Killing Castro

by Lawrence Block

  The explosion drowned the scream and Jiminez died in pieces.

  The government soldiers pushed on. Fenton let his finger freeze on the Sten gun trigger, let it keep spitting lead at the soldiers. Men died from his bullets faster than he could count them. But there were too many of them, more than he could kill.

  He saw a scene on his left, saw two of the soldiers with Manuel. Manuel, who was going to kill Castro and rule in his place. Manuel, who would be the fearless leader of the people, the force around which the enemies of Castro could rally.

  Manuel, whose ambitions were drowned now.

  They had Manuel. His weapon was on the ground, useless. And Manuel, hero, leader of the people, looked at death and saw its face. Manuel screamed like an injured child and tears streaked his brown face. He screamed and the soldiers laughed at him.

  There were two of them. One held a gun to Manuel’s temple while the other castrated Manuel with a bolo knife. Manuel passed out, fell to the ground. Then the soldier with the pistol shot him through the forehead.

  Fenton cut them both down with his Sten gun.

  The battle went on, halfway to forever. It was twilight, and then it was dark, and at some indeterminable time the Jeep engines roared and the Castristas left their dead behind. Fenton was still in his clump of shrubbery, still safe, still alive. No bullets had touched him. He could not believe this at first but it seemed to be true. The battle was over and he, miraculously, was alive.

  He remained in position for several minutes, until the last enemy vehicle was out of sight. Then he moved from the clump of brush and looked at the carnage. Over thirty government soldiers lay dead, some in the road, others in the fields. Garth was dead, Manuel dead and mutilated, Jiminez dead, Taco dead—

  Maria was alive. He found her, moaning, in a thicket not far from him. She had been wounded twice. There was a bullet in her abdomen; another bullet had shattered her left leg. She moaned and cursed in Spanish.

  He put a splint on her leg. He dug out the bullets from her body, bandaged her wounds. He lit the campfire again and made some soup for her but she refused to eat. He tended her, trying to make her comfortable.

  She died around midnight. He sat alone by the fire, smoking a cigarette he had taken from one of the corpses. He was alone, the last remnant. He—the doomed man, the man who had to die. He was alive.

  It seemed unfair.

  It was late when he fell asleep. In the morning he awoke when the sun struck his eyes. He got to his feet, made himself a quick breakfast, and left the area.

  The last survivor. Now he had to go on, to kill and kill and kill. The cancer was a strong pain over his heart—it would not let him live long, and soon he could stop killing and fighting and running. Soon the cancer would kill him, or the Castristas would kill him. From one side or another, death would come.

  When it did, it would be a release.

  TEN

  No man in history ever had an easier time taking power than did Fidel Castro when Batista fled the country leaving him the keys to the kingdom. Castro had, from the beginning, the one ingredient Batista never attained in all his years of despotism. He had the people behind him.

  There were dissident elements. The political henchmen who had grown fat under Batista did not welcome the bearded rebel, certainly. And the very rich—the large landowners, the growers of tobacco and sugar—knew that Castro’s regime would mean a financial loss to them. But the people of Cuba, the lawyers and the doctors and the shopkeepers and the students and the workers and the peasants, backed the revolution all the way. Castro was their leader and they were his people.

  It is not easy to become hated by people who love you. It is not a simple matter to switch positions entirely, so that those who supported you once now seek to destroy you. Castro did not do this all at once. He did not even manage it entirely.

  American support went first. The United States was quick to distrust Castro—and with good reason. His several reforms too soon became just another form of oppression. True, some peasants did get land, some efforts were made in the direction of combating the problem of poverty. But with those reforms came oppressions and seizures of people and property that equaled Batista’s earlier brutalities.

  Fidel could have changed American popular opinion, but the years in the hills had not made a subtle compromiser out of him. Charging forward like an enraged, clumsy bull might work in guerrilla warfare, but he tried to apply that method to international diplomacy.

  The United States was used as the excuse and cause for every failing in Cuba, the germ responsible for every last one of the island’s ills. Castro shouted that Batista’s men had held power at the wheels of American tanks, firing American guns and dropping bombs from American planes. He brought truths, half-truths and lies together in such a way that Cuban popular opinion quickly turned anti-American. But the price of this was the friendship of the United States, which he lost.

  The United States cut the Cuban sugar quota, a fairly drastic move which could have wrecked the Cuban economy. Castro traded with Russia. The confiscated American refineries were used to process Soviet oil, and the Russians bought the Cuban sugar—at a drastically reduced price. Castro ordered the staff of the American Embassy in Havana cut to one-tenth, overnight, and the inevitable result was a break in diplomatic relations between the two nations.

  In Fidel Castro’s mind, all of this was desirable, all of it justified. He was moving toward paranoia, the most common personality disorder of the dictator, in which treacherous enemies are seen around every corner. Castro had defined his enemies within his own mind. The United States was persecuting him and he would stand fast against this enemy.

  He moved on, further and further from reality, leaving former supporters behind along the way. The middle classes grew disillusioned first. Hard and fast supporters of Castro in the beginning, the educated professionals were quick to realize that the man they had backed in the fight against Batista was simply a tyrant of a different sort. These Cubans wanted freedom, but they did not want radical economic changes leading to a socialistic economy, nor did they want to see Cuba take her place at Russia’s side.

  Cuba’s middle class was small. The economic order that Batista had fostered had little place for the bourgeoisie—there were rich men and there were poor men, with few in the middle. But the Cuban middle class had raised money for Castro, had helped him when he most needed help. Now they were running out on him.

  They went to Miami, to Tampa. They went by boat or by plane, with legal visas or as secret refugees. And Castro rationalized their desertion by moving further to the left. The bourgeoisie had no place in a true socialistic order, he argued. Cuba was better without them.

  Other revolutionaries followed in their footsteps. Men who had fought at Castro’s side, men who had been willing to give their lives in the fight against Batista, now saw they had made no great bargain. Some of them were hopeless idealists, men who would be content with nothing less than perfection, men who would rebel against any established order. But still more of them were honest men who could not live with their conscience while Castro was at the helm.

  Some of these, too, went to Miami and Tampa and New York. Some gave up on Cuba, divorcing themselves entirely from Cuban politics and applying for citizenship in the United States. But others refused to give up. They raised funds for a second revolution, trained secret armies in Florida and in Guatemala just as Castro had trained his band of eighty-two rebels in the fields of Mexico.

  Members of Castro’s government deserted him. Newspapers printed articles and editorials of which he disapproved, and he retaliated by suppressing those newspapers and silencing their editors. Batista had done this, branding the editors as Communist party hacks. Castro did the same thing, calling the editors the lackeys of American imperialism. The catch-words were changed but the facts remained the same. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech were on the way out. Despotism was there to stay.

  And the resistance
began.

  It was an intelligent resistance, a keen-edged resistance. The men who were sick of Castro had learned from Castro. They knew how guerrilla warfare worked. They understood the junction of a metropolitan underground. They knew just what to do and how to do it in order to bring about the end of a man named Fidel Castro.

  Once again, men with guns stole into the hills of Oriente Province, shooting Castro’s soldiers from ambush, burning cane fields and spreading discontent. Once again men touched off bombs at night in Havana. The people had not yet risen against Castro. A great many Cubans still supported him. His aura was still visible to some eyes, and his halo, though fading rapidly, was still discernible to the diehards.

  But the process had begun.

  There was an invasion. It was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, and it was also supported by former Batistianos—but Castro crushed this invasion. The precise details may never be known, but the invasion was a masterpiece of poor planning on the part of the invaders and the American government. The propaganda value for Castro was immense. For months he had been shouting about an American-sponsored invasion, and now it had happened.

  But the tall bearded man had not learned. He offered to trade prisoners for tractors, a move that showed a total disregard for human life. He lost the propaganda he had gained and more. Latin American supporters deserted him. Bit by bit he was cutting off friends and adding enemies.

  The end was close.

  ELEVEN

  Garrison went to the airline office on Saturday afternoon. He was wearing the cord suit, a lightweight white shirt, a narrow tie with a quiet foulard pattern. He stopped to light a cigarette, taking a quick look at the three open ticket counters, studying the clerks on duty. One was a girl, young and attractive. A second was a man about twenty-three, bright-eyed and alert, looking proud of his uniform. Garrison went to the third, a fortyish Cuban with a soiled shirt front. The man looked easiest to bribe.

  “I want two tickets on a Miami plane tomorrow night,” he said. “Got a pair open?”

  The clerk checked his book, admitted that a pair of seats to Miami did in fact exist for a flight leaving Havana Airport at 7:15.

  “That’s fine,” Garrison said. He pushed his forged identification paper to the clerk. The man scanned the white slip and nodded approval.

  “For two tickets,” the clerk said, “you must have two papers.”

  “I only have mine,” Garrison said. “My friend is not with me at the moment.”

  The clerk sighed. “It is a rule,” he said.

  “A rule which could not be eased?”

  The clerk thought it over. Garrison reached for his wallet, managed to open it and extract several bills without making a show of it. He could have bought another forged paper from the old forger on La Avenida Blanco, but he had guessed that it would be simpler and cheaper to bribe the airlines clerk. He put two American twenties on the counter, thought for a moment, then added another twenty to the pile.

  The bills vanished. The clerk produced the pair of tickets and sold them to Garrison. Garrison paid with Cuban bills, pocketed his change.

  “You must be at the airport by seven,” the clerk said.

  “Fine,” Garrison said. “There won’t be any problem at the airport?”

  “Not if you have tickets.”

  Garrison nodded. He turned and left the airline office, caught a taxi to the Nacional. He stopped at the bar for a drink and nursed it for half an hour. It was a daiquiri, crisp and cool. He sipped his drink and patted the pocket that held his airplane tickets. There might be additional trouble at the airport, of course, but another twenty dollars or so would cure the trouble.

  It was all a matter of timing, he thought. Planning and timing, that was the whole thing. The guy who said you couldn’t have your cake and eat it was a man who didn’t work things out carefully enough. If you timed things right, there was no reason in the world why you couldn’t do both.

  He ordered another drink, sat over it for ten minutes more, then wandered into the Nacional casino. He won thirty dollars at roulette, lost ten at the crap table, put five more into the slots. He left the casino fifteen dollars to the good, went to the hotel restaurant and spent most of his winnings on a steak dinner. The steak wasn’t quite as rare are he liked it but it was good meat and his appetite was excellent.

  He smoked a cigar with his coffee. The waiter brought him an English newspaper and he read the latest story on the attempt on Castro’s life, the ambush that misfired in Oriente. Castro’s limousine had sped to safety in Santiago, leaving the rebels and a detachment of government regulars to battle it out along the roadside. Garrison scanned the story quickly. Nothing much was new—the Communists were claiming the assassination attempt was an American plot, calling attention to the American who had been killed with the rebel forces. There was no identification of the corpse, but the description seemed to fit Matt Garth.

  Garrison finished his coffee, folded the newspaper. So they’d tried once, he thought. And they had failed. Well, it figured. He’d been half-hoping one of the other clowns would make things easy for him by shooting Castro and saving him the trouble. Wishful thinking. He had to do it himself, and it had been a waste of money to hire the other four men in the first place. He would kill Castro, and he would wind up with the money and with Estrella, and that would be that.

  He paid his check and left a tip. He went outside, walked along the street and around the block, finishing his cigar and tossing the butt into the gutter. On the way back to the hotel he passed the plaza, saw the steps of the Palace of Justice where Castro would speak. They had erected stands where some spectators would be able to sit, had barricades to prevent a mob from starting a riot that might endanger Castro’s life.

  Garrison laughed softly. They hadn’t done anything about the windows in the Hotel Nacional. And his window was in the perfect spot. All the barricades in the world wouldn’t stop his rifle bullet.

  “Garth is dead,” Turner said.

  Hines looked at him. “How do you know?”

  “I heard the radio. It’s all over the country, for Christ’s sake. You’d be better off if you could speak the language.”

  “Well, what—?”

  “Rebel ambush in the east,” Turner said curtly. “It flopped. Castro got through and the ambush force was wiped out. The next day they found a dead American in the middle of things.”

  “It was Garth?”

  “They didn’t give his name,” Turner said. “But the description fits him. The older fellow—Fenton—was with him, the way I remember it. Fenton must have gotten away.”

  Hines didn’t say anything. Turner let his cigarette fall from his lips to the basement floor. He stepped on it, his hands busy with the casing of the bomb. This was his role. He was preparing the bomb, getting it ready for Hines. Then he would leave, would fade into the city and make a home for himself there. He was out the twenty grand now. If the ambush had worked he would have collected it, but now it didn’t matter; even if Hines was successful, he himself was out of the picture. He was a Cuban citizen and that was that.

  He sighed, put the bomb down. “Garth is dead,” he repeated. “Do you want to die, Jim?”

  “Damnit—”

  “Because you will,” he went on. “Win, lose, or draw, you’ll never get out of Cuba alive. You probably won’t get Castro in the first place. The bomb won’t go off.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “No. I did my best with it and it should explode on impact. But I don’t know a hell of a lot about bombs. It might turn out to be a dud.”

  “And it might set off an earthquake in Chile. Don’t tell me everything that might happen, Turner. It doesn’t scare me.”

  Turner shook out another cigarette and lit it. “All right,” he said. “Suppose you luck out and the bomb goes off. Suppose you heave it in the right place and you get Castro. Then what?”

  “I give up. What?”

 
“Then they tear you to pieces, you damned fool. You won’t get out of the crowd. They’ll eat you alive.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “And if you get away, you still won’t make it out of the country. You think the Luchar babe will lift a finger for you? She doesn’t give a damn if you live or die. She’s a fanatic and fanatics only care about their cause. She wants you to kill Castro. She doesn’t give a flying damn what happens to you after that.”

  Hines didn’t say anything.

  “Do you want to die, Jim?”

  “Go to hell, Turner.”

  “Jim—”

  Hines was next to him now. Hines reached out a hand, took the cigarette from Turner’s lips, dropped it and squashed it. “I ought to belt you,” Hines said. “I ought to slug you in the mouth.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You chickened out,” Hines went on. “Fine. That’s your business and not mine. But I made a hell of a mistake about you, Turner. I really did. Remember that first night. I had you pegged as a guy with guts. I thought, hell, here’s a guy who’s been around, who knows things. I thought you were a real man.”

  “I changed a lot.”

  “No kidding. You—”

  “I learned how to relax. I stopped being hunted. It makes a difference, Jim.”

  “You chickened out.”

  Turner didn’t say anything. He hadn’t expected to convince Hines but it didn’t hurt to try. And he hadn’t expected to change Hines’ mind about going through with the bombing, but again it hadn’t hurt him to try. If Hines tossed the bomb he was going to get killed. And Turner didn’t want to see that happen. He liked the kid.

  Hines said: “I’m not chickening out. You can’t scare me, damnit. You give me a load of crap about the chance of getting away. You think I don’t know that? You think I haven’t been over it a hundred times in my mind? I figure I have one chance in ten of getting away from the plaza. God knows what kind of chance I have of getting out of Cuba; I haven’t even bothered thinking about that part of it yet. I can’t let myself think any further than killing Castro. I can’t afford to. Whatever happens afterward will happen, and that’s all. But don’t try to scare me. It won’t work.”