Killing Castro

by Lawrence Block

  “You will divide now,” Hiraldo was saying. “Two and two and one. You—Turner—will go with Hines. Fenton, you will go with Garth. You, Garrison, will—”

  “Hold on, Hiraldo.”

  “Mr. Garrison?”

  Garrison took a breath, let it out in a long sigh. Fenton watched him, saw the assurance of the man, the lazy strength. “If you want somebody to follow your stage directions,” he said, “find another boy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know damn well what I mean,” Garrison said. “If I play this game, I play it my way. I don’t follow somebody else’s plan. We—the five of us—do the shooting, the killing, the dirty work. We’ll write our own script.”

  “And you think I wish to plan this assassination? This removal of a tyrant?”

  “I don’t know what you wish,” Garrison told him. “I don’t care what you want. All I know is what I want, and that is to go to Cuba, get Castro, then come back here and pick up twenty grand. That’s all. And I want to do it my way.”

  Hiraldo seemed partially amused, partly irritated. Fenton watched the play of emotions over his face.

  “Let me explain my position,” the short Cuban said.

  “I’m listening,” Garrison told him.

  Hiraldo said: “Believe me, I have no intention of … uh … drawing the plans for the assassination. I am not an assassin.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Hiraldo ignored the interruption. “As you may know,” he said, “it will be somewhat difficult for you five to enter Cuba. You cannot go in a body. You cannot take a boat or fly in a commercial plane. You cannot—”

  “We can’t walk on water,” Garrison snapped. “Get to the point.”

  Hiraldo’s tone was icy. “I am planning a landing,” he said. “A landing of five men. Two, and two, and one.”

  “Go on.”

  “Turner and Hines will go to a house in Miami. They will be expected. They will be escorted to a boat, a fast private ship which will put them ashore on the northern coast of Cuba. They will be met by sympathizers and introduced into the city of Havana.”

  Garrison said nothing.

  “Fenton and Garth will go to another house,” Hiraldo continued. “A house here in Tampa, in Ybor City. They will soon be taken to a private airstrip off the Tamiami Trail. A plane will be waiting there. It will take them to Oriente Province, to the hills where rebels, at this very moment, are fighting the butcher who—”

  “Skip the speeches, Hiraldo.”

  The Cuban sighed. “They will meet these freedom fighters who will help them in any way they can. And you, Mr. Garrison—”

  “—will get to Cuba under my own power,” the man said. “And I’ll do as I damn please, and will play it whatever way I want. I don’t need your boats or your planes or your sympathizers or your freedom fighters. I don’t want a goddamned soul to know where I am or what I’m doing. You got that straight, Hiraldo?”

  “I have it straight.”

  “Fine,” Ray Garrison said. “I’m glad we understand each other. I’m going to Cuba. When your boy Castro is dead, I’ll be back. Have the money waiting for me.” He stood up, his big body uncoiling easily. For the first time he seemed to be aware of Fenton, of Turner, Hines and Garth. “You boys take it easy,” he said. “Don’t let this spic hand you a hard time. I’ll see you all in Cuba.”

  And Fenton watched Ray Garrison walk out of the room.

  After that it was simpler, quieter, easier. After that, Fenton could sit at ease, smoke one cigarette after the other and think his own thoughts while Hiraldo talked of trivia. He, Fenton, was supposed to go with Garth, to live in a house in Ybor City and take a plane to the Oriente hills. And from there, somehow, they were supposed to kill Castro. It seemed improbable, at best. But he would see what happened. He lit a cigarette from a butt, ground the butt under his heel. Hiraldo talked too much, as Garrison had said. Hiraldo dealt in words, not deeds, and wordy men were what Fenton was trying to escape.

  So little time …

  He remembered the beginning. The beginning of awareness, at any rate, if not the beginning of it all. How could you pin down beginnings?

  Maybe the beginning was long ago. Maybe it all started with birth, many years ago, in Lynbrook. A nice town, Lynbrook. Quiet, peaceful and typically New England. He had been born there and he had lived there, had gone to school, then moved on to the bank. His life was a mirror of the town—quiet, peaceful and typically New England. No wife, because there had never been a woman with whom he’d fallen in love. No mistress; a bank teller in a tiny town cannot afford an affair. Just the job, a few friends, a glass of beer and a book in the evenings, a cup of coffee and the morning paper at dawn. Was that the beginning?

  No, he thought. That was the foundation, perhaps. The groundwork. That prepared him, made him a man ready to wait a few more years for retirement, a man who had saved money painstakingly for those years of leisure, the good years, the lazy, self-indulging years a man like himself looked forward to.

  Then it began.

  It had begun with a pain—a small pain in the chest that came often enough to send him to his doctor. Maybe a heart condition, maybe he would have to start taking it easier.

  But it turned out to be something worse—something frightening, inevitable and inexorable. It was a little six-letter word which translated itself into a smaller, colder five-letter word.

  The six-letter word was cancer.

  The five-letter word was death.

  Carcinoma of the lung—lung cancer. How much time, Doctor? More than a month and less than a year. You can have an operation, you can have radium treatments, you can have X-rays. Yes, and we can apply leeches, we can let blood, we can give you hot baths and cold baths and dose you with vitamins and fill you full of antibiotics. And whatever we do, Earl Fenton, in more than a month and less than a year we will bury you. You will be dead and we will place you into a hole and fill that hole with earth.

  More than a month, less than a year.

  So very little time …

  The very thin Cuban with the pencil-line mustache drove Turner and Hines from Tampa to Miami. It was neither a short nor a long drive. The car was a last year’s Cadillac and the thin Cuban drove it as though driver and car were component parts of a single mechanism. The Cuban did not stop once, not for gas, not for coffee, not to pass water. He stopped at last in front of a concrete-block-and-stucco house in what seemed to be a suburb of Miami. Hines wasn’t sure where they were. He had never been to Miami before, had in fact never been south of Baltimore before. He got out of the car along with the Cuban and Turner.

  The Cuban led them to the door. False dawn was streaking the sky. Hines looked at the watch on his wrist, saw that it was almost five in the morning. They had been up the whole night, then. When was the last time he’d been up that long? At school, of course. At Cornell, cramming for exams, working like a Turk for finals.

  It seemed like a million years ago. Christ, he was a college kid, he was supposed to be at school studying for tests and going to proms and laying coeds in the back seats of cars and otherwise engaging in the hysterical procedure of getting an education. He was a kid, a punk, a wet-behind-the-ears kid all of nineteen years old, a scared little kid with nothing on the ball, and now he was supposed to go into a foreign country and kill a man named Fidel Castro.

  Who the hell was he? A college kid. A kid whose father had sold insurance and whose mother lived on it now, an upstate-New-York-appleknocker kind of kid, a kid who’d never had a gun in his hand in his life. Kids in Utica didn’t play with guns. The town was a cultural backwater; teenage gangs weren’t the rage, and you could grow up slowly and leisurely, accepting middle-class values because that was simply the way things were, hoping to grow up and marry a girl right off the Saturday Evening Post’s prettiest cover, raise a few children and make a comfortable living.

  So Utica was bad training ground for an assassin.

  And so was Cor
nell, for God’s sake. Jesus, Castro was some damned kind of a folding bed, not a man you were going to kill.

  When you stopped to think about it, it was kind of nuts.

  Nuts, ridiculous, crazy, wet-brained. It didn’t make any sense at all. There were four others, and one of them was a brainless hunk of muscle and another was a rugged outdoor type and another was a little old guy who reminded Hines of his father who had died several years ago of coronary thrombosis and who had peddled insurance in Utica. And the fourth one, this Turner character next to him, the strong silent type who was made out of wrought iron. A hell of an odd bunch, a crazy bunch, and the bunch was made much crazier by the addition of one, James Hines.

  Nuts.

  The Cuban had unlocked the door, had given them the key, had left them. Turner was in the kitchen making coffee. Hines sat down in the living room. He couldn’t sit still, had to get up and pace the floor. He went on pacing until Turner came back with two mugs of coffee.

  “It’s instant,” Turner said. “And I couldn’t find milk or sugar. Black all right with you?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Then take a cup and drink it. And sit down, for God’s sake. You make me nervous.”

  He took the coffee, sat down, sipped it and burned his mouth. Turner was drinking the coffee as if it were room temperature.

  “How can you drink it so hot?”

  “I was a trucker for a while,” Turner said. “Long-distance hauling. When you stop on the road you want to get coffee down fast. You can’t wait for it to cool. It’s something you get used to.”

  Hines nodded. Well, you ask and you find out. He waited for his coffee to cool a little, then sipped it.

  Turner lit a cigarette. He stood up, sat down.

  Turner said: “Drink more coffee, wait an hour. Then get the hell out of here and catch the first plane north.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re a kid,” Turner snapped. “A young idealistic kid in the wrong boat. You can get out while you’ve got a chance and go home to Mom and Dad.”

  “Dad’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The hell you’re sorry,” Hines said. “Forget it. You were saying something and you might as well finish it.”

  The tone surprised both of them. Then Turner said: “You don’t know what it’s all about. You think this Castro is a dictator, so we’ll be heroes and kill him. You’re the only hero in the crowd, kid. I’m not here to play hero. I want twenty grand. I need twenty grand. I killed a man and a woman and if I stay in this country they’ll hang me for it. They’ll take me to Charleston and hang me.”

  Hines thought, This man is a murderer. He’s telling me all this. I’m supposed to be shocked or something. But he wasn’t shocked. He thought only that now he knew Turner’s reason, now he knew why Turner was in on the deal. It was an answer and nothing more.

  “And Garth,” Turner said. “The one with muscles instead of brains. You think he’s a goddamn freedom fighter?”

  “I think he’s a slob.”

  “Yeah,” Turner said. “A slob. You tell him to hit and he hits. No brain, no ideals, nothing. A slob. How about Garrison?”

  “He’s a bounty hunter.”

  Turner was nodding emphatically, smoke from his cigarette trailing out between his thin lips. “You got it,” he said. “A bounty hunter. There’s a price on Castro and he wants to collect it. It’s a business with him. He’d kill anybody, anywhere, any time, for the right price. He’d kill you for twenty grand—or me. Or his mother.”

  “And Fenton?”

  “Skip him,” Turner said. “I didn’t figure him yet. Let’s go on. How about Hiraldo?”

  “He’s a hired hand,” Hines said. “You noticed Hiraldo. You didn’t notice the old guy, did you?”

  “I noticed him.”

  Hines said: “You know who he is?” Turner shook his head. “His name is Juan Carboa,” Hines said. “He’s a businessman. He has a cute business. He finances revolutions.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s been around for years,” Hines said, ready to talk now, surer of himself. “There was a man in Cuba named Machado. Carboa collected money, armed a sergeant named Batista. Batista threw out Machado.”

  “You learn all this in school?”

  “Just listen to me,” Hines said. “I’m proving something. About idealists.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Then Carboa raised more money,” Hines said. “Later, years later, he financed somebody named Castro, a law student with a beard—Fidel Castro. And Castro threw out Batista. Now Juan Carboa is financing somebody who’s going to throw out Castro. Each time he does this, one hell of a lot of money winds up in Juan Carboa’s hands. He’s making a living out of revolutions.”

  Turner made no comment.

  “I know a lot,” Hines said. “About idealism.”

  “So what’s your angle?”

  Hines shrugged. Maybe you could talk too much, he thought. Maybe there was a point at which you should shut up. Maybe when you opened your wounds you were just asking somebody to pour salt in them.

  “Come on,” Turner said. “Everybody’s got an angle. What’s yours?”

  “I’m not an idealist,” Hines said.

  “No?”

  “No. I had a brother, Turner. An older brother, six years older than I am. He was an idealist, Turner.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just shut up and listen. He was an idealist, a great guy. I loved the bastard. You got that? He taught me things, spent a lot of time with me. It was the older brother-younger brother bit and I loved him for it. So Castro went up against Batista and Joe—my brother—went to the hills to help out. He didn’t come in on the tail end. He was there almost from the beginning, before half the people in this country ever heard of Castro. He was there. He fought and he starved and he was there when they won. You got that?”

  Turner looked at him.

  “So this brother of mine was there, and they won when everybody expected them to lose. They were just a band of kids with beards fighting a professional army and, damn it, they won. And Castro was on top.”

  Turner lit another cigarette. Hines stopped for a minute. This was the hard part, this was where it got tough to keep going. But he had to get it out, it was important now and he had to tell Turner. Somehow, it was important that Turner be told.

  “This Castro,” he said, “he got on an anti-American kick. And there was Joe, an American, an idealist. He was on Castro’s side, but he was still an American.” He paused for breath and then went on. “Castro called it revolutionary justice. He said Joe Hines betrayed the revolution and had to get his. With revolutionary justice you don’t need a trial. All you need is a firing squad. They took my brother, put him in front of a firing squad and shot him deader than hell. So I’m going to Cuba, Turner, and I’m going to kill this son-of-a-bitch, Castro, and if that’s idealism you can shove it straight up your ass.”

  Neither of them said anything for a while. Then Turner got up, took the coffee cups, carried them to the kitchen. Hines sat in his chair and looked at his hands. They were not trembling. I’m steady as a goddamn rock, he thought. No shakes or nothing. Just steady. Gibraltar.

  Turner came back, handed him a cup of coffee. They drank in silence. When they set down empty cups Turner offered him a cigarette. He shook his head and Turner lit one for himself.

  “What I said before,” Turner apologized, “about you grabbing a plane and going home. Just forget I said it, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “How old are you, Hines?”

  “Nineteen. Why?”

  “No reason. You ever have a woman?”

  Hines looked at his hands. He took a deep breath.

  “Well? Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be ashamed of it, for Christ’s sake. Look, it’s late, we’re both tired. There are bedrooms in the back. We’ll sack out for eight hou
rs, then send out for some food and some liquor. You drink?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good,” Turner said. “We’ll get some food and we’ll get some liquor, and I’ll call somebody on the phone and get a couple of girls. We’ll eat the food and we’ll drink the liquor and we’ll lay the girls. Then we’ll go to Cuba and get our asses shot off. That sound okay to you?”

  “Sure,” Hines said.

  “Fine,” Turner said. “Now let’s get some sleep.”

  TWO

  Fidel Castro was born on the thirteenth of August in 1926. His father was a Spaniard, a Galician who settled in Oriente Province and became rich from sugar and lumber. Fidel grew up on his father’s farm at Biran, in the municipality of Mayari on the north coast of Oriente, near Nipe Bay. He ran barefoot in his father’s fields, hauled lumber with a tractor. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic and went to church schools in Santiago.

  Fidel Castro was seven years old when Batista took over the island. Fulgencio Batista, a tough-minded sergeant in the Cuban Army, managed to rally the armed forces around him and grab power in the turmoil surrounding the revolt which ousted Machado. The young Fidel Castro grew to maturity in Batista’s Cuba, an island where personal liberty was ground out beneath the iron heel of dictatorship.

  He attended the Christian Brothers’ Colegio La Salle, then transferred to complete his grade school education at the Jesuit Colegio Dolores. He played a bugle in the school band and wore his first uniform, a navy-blue outfit with a white Sam Browne belt.

  In 1942, while the rest of the world abandoned itself to the early years of the second world war, Fidel was sent to high school in Havana at the Colegio Belen. It was there that his talents for leadership came to the foreground. He was outstanding in his studies and in athletics as well, pitching for the baseball team, playing basketball, running for the track squad. By the time he graduated in June of 1945, he had made his choice of a vocation. He was going to become a lawyer.

  The University of Havana, where Fidel Castro enrolled in the fall of that year, was a fundamentally different sort of place from North American universities. Latin American colleges have, throughout history, played a predominant role in the politics of their nations. Revolutions and uprisings are fomented there, radical thought is encouraged. Panty raids and homecoming rallies are unknown in Latin American colleges. Latin American students have weightier concerns to occupy their time.