by Gil Hogg
“So senors. I show you your rooms. Very, how you say, very leetle? Not much. OK for a short stay. I bring you food and drink.”
The house was, as Pedro said, plain. It was just about devoid of furniture. Pedro lived in a caretaker’s apartment in the basement. The reception and dining rooms were empty, bare boards with fade marks on the wallpaper where pictures had hung. Another room contained a kitchen table and half a dozen plastic chairs. The bedrooms had only single beds with bare mattresses and a small dresser. All the floors and walls were bare.
“Lavish,” Yarham said.
I didn’t like the place either, but we made the best of it. Pedro brought chilli beans and rice with enchiladas and salad to the kitchen table. We had a couple of bottles of wine, and played checkers provided by Pedro until the early hours. We did not talk about the job until we retired to the bathroom, and sat on the edge of the bath with the taps full on.
I said I had little doubt that MI6, under the leadership of Amory, was fully supportive of me. Neville was either a bored operative who had gone to sleep in a comfortable post, or he was working with the CIA on his own initiative.
“Hasn’t got anything much right, has he, sir? No usable guns, only a couple of flickknives.”
The problem with intelligence work,” I said, “is that you began to question the bona fides of everybody around you. Maybe we’re a bit paranoid about Neville. Let’s assume, for the moment, that he’s an idiot, a Brit who’s gone native, screwed himself up on whisky and sun and cheap jiniteras.”
“A bold assumption, Captain, if I may say so.”
I began to wonder how long it would be before Carmelli ran us down. After I had switched out the bare overhead bulb in my bedroom that night, I spent time at the window, looking out on to the ill-lit street, listening to the occasional dog, starting at shadows, wondering if Yarham was right about Neville, and realising that we had not even started our urgent mission.
17
In the morning, I went with Yarham to a cheap men’s outfitter recommended by Pedro and we purchased more relaxed clothes, slacks, loafers, T-shirts and light jackets, sunglasses and baseball caps. I consigned the remnants of my Mexican car-dealer outfit to the garbage with pleasure. Then I called the number I had been given for our Cuban contact, mentioned the number of my call box to the answerphone at the other end, and waited. An hour later there was a ring. A woman’s voice.
“Wolf calling.”
With very little hesitation, she answered, “Go to the fountain in the Heroes of the Revolution Park. Carry a bunch of flowers. In two hours.”
I purchased a small bunch of flowers at the gate of the park, and sat nursing it on the edge of the fountain at the appointed time. I sent Yarham off to circle the area and see if he could spot anybody who might be interested in me.
It was an exquisite day, warm but not blistering, with a clear, duck-egg blue sky. A few people were resting or strolling near the fountain which sent a cooling mist into the air. The colours of the grass and flowers and trees seemed unnaturally bright. Three children tried to sell me a candy bar in a crumpled wrapper, which I purchased after we had all laughed a lot. Then a dirty and garishly dressed beggar approached me. He held out his tin and I put a few pesos in. He looked at this, frowned and rattled it in my face for more. I eventually gave him more, and he wandered off, spitting discontent through the stumps of his teeth.
A girl had taken a seat on the wall a few feet away while I had been occupied. She turned in my direction. She was pale and quite pretty.
I smiled and put my hand on my chest. “Wolf.”
“Wolf?” she said quietly, inclining her head. “Those are pretty flowers you have, what are they called?
I held up the red blossoms of hibiscus. “The yellow roses of Texas,” I said.
“Follow me,” she said.
I walked a few yards behind her. She was wearing a thin knee-length dress which was smart and expensive. She had a tooled leather handbag over her shoulder, and the way she stuck her chest out suggested complete confidence. She left the path after a hundred yards, and began to walk up the slight slope into the trees, tiptoeing so that the thin heels of her white slingback shoes didn’t sink into the turf. I caught up with her in the seclusion of the wood. When she turned to me, I could see she wasn’t as young as I had imagined. She was a tall, well proportioned woman in her late twenties.
I presented the flowers to her with a slight bow, and she took them gracefully.
“How can I help? And will you please take your cap and dark glasses off so I can see you?”
This was more my idea of what my role ought to be, assignations with beautiful spies in a garden. I did as she had requested, and I fancied she was pleased with the result. She studied me for a few moments and then nodded her head. “You’re very fair, aren’t you?”
“And you, senora, are both dark-haired, and very fair.”
This puzzled her, but she said nothing. She waited on me. “I want to know about the terrorist missiles,” I said.
She hesitated, thought for a moment, and then gave a small smile. “It’s expensive.”
“How much?”
“Half a million dollars in cash.”
She had named the price as though it was absolute.
“I don’t have that much on me.”
“But you can get it – the richest nation in the world.”
“How do I know the information will be good?”
“You don’t. You have to take the risk.”
“It seems very risky.”
“Not if the security of your country is at stake.”
She had a point. “OK, I’ll get it. Shall we go and have a drink?”
“No. You must wait here until I’ve gone. Get in touch when you have the money.”
“Wait. What kind of information can you give me? The position of the sites, the state of readiness. Where supplies are deployed. How many warheads there are in the country. Where they’re located. How many people are involved. Who they are. Where they live. These are the things I need to know.”
“Sure. I’ll get everything I can.”
“How long after I call you?”
“A few hours maybe. I know it’s urgent.”
“OK. What shall I call you?” I asked, but I didn’t think she’d offer a name.
“Dolores,” she said, and as she brushed past me I could smell her faint perfume in contrast to the rank smell of the vegetation around us. I noticed that her left hand was loaded with a wedding band and two sparkling diamond rings.
I waited for a couple of minutes as she had asked, and when I came out of the trees she had gone. But Yarham would have watched our contact, and I had instructed him to follow her. I waited for Yarham in the park, fending off beggars, children, and jiniteros and occasionally discussing with various vendors the varieties of dope, booze and people that were for sale. I also composed, in my head, my satphone message to C3 calling for the money. Half a million dollars was nothing when I thought of the crisis, and C3 would readily see it that way. Yarham returned in about an hour and a half, quite pleased with himself.
“I followed her in a cab. I told the cab driver she was my wife and she was screwing around. He wouldn’t let her out of sight. You’d have thought she was his wife. She went to a very plush condo in the Flores area. Seventeenth floor.”
“Can we find out who owns or leases the seventeenth floor?”
“I already have. There are three big apartments, three names.”
“A Dolores amongst them?” I didn’t for a moment think she would have given me her real name, but one asks the obvious.
“Carlos and Dolores Martinez.”
“Well done, Yarham. I wonder what Dolores does. She sounds bossy, like some kind of manager, an accountant perhaps.”
“One of them has a law firm, Herrera & Martinez. It’s on the name-plate.”
As there would be a delay in getting the money, we agreed that Yarham would follow Dolores for t
he next few days and find out as much about her as he could. I would visit the ex-missile sites and see if there were any signs of activity, or any other clues that might lead me to the terrorists; which actually meant I would idle about on bus journeys or stay in the house and read a book.
Yarham, with his fiery hair hidden beneath a baseball cap, dark glasses and a dense black walrus moustache, had some further success in tracking Dolores Martinez. She might have been a lawyer or perhaps a clerk in her husband’s office. Yarham found out where her office was, where she went for lunch when she was alone, where she shopped at lunchtime, and he followed her on an afternoon visit to another apartment in the Siboney district. After sharing a bottle of aguardiente with the concierge, he learned that these visits were regular, one afternoon a week. The apartment was occupied by Alfredo Arias, a senior figure in government – Yarham concluded this from the fact that Senor Arias was driven to his work at the ministry each day by a chaffeur.
“Is she a lover, a messenger, what?” I asked Yarham.
“Senor Arias is always at home when she calls. The concierge reckons he’s an expert with women, and if he’s ever seen a lady going to meet her lover, she is the one.”
I felt a pang of envy of the bureaucrat Arias. Dolores was an interesting creature. I requested information about Arias on the satphone – my messages were encrypted and sent in a microsecond burst, almost undetectable, except perhaps by the latest Russian equipment. The answer, similarly dispatched, confirmed Arias’s high governmental rank, and said he was regarded as a possibly friendly independent.
I was becoming bored with my fruitless journeys to find old missile sites. And a little tired of Yarham’s tongue-in-cheek questions about my success. I decided upon a slightly different tactic. I waited in the lobby of Dolores’s building until she came out for lunch. The first day, she had a meeting with a woman. The second day she was alone and I followed her, determined to speak. She went into a fish bar – not a place I would have chosen to dine in myself. I slipped into the seat next to her. The customers sat on high stools randomly next to each other, and the fishy delicacies were visible beneath the glass counter. The odour was very strong, the décor rough and the prices cheap, but the place seemed clean and efficient.
I removed my cap and shades. “Hullo Dolores.”
She looked at me, crestfallen. “You’ve been following me.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that. I had business in the building, and when I came out of the elevator I saw you. I admit I followed you in here, but I do want my lunch. By the way, my name is Dan Garcia.”
I could see that her better judgment was telling her that the chances of a casual meeting were remote, and that she should leave immediately, but she turned, eyed me slowly, sighed, and said, “All right. Let’s lunch.”
I ordered glasses of cold white wine and we picked at the quite tasty plates of raw white fish and prawns in vinegar, while she told me of her education in the USA and Spain, and her husband’s busy corporate law practice, her husband, and her childless marriage.
The best way to sell a second-hand Porsche to an older man or woman is to ask about their children. I was selling myself rather than a Porsche on this occasion, but the same principle applied. People delight in titillating their own egos by talking about themselves, and they see their children as reflections of themselves which they like to dilate upon, either to commend or complain about. Dolores had no children but she did have a story of a neat, orderly, middle-class life.
I couldn’t understand why she was involved in spying, but that wasn’t a question to table. For my part, because one has to trade intimacies, I admitted I was English, American by adoption, an exporter and importer of cars based in Mexico City, doing a one-off task out of loyalty to my country. We parted warmly after three quarters of an hour, and I knew I had penetrated her skin. Perhaps we had told each other a pack of lies about ourselves, but there was a warmth there, a connection.
Four days following the request to Washington for funds, I arrived at the safe house after another frustrating day of touring a site. When Pedro admitted me he said, “Your friend is here.” I was mystified for a moment. Then I walked into our spartan dining room to find Yarham, and sitting across the table from him, on which there was a small suitcase, the bulky figure of Kershaw, his face cracked in one of his mirthless grins. I tried not to show my disappointment.
“I broughtcha the lolly. The whole three-quarters of a million.”
I had thought it prudent to apply the Kershaw technique, and request a sum to cover ‘additional expenses’. “Good. That was a quick delivery. But surely you didn’t bring that through customs?”
“I picked it up in town from the Bank of Chile by special arrangement.”
“I could have done that.”
“Gerry didn’t want you to be troubled. He wants me to work with you.”
“I don’t have a job for you,” I said, silently cursing Gerry Clark, who had managed to get his way. Clark didn’t trust me, but I couldn’t expect that he would, spook to spook.
“Then I’ll find one for myself,” Kershaw snorted.
But, despite my annoyance, it occurred to me that Kershaw was like a Rottweiler who could be used against Carmelli and his goons if necessary. I retreated, told him our problems about being followed in a whisper. Kershaw relished the idea of tangling with Carmelli. Then I pointed to the ceiling which dried up the flow of talk.
Dolores and I met to discuss the exchange of money and information at a small and unfashionable restaurant in La Habana Vieja. We had a secluded table. My guess was that the designer-label Dolores did not mess with the dirty business of exchanging information, that she was really a middleman for somebody else, perhaps even Alfredo Arias.
When we were settled over iced Campari sodas, she said, “You bring the money, and I arrange for you to meet the man.”
“Who is he?”
“An important person in government.”
“Why is he doing this?”
“For the same reason you are. Patriotism.”
“Patriotism at a price?”
“He must fund the political movement which will save Cuba.”
“Is it Arias?”
She looked shocked. “It’s a man. What do you know about Arias?”
I gave an unconcerned gesture. “The people who asked me to do this are carrying on intelligence work all the time. Senor Arias is a respected figure.”
“Bring the money. The meeting place will be a hotel room. Tomorrow. I will not be there. The man will be. You have to trust us.”
We had hardly touched our salads. Dolores looked bright-eyed, excited. “Have some more wine,” I insisted, pouring from the bottle of white wine I had ordered.
We finished the bottle, talking idly, but not focusing too much on precisely what we were saying. We were in a cocoon together, apart from the other diners. I was conscious of the sensual proximity of our bodies, and it was more intoxicating than wine. Cuba is a place for love-making, relaxed, warm, and fleshy.
“Why don’t we continue this at my hotel?”
She gave a small sign of assent. There was no doubt about her attraction to me. How much of her feeling was counterfeit, spurred by lurking suspicion, and perhaps fear that I wasn’t what I seemed, I didn’t know or even care at that point. I had no hotel, but I soon remedied this when our cab arrived at the Hotel Santa Isabel in Plaza de Armas. It was stupid to head for such an opulent venue, but my thoughts were pelvicly inclined at that moment, and nothing but the best surroundings would suffice.
I pushed my Mexican passport, containing a credit card and a hundred-dollar bill, across to the reception clerk, and was rapidly allocated a superior room.
The clerk leaned across the desk toward me. “For you, senor, it’s no problem. But your Cuban friend…”
We both looked across the lobby to where Dolores was sitting, straight-backed and proud, on the edge of a chair, flicking the pages of a magazine, oblivious. Did she
really look like one of the jiniteros? I took another hundred-dollar note, slipped it into my passport, and handed it to the clerk. “She’s a Spanish lawyer.”
The clerk extracted and palmed the note expertly, moved his head, giving me the accolade for imagination. “As you say, Senor Garcia.” He slid the entry-card across the desk.
As soon as we crossed the threshold of the room, Dolores said, “This is lovely!” She unceremoniously dropped her bag on the carpet, kicked off her shoes, and walked to the window. She drew back the curtains to reveal the trees of the Plaza sleeping heavily in the heat. I stood close behind her, my botanical interests weakening. She turned, and wrapped her arms around me, fragrant and soft.
18
The room had a fine view of the tops of the lime trees, the basking buildings, and the deceptively gentle blue sky touching the distant sea. Dolores had pale skin which, with her ebony hair and eyes, suggested a cream veneer over mahogany blackness. She insisted she was a creole of pure Spanish descent, prized for her whiteness. It didn’t matter a cent to me one way or another, but her admiration of the whiteness of my body was touching and useful, although she had seen very little of it.
I suspected Dolores wasn’t a trained espionage agent but a go-between, acting perhaps out of patriotism or political loyalties or love. She could be objective and businesslike, but that was the façade of the lawyer which could possibly be pried away to reveal the yearning, sexually passionate woman underneath. She seemed to have little idea of the personal risk she was running. I liked her, and I was inclined to despise those who were using her.
Dolores disappeared for a moment to use the bathroom, and I plotted how to lure her from the floor to the bed, feeling that in a strange way, now that we were alone, she seemed more distant. On her return, Dolores opened the wardrobe doors and found an empty space. “You don’t stay here at all?”