“A world market.”
“No, a world. One world. You can see it already in its embryonic form. And that world, that unified, democratic, free-market world, will be good for everyone. It is Marx and Engels turned on their heads. Every boat will be lifted, not just the United States’ boat, every one.”
“The Islamic extremists’?”
“The Islamic extremists are having their day, even as we speak. It will be a short, brutal, bloody day, one or two generations at the very most, but there’s really no place for them in the future world, no hope. They understand this perfectly well. It’s not an accident that bin Laden attacked the World Trade Towers, you know . . . the symbol of this world economy. The extremists will slowly be squeezed further and further to the margins. In half a century they won’t even make the morning news, any more than the Soviet ballistic missile threat makes the news today. Ultimately, it will be financial, not military, pressure that suffocates them.” He rested a moment, closing his eyes and rocking his head slightly side to side. Carolina studied the small round scar at his temple, the skin slick and white there. She looked at his full lips.
He opened his eyes and caught her staring. “You see, my beautiful older friend, most people have a poverty-driven mentality, a zero-sum mentality: If this many are rich, then this many must be poor. If this many are safe, then this many must be in danger. Very, very few people understand the growth potential of the planet in all its depth and complexity, the long-range supplies of energy we are capable of producing, long-term communications developments, the sheer amount of foodstuffs. But our bosses, you see, they are visionaries. Buddhas in suit and tie.”
“So who is Lincoln?
“A wannabe. A minor player with a huge ego. At the side of our current president, however, he looks like a genius. And he has surrounded himself with sycophants who tell him he is a genius. To your uncle, Cuba is the queen on the chessboard. To Lincoln, she is a bishop. To us, a single pawn. Look at it this way: We find brilliant, brave, deep-thinking people like you and pay them five times what your uncle or Lincoln can pay, so which organization do you think best understands the larger picture?”
It was Carolina’s turn to leave a question unanswered. She looked out at the darkness, the world spinning there, billions starving, billions more laboring, a tiny few thinking like this. It all sounded so wonderful. But if she was lying to her uncle and the vice president, then why shouldn’t she assume that Oleg was lying to her, that the Orchid had been lying to her all along? They’d seen an attractive, smart, mostly fearless young woman with CIA training and thought: We can use this person. What do we have to say to her in order to make her spiritually at peace? How much do we have to pay her?
“You’re not cherishing a doubt, are you?” Oleg asked. “Now, just when we’re about to entrust you with something particularly special?”
“Of course not.”
“Your visits today haven’t shaken you?”
“I get paid very well not to be shaken.”
“Good. Because you are about to be paid a lot more.”
“Really?”
“And also get a free bonus vacation.”
“Where to?”
“To a place called Cuba, via a place called the Czech Republic. You are to deliver certain pieces of the ceramic pistol that will send our friend Fidel into permanent retirement.”
“When? I told my uncle we would contact him soon. I told Lincoln it would be months.”
“It probably will be several months, but there are certain important pieces that have to be put into place right now. You must simply trust me on that.” He put his hand on her knee. “You leave for Prague tomorrow night. Make sure you sleep well.” Oleg squeezed her knee once, gently, and took his hand away. She had an urge to tell him to leave it where it was. “Rest now,” he said. “We’ll talk again before we land.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Carlos loved Old Havana at night. It seemed to him that the tattered facades of the colonial buildings took on a more dignified aspect once the sun went down. The children on the sidewalks seemed happier. There was always music coming from somewhere, gatherings of friends on the street corners, and, relieved of the weight of the daytime heat, the capital seemed to breathe easier. It was almost a happy place.
Usually, strolling arm in arm with Elena like this in the Plaza de la Catedral, he could let the responsibilities of the day slide off him. For an hour or a few hours he would not worry about AIDS, tuberculosis, malnourishment in the countryside. He would not think about Fidel and his broken wrists and skin cancers and stomach troubles, or Olochon and his tubercular inmates, or the blockade, or the latest norteamericano plan to prove to the world that Cuba was wrong and the United States right—at the expense of the daily caloric intake of millions of Cuban children.
But tonight he had no peace. Elena sensed it, he knew that. Tonight he was already a murderer and a traitor, and because of that, because of those sins, an awkward silence hovered in the humid air between them. She had wanted to go to a little place they liked in the former Chinese Quarter, near Paseo di Marti. Ordinarily he’d go wherever she wanted. Tonight, for reasons he could not disclose, he had to be at the Cafe Sierra Maestra at 9 P.M., and he’d been hasty and short with her at the apartment. Now she was paying him back by not speaking.
Elena was also a physician and she served her country in a clinic in one of the city’s poorest sections. They had met a year and two months after he’d lost his Teresa. He had been taking a group of visiting Italian doctors and high-level international bureaucrats on a tour of the city’s facilities, and one of them—a red-haired woman, impertinent, full of ugly preconceptions—had complained that they were seeing nothing but the cleansed version of Cuban health care that Castro wanted them to see. “Take us to the poor sections,” this doctor had said, petulantly, arrogantly. “Let us see what is not going perfectly. Let us see your failures as well as your successes.”
The failures, as Carlos knew so well, were in the countryside, where the American blockade had hurt most, where even basic painkillers were all but nonexistent and the operating rooms might or might not run short of electricity at any given moment. Cane cutters would come in with a bone-deep machete wound on their thigh, and the doctor—if there even was a doctor—would sew up the wound from the inside, with only a few gulps of rum as anesthetic.
But he could not show the visitors that. So, on impulse, and out of annoyance with the Italian woman, he’d directed the driver of their bus to turn down Calle Cinco de Diciembre. On his morning commute he always passed the clinic there, deep in the slums, but he had never set foot inside it, so there was some risk. But there was also some risk in allowing the woman to complain and complain, because the delegation included World Health Organization observers, and Fidel was sensitive to bad press in Europe.
So they’d pulled up unannounced in front of Clínica 28, and Carlos Arroyo Gutierrez, minister of health, had marched through the front door leading sixteen foreigners with notepads and cameras. It was every doctor’s worst nightmare. But the doctor in this case had been Elena Ruiz Mendoza. Dark hair, beautiful figure for a middle-aged woman, fierce eyes with a hint of gold light in them. She’d reacted as if the clinic had had a month’s advance notice. There is nothing to be ashamed of here, that was her attitude; you could read it in her posture and voice. The clinic was filled with wailing children, some with running sores, most with lice, a few of them indeed very ill with a violent intestinal flu that had been troubling the island at the time. But the five rooms were spotlessly clean. The morale of the two doctors and the six nurses was high. And though the shelves were not stocked with more than a week’s supply of the essentials—zylocaine, penicillin, aspirin, hydrogen peroxide—the nurses called on the patients in fair order, and, it seemed to Carlos, treated them capably, efficiently.
After the Italian delegation had left the country—no loud complaints, no bad press—Carlos dropped in on the clinic a second time,
one morning on his way to work. He and Elena talked for a few minutes. He thanked her, complimented her. After that day he began a small campaign to divert medicines to Clínica 28, and then another, more personal campaign: calling on Elena to see that she was receiving the medicines, taking her out for coffee on her breaks, then to dinner, then to bed. She’d lost her husband to pulmonary fibrosis a few years before. Her grown daughter taught at the University in Camagüey. Her grown son was a poor architect for the city of Erlos, not far from Matanzas, and he and his wife had a new baby.
Elena was a brilliant woman, bursting with energy and hope for the work she did, but full of disdain for the politicians—Cuban and otherwise—who built their careers on the backs of sick children.
After a few months of courtship she’d moved in with him, passing on her apartment to a colleague with three young children. Carlos had revealed to her nothing about his extra-governmental political involvement. To protect her, he told himself. To protect her, and others. But, in fact, he was not truly sure of Elena’s political leanings. At times, quietly, she voiced criticisms—never of Fidel personally, but of the way things were done. And then, other times, he’d see her watching a television program that was pure propaganda, and there would be tears in her eyes for the great experiment that was Cuba.
Silently, arms linked, they walked along the Paseo, passing a waist-high billboard that read CIA = ASESINOS. They turned down an alley, past a woman and small child begging and a man playing the Peruvian flute, then ducked into the large, noisy, popular Cafe Castro, where you could sometimes get a little chicken or fish with your beans and rice and tortillas, and where you were likely to be seated next to anyone from a government minister to a colonel in the armed forces.
They sat at a table near the dark windows and ordered beer and food. The palms of his hands were slick, but Carlos believed he presented a peaceful face to the world, the face of a loyal patriot, an honest servant of the state. An anti-asesino.
“Something’s wrong,” Elena said, breaking her angry silence.
Carlos shook his head and ran his gaze once around the room. He then pretended to study his palms, as he did in cabinet meetings. Eleven minutes before the hour.
“You’re never rude like that with me, Carlos. You never insist on going someplace I don’t want to go.”
“I needed a change,” he lied.
“You’ve never liked the food here.”
“I wanted to give it another try.”
She reached out and took hold of his hand, wiping away the perspiration. “Are you feverish?”
“I might be. My stomach is upset. The day upset me. It was an awful day, full of delay and paper shuffling, phone calls and meetings that accomplished nothing, people content to do nothing. I’m sorry. I apologize. I’ll make it up to you on Friday night.”
She was watching him. A ceiling fan turned lazily overhead. He was trying to count the seconds as they passed.
“If you feel ill why would you come here?”
“It really started to come on when we were driving here. I’ll step into the toilet for a moment. Be a different man when I come back.”
He tugged his hand from hers as gently as he could manage, stood up, and headed off to the toilet. Four lies already, and the night was young.
General Rincon, he guessed, had chosen this place because there were two stalls in the men’s room, and because it wouldn’t be suspicious in the least for the two of them to happen to be here for dinner at separate tables. Carlos made his way toward the back, feeling slightly faint. It’s you, Rincon had told him. But how was he going to find the nerve to do something like that if he could barely walk across a noisy room without losing his balance? How was he going to keep hiding it from Elena? It’s you. It’s you. Carlos had thought about it constantly. Clearly, they needed someone with regular access to el Comandante, and, at the same time, someone who would seem the most unlikely of killers.
There was a short wait for the toilet. Carlos stood behind a hugely obese man—how did someone find that much to eat in Cuba?—in the narrow hallway, with waiters squeezing past carrying trays of steaming beans and plantains. His watch read 8:57. He wiped his hands on the sides of his trousers, and, when it was his turn, went into the cramped bathroom. Two toilet stalls, a stained urinal where the obese man stood, a sink. He looked at the shoes in the occupied stall—sandals, dirty feet, not the footwear of the nation’s second most senior general—and went into the other one, sat, and waited. In a moment the man at the urinal shuffled back out the door without flushing, without washing his hands. Another moment and Carlos heard a loud flush beside him, followed by the scraping of sandals as the man made his way to the rust-stained sink. Then the door banging shut, then banging open, and what sounded like Rincon’s happy voice, humming a tune.
The general took the stall next to him, and, not knowing what else to do, Carlos shuffled his foot as a signal. Nothing happened. Perhaps it was not Rincon. Perhaps Rincon was not who he believed him to be, and it was one of Olochon’s men in the stall beside him. Perhaps the night would find him at the prison again, Olochon standing before him triumphantly with his pliers and hideous smile. Carlos coughed. After a long moment a piece of cardboard appeared beneath the metal wall that separated the two stalls. It seemed to be the hand of General Rincon, and Rincon seemed to be holding a note for him, a piece of cardboard tilted up so Carlos could read.
Day after tomorrow. Oriente Hotel Bar. 9:05 P.M.
Make an excuse to be there. Tap twice if understood.
Carlos read the message three times, tapped his shoe twice, flushed, washed his hands at the sink, and went back to his table. The food had already been served and was growing cold, and Elena was watching for him with a smear of hurt on both cheeks.
“Feeling better?” she asked when he rejoined her.
“Diarrhea. Lunch at the Ministry cafeteria. Always a mistake.”
But she wasn’t so easily fooled. The room was noisy with laughter and talk, and music piped in through rusty old red metal speakers that hung in the corners, but the silence between them was deafening. With his mind spinning in fast circles, and the piece of cardboard and Ernesto’s hideous, torn apart face appearing and disappearing in the air in front of him, Carlos asked about her children and new grandchild, about her day at the clinic, talked too much about an outbreak of hepatitis C in La Finca province. Part of his job was to oversee the biotechnology industry, Cuba’s pride and joy, and he told her, in great detail, about one Havana lab that was soon to get an international patent on a cancer drug. “Blood cancers,” he said. “Leukemia. They’ve tested it extensively and the white cell levels went from the forty thousand range to the mid-teens.”
She listened, watching him. When he had finished his main course—cleaning his plate in spite of the supposed stomach troubles—he came within a whisker of telling her. “Something is happening,” he wanted to say. “Something is going to happen.” There were three parallel creases in her forehead, and when she was upset, concerned, or tired they grew deeper. He looked at those creases and felt a whisper of distrust in his ears. If he could lie to her so easily, if he could hide things from her . . . then perhaps she was lying to him, hiding things from him.
She watched him. They took coffee in a strained silence. Afterward, they went back out through the alley and strolled down the Paseo arm in arm, but her touch was uncharacteristically cold, and he could still feel her watching him. At the corner where the Officina de Correo stood, two prostitutes dissolved into the shadows. “I have an urge to go over to them and hand out condoms,” Elena said.
“Go, if you have them. You’ll save a life, perhaps many lives. You’ll save the state fifty thousand pesos.”
“I have them at the clinic, but they’re ours.”
“ ‘Ours’ meaning ‘Cuban,’ verdad?”
They were speaking softly, beneath the noise of the bus motors and the salsa music from a third-floor balcony.
She nodded. �
�Sí, claro. The rumor on the streets is that only American or French condoms really work. And American and French condoms are expensive, sometimes twenty-five pesos.”
“The price of our dinner. Whereas Cuban condoms are handed out without charge at every clinic in the city.”
“Sí. Pero los nuestros no son seguros.”
“Seguros.” Secure, safe, dependable. The word caught him like a slap on the back of the skull. It had always been a word he’d applied to himself. But he was a certified traitor now; he could be arrested and killed for what he’d just done, for what he’d been doing over the past months.
“I’ll send people to the factories for an unannounced check,” he said. “Tomorrow. I’ll talk to Callata about a propaganda campaign: Los Preservativos Cubanos—Los Mejores del Mundo!”
She didn’t smile, and he knew she believed it was all slightly abstract to him. He cared, but his work was a matter of reading the statistics, the charts, the falsely positive official reports. It was she who saw prostitutes with Kaposi’s sarcoma holding infants at their breasts, a rare sight in Cuba, still, but . . . “It sickens me,” he said, very loudly, as if to prove something to her and to himself.
“Shh! Carlos!” She squeezed his arm.
“We can make a drug to fight cancer, but we can’t make a rubber without a hole in it?”
Fidel's Last Days Page 9