in Spanish. “I will kill you. I will shoot you and watch you die.”

That night she spoke to Manuel. In Spanish, Maria said: “That Garth continues to bother me. Today he put his hands on me. Several times.”

“You have no man,” Manuel said. “He wishes to be the one.”

“I don’t want a man.”

“It is not natural,” Manuel said. “A woman without a man.”

“I do not want one. And even if I did, it would not be Garth.”

Manuel shrugged expressively. “If you took another man, perhaps Garth would cease to bother you.”

“I cannot. Not any man. You know what happened.”

What happened was simple. Four months ago Maria had had a man, a husband. She and her man fought in the hills with Manuel. Then one day the Castristas caught them both on patrol. There were four of the Castristas. First they killed Maria’s husband by shooting him in the head with a machine gun until he had no head left. That was a picture which never left Maria’s mind, the picture of Carlos lying on his back in the dirt with his body ending at the neck, with blood everywhere.

And then she had been raped. The four of them took her in turn, and it didn’t do her any good to struggle, but she struggled nevertheless. She kneed one soldier in the groin and tried to gouge the eyes of another. To punish her for this, the four of them burned her breasts with a cigar after they had finished with her. They did not kill her. They left her on the road, living but in fearful pain, as an example to the others. And for dramatic effect they placed Carlos’ dead body upon her and tied the two of them together.

Her breasts still bore scars from the cigar burning. And she wanted no man now, no man at all.

“If this Garth bothers me,” she said levelly, “I will kill him.”

“This would be unfortunate. He is a good fighter.”

“He is stupid.”

“That is true,” Manuel said. “But he is fearless and strong. He helps us. And he will help with the ambush, when Castro rides his Jeep through the valley of death. He will be helpful. It would be good if you did not kill Garth.”

“If he bothers me—”

“After Castro is dead,” Manuel said, “then you may kill Garth. I will help you.”

“You could tell him to stay away from me.”

“I have told him this.”

“And it does no good?”

“He is not a man who thinks,” Manuel said slowly. “He is a man who decides, and who acts. One cannot reason with him.”

Maria looked away. It was night; the rest of the band slept. The moon was high overhead, a thin crescent.

“We must kill Castro soon,” she said.

“I have heard reports. They say he will travel to Santiago one week from Sunday. He will come on the road from Bayamo and Palma Soriano, of course. We may have the ambush between Palma and Santiago.”

“There will be patrols.”

“Many patrols, many guards. It is a chance.”

Maria nodded thoughtfully. “We must kill him soon,” she said. “Because very soon I shall kill this Garth. I shall shoot him and watch him die.”

Turner stretched, stood up. He took his pack of cigarettes from the nightstand and put them into his shirt pocket. They were Cuban cigarettes which Señora Luchar had given him. He had discovered that he preferred them to American cigarettes.

“I’m going out,” he told Hines.

“You kidding?”

“No. Why should I be kidding? Because I might get picked up by cops? To hell with that.”

“Well, you might.”

Turner was shaking his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Look, I know the fugitive routine. I went all over the States with the police looking for me. I got used to looking over my shoulder every time I took a leak. I don’t have to do that here. Nobody’s on my tail.”

“I still think you’re taking a chance.”

“Then you still don’t get it. Hell, you don’t know what it’s like to be hunted. It’s like nothing in the world. You don’t relax. I told you about what happened, didn’t I? About the girl and the pig with her?”

“You told me.”

“Yeah. Afterward I got drunk and slept it off. Then I woke up and remembered. Since then I never relaxed, not once. I kept running and I kept hiding and I kept looking over my shoulder. It’s quite a feeling. Not a good feeling.”

Hines didn’t say anything.

“Now we’re in Cuba. And it’s a hell of a thing, Jim. Nobody’s looking for me now. If I went out in the streets and told the world I killed a whore and her customer in Charleston they wouldn’t give a damn. I’m a free man. I don’t have to spend my time in a stinking basement. I can get out in the open air.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’ll chance it,” he said. “Take it easy.”

Hines stayed on the edge of his bunk. He picked up an American magazine that the Luchar woman had brought, leafed through it absently. He tossed it onto the bed and wandered over to the heavy wooden work bench. It was like the one his old man had in the cellar. The old man used to like to make things. They were always things that he could have bought for half the price it cost him to make them himself, and they always came out a little wrong, but his old man got a kick out of it.

His old man had never made bombs. And that was what they were making now. Impact bombs with a power charge of TNT that would go off on contact. You took the bomb, gave it a heave, and when it landed it went off like… well, like a bomb. What else?

He didn’t know a hell of a lot about bombs. Neither did Turner, really, but Turner at least knew what was supposed to go into the thing and how it all worked. He had put together a list of materials for Señora Luchar, metal casing for the exterior, TNT for the charge, various other gimmicks and gizmos that ought to work. And Turner had done most of the work, drilling and sawing and fitting the casing, figuring out the right charge. Now they had two bombs almost completed. All that was needed was a few finishing touches and a strong heave in the right direction. And that would be that.

He wondered who the bomb would kill. Besides Castro, of course. God alone knew how much of a bomb they had. It could turn out to be the world’s greatest dud since Primo Carnera or it could blow half of Havana off the map, for all they could tell. They might get Fidel Castro. They might also get some of his soldiers, and some other politicians. And some people in the crowds, some women and children, some—

Hell. This wasn’t a game. He had a score to settle, had a slate to wipe clean. Joe was dead, damn it to hell, and Castro was going to get his, and if some poor clowns got in the way it was their tough luck. It was part of the game.

Like revolutionary justice?

Well, now.

He left the room. He was thinking too damned much and it was just getting him jumpy. Maybe Turner had the right idea—take it easy, do your job, keep your mouth shut, and go out in the streets and enjoy the sights. No thanks, he thought. Not yet. I’ll stay indoors right now, thank you.

He took a flight of stairs two at a time, walked through the kitchen to the living room. The Luchar dame was sitting in an easy chair reading a Cuban newspaper. She looked up at him.

“Your friend Turner went out,” she said. “How come you decided to stick around?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sit down,” she said. “Want coffee? Or maybe some lunch?”

He told her that sounded fine. She got up and he watched her leave the room. She spoke English with an American accent and this got him, got him good. It didn’t fit with the rest of her. Christ, she was straight out of A Tale of Two Cities, a twentieth-century Madame Defarge who didn’t know how to knit. She got to him, sometimes. Gave him the chills. He wasn’t sure why, but that was the way it worked.

She came back with a plate of arroz con pollo and a cup of steaming coffee. The chicken-and-rice dish was spicy, tasty. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

“Have you been back in Cuba long?” he asked her.

“Since the revolution won. Batista left and I came back. Why?”

“I just wondered,” he said. “Maybe you knew my brother.”

“He was here?”

He nodded. “His name was Joe,” he said. “Joe Hines.”

She looked thoughtful.

“You remember him?”

“I remember,” she said. “I didn’t know him, not person to person. I knew who he was, of course. Castro had him shot.”

He nodded bitterly.

“Of course,” she said. “I wondered why you were here. Revenge, the rest of it. Am I right?”

“Of course.”

“I see,” she said. She turned away slightly. “Well, one must have reasons. And the reasons matter only to the individual. It doesn’t make a bit of difference why you are here, only what you do here. The results are more important than the reasons.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you?”

“No,” he said, annoyed. “You use a lot of words but you don’t say a hell of a lot. What are you getting at?”

She smiled shallowly. “I told you. It does not matter.”

“It matters to me.”

She shrugged. “More arroz con pollo? There’s a whole pot of it on the stove.”

“No, thanks—”

“More coffee?”

“No,” he said. “Look, you’re trying to change the subject. I don’t want it changed.”

“Sometimes it’s a good idea.”

“Damn it!” He stood up, his hands balled into fists of tension at his sides. “Look, you’ve got something that you’re not telling me and I just don’t get it. I want to hear what it’s all about before I crack up. If you’ve got something to say, say it. Otherwise quit playing games with me!”

She smiled again, unnervingly. “So young,” she said. “When a man is so young everything is simple, true? Easy questions and easy answers. I wish I had learned how to lie to my friends. It is easy to lie to enemies. I cannot lie to friends.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that your brother was a traitor.”

He stared at her. She was crazy, that was all. She was some kind of a nut and he was wasting his time paying attention to her. She was out of her skull, off her rocker. She was batty.

“I am speaking the truth, Hines. But you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. Perhaps you shouldn’t believe me.”

“A traitor to Castro,” he said desperately. “He saw that Castro was ruining the country so he broke with him. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? He broke with Castro so Castro called him a traitor and had him shot. That’s it, huh? He was a traitor the same way you’re a traitor, because he wanted what was best for Cuba and—”

“No.”

The single syllable stopped him. He broke off, stared, lowered his eyes. For a long moment he stood looking at his shoes. Señora Luchar was still sitting in the easy chair, her eyes quiet. He sat down himself, with a great heaviness and looked at her.

“You’d better tell me all of it.”

“Would it serve a purpose?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be an ass,” she said. “Don’t be a damn fool. Castro killed your brother and blood is thicker than principles. You still have to get your revenge. Joe Hines was still your brother and you still have to get revenge on the man who killed him. Why knock yourself out?”

“Tell me.”

“Listen—”

“Tell me!”

She sighed. “Your brother was a hero,” she said easily. “In the beginning in Oriente, he was a bearded hero with the rest of them. He fought like a hero and he laughed like a hero. And, with the rest of those bearded ones, he won. He marched into Havana with a gun on his belt and a gleam in his eye. He won, Hines.”

“I know all that.”

“But you don’t know the rest. He had his own ideas, your brother did. He saw riches all around, saw a whole nation which could be of use to him. He had these visions. He saw himself at the top of it all, running the country, with a host of grateful Cubans kissing his rump and telling him he was God. He fought with us, Hines, but he was not of us. He was an Anglo and wanted to take up that white man’s burden you all carry so selflessly. He wanted a batch of inferior Cubans smiling up at him and kissing his rump.”

“He wasn’t like that.”

“He became like that. He and two others organized a movement. A counter-revolutionary movement. They were not going to push out Castro because Castro was undemocratic. They were going to replace him because they wanted to have his power.”

Hines said nothing. He was numb.

“So Castro had him shot. And he deserved it, Hines. Your brother was no good. He started as a hero and ended as a traitor. Still, your revenge must be carried out. Blood is thicker than principles.”

“Joe—”

“Was a traitor.”

His eyes suddenly went wild and he sprang to his feet. “Damn you!” he shouted. “Do you think I’m going to believe something like that? Joe was my brother, you dried up bitch! He was a wonderful guy. He was a hero. He did wonderful things for your crummy country and you just want to look for rotten things to say about him. You—”

“Believe what you wish,” she said softly.

“What I wish? You think what I wish has a damn thing to do with it? I believe what I’ve got to believe, damn it. You can go to hell!”

She did not say a word. He stormed past her, pounded down the stairs to the basement room. He slammed a door, swung his fist against the wall, blinked his eyes at the pain. He walked to the bed, threw himself down on it, then stood up again. He punched his pillow, punched the wall again with his other hand, and sat once more on the bed.

Joe, he thought. Joe, where are you? Tell me about it, Joe. Tell me she’s a lying bitch. Tell me she’s handing me a load of crap. Please, Joe. I need you, Joe.

I miss you, Joe.

He stood up, sat down, stood up, sat down again. He clenched and unclenched his hands, trying first to accept what the woman had told him, then trying not to believe it, torn constantly back and forth, torn in half.

He wanted to cry but he did not know how.