The bodyguard nodded and left, closing the door tight behind him. For a moment, the colonel did not seem to know which of them to approach first. The man behind the desk had started to tremble now; she could see the sinews of his neck twitching. The colonel had one hand on her, just tracing the muscles of her right shoulder, where they were pulled back taut. “Let me speak with my friend here for a few moments,” he said to her, almost in the voice of a lover. “Let these muscles start to feel the fire, and then we will begin.”
He turned his back to her and took four steps over toward the desk. He said, “My good, good friend, the minister of health, how are you feeling on this glorious day? And who was kind enough to deliver you to me?” As he finished this sentence he leaned slightly toward his captive, as if getting ready to remove the gag, and at that instant the man behind the table somehow released his arms and swung them forward, and then there was a deafening sound, and the back of the colonel’s head exploded toward her in a spray of blood and bone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Volkes sat at a small table on the balcony of the Mandarin Restaurant, watching his comrade pace. They had requested privacy on the balcony, and his longtime partner and cofounder of the Orchid had walked the entire length of it and back probably twenty times. Volkes was nursing a martini. On the table beside his glass sat a cell phone, open so that he could see the screen. They had been waiting for it to ring for hours. “Calm yourself,” Volkes said kindly, in the direction of his pacing partner. “It’s going to be fine.”
“She’s my daughter,” his partner answered. He had been saying it all morning. “She is the same as my daughter.”
“We have people there who will help her.”
“She fled the hotel.”
“We know that. She’s probably on her way home by now.”
“Why haven’t we heard anything, then?”
“There are always minor problems. Eddie called, our Eddie. Six Spanish freighters, said to be carrying cotton but in fact loaded with relief aid, are steaming toward Cuban waters. Slowly. One signal from us and they speed up. There will be an escort of U.S. Navy destroyers close by, if such a thing is needed. There will be planes dropping food. All we need now is one sign. Give us a sign, Lord.”
“And the helicopter?”
“Hovering just beyond Cuban airspace.”
“Wait ten more minutes and send it in.”
“We can’t, Roberto. Not until we know.”
Anzar wrenched his wrist violently out from beneath the sleeve of a tailored shirt and stared at his watch. He paced to the far end of the balcony and leaned on the railing, looking across the Intracoastal at his buildings and the ones surrounding them. He appeared to be talking to himself. Volkes felt slightly sorry for him, but full of confidence, as always. At twenty minutes past two the phone sounded and he had it to his ear before the first ring was finished. “Yes,” he said coolly, aware of the set of eyes burning into him from the other end of the balcony. He listened for a moment, then said, “Don’t call again until you have found her” and hung up.
“The dose has been applied,” Volkes said to the other man on the balcony. “Your niece, our brave girl, is missing.”
“What about our boat?”
“Our boat never left the Port of Havana, for reasons we do not yet know.”
“Then she’s out there, alone, with every fucking D-7 animal searching for her.”
“I don’t think so,” Volkes said calmly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Carlos tossed the pistol away from him as if it was poisoned. It went skidding across the cement floor and knocked against the wall. Once the weapon was out of his fingers he found that he could not move. He could not take his eyes off the scene before him, a spurting stew of gristle and bone where Felix Olochon’s head had once been, the carotid arteries still pumping blood. He believed, now, that he had killed the devil. And become the devil. He no longer wanted to be alive.
“Get the key from his pocket,” the woman said. It was, he believed, the third or fourth or fifth time she had said it. He could not move. “The key. La llave. We must go.” Her Spanish was nearly perfect—it seemed to him an odd thing to notice, but he noticed it, watched one crimson rivulet trailing across the floor toward her feet. He saw then that her feet, half wrapped in tattered leaves, were blistered and cut, rubbed raw, and as if his professional self were rising up from a paralysis, that sight awakened him from his dream. He stood and wobbled two steps on rubbery legs. He leaned down, fished in the pocket of Olochon’s uniform, and pulled out the key. Blood was still pouring from the ruined vessels, but at a slower rate. Coins skittered across the floor when he tugged at the key, coins and some kind of tiny doll. He thought, at first, that it was a Santeria idol, but when he picked it up he saw that it had belonged to, or been intended for, a small child.
“Quickly,” the woman said. “¡Rápidamente!”
Carlos moved like an automaton, releasing first one wrist then the other. The woman did not even stop to rub them, but went for the pistol, lifted it, wiped it once against the peasant skirt, and pointed to the body on the floor. He saw that she was a beautiful woman. Cuban, Spanish, American, he could not be sure. One side of her face was swollen horribly, but you could see the beauty all the same, around her eyes, in the shape of her forehead and the cheek that had not been injured. “Take his pistol,” she said through broken lips.
Carlos shook his head.
“Take it. Let’s go.”
He shook his head again. Then, as if in a dream, he bent down and, without getting too much blood on his shoes and hands, managed to remove the pistol from Olochon’s holster. She urged him to take it, to go, but instead he put the pistol in Olochon’s hand and tried to turn the arm so that it seemed the Dentist had pointed the gun at himself. He did not know what had given him the idea to do this. Olochon was dead. To whom would it matter how he had died?
The beautiful woman in the billowing peasant dress opened the door cautiously and peered out. She smelled of sweat and piss and the dress was stained behind her. He peered out, too, beside her shoulder. The corridor was empty. Jose had told him to do something, but he could not remember what that something was. They went along the corridor, crouching against the wall, the woman in front of him, holding out the pistol, Carlos staggering along behind. They found the door to the stairwell and looked down. There were cries, but it seemed to him that they were muted, as if the souls here already knew that Olochon was dead, and just that fact had somehow begun to ease their torment. Soaked in guilt as he was, if he’d had the key, Carlos would have let them all go, all of them, politicals and real criminals alike, all of them.
At the bottom of the third flight of stairs the body of Olochon’s personal guard lay sprawled like a huge mannequin. Carlos glanced at it once then looked away, unable to ascertain how the man had been killed. The woman in the peasant dress opened the door carefully again and peered out. “There’s another corridor,” he said, as if she had not seen it. “Then there will be desks. Guards at the door. More guards beyond the door, at the top of the outside steps.”
She moved out into the corridor and he was close behind. After a few steps they could see the desks in the lobby, but not a single person sat there. Word of the attempted coup had arrived; anything could happen now, in Cuba, anything at all. The clerks and the country-boy soldiers had fled for their lives. Carlos and the woman stepped forward cautiously, staying close to one wall. Through another set of doors they could see the two guards on either side of the entrance, D-7 thugs standing in the sun, working here because they enjoyed it, reveled in it.
“We’ll never get out.” He and the woman stood there, close together, breathing in what seemed to him a very loud way. A shadow stirred and cried out in the cell not far behind them. Carlos cringed but did not turn around. As they crept slowly forward along the wall, he suddenly saw a military hat appear through the barred glass windows of the front door. The hat rose up in quick j
umps as its owner jogged up the steps. Another second, and the top half of General Rincon’s face came into view beneath the hat. Rincon marched forward across the wide exterior landing, just as if it were any other day, but as the guards saluted him, he shot them, one after another, through the forehead. Once, twice, without emotion, without doubt. Carlos saw the raised arm, heard the reports. Saw one of the guards fall sideways, watched as blood spattered on the barred windows as if thrown there from a bucket. He watched Rincon march straight on, through the doors. “He is a friend,” Carlos managed to say to the woman as she was aiming the pistol in her hand.
Rincon held the doors open with his body and motioned for them to come forward, quickly now. The woman pushed the gun down into the pocket of her absurd dress. Rincon’s hand was on Carlos’s shoulder. There was his car, there, at the curb, Jose at the wheel. Men in uniform were everywhere, but these must be Rincon’s men. Vaguely, as if through layer upon layer of dream, Carlos sensed some sort of swelling, a movement on the streets beyond the tall iron gates, people sweeping in one direction with an urgency that had nothing to do with the everyday.
Rincon sat in front, Carlos and the woman in back. The radio was on, a familiar voice speaking there. Jose caught his eyes in the mirror and there was apology in them. Apology, admiration . . .something else.
“Central Committee building,” Rincon ordered, and already it seemed to Carlos that the general’s manner had changed. Why weren’t they listening to the voice on the radio? Rincon reached his arm diagonally over the back of his seat and slapped the top of Carlos’s thigh, hard, and left his hand there, squeezing him. On the radio, Fidel was going on and on. Fulminating. Waving a fist—Carlos could almost see him. “Y los enemigos de la Revolución del Cuba, los enemigos de la humanidad son . . .” And so on. He had heard this nonsense all his life. So Fidel was still alive, ranting about the enemies of the Revolution. The cream had not worked. Why were Rincon and Jose grinning then, like schoolboys?
“Es una grabación,” the woman said. “It’s a recording. I know this speech. We heard it. We studied it.”
The men in the front seat nodded, but Carlos did not believe them.
And then, after another thirty seconds, abruptly, as if the radio had heard her, the voice of the Maximum Leader went silent. Nothing came out of the speakers, only static. Jose tried the other two channels, but the result was the same. He turned the radio down but left it on. He met Carlos’s eyes in the mirror and there Carlos saw a flicker of something new. Triumph, he thought it was. In a moment they had pulled up in front of the Central Committee building, or as close to the building as they could get. Already, people were milling about in a way unheard of during any normal day. As Jose pushed the nose of the Volga tentatively through the crowd, Carlos studied the faces near his window. Nothing was certain yet. Some of them would be outraged. Some of them would be celebrating, hoping. When they heard Fidel was actually gone, when they heard that Olochon was dead . . .
“What about Raul?”
It was the woman speaking. General Rincon turned around and faced her, brimming with confidence, bursting with it. “Raul Castro, unfortunately, has fled to parts unknown. But we will find him. My men have roadblocks on every road leading out of the city.” He turned to Carlos. “Do you know this woman?”
Carlos shook his head, though, in fact, he felt as though he knew the woman in ways that he had not known anyone in his life, not Teresa, not Elena, no one. And that she knew him in the same fashion.
“This,” Rincon said proudly, “is the woman who brought the lethal dose into our country.”
“Carolina,” she said, through swollen lips, looking at him, and then at the side of Jose’s face, and then into Carlos’s eyes. “Carolina Anzar Perez.”
“Carolina”—Rincon was still squeezing Carlos’s leg—“this gentleman here is our former minister of health, Carlos Gutierrez. Now head of the provisional government. This is the man to whom you ultimately delivered the dose.”
“There are troops everywhere,” Jose interrupted.
“Mine,” Rincon said. The confidence was spilling through the skin of his face. “Hand chosen. There will not be a problem. Get as close as you can, and then Carlos and I will walk in and make our radio address, our appeal for calm, our announcement that the great Fidel Castro died peacefully at his desk today at one P.M., and Felix Olochon, upon hearing the news, took his own life. There will be supplies at the port, and we will announce that, too. All political prisoners will be released within the hour. Take Carolina to the port, Jose. In a short while you will see a helicopter, unmarked, come to carry her home.” He turned now, looked her full in the face, and said, “From your uncle, Roberto Anzar. With love.”
Carlos glanced at the woman, but could not manage a word. He looked into the rearview mirror at Jose. At Rincon’s urging, he opened his door and stood up.
Blood on the cuffs of his sleeves, he was walking shoulder to shoulder with General Rincon toward the building that had once held Castro’s offices, maneuvering his way through the loose spontaneous gathering, feeling Cuba seething all around him. Provisional government. A speech. Announcements. Anzar. He kept his eyes forward, forward, and did not stop.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Once they had left the horrible building, once she recognized that the speech was an old one and understood that it meant Fidel was likely dead and she was safe, Carolina began to breathe again. The three men with her in the car were not going to hurt her. She breathed. She could feel the pain in her face and feet again. She could smell the sour odor of her soiled dress.
As the car moved forward, she began to try to work her way backward, piecing things together. The man to her left was still in a semi catatonic state. The man behind the wheel—he kept trying to meet her eyes in the mirror—was Jose Ulises. The man directly in front of her was the second-in-command of the Cuban Armed Forces, she knew that from his uniform and from his face. Rincon. Until the moment she had spoken her name she’d believed it was Rincon who had organized everything. And then Rincon had said something about the port, a helicopter, had said: “From your uncle, with love.”
And she understood. All of it had been a test, a vetting, a charade intended to expose her to the roots of her soul. Roberto Anzar, Volkes, and Eddie Lincoln had orchestrated everything, tricking her into tiptoeing along the edge of the crevasse and hoping she would not fall in. She understood now. The false trip to see her uncle, the false meeting with Oscar in church, Volkes’s lie that he knew who Roberto Anzar was but had never worked with him. It had all been an elaborate charade designed to assess her courage and loyalty while the plot—one of the plots—moved forward. Would she deceive her own uncle for the cause? Would she run away once she knew the organization had been infiltrated? Could she do what had to be done? The whole time she thought she had been deceiving the great Anzar, while he had been deceiving her.
Through the pain and the first sparks of exhilaration, a violent anger rose up in her. They had used her like a trained dog.
When the general stepped out of the car, she stepped out, too. He did not even notice. He and the other man, her fellow prisoner and apparently the former minister of health, Carlos, went pushing through the crowd, and the crowd, recognizing them perhaps, or just used to being shoved aside, was parting. She heard one or two brave people in the rear shout out a question: “What has happened? Tell us!” She could hear the anger and fear in some of the voices. But the two men moved forward, past the saluting guards, up the long set of steps, and into Cuba’s future, leaving, as such men always did, bodies and blood in their wake.
“Get in, Carolina,” Jose called, urgently now, she thought. He had leaned down across the front seat and was looking out the window at her. She realized how hideous she must look. She reached up and touched her swollen face. In the distance, she believed she heard the steady whump-whump of the helicopter that had been sent for her. All planned out so well. But instead of getting into the car, she t
urned and walked away, burying herself in the loose crowd, the Cuban woman’s stolen peasant dress billowing around her, the side of her face throbbing, one eye closed, a pistol and poison in her pocket. Each step sent shards of pain through the bones of her legs, and she understood that she would not get very far before Jose caught up with her, but she moved into the crowd anyway. There was a peculiar energy there, a peculiarly Cuban kind of nervousness or thrill running in their faces. Somewhere off to her right someone had started to sing in a crazy voice. There seemed to be pockets of anger, bursts of violence in the heavy air.
What a sight she must be: People gave her strange, frightened looks, as if she had just walked out of the Torture House, ghost of all the souls who had been taken there. As if, battered, used, tricked, and dressed in bright colors, she belonged to them absolutely.
“¡Se ha muerto! ¡Se ha muerto!” someone was shouting now. And she could feel the reaction of the people around her surging in her own blood. There were more people singing, a fight breaking out somewhere near the fence of the Central Committee building, many defending Castro, mourning, others in rejoice mode. She could feel it all. “¡Ha muerto Olochon!” someone else bellowed, and a great roar of joy rose up and traveled through the crowd like a wave.
When it subsided, she heard Jose calling her name again, behind her, but she struggled on another few steps, wanting her uncle to worry, wanting things not to go exactly as he had planned them, wanting to disappear into the heart of Cuba and make them all sweat in their northern luxury, worrying about her. She pushed on a few more steps, thinking: Always the same here, on this island. Always this hope and this music and this violence. Always the trickery from above laid over this hope, laid over this rich soil. May it end now, she thought. May the misery end.
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