“A militiaman’s daughter?”
“Absolutely. There’s a family of them in every block of every town in Cuba. Her mother and father, and brothers and sisters, are probably all busy casing other homes in the same block or prowling around inside of them.”
“Why does anyone stay home at all?”
“They don’t, if they can possibly help it. I’ll show you.”
He stopped at a nearby neighborhood bar. It was crowded to capacity, and then some. We had a drink and quickly left. Again, I was conscious of the deadening effect of my uniform.
The night clubs and bars were running full blast, and they were everywhere. Raucous music blared from some that were open to the street, and customers stood in rows watching the Negro dancers. Others with dimmed lights were more quiet while a singer performed, but they were just as full.
“Make things unpleasant enough at home and you drive them out to the hot spots,” the doctor said. “In that way the government, sooner or later, gets any money that anyone has held out in the old teapot. They collect on the movies, if you can stand half propaganda and half show. What they miss on food and drinks, they get through the lottery and the gambling tables at places like the Tropicana or the Casino Nacional.”
“I’ve had enough,” I told him. “This isn’t a city. It’s a penitentiary with the inmates watching the warden’s show. I’ve only one thing left to live for now. I have to get Milagros out of here. Both of us will die if I fail.”
“So, you’ve had enough of it in just a few hours,” he said stonily. “Well, I had too much of it five years ago. Still, I managed to live through it somehow, even with a tag on my tail.”
Both of us were silent until ten minutes later he parked on Agra-monte a block away from the Plaza bar. Then all he said was, “I’ll wait in the bar. Good luck.” I watched his bent figure straighten up and his shoulders go back, as he walked down the street to 277 and went in the bar.
A man and woman, linked arm in arm, turned the corner from Virtudes and followed him. Boiling anger welled up inside of me, helped not a little by my fine foundation of gin, wine and rum. Were they an innocent couple out for the evening or Castro agents? It burned me that I had reached such a state after seeing that peeping-tom brat at the window, who should have been given a slipper on her bottom instead of a gun, that I was beginning to see spies and agents in every innocent passer-by. I wasn’t any teniente to be trifled with, for I was seething with animosity when I got out of the car, and truculently clutching my kit bag and a bottle of rum purchased at the Rio Cristal strode down to the Plaza Hotel. Apparently my alter ego had taken over entirely and come to stay.
I spotted the sentry guarding the main entrance twenty paces before I got there, and he spotted me too. Either something in my stride and bearing warned him of the mood I was in, or he was better trained than his pal at the Rio Cristal. At any rate, he stiffened to attention and saluted. There’d have been an unfortunate run-in right then and there if he’d made any move to question me or bar my way.
The lobby hadn’t changed in twenty-five years, except to shrink in size and look more tired from the pleasant vastness I had remembered as a little boy. A man behind the desk stood up as I crossed the checkerboard squares of the black-and-white tile. His eyes were mean dots of black, and aside from a small pointed tuft of hair on his chin his head was as bare as a billiard ball.
I planted my kit bag and the bottle of rum on the desk and said, “I want a room with a bath on the second floor, with a fire escape. At the back where the noise won’t disturb me. Give me a registration card.”
He looked at a wall clock at the end of the office then moved his dots of meanness back to me and eyed me with disfavor. “You should have tried earlier, Compañero Teniente. I’m sorry but we’re full.”
“Are you the manager?’
“I’m in full charge here.”
“Responsible for everything, hunh?”
“Everything, while I’m on duty. Certainly responsible enough to tell you when we’re full.”
“That makes two of us on duty, then. You with the Minister of Accommodations, or whatever his title, and I with Intelligence of the F.A.R. Waiting for me in the bar is Compañero Alfredo, head of the Secret Police in Las Villas Province. We needed a room on the second floor where we might come and go without too much trouble.”
I swung around and pointed to the bird-cage elevator nestling in the embrace of the marble staircase. It was dark and the door was closed. On the door a printed sign read EL ASCENSOR NO FUNCIONA—The elevator isn’t running.
“Among our other duties will be that of taking your name and charging you with negligence in the upkeep of government property, the creation of a fire hazard, and endangering the lives of innocent citizens through your failure to keep an elevator running while the hotel is full. You will further be charged with failure to cooperate with—”
“But, Compañero Teniente, you asked for a room with bath on the second floor!” He produced a handkerchief and mopped his shining dome. “There is a suite on the third. The price, of course—”
“Will be less,” I broke in, curtly, “since we have to walk up one flight more, and take double the chance of being incinerated if this tinderbox catches on fire. Give me the registration card.”
He wet his lips and tugged at his goatee while I signed myself in. He marked down 322 on the card, but before he could give me the key, I said, “Be kind enough to see that my suite is in perfect order, unlike the elevator. Get the bellboy or porter, if you have such a thing in this rundown hostelry, to take up my kit bag and this bottle of rum and provide some ice and water, with two glasses. Just leave the key in the door.”
I gave him my back with marked disdain and went in search of Maciá in the bar. Minute by minute my hatred of these servile Soviet lackeys was growing. I knew quite well that he had no porter and would have to climb the stairs himself. I hoped his subservient feet were sore.
We spent ten minutes and another rum in the bar. The clerk was sulking over a copy of Free Cuba News and didn’t bother to look up at us when we went up to the suite. The doctor put his fingers to his lips when we closed ourselves into 322. He searched the sitting room for bugs behind the pictures, under the furniture, lights and rugs while I opened the rum. He softly closed the communieating door to the bedroom and drank off half his drink without sitting down, then added more rum.
I began to admire his capacity as well as my own. We had really been pouring it in and without the slightest effect on either of us, as far as I could see. Tomorrow, of course, might be different. Rum is a drink of delayed reactions that later attack you violently.
Maciá said, “¡Que tonteria! —What nonsense!” and pointed to the old-fashioned shuttered windows reaching from the ceiling to the floor. “This is the day of proximity microphones, lowered outside of windows, if you really want to eavesdrop. I don’t know what I’m looking for. If your gentlemanly friend is interested in you, he’ll have you staked out by now.”
I started to ask, “Xiqués?” but said instead, “You make them sound very efficient.”
“So are computers.” He finished his drink. “But a nation of them is dull as hell. Who on earth but another computer would want to trot around with one from bar to bar? Look. We came up here for a game of chess. Get your men from out of your bag and let’s begin.” He moved his eyes and jerked his thumb toward the door to the hall.
31
Suite 322 was at the end of the hall. Dr. Maciá stepped out casually and turned around as though about to bid me good night. Just to the left of the sitting-room door was another slatted ceiling-high window. Shutters, opening head-high, led out onto a balcony overlooking the street. Halfway down and across the hall was the elevator and the marble staircase.
I followed him out into the deserted length of the tessellated corridor, closed and locked the sitting-room door, and put the key with its big brass tag into my right-hand side pants pocket.
We pa
used to listen for I don’t know what, possibly footsteps on the marble staircase ascending or descending. The only sound was the muffled voice of Fidel Castro delivering one of his endless tirades to the captive diners at the Libre. It came from a bedroom nearer to the elevator across the hall.
A wave of claustrophobia swept over me at the sound of Fidel. Surreptitiously, so the doctor wouldn’t notice, I loosened the Makarov in its holster and slipped off the safety. Like most of the foreign automatics, the first shot was fired like a double-action revolver by pulling the trigger. I hadn’t forgotten Leo’s warning that if I ever drew it, I was a dead man. I wasn’t any TV US Marshal, but I did know my own skill and I’d been pushed too far by gun-toting females and high-school spies. Also I had enough red-eye in me to be ready for a shoot-out in the X-Y Corral. It bolstered me up to remember that, the last time I’d had to pull an automatic in Cuba, three of Fidel’s flunkies had gone down along with Milagros and me.
We climbed one flight of the marble stairs into another deserted hall. The doctor stopped and tapped softly on the door of 414. It was opened by an ancient crone with a kerchief wrapped around her head. Two unblinking shoe-button eyes stared at us out of her wizened face that looked half Negro and half Indian. Her shrunken frame was no larger than that of a walking doll. She could have been a hundred or more.
At sight of the doctor, she opened the door just wide enough to let us slip in. She closed it swiftly and stepped back to bob him half a curtsy, moving with a surprising agility.
Dr. Maciá addressed her with a tenderness that a son might have shown to his mother. I recalled then that Villaverde had told me she was an old retainer in the Villaverde family.
“Ágata, my dear, this is not really a soldier, but a doctor more experienced than I am. I have brought him with me to examine the señora. How is she?”
“¡Peor! Hoy se puso amarilla,” Ágata said almost inaudibly. “Worse! Today she turned yellow.”
The doctor said, “We will examine her while you wait in the hall. If anyone comes, do as you have done before. Make just enough noise to warn me, then try to trick them downstairs or anywhere that will give me a chance to get away down the service stairs, even to the floor below where the doctor, here, has a room. Perhaps we can come later. After two when the other night man comes on duty. ¡Me entiende Ud.? Do you understand me?”
Her ancient head bobbed wordlessly. She went out into the hall. We walked to the bed, pulled aside the mosquito netting, and turned the lamp shade at an angle so the light fell on our patient.
Señora Teresa Villaverde de Nunez was enough like her father to have been recognized instantly by anyone who knew him well. Somehow she radiated his strength of character. The delicate curves of her body, outlined under the ruffled nightgown, were more boyish than full-blown. With her wealth of black hair spread on the pillow she was strikingly beautiful, even with her eyes closed and her jaundiced skin.
I said, “We can thank Comandante Ernesto García for diagnosing this one for us. Has she been in Las Villas Province lately?”
“I can’t say positively, but she tries to get to see her father whenever she can without risk to him.”
“I asked because the Comandante picked his up around Cien fuegos. Also the water is bad in Sancti Spíritus. Government monopoly. All sorts of peculiar wild life comes out of the taps. Leo and Guido steal all theirs in five-gallon jugs. I’d say she has Weil’s disease.”
He said, “I was afraid of acute yellow atrophy.”
I shook my head and pointed to the purple purpura already hemorrhaging on her arm. “I’ll bet on Weil’s leptospirosis ictero hemorrhagica. I’m no genius. I have had all the answers before I begin. If you doubt it put a scraping from those purpura under an ultramicroscope—”
“If I had an ultramicroscope,” he interrupted, “it would be easier to make a dark-field examination of the particles of your brain. It fits perfectly, now that you’ve named it. But what’s the answer?”
“Penicillin.”
“How much?’
“Massive doses. Five-million units a day. Thirty to fifty-million units, say.”
“Dios mediante—God willing, with the help of Justino, the black market and about a thousand pesos, I might raise thirty to fortymillion units. We’ll probably both get shot, but if I can raise the money I’ll make a try.”
I took the roll from my pocket and counted out five hundred pesos. “Put this in the pot. I have plenty to last until I contact Villaverde again. It’s his money anyhow. If you’re willing to risk your neck, I’m sure he’s willing to help finance it even though for what would be about ten-dollars worth of penicillin in Miami the price does seem a bit high.”
“Not much higher than cigarettes at forty dollars a carton,” he reminded me. He took the money and shoved it in his pocket. “I’d better get on the job right now. The black market works much better at night. That’s why they call it black. I know a delightful character called Jacobo Juncadella who deals crooked Twenty-one at the Tropicana. The service stairs are two doors the other side of the elevator from here. Follow me down to the service entrance. Bolt it shut after me and get back to your room, chico. Don’t push your luck too far.”
I said, “Not until I’ve made one try to find out the main thing I came here for.”
“¡Por Dios sí, chico! I’d forgotten entirely about Milagros.”
Teresa’s lips moved in a whisper at the sound of the name, and she repeated, “Milagros. Milagros.” She opened her eyes and stared up at the mosquito netting, not seeming to know there was anyone else in the room. “Milagros. The last of my friends. Ágata told me why she hasn’t been to see me …”
I thought for one deadly second that she was going to stop. “But of course she would come if she could,” Teresa went on haltingly. “Ágata told me that she was in the women’s prison at Guanajay. Forty kilometers from here. The last of my friends in Guanajay. Ágata told me how they arrested her outside of the hotel on her way to see me and took her away. Now there has been no one since two weeks ago. The last of my friends in Guanajay …”
She closed her eyes and I closed mine. I stood there supporting myself against the headpost of the bed for what seemed to be an eternity. There could only be one resurrection in a lifetime. My mind hunted frantically for the reason for this second blow that life had dealt out to Milagros and me.
The doctor came around the bed and took my arm. I opened my eyes and focused them on him with difficulty. Dear God, this was the end of everything. The end of the world and of the wife I had lost twice without ever finding once. I could feel the sickness deep down in my guts, and my mouth was all bitter with the taste of despair.
Maciá’s arm was around my shoulders supporting me and he was whispering fiercely in my ear, “¡Escuche un momento!— Listen a minute!”
Voices were raised outside in the hall. The voice of a man. Then Ágata’s, squeaking shrilly, “What do I care who you are, vomit of a dog? Take your filthy hands off of me! I’ll go down any stairs I want to. I’m on the wrong floor, that’s all there is. My eyes are poor and I can’t see.”
Then the deeper man’s voice, “Why you damned old witch, you’d better quit trying to claw and kick me!”
Then Ágata’s, “I’ll claw your eyes out if you try to stop me.” There was a clatter of feet on the stairs going down.
We left the room together with Maciá dragging me. Then the dimly lighted well of the service stairs had sucked us in. We started down with the doctor leading, and I following him automatically. Halfway down the second flight at a right-hand turn we met a militiawoman face to face. She was standing three steps below us crying “¡Alto! ¡Alto ahí!—Halt! Stop there!” and moving her tommy gun menacingly back and forth, from side to side, like a rattler seeking a place to strike.
We stopped there all right, at her sharp command. Then her tommy gun moved too far to the right. From behind the doctor, steadying myself by clutching the handrail, I landed one beautiful hate-fi
lled kick with my combat boot on the point of her prominent chin.
She did a cup-winning backward swan dive while the tommy gun squirted bullets in an arc at the bottom of the stairs above us with a boiler-riveting din. She landed in a heap at the bottom of the flight and lay quite still.
We hopped over her and made the exit. Maciá jerked back the heavy bolt and opened the fire door to face a militiaman standing there on the sidewalk. He was holding a rifle pointing down and he started to raise it to a level of the doctor’s stomach. It hadn’t come up six inches when the Makarov blazed out twice in my hand. I stared in sick astonishment at a ghastly hole where his eye had been. Together we caught him before he fell and dragged him inside. The doctor sprinted off for his car and I bolted the door behind him.
Two flights up in the service shaft, women were screaming and voices were yelling everything. I walked up one flight to the second floor, went into the hall, and took the stairs by the elevator up to the third. Everyone must have been jammed into the service shaft to see the fun, for it was as free of people as it had always been.
Fidel’s speech was still going strong as I used my key on 322, opened the door and stepped in. I wasn’t alone. Xiqués stood quietly facing me, impeccable with his Panama hat and Malacca cane. The rest of the room seemed overcrowded, not this time with militiamen, but with very efficient-looking soldiers of the F.A.R.
“You were gone a long time, gusano Carrillo,” Xiqués said as one of the soldiers relieved me of my gun. “Five years, isn’t it, as I recall. We were beginning to wonder what you were doing, and where you had been.”
Twenty minutes later, the van I was locked in dipped into the tunnel under the channel that leads to La Cabana. I knew very well where I was going, even if Xiqués didn’t know where I’d been. Neither did he know how neatly I had tricked him. He actually thought he had caught a man, instead of just a skeleton rattling around quite emptily in a blown-up sack of skin.
Flight from a Firing Wall Page 22