Shift: A Novel

Our Man in Havana

After languishing in a Havana prison for more than three months, he’d been dragged out of his cell one morning, into a courtyard whose western wall was stained darkly with the blood of previous executions. His guards stripped him, handed him a sliver of soap, told him to clean himself up. It was his first time in direct sunlight in three months, and he had to squint to see. Rubbing only seemed to spread the dirt across his skin, until finally his weakened eyes realized it wasn’t dirt he was massaging into the sallow flesh of his arms and legs, but bruises. Naked and dripping, he was brought to a barber, who shaved his head with an electric clipper, then took a straight razor to his beard, chest, underarms, and the rest of his body. Prickly as a poorly plucked chicken, he was handed a thick tube of anti-lice cream, then given a piss-elegant suit in midnight blue linen—brass buttons, silk lining, and two carefully mended bullet holes under the left lapel—and a pair of rather dainty leather sandals for his sockless feet. Gussied up like a scarecrow on his way to the yacht club, he was hustled into the back of a van and driven through the sweltering maze of Havana’s Old City until, just over three hours after he thought he was being taken to his death, he was instead escorted into the office of none other than the brother of the revolution, El Segundo himself, Raúl Castro.

Melchior had to admit: he hadn’t seen this coming.

In many ways, Raúl Castro was more fearsome than his older brother. He’d personally overseen the summary execution of scores, possibly hundreds, of soldiers and government officials loyal to deposed President Fulgencio Batista, and he was the man Fidel dispatched to Moscow to negotiate a military alliance that brought Soviet tanks, troops, and planes to Cuban soil. But more than that, he had the reputation of being fanatically loyal—not to Communism, which would have been familiar enough and easy to handle, nor even to the age-old concept of Cuba libre, but to his brother. To Raúl, Fidel was Cuban Communism, and Segundo would do more than lay down his life to protect him: he would kill, mercilessly and indiscriminately.

But reputations, as it turned out, are not always what they’re cracked up to be.

The office of the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Raúl’s only official title, occupied the fourth floor of a converted town house just off the Malecón, the long promenade on Havana’s northeastern coast. It was a long room, possibly a ballroom in its previous existence, or a gallery. The tread of thousands of military-issue boots had bruised the delicate parquet, and tiny pieces of sycamore and mahogany creaked and splintered beneath Melchior’s sandals like the shells of dead cockroaches. The sound reassured him somewhat—reminded him that, despite his diminished frame and the legs that wobbled beneath him, he still had a presence in the world. Was still capable of having an effect on things outside of himself. He shuffled as steadily as he could to a curule chair planted in front of the desk but didn’t sit down. While he waited for Raúl to acknowledge him, his gaze drifted of its own accord out the tall windows to the nearly deserted promenade. Once the boulevard of Cuba’s rich, the Malecón had begun to deteriorate after just three years of Communist egalitarianism. Not even Communism could dull the glow of the sun, however, and beyond the potholed, pockmarked concrete was the brilliant blue vista of the Florida Straits. Melchior squinted as if he might actually spy Key West, ninety miles more or less due north, and when he returned his attention to the baroque desk that sat in front of the glass, all he could see were shadows and shapes. An expanse of pink-flecked marble the size of a DeSoto, a tall man seated behind it in some kind of creaking industrial office chair, his broad shoulders and smallish head nothing more than a featureless silhouette until Melchior’s sun-blinded eyes readjusted to the light.

Unlike his older brother, Raúl Castro did not affect military fatigues, but wore a plain gray business suit. The jacket fit his tall frame poorly, pulling across the shoulders and riding up in the sleeves, and the narrow black tie had been crookedly knotted, so that it ran aslant the buttons of his shirt instead of covering them. All in all, he gave the impression of a man who would rather be shirtless, wielding a machete in the cane fields perhaps or a machine gun in the mountains. Though he was over thirty, he still had a baby face, but the eyes above his round cheeks were small and hard, and he regarded the shabbily dressed skeleton who walked into his office skeptically, as though he could not believe this was the agent of the all-powerful Central Intelligence Agency he had summoned. It was as if he was contemplating, not whether the visitor should live or die, but rather if it was even worth the effort to give the order.

After an interminable moment, he lifted one hand and pointed to the chair. Melchior sank into the seat, trying not sigh. The rickety hinges creaked beneath his wasted buttocks, and Melchior started slightly—he didn’t have the strength to get up again if the chair broke beneath his weight. But the sound reminded him again: he was real. He was here. And, however tenuous the link to his past seemed, he was an intelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had a job to do.

He took a deep breath to steel himself, only to have it turn into a thin, dry cough that shook his whole body. He had to grab the curule’s spindly arm to keep from falling off the back. He wondered if this was an attempt at irony on Raúl’s part—in Roman times the curule was reserved for men of the highest rank—or if Segundo had simply chosen it because it was backless, thus making an audience with him that much more uncomfortable. If that was the case, he had certainly succeeded.

For his part, Raúl continued to regard him silently. Then, in an easy, educated Spanish—for all his rough look, he and his brother, like most Communist leaders, were in fact the children of privilege—he said, “Your jailors call you the Magus. Do you know this word? The singular of Magi. The three kings who followed the star to Bethlehem to see the Christ child.”

“The Wise Men.” Melchior said, a flicker of a smile crossing his lips.

“They say you sit in your cell like a Buddha, meditating all day long.”

Melchior’s chuckle came out as another chest-wracking cough. “Clearly they don’t understand the enervating effects of malnutrition.”

“They grew up under Batista and Machado,” Raúl said in a sharp voice, “all those other puppets of your government. They understand malnutrition just fine. They see it in their parents and grandparents, in their co-workers in the cane fields, in their children, dying of colds and flu because they are too weak to fight off the littlest infection.”

This speech did not seem to require an answer—or perhaps the answer had already come, in the form of the ’59 revolution—and Melchior said nothing. Raúl allowed the silence to stretch for another uncomfortable moment before speaking.

“You are in a very curious position, Magus. A precarious position. Though we know you are an American, neither you nor your American superiors will admit to this fact. Normally such a situation frees us to execute you without fear of reprisal, yet in your case this is a less-than-attractive option.”

Melchior’s lip curled up in a weak grin. “I’ve failed at many things in my life, but never at being an ‘attractive option’ for public execution.”

Raúl’s fingers drummed lightly on his desk. The marble surface was bare, yet Melchior still found himself imagining Segundo’s finger pressing a big red button: a trapdoor opening beneath this uncomfortable chair, a long plunge into a pit with blood-caked spears at the bottom. An image of Aunt Juliette’s puppy all those years ago flashed in his mind. The pitfall had been meant for Aunt Juliette—she had sent him to bed without supper for saying a dirty word—but the look on her face when she saw her dead puppy had taught him a valuable lesson: sometimes you can hurt people more by going after the things they love rather than attacking them directly.

A smile creased his face as all this ran through his mind. Raúl noticed it, but didn’t ask. Instead, in a voice that had quieted somewhat: “Since the Revolution, we have been able to offer free education to all Cubans. Some of your jailers, perhaps eager to show off their new knowledge, call you not Magus but Melchior.”

“Melchior?” Melchior shook his head lightly to bring himself back to the present. “The black Wise Man?”

Raúl nodded. “On some level this is ironic, since you probably resemble the Semitic Magi more than El Negro. Nevertheless, the color of your skin is precisely the problem—the color of your skin, and the quality of your Spanish, and your ridiculously detailed knowledge of Cuban history, which I confess puts even our newly edified citizenry to shame. In fact, you look and sound so Cuban that many people are convinced you are trying to intimidate us by claiming to be American.”

“I never claimed to be American.”

“Indeed you did not.” Segundo’s smile was quick and cold. “It is a troubling situation. We do not know what to do with you. Contrary to the misinformation your government feeds the world, we do not execute people who have not committed a serious offense, and we do not execute foreigners at all, unless they are spies. But, though you are undoubtedly a spy, we would have a hard time convincing the outside world of that. So we find ourselves at an impasse. A public execution would only bring even more of the world’s disapproval on the revolution, but a private execution would accomplish nothing. Your government considers you too insignificant to acknowledge while you are living. Dead, it seems likely they would simply write you off and move on.”

In his three months in his cell, Melchior had come to pretty much the same conclusion, which, in addition to being both terrifying and infuriating—he had served his government faithfully for nearly twenty years, surely they could broker a private deal to get him back—meant that his life was completely in the hands of the man on the other side of the desk. His only comfort was the fact that he had been summoned here. If Raúl wanted him dead, it seemed unlikely he’d’ve summoned him for a private meeting first.

And so, doing his best to keep his voice level, he said, “If you don’t have enough evidence to convince ‘the outside world,’ I don’t see how you can arrive at the conclusion that I’m a, what was the word you used, spy?”

The expression that flickered over Raúl’s face could’ve been grin or grimace, but Melchior was pretty sure it was a smile.

“There is evidence and there is evidence—as any spy would know. And yet leaving you to rot in jail is not an attractive option either. It is passive, and I hate to leave things to inertia. Who knows what sort of unrest you might foment among your fellow prisoners?”

In fact the longest single sentence Melchior had uttered during his time in prison had been “I will cut it off and feed it to the rats if it comes within three feet of me,” but he didn’t bother to repeat this to Segundo. For one thing, he was pretty sure Raúl already knew every word that had passed his lips in the previous three months. For another, he was starting to feel light-headed again, and was holding onto the curule’s arms with both hands to keep from falling off the back.

“So tell me, Melchior,” Segundo was saying, “have you ever been to Russia?”

Melchior noted the choice of name: not the Soviet Union, but Russia. This wasn’t a political conversation then. Not yet anyway.

“I myself have recently returned from nearly three weeks in that country,” Raúl continued. “It is a very curious place. All around you see the mixture of old and new—one of the most ancient and singular of all European empires mixing with the most radical political experiment the world has ever seen.”

Caspar flashed through Melchior’s mind. If all was going to plan, he should’ve been making his was back to the States by now, an American “defector” having been “doubled” by the KGB. He suddenly realized that he might be facing a similar proposition. His heart began to pound in his chest, but, struggling to keep the emotion from his voice, all he said was:

“Radical is usually another word for stupid.”

“I am inclined to agree with you.” Raúl’s words surprised Melchior. “It is not a happy place. The will of the government is entirely inflected toward a single goal: conquering or, at any rate, outlasting the enemy. Yet the will of the people is bent in another direction: survival. I myself have always believed that the goal of the state should be its citizens’ happiness or, at any rate, the pursuit of it, as your own Declaration has it. Yet that goal is made unattainable when all forms of self-expression are quashed and the overwhelming majority of the state’s resources are shunted toward the fight against American capitalism. Even the most basic tenet of Communism, that of providing for the proletariat, cannot be realized in such a context. I see you are interested in what I am telling you.”

Like most field agents, Melchior was a practical man. He wasn’t thinking of winning the war against Communism in Cuba, let alone the Soviet Union. He was thinking that this was the kind of intelligence that made a career. Imagine: even as Fidel was attempting to form a military and economic alliance with the Soviet Union, his second in command—his brother!—was trying to undermine it! This was the kind of stuff that got you out of the field—finally!—and into an office. No more twenty-hour flights in the cargo hold of a C-47, no more weeks or months roughing it in the bush, the mountains, the desert, attempting to recruit local support for whatever revolution the Company was backing that day. No more prisons, rats, lice, firing squads. An office, with a window and a picture of the president and an intercom with a secretary at the other end of it! Melchior did his best to remain calm. But how could he not be excited?

“Do not think me disloyal,” Raúl continued as if reading Melchior’s thoughts. “I understand why my brother has sought this relationship, and I support it fully. Your presence on Cuban soil is indicative of your nation’s refusal to allow countries to choose their own path. But the Soviet Union is as tolerant of independence as the United States is. Or, to put it another way, Khrushchev seeks an alliance with us not for our sake but for his own. For the sake of his war with your country. And it would be a great—an avoidable—tragedy for Cuba to be consumed in that interaction, like some expendable geopolitical catalyst.”

Melchior remained silent. The implications of Raúl’s statement were broad, but it seemed prudent to let Segundo clarify them, rather than overreach and alienate the man.

But Raúl fell silent, and regarded Melchior across the broad plain of his desk. His hard little eyes sat uneasily above his soft cheeks, as if manifesting the conflict between the boy he had been and the revolutionary he’d become. Melchior had seen this dichotomy in a dozen, two dozen, countries, and he knew how dangerous it was. A romantic—like, say, Raúl’s older brother—will lay down his life for his country but is unlikely to kill you in cold blood, because his heart will trump his politics. A mercenary, like Che Guevara, kills only when necessary but then efficiently and without hesitation. But a divided man—a man like the one sitting on the far side of the desk—is unpredictable. He doesn’t know if he should listen to the whisper of his mother’s voice, telling him to be a good boy, or the roar of the proletariat, telling him to destroy anything that stands in the way of progress. Though he can be turned, it is a dangerous undertaking, because if he once senses what you’re trying to do, he’ll not only kill you, but will go after your friends, your family, and anyone who reminds him of you. Melchior didn’t have family and didn’t really have friends either, but he wouldn’t have minded that promotion. A corner office, a house in the ’burbs, government holidays, and insurance. So he waited.

Finally Raúl nodded.

“I admire your prudence. I am a prudent man myself. That is why I have approached you rather than attempt what I am about to describe myself. Better you should be shot if it comes out, rather than me. So. Let me come to the point: Premier Khrushchev has agreed to pay for the construction of a missile-launching facility just outside Cienfuegos, in which he intends to place twenty-five medium range ballistic missiles. As you well know, despite the propaganda your government uses to justify spending so much of its citizens’ tax dollars on its bloated military budget rather than health care or education, the United States enjoys a considerable advantage in the size of its nuclear arsenal over the Soviet Union. But having missiles a little more than a hundred miles off American soil would lessen that advantage considerably. The Soviets could launch an attack from here and still have time to evacuate large portions of their bureaucracy and population from major urban centers before your government could respond.”

Melchior had a good poker face, but even he found it hard to maintain an impassive expression when presented with such startling news. What’s more, Raúl’s analysis was exactly correct: if Khrushchev succeeded in placing his missiles here, it would given him tremendous leverage, especially in Eastern Europe. The United States had demonstrated in Hungary in ’56 how loath it was to respond to Soviet aggression; that reluctance would only increase with nuclear horror a few hours from its doorstep, and the Soviet Union buffered by five thousand miles of the Atlantic.

He chose his words carefully. “I’m not sure I understand you. Are you asking me to carry this information to the United States in order to prevent the Russians from installing nukes on Cuban soil?”

Raúl shrugged. “I doubt that will be necessary. It is very hard to hide the construction of a missile silo, let alone twenty-five, and I have no doubt that your spy planes will discover them soon, if they haven’t already.”

“Then I’m confused … ”

“I believe the missiles are a diversion. A shell game the likes of which the Russians have been playing for more than a century and you Americans, with your penchant for brute force, have never managed to understand. There will be a confrontation. Your president will threaten war. The Russians will back down, and nothing will change. Or they won’t back down, and still nothing will change, because neither side is willing to fire first.”

“So what’s Khrushchev’s real plan?”

“You misunderstand. At this point, Khrushchev is only nominally in charge of the Politburo, and the Politburo is only nominally in charge of the country. But I have reason to believe that certain officers of the KGB—men whose power predates the premier’s and will continue long after he has been replaced—have come up with a less visible strategy. The missiles will hold everyone’s attention, but they are just empty shells, both figuratively and literally. Their payloads are the real threat. While everyone’s attention is focused on the shells, these men plan to move several ‘unmated’ nuclear devices into Cuba under cover of conventional trade shipments—oil, wheat, and the like. The payload of an SS-3 weighs nearly three thousand pounds, so they can’t exactly be carried in a suitcase. Nevertheless, they are relatively small and portable compared to a rocket-powered MRBM and, should the necessitating situation arise, could be delivered to locations in the United States by boat or airplane and thence by small truck to any target desired. No doubt some of them would be intercepted along the way, but if even one got through, it could wreak tremendous damage.”

Melchior’s head was spinning, and it wasn’t just the fact that he’d been on an eight-hundred-calorie-a-day diet for the past three months.

“That doesn’t make sense. The conventional wisdom says that nuclear weapons are only useful if the other side knows you have them. If anything, you want to exaggerate the size of your arsenal, not play it down. ‘Mutually assured destruction,’ as the policy has it. What would be the benefit of having a hidden nuclear arsenal on Cuban soil?”

“Your analysis presupposes the idea that the men who are bringing this arsenal to Cuba are interested in maintaining détente or some other version of the balance of power. But what if they actually want to win the war, or shift its terms?”

“You think they actually plan to use these weapons? But that would lead to nothing but their own annihilation.”

“Would it? If millions of lives were lost in an anonymous nuclear attack on the United States, what purpose would it serve to wipe out Russia and perhaps China? The damage would have been done. A counterattack would be nothing more than punitive, and would lead only to reprisals. Destruction on an unimaginable scale. No, the Soviet Union would be an unattractive target. Cuba, though. An insignificant little country. A thorn that had somehow managed to pierce the aorta of the United States. That would be a target to appease an enraged citizenry’s demand for blood, without risking any kind of serious reprisal.”

Melchior looked for a flaw in Raúl’s reasoning. He didn’t see one. So here it was, he thought. The next level of proliferation. Not nuclear-armed states but nuclear-armed organizations, nuclear-armed individuals, with their own, unparsable agendas. He supposed it was an inevitable development, but God, it had come fast.

“Then my question is the same,” he said. “Are you telling me about the bombs so I can pass the information along to the U.S. government?”

“Pass along what? A rumor? Your James Jesús Angleton”—Raúl gave the middle name its proper Spanish pronunciation—“will spend weeks analyzing every possible motive we might have for telling you such a story and ultimately dismiss it as misinformation, a strategy to focus CIA attention on Cuba while the Soviet Union hatches its real plan elsewhere. You need proof in order to make your story compelling. Of the bombs’ existence, and of their location.”

At last Melchior understood.

“You don’t know where the bombs are.”

“Because they are being moved here clandestinely—that is to say, without Politburo approval—it is very difficult for even my government to keep track of them.”

“So you want me to track them down and tell you where they are. Why would I do that?”

“If all I wanted was to track them down, I would put my own men on the task. I want you to remove them.”

“You want to give nuclear weapons to your worst enemy?”

“I am giving you nothing that you don’t already have. I merely want them off my soil. Cuba has no desire to join the nuclear club, and it is tired of being the pawn in other countries’ wars. I can easier stomach a small-scale CIA operation that my brother can denounce as capitalist intervention than a full invasion in search of something that might not even exist—or, worse, a couple of ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear strikes.”

“Let me see if I got this straight. You’re going to set an American agent free”—Melchior figured the time for subterfuge was long past—“on Cuban soil, to track down possible nuclear bombs being moved here by rogue officers in the KGB, and, if I find them, to bring a full CIA team into the country to remove them?”

Segundo smiled.

“Who said anything about setting you free? Just as your country has denied your existence for the past three months, so shall I announce your escape a half hour after you walk out of this office, and call for a national manhunt. Of course, as the man in charge of that hunt, I can do as much to hinder as help its efforts. But if my men were to catch you, well …” Raúl shrugged. “I would probably shoot you myself, just for making me look the fool.”

Melchior sat silently for a long time.

Then: “What makes you think I won’t just shoot Fidel the minute you let me go?”

Raúl laughed so hard that Melchior thought he was going to fall out of his chair. When he’d finally regained composure, he reached into a drawer, pulled out something small and shiny, and tossed it across the desk’s broad surface. Melchior recognized it immediately.

Donny’s crucifix.

“Shoot him?” Segundo said. “Wouldn’t you rather offer him a cigar?”