“Without alarming the Cuban, Kirov thought it would be prudent to ascertain his name and military address. He invited the soldier to have a shot of vodka in Kirov’s private office at the end of the cave, the soldier gratefully accepted, and during drinks they exchanged names. Ramón Luminante, the soldier, instead of just giving his name, handed over his identification card, and Kirov quickly memorized its details.
“The trouble, Nikita Sergeyevich, came when a few weeks later Kirov read a denunciation in the Cuban press of a captain who had stolen a Cuban patrol boat and taken six soldiers and their wives to Miami.”
“What trouble?”
“One of the soldiers was Luminante.
“Now, Kirov should have told us about this at the time, and he did not, and I shall reprimand him. But clearly Luminante is not taken seriously. Although obviously he made the allegation, it has received no attention in the Cuban press, and only overnight attention in the Cuban refugee press, and apparently General Fitch has completely reassured Congress.”
“I don’t much like it, Rodion.”
“I would rather it had not happened, Nikita Sergeyevich. But I am not overly concerned. Kirov is a good man. And he is the custodian of a very important asset. We will tighten security at that depot.
“And always remember, among other things, that only Kirov and his small crew know how to fire that missile. He and his men are there as general matériel maintenance experts, along with the twenty, thirty Soviet technicians who look after the tanks, planes, etc. Kirov has asked when he can come home to his wife. He would need to be replaced with another nuclear technician. I am inclined instead to send his wife to Cuba. That would quiet him down. Anything else, Nikita Sergeyevich?”
Khrushchev clenched his jaw shut. He never raised his voice with Malinovsky. They were old Bolsheviks. And they had a secret.
BOOK II
9
Every few days Blackford heard from Anthony, sometimes by long distance, three or four times a week by mail. Trust was touring critical Latin American capitals, taking careful political measurements. Rufus had charged him to explore two questions, without ever touching directly on either in the course of conducting his investigation. The first was: How would individual Latin American governments probably react to a hypothetical assassination of Castro by a disillusioned follower? Would they (mostly) simply sigh with relief? Would there be left-wing demonstrations? If so, seeking what? A boycott of the new Cuba, ruled by the party of the assassin?
And the most important question. What if such an assassination, as the result of a catastrophic accident, were somehow traced to the United States?
Rufus and Trust agreed that “traced to the United States” could mean one of two things, and Anthony was to bear the distinction in mind. The first (and worst) contingency envisioned something that propelled the conclusion—or, if less than that, engendered hard suspicion—that the United States had conceived and expedited the assassination. The second sequence would reveal that the United States had indirectly expedited the assassination, for instance by making available critical weapons to resistance leaders, including the assassin. Rufus would be influenced in the guidance he gave to Mongoose by these reports, and the pace of Blackford’s work in Miami would be affected by Trust’s reports.
Anthony’s telephone calls were informally, but carefully, coded. It was hardly necessary for him to communicate his news in detail. Blackford, on the other hand, needed to be more careful about keeping Anthony as much informed as was thought vital to his continuing exploration. During the first ten days Blackford had gone no further in talking with Trust than to say about Mongoose-Miami something on the order of, “Things are pretty interesting down here, but then I guess things are pretty interesting everywhere—right, Anthony?” As often as not Anthony would take the opportunity to hew to the lewd, low road; for instance, by attaching to “things” a meaning not intended. He would interpret a comment by Blackford to the effect that “things” were “interesting”—or “hot,” or “exciting”—a meaning Blackford did not intend. Blackford remonstrated every now and then, when Anthony’s lubricity got out of hand. “You are like a lot of Englishmen,” Blackford once told Anthony. “They learn about sex later than we do and freeze into a Freudian first gear whenever anything remotely suggestive comes up.” Anthony had replied solemnly that Blackford’s observation reminded him of fucking. Blackford told him to do so to himself, to go to hell, to grow up; Anthony replied that he could not attend to all Blackford’s commissions, he was simply too busy.
Tonight, though, something was different. It was in Trust’s tone of voice. The call came from Mexico City, and Trust reported matter-of-factly that the teachers’ union had that morning passed a resolution urging the government of President Adolfo López Mateos not to join the Organization of American States in the general economic boycott against Fidel Castro. Blackford waited to hear whether there was more of what he would call commercial traffic, but there was none, leaving him to wonder whether Anthony had spoken with or visited Sally, and so when Anthony was about to hang up he raised the question directly. He did not expect his best friend to visit a foreign capital in which his fiancée lived without calling her. So he said, “Anthony. Have you called Sally?”
There was just that hint of a pause. Very unlike Anthony, whose reactions tended to be instantaneous.
“… Yes, of course I did. I mean … well, if you stopped in in London, would you fail to call the Queen of England?”
Blackford found the attempt at humor lame. “Have you made a date to see her?”
“Actually—you know, I’ve only been here two days, and I’m staying only a couple of days more. She’s busy as hell—exams, papers, usual stuff—so we’re going to try to connect up tomorrow, or Tuesday maybe. But for sure before I leave.”
“Anthony. Sally would see you even if she had a thousand papers to correct. Can’t understand it. Oh well, tell her I know I’m behind in my mail, but for sure I’ll write her tomorrow. Maybe tonight. Give her my love.”
Anthony said something or other, lapsing into badinage, and they signed off.
The following morning the special delivery letter came. Blackford was absentmindedly eating a banana, his cereal and toast yet to go, while reading the Miami Herald. He nodded his thanks to the messenger, slipping him a coin. He finished the lead story in the paper. It detailed the two-year trade pact signed between Cuba and China, which included a long-term interest-free loan. He was thinking, goddamnit, Castro is a sly, effective bastard, when he picked up his fruit knife and sliced open Anthony’s letter, which he expected would enclose a clipping or two of interest from a Latin American paper, as with his last few letters.
It was written on the stationery of the Hotel Geneve.
“Black: You should be getting this a day or two after we talk tonight on the phone. Maybe even tomorrow. I’d better get to the point.
“I phoned Sally Friday afternoon, after I got in. She sounded funny. She didn’t say, ‘Where are you staying?’ ‘When can we meet for lunch, dinner?’—that kind of thing. She said she couldn’t talk right now because there was a car waiting for her outside to meet an appointment, and could she call me later? I gave her my number, but there wasn’t any message from her that afternoon or that night, and when I called her on Saturday morning there was no answer.
“Saturday night I took Emily Hastings—don’t think you know her, Legal Department, Embassy—to El Tecalí, puttin’ on the dawg, Black. The steward led us past the Tecalí’s banquette and I passed—Sally. She was seated with a Mexican guy. She looked very surprised, flustered. She introduced me to her date, one Antonio Morales. I said hello, and introduced Emily. Emily reached over to shake hands with Sally and knocked over a little flower vase. I dove down to pick it up and Sally’s left hand reached there about the same time.
“Black, she was wearing a wedding ring.
“After I stood up, all I could do was say, you know, ‘Good to see you Sally,
Señor Morales’—and I went on to our table. When I spotted Sally and her guy leaving the restaurant, I asked the maitre d’ who my old friend’s escort was, and he said they were recently married. I wasn’t very good company for Emily on Saturday night. What can I say, Black? Maybe Sally was just pretending?
“Ever, A.”
Blackford felt the blood drain from his head. He leaned over a full minute, waiting for the renewal of sensation. Then he rose and went to the telephone. He dialed the operator. But when the operator answered, he could not speak. He hung up, looked at the breakfast tray, lifted the glass of water to his lips, and walked back to the telephone. He drank and, carefully monitoring the movements of his mouth, dialed again.
“I want to speak to Mr. Trust in Mexico City. T-r-u-s-t. The telephone”—Blackford glanced down at the letterhead of the Geneve—“is 25-15-00.”
Anthony answered the Hotel Geneve’s telephone operator.
“I got your letter. I’m going to Mexico—”
“Black. She called me last night. She sounded, well, kind of drained. But she said I should know that she had written you a letter to the Fontainebleau, that she had meant to write it earlier, but that she ‘couldn’t.’ But she had driven to the airport—right to the post office there, she said, about midnight last night. One of her students works at Pan Am and promised Sally she’d get the letter to Miami today. You should have it this afternoon or tomorrow morning. I think you should see that letter before you come.”
Blackford experienced a strange sensation. He could easily hear Anthony’s words; he could evaluate them; but he could not do the normal thing, which was to formulate an appropriate—or, for that matter, even an inappropriate—reply.
Anthony was alarmed. “Black. Black! You hearing me?”
Blackford brought the telephone as close as possible to his lips.
“Yes,” he managed to say. “Yes … I’ll wait. Thanks.”
He hung up the telephone.
He sat down and wondered, childlike, what to do. Without knowing why, he began a round of physical exercises. Deep knee bends. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Squat thrusts. He did these with no conscious attention to what he was doing, or to what lengths he was going. He worked out with a rigor that became inordinate. He was reaching for pain. When he had begun a third cycle of push-ups he became dizzy again, collapsing into a carpet moist from his own sweat.
He didn’t know how long he had lain there when the telephone’s insistent ringing roused him. On his knees he reached for it.
“Yes.”
“It’s Pano, patrón. Downstairs. Okay to come on up?”
“No,” Blackford managed to say, in a relatively controlled voice. “I … can’t meet with you today. I will explain later. I will call you.” He hung up, raised himself back on the chair, and reread Anthony’s letter.
Ten minutes later, dressed in khaki slacks, beach shoes, and a red light cotton crewneck sweater, he took the elevator down to the garage and gave his ticket to the attendant. Five minutes later he was driving. For reasons he did not seek to explore, he drove toward Key West. He drove at a moderate, detached speed, about fifty miles per hour. He invited to accost him, to occupy his mind, geometric and trigonometric problems of the kind, long ago at college, he had been professionally trained to grapple with, and back then there were no calculators, only slide rules. He was headed from Miami to Key West, a driving distance of 125 miles. He guessed—not a wild guess, an informed guess—that he was headed south southwest, or at an azimuth of about 195 degrees. He knew exactly the location of Key West. He would never forget it after his experience of only three months before, struggling to head there to escape in the little fishing boat before Castro’s plane spotted him. Come on, Key West, 24-24 North, 81-48 West, as he wrestled desperately below at the navigator’s station, with the Radio Direction Finder.
All right then. Now where exactly is Mexico City?
On the 100th meridian. He didn’t need to join the CIA to know that. Third-form geography. But what was its latitude?
He remembered from one of the dozens of books he had read about Castro’s epic voyage from Mexico to the Playa de los Colorados the heroic couplet in Spanish:
Viajando directo, directo al este,
Vino Fidel, deshaciendo el oeste
(Voyaging straight, straight to the east,
Fidel came, undoing the West)
Was the poet who put such stress on a direct easterly course being accurate, or merely poetic? Because Cuba lies between the Tropic of Cancer—the northern tip, where Havana sits—and Latitude 20, the southern tip at Santiago de Cuba, Castro’s home town, directly west of which, at Los Colorados, he had landed his ship, the Granma. So, directly east from Mexico City to Santiago would mean Mexico City was at 20 degrees North. Longitude 100, Latitude 20. What is the distance between Key West and Mexico City? You drop down—he would round off the coordinates for Key West to 25 North, 82 West. To go to Mexico City, drop down five degrees, go west eighteen degrees. Down five degrees of latitude is easy, five times sixty means 300 miles.
But what distance can you assign to eighteen degrees of westward longitude at Latitude 20 North? Well—his mind now began to throb—the circumference of the globe is 25,000 miles at Latitude o, the Equator. At the North Pole, the circumference of the globe is—nothing. Since from the Pole to the Equator is ninety degrees, then at twenty degrees you are seventy-ninetieths of an arc that goes from zero to 25,000 miles. Seven over nine.
Doing to his mind what he had done that morning to his body, he knew that with a pencil it would have been a matter of a minute to run through the figures. He would on no account have stopped the car to take that minute. Blackford dug the nails of his thumbs into his index finger to maintain focus.—Now, the distance around the globe is 360 degrees, so that eighteen degrees of that would mean—360 divided by eighteen.
A dividend, that one! An easy twenty. One twentieth of the distance around the world. One twentieth of twenty-five thousand miles is … Two into twenty-five, obviously, is 12.5. So that eighteen degrees of longitude at the Equator equals 1,250 miles. Now back to the other: seven ninths, of that, that’s the number I want. Seven ninths of 1250… Seven times 125 equals eight seven five and however many zeros, doesn’t matter. Now 875 divided by nine. Well, nine times nine is eighty-one, leaving you with seventy-five left over, nine into seventy-five—8; 8.3. 972 miles.
He found himself driving past the city limits of Key West. He kept on. He assumed the road would lead to the commercial wharf, which it did, after winding through the commercial center.
There were boats there of all kinds for charter, which he had also assumed. He selected a 36-foot yawl, signed the paper, and paid in cash. He was about to board when suddenly he paused.
“Any provisions aboard?” he asked the old man with the large straw hat and no teeth who had written out the charter document.
He removed the pipe from his mouth. “Just water.” He pointed to a supply store at the end of the dock. “You can get anything you want there.”
Blackford went into the store and bought a handful of the first things he came on: two boxes of cookies, an apple, two bunches of celery, two bottles of tomato ketchup, two cans of soup. At the bar next door he bought six cans of beer and a bottle of gin.
He tossed his provisions onto the pipe berth, opened the navigator’s desk, and pulled out the harbor chart. He looked then at the larger chart, and knew what he would do. He would sail out into the Gulf Stream, up to Miami. The enterprise engaged him fully. He worked with his dividers and his parallel rules, laying out the course. He returned now to the dock and walked back to the office where the old man sat.
“I’ll want the boat for longer than a day.”
“It’s two hundred and seventy-five for one week.”
Blackford gave him a credit card.
“And another two seventy-five deposit.”
Blackford nodded. When the old man was done, Blackford put the two vouchers in his p
ocket.
“We tear up the deposit when the boat gets back,” the old man said.
By sundown, Blackford was thirty-five miles out to sea, heading north by east. The wind was a vigorous sou’wester. With the help of the Gulf Stream he was probably doing over nine knots, he figured. He loosened the mainsail slightly, letting it luff just a bit, to spill a little wind. He would need pretty soon to reef it, the way things were going. He opened the box of cookies and ate one, and opened a can of warm beer to sip. He projected the seas and his own strength four or five hours from now. What he would do would be drop the main and experiment with the wheel, see how steady a course he could keep with a becket fastening the wheel at a good position. Then he would experiment with the genoa and the mizzen sail behind him, easing the little yawl toward its heading, in case he fell asleep.
At some point he was sailing away from her, he knew. Tomorrow he would arrive, some time in the afternoon. Her letter should be there. The night was clear but dark, not a trace of the moon. The brisk wind was still warm, but getting less so, and it brought in a smell of faintly acrid foliage: mangroves along the waterway; He picked a star to sail by. The star would be good for a half hour. Then the revolving heavens would offer him another one, allowing him to keep his compass course at about 025 degrees. He opened the bottle of gin, stared at the ketchup—why ketchup?—took a bite from the apple and a slug from the bottle, and thought back on the quarrel they had had in Washington that summer five years earlier, when she so ostentatiously had gone out with the architect, whatever his name was, while Blackford looked about feverishly for consolation. He had found it, he supposed, in the struggle, the endless struggle, but one without any prospects for him now, even if the whole world were to become, tomorrow, a free and fair city. He had not enjoyed the first drink of gin and wondered whether he should take a second. He decided listlessly against it, reaching in the cockpit instead for a can of beer. He looked up, focusing on the constellations he had been so familiar with as an army pilot. They were still there. But, turning his head abeam, the one his eyes fixed on had splashes of starry hair that shimmered, and eyes to steer by, and lips set in a pensive, seductive mode. He felt a luff in the sail, snapped his head forward to the mast, and quickly located his navigational star. He had wandered high on his course, while looking back at that chimera over Mexico.
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 8