AFTER LUNCH, JOSE chauffeured him to the Port of Havana. For amusement, Jose put the blue light on top of the car and set it to flashing, and then pushed down hard on the accelerator and made the siren sound against the fronts of the buildings they passed. A few people turned their heads to look, but it wasn’t Fidel, wasn’t even the police, just another minister in a black car, his suit new, his belly full, his children protected. As they raced past Elena’s clinic, Carlos studied the front door and windows there. One stooped old woman leaving; nothing more to be seen.
For some reason, the port always soothed him: the magnificent old Morro Castle, the beautifully tattered facades near the Malecón, all of it cut by alleys that were inhabited by a ragtag band of workers, whores, con artists, thieves, foreign sailors, and drunks. He wondered if he enjoyed being there merely because the port spoke of the existence of another world, another way of life beyond the horizon. Three freighters were anchored in the filthy waters—in the days of the old Soviet Union there would have been twenty-three.
Carlos stepped energetically out of the car, found the director of the port, made a bit of small talk with him, told one vulgar joke, informed the man about his new campaign, and then marched around in his suit, with two deputies at his elbows, asking questions and bothering people. One of the freighters was from the Czech Republic, bringing in cotton fabric and carrying out—what else!—sugar. In the third car of the three-car convoy, Carlos had brought along a doctor and two nurses, and they set up an impromptu clinic, checking the eyes and pulses of a handful of longshoremen, drawing a few vials of blood for random AIDS and hepatitis C testing. He found the captain of the Czech ship and lectured the man on making sure his sailors used the proper health protection during their visit to the capital. The man listened quietly and nodded, but there was a grin beneath the hard muscles of his face. He was old enough to remember communism; he knew what was going on. Carlos’s little lecture would go no farther than the breezy, sunny, salty bridge on which they stood.
When he was finished with the captain, Carlos promenaded back and forth in front of the little bars at the far end of the harbor, stopping at the door of one of them and sending his deputies into the back room to make their inquiries. The chief health inspector of Havana would be furious, of course, but Carlos did not care about the city health inspector. Everything in his life now was a circus playing out on a thin layer of cellophane. Another little while—months, weeks, days—and he would fall through, and then he would either be dead, screaming in Olochon’s torture cells, or free. Beneath the ordinary sounds of his life was a droning voice that did not leave him, day or night: It’s you, it’s you, it’s you, it’s you, it’s you.
When the charade was finished, the three-car convoy rushed back through the streets of the capital, past the Institute of Contemporary Politics, past the statues to revolutionary heroes, past the lovingly cared-for cacharros, 1950s-style Chevrolets and Pontiacs parked at the curb. The cars needed gas, the people needed food, but the propaganda billboards were unblemished and the monuments were polished clean. It was no way to live.
In the office again, he half expected, half wanted to find that General Rincon had stopped by or left a message for him, in code, on some pretext or another. Plans had been changed. There had been a delay. The whole thing had been canceled. But no, nothing.
On his way home in the afternoon, he and Jose stopped for one glass of rum at the bar of the Cielo Rojo Hotel—it was good for him to be seen in bars and hotels now, good for him to have been seen by the director of the port.
Warmed by the rum, Carlos was starting, just starting, to allow himself to believe that this plot of theirs was a good and necessary thing, that it might actually work. When Jose dropped him off at his apartment, he climbed the two flights of stairs, opened the door, and found Felix Olochon sitting at his kitchen table. Elena was making coffee for the colonel. When she heard Carlos enter, she half turned away from the machine, and for one instant he saw, in the pretty lines of her face, what seemed to him a flicker of deceit.
Olochon immediately got to his feet and saluted in a way that could have been mocking or could have been the gesture of an old friend and compañero. They shook hands. Carlos kissed Elena, who began making a second cafecito while he loosened his tie, hung his coat on the back of the chair, and sat. Olochon had his wide, toothy smile working that afternoon. He was always like this in the presence of someone else’s woman—grandiose, joyous, giving the impression that if Carlos had not come through the door at that moment, he and Elena might have been headed toward the bedroom, arm in arm.
“A new campaign,” Olochon said. “I approve.”
“I’m glad,” Carlos said, worried that a droplet of sarcasm had found its way into his voice. Elena set the coffee down in front of him, moved the sugar a bit closer to his hands, and smiled unsteadily. He was wrong about the deceit; it wasn’t deceit he saw in her face, only a reflection of his own dissatisfaction with himself, his own lack of honesty, his own fear. She was not made like him, this woman; she could not lie.
“You were seen at the port,” Olochon said.
“I decided to make the campaign personal, yes. There’s far too much sickness on the island; Elena can attest to that. And far too much of it comes from abroad. It occurred to me last month that we’re losing millions of hours of productivity because of illnesses brought to us by foreigners. I’ve been mulling it over. Where are the places foreigners touch us? The ports, the airport, the hotels, and hard-currency bars. Those are the points of entry for these illnesses. If we can keep those places immaculate, if we can educate the workers there, then—”
“Brilliant,” Olochon said, as if there were something else on his mind. “The ports, the airport, the tourist hotels. Brilliant.”
“We’ll see,” Carlos said guardedly. Elena had made a coffee for herself, put together a plate of sweet rolls, and she was now sitting at the head of the table watching him.
“To what do we owe the rare honor of your visit?” Carlos asked, between sips of coffee. To show that he wasn’t concerned, really, about the answer to his question, he got up before Olochon could answer, took a spotted, undersized mango from the counter, a knife from the drawer, a plate from the cupboard, and proceeded to skin and slice the mango and offer the slices all around.
Olochon smirked into his coffee cup, toyed with the slippery slice between his square-tipped fingers. “Well,” he said, twisting the cup in a half circle and running a napkin across his battered lips, “it turns out that you and I are thinking along the same lines. We see the same locations as being places of potential infection. Only the infections you are concerned with are bodily ones, and I am concerned with infections of the mind, the national spirit.”
Carlos nodded, wiped his fingers, tried to keep his breathing steady and slow. “How goes the investigation?”
Olochon smirked again, working the muscles around his mouth over the protruding teeth. He turned to Elena and put a hand over her hand. “Carlos is referring to matters of state that cannot be discussed here. Forgive me.”
“He tells me nothing,” Elena said.
“No?” Olochon somehow filled this question with sexual innuendo. “Nothing of his new campaign?”
“What campaign?”
“It’s a state secret,” Carlos said to the colonel. “You shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Olochon forced a loud laugh. Outside the windows, they could hear the sound of sirens, moving closer. “Those are my men,” Olochon said, when he saw that Carlos was listening. “Coming to carry you off, at my orders.”
Carlos grinned. Elena looked at him, her mouth tight. In a moment, she stood and went into the bathroom but no noise came from that room.
“A sensitive soul,” Olochon whispered, nodding at the bathroom door.
Carlos nodded.
“Concerned for the well-being of her man.”
Carlos nodded again. His eyes drifted to the sharp paring knife on the counter.
Olochon sighed, toyed with his cup. The sirens wailed nearer, then reached a screaming pitch and passed on, fading and fading. “We need to take a little ride,” the torturer said.
At the words, Carlos felt the muscles of his inner thighs tense. He pressed his lips tightly closed, as if Olochon had already started reaching past them. “I promised Elena I’d take her out for dinner.”
Olochon showed his teeth. “It’s well before the dinner hour. Perhaps you will still be home on time.”
“Where are we going?”
“A secret.”
“How long shall I tell her we’ll be gone?”
“Not long.”
Carlos stood and walked the three steps to the bathroom on unsteady legs. He tapped on the door and Elena opened it the width of her cheekbones, her face streaked with tears. “Take your shower,” Carlos said. “Felix and I are going for a short ride. I’ll be home in time for our dinner date.”
She nodded, unable to speak.
As they were going out of the apartment, Olochon said, “So she was naked in there, when you were talking to her. Perhaps I should let you stay for half an hour longer?”
Carlos didn’t answer.
He sat beside Olochon in the back seat of another black, Soviet-made Volga sedan, a thick-necked driver/bodyguard at the wheel. They set off through the city’s mild, late-afternoon air. The driver seemed in no hurry. Olochon sat looking out the window. They were headed in the direction of the Montefiore Prison, the Torture House.
Carlos could smell his own sweat, feel it running in a rivulet down his left side. The two men did not speak. Three blocks from the prison, Olochon leaned forward and said to his driver: “Oriente Hotel.”
At the words, Carlos’s left leg twitched. He reached down immediately and raised the cuff of his pants, checking the skin, pretending something had bitten him. The driver sped out of town on the two-lane road to Matanzas, and for a while they rode in silence.
“Difficult day?” Olochon inquired calmly.
Carlos shrugged. He wasn’t sure his tongue would work properly if he tried to speak.
“These are bad times, are they not?” Olochon pressed.
“I see room for optimism.”
“Really? Where? Tell me.”
The driver glanced at Carlos in the rearview mirror, as if he, too, were hoping for something to be optimistic about.
“The biomedical sector,” Carlos said, and he could sense a sag in both the other bodies. “Cuba has some of the best scientists in the world, and our government supports medical research with a vigor you can find nowhere else. I believe that, in the very near future, the curing of disease will come to be the most valuable economic resource, and when that day comes, our patents will be in great demand. We will open a whole new sector of the economy—producing medicines for the world.”
For a moment, Olochon watched him across the seat, then he snorted out a laugh. The laugh dissolved quickly into a sly smile. “This from a nation that cannot even produce a decent prophylactic?”
“What are you talking about? Our prophylactics are fine.”
Olochon’s green eyes did not move from Carlos’s face. “You yourself said they were substandard.”
“I said no such thing.”
“No?”
“No, never. I’ve used them myself.”
“You put out one of your ministry papers on the subject, you don’t recall? Last year it was, July or August.”
“I don’t recall. And, in any case, rubbers aren’t made by the biotechnology industry. You are talking about a different type of worker, a different organization.”
“I use the North American or French,” Olochon said, “when I feel the need to use them, which is rare.”
“You should always use them.”
“I’m a sensitive man,” Olochon said, and Carlos could see the driver smiling now, at the joke. “Anything that comes between the object of my lust and me is generally unacceptable.”
They turned down the access road and pulled up in front of the Oriente Hotel. It sat on one of the nation’s finest beaches, all white sand and pearl blue sea.
“Why here?” Carlos said, and instantly regretted it.
Olochon got out without answering. Carlos made a show of checking his watch, as if worried about the dinner date. Olochon strode up the front walk of the hotel, and Carlos had no choice but to hurry and fall into stride with him. They went past the two sets of guards without so much as glancing to either side. The guards were there to prevent ordinary citizens from visiting the premises, which were for hard-currency-paying tourists and a few very well-connected Cubans only. Even the menial jobs here—bartender, maid, clerk—were among the most sought-after in the nation. Doctors, mathematicians, physicists left their practices, classrooms, and laboratories to work in places like this, making, with one week of generous tips, more than they had made in a month of meager state salaries.
Carlos and Olochon passed through revolving doors—they must look like friends, Carlos thought—and entered another world. The lobby was all chrome and shining tiles, the clerks at the desk eager, attentive, perfectly groomed. Here and there Carlos saw foreign tourists standing in small groups or gazing out at the sunlit palm trees on the manicured grounds. He’d seen such people before, of course. He’d been abroad several times—Moscow, Warsaw, Mexico City—though never to the richer capitalist countries. He was no stranger to foreigners, and had, in the past, visited these hotels for international conferences. But now it was as if a film had been scraped from his eyes. In the relaxed expressions and happy faces of the men and women tourists, he saw not decadence so much as a kind of confidence and ease that was almost exactly opposite what he felt. Their world was a safe, predictable world; his was riven with danger, doubt, and want. They had the luxury of trust; he was weighted down with a defensive armor. Almost every encounter of his life now bore the stamp of fear.
Olochon feared nothing, it seemed. He marched into the lobby and commandeered a pair of brown leather chairs that had been arranged around a reading lamp in a small alcove. He motioned for Carlos to sit. From the alcove they could see everything that went on in the lobby, and yet they were safely set aside from it so that no one paid them the slightest attention. Carlos’s heart was slamming around in his chest.
“What is this about?” he said, making a show of checking his watch again. “You take me away from a dinner with Elena so we can sit in a tourist hotel and look at the sunburned legs of female guests?”
Olochon had gone into what Carlos thought of as his turtle mode. His eyelids had lowered so that they half covered his eyes. He was resting his elbows on the soft arms of the chairs, his hands palm to palm in front of his chest, as if he were praying. And he had grown very still. Carlos could almost see the shell over him. “Felix,” he said, bolder now. Any sign of weakness or worry here and he was dead. Worse than dead. “What is this?”
“This,” Olochon said quietly, slowly turning his turtle gaze on the minister of health, “is the heart of the antirevolutionary conspiracy. I’m almost sure of it.”
Carlos let out a laugh that echoed in the room. A pretty, blond, sandal-wearing woman, Eastern European he suspected, perhaps German, turned briefly to look at him, before readjusting the small pack on her back and flapping out the front door. “What?” he said. “These young people come here to shoot our leaders after a day on the beach?”
“Why do you say shoot our leaders?” Olochon demanded. The eyes were a bit more open now. “Why shoot, exactly?”
“Why? Because I have information that an entire brigade of bikini-wearing Portuguese lesbians is in residence at this hotel. There are twenty of them. Each carried in a small piece of a rifle hidden in her crotch and they are assembling it now in one of the elegant, decadent rooms above our heads.” For a moment, Olochon looked at him eagerly, then Carlos watched the anger rise, then the bitterness, then the viciousness, and then the face of false friendship covering all of it.
“Come on, Felix,” he said. “If you suspect even me—which you seem to lately—then your watchfulness has crossed the line into paranoia. If every time I mention something, you are going to seize on it as the slip of a guilty would-be assassin, then why do we bother with talk? Take me to the cells and beat it out of me, or just shoot me on the spot. But, failing that, I have a dinner date with Elena and I intend to keep it. If you’ve brought me here to look at German girls in halter tops, you’re wasting my time. What is going on?”
Olochon’s face seemed to turn to stone while Carlos spoke. When he finished, he met the green eyes squarely, unflinching. Slowly, the stone showed a few cracks. At last, what seemed like a genuine smile lit up the hideous mouth, and Olochon nodded. It almost seemed that he was sincerely happy. “Not the speech of a guilty man,” he said.
“I’m insulted that you would ever have thought otherwise.”
“Ah, I insult so many people.”
“Enough.” Carlos made a move to get to his feet. “I’m having dinner with Elena. If you want to stay here and ogle, fine, but kindly have your driver return me to my apartment.”
“I’m not ogling,” Olochon said, taking hold of Carlos’s arm with one powerful hand. “I don’t like foreign meat in any case. What I told you was true: I have reason, good reason, very good reason, to believe that this hotel is, if not the center of the plot, then centrally concerned with the plot.”
“And you’re carrying on undercover surveillance . . . in your army uniform. Come on, Felix, we’ve been involved in this too long for charades.”
“Not a charade at all,” Olochon said. “Last night we arrested someone named Jorge Zialos, a musician, supposedly. We had information that led us to him, information provided by another criminal. Zialos let it be known that he had heard something about the Oriente Hotel, and a plot against the regime. Other people work differently, Carlos. And I do, in fact, have undercover men here, as you can imagine. I’ve had them here since the beginning. But I like to see for myself. I have something of a sixth sense when it comes to these things. I walk into a place like this and a certain kind of music sounds, audible only to me. I can read conspiracies in the faces of the supposedly innocent. I can understand at a level that would not be possible if I were to remain at my desk shuffling papers and attending meetings.”
Fidel's Last Days Page 12