Flight from a Firing Wall

by Baynard Kendrick

  “No questions,” he said. “You have my word. You’re the doctor.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” I said as we went on in.

  Clooney stood at the foot of the bed. I sat down and touched Ernesto on the shoulder. He opened his eyes and for the briefest flash his built-in caution prevailed as they estimated the new arrival. Then he accepted him with a weary shrug. He continued as though there had been no interruption.

  “Your opinion can make no difference to me since only the facts can speak for themselves.” He spoke in English and his voice was stronger as though he was glad to have someone else there to hear. “One only survives the machines of dictatorship either by becoming a cog or living a life that is a monstrous lie. One must be utterly callous toward the esteem and opinions of others when one chooses the latter course of fighting corruption. It is an art to live the perfect lie.”

  His eyes burned at me daring me to deny. “You believe that it was by my orders that you and Milagros were shot while trying to make your escape. The men who opened fire on you believed that too. It was a primer capitán, jealous of my quick promotions, and probably just a little suspicious of my views, who issued those orders. Not I.” His look challenged me again. I stared back blankly. “I admired that capitán greatly for his loyalty to the rebel cause, if not for his Communistic leanings. It pained me no little when later, to protect myself and my authority, I was forced to have him shot on trumped-up charges.”

  He coughed and I poured him some water from the Thermos jug. After two difficult swallows he went on again. “I tell you this to demonstrate, that like the American General, Benedict Arnold, you can only play the part of a traitor successfully in the Rebel Army, or any army, when your rank is sufficiently high. If I had not already outranked that primer capitán in 1960, you and Milagros would both be dead right now. I ordered an exchange of fire from men I had in ambush with those in the jeep who had fired on you. No one yet has dared to question why. There were plenty of anti-Communists in Havana then, and the blame was easily put on them. It was the reverse of the world-wide procedure used today.

  “There was some confusion. In the turmoil you and Milagros were placed in an ambulance and whisked away. I got her admitted as my daughter in a hospital in another part of the city through the offices of a friendly nurse, but there was a dragnet already out for you as a member of the underground, and now worse as a recusant priest who had shot three soldiers. My only chance was to keep you alive until I could find some means of getting you out of the country. A doctor I knew, at the risk of his life, dressed your wounds and hid you out in his office until arrangements were made and I called for you.”

  He took another swallow of water and feebly rubbed the back of his neck. He was growing steadily weaker. I said, “I’m anxious to hear the rest, Ernesto, but if it’s going to be too much for you, don’t try.”

  His weakness was all of the body, not of the will. He said, “Fate, or God, likes to play strange tricks on those who live a deliberate lie. I got you aboard a fishing cruiser after nightfall. It belonged to a charter-boat fisherman who hoped to make an escape to Miami.” He drew a long breath. “Fate must have had a good laugh at my feeble efforts, for now comes the strangest quirk of all. There was another refugee on board that cruiser escaping from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. He was also a doctor and badly wounded—”

  “And he died,” I burst out impulsively, remembering my moment of consciousness on that throbbing boat, and the dead man in the opposite bunk whom I had spoken to.

  “Yes, he died,” Ernesto said stolidly, “but you haven’t heard why fate was laughing so loudly. His name was Carrillio—the same as your name except for that final ‘i’—and for five years now it has separated not only you and your wife, but my daughter and me. That dead doctor’s name trickled back to Cuba as ‘Carrillo’ without the ‘i.’”

  “And you claim you just heard that dead man wasn’t me?”

  “Day before yesterday a correspondent for UPI was talking to me. He asked me if I didn’t have a son-in-law, Antonio Carrillo, who was a doctor working in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Miami. There was one safe way of finding out and I used it. If it was you, you would be bound to recognize the scene of your shooting hidden in the music of María la O….”

  I fumbled around lighting a cigarette. Time seemed to be holding its breath. The room was so quiet I imagined I could hear the hum of Albert Clooney’s tiny recording machine. Two doctors—Carrillo and Carrillio. Such things could also happen when a master of deceit as expert as Ernesto García had a hand in the scripting of a story.

  He read my thoughts and my indecision with an intuition that was working overtime, well aware that I could neither prove nor disprove. He had made his pitch. Regardless of the value of the product he was offering or its obvious flaws, he was far too keen a salesman to pursue the matter further and kill a sale with a customer as anxious as I was to buy. He looked up at me. There were deep lines between his eyes now, and his mouth was twisted with pain.

  “And Milagros still doesn’t know I’m alive?” I felt forced to ask him.

  “No more than I did.”

  “I have heard that she has worked so hard for the Communist Party that they awarded her the title of the Red Queen. Did you know that?” I could feel the touch of Soledad’s hand against my cheek and hear her saying, “In a world gone topsy-turvy neither people themselves, nor what they do, are ever exactly what they seem.” He gave me time enough to snuff out the cigarette that was making my mouth so dry.

  “I am, or was until I left the country, a Comandante in the Rebel Army’s G-2,” he reminded me, spacing his words. “As such, my tentacles stretched from one end of the island to the other. It was my duty to get firsthand information on the activities of everyone. If as recently as day before yesterday I could learn about you and Luis Martínez, and the ominous cloud of passive resistance that you are gathering in this country against the Castro regime, certainly you must know that I have been aware of every move my daughter has made that has turned her into the legendary figure called the Red Queen.”

  I pounced on what I thought was the rift in the fabric of his wonderful story. “You told me that you found I was still alive and where I was working from a news correspondent with the UPI.”

  That threw him back into Spanish, but not for long. “Si. Esa es la verdad. Tiene un puesto de mucha confianza.— Yes. That’s the truth. He holds a position of great trust. Not only with the American press, but with Fidel Castro and me. Even dictators must have some outlet to spread the word, and to show the world how powerful they are and how much good they have done. This particular correspondent, like many others, is just another loose thread in the tangled skein of secrecy. His stories are closely censored by my department, but the credentials that brought him to Cuba, and that keep him there, came from me.”

  “And Milagros?” I persisted. “Is she aware of your double game? Of any of the things you have just told me?”

  “How could she be? We play at cross-purposes,” he said after a time, resignedly. “I have seen her only twice in a year and then only officially. We are supposed to be working together, you see, but in my heart I know she despises me. Not only because she considers me your murderer, but because she believes me to be the murderer of many others, acting as a G-2 Comandante.”

  “Then she isn’t really working for the Communists? This Red Queen image is just another living lie?” My speech was stumbling as if it came from a bumbling boy.

  This time he went proud and pulled family on me. “We are speaking of Señora Milagros García de Carrillo, who bears my name and yours. She is my daughter and your wife. Has your love for her grown so weak that you dare to question her integrity?”

  “I’m not questioning Milagros. I’m questioning you.”

  “It is only because I realize how distraught you must be that I choose to give you an answer.” His voice crackled at me like breaking ice as though his disdain must have answered it al
l. He had accused me of heavy sarcasm but his could make your skin crawl.

  “Maybe because of her hatred of me, she has taken up the cudgels against Fidel and is apparently collaborating with the Russians while actually working for the anti-Castro underground. There is no more dangerous game than that in Cuba. Even some of the most powerful Fidelistas are eager to trip her and see her fall.”

  “Among them her devoted father in G-2?”

  That was unworthy of an answer too. “Milagros is brilliant and plays a lone hand, but no one living is brilliant enough to defeat the Security Police of any country, alone,”

  “Yet you claim to have done so for thirty years.”

  “By joining them, not fighting them alone.”

  “You admit that she has done so successfully. For how long?”

  “Three years.” He looked at me emptily, then turned his gaze on Clooney. “The irony is that she hasn’t done it alone, but no one could possibly tell her that. She has made three bad slips. Only the fact that I was in a position to cover for her has kept her from prison, or the firing wall. Now I am gone, and Security is suspicious of her. Doubly suspicious because she is my daughter. They’ll close in on her immediately, if she happens to make another slip or tries to leave Cuba. That’s the system I established myself. Let the subject go on unsuspectingly while you tighten around them, coil by coil.”

  “And just exactly what did you think you would accomplish by running away?” I asked him rather pettishly.

  “I figured I would stay alive, and that even in Miami alive I could be of more use to Cuba and to Milagros than I would be dead in Cuba.”

  “You told them on board the Kerritack that your Atabrine had run out and that you thought you had malaria.”

  “Malaria was a safe enough ailment for them to take me on board without alarming them, or risking breaking a quarantine. I’ve had malaria, but I don’t believe I have it now. Do you?”

  Clooney spoke now for the very first time, using his perfect Spanish. “I apologize for the intrusion, Comandante. I am a member of the Friends of Cuba, and I wish to express my appreciation for your allowing me to listen to you. My thanks to you too, Doctor.”

  Ernesto said, “I am grateful for a silent witness, señor. I have just one request: When you make your report to the authorities, please assure them from me that every word I have spoken is true. I’ll say Hasta manana, rather than Adiós for I feel quite certain we shall meet again.”

  Clooney gave his quiet smile. “That is also possibly true.” He left with another nod to me and softly closed the door behind him.

  15

  I took off my mask and cloak, sheathed my dagger, reached out for my stethoscope and went back to the job of doctoring again.

  “Since you don’t think you have malaria, and you were brought to the Kerritack in an ambulance with a doctor’s assurance that you were probably fatally ill, what do you think is really the matter? Can you give me a clue?”

  “What doctor’s assurance?” Ernesto used his sputum cup again. “Doctors in Cuba are scarcer than whisky. The present crop is almost as green. My attending physician had been trying to find the cause of abortions among some swine, but he wasn’t even a very good veterinarian. The ambulance was a station wagon, with two boards laid across the seats, which drove me two-hundred-and-fifty kilometers from the Manuelita sugar mill, near Cienfuegos, to Matanzas.”

  “Why not Havana?”

  “I had word that Harrington and the Kerritack was in Matanzas.”

  “Weren’t you a long way from your base of operations?”

  “There has been an epidemic spreading among the cane cutters on many of the sugar plantations. I started out a couple of weeks ago on a personal investigation.”

  “Isn’t that a little off-beat for an officer in Security?”

  “Sabotage shows up in more ways than one, particularly when it’s directed against the main crop of the island—sugar. Disease germs may be deliberately spread by saboteurs, or disgruntled workmen may be malingering.”

  “I’ll buy the malingering,” I told him, “but that spreading of disease germs theory sounds like a bulletin from the Commie propaganda mill. Was part of your duty to examine any germs you found and see if they were marked Made in USA?”

  He let that one pass without batting an eye. “I found that a number of the workmen were really ill. Some had died, after a number of the symptoms I seem to have now.”

  “What about the aborting swine?”

  That he took personally. “Even though your attitude is one that might be used toward a pig, I haven’t complained of pregnancy. Neither do I feel in any danger of dropping my young. The veterinarian student was interested in the family problems of the swine, not I.”

  “I am,” I said. “Pasteur was interested in anthrax in cattle but he wasn’t necessarily calling all humans bulls. Were these aborting swine around Manuelita while you were there?”

  “No. The young veterinarian I met was investigating a pig ranch at Cienfuegos.”

  “And you met him there?”

  “Yes. As I said, they had been having trouble at several pig ranches on the island. You’re not claiming I have anthrax, are you?”

  “No, nor smallpox either. I’m not claiming anything yet, except that your disposition hasn’t improved with the years. What did this young vet say about the deaths among the workers?”

  “He thought the deaths might have come from several different causes. Dengue and yellow fever among them. One case he felt sure had died from pneumonia, and another from uremic poisoning.”

  I pulled the string that lit the fluorescent lights over his bed. “I think it’s time we took a look and made sure you don’t have one, or all. When did this fever first hit you?”

  “Five days ago. Chills, headache, vomiting and pains in my legs started all about the same time. My neck’s grown stiff now.”

  I went to work with the old routine. His heart and blood pressure were those of a man of forty, but those lungs were going to show pneumonitis, or inflammation, I was certain, when I got him under an X ray.

  I stripped him down, and from my point of view there couldn’t have been a better patient if I was asking for signs and symptoms to confirm my mental diagnosis. The Comandante, as though for once he was eager to cooperate, obligingly had them all.

  The conjunctival injection of jaundice had reddened the whites of his eyes. Meningeal irritation had stiffened his neck. While the palpable spleen of malaria was missing, the liver was not only palpable, but under fist percussion, exquisitely tender, and brought forth his first sharp cry of pain. Capillary hemorrhages, and even the livid purple purpura were dotted like pimples over his trunk and legs. I took a scraping from one of those purple lesions, covered him up and hustled downstairs to the hospital laboratory with my specimen.

  They were out to lunch, but I didn’t care. Twenty minutes later a dark field examination on the microscope had shown me that the corkscrew-shaped spirochetes were there.

  Ernesto didn’t like my triumphant air when I went back in the room. “So I do have something fatal!”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Your happy expression. All doctors are ghouls at heart. They wear a death smirk that is unmistakable when they are about to lose a patient. You have the look of a hangman about to spring the trap on a mass murdering sex-fiend.”

  “I don’t feel quite that strongly about you,” I told him. “I was pleased to confirm my diagnosis, that’s all. You have Weil’s disease.”

  “Weil’s disease? What is that? Even my English isn’t good enough to comprehend your medical jargon. Nor my Spanish, either.”

  “How’s your Greek?” I gave him the full treatment. “Weil’s disease is leptospirosis icterohemorrhagica to put it simply. If you prefer you can call it infectious (spirochetal) jaundice.” I opened and closed the parentheses for him. “Or in your basic English just: epidemic jaundice.”

  “So I caught this from those work
ers in the cane fields, eh?”

  “Not unless you were so short of food that you killed and ate one,” I explained. “It is caused by a corkscrew-shaped spirochete, which showed up under the microscope from that tiny scraping I just took from one of those lumps on you.”

  “How did those get in me?”

  “I’m trying to tell you. You’ll probably know more about it than I do. The organism is a natural infection of rats, mice, possums, cattle, dogs, and swine. About the only sign of infection in any of these animals is an increased abortion rate among the pigs.”

  “Oh. You’re very clever, aren’t you?”

  “That’s something coming from you, Comandante! The germ is spread by way of infected urine, or feces, to a contaminated water supply which is consumed by the human. It also can be contracted by persons who have to handle the infected flesh of these animals, such as butchers, slaughterhouse workers, and veterinarians.”

  “I’m none of those,” he said disgruntled.

  “Give me time. We’re coming to you. You belong in Class 2. It is most commonly found in farmers, swineherders, cane cutters, ricefield workers, miners, sewer and dock workers, and military personnel.”

  “Why the military personnel?” he demanded suspiciously. “Or is that something you just dreamed up and threw in?”

  “You have it, don’t you? And you got it in performance of your military duties. The military is very apt to be around areas where the sanitation is poorest, or lacking altogether, and the rat population is the highest. Those areas are where the incidence of Weil’s disease is also the highest. Rats are fine carriers since they can easily contaminate food or drinking water with their feces or urine, as well as materials you may handle. It is communicable by contact through a break in your skin.”

  “Was this disease responsible for the death of those workers in the cane fields?”