Valley of the Templars

5

They met the man at La Taberna de la Muralles, a cafe and bar on a small cobbled plaza in Old Havana, the following day at lunchtime. He was in his fifties, with a rugged, clean-shaven face that had seen a lot of sun. He wore a porkpie hat that made him look a little bit like Gene Hackman in the French Connection, dark glasses and he had a napkin tucked into his white silk guayabera shirt as he ate a plate of assorted pastelitos-Cuban puff pastry stuffed with savory fillings. His gleaming hair looked too perfectly black to be true.

“Who is he?” Holliday asked as they approached his table on the crowded outdoor patio.

“His name is Cesar Diaz. He is a policeman, a detective, in fact,” said Eddie.

“We’re buying information from a cop?” Holliday asked.

“He is the brother of my sister’s husband,” explained Eddie.

“Still…,” worried Holliday.

“The police are as poor as the people they’re supposed to serve. Five pesos a month doesn’t buy anything on the black market. They have to make their way just like everyone else.”

They sat down and Eddie did the introductions. Diaz offered them pastries from his plate, but they declined. He ordered coffee for them all, wiped the sugar off his lips with his makeshift bib and sat back in his chair. He really was beginning to look like Popeye Doyle.

“Eddie Cabrera, it has been a very long time,” said Diaz, speaking slightly accented English.

“Africa,” said Eddie. “Other places more recently.”

“There are some people in the Direccion de Inteligencia who would be interested to know you are back in Cuba. You must know that, of course.”

“And if you so much as whispered my name, you must know what would happen to your brothers and your uncles and your aunts and your good friend Tomas who you play dominos with, even that dog of yours-what is his name?”

“Romeo.” Diaz smiled. “You have turned very hard, Eddie. I must say this.”

“Try fighting with Ochoa Sanchez in Angola-that would make you hard, too.”

“Ochoa was executed in the Tropas Especiales.”

“Everyone is executed eventually who disagrees with Fidel. Which is why I stayed in Africa.”

“Probably a wise move.”

“I thought so.”

“But now you are home again,” said Diaz. “And you want something.”

“That’s right.” Eddie nodded. The coffee arrived, the real thing in tiny cups-thick and strong and black.

“So tell me,” said Diaz, sipping. He took a red-and-white package of Populars from the pocket of his guayabera and lit one with what looked suspiciously like a gold Dunhill lighter, or at least a pretty good knockoff. Holliday noticed that the detective was wearing a stainless steel Omega Constellation on his left wrist. Whatever the detective was doing for money was clearly quite lucrative.

“My brother, Domingo, has disappeared,” Eddie said flatly.

“A lot of people are disappearing these days.” Diaz shrugged, smoking. “You have been away too long, Eddie; things have changed. Fidel gives lectures on the television about robots and Mars and how atomic bombs all over the world are leaking their radiation into the air, which is causing the hurricanes to get worse each year. He thinks American drones fly over his house all day looking for ways to poison his food. Raul dreams of his farm in Spain. The generals fight to see who will be the next comandante. The rest of Cuba thinks it wants to go to Miami.” He shrugged again. “Not to mention that Domingo had the misfortune to work for the Operations Division of the Ministry of the Interior and who knows what that means? There was even a rumor he worked at Lourdes and at Mantanzas.”

Holliday had heard of Lourdes; it was a giant signal intelligence operation built by the Russians and completed by the Chinese. Effectively it was the Cuban version of the NSA, a giant ear, listening to America. He’d never heard of Mantanzas, so he asked.

“You know the CIA operates a training camp for new agents called the Farm?”

“I think I’ve heard of it,” said Holliday evasively. In fact, he’d once been an instructor at the installation at Camp Peary in the Virginia countryside. He didn’t dare mention it.

“That is what Mantanzas is,” said Diaz, stubbing out his cigarette. “Carlos the Jackal trained there in 1962.”

“You have no idea where he is?” Holliday asked.

“No, senor,” said Diaz, shaking his head.

“Can you ask questions, perhaps?”

“Careful questions. For a price.”

“What price?”

“A thousand. U.S dollars, of course, to start.”

“How about five hundred?”

“For now.”

Holliday took ten fresh twenties out of his wallet and laid them neatly on the table. Diaz covered them with his big hand and slid them out of sight.

“That is not five hundred dollars, senor,” said the cop.

“No. It’s two hundred. Another three when you bring us some information we can use.”

“How do I contact you?”

“Tell my sister you wish to talk. She will know how to reach me. I will choose the place,” said Eddie. “Vamos a necesitar armas.”

“What kind of weapons?” asked Diaz blandly, lighting another Popular.

“Pistolas,” said Eddie.

“Makarov?”

“Two, with fifty rounds and an extra clip each.”

“A thousand.”

“Mierde,” scoffed Eddie. “I can get an AK-47 for a hundred and eighty dollars in Mozambique and still with the greased paper on it. Do better, Cesar, and maybe there will be more business we can do together. Two hundred each, pay when we get them.”

“Are you sure we can trust this guy to get us guns?” asked Holliday. “Maybe he’s setting us up.”

“This is not America, senor. We do not have-what do you call them? Stings? We are all on the same side here, senor.” He rubbed his fingers together and winked. “The side with cash in its pockets, comprendez?” Diaz frowned. “Once upon a time Cuba was a paradise, senor. Now it is a jungle and the only object is to survive.” He stood up abruptly, pushed back his chair and walked away.

“What now?” Holliday asked.

Eddie watched Diaz go, a thoughtful expression on his face. Holliday looked around the square. From where he sat and from what he’d seen, there was nothing but music, cafes, good food and pretty women in Havana; it was a museum piece, a country caught in amber, a giant tourist trap, perhaps, but so far he hadn’t seen much of Diaz’s jungle.

“Now?” Eddie said at last. “We must go to see my mother and I must pay my respects to her and tell her I am here.”

Eddie’s mother lived in a second-floor apartment on the Calle Maloja, a narrow street well off the Avenida Salvador Allende to the north. This was no place of cafes and tourists but something akin to a run-down backstreet somewhere in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

The colored stucco was broken and old, showing the water-stained limestone beneath, there was a maze of wires and cables running up and down the outer walls and sagging over the street to the other side, and the sidewalks beneath were cracked and broken and clearly hadn’t been repaired since they were put down.

There were one or two ancient vehicles parked, pulled haphazardly off the street and the archways at the main level, which might once have been home to small businesses that were long since shuttered and locked. Oddly, on the ornate wrought-iron balcony that ran the length of the second story, there was more than one satellite TV dish, poking its seeking parabola toward the bright blue, blazing sky.

By comparison the inside of Anna Margarita Alfonso’s apartment was pleasant, well appointed with a few pieces of old Victorian-style furniture, framed photographs of her children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles and other ancestors displayed on one pale blue wall.

Eddie’s mother wore a blue housedress and slippers. She was very slim, her face dark as chocolate, with her son’s aristocratic cheekbones and a narrow patrician nose. Her hair was snow-white and done up in a scrap of cloth. Eddie compared her to the pictures on the wall. Two photographs in particular caught Holliday’s eye-a wedding photograph of a young man in his early thirties, very dark, and his even darker-skinned bride in a blazing white dress standing on the steps of some official-looking building, both figures looking ecstatically happy.

Parked to one side at the foot of the steps was a gigantic black 196 °Cadillac Special with whitewall tires and a raised wheel well set into the front fender, dating the photograph easily enough. The other picture showed the same striking black woman in a dramatic poses, backlit and wearing the maid’s costume of Dolores in the Spanish opera of the same name.

On the other wall was a large plasma TV. A silent man in his seventies or eighties wearing a grimy wife-beater was sitting in what looked to be the original Barcalounger drinking from a tall brown bottle of Bucanero beer and smoking cheap veguero cigarettes. He was watching Miami channel 7.

“My teo, Fidelio. He used to work for the garbage, but he was let go two years ago. He comes here because my mother has a big TV and the satellite.”

“How the hell did she get a plasma TV? I thought the whole country was starving to death.”

“Her nephew Victor, my cousin, works for Air Cubana. They can bring back anything. In Cuba you have to know people,” Eddie explained.

Eddie embraced his mother. “Madre,” he said softly.

“Mi nino hermoso!” she wailed, and burst into tears. They stood like that for a moment and then she pushed Eddie away and slapped him lightly across his broadly smiling tearstained face. “Whay no han visitado a su madre en tan largo tiempo?”

Holliday didn’t need a translation. Teo Fidelio noticed nothing. Eddie’s mother turned to Holliday.

“Y que es su amigo?”

Eddie made the introductions. His mother answered in excellent English.

“You are a doctor?” Anna Margarita Alfonso asked.

“Se trata de un apodo, Mama,” explained Eddie.

“You were a soldier? You look like you were a soldier,” she said, eyeing him carefully, especially the eye patch and the new slash of gray above the scar on his temple.

“I was.” He nodded.

“An American?”

“Yes.” He nodded again, glancing at Eddie.

“You come here to fight Fidel?”

“He is my friend, Mother. He has saved my life more than once.”

“Tranquillo, nino,” the old woman said, admonishing her son. She turned back to Holliday. “You come here to fight Fidel?”

“I came here to find Eddie’s brother, Domingo.”

“Aye, Domingo!” wailed the woman, and launched into another bout of tears. She slumped down on an old overstuffed couch against the wall full of pictures and dropped her head into her hands. Eddie sat down beside her and put a comforting arm around her shoulder.

“Mama, Mama, we will find him,” he soothed.

“Your brother was a fool!”

Teo Fidelio broke wind, lit another cigarette and switched to channel 6. America’s Got Talent.

“Why was he a fool, Mama?”

“Because he thought working for them would protect him when…the Comandante died.”

“Who is them, Mama?”

“The people who run this country, Edimburgo. The people who have always run the country. Fidel was one, Raul another, and Domingo thought they’d let him join if he worked for them. When the end came we would all be protected.”

“Who, Mama? You must tell us who these people are if we are to find Domingo.”

“The families.”

“What families?” Eddie urged, exasperated.

“The old families. The families going back to Diego Velazquez de Cuellar. The Ten Families.”

“How do you know all this, Mama?”

“Because when I was a girl I did the laundry in the house of Ramon Grau and many other wealthy families in Havana. A black laundry girl was invisible. I saw and heard a great many things and I remembered. The Ten Families might have different names now, but they still rule Cuba with an iron fist.”

“The Knights of the Brotherhood of Christ,” whispered Holliday. “The Spanish Templars!”

Eddie’s mother made a hissing sound and waggled her long, gnarled fingers in some strange ritual motion, then quickly crossed herself on both chest and forehead. “There is no Christ in these people-they go to La Templete to make their three circles around the ceiba tree. They are devils!”

“Ceiba tree?” Holliday asked.

“I will explain later,” said the Cuban. The old lady looked as though she was going to have a fit. Eddie laid a calming hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Mama, tranquillo, tranquillo.…” He turned to Holliday. “It is like your friend in Toronto said, Doc. Fidel’s family were named Vazquez. They came from Lancara in Galicia. Galicia borders Portugal. They were sailors and conquistadores.”

“Si.” The old woman nodded. “The devils met at La Templete. Domingo thought they would protect us. The fool, the fool!” she wailed again.

“What happened?” Eddie asked.

“I do not know,” said Eddie’s mother, weeping openly. Teo Fidelio appeared not to notice. He lit yet another cigarette and sighed a huge cloud of smoke toward the plasma TV. Eddie’s mother wiped her tears away on her apron and spoke again. “I only know that Domingo said if there was any trouble you were to go and see Leonid.”

“Leonid?” Holliday asked.

“Leonid Maximenko,” said Eddie. “Which means my brother is in very bad trouble.”