The Betrayal Game - [Mikhal Lammeck 02]

by David L. Robbins

  He closed his eyes, not seeking sleep. He simply wanted release, from the coop of this room, from Cuba, the killing of Calendar, from the labyrinths of assassination and betrayal. He needed to trim his beard and switch out of his khakis and undershirt. He had no razor, scissors, or fresh clothes, no toiletries. The only other items in the room with him were an uneaten dinner on the dresser and another well-used bottle.

  When Johan arrived an hour after sundown, Lammeck knew the man was coming down the hall before he knocked. Lammeck’s senses for what went on outside his door had grown acute. He stood from the bed, turned on the light, and checked himself in the mirror, in case there might be some instant improvement he could make in his appearance. There was none. Johan knocked.

  “Come in, Captain.”

  The policeman poked his head around the door, careful, as though unsure what he would find inside. Lammeck waved him through the door. “Where have you been?”

  Johan stepped in, closing the door behind him. He sniffed the air.

  “Clearly away too long. It smells like monkeys in here. You need a shave, Professor. Have you showered?” The captain walked to the dresser. He poked a fingertip into the cold plate of food. Beside the stale dish stood the uncapped bottle of siete.

  “It’s been over forty-eight hours,” Lammeck said. “He’s dead. I want to go home.”

  Johan shook his head.

  “I am sorry, amigo. That cannot happen just yet. We have no proof. Fidel was quite specific about the terms of your agreement.”

  “Goddammit.” Lammeck sat on a corner of the bed. “Didn’t your men follow him from the Inglaterra?”

  Johan settled in a chair. “Yes.”

  “And they lost him?”

  “Remember, Professor. We are talking about a career CIA field agent. This is a man who’s worked in a hundred places around the world as a ghost. Calendar did not intend to be followed. So he was not.”

  Lammeck fell back on the mattress, his hands pressed against his temples.

  “Do you think something went wrong? With the poison?”

  “I have no way of knowing that.”

  “Blanco put it in his beer, you’re sure?”

  “Everything went the way it was supposed to.”

  “So until you find his body, I’m stuck here.”

  “Or until Fidel loses patience and revokes his arrangement with you.”

  Lammeck closed his eyes again, barely able to look more at the ceiling.

  “That wouldn’t be good for you either, Johan.”

  “I am aware of that. Trust me, I am using every man I can spare to find Calendar.”

  Without looking, Lammeck heard Johan reach to the dresser for the rum bottle.

  “You know the way,” Johan said, “when a dog has been hit by a car on the highway, it often dies where it has been struck in the middle of the road. But a cat. A cat will somehow drag itself off the pavement. It will die on the shoulder or in the ditch, out of traffic. I believe this is what our Agent Calendar has done. He has always been a tiger. He has crawled somewhere else to die, not in the middle of the road.”

  Johan set down the bottle. He rose from the chair and went into the bathroom. Lammeck heard the squeak of handles, then the spray of water. The captain came beside the bed to stand over him.

  “Clean yourself, Professor. I am going out for an hour. I’ll be back.”

  Lammeck sat up. He glanced into the open bathroom door. Steam began to spill across the floor tiles.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “To find Blanco. He will arrange a security detail.”

  “For what?”

  “I am going to transfer you out of this hotel before the other guests complain about your odor. You can wait for Calendar at your own house.”

  Johan took up the ignored plate of food and the drained bottle. Without another word, he carried them out the door. Lammeck was left alone with the running shower.

  ~ * ~

  April 13

  Miramar

  “Professor, please.” Blanco shrugged. “Move.”

  Lammeck’s right hand, finally without the gauze wrapping, hovered above his remaining rook. He saw an opening that might develop in three or four turns.

  “Quiet,” he said, wiggling his fingers, enjoying the absence of the bandage. The gash in his palm was knitting well. He believed the salt air of the nearby ocean had helped his healing, as Johan had prescribed.

  Blanco sighed, doing his best to restrain his impatience. Lammeck’s wait here at his house, among his books and notes, with a television and human company and the sea, was better than the miserable two and a half days at the Nacional. Still, he was not a free man, and he drank more than he knew was good for him. His status was paradoxical; he needed to be proven a murderer to regain his liberty.

  He tapped on the rampart of the little wooden chess castle. Dinner dishes sat unwashed on the table behind them. Lammeck had cooked chicken for the two of them, then delivered sandwiches to the four others out in the dark guarding the house, the men keeping Lammeck prisoner. Two glasses of rum waited beside the chessboard.

  Lammeck pulled his finger away, exploring instead into his beard to consider a different ploy.

  “This,” said Blanco, rising from the sofa, “is the difference between us. You deliberate, you analyze, endlessly. Just move!”

  Lammeck watched the young policeman turn a frustrated circle in the living room before he plopped again onto the sofa.

  Amused, Lammeck said, “Another difference is that I’ve won six out of seven.”

  “Yes.” Blanco reclined farther into the sofa, leaning his head back to gaze upward. “And when the games are over, you are not exhausted.”

  “You’re younger. I have to conserve my energy.”

  “No,” Blanco said, sitting straight, then leaning over the table. “I know you. You have always been this way.”

  True, Lammeck thought, then said it aloud. “True.” He returned to the rook and shoved it forward four squares. Instantly he regretted the move he’d been goaded into, seeing ahead the trouble he might have gotten into.

  Outside, footsteps approached on the sidewalk. Blanco stared glumly at the chessboard. Before the young policeman could take his turn, Johan came through the front door. He carried with him a newspaper and a flashlight.

  Blanco started to rise, Lammeck kept his seat. Johan waved the young policeman down. He dropped a folded New York Times into Lammeck’s lap, then headed for the kitchen. While fetching himself a tumbler to share in the rum, he called to Lammeck.

  “That is yesterday’s paper.”

  “Anything of interest?”

  Johan arrived beside the chessboard as Blanco made his move with a knight. Blanco did not counter Lammeck’s blunder. The captain set the flashlight down to pour himself a shot while scrutinizing the board. Clucking his tongue, he reached down to take back Blanco’s move. Instead, he pushed forward a bishop which, in two more moves, if the queen were involved, could capture Lammeck’s rook.

  The captain patted Blanco on the shoulder. “You need to slow down. You missed an opportunity.”

  Blanco slid sideways on the sofa to make room for Johan. “Please, sir, finish the game.”

  “No.” Johan smiled. “I will enjoy watching the viejo teach you a few things. He’s outmaneuvered me quite a bit lately.”

  The captain pointed at the newspaper.

  “Your Kennedy said at a press conference that under no circumstances will the United States intervene militarily in Cuba. He claims the conflict is not between America and Cuba but between Cubans themselves. He is, of course, lying.”

  Lammeck looked at the chessmen, imagining the moves Kennedy was needing to make in advance of the invasion, now that one big strategy—the assassination of Castro—had failed.

  Johan asked, “Have you been playing chess all night? Did you not turn on the television?”

  Blanco answered, “What happened?”

  “The
El Encanto has burned to the ground.”

  “The shopping center?” The place was in the center of Havana.

  Johan sipped his rum, turning to look through the open back door, to the stars and the sound of waves. “It seems that while the store was owned by rich men, there was no need to destroy it. Once it belonged to the people, it was marked for flames. The El Encanto is gone, completely. There were deaths.”

  The captain brought his head around. He circled a hand above the chessboard.

  “The forces are gathering, Professor. I can feel it. A few more moves to go.”

  Blanco rose. “I will tell the men about the fire.”

  They waited for the young man to exit.

  Johan said, “I have good news, and I have bad news. Myself, I always prefer the bad first. It leaves me something to look forward to.”

  Lammeck lifted his rum glass. He tilted it Johan’s way.

  Johan said, “You will not be leaving Cuba for a while longer. I am sorry. This is out of my control.”

  Lammeck brought the rum beneath his nose to inhale the fragrance before taking a swallow. The slow gesture, like his measured chess playing, helped keep his emotions in check, his reaction measured.

  “Why not?”

  “After the El Encanto fire, Fidel has decided to lock the island down. In Havana alone, over thirty-five thousand people suspected of anti-regime sentiment are being detained as we speak. Jails and prisons in every part of Cuba are overflowing. Fidel has suspended all commercial flights. Shipping has been advised to stay offshore. Castro suspects, as do we all, that the rebels are on their way. The invasion is only days, maybe hours, away. The only remaining questions are exactly when and precisely where.”

  Lammeck poured some rum across his lips. He let the liquid rest on his tongue, a pleasure in a world fast running short of them.

  Johan continued. “I am sorry, my friend, I have not been able to visit with you during your own incarceration. I have been, to put it mildly, busy.”

  “Why do you call me your friend, Johan? You were willing to let me be killed by Alek. You would’ve put me in La Cabaña.”

  The captain picked a knight off the chessboard. “This is my favorite piece. But I do not hesitate to send him into harm’s way to defend my king.” He set the horse on the square where it resided. “Now, ask me about the good news.”

  “It’ll have to be pretty good to balance out the bad.”

  “We will see. Come.”

  Grabbing the flashlight, the captain led Lammeck out the front door. The evening was balmy, the street deserted except for a few parked police vehicles. The only light for blocks in both directions came from his house.

  Johan approached Blanco, who was speaking with one of Lammeck’s guards.

  “We will be gone a few minutes.”

  The young policeman asked, “Do you want me to come?”

  “No. Professor Lammeck and I both lack the ability to escape each other.”

  Without cutting on the light, Johan walked into the empty street. He strolled with Lammeck down the center of the starlit road.

  “Professor, you are renowned for your ability to think like an assassin. Since coming to Cuba, you have been personally involved with an assassination plot. You have poisoned a man. I must wonder whether becoming a murderer yourself has decayed your powers as an intellectual of murder. I fear Cuba has cost the world a scholar.”

  Lammeck stopped walking. “You found Calendar.”

  “I merely stumbled upon him. After all, I am not the genius between the two of us, just a poor administrator. You should have figured it out. Even I am embarrassed for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because his whereabouts, when I show you, are sadly obvious.”

  Johan walked more along the dark coast road, headed in the same direction they had a week ago, past deserted houses.

  “Since you came to the island, I have enjoyed the few times I visited you here in Miramar. Our talks on your porch with a candle, the smell of salt, the breeze fresh on your face before it strikes the city. Just this evening I decided I would seek permission to take over one of these dilapidated houses for myself. This is appropriate, you know, as the number two man in my department. Besides, recently I have had a string of notable successes. Thanks to you. And, of course, Agent Calendar.”

  “Heitor.”

  “Spilt milk, Professor. Let it go. My point is, this evening, on my way to come tell you about Castro’s restrictions on travel, I walked this road, looking over some of the homes. Though abandoned, you may have noticed they have not been vandalized.”

  Johan clicked on the flashlight. He stopped walking and shined the light on a one-story stucco house, three doors down from Lammeck’s.

  “This was the only one with a broken window in the rear.”

  Lammeck’s throat tightened. “He’s in there.”

  “Shall we?”

  The back of the house featured a porch bigger than Lammeck’s. A pane had been smashed in. The window frame, like all the others, remained shut. Lammeck said nothing, working to control his revulsion at the thought of what lay inside. But he had to see for himself the completion of what he’d set in motion.

  Johan turned the knob to the unlocked back door. He pushed it open, moved inside. Lammeck hung back.

  “Professor,” Johan said without turning the flashlight on him. “Come see your handiwork.”

  Before entering, a wretched stench unfurled out of the doorway, draping itself over Lammeck. Feces. Putrefaction. He cupped a hand across his nose and forced himself forward.

  The interior was bare. Johan’s flashlight found Calendar upturned on a tile floor. He lay beneath a window facing the direction of Lammeck’s house. The sallow flashlight beam gave his flesh the color of a pustule.

  The house had been shut up, the only ventilation was the broken glass pane. The past two days had been warm. Lammeck lowered his fingers from his nostrils to test the odor. Instantly he fought down a gag and returned his hand over his nose.

  The policeman kept his distance, focusing the flashlight on the corpse. Two days of death had changed Bud Calendar. Lammeck neared the corpse and kneeled. The agent’s belly was swollen with unreleased gases. The violet of pooling blood splotched the backs of his arms and neck. The skin felt firm like wax. Lammeck pressed and pulled back, his touch left no impression.

  The flashlight revealed no signs of struggle. Calendar’s eyelids were lowered. No blood stained his mouth or hands. The cheeks displayed some broken capillaries from his last labored gasps, the final stages of the poison’s paralysis. The toxin had simply lain Calendar down when it got the upper hand and choked him.

  Lammeck leaned over the mound of the bloated torso. A .32 revolver had been tucked into the belt at the dead man’s hip. On the other side of the body, on the floor close to Calendar’s right hand, lay a long-bladed skinning knife.

  Calendar had come to Miramar. Lammeck’s mind raced backward from this final destination. Hours after their encounter at the Inglaterra, perhaps as soon as dusk, Calendar must have felt the first awful symptoms of the botulinum. He knew. He must have gone into a fury.

  He’d promised Lammeck a terrible death. Instead, that death was coming for him. With the numbness rising in his feet and legs, Calendar must have seethed an oath. He swore that a wicked end would not be his alone.

  Angry, he struggled to the only place he was sure Lammeck would return to. He brought weapons to keep his vow. He kept watch, knowing the poison’s clock. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours. He waited. He held out.

  He died waiting.

  Lammeck stood away from Calendar. He expected that he would want to retch but his stomach had calmed. He lowered his hand from his nose.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Lammeck walked away to the kitchen and out the back door. He walked off the porch to the weedy lawn. He spit. A deep breath of the ocean cleared his lungs. Behind him, he heard Johan open a window from inside.
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br />   The captain shut off the flashlight and came to Lammeck’s side. Together they gazed north. Silver tinged the eastern horizon where the moon prepared to rise.

  “I should like this house,” Johan said.