At the desk, there was some difficulty with the reservation, and the clerk announced that the rooms had yet to be made up. There was presently only one room vacant, a double. As it was only ten in the morning, he suggested they wait until the afternoon, when the hotel might have adjoining rooms. Tania said they were tired and would share the available room. The clerk suppressed a giggle, and neither D’Esperey nor Sandoval had the energy to object. The long trip had eroded resistance and whatever sense of propriety might have interfered. All signed the register. Tania was thought to be a prostitute from La Paz and was not troubled for identification. Sandoval and D’Esperey, more exotic in appearance, were asked to fill out tourist cards and did so, showing their forged papers. Beyond these formalities, the clerk paid very little attention.
In the room, a bellman wheeled in a cot, and Sandoval fumbled with a tip. As soon as the door closed, Tania astounded them by disrobing. She took off her jacket and skirt, bra and panties, and tossed them in a corner. D’Esperey blinked and then averted his gaze. Sandoval could not help but stare. His eyes took in the curve of her hips and the small dark triangle between her legs. He noticed that her arms were bruised, and there were several long welts across her back. Paying no heed, Tania swayed nude into the bathroom and closed the door.
D’Esperey shook his head, and Sandoval sat down in a chair by the window. The thought that Tania was insane crossed his mind. Both men felt abashed; Sandoval’s machismo and D’Esperey’s savoir faire were punctured. Her brazenness had fairly unmanned them.
In the bathroom, water splashed, and then the toilet rumbled. Tania padded back out into the room. D’Esperey did not look away. She drew the curtains all the way, then walked to one of the beds. Her breasts plunged as she bent to pull down the coverlet. D’Esperey watched her—he could not help himself—and she fixed him with a lucid, fierce gaze. Her head was inclined slightly; atop her high cheekbones, her dark eyes gave back no light. She looked at D’Esperey for several long seconds and did not give the impression of searching for words. Propped against the pillows, Tania seemed formal, and her thin mouth was set in a flat line. D’Esperey felt uncomfortably like Tania was looking through his skin at his bones. She slipped one leg and then another under the covers.
“Will you wake me?” she said.
“Of course.”
The covers bunched around her waist and her breasts pushed visibly together as she rolled slowly onto her side. She closed her eyes and then said languidly, “Wake me up at six. We can all have dinner together.”
IN A PLACE called El Verdugo, they were seated at a table beneath a leafy tree overlooking the plaza. Sandoval ate a plate of pacumutu, beef, rice, and cheese and D’Esperey a soup made of chicken and plantains. Tania did not eat but drank several Singanis, and as these went down, she became increasingly talkative, almost jovial. The change in her was marked.
Food and drink had calmed Sandoval a bit. After all, they had made it out of La Paz, they were halfway to their meeting with Guevara, and the evening was beautiful.
D’Esperey asked her, “How long is the trip tomorrow?”
Tania looked over her glass. “Ten hours. Including the walk from the road head to the Base Camp.”
“How far into the forest?” D’Esperey asked. It took him a while to make up this sentence, for in public he could not make himself say the words “base camp.”
“It’s about a four-hour walk. But I’m going to bring us in the back way. It’s a little shorter.” Tania’s voice trailed off, and she looked away from the table over the plaza. Around them, the whitewashed walls of the city were taking on the orange hue of dusk. She began to hum a tune—maybe it was Edith Piaf.
It again occurred to Sandoval, dejectedly, that Tania was totally insane. Without thinking, he said, “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
Her words were hollow, and when the waiter came by, she handed her glass up onto his tray and said, “Más.”
“When did you first meet him?” she said to D’Esperey. “He” could be only one man. Che Guevara was the common axis of their turning worlds.
D’Esperey’s eyes found Tania’s across the table. Her gaze was not as intimidating as that of the nude woman sprawled on the bed; he pushed back in his chair. “In sixty-one. I went to the island as a graduate student.”
“You know Barbaroja, of course.”
Barbaroja was the code name of Manuel Piñeiro, the head of the “Liberation Department,” the external operations division of the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia. As his name dropped, D’Esperey and Sandoval stiffened visibly.
“Relax,” Tania said. “We can talk here.”
The waiter came and placed another drink in front of Tania. When he left, she put her arm over the back of her chair. She seemed at ease, but there was much going on behind her eyes. D’Esperey was less inhibited than Sandoval; no one was in earshot, and it seemed safe to speak.
“Barbaroja arranged my first trip here in sixty-five,” D’Esperey said. “I wrote a paper for the leadership about the selection of sites—locations for the venture.”
D’Esperey was elliptical, but his meaning was clear. He had entered the country then and now as a journalist. This cover was close and solid; he was legitimately a writer of some moment in leftist circles. D’Esperey had first come to the attention of the Cuban intelligence service after the publication of his book, Reigniting the Revolution, a text heretical to orthodox Marxists. D’Esperey had evangelized the rural roots of the Cuban revolution, maintaining that the guerrilla fighter had a vital political role. He believed, like Guevara, that rural guerrilla nuclei could educate, inspire, and mobilize the peasantry. The conditions for revolution could be jump-started by this guerrilla nucleus; they did not have to evolve. The concept was essentially Maoist, and thus apostasy, but it was music to the ears of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. During his stint as a lecturer at Havana University, D’Esperey had been approached by Barbaroja. Urbane, educated at the École Normale Supérieure, and from a wealthy, noted family, D’Esperey was no bomb thrower. And that is why he was courted. Swept up in the romance of the Idea, D’Esperey agreed readily, and over the next several years he served as an undercover courier for Cuban intelligence. He’d traveled widely in Latin America, ostensibly writing articles for Jean-Paul Sartre’s Le Temps Modernes, but the most important part of his work was authoring studies for Havana on the ripeness of countries as revolutionary targets.
D’Esperey’s report on the merits of a Bolivian revolution had recommended that a foco be established in the Alto Beni, a jungle region two hundred miles north of the Ñancahuazú. For a dozen different reasons, all of them bad, D’Esperey’s advice had been ignored, first by Manuel Piñeiro and ultimately by Castro and Guevara. It could be said that the Ñancahuazú was chosen almost by default.
“I haven’t gotten much help from Barbaroja,” Tania said.
“You’ve done a lot here,” Sandoval offered. If she were insane, he at least wanted to be in her good graces. He also knew, as did D’Esperey, that Tania was close to Guevara.
Tania did not acknowledge the compliment. “Barbaroja’s a conjo,” she said. Her language was a bit rough: The epithet translated to a term somewhere roughly between “asshole” and “motherfucker.” Tania continued to talk, about her travels, about her training in Cuba; she talked of dozens of things, maniacally, quickly, and always with her eyes darting about. She drank another Singani but did not speak a word of her arrest, nor of the torture that followed. She built a wall around herself with words, with facts and details that linked her to the two men at the table. She embroidered truths upon circumstances, immodestly claiming that the entire urban network was her creation, then understating an equally important achievement, brokering the transfer of arms to the farmhouse. She kept at it, and Sandoval became bored, then so did D’Esperey. They both thought her a bit of a revolutionary groupie, and the more she carried on, the less gallant her achievements seemed.
This was her intent.
Eventually, the recklessness and insanity of the taxi ride was forgotten, put off to exuberance or even a surplus of precaution—a bold move that, through its success, proved that the group had not been detected by the authorities.
D’Esperey knew himself to be a journeyman agent; for him, so far was so good. For the last six years, Sandoval had coordinated Guevara’s efforts in Argentina, including arranging supplies and support for Masetti’s and Atilio’s failed efforts in Salta Province. Having survived the erasure of Masetti’s network, Sandoval considered himself above simple betrayal. He’d long suspected that Guevara and Tania were lovers, and like many others, he was certain that Tania was devoted to Guevara.
Sandoval had hitched his star to Guevara, so if Tania was close to the comandante, Sandoval thought it best to remain cordial. D’Esperey and Sandoval could not imagine that any other threat existed—to them, to their enterprise, or to Guevara.
Above the plaza, the clouds were silver with moonlight. D’Esperey ordered a bottle of wine. Tania drank and even laughed and managed impressions as best she could. Somehow she kept the wires apart, kept her two secret lives away from each other, for if they ever touched, they would spark and explode.
Tania made these men believe, if not in her, then about her. She was ashamed at her success; she was ashamed of even herself, of the conceit that had made her loyal to a cause but to no one person. She was, despite herself, quite aware of the powers within her. She knew she was no friend, only an acquaintance, complete unto herself, always uncomfortable with others and as unknowable as the inside of a cloud. Feelings and illusions battled within her; was there nothing left that was human? Was her soul now nothing but ashes?
Couples walked by on the square, and Tania got a little drunk and felt a warm numbness rising about her cheeks. Her voice came to her sounding alien and distant, like her own words recalled—not heard, but filtered through recollection and prejudice. She seemed to have become a spectator, even to herself. She was smashed up inside, filled with self-pity and also dread. She had learned from so many performances, and now she was simply playing another part. Her masks were impenetrable, and her act masterful: Inside, defeated and alone, she felt like a person about to be hanged.
42
GUEVARA AGAIN HEARD the engine of an aircraft, though under the tree canopy, he could not see it. It had passed over them twice during the morning, each time continuing to the north and returning down the other side of the valley. Joaquin and Pombo agreed that it was definitely flying a search pattern. There was little chance that their party could be seen from the air, and no chance at all that they were leaving a discernible trail through the forest. Still, the aircraft was worrying. Guevara ordered the group to travel upslope and away from the river bottom, knowing that a lazy patrol of soldiers would follow the river. This he did as a precaution, though he knew it would slow the group by as much as two days. The aircraft was simply too persistent. Guevara had a nagging feeling trouble lay ahead.
For several hours, the main column had climbed away from the valley floor, cresting one ridge then another as the river was put behind them. The center group hacked through thick underbrush until they worked across a saddle and then turned sharply left, keeping close to a precipitous series of bluffs heading almost directly south. By midmorning the column was bunched, starting and stopping behind the trail cutters, with as much standing about as walking.
Guevara had decided to continue pushing south, though the night before, he’d received a message on the shortwave promising the delivery of supplies at the junction of the Iripiti and Ñancahuazú rivers in seventy-two hours. The message had come as an agreeable surprise. The resupply point was a hard day’s march back downstream, and Guevara knew the terrain around the river junction fairly well. The radio transmitter had finally given up the ghost—its dunking in the river was only the latest of a string of hard knocks, so Guevara had not been able to acknowledge the message. He expected to fix the radio at base, or at least replace it with a backup, and anyway, he was eager to get his exhausted troops back to the relative comforts of the established camp. He had decided that he would continue toward Camp 2, and after the men had been fed and rearmed, he himself would lead a detachment to accept the supplies.
They stopped at noon, and Guevara allowed the group a few hours’ rest. He intended to travel late into the evening, certain that then the airplane would not be flying and any Bolivian soldiers who weren’t at their barracks would be standing around a blazing campfire. As the men rested, he studied the map and came to a disheartening conclusion. They were perhaps four miles north of Camp 2, and it was another seven miles or so to the Zinc House. They were at least three hours’ hard march from base, more if they continued to travel off the river bottom.
But that was not what caused concern.
The aircraft passed over them again at a quarter to one. Guevara managed a peek as it flew over the trees; it was an old Piper, a high-wing single-engine Cub, the sort of plane used to spot artillery. He clearly saw the red, yellow, and green roundels painted on its wings. Despite a nonbelligerent appearance, it was a military aircraft.
Guevara took out a pencil and drew a long oval on the back of the map. He made an X at the bottom and assumed that this was where the Zinc House was located. He placed another X at the top of the oval; this was the position where the group now rested. He assumed they could not be seen from the air. Then why had they been overflown three times? He scribbled some numbers. It was approximately eleven miles to the Zinc House. An aircraft like a Piper Cub had a maximum speed of slightly better than a hundred miles an hour. They had first heard the sound of the engines at about ten o’clock and then heard them again at about a quarter to noon.
Was the aircraft flying a search pattern?
This was a simple problem of two-dimensional geometry, and Guevara delighted in mathematics. Now a riddle of arithmetic might foretell the future.
He stared at the oval. The aircraft wasn’t searching randomly. It was searching a pattern that corresponded to things on the ground. If the soldiers had discovered the Zinc House, they would certainly search around it. If they had an aircraft, it made sense that they would send it to search the valley. That aircraft, ergo, would fly in an oval. Perhaps a figure eight, but the calculations would be the same, or nearly the same.
The sides of the oval were eleven miles long. Eleven miles down and eleven miles back. Twenty-two miles. Thirteen minutes of flight time.
Added to that was the time it took to fly around the top of the oval. What was the diameter of a broad, lazy turn? Guevara had piloted his uncle’s sailplane as a boy. He knew something about aircraft. The turn would be about as far as the pilot could see on this partly cloudy day—a radius of, say, ten miles. The circumference of a circle was the product of p times the diameter. The diameter was twice the radius.
Mathematical simplicity. But was it truth? Or was this all the fantasy of an exhausted mind? 3.145 multiplied by 20. Guevara scribbled, squinted, cursed, and started over. The circumference of a circle twenty miles in diameter was 62.9 miles. He sketched the oval again, tracing over his lines and writing in the distances. His lips moved as he wrote down the flight times. Six and a half minutes to fly eleven miles. Times two. Half of 62.9 was 31.5. That distance would be flown twice, so back again to 62.9. How long did it take an airplane to fly 62.9 miles at one hundred miles an hour?
Silence unreeled in his head. Think.
The edifice he had built of numbers shuddered and threatened to collapse.
Think, conjo!
An airplane traveling a hundred miles an hour would take 37.68 minutes to fly 62.8 miles. Thirty-seven minutes and forty seconds.
That meant that total flight time around the oval was fifty minutes and forty seconds. The plane had last passed over at a quarter to one. That meant it would return at…Silence again, roaring silence.
The plane would return at 1:35, fifteen minutes fr
om now.
Guevara stood up, intending to tell Joaquin, but stopped. The big man was sprawled under a tree, his weapon crossed in his arms, his head was tipped back, and his mouth was open. His breath escaped in a rattling grunt. He was dead asleep. There was no point in waking him with a prediction, especially if it foretold doom. Especially if it was wrong.
So Guevara waited, leaning back against a tree. He killed time, straining his ears, and five minutes passed like a week. Ten minutes passed like a month. Joaquin woke and stretched and got up to take a long piss. Still Guevara waited. Joaquin used his foot to nudge Pombo awake. “Vamos,” Joaquin said.
And then Guevara heard it, far away; closer, it became a popping sort of rattle. The hum of a single-engine plane. He looked at his watch. It was thirty-six minutes past one in the afternoon; the aircraft was on time almost exactly to the second.
“Joaquin,” Guevara said flatly, “the army has found the Zinc House.”
TANIA’S DRIVING HAD been manic, almost daredevil, and the men were quietly thankful when at last they heard the parking brake grind up and the vehicle’s engine switch off. Begun well before dawn, the long jeep ride had taken them southeast from Sucre; from there they drove to the sad little pueblo of Tichucha, and then north on an increasingly sketchy road to El Meson. The jeep headed north up a slot of a valley to the place the telegraph wires ran out, a dusty clutch of stucco, tile, and thatch-roofed hovels called Yaquí. They left the jeep, and Tania paid the corregador ten American dollars to park behind his house. She told him she would be back within a week. The old man smiled, revealing black and diseased gums, and as he counted the five and five one-dollar bills, he could not have seemed less interested in Sandoval, D’Esperey, Tania, their backpacks, or the several pieces of luggage they’d left covered with a blanket in the backseat. They started their walk from the village at one in the afternoon.
Killing Che Page 33