“Nothing. And nobody.”
Trafficante tapped fingertips below his chin. Giancana spun the gold ring, and Roselli drummed fingers on the table. Maheu shook his head in a barely perceptible display of loathing.
Calendar reached into his pocket. Between finger and thumb, he held up for the men at the table the small amber glass vial.
“These are the pills.”
Roselli reached for them. Calendar held the bottle away.
“Botulinum. Sprinkle one of these babies on food or in a cold drink. Nothing warm. In six hours, paralysis starts at the feet and crawls up the body until it hits the organs. They shut down, the lungs quit next. Castro’ll be dead twenty-four to forty-eight hours later.”
Calendar set the bottle on the table. Giancana picked it up. The Mafioso peered closely into the glass, as if trying to see a life trapped inside like a genie. “These’ll do the trick, huh?”
“No antidote.”
Giancana passed the bottle to Trafficante, who also gazed into the little shaded glass at the six white capsules. Roselli was next. Maheu did not desire a closer look.
“Okay,” said Calendar. “Now that Uncle Sam’s anted up, I’ll need something from you. A name.”
Trafficante exchanged glances with Giancana. The two nodded.
“When?” Giancana asked.
“I’ll let Bob know. It’ll be inside the next couple weeks.”
“Okay,” said Trafficante. “I got a guy in mind. You say the word, Mr. Calendar, I’ll bring him here for a sit-down.”
“That’ll work.”
Giancana spoke. “One last thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Plausible deniability.”
“That’s right.”
“So, who’s the patsy?”
Calendar stood to end the meeting.
“I got my eye on one. As we speak.”
* * * *
CHAPTER FIVE
March 14
First Avenue
Miramar
Havana
A STRONG EVENING BREEZE blew across the Florida Straits. Mikhal Lammeck stood in the backyard of his rented house, hearing the wind in a royal palm left leaning after some old hurricane. He looked over the waves and whitecaps to the northern horizon. Ninety miles that direction, under the same purpling sky, lay America.
The actual distance, Lammeck thought, was not so great. It was nothing, crossable in an hour by plane, three hours by powerboat. Ninety miles was a poor measurement of what separated Cuba from the U.S. today.
He checked his watch: 6:00 p.m. He left the rear yard and entered the house, passing through the kitchen. Pouring himself a tumbler of rum, he went to the front porch, out of the wind, facing the road, to wait.
He sat on the step. His house was the only one on the block that had an inhabitant. The others had been abandoned over the last two years, furniture left inside, cars still in the driveways. The homes were beginning to show the effects of tropical weather and neglect. Their owners and families took what valuables they could carry to travel that ninety miles north. Most settled in Miami. All gnashed their teeth over Castro.
Lammeck sipped the dark rum, letting the taste swirl on his tongue. He’d been in Havana a week; rum and sunsets had become his early evening ritual. Then he would call a taxi and head back into old Havana to eat, have another few drinks, and listen. But not tonight. Lammeck set the glass of rum on the porch and let the warm Caribbean evening fall.
Johan arrived on time, at seven. A powder blue and white ‘56 Ford Fairlane pulled up. Lammeck did not rise or lift a hand in greeting. This meeting was not something he’d asked for. The man coming up the sidewalk was not someone he knew better than a five-minute conversation could tell him.
“Professor.”
Lammeck inclined his head. “Captain. Right on time.”
“It is my profession to be exact, Professor. As it is yours.”
“What have you brought me, Captain?”
Johan showed a cigar box. “The Partagas, as promised.” He set the box on the porch beside Lammeck, then handed over a bottle. “And añejo rum.”
Lammeck admired the bottle, then gave it back to Johan. “I’ll fetch you a glass, Captain. Open that and have a seat.”
When Lammeck returned from the kitchen with the tumbler, Johan had already poured Lammeck’s glass full. A new, snipped Partagas cheroot waited beside it.
Lammeck sat on the step and tilted the glass at Captain Johan beside him. The policeman returned the salute. Lammeck took a swallow.
“This is good.”
“Thank you. It is the siete rum. I assume you have been drinking the quince.”
“I have.”
“That is for tourists and export, Professor. In Cuba, we know to drink only the seven-year rum, especially with cigars. The siete has gained all its flavor, and lost nothing. The fifteen-year is too old.”
Lammeck tipped the glass again Johan’s way. “It is possible to be too old. I worry about that every day.”
Johan shook his head. “No need, Professor. You are a fine-looking man.” Smiling, the policeman patted his own stomach. “We are of a kind, in that department. Here, let me light your cigar.”
Johan produced a Zippo and set the flame to both cigars. Lammeck breathed in the good Cuban tobacco, then sipped the siete. Johan was right, the dark flavor of the younger rum married the tobacco’s tang better than the quince. The two tastes filled each other’s gaps.
Johan savored his own smoke and glass. “This is a fine home, on a wonderful street. You are fortunate.”
Lammeck shrugged. “I made the arrangements in December, before the U.S. broke relations in January. The Cuban government owns this house. Someone decided to let me keep the contract.”
Johan smiled. “Por nada.”
“You?”
“I am particularly fond of historians, Professor. I am in charge of approving American entry visas since the break. I thought it might be a good thing to let you come, despite our countries’ disagreements.”
A tingle crept up Lammeck’s spine. He rolled the glass of rum in his hand and chose his next words carefully.
“How long have you been following me?”
“Let us say I’ve simply been waiting for a good opportunity for us to meet. I wished to give you a chance to get settled, before I introduced myself.”
Lammeck eyed his guest. “Why don’t you do so now?”
The man set his own rum on the stoop and rose. Slightly shorter than Lammeck and not as stout, he had the same firm rotundity; he was strength and excess in tandem, a powerful blend like the cigars and rum. The posture Johan struck was meant to be comic and self-deprecatory but Lammeck made no mistake: this was no regular policeman.
“I am Captain Pablo de Santana Johan Guerrero. I have the honor of serving on Commandante Castro’s security force.” Johan clicked his boot heels and bowed. The move was Germanic, a lampoon. Johan was trying to take the sting out of who he was.
“You’re with the secret police.”
Johan shook his head. “Really, I am more a policeman of secrets. That is why I have an interest in you, Professor. May I?”
“Please. Sit.”
Johan returned to the porch.
“And exactly why have you been following me? You could have just met me at the airport. Or dropped by the house.”
“You are an expert in assassinations, Professor. It is known you have had high-level affiliations with your government in the past. And you are an American during this unfortunate time of conflict between our countries. It was considered wise to keep an eye on you for a little while, to be certain you have no agenda here in Cuba other than research, rum, and cigars.”
“I have none, I assure you.”
“That is excellent to hear. Do you know, Professor, I have read your book? Years ago. The Assassins Gallery. It remains the definitive work on history’s assassinations.”
“I’m flattered.”
Joha
n studied the tip of his cigar, then said, “This is my assignment, you see. Protecting Fidel from the very people you describe so brilliantly in your book. People that you continue to study, I understand. Assassins.”
“I do.”
“I am, as you say in English, a fan.”
“What did you do before the revolution, Captain?”
“I have always been a policeman.”
“You married? Family?”
“No. I’m afraid my work has been my home. It has been full at times, empty at others. I know you have not married either.”
“Another similarity between us.”
Johan allowed a delicate pause, for the wives and children they did not have. Then he raised his rum in toast to Lammeck and the lives they did. The two men drank.
“I assumed you wished to come to Cuba to continue your research. That is why I decided to allow you. You know something, or you suspect something is going to happen. You are like a raven. You are a harbinger.”
Lammeck drew on the Partagas. “You’re a clever man, Captain.”
Johan grinned behind the rim of his glass.
“Like you, Professor, I have lived more than my half century. And we have both, I believe, lived it well. One learns along the way, yes?”
“Yes.”
Johan finished his rum. He set the emptied glass on the table with a flourish. “Have you never been to Cuba before this trip?”
“No.”
“Why not? We are, as Kennedy is so fond of reminding you and your countrymen, only ninety miles south of Florida.”
“I’m from New England, Captain. Warm weather reminds us of how unhappy we are. We avoid it.”
Johan laughed. He got to his feet.
“Come, Professor. Take a walk with me by the ocean. I will tell you things about Cuba you do not know. And you will teach me something about assassinations.”
~ * ~
Johan put Lammeck in his Ford Fairlane, but did not drive far. He headed east toward old Havana, then parked on the wide seafront road, the Malecón.
“My favorite walk in all of Cuba,” Johan said, climbing out of the car. “In all the world.”
Lammeck, too, marveled at the Malecón every time he strolled it. The waters of the Florida Straits, when driven by the north wind as they were this evening, beat against the seawall with waves rolling in ten feet high. Plumes of spray leaped into the air, then cascaded across the road, soaking traffic and pedestrians. Lammeck had always stayed on the opposite side of the wide boulevard, out of reach of the flying water. Johan stood beside the seawall, waiting for Lammeck to join him.
“Come, Professor. Let us gamble.”
Lammeck moved up on the wet sidewalk. Johan pointed ahead. A mile and a half farther east, heaving up to the edge of the water, was the old city. Standing on the wet concrete, he glanced across the street where the walkway was dry and mostly empty. Dozens of Habaneros strode the ocean-side with Johan and Lammeck, testing their luck on the fickle Malecón.
“It is a tradition,” Johan told him. “It is Havana.”
Traffic flowed past, Fords, Chevrolets, and Buicks from the 1940s and ‘50s. Many glistened and swished windshield wipers from a dousing they’d taken farther up the road. Lammeck imagined being waterlogged and sitting through dinner. But Johan smiled like a boy. Lammeck stepped beside him.
“I appreciate that you are trying to trust me, Professor.”
“It’s not so easy to do. You’ve got a few advantages on me. I don’t know a thing about you. And you’ve been following me.”
“Let me rectify that. Ask me questions.”
“How high up are you in the government?”
Johan raised his thick palms. Lammeck noted they were similar to his. He knew what had made his own hands that way, decades of weapons and martial arts training, all for research into the tools and skills of history’s assassins. He wondered at Captain Johan, at his careful refinement, and what it concealed.
“I am not so important,” Johan answered. “I am the number three official in the protection service around Fidel. I have enough authority to approve an American historian’s entry visa and his application for a rental house. And to, as you say, follow him to one of Fidel’s speeches and a restaurant. Beyond that, I deal with paperwork. Others handle Fidel’s physical security. I am like you, Professor. Somewhat of a theoretician. I handle information. I search for... tendencies.”
“Fidel must be difficult to protect.”
“He is a man of his people, definitely. Not a week goes past when Fidel is not eating in a restaurant, swimming in the sea, playing baseball with youths, visiting a hospital. He sleeps in different places all week long, at odd times. Remember, Fidel is only thirty-five. He has energy. So, yes,” Johan chuckled, “Fidel is difficult.”
“Where are you from?”
“I was born in Las Tunas, a small city in the heart of Cuba. My family were landowners. They farmed sugar cane.”
“Sounds a lot like Castro’s background.”
“Yes. Both of our parents came from Spain in the ‘20s.”
“Were you with Fidel during the revolution?”
“I was not with him in the mountains, but I joined the resistance to Batista here in Havana.”
Lammeck eyed the man. Johan smiled at teenagers they passed lounging on the seawall, he dipped his head to older couples taking the air before dinner. Johan did not seem suspicious and hawkeyed. This secret policeman was gracious, measured.
“Does that mean you’re a Communist?”
Johan cast Lammeck a sideways glance. This was the first hint Lammeck got from the man’s face that he was not completely open. Then the look was gone, replaced by a wily grin.
“As I said, I suspect I’m very much like you, Professor. Simply a man trying to understand what history determines is just, and what it does not.”
In the next instant, Johan grabbed Lammeck’s elbow and yanked him into a sprint. A column of water shot overhead and spilled behind them, bathing a passing car and the sidewalk where they’d strolled seconds ago.
Huffing but pleased, Lammeck said, “Your instincts are pretty good.”
“Thank you. And you are agile for a portly professor.”
The two walked on. Several streetlights were broken, making the street patchily lit. Teenage boys beat salsa rhythms on congas and bongos, struck chords on yellowed guitars. Others sang, often in adept melodies. Their girls snapped fingers, joined in the singing, or reclined on the seawall with heads in their boys’ laps. Sometimes, in the places where the lights were out, the girls kissed their boys or danced for them, hiking skirts above brown thighs, swishing their hems to the beat.
Lammeck and Johan walked blocks without speaking. Johan let Lammeck take in this damp side of the street, the authentic Havana. Lammeck watched the others on the promenade, the cars, and the wild sea. He kept his ears peeled for the sound of a wave whacking the seawall, to see if he could be the one to warn Johan against a cold soaking. He had one false alarm and ran up the sidewalk alone. Johan stayed behind, dry and laughing.
“Tell me, Professor,” the policeman said when he caught up, “about your instincts. I expect they are better than mine in many areas beyond the Malecón.”
“Such as?”
“Assassinations. You have come to Cuba. You’ve rented a house with no time limit on when you intend to go home. You are the world’s leading expert on the subject. Your instincts tell you something is going to happen in Cuba. What? And just as important, why?”
Lammeck was reluctant to get into a political discussion with Johan, a government official, or anyone in Cuba. Since arriving in Havana, he’d been mindful that he was an American; anti-U.S. sentiment ran high on the island. Lammeck made no reply to Johan’s question.
“Please, Professor. I would be very grateful for your insights. I will not lie to you. I can be a useful friend here in Cuba.”
Lammeck looked down at the dripping sidewalk. He could walk on without
Johan, out of range of the waves whacking the wall behind him. But the policeman claimed to be a theoretician. Lammeck had theories to spare.
Lammeck eyed the water. He spotted a tall roller coming in, coursing at the Malecón. This one would blast water thirty feet high.
“Okay.”
The policeman put a hand in the small of Lammeck’s back and pushed. The wave pounded against the seawall; the pair galloped out of the shower just before it landed. At a safe distance, both turned to look back. Mist drifted over them.
The Betrayal Game - [Mikhal Lammeck 02] Page 5