October's Ghost

CHAPTER FOUR DISCOVERY

The offices of the Los Angeles Times are located in an externally beautiful facility in what is known as Times Mirror Square. It is a visual oasis of sorts in an area of downtown Los Angeles that is reminiscent more of the urban centers of the former East Germany than of the perceived ideal associated with great American cities. The usual gathering of denizens and the down-and-out abounded in the area, mixing with the workday crowd of suits and blueshirts to create a patchwork representation of social standing that existed on a nine-to-five schedule, five days a week.

“Depressing,” Art commented as he pulled the Bureau Chevy into a space marked with a familiar No Parking placard.

Frankie stepped out of the car onto the sidewalk. “Things sure have changed.”

The senior agent nodded at the observation as he came around the rounded nose of the shiny blue Caprice. As much as he loved the feel of Los Angeles and its architectural mix of old and new, the city was becoming something he’d never dreamed it could. “Let the social theorists come hang out down here for a week.”

Francine Aguirre, product of the Pico Aliso housing projects in what had become one of the city’s worst areas, knew firsthand just how much things had changed. She had seen her community begin a slow downward spiral over the years. People she had grown up with were now more likely residents of Sybil Brand Institute for Women or the men’s central jail than the old stomping grounds they had shared. Times were simpler then. Funerals came when cancer, old age, or a car accident took one of the neighbors whom everybody knew. Now they happened weekly, and the young were passing at a pace that had surpassed the mortality rate of the community’s elders. The place of her youth was dying, and the disease that caused it had spread to envelop areas once thought untouchable. And people, she thought.

“Quite a bed we made,” she said, walking past a man covered in the tattered remnants of what had once been a coat. His hand was out, reaching up from where he sat against the building, his eyes locking with Frankie’s in a plea for spare change. She remembered the “we” in her last statement and continued into the building without acknowledging his presence, much less his existence.

The agents showed their shields to the guard in the lobby, who called up to the city desk to announce their presence and directed them to an elevator. They stepped off on the sixth floor a minute later and were immediately set upon by a giant of a man.

“Art, you old rascal,” Managing Editor Bill Sturgess bellowed, his hands coming down on the six-foot-two agent’s shoulders.

“Bill, damn good to see you again.” Art gestured to his partner. “Frankie Aguirre.”

Sturgess offered his hand in a much gentler greeting. “Hell of a lot prettier than Toronassi. How is he doing, by the way?”

“Working his way up at the Academy,” Art explained. “He’s supervising the OC Section there now.”

“That old mob stuff of yours rubbed off on him, huh? Come on, my office doesn’t smell as bad as this place.”

A chorus of mock protests erupted from the newsroom near the elevator. Bill Sturgess, all six foot nine of him, was an editor from the old school of journalism, where facts superseded conjecture and glitz. It was a code he lived by, and one he insisted his people adhere to, though his reach extended only as far as the borders of the city. The national and international correspondents were run by another group of men and women, people whose education had stressed business and sales above ethics and accuracy, resulting in a slant that not all observers and critics agreed with. Sturgess was an internal critic with a loud voice, one booming enough to keep his people from stumbling over their own desire for the story. Find it, check it, confirm it, write it, confirm it, edit it, confirm it, print it. Those were his instructions, and God help the reporter who was foolish enough not to follow them.

“Sorry about your loss yesterday.”

“Thanks,” Art said. “Good kid. Anyway, I’m sure you guessed why we’re here.”

“What can I do for you?” Sturgess asked, closing the door to his glass-walled office and taking a half-sitting position against his desk.

“The hit on Melrose yesterday,” Art began, knowing that his friend of more than ten years hated preliminaries when there was a main event to be seen. “The victim had a card on him with the city desk’s number penciled on the back. Did you have anybody set to meet with someone in that area?”

The managing editor’s eyes looked briefly at the floor before meeting Art’s again. “You have an I.D. on him?”

Art knew there was no reason to hide that fact. “Portero, Francisco. But you can’t print that just yet.”

“No problem. Yeah, I had a guy who was supposed to meet with him. Good reporter, lots of potential, but he has a problem with his mouth.”

“His mouth?” Frankie asked.

“Yeah. It tends to open too frequently when there’s a bottle around. Too bad. It looks like he might have had a story out of this one.” Sturgess shook his head with true regret at the loss, and at his reporter’s bleak future. “Wasted talent.”

“Is he here?” Art inquired.

“Haven’t seen him since yesterday before it all went down. Told me he had an eleven-forty-five lunch set up with this Portero.”

“I’m a little surprised he gave you his name,” Art admitted.

“I told him we’d have to confirm his background before I committed someone to listen to him. He claimed to be a translator at the UN and said he was an assistant to Castro’s Russian-language translator in the early sixties. I verified the first claim, but the stuff in the sixties was pretty much a wash.”

Well, CNN had proved that the media was sometimes the preferred method of gathering and presenting intelligence quickly. Art figured print shouldn’t be much different on the gathering end of it. “We knew about the UN stuff, but I’ll admit that the other is news to us. Interesting.”

“I presume he didn’t give up this story or whatever he had to you,” Frankie surmised.

“If he had, I couldn’t tell you, but, off the record, he didn’t give us anything but enough bait to keep me interested. Sullivan was supposed to get the whole spiel from him yesterday.”

Frankie took out her notebook. “Sullivan…two L’s.”

“Right. First name George.”

“You say eleven forty-five?” Art probed, the timing jogging his memory.

“Yep.”

“What kind of car does Sullivan drive?”

“Damn, let me think. It’s some old bronze or tan-colored thing. Dodge, think. Why?”

Art started his own notes. “He may have almost taken my foot off bugging out of there. You say he hasn’t come in or called?”

Sturgess checked the time. “Well, it’s early still, but I get the distinct impression that he’s not going to show. Gut hunch based on past performance.” Again his expression was one of regret. “I had to put someone else on the story.” The big man paused for second. “I don’t know if I can keep him on much longer. He had the same problem in New York, but he wouldn’t own up to it there either. Just said he preferred warmer weather and came out here with the same baggage. Guess I’m a soft heart.”

“We need to know where he lives,” Frankie said. “He could be in danger.” And he might know something, she silently hoped.

“He’s always been in danger, young lady.” Sturgess walked around his desk and flipped through his Rolodex, pulling the card out and handing it to Frankie. “If you see him, tell him to give me a call.”

“Sure will, Bill.” Art stood, shaking his old friend’s hand before heading back to the elevator with his partner.

“Nice guy,” Frankie commented in the solitude of the elevator. “How’d you two meet?”

“I had my gun in his ear one night,” Art said calmly. “Had to talk him out of blowing the head off the guy who raped and murdered his wife.”

“Jesus, I didn’t know.”

Art turned to his partner. “Neither does anyone else. How do you blame a man for wanting to do that?”

You don’t, Frankie answered silently, her world having suddenly changed to allow an intimate empathy for the desire.

“You should have seen it. Bill with this big old cannon of a handgun pressed up into this guy’s mouth, and me with my old Colt shoved in Bill’s ear. Took me half an hour, but I got him to let it go. The perp screamed and moaned as soon as I got him out of there, telling everyone what Bill had done. Kidnapping, assault with intent. All kinds of good stuff.”

“Sturgess didn’t do any time?”

Art’s head shook as the 3 lit up above them. “Never happened, Frankie.”

Her lips parted slightly with shock. “You mean you…”

“Lied? Yes, I did that. I lied to keep a man who was damn near destroyed from going over the falls because some lowlife took his world away from him. Have I ever done it again or before? No. Would I?” Art paused momentarily, the door opening to their front, and the answer to the self-inquiry hanging somewhere inside his conscience.

“I’ll drive,” Frankie said. She’d never have expected it of her partner. He was the finest and most human cop she had ever known, and he would do that! The motivation was easy to understand, on both sides of what had happened. Art didn’t want to destroy a man, and that man wanted desperately to avenge a loss. One, though, was much stronger for her.

Art’s hand retrieved the Chevy’s keys and something else from his pocket. He handed the keys to Frankie as they stepped into the sun and placed a dollar in the hand of the old beggar.

“Let’s go find Sullivan.”

“Sure thing,” Frankie said, seeing something new in her partner that she hadn’t expected to and feeling something new in herself that, despite its source, was strangely satisfying.

It was best to die in one’s own land, Antonio Paredes believed. His father had fallen during the invasion of the Bahia de Cochinos, just thirty miles from the home in Juragua he had fled when the Communists came to power. The men strewn across the field south of Santa Clara had seen themselves as patriots also, but they were defenders on the wrong side of two rights in this instance. They had died at the hands of their comrades who were fighting to free them. What an incredible juxtaposition of purposes, Antonio thought.

“Papa Tony.” It was Captain Emilio Manchon, assistant to Colonel Ojeda. “The colonel wishes to see you.”

They walked toward the gathered command vehicles belonging to Ojeda’s old unit, the Second Mechanized Division, which he had appropriated en masse from the Cuban Army. Across the nation, Ojeda’s collaborators were waging the war with their own units, some of which they seized control of by subterfuge and threats, and some, like Ojeda, by elimination of a hated commander. And, surprising to some of the participants, they were winning. Ojeda was not among the doubters.

“Papa Tony.” The colonel was seated in the passenger seat of the familiar American Jeep of World War II vintage, hundreds of which were in use by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, and now by the rebels. He offered the American a drink from his metal canteen, also a vintage piece of equipment, though this from the former East Germany. “We have secured this area. Santa Clara is ours, and from here we can slice the island in half.”

Antonio noticed that the words were not said with glee but with precision, like a surgeon describing a procedure. A surgeon had certainly visited this field, though not of the healing kind. “Who were these men?”

A shot rang out nearby. Antonio jerked his head to see one of Ojeda’s men finishing off a loyalist who had not been killed outright. He felt a wave of coldness envelop his body.

“They died like they fought,” Ojeda said. “With a lack of proficiency. As for who they were… Captain?”

“The Thirteenth Infantry Brigade, Papa,” Manchon answered. “Nine hundred men.”

“Dispatched with in half a day,” Ojeda added. “We move tonight toward Cienfuegos. Major Sifuentes is closing on Mariel from Los Palacios. In the east Colonel Torrejón will have Camagüey in our hands by tomorrow evening.”

“And the people?” Antonio asked. “What are they doing? How are they reacting?”

Ojeda looked puzzled at the question. “The people? Papa, tell me, if you lived in the house of a slave master for thirty-five years, and suddenly the master was gone, what would you do? Eh?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Exactly. Did you think these people, who have known only one way of life, had only one man who told them what to do, what to eat, how to behave, did you think they would run into the streets and celebrate?” Ojeda brought up a long finger that waved back and forth. “No, Papa Tony. They cannot. They are afraid. Their world is changing. It will take time for them to understand what is happening. Much time.”

“I see your point, Colonel.” The man was wise, Antonio decided. Fierce and wise. He might have made a good leader for the nation under different circumstances.

“Papa,” Manchon began, “when will we have the locations of the loyalist units?”

“Tonight,” Antonio replied. “Each night we will get the report.”

“We will go over the information together.” Ojeda pronounced the directive like a dictator, then signaled his driver to take him away from the place where only dead enemies abounded. He wanted to find where there were more loyalists to remove from the rolls of the living.

“It was an appropriate place for the men to die,” Captain Manchon commented, pointing to an overgrown patch of rough earth off to the east a hundred yards or so. “The old cemetery at St. Augustine’s.”

Antonio walked toward the site, leaving Manchon behind. It was a diversion of sorts, something to relieve his mind from the constant thoughts of the newly dead by visiting those who had met their maker long before. From the looks of the graveyard it had been decades since any had been planted in the ground beneath the lush canopy. What church might have been near was reduced to rubble, a result of some battle in the Revolution before he was born. The headstones were mostly toppled, some broken, a tangled tapestry of weeds and vines covering the dark gray slabs.

“Witnesses to history,” Antonio said aloud. He bent down and moved the foliage aside with his hands, exposing several of the markers. “Mariana Lopez. Died 1962. Age twelve.” The grim reaper took whom he took, regardless of age, Antonio thought. His gaze moved across the other names, all people who had…

Wait. Antonio went back to one of the names, then to the next one, and to the one beyond that. There were several of them, all names foreign to the island. Well, not entirely correct as they had probably come as invited guests. Ha! Only to die for some reason. It must have been an accident or something. Maybe a transport went down. That would make sense.

While not of any real consequence to his mission, it was of an interesting nature and worthy of a mention in his situation report for the night. Langley could take it from there. Something for the history books, Antonio figured.

He pulled out his notebook and began taking down the names from the headstones, careful to get the correct spelling for each, thanking the stars that whoever had buried these fellows had opted for the English spelling of the names, rather than the traditional Russian.

The night’s sleep had done him wonders, as had the bottle of bourbon. The company hadn’t hurt either, though she had cost five times as much as the liquor. George Sullivan knew he could have had cheaper, but Loretta was a favorite, and, hell, just thinking about her expertise in certain matters made him realize that she was worth every penny.

But today. Damn. How was he going to explain to Bill that the guy he was suppose to meet the day before got the shit blown out of him? Just like those two gangland hits he’d covered in New York. The whole damn world was turning into a slaughterhouse.

“Guess the guy might have really had something,” Sullivan said to himself as he pulled into the driveway of his house. And guess I have a real story, now. If only he hadn’t run from the scene like a scared school kid afraid of the bully. Now he’d have to start digging almost twenty-four hours after the fact.

He closed the car door with a kick, hearing the familiar groan of old metal. Maybe it was time for a new car. His eyes scanned the front of the house as he trotted onto the porch, deciding it was definitely time for a new paint job for the house. Yellow peels were not attractive.

He took yesterday’s mail from the box and went through the front door, tossing his keys to the right as he checked what wonderful bills had come for—

The sound of his keys not landing on the bookcase just inside the entry caused him to freeze. Then his eyes came up from the mail, the sight immediately erasing the semblance of normalcy he had attained from the night just ended. Oh, my God.

Everywhere there was chaos. The furniture was turned over, the tables upended. Pictures were off the walls. Sullivan let the mail slip from his hands as he stood and listened for any sign that the intruder might still be there. He was just feet inside the door and could have bolted out with no problem, but there was quiet. Utter, disconcerting quiet.

He began to take steps forward, his eyes looking left to the kitchen. It was empty, though no less disheveled than the living room. Then the hallway. Stripped of the pictures and other decorative items that had adorned the wall. Still silent as he gingerly stepped over the debris littering the carpeted hall, past the bathroom, to the bedroom.

The same there. The mattress was off the heavy oak-and-steel frame, lying against one wall, its fabric covering sliced open exposing the springs. Drawers pulled out and left lying on the floor, along with all their contents. The fucking robber had…

But nothing is missing. The video player was there, in the corner on a pile of clothes, its cover torn off? The same with the television. What the… No way!

Someone was looking for something. They weren’t here to rob him, they were here to… What if it’s the same ones who…?

Sullivan backed out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen, his feet sliding through the glass littering the linoleum floor. There was something there he had to get, something he needed. No fucking work today, that was for sure. So who would give a — There! He found the bottle, still intact, thankfully, and twisted off the cap. The sweet, smoky flavor rolled down his throat a second later.

The drink hit him where he needed it. He had to get his head on straight and figure this out. He thought of calling the police, but what would he say? “Hi, I witnessed a murder yesterday and just ran away. Oh, and by the way, the guys who did it were just over at my place.” No way on that one. He took another swig, still thinking, the ideas racing through his mind. He had to relax. Had to calm down. Another drink. But what if they came back?

That question hit him like an unwelcome brick of sobriety, which he washed away with a long, steady draw on the Jim Beam. What if they do? He knew what to do about that, or at least what he could do, or maybe what he might be able to do. Shit! He went back to the bedroom and fished through the piles that had been his life until sometime between yesterday and today. The box was under a mound of his various sweats and T-shirts, its lid open and…the contents right under it.

George picked it up, holding it tightly in his right hand while his friend stayed true in the other. He was really safe, now, he believed, but had no idea what came next. None whatsoever. With such a stunning plan he sank to the floor, his back against the wall, and waited. For what, he hadn’t a clue.

He was in the basement of the Defense Ministry in Havana, the Plaza de Revolución fifty feet above. Buried by the Revolution, Fidel Castro thought. A proper way to go.

What the president had heard from his brother so far led him to wonder if his destiny did lie in failure. Yet it was early. Though the threat was serious, the gravest he or the country had ever faced, they were still in power. Still the chosen leaders. The people would come to the defense of their land as they had been trained to do. All would be well. All would be fine.

“We have almost no aircraft remaining to fight with,” Raul Castro said in exasperation, hoping to break through the disbelieving trance his older brother had fallen into. As defense minister, he knew the gravity of the situation, and it fell on him as his brother’s closest confidant to explain it. “The last two MiGs we had capable of flying, both out of the capital, did not return from their mission. They were more than likely shot down by antiaircraft fire, or…”

“Or what?” Fidel asked, the spell broken by the trepidation in his brother’s words.

“They may have gone north.”

The aged leader rose up, his right fist clenched as it came up even with his face. “The cowards!” His fist crashed down upon the makeshift map table before him, causing the group of senior military officers present to jump where they stood. “If ANY man so much as THINKS about surrender or defection to the enemy, I want him shot dead ON THE SPOT! Is that clear?! IS IT?!”

“It is, Fidel,” Raul said. “Every man here knows that. They are all loyal to you, to the Revolution.”

Fidel turned sharply to one side and paced two steps, then back to where he had stood. “We will defeat this coup d’état. The perpetrators will be captured and hanged in the plaza!”

“Si, they will.” Raul acquiesced more than agreed. He had to get the seriousness across to his brother somehow. “But we have to ensure your safety. If the rebels are fortunate, they may—”

“Fortunate! To hell with their fortune! Wars are fought not on the basis of luck, but by men with vision! By men with a fire in their belly!” The president looked down at the map table, noting the location of units in the center and west of the country. In the east there was less fighting, mostly from ragtag partisan bands, he suspected. From there the crushing blow to this coup would be struck. “Raul, listen to me carefully. This is what I want done. From Camagüey I want Colonel Torrejón to move west and strike at the flank of the units moving southward toward Cienfuegos. This will force them to halt their advance. I know Torrejón. He will take the fight to them and destroy them!”

Raul looked away from his brother and cleared his throat before looking back. “Fidel, Torrejón is not responding to requests from us. He is apparently among the plotters.”

It was as if an invisible fist had struck him in the stomach. Fidel grimaced and slid backward into his chair, the air leaving his lungs in a loud, wet gasp. He was literally in pain. How could Torrejón have done this? How? He had been with Fidel and Raul aboard the Granma when the cabin cruiser brought them from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to begin the Revolution. He had marched with them through the Sierra Maestras. He was a patriot! How could this have happened? Who was responsible?

“Fidel. Fidel.” Raul leaned over the table, watching helplessly as his brother’s head shook in disbelief.

Who is responsible? Fidel repeated it over and over, searching for a guilty party to strike out at. Looking for those culpable. There had to be…

Yes. His eyes came open and met Raul’s. There was a responsible party. One that bore the blame for more than this episode in his country’s history. A true enemy of the Revolution. The would-be destroyer of his nation.

But not before a price was exacted for the actions that allowed this to happen. A lesson in the cost of war would be taught to the responsible one. A lesson to never be forgotten.

Fidel sat forward in his chair and lifted the phone from its cradle. It was answered immediately in the army’s communication center. “Get me General Asunción at once.”

“Dios mio,” Raul said aloud, invoking the name of a being whose existence he doubted but whose wrath he suddenly feared.