Fidel's Last Days

by Roland Merullo

  Hoping to recover his confidence and to make things appear ordinary—just another ordinary twenty-four hours during which he’d dodged a couple of bullets, saved the life of a torturer, told two people a secret that could kill them all—Carlos reached across and squeezed Jose’s shoulder, then climbed out of the car and into the Havana twilight. He pretended to brush something off the front of his shirt. He walked past the pair of guards, up the office building’s cracked, shallow steps. Past another guard at the door, up one flight of stairs to his office. Everything seemed at once ordinary and absurd. The neat desk of his secretary, Véronique, with her nail polish and cupful of pens. His large desk with the view out over the Museo de Arte. The framed portrait of Fidel on one wall, surrounded by citations and diplomas—it all seemed alien, the accoutrements of another man. In the picture, Fidel was in his early forties, his black beard shining, his eyes intense, wise, fearless, triumphant. He had survived the assault on the Cuartel Moncada, survived prison and exile, chased Batista off the island, repulsed the worms at the Bay of Pigs, stood up to Kennedy over the missiles, avoided a string of CIA assassination attempts, survived, somehow, the withdrawal of billions of dollars a year in Soviet aid without the economy completely collapsing, repaired relations with the European Union after his crackdown on dissidents. He had, in other words, won every battle he’d ever engaged in, with enemies more powerful and more sophisticated than the ragtag group Carlos seemed to be a part of. How could he kill a strategic genius like that, in person, in cold blood?

  In case his phone line was being bugged by Olochon and his men, Carlos called Elena, intending to tell her not to worry, he’d be home shortly, they’d still have time for their dinner date. But the phone just rang and rang.

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, when he went outside to meet Jose, he thought he sensed a change in the posture of the guards at the door. Word of the assassination attempt at the Oriente Hotel had spread like a fire through the city. There had even been a rumor—briefly, he’d heard the cleaning women in the corridor whispering—that Olochon was dead, but he knew where Olochon was, and what he was doing, and he could not force from his mind a vision of a bleeding, big-nosed man, hanging from iron cuffs in the Montefiore Prison, saying the name Carlos Gutierrez through splintered teeth.

  In the front seat of the Volga the air was stifling and the radio still playing too loudly. Jose seemed to be tormenting him with a purposeful silence, making him wait. They went four blocks before he spoke, and by that point Carlos wanted to reach across the seat and strangle him. “Rincon is in Mallarta Province, supposedly inspecting the troops. But the person I spoke with said, when I told him what had happened at the Oriente today, ‘That man is not ours.’ ”

  Carlos leaned closer to him. “Who is the person you spoke with?”

  “I am not allowed to say, Boss.”

  “Even to me?”

  “Even to you.”

  “He’s reliable?”

  “As reliable as any of us now,” Jose said, and they did not speak another word to each other until they were almost at Carlos’s apartment. There, just before he stopped the car, Jose said, “Your meeting at the Oriente has been canceled. It’s still you, though. But now you will meet your contact at Elena’s clinic instead. Day after tomorrow. Eleven A.M. His name will be Ulises. He will give you a cigar. You can light it, but don’t smoke it more than an inch or so down. When you are in a private place, carefully cut it open. There will be something inside.”

  Carlos nodded once, tersely, and shook Jose’s offered hand. Suspicion between two people was a poison, he thought, climbing the steps to the third floor. As deadly as any bullet.

  Inside the apartment there was no sign of Elena, which was very strange. Whatever her duties at the clinic, she was usually home for lunch on Tuesdays, and always home by six P.M. on nights when he’d promised to take her to dinner. He went into the bedroom looking for her, and saw a book—one of her sentimental novels, a story of the great revolutionaries—set out on his pillow in a way she would never have left it. When he picked it up he noticed a scrap of paper protruding from the pages. He opened to that page and the note said: “I have gone to my son’s. I left you the car. I called one of my colleagues at the clinic and told her that he is ill. Do not contact me.” And nothing else. He lay down across the bed, touching both her side and his, and watched the ceiling fan turn in a breath of air.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Carolina wondered how much more dyeing, bleaching, and redyeing her hair could take before she’d have to cut it all off and grow a new crop. They had made her a brunette now, with highlights of chestnut brown here and there. They’d given her green contacts to wear. They’d cropped her hair short—it would take months to grow back this time. They’d darkened her teeth a shade and exchanged her stylish skirt and blouse for a lime green pantsuit, so that now, flying back over the Atlantic again in the opposite direction, she felt like some kind of Spanish American butch executive sneaking off to Havana for her winter tan.

  When she’d awakened at the hotel that morning, a sense of nervousness had come over her all at once. She’d looked in the bathroom mirror and it seemed that even with all their miraculous work, she did not look different enough. Without Volkes there, laying out her duties in his calm voice, the plan seemed faulty to her, dangerously flawed. Oleg knew too much. Castro’s people would be too wary. She was flying, as always, on faith, on a love of risk, on buried old feelings for Cuba.

  The deadly ointment was contained in an ordinary-looking collapsible tube the size of her little finger. The tube was printed with a prescription label identical to those used in Cuba. The whole thing fit neatly into a hard plastic container and the container was inserted into one of two lipsticks she kept in her purse. Light red and dark red. She had to remember: Dark red was deadly.

  Sitting beside a sleeping pensioner, in tourist class, she’d resisted the urge to open her purse and check the lipstick tube, which was slightly wider and longer than its twin. She limited herself to two drinks with the rice and beef dinner. She tried to sleep but could not.

  One thought gave her comfort: If they suspected her, they would suspect her right from the first glimpse. If there were DGI agents in the customs line—and of course there would be—and if they were on the lookout for a woman who fit the description Oleg would by now have given them, then she would be picked up right away; or, at least, her bags would be searched with special care. If she made it through customs without too much fuss, made it through the check-in at the hotel, then she would have a fighting chance.

  The night wore on, endlessly, the drone of the engines vibrating against the tiredness in her body. She wanted more than anything to sleep, but the medication she had taken could not make any headway against the rip currents of her fear. She’d slept for half an hour after taking it, and was now painfully wide awake, listening to her neighbor’s snores.

  At last the sun rose and the plane began its descent into Havana International Airport, the fuselage bumping on the tropical air like a truck on a rutted dirt road. Her neighbor, nervous about the landing, babbled on and on in Castilian Spanish about some television news anchor who had been involved in an affair with a high official of the Spanish government. Carolina nodded and nodded in response, but her eyes were on the emerald island beneath them, a land full of silver, nickel, and copper, a land where coffee, tobacco, sugar, and almost every kind of fruit and vegetable grew, a land that had been drenched in blood and misery for half a millennium.

  The jet bumped hard on landing. The brakes squealed and screeched, sending vibrations up through the bottom of Carolina’s seat. They taxied quickly—too quickly it seemed—toward the terminal, and the nervousness rose into her chest and made her take short, tight breaths. When at last the doors opened and she worked her way down the aisle and then stepped out onto the top of the portable stairway, the nervousness disappeared for a moment in a soft breath of morning air. Cuba. In Spanish it sounded softer, more femin
ine: Coobah.

  The new, Canadian-built terminal and the luggage trucks seemed to be glistening in the fragrant air. By the time she’d retrieved her bags and was standing in the customs line with her fake passport in one hand, currents of excitement and terror were racing through her fingers and forearms, and it was all she could do to still the trembling of her jaw. Just get through this, she thought. Just get through this part. She was fifth in line, fourth, third. There was some fuss up ahead, a magazine being confiscated. Freedom of the press, Castro-style.

  The man who took her passport was a sleepy-eyed, light-haired descendant of the Spaniards who’d come here to find gold and work the Indians to death. He flipped open the passport with a practiced thumb and read over her new name, Angela Vera Miranda, very slowly. Very slowly he raised his eyes to her newly colored hair, and ran them across her cheeks and mouth, and then down over her breasts. He looked at the passport again. He frowned. He raised his eyes to her eyes and stared into them, noticing the green contacts, she thought, perhaps noticing the sweat on her forehead. He thumbed through the pages, then returned to the photo, studied it for at least the count of ten . . .and handed it back. Waved her through.

  There were some women working the customs lines—that had not changed since her last visit, two years ago. One of them, thin and dark brown, ran her hands through Carolina’s clothes, with some envy, it seemed to her. The silks there, the fine cotton cloth, bathing suits and bras and gossamer skirts, two and three and four of everything. Carolina had a strange urge to say, “You can have that one if you’d like.” But she stood still, trembling in the core of her torso, watching, not speaking. There was a tension in the air here, it was almost like Haiti in that way, though the two places were as different from each other as night and day, sorrow and sin, ingrained poverty and enforced poverty. The female customs clerk found and opened her makeup case—black leather. She moved her index finger around as if it were a spoon in soup, pushing the razors, lipstick tubes, and lotions this way and that. She zipped up the case, then turned to her colleague and made a hand signal, and Carolina was free to move forward with the other tourists in the direction of their bus.

  Soon they had left the crowded edges of Havana behind and were in the lush, poor countryside. The bus moved toward Matanzas along a two-lane road that ran not far from the coast. Her seatmate, a Madrid schoolteacher visiting for the first time, sat at the window, gawking at the tin-roofed houses, the beautiful children in the road, and the bright colors of laundry drying on lines. The world was a Spanish-speaking world now—it had been for the past twenty–four hours, and was not so different from the world she had grown up in, ninety miles to the north—and the woman kept saying, “Increíble! Increíble!” Carolina didn’t ask her what was incredible—the gorgeous shoreline blinking blue and green beyond the houses; the palm trees leaning as gracefully as dancers, their fronds glistening in the sun; or the poverty, so obvious, even as the government guide went on with her propaganda into a microphone a few feet in front of them: “Y el gobierno de Fidel Castro suministra . . .” Fidel’s renowned health care for all, and a guarantee of education and employment, and the sustainable farming programs to which even the norteamericano students had turned their attention. The sanitation initiatives that had reduced infant mortality; the elimination of prostitution; the medical research sector and its new drugs. All true, of course, at least in part. But the price of these improvements was never mentioned.

  In just under an hour they made a left onto a long access road—their guide also failed to mention that it was guarded by soldiers to keep ordinary Cubans from approaching the foreigners, or making use of their clean stretch of beach. They bounced along the dirt road past the tall thin palms and the banana plants, and, after a mile and a half, pulled up beside the glass and red stucco of the Oriente.

  They checked in as a group and were given an hour to rest and wash up. Carolina had, of course, been instructed to pay extra for a single room, so she rode up in the clanking elevator, used her key in the shiny wooden door, closed and locked it behind her, and tried to get rid of the nervousness by staying busy. She immediately unpacked her things. The two lipstick tubes—dark red was death—stayed in her toiletries bag on the edge of the bathroom sink.

  The morning would be devoted to a tour, a visit to the Museo de la Revolución, lunch, and then some promised beach time in the afternoon. At night they would be free. She would dance, meet a man named Ulises at the hotel club, make the transfer in any way she saw fit. Everything would be over then, from her end. Almost everything. The nervousness had retreated to a small film of sweat on her palms, and a low, steady vibration in her abdomen. She thought of Volkes and his supernatural calm. She thought of the assignments she’d had over the past eight years: never a problem she hadn’t been able to solve. She thought of her parents and her uncle and the rest of the Cuban community in Miami. She would be a heroine there, if they ever learned the truth. It occurred to her, briefly, that all of this—her work at the CIA, at the Orchid—all of it could be traced to a certain kind of wound all Cuban women knew about. It was nice to be distinct from men; she liked that. She liked the fact that outside the Versailles Restaurant in Miami on Sunday mornings, the men stood off to one side, smoking and waving their hands, while the women and children formed a warm circle of laughter and care. But from the time she was nine or ten, she had not liked being told she could not do certain things because they were not the kind of things good Cuban girls tried. Could all of her adult decisions be traced back to that?

  The telephone rang—its strange elongated tone sounding like a memory from childhood—but when she lifted it to her ear the line was dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Carlos could not eat breakfast, could not even bring himself to make a cup of coffee. The empty apartment reminded him of the months after his wife had died, and he realized that, had his beloved Tete been alive, there would have been no thought of doing this, no thought of risking their life together even for a cause as important as this one. Maybe Elena had sensed that, and taken it as an insult. Maybe she’d left for other reasons, less personal, worse.

  He went down the three flights of stairs and out into the morning sunlight, trying to remember how he walked and stood and greeted the neighbors on ordinary days. Jose was late, which never happened on ordinary days, never, not ever, not once. Carlos waited on the sidewalk in the stink of diesel exhaust, in the noise of the morning traffic, in the rising heat. He looked once at his watch—9:07.

  At twenty past nine he saw the black Volga turn onto his street, and when Jose pulled up beside him at the curb he glanced into the back seat, half expecting to see Olochon. “Sorry, Boss,” Jose said cheerily when they were moving. “A detour in front of the Montefiore. Colonel Olochon is no longer allowing motorized vehicles to pass on any of the four sides of the building. And since the building is in the heart of the city, this is causing us trouble.”

  “Olochon is safe, then. We can be thankful for that.”

  “Safe, safe. ¡Gracias a la Revolución! The word in unofficial circles is that his good friend, Ministro de la Salud Carlos Gutierrez, pushed him out of the bullet’s path. Fidel is said to be pleased.”

  “I’m scheduled to give him a physical today, just before lunch. Fidel, I mean.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re not supposed to know.”

  “I know that, too.”

  They rode along in silence for a few blocks. Carlos felt like a man walking in complete darkness, waving his arms around to find something familiar to hold on to. He tried to puzzle out the facts. If Jose knew about the timing of Castro’s physical—a state secret—then there was someone else very close to the dictator who was also in on this. But who was that close? A bodyguard? Raul? He looked over at Jose but could not bring himself to ask.

  “It is still the same?” Carlos asked, at a particularly noisy intersection. “Eleven o’clock tomorrow at Elena’s clinic?”

&nbs
p; Jose gave a nod without looking at him. “It’s going to be done with ointment. You put some on and wipe it off. Put more on and leave it.”

  Carlos could barely concentrate. “She went away,” he said. “Elena.”

  “To where?”

  “To her son in Matanzas. She left a note. Told me not to call.”

  “You told her, then.”

  “Sí, as I told you.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No one.”

  “Did you mention Rincon’s name to her?”

  “No. She left out of hurt, Jose, not because she disagrees with what I am doing. She would no more betray me or you or Rincon than she’d betray her son or daughter.”

  “Claro,” the driver said, but he sounded unconvinced. The assassin himself, their main player, had told at least two people he should not have told. Carlos watched his friend’s face for a moment, then looked away. At the gates of the Ministry, he met Jose’s eyes and saw a sliver of doubt there. He could not think of anything to say, any message for Rincon, any good reason why Jose knew Castro’s schedule, or why he had worried about Rincon’s name being mentioned. Was Rincon more important than the assassin? Weren’t they all in equal jeopardy if Elena turned out to be more loyal to the Revolution than to him? He squeezed Jose’s shoulder, as he always did, said, “We leave for the appointment we cannot mention at a quarter to noon,” and stepped out into the light.

  During the morning hours the phone did not ring. In all his years of sitting behind this desk, in this sunlit office, Carlos could not remember that happening more than half a dozen times. He wondered if all calls were now somehow being routed through Olochon’s office, through D-7. Véronique seemed distracted; he wondered if someone from D-7 had spoken to her, if she’d been told to watch him carefully. Twice he called her in to be sure there had been no messages. He thought of making another trip to one of the places where Cuba touched the outside world, conducting another inspection, but he could not bring himself to go out again, to face the sunlit city so soon. He tried to steady himself by reading through reports from the various clinics, inspectors, and directors of enterprises that had any connection with the nation’s health, but it all seemed like so much froth to him now, bubbles upon bubbles, lies upon lies, piles of ridiculous folders on his desk with one truth running beneath them.