by Gil Hogg
“No. I took the room for us, this afternoon. Because you are very beautiful.”
She sat on the end of the bed and pulled a small chrome-plated semi-automatic pistol out of her handbag. “And I came here to find out more about you – but I liked you.” She pointed the pistol at me.
“Is that a cigarette lighter?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Let’s go over the money exchange arrangements.” I was hopeful that she would put the gun away if she was at ease. And we might even use the bed.
“You come alone. You bring the money, you get the information. It’s as simple as that,” she said flatly.
Dolores might have been a woman whose tender feelings for a man could melt the trip-wires of her judgment, but I couldn’t budge her. “It’s a big risk,” I protested. “The information might be poor, or I might be robbed or suckered in a con game.”
“Sure it’s a big risk. Yours. Now let’s go.” She stood up and walked to the door, still holding the gun.
We parted from the Santa Isabel with a meeting fixed for twelve noon the next day at a hotel out of town to be named.
At the safe house, Kershaw was restive with inaction, and inquisitive. Gerry Clark had never told him what was in the VRK file. All he knew was that our break-in at Pennsylvania Avenue had touched off another skirmish in the war with the CIA. I had no intention of telling him what Yarham and I were doing. I told him I had reservations about our MI6 contact, Neville, and that he had to keep watch in the house for the moment to protect us from the CIA goons.
That night I walked with Yarham in the park and we were able to talk.
“Don’t you think it’s all gone very smoothly with our Cuban contact, sir?”
“You mean too smoothly? We meet. She’s beautiful. She leads us to the precise information we want. We pay. We catch a flight for Mexico City. Yes, it’s a dream too easy, isn’t it?”
“There might be a need to be prepared for action tomorrow when we hand over the money.”
Yarham was right. It seemed to me to be preposterous to walk into a stranger’s hotel room with half a million dollars in cash and hope you were going to get good value. Because it was sure that we weren’t going to walk out of there with the money if we were disappointed with the information. But we had to find a way to act on the proposal. I thought of sending somebody; that meant going to the meeting without the money as a testing operation. Yarham? I couldn’t ask him to do something I was hesitant to do myself. Well, I could, but I wasn’t going to on this occasion.
“I’ll send Kershaw. He can look after himself.”
“I can tail him, and provide back-up if necessary,” Yarham offered.
And so it was agreed. We returned to the house and brought Kershaw out into the street for a briefing. I told him it was a trial operation for a handover of the money and receipt of information. He was to assure himself as far as he could that the contact was genuine, to specify that we would choose the next meeting place and obtain a contact number. I explained that Yarham wouldn’t be far away. It sounded simple.
Kershaw’s small, white-cold eyes glinted in the dark as he absorbed the task. “What will you be doing?” he asked.
“I’ll be in bed at the safe house, sipping my rum and Coke and reading a book. Do you want this job, or do you want out?”
“I can do it,” he said offhandedly. “I need to know what the info you’re payin’ for is about.”
“No you don’t, and it’s better for you if you don’t,” I said, perpetuating ignorance once again with use of one of my masters’ hallowed phrases.
Kershaw was dispatched to an address in Santa Maria del Mar, a tourist hotel, received that morning from our contact number, with Yarham not far behind. Kershaw must have been observed carrying an empty suitcase for effect, and identified as a stranger, because when he arrived at room 412 of the Hotel Hermosa, it was locked and unoccupied. We were back where we began.
I arranged another meeting with Dolores Martinez. She was chilly, but agreed to meet at a room at the Santa Isabel. Dolores’ capacity for passion did not overcome her petulance, and she remained as stand-offish as before. We had an inquest into the failure of our mission. Dolores opened with an icy indictment.
“You let me down,” she said, turning her back on me, as though I was her lover.
“My friends wouldn’t let me do it, Dolores. They said, Send somebody to make better arrangements. So I did, and it didn’t work. OK. Let us try to do better.”
“I got a lot of heat because you didn’t show.”
“I’m sorry about that, but at least we meet again…”
“This could go on all year!” she said impatiently.
“I don’t mind. It would be a pleasure,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be on your country’s business. Can’t you be serious?”
“In return for the information I told you about, yes.”
“Where, then?”
I had given thought to this – and to the possibility that Dolores would offer to do the deal. It seemed to me that one place was as vulnerable as another, and I had decided to sacrifice the safe house. I wanted to get Dolores on to unknown ground where I had support. Yarham, Kershaw and I could leave the house immediately after the handover. I told Dolores I would give her the address of a house when she was ready to come.
“Why not here? Then we can make love,” she said, brushing her hand down my thigh in a gesture which seemed theatrical. She had to reach across the coffee table where we sat opposite each other.
“No.”
I wasn’t going to take the chance that she would send somebody into the hotel to whack me and collect the money. Her gesture was not loving, and half a million dollars was at stake.
Dolores was firm about the Santa Isabel, saying she couldn’t go alone to a strange place, but I was equally adamant.
“You know you can trust me, Dolores. I care for you. If you bring the information, you go away with the money. This can’t hurt you or your friends.”
“You could take the secret information from me and send me away without the money,” she protested. “Just like we could take your money and give you nothing. As I said when we met, the risk has to be yours.”
“I represent the US government, Dolores. We wouldn’t send you away without the money.We don’t do business that way.”
“Oh yes?”
I wasn’t going to defend the morality of the US government in the face of her cynical stare. “Look, a compromise. We’ll meet in a restaurant, do it in two instalments. I’ll tell you what I need to know at our first meeting for two hundred and fifty thousand. If that goes OK, we set up another meet in the same or a different restaurant, for the rest of the info and the balance of payment.”
“No way!” she said, firmly. “It has to be the whole amount… but a restaurant is OK.”
Despite a little discomposure, Dolores was still thinking clearly. The concession to meet in a restaurant went some way toward restoring my belief in the genuineness of the deal. Perhaps Dolores’s friends really were patriots working for a better Cuba, rather than conmen trying to fiddle the US government.
“Let’s do that, Dolores. The total sum in a restaurant. But I name the restaurant.”
“OK,” she said, still distant.
That night, in the park, I explained the plan to Yarham, and we took a long cab ride to inspect a number of restaurants. Later, we discussed the different layouts, from Las Ruinas on Parque Lenin, to La Torre on the top floor of the Edificio Focsa, a hundred and twenty five metres above the city. The high restaurant had the advantage that if thieves snatched the money, they wouldn’t be able to exit easily. Finally, however, we chose Los Dos Apostoles, a spacious, quiet, middle-class establishment in Vedado on Calle 16, approached through a short pedestrian shopping mall.
Yarham left a message at our contact number in the morning, and made a reservation at Los Dos Apostoles.
Having debated the merits of c
haining the case to my wrist, I loaded the cool half-million in hundred-dollar note packets into a backpack, and slung it over my shoulder. I was wearing a plain white T-shirt with a thin, cream linen jacket which concealed the bulge of the Colt in my waistband. I arrived in a cab at the entrance to the shopping mall at one pm, the appointed time. Yarham would be in the crowd watching, but I couldn’t see him.
I paid the driver generously with a ten dollar bill, and struggled out of the rusty old 1939 Ford cab on to the sidewalk, hitching the pack. I was tense, but I was eased by seeing Dolores Martinez about twenty feet away, watching in the reflection of the window of a jeweller’s shop. She looked at her own diamante wristwatch, squared her shoulders and began to move down the mall ahead of me, toward the restaurant.
I had the feeling that this was going to go well. There was a press of people around me. Suddenly a man stepped forward, a nondescript mulatto in a suit with an open shirt, and a sincere look of concern. “Excuse me, senor,” he said, pointing above my head. I was distracted for a second. I looked up to see if anything was going to fall on me. Then there were two men alongside me, containing me gently from either side. They could have been passers-by in a sudden crush. One said quietly, “You’ll be OK, senor.”
Too late I realised I was being held in a vice. I felt the tugging at my back. Another person was behind me, taking the weight of the pack. And then, as suddenly as the press of bodies had started, I was on my own, packless, with a fragment of the shoulder strap, which had been razored off, at my feet. I stopped while the crowd surged past. I spun around, saw Yarham’s undisguised jaw. He veered off in pursuit of the men.
I had been mugged like a greenhorn tourist in front of a hundred people, hardly one of whom gave me a glance, but hurried on down the mall. I was torn between pursuit of the men, or Dolores Martinez. I couldn’t have recognised any of the men. I felt very, very sick and angry. I blundered a few yards to the doors of Los Dos Apostoles, shoving people out of my way.
I pushed past the head waiter to survey the room. I scanned every chair and table. Just quiet people eating or preparing to eat, taking no interest in me. No Dolores. I walked into the woman’s lavatory. No Dolores – only a bouncer outside wanting to know what I was doing. Yarham, breathing heavily, appeared beside me.
“The maitre d’ says no woman like Martinez has come in here in the last few minutes. The thieves got the bag away on a motor scooter. No chance to get them. I didn’t even realise you’d been boxed in by the thieves until they broke away. It all looked so innocent. After they cut off your pack, Captain, they passed it back along the mall to other members of their team like seasoned rugby players. They just melted away. I’m fairly sure the pack went with a pillion passenger on the motor scooter.”
“How’s that for an MI6 operation, Yarham?”
“Leave it out of your memoirs, sir.”
19
I was not so concerned about losing half a million dollars of the US taxpayers’ money as I was about my complete misjudgment of Dolores Martinez. Her portrayal of the soft, conscience-bitten intermediary had been consummate, when she was actually a brass-necked thief. I couldn’t whine to Clark, Fernandez, Bolding & Co, you gave me the name of a thief. Dealing with crooks was part of my game. This one was on me. My cock had run away with my brains and our task was no further ahead.
I sat on the wall of the park with Yarham that night, and we shared a bottle of rum, laced with Coke. I was punishing myself. We had checked on the Martinez apartment and made enquiries at the legal office, only to learn that both Dolores and her husband had fled. The apartment was available for letting, and Carlos Martinez was taking a sabbatical from his practice in Acapulco.
It was impossible to keep the failure, and at least an outline of events, from Kershaw, who was ecstatic. He rocked with gales of hoarse laughter: “She made a cunt of both the big dicks!” Needless to say, I did not invite him to join Yarham and me on the wall of the park and share our bottle.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it, sir. We still have a quarter of a million petty cash.”
“I’d like to… ” I was going to say “wring Dolores’s neck,” but I had to admit she was an alluring woman, and her duplicity would have made her more interesting were the results not so personally embarrassing.
I took a grave line. “We’re not getting anywhere, Yarham.”
“True, Capain. Sadly true. I suppose we could check out the site positions you were given more carefully,” Yarham said, I think flippantly. He had never supported my idea since the santeria ceremony.
“Poking around in shitty tunnels, abandoned long ago? No, Yarham, we have only one worthwhile contact left in this place. Do you know who that is?”
“Could it be our colleagues in the CIA?”
“Regrettably.”
“Ah, yes. You mean we… what do we do?”
“We take the initiative with them, Yarham, find out what they know. Then at least we might make some progress.”
“When you think of it, Captain, the CIA have had since the last crisis in 1962 to find out about the possibility of a missile strike, and all that diddle about lost warheads. I daresay they have found out something. But how can we actually lay our hands on it?”
“I’m not too optimistic, but it’s our only chance. We target Carmelli tomorrow. Find out where he and his boys operate from, and…” my voice faded.
“And what, sir?”
“Mmmmm. We’ll work that out when we’ve found them.”
With these simple – crude – intentions, we retired to the house, dined on Pedro’s tasty brand of chilli beans, rice and tomatoes, and finished off the rum with Kershaw, enduring his wisecracks about the mugging. I promised Kershaw an active role tomorrow, although, other than a raid on the Excelsior Hotel, I had formulated no clear plan. Fortunately, he was used to taking orders, even when he didn’t like them, and it was only necessary to hush my lips to stop his questions. By eleven o’clock we three had settled a second bottle of rum. We were drunk, and ready for bed.
I slept dreamlessly until about two am by the illuminated digits of the bedroom clock. I woke up suddenly, with a headache from the rum, sensing somebody in the room. It wasn’t a dream when the light went on. A man was at the end of the bed, levelling a gun at me. He had a pyramidal head, a small shaven dome, broadening out into a wide jaw which sank into his wider neck. His thin mouth, turned down at the corners, was like the trap of an excavator. It was Carmelli.
“Geddup Mr FBI Smartass.”
Another, younger man, whom I recognised as the tranquiliser gunner at the Comodoro Hotel, swept into the room. He clipped me over the jaw with the butt of his automatic, pushed my head and shoulders down, and snapped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists from behind. The noises I could hear from adjoining rooms suggested the same thing had happened there. Yarham and Kershaw, handcuffed, were herded into my room.
Trank threw a pile of clothes at us, collected from the other two bedrooms. “Phooie! You guys smell like a distillery. Had a party, eh? You better dress each other best you can,” he said with a cackle. “It could get cold – and hot where you’re going.”
“What happened to Pedro?” I asked.
“The gateman? He moved out. Went back to the farm,” Trank said.
It was hardly possible to dress while handcuffed, and it was a bad sign that our captors didn’t particularly care whether we were dressed or not. We pulled on trousers and wrapped shirts around our bare shoulders, helping each other, while Carmelli and his two men searched the premises. They found the only things I had to hide – the quarter million dollars and the satellite phone, which were in my bedroom wall, behind a loose board.
“We can always do with a bit of small change,” Carmelli said, shaking the bag of money. It could have been a bag of bird droppings for all the pleasure he showed.
Then they gagged us, and manhandled us downstairs and out to the street, where we were pitched in the back of an old van like sides of me
at, and our ankles were hobbled.
The journey in the back of the van took a half-hour and ended with the vehicle edging down a slope. I could hear the swish of the sea, and there was a humid, salty smell. We were covered with blankets, carried out of the van, and dumped one by one, in the cockpit of what smelled like a fishing boat. The boat’s diesel engines were already thumping slowly.
I could feel Carmelli and his men settling themselves on board near to us. The craft seemed small. The engines revved, and the boat began to move. After a few slight swells as we left what must have been a harbour or a river mouth, the hull of the boat settled to cut smoothly through the waters of the Straits of Florida.
It wasn’t hard to work out what was going to happen. Carmelli wouldn’t be taking us on a voyage if all he wanted to do was to grill us. He could have done that at the house, or elsewhere on land. And he surely wasn’t returning us to the US. We were going to be shark bait. It was another case for the Gas Chamber Alternative, except that we didn’t have the immediate freedom required for that response. It was impossible, at the moment, to see how we could make any physical move.
When I thought it over, I questioned how Carmelli found our house. We were coming and going a lot, and as we always wore baseball caps, dark glasses and sometimes a moustache or wig, it was only remotely possible that we were followed to the house. It was also possible that Neville had wittingly or unwittingly turned us in. The timely withdrawal of Pedro seemed to confirm that Neville had something to do with it. But the important point, and what made me almost despair, was that we got drunk and went off guard. I had encouraged Kershaw to drink last evening, but on any other night he had the guard duty, and we would have had a reasonable chance of defending ourselves. I had made two abysmal mistakes in twenty-four hours, and I set about thinking how to get out of this one.
After about quarter of an hour at sea, the blankets and gags were removed and we sat up. The boat was indeed small, about twenty feet, with only a small wheelhouse. The lights of Havana were falling away fast, and we were heading into a womb of blackness, with only an occasional distant flash of lightning on the sea. After about another half an hour, Havana looked like a diamond and gold necklace on a black velvet cushion at Cartiers’.