Fidel's Last Days

by Roland Merullo

  “We can. Of course we can. Only nobody here believes that we can.” She squeezed his arm more tightly. “And the Americans should sell them to us, in any case. What are we are going do, turn rubbers into bombs?”

  “For some things we can’t blame them. I mean, we can blame them, but we have to take our own responsibility. Every decent country in the world can make a good condom, but we can’t? Cuba can’t?”

  “But we can, I’m telling you,” she said. “We do.” She looked over her shoulder. They had turned the corner just as Carlos spoke the last two lines and a group of smartly dressed young men had been passing them, fresh from the Institute. Fresh from having their brains filled with propaganda. One of them recognized him, he was sure of it, he’d been on television recently, promoting prenatal programs. So, tomorrow morning, that ambitious young student would go to the political officer of his section and report that he’d seen Ministro de la Salud Gutierrez on the street on Thursday night, and the ministro had been spouting anti-Cuban propaganda. Neither he nor Elena said another word until the students were a block behind them.

  “Shout it from the rooftops,” Elena said.

  “Only here would a minister fear a student; only here.”

  Another cold draft of quiet between them. She loosened her grip. “Tonight,” she said, “you are a different man.”

  “Yes,” he said. “The illness. The fever.”

  But when they were home in bed, side by side on their backs with the sweaty skin of the sides of their thighs pressing together and only a thin sheet covering them against the night air, he decided that he’d had enough of it. Enough lying. Enough deceit. Enough fear. If he were caught and arrested, she would be imprisoned anyway—guilt by association—so there was really nothing to lose in telling her. Nothing . . . except everything. He had known her for five years. In secret, in bed like this, quietly, they had made their timid complaints. They knew who Fidel really was—an old egomaniac, deluded by himself and those around him but sitting on the kernel of a correct idea: that people should be treated equally; that the state should care for those least able to care for themselves; that huge gaps between rich and poor were morally unacceptable.

  But it was also true that, from time to time, she said things that echoed the propaganda of their youth. Fidel was heroic. The Cuban people were engaged in an heroic struggle against the coldhearted capitalism ninety miles to their north. That struggle required sacrifice from all of them, and patience, but on some glorious day in the future they would reap their reward. The Revolution, he thought. The Revolution meant free health care for everyone. The Revolution meant you were afraid to tell your lover what you actually believed. One sentence and you put your entire life in her hands.

  He took two breaths, still unsure, then he said, “Elena, I have to tell you something very important and difficult.”

  He heard her take in a sharp breath and he knew she thought he was going to break off the relationship, just at the point where she’d been hoping he would ask her to marry him. He took her hand and squeezed it warmly, but he felt as if his body were made of concrete. He turned on his side to look at her in the faint light from the street. In the quietest voice he could manage he said, “I am involved in a plot against the government. There are others involved. There are no North Americans involved that I know of. It’s not what you think. We have to make a change now and we are the only people who can do it.”

  Her face was only inches from his, and he could see the spark of gold in her dark eyes. He felt the same deep tremor of fear and hope that he had felt the first time they’d made love, the same vulnerability, the same urge to set aside every separation. He waited and waited and at last could no longer stand it. “Speak,” he pleaded.

  “They’ll kill you,” she said, in a whisper. “They’re just using you, whoever they are. You’re not that kind of man. They’ll end up killing you, I know it.”

  He felt something heavy inside him, sinking now into his depths. “Elena, the people who are organizing this are brilliant people. It is a plan that cannot fail.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely positive.”

  She was silent so long that Carlos thought she might have fallen asleep. He found himself answering a question she had not asked, tracing his route back to the point where the most loyal of patriots had started a process of questioning inside himself. The questioning had led him to this moment. It is you.

  Elena reached up and wiped the tears from her face. Her sobs became audible. He took hold of her hand and squeezed it.

  “There is no worry,” he said. “None.”

  She was shaking her head from side to side, almost violently. “Two officers from DGI came to the clinic today,” she said, still in a whisper. “They spent an hour going through the files and records, even my personal notes. I thought it had something to do with you, but I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want you to be worried.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Part of what Volkes found so difficult about Oleg Rodriguez’s treachery was that he had always liked the man. Had a real soft spot for him, in fact. The good looks and confidence, the classy wardrobe, the way Oleg often seemed to be thinking about the world in a grand way, as if all of humanity were one body and he had been entrusted with its care—it reminded Volkes of himself when he’d been younger. Brimming with ambition, energy, shrewdness. Wanting nothing but the best for his suffering species. In those days—his thirties, forties, and early fifties—he’d be in the gym at sunrise, doing a forty-minute piece on the rowing machine, then he’d shower, shave, and have a light breakfast while reading Walt Whitman in the back of the limo on the way to work. He’d functioned like a well-oiled machine then, moving from one pleasure to the next, accumulating money like a magnet in a room of metal filings, courting the most magnificent women, fashioning the grandest plans.

  The Havana Project was going to be the culmination of all that effort and ability, all that foresight, imagination, and self-discipline. His swan song, his last great gift to the world. “From those to whom much has been given, much will be asked” was the way the Bible put it. Well, he had been given a great deal, and this was going to be his repayment.

  For the last few years he’d been thinking that, when the Havana Project was complete, he was going to retire into the lap of luxury, and watch Oleg take over the organization’s reins.

  So much for soft-heartedness.

  Rodriguez was sitting next to him now on one of the Orchid’s corporate jets; just the two of them flying across the bottom part of Florida for what would appear to be nothing more than a relaxing morning of golf at a club he belonged to in Naples. Eddie Lincoln had called him the night before, quite late, all full of enthusiasm for the young Cuban woman he’d just been yelling at. “Volkes,” the vice president had boomed, “balls the size of watermelons, this girl!”

  “I’m sure she’d consider that a compliment,” Volkes had said dryly, but Lincoln was a bit slow on the uptake in the later hours.

  “Fine. She’s fine. All set by me. We had quite the chat.”

  Volkes had been happy to hear it, of course. Happy, but not surprised. He sat now with his hands folded in his lap, thinking about Carolina Perez, on whom so much rested, and staring down at the long stretch of alligator-infested swamp that went by the quaint name Everglades. Canals like blue ribbons sparkling in the sun, thousands of small ponds, a few well-spaced Indian settlements, surrounded by some of the wildest land in the lower forty-eight. A person—a betrayer—could be made to disappear in the muck and mosquitoes there and never be traced.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Oleg said at that moment.

  Volkes turned and regarded the dark eyes and angular cheekbones. There was some Indian blood in Oleg’s line, he supposed, and so, in a way, depositing the fellow here would be like returning Oleg to his own people. He said, “I was thinking a couple of things. First off, Eddie Lincoln called me this morning when I was on route to the
airport to meet you. He’s not happy with our choice.”

  Oleg’s face registered real astonishment.

  “Too emotional,” Volkes went on. “He said he was hoping for someone with cooler blood.”

  “Cooler blood?”

  “His words exactly.”

  “The woman has met with torturers, murderers, despots, and never flinched. We’ve been grooming her, checking her out, for years. If she were any cooler in the blood she’d be—”

  “I told him the same thing. He wasn’t moved.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s one of the partners. We’ll have to either convince him he’s wrong or move to plan B.”

  “Plan B might work,” Oleg said after a moment.

  Volkes could hear the treachery in his voice, the disappointment. Plan B would complicate things for Señor Rodriguez, make him look less than reliable in DGI headquarters, a man who wasn’t sure, whose information might not be 100 percent reliable. What a shame, Volkes thought. He turned toward the window again, searching for a suitably remote resting place, playing Oleg now like a tarpon on a line.

  “And the second thing?”

  “What second thing?” Volkes asked, concentrating on a particular stretch of unpeopled swampland and thinking: It would best be done at night.

  “You said you had two things on your mind.”

  Volkes turned to him. “The second thing, my friend, is that I’m retiring after this. Lincoln and I talked about it this morning. I’m seventy-one. A well-preserved seventy-one to be sure, but seventy-one all the same. I’ve got ten good years left, at the outside, and I’d dearly like to pass those years enjoying my money. Some sailing, a little travel, lots of golf. If the Orchid wants me to consult, I’ll consult, happily, but when this is over I’m most likely to be found on the first tee at Isle of Lakes, Ponte Vedra, Tiburón.” Oleg started to object, but Volkes held up a hand. “We talked at length, Eddie Lincoln and I, and it’s all set. We’d like you to be the man who takes my place.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Carolina slept a deep sleep broken by one flash of dream. In the dream she was in the waiting room of the orthodontist she’d gone to starting at age twelve, terrified. Her uncle was sitting beside her, reading aloud in Spanish, slowly, as if to a child.

  When she awoke, it took her a full minute of looking around the hotel room to remember where she was. Her old woman’s dress lay where she had left it, on a chair by the desk. The makeup still sat in clumps in the hotel sink, and in the roots of her hair. She made a call to the number Oleg had given her, then stepped into the shower and remained there a long time, scrubbing away old age. Shortly after she was dry and dressed, Evan knocked on her door carrying his hairdressing supplies, and soon she was a blond once more, almost her natural color.

  She had a breakfast of fruit and coffee at the hotel restaurant, then went out into the parking lot, young again, or almost young. If someone had been following her since she’d left Atlanta, then at the very least they would be tired and confused. But there were no white Ford Explorers in the hotel parking lot, no one sitting in any of the cars. The Orchid had been kind enough to have another pretty vehicle, a Porsche SUV, brought to the hotel for her, keys with the valet attendant. One ten-dollar tip later and she was driving west in morning sunshine.

  Instead of going straight to the Doral apartment to pack, she turned onto Seventy-second Avenue, northwest, drove a ways, then pulled up behind a new, rather nondescript Catholic church. Morning mass had concluded half an hour earlier; the front doors were unlocked. Inside, once her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, she turned into the pew nearest the back wall and sat there, not praying so much as wondering. She believed in some kind of God. The God she believed in would want people to be happy, to be free. If some people had to do evil things in order to make that happen, then she believed her God would forgive such things, to a point. She had done things she was not proud of. Shot a man once, perhaps killed him, she did not know. Working for the Agency she had put the lives of strangers at great risk, served governments that, while friendly to the United States, were not exactly paragons of virtue.

  She sighed, and closed her eyes to pray. In the midst of her prayer she heard the exterior doors squeak open and knock closed, a pause, and then heavy footsteps—a man’s. She kept her head bowed, but moved her purse onto her lap, opened it, put her right hand inside, and gripped the handle of her 9mm Markus. The footsteps echoed against the church’s high ceiling. When the man drew even with the row where she sat, she turned, moving the purse with her, beginning to withdraw the pistol, and saw her ex-husband, Oscar, there at the end of the pew, smiling at her, holding up his hands very slightly from his sides in a gesture of dignified surrender.

  She set the purse to her left side, away from him. As he was sidestepping along the pew toward her, a little shiver of feeling washed over the skin of her arms. Except for weddings and funerals, Oscar had not set foot inside a church since his first communion. He was here to see her; he had obviously been following her.

  As she knew he would, he sat down very close to her. She could smell his aftershave, and another old tremor moved through her. For a moment, he sat quietly looking forward, as if they were in the cathedral again waiting for the priest to join them in holy matrimony.

  “You’ve been following me,” she whispered, when she could no longer stand the silence.

  He only nodded, and would not look at her.

  “What’s going on, Oscar?”

  He hesitated, pressed his lips together. Their thighs were touching. She resisted an urge to slide away from him.

  “Do you know who you are working for, Carolina? Really know them?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t think you do. I think you were seduced by their money, and their high-sounding principles, but I don’t think you have a clue as to who they really are.”

  “We’ve had this fight, Oscar. I don’t want to have it again, not in church, not anywhere.”

  “I want to protect you, not control you.”

  “It amounts to the same thing.”

  “Right,” he said bitterly. She thought he might stand up and leave. He looked at the altar, ran his eyes over the mural there, Jesus surrounded by his apostles, with Judas the traitor approaching, leading Roman soldiers. He said in a whisper, almost as if it were a confession, “Look, I know some things about what you’re doing. I have friends everywhere, Caro, good people, all of them. I give them a little help from time to time, and they give me a little help from time to time. And the little help they’re giving me now is to let me know that my wife is in water too dangerous for swimming.”

  Ex-wife, she wanted to insist. But instead, she said quietly, “I’m an excellent swimmer.” She did not take her eyes off him now. In profile, he looked like some kind of general, an honorable man burdened with the responsibility for his troops. In the great Latino tradition he had always seen her as one of those troops, special perhaps, adorable, but nevertheless subservient. At his temples she saw the first threads of gray.

  “Of course, of course,” he said, turning at last to meet her eyes. “Excellent. A great swimmer. Better than me. But I’ve always made it a point to know the people I am swimming with. I’m not sure you have done that. The people you are working for now are reckless. Their aims are not what they claim to be. They’ll risk your well-being while keeping themselves safe. This risk might result in your capture, your torture, your death, and I can’t just stand by and let that happen.”

  “I’ve worked for them for eight years, Oscar, and never once in all that time have they failed to protect me. I have never done anything, or seen them do anything, that was at odds with what I believe. I can’t say that about the Agency; can you?”

  “No.” He shook his head sadly. “But you are at especially great risk this time. They’ve been preparing this, preparing you, for years, since the day they hired you. I warned you then, and I’m warning you again now. I plead with yo
u to listen to me.”

  “And what, Oscar?”

  “And resign. Take your money. Invest it with me in your uncle’s businesses. Together we can agitate for a free Cuba, but not like this.”

  “You’re going to retire, then? Give up a life of chasing terrorists through the alleys in Pakistan and decide to be a stay-at-home Dad?”

  She felt as though she could look all the way down into the centers of his eyes and see his soul. They’d been too young when they married. They’d been pursuing careers that would have broken apart any union—weeks without seeing each other; so many things they could never talk about; when they were home in Virginia, the incredible drudgery of working for one of the biggest bureaucracies on the planet. “I might,” he said. “I’m willing to talk about it anyway.”

  “Bien,” she said, but she could not let herself completely believe him. “All right. I’m going away for a while, a week or two. When I get back, call me in Atlanta and we can talk about it if you really mean that.”

  “I really mean it. And I really mean this, too: I don’t want you to go.”

  “I have to, Oscar. I get paid to go.”

  “Tell them you won’t go this time.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because Oleg Rodriguez works for DGI.”

  She blinked. She turned her eyes away, remembering his jealousy, the insinuations, the fights. Suddenly their proposed talk about a future reconciliation did not hold much appeal. “And that information came to you from what source?” she asked him, eyes averted, her voice cold.

  “An unnameable and reliable source.”

  “You know how easy it is to make that accusation. You know how it’s used in our community.”

  “He is using you to expose the entire underground dissident movement in Cuba. You’re going there in two months to the day—this is how secret your network is, your Orchid. You’re going there in two months with a passport from one of the former Eastern European countries. When you arrive, when you meet your contact at a tourist hotel, you’ll both be arrested and tortured. You’ll give up the names on the American side. And your contact will be forced to give up the names on the Cuban side. When that’s accomplished, there will be more arrests and torture in Cuba, there’ll be assassinations here. And you’ll be killed, naturally. The whole thing—your hiring, your years of work, all of which this Rodriguez has had a hand in—has been an elaborate preparation, dreamed up by Castro and his men, as a way of decimating the dissident movement.”