Killing Castro

by Lawrence Block

  Turner didn’t say anything for a minute or two. He lit another cigarette, smoked in silence.

  Then he said: “I didn’t mean to get on your back, Jim.”

  “I know.”

  “I was trying to make it easier. Not harder.”

  “I know that.” Hines turned away. “You want to make me save myself. I understand. And I’m sorry I called you chicken. That’s a pretty silly word, isn’t it? I don’t know anything about courage, Turner. About bravery, heroism, all that jazz. Sometimes I get the feeling that there’s no such thing as a brave man. A guy does what he has to do and no more. You’ve got an out now. You can stay in Cuba and enjoy yourself. Without that out you’d be braver than hell. If you’ve got a guy cornered then he’s brave. I guess that’s the way it works.”

  “Maybe, Jim.”

  Hines studied the floor, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “You want to know something? I’m not even sure any more if I’m getting back at … at Castro because of Joe. Joe was always my big hero, you know, and I had this image of the little brother evening things up for the big brother. That part of it doesn’t fit any more.”

  Turner said nothing.

  “So I don’t know why I want to kill Castro. Maybe because he ruined my hero for me, maybe some cockeyed reason like that. I don’t know. It’s just something I have to do.”

  “Sure.”

  “Turner? That bomb’ll go off, won’t it?”

  “It ought to.”

  “You said something about it turning out to be a dud. Was that just crap?”

  “Probably. It should work. But don’t stand around waiting for it, Jim. Throw it and get the hell out.”

  “I will.”

  Turner stood awkwardly for a moment. Then he clapped a hand on Hines’ shoulder. “Luck,” he said. “I hope you make it.”

  “Thanks.”

  He turned quickly, took the stairs two at a time.

  Señora Luchar was alone in the living room. She asked him if he wanted coffee.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I thought I’d go for a walk.”

  “Just a walk?”

  “A long walk,” he said. “I’ll be staying at a hotel tonight. I’ll meet Hines at the plaza tomorrow. It’s safer that way.”

  Her eyes regarded him coolly. “Sit down,” she said. “Have a cup of coffee before you go.”

  He had coffee with her. She talked about trivial matters until he had finished the coffee. He watched her, listened to her. Jim was right, he decided. She was like Madame Defarge in the book. She should be knitting a shawl.

  “Castro will die tomorrow,” she said.

  “I hope so.”

  “He had better,” she said.

  Her tone accused him of everything from original sin to the crucifixion of Christ. He pretended not to notice the implication in her words, stood up, thanked her for the coffee, left. The old man was still rocking on the porch. Turner smiled at him and kept walking.

  He checked into a residential hotel. His citizenship papers were in his wallet and he looked at them in the privacy of his hotel room, smiling quietly to himself. Then he went out to meet Ernesto. He walked easily, arms swinging freely at his sides. He was a free man now. He was safe. Tomorrow Hines would live or die, and tomorrow Fidel Castro would live or die, but neither of these lives or deaths were any of his concern any longer. He had done what he could do.

  Now he had his own life to live.

  Garrison was alone until a few minutes after ten. This evening, however, was different from all the other evenings he had spent alone. Other nights he had relaxed, listening to music, taking things easy. Tonight he was tense. He paced the floor, walked back and forth until he thought he was going to wear out the carpet or walk the heels off his shoes. He went again and again to the window to look out across to the steps of the Palace of Justice.

  It was the night before the job.

  But that was no reason to be tense. He had always been the icy one, the man who could eat a heavy meal, go out and commit murder for a fee, then go home and have another big meal and sleep soundly for ten straight hours. The perfect emotionless, steel-nerved killer. The pro, with a good professional attitude and solid, perpetual calmness.

  And now he was tense. Tense, nervous, edgy. Somebody down the hall slammed a window shut and he nearly jumped off the edge of the bed. Tense, nervous, edgy. Three or four times he opened the dresser drawer and took out the bottle of light rum, but each time he put it away. Solitary drinking was bad any time, especially bad the night before a job. And he didn’t need a drink that badly.

  When Estrella came at thirteen minutes after ten he drew her inside, closed and bolted the door, found two clean water tumblers in the bathroom and filled them each a third of the way with light rum. They touched glasses and drank the liquor. Her eyes questioned him but he only smiled back at her.

  They drank the rum, drained their glasses, put them down. Garrison reached for the girl and she came into his arms quickly and eagerly, her mouth raised for his kiss, her hard breasts thrusting into his chest. He held her close, kissed her. Her tongue darted out, plunged into his mouth. Her arms were tight around him, holding him.

  He undressed her, undressed himself. She stretched out on the bed and he lay beside her, fondling her breasts, kissing her, telling her now that he loved her. He was surprised by the way the words felt to him. They felt true; more, he had to say them.

  Preliminaries were over quickly. The need was too great now; he couldn’t wait to have her, couldn’t kiss and stroke, couldn’t help throwing himself upon her and stabbing into her, needing the warmth of her embrace, needing the way her passion rose to meet his own.

  It was fundamentally different this time. Far more intense, although that seemed impossible to Garrison. And this time, far more necessary, far more essential. He needed the girl in his arms, needed her with him, near him.

  It was the need that assured him that he was playing things correctly. Need was something new. All along, from the early years in Birch Fork through the war years to the present, Ray Garrison had never needed anyone. He was always his own man, always a lone man in an alien world. Now …

  He could not leave her in Cuba.

  Afterward, while she lay stretched out on the bed in the warm afterglow of love, he walked to his dresser, took the wallet from one of the top drawers.

  “What you doing, ’arper?”

  He took out the two airplane tickets and passed them to her.

  “To Miami?” she asked, her voice uncertain, tremulous.

  “That’s right,” he said. “To Miami. We’re leaving tomorrow night. You have to be at the airport by seven. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Mañana noche. At the airport, at seven o’clock. Can you remember that?”

  “I remember,” she said. Her eyes were bright, happy. “I love you, ’arper.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You’ve got to go now, honey. Put your clothes on and go back to wherever the hell you live. And don’t come here tomorrow. Go straight to the airport. Be there on time. Hell, get there early so there’s no chance of a foul-up. I’ll meet you.”

  “Okay. I love you, ’arper.”

  “Then why the hell are you crying?”

  “Because I am ’appy.”

  He sat next to her, kissed the tears from her eyes.

  He held her, patted her. Her eyes adored him.

  “You better get going,” he said.

  “Don’ you wan’ me to stay tonight?”

  “Not tonight,” he said.

  She pouted.

  “We’ll have plenty of nights,” he told her. “We’ll go to America. We’ll have the rest of our lives, Estrella. I have to be alone tonight, and tomorrow. I’ll meet you at the airport.”

  She was a woman who knew better than to argue. She kissed him, got dressed, kissed him again, took the tickets and left. By the time she was out the door he wanted to
go after her, to tell her he had changed his mind and that he wanted her to stay. He took another quick jolt of rum instead and walked once more to the window. The shade was drawn. He raised it and squinted out through the darkness.

  Less than twenty hours. He would have to shoot Castro by six. Then the gun would go back into the mattress, and then he’d hurry downstairs and take a taxi to the airport. Estrella would be there. The plane would take them to Miami, where they would pick up the money from Hiraldo. It would be twenty-five grand at least, since Garth’s share would get re-distributed. Maybe more—maybe thirty-three, if Garth’s partner caught a bullet of his own.

  That meant no more jobs, no more of the gun-for-hire routine. With that much capital, plus the several grand he had in banks around the country, he could open some kind of business, could buy himself a soft touch that would let him retire from the trigger-pulling racket.

  He tried to go to sleep but it didn’t work out. He wasn’t relaxed enough to sleep; the job loomed in front of him, worrying him, and his eyes stayed open. He gave up, switched the light on and got a cigarette going.

  He wished the job was over and done with. It scared him, this one, and it was the first job to have such an effect upon him. He’d pulled plenty of tougher ones, had filled contracts for the syndicate that made this particular hit child’s play in comparison. But this was the one that had him on edge.

  He knew why.

  On the other jobs, before Estrella, he had been on his own, rootless, empty. Now he had something to lose.

  Saturday night Earl Fenton stormed the garrison at San Luis.

  He did this alone, because he was alone now. He had been living for two days in the hills; living alone, traveling alone, sleeping alone. He had been living with cancer inside him, living with the sure foreknowledge of death and with the memory of the death of others. The memory of carnage, of Maria shooting Garth in the head, of Manuel screaming before they castrated him, of Jiminez blown to pieces by a grenade, of Maria growing weaker and weaker until she died in his arms.

  He moved in silence through the hills. His Sten gun stayed always in his hands, and over his shoulder he carried a musette bag with extra clips for the gun and what food he had been able to salvage from the camp. The pain of the cancer was bad now. The disease was spreading like wildfire through his whole body, and there were times when he would cough uncontrollably while arrows of pain shot through his flesh.

  Saturday, around midnight, he made his attack. San Luis was a small town a few miles to the north of Santiago. There was a detachment of soldiers stationed there. Fenton attacked them.

  He killed the sentry with a knife. He crept up behind the man on silent feet, plunging the knife he had taken from a corpse into the throat of the sentry who was to become a corpse in his turn. The man died in silence and Fenton stole into one of the barracks.

  He sprayed the interior with the Sten gun. He killed fourteen men before a single one of them was entirely awake. Most of them died in their sleep. The rest opened their eyes momentarily and closed them forever.

  The gunfire brought soldiers from the other barracks. Fenton put a fresh clip in his Sten gun and readied himself for the charge. He threw himself under a bunk bed, sent out a burst of fire to greet the soldiers who charged into the area. Another group tried to enter through a window and he shot them dead.

  They used tear gas. He ran after the first shell and threw it out at them, but the second one went off and filled the small wooden building with thick, eye-burning smoke. He knew better than to try to hold out against it. He broke open the Sten gun and fitted it with a full clip, his last. He left the musette bag behind and raced outside, his finger on the Sten gun’s trigger.

  He did not stop shooting. He was surrounded and bullets came at him from all angles, but Fenton stubbornly refused to go down. He fired a full clip at the soldiers before he slumped and died.

  The soldiers searched the barracks. They couldn’t believe that this one little man had been the only invader, but there was no one else around, no one but their own dead soldiers.

  Someone took the trouble to count the bullets in Fenton. There were sixty-three of them. Machine gun slugs had almost torn him in half.

  And, strangest of all, what was left of his face seemed to be smiling.

  Hines awoke early Sunday morning. The room was dark because sunlight never reached the basement. He switched on a light and glanced at his watch. It was not yet seven. He tried catching another hour’s sleep but found it impossible. He got out of bed, washed, dressed.

  At eight o’clock Señora Luchar brought him breakfast—oatmeal, fresh fruits, biscuits and coffee. She left him and he tried to eat. The food stuck in his throat. He could not possibly have been less hungry.

  When she came down for the tray she saw that he had eaten nothing. “There is something wrong with the food?” she said. “You cannot eat it?”

  “The food’s fine. I’m not hungry.”

  “You are nervous?”

  He said nothing because he did not know how to answer her. He was not nervous, not exactly. He wasn’t sure how to describe the feelings he had. He looked at his watch. The time was crawling.

  “You should eat. Today will be an important day. Murder is hard work and work is difficult on an empty stomach.”

  Hard work? All he had to do was toss a bomb in the air. But her words somehow intimidated him. He picked up his fork and ate some of his food. Then he drank the coffee.

  “An important day,” she went on. “And you are doing something for Cuba as well as for your brother, Hines. That, too, is important.”

  She left him, sparing him the need to answer her. Between then and noon he went four times to the work bench, and four times he picked up the bomb and hefted it in his hand. It was cylindrical, roughly the size and shape of a can of beer, although of course much heavier. Each time he replaced the bomb on the bench and went back to his bunk.

  He no longer thought of giving it all up, of running to the Swiss consulate and asking for asylum. He was committed now, and he did not even think of backing down. At noon he left the house. It was not time yet—Castro’s speech was scheduled to start at five, the hour of bull fights. Hines remembered the García Lorca poem, the one in which every other line was a las cinco de la tarde, at five in the afternoon. A chilling, sobering poem about a bullfighter gored to death in the ring—

  But he couldn’t stay around the house. He waved a hand at the Luchar woman, nodded at the old man rocking stonily on the porch. He headed for the Plaza of the Revolution where Castro would speak. Already people were gathering. He would have to arrive early to get a good position.

  But how early? He found a Cuban man who spoke English, told him he wanted to see Castro speak, asked him how soon he would have to be there to get a good spot in the crowd.

  The man looked at him. “You are a Yankee?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is good, then,” the Cuban said. “More Yankees should hear Fidel speak. There would be less trouble if you Yankees listened to our Fidel.”

  The man told him three o’clock would be time enough. Hines thanked him and left the square. He walked to a small lunch counter next door to the Hotel Nacional and had a cup of coffee. On an impulse he bought a pack of cigarettes and tried to smoke one. He choked on it and put it out, leaving the pack on the counter.

  He went back to the house, went downstairs to the basement. Señora Luchar brought him a fresh pot of coffee and a bottle of whiskey to spike it with. He mixed whiskey and coffee half and half and drank a great quantity of it. The whiskey did not seem to have any effect on him. He did not get at all high. But the whiskey did counteract the coffee, which made him sweaty and irritable when he had too much of it.

  At two-thirty he put on a loose jacket and tucked the bomb into one pocket of it. He said goodbye to Señora Luchar and left the house. She told him she wished him good luck and he thanked her. The old man on the porch said buena suerte and Hines smiled at hi
m.

  He walked to the Plaza de la Revolution, acutely aware of the way the bomb bulged his pocket and waiting every minute for someone to notice, to tap him on the shoulder, to place him under arrest. No one bothered him. He made his way to the square where a thick crowd was already forming. He inched forward in the crowd, securing a perfect vantage point not at all far from the steps of the palace.

  He was sweating. He was not sure whether it was the coffee, the crowd or the heat that made him perspire, or whether his fear was causing it. But somehow he was not really afraid. Fear ceased to have anything to do with it any more, just as logic had flown the coop not long ago. It was three o’clock. Castro would begin his speech in two hours. And the steps where he would stand were just a stone’s throw away.

  A stone’s throw. Or a bomb’s throw.

  Turner sat in a café on La Calle de Trabajadores. His hotel room had no television set and he wanted to see Castro’s speech. He drank bottled beer and watched the screen of the café’s set.

  At four-thirty a movie ended and the channel began coverage of the speech. Castro was not yet due to arrive for an hour, but the television cameras began by panning the crowd while the announcer killed time by reading news bulletins in rapid Spanish.

  Today, Turner thought. Today, while I sit here drinking this beer in this café. Today.

  Maybe he was making a mistake. Maybe he should be with Hines. Maybe the kid was right to call him chicken. Maybe he was copping out, turning yellow.

  But what good could he do? One man could throw a bomb as well as two. One man could blow up a dictator as well as two. And one man could surely die as well as two.

  To hell with it. He had his own life to live. And if Jim Hines had his own death to die, well, that was his own damned business. And not Turner’s.

  He sipped his beer and watched the screen.

  At a quarter to five Garrison locked and bolted his door. He took out a small penknife and slashed his mattress open again, pulling the high-powered rifle free. His window shade was drawn. Garrison broke down the gun, cleaned it, loaded it with a single bullet. When you are paid high prices for murder, you do not need more than one bullet. Not with an expensive rifle fitted with a scope sight and zeroed in on a stationary target. One bullet was plenty.