The Betrayal Game - [Mikhal Lammeck 02]

by David L. Robbins

  She told Lammeck that Alek had suggested Cuba to celebrate their engagement. Somewhere warm and far from Minsk. She had an uncle in the government. He’d pulled strings for them and paid for their tickets.

  She asked about Lammeck. He told her he was a political science professor, in Havana for research into Cuban history. No wife, no children. “Just my work.” She smiled and patted his lapel in sympathy.

  Alek watched from the table. He did not come to cut in, but applauded from afar when Lammeck spun the girl; he laughed with Rina at Lammeck’s awkward cha cha. After four dances, Lammeck was tuckered. They returned to the table. A fresh round of drinks awaited. The band struck up a slow bolero. Lammeck was glad not to have to dance again; he’d sweat up his tux, while the girl was still fresh.

  “Thanks for the drink.” Lammeck took up his icy rum.

  Alek answered, “It wasn’t me. The waiter told me they came from that guy over there.”

  Lammeck glanced across the nightclub to the bar. From a stool, a gray-haired man dipped his head when Lammeck caught his eye.

  “Excuse me.” He rose with the rum.

  “Mikhal.” Rina stopped him.

  “Yes?”

  “May I tell you a truth?”

  She did not use the common Russian word for truth, pravda. Instead, she said istina, implying something spiritual, a gospel truth.

  “Yes.”

  “You are good man. I am sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “You have no wife. No heirs.” She lapped her arm around Alek’s slight shoulders. In English, she told Lammeck, “It is no way.”

  Lammeck nodded, saddened for a moment. He looked at the two, wishing he could do something to preserve them, certain at the same time that he would prove powerless to do so in the face of the forces and events that lay ahead.

  He wended his way through the well-heeled patrons of the Tropicana. Like the rest of the nightclub, the bar appeared to have been etched out of the jungle. Mature acacia trees and ferns surrounded the long curved bartop. Space-age chrome stools and high-design chairs of blond woods blended the bar into the modern motif of the rest of the nightclub.

  Lammeck approached the fellow who’d nodded to him. The man watched him come, calmly shooting the cuffs of his tuxedo. Lammeck neared. The neighboring stool opened, as if prearranged. Lammeck took the seat.

  To his left, a woman in a chinchilla stole laughed loudly with a mustachioed man. On his right, the gray-haired man extended an open pack of cigarettes. Lammeck waved away the offer.

  “Don’t smoke?”

  “Cigars. And only here in Cuba.”

  “Ah, the best in the world. Why not? They will not be available soon in America.”

  “How did you know I was American?”

  “I watched you rumba, señor. What else could you be?”

  The man chuckled alone. He waved his cigarette about as he spoke, animated and Latin.

  “How do you like the Bajo las Estrellas here at the Tropicana? Dancing under the stars?”

  “It’s beautiful. Never seen anything like it. Thank you for the drink.”

  “The añejo rum, yes? The siete, not the quince.”

  “Do I know you, amigo?” Lammeck said bluntly.

  “No. A lucky guess.” The man circled a manicured finger. “Please turn around and face forward, Professor Lammeck,” he warned. “We do not want more than our small share of attention. ¿Sí?”

  Lammeck obeyed, looked into the great mirror behind the bar. He wondered if he’d ever get accustomed to people knowing his name before he met them, shadows showing up on his porch, fragments of secrets scattered like unmatched puzzle pieces, always the cloak of plausible deniability. He kept his hands around his rum glass to keep from betraying his nerves.

  “Drink with me for a few minutes, señor. Your two young friends will wait.”

  Lammeck looked over his shoulder. Alek and Rina were on the dance floor. Alek was as poor a dancer as Lammeck.

  “Alright. For a few minutes.”

  Without turning, the stranger spoke: “Speak without facing me. Talk only loud enough for me to hear you over the music. Do not show too much interest in anything we say.”

  The man pushed away his own empty glass. He raised his ample chin to the bartender to bring another.

  “My name is Heitor Ferrer.”

  “You seem to know who I am, so I’ll skip my introduction.”

  Lammeck sipped his siete, doing as he was told. He and Heitor both looked at the futuristic mobiles hanging above the bar.

  “Did you know that every great entertainer of the day has played the Tropicana?” Heitor asked. “Nat ‘King’ Cole, Sinatra, Josephine Baker, Xavier Cugat, Paul Robeson, Liberace. Carmen Miranda sang here two days before she died.”

  “Very impressive.”

  “Yes. Fidel shut the Tropicana down, along with all the nightclubs and casinos, for the first year of the revolution. Then he allowed them to reopen. He realized that too much money is brought to the island by tourists seeking games of chance. But Fidel does not like gambling. It does not fit the Communist view of the world. Everyone is an owner of everything. So if I gamble away my money, I also gamble away my neighbor’s money. It is not the only absurdity of Marxism, but it is sweet in a naive, humanist sort of way. Very much like Fidel himself.”

  “You know Castro?”

  “Ah, yes. Indeed. I am a retired tobacco engineer and executive. It was a very important job, as you can imagine. I have known Fidel and Che since 1958, back in the Escambray mountains when we were ducking Batista’s soldiers. We used to break the cane stalks to suck the sugar water inside. It’s amazing I have managed to grow so fat again, the weight I lost running through those woods.”

  Lammeck kept himself from reacting. This man knew Castro, had even been a guerrilla with him. And he recognized Lammeck. What else did he know? Calendar, Alek, the pills? Lammeck fought off the urge to glance around, to see if guards were moving in. He steadied his gaze on the artwork overhead.

  “You are in no danger from me, Professor. I am going to help you and your young man kill Fidel.”

  Lammeck whispered, “Don’t you think we should’ve met in private? We’re in the middle of a nightclub.”

  Heitor maintained an upbeat tone. “Calm yourself. What if we are discovered in private, hmm? Then we have no alibi. Here, we can always claim we met serendipitously, you and I. We sat next to each other in a bar, what is sinister in that? Relax. Drink your rum. Listen a bit. Then we will part. We will have the secret meeting you desire later.”

  Lammeck wrapped his hand again around his sweating highball glass. Heitor stubbed out his cigarette. He spoke while grabbing up the Zippo to light another.

  “After the debacle with Sorí Marín, Unidad had to move quickly. Many of our top people were rounded up. So far, they’ve managed to keep their mouths shut in Fidel’s prisons, but for how long? If it were me in a cell in La Cabaña, I would be singing like Caruso. The parade where Sorí Marín was to blow up Fidel by a petaca is coming soon. We have switched strategies, Professor. Fidel is not going to be blown apart on his reviewing stand. He is going to be shot.”

  Lammeck revolved on the stool enough to look back at Alek. Rina had her head on the boy’s shoulder.

  Lammeck turned back, to gaze at Heitor’s reflection in the mirror.

  “Yes. By your young man, Professor. He is a trained Marine sharpshooter.”

  Lammeck hoisted his rum and gulped it in two swallows. The bartender delivered another rum seconds after Lammeck set down the rattling bare ice.

  “And my part in this?”

  “Needless to say, Unidad is running out of time. And resources. We have only this one last chance. We assume the invasion is coming soon. The CIA has told us to eliminate Castro beforehand. So, we cannot afford another failure and the arrests that follow. You, Professor Lammeck, are going to help us ascertain whether to let our young assassin proceed.”

  “How am I s
upposed to do that?”

  “You do yourself a disservice. We know all about you. The world’s leading scholar in assassinations. Who better than you to tell us if young Alek Hidell has the makings, eh?”

  The man was discussing the murder of an old comrade, his country’s leader. Lammeck imagined this conversation with John Wilkes Booth, Cesare Borgia, Charlotte Corday, Josef Gabčik, Jan Kubiš. He wondered if all the calculated plotters and killers of history were this cool before the deed?

  “What else do you know about him?”

  “Nothing except his assignment, and whatever you will tell me tomorrow. I am the only one in Unidad who knows his name, and 1 wish I did not. I suggest you limit your knowledge of young Alek, as well. It cannot serve you, Professor. It is not safe for any of us to become too familiar. Learn only what you must. No more. Trust me in this.”

  Lammeck understood the purpose of Heitor’s admonition. What if he, or Heitor, any of them, were arrested and questioned? A man cannot blurt what he does not know. Lammeck felt the small mound of the poison capsule in his pocket. A corpse can’t betray anyone either.

  “Tomorrow,” Heitor said, “I will pick you up in the morning at your house, then young Alek at his hotel. I will drive you both into the country. I understand you have the rifle the boy requested?”

  The duffel bag. Calendar had already given him the murder weapon.

  “Apparently, yes.”

  “Good. You will spend a day observing the boy, training him as necessary. Then you will tell us whether you believe, in your skilled opinion, that Alek Hidell is an assassin. If so, Unidad will take over from there.”

  Lammeck fingered the cold glass. He pushed it away, his appetite for the siete slackened. He wanted to tell Heitor right now that Alek was not a killer. That the boy was barely in his twenties, he had a young fiancée, he was a defector, he was confused, and this was a rotten thing to do, taking advantage of him this way. Heitor might not know these things, but Lammeck did. And he knew instantly how Calendar, if he was here, would answer: It’s war, Professor. Alek Hidell is a Marine. That makes him old enough to die for his country. So he’s old enough to kill for it. You just tell us if the kid can shoot straight.

  Lammeck responded to the Calendar in his head: Why would a defector, a man who’d rejected his country, kill for it? What vise grip did Calendar have on young Alek Hidell?

  “Your enthusiasm for this work is not what I’d hoped it would be, Professor. I apologize for your involvement, but there is little alternative for us.”

  “Somewhere there’s bound to be a Cuban weapons expert who can do this. Why’s it got to be me?”

  “Because you have been specifically named by your government for this part. I cannot change that. As you may guess, we in the underground are not in a good negotiating position with your CIA.”

  Calendar, Lammeck thought. He put me here. Why?

  “But I don’t get it. Unidad doesn’t really need me or the CIA at all. Just go ahead and kill Castro.”

  “Understand, Professor Lammeck, we cannot do this without the cooperation of the United States. Yet, paradoxically, we cannot do this with the cooperation of the United States. So there must be someone interposed. Someone in the middle. A private individual with no official connection to either Cuban or American politics. You have no pivotal role or interest in Castro’s revolution or its reversal. And that, mi amigo, makes you pivotal. You see how this goes? Paradoxes within paradoxes.”

  “Plausible deniability.”

  “An excellent phrase. I have not heard it before. In Cuba we have a different name for this concept: La prueba de la luz del dia.”

  “The test of the daylight.”

  “That is a bit literal but yes. Something that cannot stand being brought into the open. But the Spanish is so typically poetic and lax. Your American term is much better. Very exact. ‘Plausible deniability.’ It is quite technical.”

  Lammeck didn’t reply. Heitor might have believed the thin reason for Lammeck’s involvement, but he couldn’t shake the sense that there was more beneath the surface, out of the daylight, than what Heitor explained. CIA was playing chess with Lammeck’s life, and this was one of their moves. Lammeck had no counter but to play along, push his own life into position, and see where it led.

  Heitor scooped up the Zippo and waggled fingers to the bartender at the drinks on the counter, to lay them on his tab.

  “We are all counting on the invasion, Professor. I am going to assume that soon after Castro is dead, the exiles will arrive on a beach somewhere on the island. Not far behind them will be the Marines and the U.S. Navy. Please tell your CIA that many of us are willing to die to free Cuba. But the firing squad holds little appeal. We are not eager to be martyrs, only heroes.”

  Behind them, at the opposite end of the open-air nightclub, the dance floor elevated into a stage. Waiters wove through the crowd snatching up the last china from the four-course dinner. Heitor, Lammeck, and all the patrons at the bar rotated on their stools to watch. The lights dimmed. The little flames of candles danced on every table, so did the pinholes of stars over the treetops. The Tropicana jungle garden sat motionless, flickering. A spotlight jutted from a tower down to the stage. The master of ceremonies walked into the beam and announced the evening’s cabaret, Pachanga en Tropicana.

  The orchestra struck up. Two dozen dancers swept onstage, kicking and shimmying in time to the fast merengue beat. All the men wore tight, Latin-lover costumes, and slicked hair. The women swayed in risqué outfits of spangles, sheer stockings, and false eyelashes.

  “You see the way they move?” Heitor leaned over to Lammeck. “The grace, the sensuality? In Cuba this is called sandunga. There is no English equivalent for this word.”

  “Or those dances.”

  Heitor nodded and said only, “Cuba,” as if that were explanation enough. He rose from the bar. “I will see you at eight tomorrow morning, Professor. I apologize for the little games we find it necessary to play. But that is why Fidel must die. ¿Comprende?”

  Heitor filtered away into the crowd. Lammeck kept his seat. The bartender noticed him.

  “A vodka gimlet and a Stoli.” Lammeck jerked a thumb after Heitor. “On his bill.”

  He left the bar with the drinks. Alek and Rina sat enjoying the show curled close to each other. They were dapper in their eveningwear, flushed from liquor and dancing. Alek, the Marine-trained sniper, a defector to the Soviet Union, recruited by the CIA to come kill Castro. Rina, his Soviet girl who chose her man after less than two weeks, who loved him and knew he was a spy. Lammeck set the drinks in front of them. They both thanked him in Russian. Lammeck wanted to tell Alek to drink, get so drunk you can’t wake up tomorrow when Heitor comes for you. Don’t get involved, Alek. Go back to Minsk. Leave history alone. She is never, ever kind.

  “Alek. Walk me out. I’m leaving.”

  The boy and Rina stood. She came around the table.

  “Good night, Mikhal. We will see you again, I hope.” To his surprise, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

  “Good night, Rina.”

  Lammeck led the way out of the music and lushness of the nightclub. Walking between the concrete shells that framed the main entrance, he gestured for the doorman to hail him a taxi.

  “Tomorrow at eight in the morning. That man I met at the bar will come get you. Be ready.”

  Alek was confounded. “Tomorrow morning? That’s too soon. I’m not—”

  “No, it’s not happening tomorrow. Don’t worry, he’ll explain when he picks you up. But it will be soon. Alek, look.”

  “Yeah?”

  Outside the cabaret, away from the noise and lights, the hundreds of others in tuxedos, beyond the red cheeks and loving eyes of Rina, Alek appeared even more a boy, almost a child, in a grown-up and dangerous world.

  “Son, you’re pretty mixed up right now, that’s obvious. You’ve got a wonderful girl in there who’s crazy about you. You’ve got plenty of time to figure
things out, the rest of your life. It can be a long and happy one. Think about this, think hard. And if you don’t want to do it, don’t get in that car tomorrow.”

  A taxi rolled to a stop in front of them. The doorman opened the rear door for Lammeck.