“Fine. And tell me what, precisely, does the minister of health have to do with any of this?”
“I suspected you.”
“Again with the insults.”
“I had reason to. For a little while a pattern of small pieces of information seemed to be leading us to your ministry. You are the head of your ministry. So, naturally, we suspected you.”
“Well, go fuck yourself.”
“Thank you. I’ve tried; I can’t seem to manage.” Olochon beamed at his little witticism, and ran his eyes—the antennae of his sixth sense—around the gleaming lobby.
“The trail of small details veered off suddenly in another direction, here. I consider you a friend. It would have been a savage disappointment to me if the trail had led to you. So I thought we would come here together and I could get a sense of several things at once.”
“Maybe the trail leads to D-7.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, if there is, in fact, another plot, it would be logical for the plot to originate among your own people. Perhaps they are power hungry. They have access to state secrets. They have the materials and expertise. They have close access to el Comandante. ”
“My turn to be insulted then,” Olochon countered. “To say ‘Fuck you.’ ”
Just as these words were out of Olochon’s mouth, what at first seemed to be the crack of fireworks rang out, a strange and incongruous sound among the tile and chrome. Instantly, there was another, stranger noise very close by. Acting on some odd new instinct, Carlos dove to cover Olochon’s body, knocking him out of the chair and onto the floor and then pushing him, like a frantic lover, around behind it. Two more shots were fired. The two men lay for a moment on the tile against the chair’s back legs, then rolled apart. There was a scuffle in the lobby; three of Olochon’s undercover agents had already wrestled a man to the floor and were pummeling his face. One of the rounds from this man’s weapon had struck the wooden arm of the chair where Olochon had been sitting—Carlos could still hear the peculiar quick thut of the bullet embedding itself in the wood. The other round had ricocheted off the wall. Olochon stood up, smoothed the front of his army coat, made eye contact with Carlos, indicating his approval, his gratitude perhaps, with the smallest of nods, then walked over to begin the first in a series of conversations with the man who had tried to kill him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the rows of dark-upholstered seats near Gate 39 at Miami International Airport, Carolina sat with her magazine and coffee, waiting for the first-class passengers to be called upon to board. A thin coat of fear seemed to lay over everything she could see. She imagined it as a fine white frost, icy and sparkling, and it made her strangely happy. Her father had been a boxer in his youth, an Olympic hopeful at one point, and he had passed his interest in the sport on to her. In her twenties she had been something of an aficionado, impressing boyfriends with her knowledge of different fighters and their styles and records. These days, she liked to watch films of old bouts—Marciano-Walcott, Ali-Foreman, Ali-Chuvalo, Benvenuti-Griffith. Some of the tapes she rented included before-and-after interviews with the fighters, and she remembered watching an interview with Muhammad Ali and being struck by the thrill in his voice when he talked about the upcoming fight. She could not remember which fight he was preparing for—the Thrilla in Manila, it might have been—but she would never forget the light in his eyes, as if running and lifting weights and being bruised by sparring partners and then stepping into a roped-off ring with a man who could break your neck with one punch were the greatest pleasures life offered. Better than sex, or eating, or friendship; better than any kind of artificial high.
She could relate. Looking around at the men and women getting ready to fly across the ocean—for business or vacation—she felt she never could have endured the ordinariness of a life where the biggest worry was whether you’d packed enough underwear, or prepared well enough for a presentation. She needed more than that. She needed to feel the edge of things, that cold breath on the skin of her shoulders. Her uncle had never been satisfied with merely making money and sleeping with beautiful women; he had to have his meetings with Cuban émigrés, his imaginary plots and treacherous DGI agents. And, for better or worse, the same gene thrummed and sang in her cells. The need only grew stronger as she grew older. Pretending to page through her magazine, she thought: I am going to help rid the world of Fidel Castro, and it was like an electric current surging in her.
The fear, the risk, rendered her oddly calm. It had always been like this. She made her way past the check-in desk and down the ramp, smiled at the hostess, stowed her carry-on, and took her seat like any other traveler. When the plane lifted off and banked west, then north over Doral, she gazed down at the green bands of the golf courses there, thinking she really must learn to play. And then, as they turned east, she studied the strand of shore shining like a straight necklace of emerald and tropical gold. Fidel’s last days, she was thinking. Fidel’s last days.
They were served drinks. The man beside her—lanky, silver-haired, handsome as a film star except for a certain slight sagging of flesh to either side of his chin—turned his calm eyes on her and struck up a conversation. It was the usual thing at first: Had she been to Prague before? Was she going for work or pleasure? Ordinary enough, until she asked him what he did with his days and he shrugged, offered a gorgeous, bemused smile, and said, “I own companies. A conglomerate, actually. Fairly boring way to pass one’s time.”
“Boring? I would think it would be fascinating.”
“For the first few years, yes. But once you realize the intricacy of things, how large the human situation is . . . then what you are doing for the world seems too small by a factor of a thousand.”
“Why are you flying commercial if you own a conglomerate?’
Again the bemused smile. The smile said that he wasn’t exactly tired of the world, but that he knew it too thoroughly. It was a kind of advanced, refined boredom, she thought, and it would make him seek the spice in everything, the risk, the adventure. She felt an immediate kinship. “This airline is one of our companies,” he said. “Every once in a while I go along for the ride just to see how we’re doing.”
Soon there was only blue ocean beneath them, and fields of clouds billowing up like misshapen white carnations. They flew gradually into darkness. The conversation went on with a perfect comfort that pleased her deeply. Why did one find one’s soul mates on airplanes? Why were they always thirty years older? Everywhere the talk took them—her carefully made-up family back home in LA, her carefully made-up job as a Spanish-language consultant for the Pensacola police and fire departments, her mostly imaginary interests in ceramics and gardening, his children, his country home outside London, his fascination with nineteenth-century oil paintings—they trotted along like two happy horses in tandem. He made her laugh. He seemed genuinely interested in her work. From the tips of his brilliantly shined black loafers to the wide shoulders and gray eyes, the man exuded a supernatural calm, a kind of mastery. Nothing would frighten or surprise him.
Their conversation dwindled as easily and naturally as it had begun. After their meal, the hostess handed them blankets, and Carolina set hers across her lap, turned her head away from him and dozed. When she awoke, the first red shards of light were showing against the smoky eastern horizon, and the pilot was speaking to them—another calm man: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re having a tiny little technical problem, nothing to worry about. I have a very small crack in the windshield here so just to be absolutely on the safe side we’re going to drop down to ten thousand feet and then make a landing in Spain, where we can get things fixed up. This is not an emergency landing, just a little detour. We should have you on another plane shortly and back on your way to Prague. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Carolina turned to the silver-haired man beside her and he smiled back tiredly. “And just when you were about to buy some of our stock,” he said with a certain irony.
In a matter of minutes the Atlantic came into sharper focus below them. A murky coastline lifted itself into view. In first class, at least, a quick breakfast was served—coffee and rolls, some fresh fruit—and then they were moving into a landing pattern, the gear cranking down, houses, roads, and vehicles taking shape below them.
When the jet had touched down and was taxiing, her gentleman companion said, “I’ll arrange for us to sit together going into Prague, if you don’t mind. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.”
“I enjoyed it, too.”
But as soon as she stepped into the terminal, two Spanish security personnel in moss green uniforms approached her and asked her to stand aside, away from the waiting area. A routine security check, they said, in thickly accented English. She began, quietly at first, to protest. A woman in civilian dress approached them, made solid eye contact with her, and spoke in Spanish: “Señorita Perez,” she said quietly, “por favor. Es importante.” And something in her voice and manner sent a signal.
The woman took hold of Carolina’s forearm, and she was led into the terminal and then through a ribbed, smoked-glass door that seemed to be the entrance to some kind of club for first-class travelers. Beyond it, out of reach of the bustle of the terminal, was another door, decorated in gold and red, then a sort of lounge, and off this lounge yet another door. Both burly uniformed security personnel remained in the lounge. The woman kept a firm grip on her forearm and led her through the gold and red door, down a short corridor and into a windowless room where there was a small cherrywood table surrounded by three leather-upholstered chairs, a wooden desk with another chair behind it, and two more chairs in front. The place had the feeling of someone’s private study more than of an interrogation room reserved for special threats to Spanish security. Carolina felt herself relax, partly. She was asked to sit and wait. She had the room to herself for thirty seconds, and then the door opened, and her silver-haired neighbor from the trans-Atlantic flight stepped in behind his calm smile. “Bit of a change of plans” was the first thing he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
After one tremendous slap to the face of his would-be, already-bloody assassin—their foreign visitors were getting a show for their money, Carlos thought, though most of them were cowering in various corners of the lobby—Olochon took the man by the throat and shook him roughly. The man’s hands were already cuffed behind him. He had a very large nose, which was bleeding profusely now, perhaps broken. He stumbled sideways beneath Olochon’s assault. One of the plainclothesmen caught him, forced him upright. They moved him quickly toward the door, Olochon following, barking orders, exuding a kind of perverse, businesslike joy. Carlos was left standing in the lobby on shaking legs, without a ride home. After a minute or so, he went to the main desk, called his secretary on the phone there, and went in search of a shot of rum.
No one else was in the bar. By then, all the tourists had been chased up to the safety of their rooms, no doubt swearing to themselves never to set foot on Cuban soil again. Carlos finished the rum and ordered a second. The bartender seemed to know who he was—no charge for the liquor. After serving it, he retreated to the far end of the bar and pretended to busy himself there, wiping imaginary spots from clean glasses.
General Rincon had told him that things would happen in multiples, all at once. Clearly, they had meant to assassinate Olochon as a preliminary to the greater assassination, as a way of crippling D-7 before the main event. And clearly it had been a very clumsy attempt. Shots fired by an excited amateur from a distance of eighty or ninety feet. No doubt they had lured Olochon into the hotel for that purpose. But they had not expected him to be seated next to one of their own, arms almost touching. Within the hour the would-be assassin would be talking. Which meant Carlos had to get word to Rincon before then, or it would be over before it had begun.
By the time Jose arrived, Carlos had enjoyed a third glass of rum and was a bit unsteady on his feet, but behind the cottony curtain of alcohol he believed he was thinking clearly. The one thing that had troubled him from the start was that there was no dependable way to contact Rincon without other people knowing. He received messages from the general in half-sentence whispers, scraps of cardboard in a toilet. “It’s safer this way,” Rincon had told him. “If the house falls apart, it will fall apart one brick at a time. We are each only able to give up one or two names. You have my name. I have yours and one other.”
“What happened?” Jose wanted to know when he arrived. “I drop you at your house. An hour later Véronique is calling me, saying you are at the Oriente. You look like you’ve just been run over by a bull.” They walked out of the building and climbed into the Volga’s front seat.
“Olochon took me for a ride. We ended up here, where some fool tried to assassinate him. I threw him to the ground and covered him.”
“Who, the assassin?”
“The Dentist.”
“I never knew you cared for him so much.”
Carlos reached forward and snapped on the radio loudly. “I despise him. It was all an act. An impulse.” Before Carlos realized what he was doing he said: “He suspects me of plotting to overthrow the government. I was trying to throw him off.”
“Olé!” Jose sang. They raced out of the Oriente compound and were driving the two-lane highway back into the heart of the city. “Now he suspects everyone, every last person. No doubt, he even suspects Fidel of trying to kill Fidel.”
For a minute, Carlos rode in silence. So clear was the view through the window, and the sound of Jose’s words, that it seemed to him the effects of the rum had already disappeared. He watched the outskirts of the city sail past, broken apartment blocks and barefoot children. He listened to the familiar shifting of gears. He thought it over for another few seconds, tried to gauge the effect the liquor was having on him, glanced at Jose’s face, looked away, and said: “He has good reason to suspect me.” Carlos waited for the count of three, then looked across the seat again. Two people now; he had told two people in the past twenty-four hours. If everyone involved in the plan told two people, and those people told two people . . .
Jose was flexing his square, scarred jaw with the stubble of beard on it, working the stick shift, not looking at him. “You can pretend I didn’t say that,” Carlos told him. “If you want. If they find me out they’ll kill you anyway, so if you feel you must turn me in, do so.”
Jose did not speak. He chewed the inside of his cheek as he drove. He kept his eyes straight in front of him. “Good reason to suspect you—what does that mean?” he finally asked.
“It means I am involved in a plot with a group of other high officials to stop the madness, to try to bring back a Cuba that makes sense.”
Jose glanced across the seat at him for two seconds. He stopped chewing his cheek. He looked at the loud radio. He was nodding. There was an unbearable stretch of silence before he steered the car around a pothole and said: “This is not exactly the surprise of my adult life.”
“All the worse for me, then. It shows.”
“It shows to me. Enough so the thought crossed my mind once. That’s all.”
“And?’
“And . . . you have more courage than most people.”
“Courage? I’m pissing my boots.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet. To the office, not home. I need a little time, half an hour, before I see Elena.”
“Everyone knows what you know, Ministro,” Jose said, still not looking at him. “Everyone sees what you see. Not the top secret government things, naturally, but the ordinary things—no toilet paper, no cheese, shoes that fall apart, houses that fall apart. People arrested for nothing. Everyone sees it. It makes sense that they, that you, would try to kill Olochon first, because Olochon is the minister of fear, and because of that fear, nothing changes.”
“I had the chance the other day to kill him. He had tortured someone, a man, Ernesto, no one I knew. Tortured him worse than you woul
d torture a cat, a tarantula. He asked me to kill the man and I did.”
“You did Ernesto a favor then, killing him.”
“I could have killed Olochon. I wanted to, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it . . . good thing, too, because the first chamber was empty. He thought I might aim at him and hear the click and not pull the trigger a second time.”
“This was the morning he summoned you. Two days ago?”
“Yes.”
At the traffic light, Jose took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “Does General Rincon know this? About what happened at the hotel?”
“Why do you say Rincon?”
Jose turned to face him, a wisp of smoke curling up between them, and said quietly, “Because Rincon approached me even before he approached you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Instead of sitting behind the wooden desk, as Carolina thought he might do, her silver-haired friend half sat, half leaned on the front edge of it, facing her. Before he had a chance to say anything else, there was a knock on the door and a pretty young woman wearing a tight black skirt and white blouse stepped into the windowless room, carrying a tray. On the tray was a silver coffeepot and two china cups on china saucers. Silver creamer, silver sugar jar, china plate on which sat crackers, three small wedges of different kinds of cheese, and slices of apple and pear. Without looking at either of them, the woman poured two cups of coffee—one black, one with cream—and served Carolina first. She then glanced at the silver-haired man, and, after registering his small nod of approval, disappeared through the door.
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