Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  It was then I realized that if I had been a member of the Brigade, I would have been ready to enter any purgatory with them. I understood their hatred of Castro. To hate Castro offered exaltation that could not otherwise be approached, and I felt much moved by what was awaiting our Brigade. The enormity of attacking Cuba with so small a force weighed upon me; I wanted to be able to hate Castro with sufficient intensity to make their mission more possible.

  38

  I HAD NOT FELT TOO MUCH PAIN IMMEDIATELY AFTER LOSING MODENE, but then some wounds are anesthetized by the shock of the laceration. Returning from Guatemala was more difficult. I soon called the Fontainebleau. I was determined not to speak to her, but at least I could learn whether she was still in Miami. The desk clerk told me that her base had been moved to Washington. Would I like a forwarding address? I would not. It cost me something to say that, as if we were separating all over again.

  New difficulties with the Frente awaited Howard and myself. The proposed linking-up of the Frente with Manuel Ray’s forces was dividing ranks. Half of the exiles in Miami appeared to believe that Ray was an agent for Castro.

  On the other hand, Manuel Ray was laying claim to the largest underground network in Havana, and, in addition, Presidents Betancourt of Venezuela and Muñoz-Marín of Puerto Rico were well-disposed toward him. It was reported that they had serious influence with Kennedy’s administration.

  I felt for Hunt. He worked so hard. He had done his best to advance the political agenda of Cubans whose political programs he could hardly endure. Now there was every intimation he would soon be forced to accept a Cuban he considered cousin to a Bolshevik. “Just look at Ray’s policies,” he would complain. “Keep Castro’s nationalization of banks and public utilities; keep socialized medicine; don’t restore any confiscated properties. Maintain close relations with the Communist bloc. Why, Manuel Ray is Castroism without Castro.”

  Next day, Howard was called up to Washington. He came back to Miami with the news that Dr. José Miro Cardona—by choice of Quarters Eye—was going to head up the Frente. Cardona had been President of Cuba for the first few weeks of Castro’s triumphal arrival in Havana, but soon resigned and went to Argentina. Recently, the CIA brought him to Miami. He was, Hunt told me, a prestigious figure. He would be able to unify the Frente far better than Toto Barbaro.

  “Just one thing wrong,” said Hunt. “Until now, whenever Quarters Eye has asked Ray to join the Frente, Ray was arrogant enough to tell them that it would make more sense for the Frente to join him. Now that Dr. Miro Cardona is coming on board, however, I think Ray will sign up.”

  “Where does that leave you?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  By the second week in March, Hunt was summoned once more to Washington, where Bissell informed him that Manuel Ray was indeed joining their ranks.

  Hunt replied: “This is tantamount to liquidating the Frente.”

  My father, who had been asked to attend this meeting, now said to Hunt, “Couldn’t you force your guys to accept Ray?”

  “Yes,” said Hunt. “I could force them, but I’d rather not be asked to try.”

  “Why not?”

  Hunt provided a full answer to the question. Later, Cal said that he could not remember the reply. “Hunt was just being a royal pain in the ass,” Cal said. “I have no use for Manuel Ray, but it was obvious that Howard had to get on the train or get off. Instead, he was arguing.”

  Telling it to me, Hunt repeated his speech. I knew why my father had not listened. The remarks were too well rehearsed for Cal’s taste. “We,” Hunt said, “have trampled heavily on the pride of men who, in their own country, were distinguished, highly respected citizens. Over a period of time, these men of the Frente have come to realize that in Miami they are not much more than puppets. Despite that, they go on doing what I ask because they know there’s no other way their country can be rescued. They have become just about entirely dependent on us. I can’t face them, however, with a proposal to make Manuel Ray their equal. Rather than compromise on the issue, I prefer to withdraw.”

  “What was the reaction in Bissell’s office?” I asked Hunt.

  “A prolonged silence. I took in the message. I said, therefore, that I’d like to come back to Washington. I could work with Phillips on our radio broadcasts for the invasion. I can assure you, they were relieved to have me come up with such a proposal.”

  “It must have been a long plane ride back to Miami,” I said.

  “Time enough,” he said, “to change one’s thinking about more than a few things.”

  I invited Howard to dinner, but he was going out with Bernard Barker to tour a few Cuban hangouts and say some farewells. Tomorrow, he would be on his way to Quarters Eye. On the drive home to my empty apartment that night, I decided that Howard Hunt had lost more than his job. I did not pretend to understand the Agency, but I thought he had probably come to the upper limit of his career. No job was supposed to be too onerous to take on.

  All the same, next morning over breakfast, I accepted Hunt’s invitation to work with him at Quarters Eye. If I remained at Zenith, I, too, might have no future. Whoever succeeded Howard would hardly be partial to his former assistant. Whereas, at Quarters Eye, as propaganda officers, we would, Hunt calculated, still be flown to the beachhead with the Frente. A spill of adrenaline as pure as the fear of jumping from a quarry wall into ice-cold water confirmed my decision. I would fight against the steel-tipped hearts of the Communists after all.

  So, the move was put into the paper mill, and a week later, my orders were cut. I sublet my apartment in Miami, and got ready, upon his sudden if unexpected offer, to bunk with Cal in Washington.

  Just before I went up to Quarters Eye, the Frente was reorganized into the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Dr. José Miro Cardona became President, and Manuel Ray’s group was proposed for membership. In a meeting at the Miami Skyway Motel, a couple of Agency officers I had never seen before, large men calling themselves Will and Jim, dressed in three-piece gray flannel suits, declared to a near-riotous group of exiles that if the proposed change did not take place, no further aid was forthcoming. The executive wisdom of the Agency had just been demonstrated. When it came to promulgating stern measures, send out a couple of strangers.

  39

  MY FATHER WAS LIVING IN MEAN QUARTERS. A DECOMMISSIONED SAFE house had become available through the Agency rental office, and he picked it up for low rental. I believe it was his pleasure to save money in this manner in order to have more bounty available for food and drink. To celebrate my arrival, he took me to Sans Souci.

  We had a splendid meal on Saturday evening, and the restaurant was so full, and the mood so powerfully festive, that we talked freely. Given the din, no recording mechanism yet developed could have picked up our conversation, and I, after a week of closing down Hunt’s desk and living as liaison to the ice-cold executive team of Will and Jim, was as merry as a man on the first day of vacation.

  “It may interest you to know,” Cal offered, “just what happened to the last batch of pills.”

  “The ones given to the girl?” I asked.

  He nodded. He began to laugh.

  “Well, what did happen?” I asked.

  “It appears,” said Cal, “that the girl put the pill in the bottom of her cold cream jar in order to take it through Cuban customs. A couple of nights later, lying there beside a soundly snoring Fidel Castro, she got up to dig out the little pellet and drop it in a glass of water on the end table within reach of the Caudillo’s hand. The pill was missing, however. Either it had melted in the cold cream, or Castro’s security had found it.”

  “Are you saying that they were witting to her?”

  “The girl thinks so. Castro had been, it seems, a masterful lover that night—which was considerably out of character for the kind of buckeroo he usually is—at least, according to the girl. On this particular evening, however, he was Superman. This, apparently, kicked off her suspicions. She says he
is a man who would take pleasure in knowing a mistress was trying to kill him provided, of course, she could not succeed. In fact, he might be sufficiently amused by it to be generous afterward. She is now back in Miami and tells her boyfriend, Fiorini, that Castro says no one will ever be able to kill him because the highest practitioners of santería gird his person day and night with all varieties of sorcerer’s protection. ‘For a Marxist, I am curiously partial to magic,’ Castro actually said to her.”

  “Did you get all this from Maheu?”

  “Hell, no,” said Cal. “The bare outlines Maheu provided made me curious enough to interview the girl myself.”

  “And what did she look like?”

  “Ravishing, but frightfully nervous. She is just sufficiently paranoid to believe that the DGI could have a hit man out looking for her.”

  “And what is her boyfriend like? This Fiorini?”

  “Adventurer. Heavily suntanned. He’d look happy with a bloody shark’s head on his deck.”

  “Isn’t he linked with Masferrer?”

  “I expect you’re right.”

  And Masferrer, I told myself, was linked with Mario García Kohly, who was ready to kill the Executive Committee of the Frente—or would it be now the Cuban Revolutionary Committee?—when they landed on the beachhead in Cuba. I must have been growing paranoid at the length of these link-ups, for I asked, “Did the girl have fabulous dark hair?”

  “Yes,” said my father, “and green eyes. A nice combination.”

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  “Regretfully, no. Not with me tonight.” He took a sip of his Grommes and Ulrich bourbon, a bottle of which, he confided to me, Sans Souci always kept on hand for him. “By the way,” he said next, “I’ve been researching into some of that santería stuff. You won’t believe the potions those mayomberos cook up. I obtained a recipe for confounding any and all dark purposes of your enemies: You boil the head of an executed murderer together with seven scorpion tails from midnight to two in the morning. You add a little blood from the mayombero’s arm, shred a cigar butt, dissolve a drop of quicksilver, put in lots of pepper to season the cadaver meat, fold in ground herbs, tree bark, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, ten live ants and twenty live worms, offer several carefully selected incantations, add one dried lizard, one squashed centipede, a quart of rum, two dead bats buried last night and dug up tonight, three dead frogs, ditto, a small log of wood teeming with termites, and the bones of a black dog. Last of all—crucial to the soup—one quart of Florida water. I call that cooking.” He roared with happiness. “I suppose gathering all that stuff is no more life-consuming than tradecraft.” His face went blank for a moment in the midst of his laughter, an indication to me, as always, that he was debating whether to tell more.

  “We’re but a couple of weeks away from the beachhead,” he now said in so low a voice that I was just about reading his lips. Without pause, he said, “Let’s get you some Hennessey for the coffee,” and signaled to the waiter. “Now that you’re working down the hall,” he went on, “I want you to have a better conception of what went on last month. Needless to say, treat it like homeopathic medicine. One drop at a time fed to others when necessary.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Trinidad was the place to land,” he said, as soon as the waiter who brought my brandy had stepped away, “but Dean Rusk put the weight of the State Department into blocking that option. I don’t trust Rusk’s goodwill. When he was head of the Rockefeller Foundation, Allen asked for a look at the diaries of Rusk’s top people on their return from visits to international figures. Didn’t Rusk just refuse! Couldn’t imperil, he said, the integrity of the Rockefeller Foundation. Whereupon, Allen went ahead and managed to read their mail anyway. Through an operation—it may interest you to know—that Hugh set up. I don’t know how it happened, but Rusk found out. Now Rusk does not trust Allen. You can bet he doesn’t! All we keep hearing from Rusk, therefore, is that the President does not want the Cuban affair to jeopardize larger U.S. interests. Goddammit, Harry, there’s nothing larger right now than Cuba. Cuba is the hot spot and we’re mucking it up. Trinidad was the town to hit. Good landing beaches, and all the rest. But Rusk had to put the kibosh on it. Too much noise, he said. What if women and children get killed? So we lost to State. Trinidad was out. The new landing place is located back of the devil’s asshole. An area called Bahía de Cochinos. Bay of Pigs. Cherish the name.”

  “Does it have any virtues?”

  “It’s inaccessible as hell. We will establish a beachhead with no pain. How we are going to deploy from that perimeter, however, is another matter. The beachhead is surrounded by swamp. It will be hard for Castro to get at us, but just as hard for us to get out. Of course, there won’t be noise. Just us Cubans and the fish. Compliments of Dean Rusk.”

  “Could he be passing on negative signals from Kennedy?”

  “No question,” said Cal. “Kennedy’s inclination is to mañana the invasion. We had a date in March, now it’s been moved into April. In fact, I don’t believe we would have any date at all without Allen. He keeps pressing on the President as hard as he dares. Informs him that the Soviets are supplying Castro at such a rate that by May, it will be too late. Keeps telling Kennedy that the Joint Chiefs have rated the Brigade as the best-trained force in Latin America. ‘Mr. President,’ says Allen, ‘if the Brigade is never employed, you are going to have a disposal problem. Think of this incredibly motivated force rattling around in southern Florida with nothing to do.’

  “‘Well,’ replies Kennedy, ‘the invasion must appear Cuban. Since all the world is bound to know we’re behind it, the bandages must be clean.’

  “‘Nothing will show,’ says Dulles. Then he says to the President, ‘I feel more confident about this Caribbean job than I ever did about Guatemala.’”

  “I can’t wait,” I said.

  “You’ll be in it,” said my father. “You are going to the beachhead with Howard Hunt.”

  “Definite?”

  “Definite.”

  That fine leap of fear, almost as sensuous as the stirring of sex, went from my heart to my lungs, to my liver, to all of the capital cities of my soul. A large phrase, but then the brandy was ready to declare what everything was all about.

  “Take my advice,” said Cal. “Keep a diary over the next few weeks. I never did during the war, and God, I miss it now.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Security is always a problem, but you can insert your pages in the mail slot in my safe. No one goes near my safe.”

  I was silent. I was trying to mask an amalgam of small panic and pride that my father thought enough of me to suggest a journal.

  On our way out of Sans Souci, Cal said, “I forgot to tell you that while I was in Miami to interview Fiorini’s lady, I happened to take in the third Patterson-Johansson fight.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were in town.”

  “I’ve been in Miami a number of times without telling you,” he said so clearly that I had no desire to pursue it.

  “How was the fight?”

  “A good club fight, no more. And they are supposed to be champions! I mention the evening only because I happened to run into Sammy Giancana again, and he was in a splendiferous mood. Had the most attractive girl on his arm. A true stunner. The sort you have to be ready to kill for. Most marvelous combination of black hair and green eyes.”

  “Did you get her name?”

  “Something like McMurphy or maybe it was Mo Murphy. The name hardly suited her.”

  “Is she the same girl who was with Castro?”

  “Certainly not. What gave you that idea?”

  “You described Fiorini’s girl as having black hair and green eyes.”

  “I didn’t.” Now he was distressed. “Did I misspeak, or did you mishear? Fiorini’s girl is a blonde with green eyes.”

  “Then I believe you misspoke.”

  “How peculiar.” He punched my bicep hard enough to let me sh
are his pain. “Maybe a mayombero is doing a job on me,” he said.

  “Never.”

  “Before your brains go, keep a journal.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Bequeath it to someone from the start. It will focus your entries.”

  40

  April 1961

  In the event of my demise, these journal pages are to be delivered by hand to Kittredge Gardiner Montague, TSS, Detached Duty. My father, Boardman Kimble Hubbard, will serve as my executor and vet these entries for security should he deem it necessary. I do not wish to embarrass Mrs. Montague or my executor.

  Let this first entry serve, therefore, as a cover page. Subsequent entries will be placed in envelopes and transmitted to safekeeping as per mode agreed upon.

  Quarters Eye, April 4, 1961

  This page marks the first sealed entry.

  After some deliberation, I have decided to keep a journal. The invasion of Cuba is to take place on April 17, and that is precisely two weeks from today. So soon as a perimeter is secured, I expect to be flown to the beachhead with the exile leaders of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. It occurs to me that I may be describing the last two weeks of my life.