Mongoose, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley

  “Devoutly,” said Ingenio Tamayo. He took great comfort at this moment in his atheism. If there were a God, he told himself, Ingenio Tamayo would just now have been hit by a bolt of lightning.

  Kirov was drinking heavily. Tamayo ordered a glass of beer every time Kirov ordered a double rum and Coca-Cola. And suddenly it flashed before him! Tamayo might be given an opening to construe a conversational jog in an unexpected way. Dangerous, but with the possibility then of spectacularly profitable results …

  Tamayo was in the men’s room. What, Tamayo’s mind was racing feverishly, What would he stand to lose by simply coming up with it? Whatever Kirov’s reaction, given his volatile mood his face would register vital information. And, if total ignorance were unconvincingly professed, Tamayo could, if he chose, simply ignore it, and proceed methodically with his investigation. But just conceivably—

  Tamayo sat down, and put his hand around his glass. Kirov said, “Let me tell you something, Ingenio, that I have not told any of my friends.”

  “You mean, that you have not told any of your other friends, Anatoly.”

  “Yes,” Anatoly Kirov smiled, wanly. “Yes. You are my friend. I know that. Well, it is this. On Wednesday I receive a telegram that my wife, my wonderful wife, Olga, was suddenly dead of a heart attack in Moscow.” Tears began to well up in his eyes. “And then, yesterday, I get a message from a Cuban—never mind who, Ingenio; there is no need to go into that—a message from a Cuban who has access to a wire. He gave me a message from Olga’s roommate. A wonderful woman, a singer with the Bolshoi Opera chorus. Zinka Petrov reports quite bluntly. Here—here are her words exactly. She said by wire: OLGA WAS KILLED BY THE KGB LAST NIGHT. NOTHING ELSE YOU HEAR IS TRUE. Those were her words.

  “Now, just understand that my wife Olga did not die of a heart attack at age thirty-four. Her roommate—Zinka—would not make up so serious a charge. Why, then, did they kill her? I have thinked of nothing else for thirty hours now. I have not slept. I reread every letter I have receive from her since coming in August. More than one hundred letters. I do not keep a copy of my letters, but reading her letters I can tell what I wrote about, and what I did say in several letters was that life in Cuba under the excited leadership of Fidel Castro seems a—better life than in the Soviet Union.

  “There is, I remember in one of the letters I write, the question of the climate. It gets very cold, for very long periods, Ingenio, in Russia. And a true socialist man will attempt to further the Revolution from whatever country he lives in. I did say to her, I now recall it, in one letter, maybe in two or three, that perhaps we consider a permanent home here in Cuba, helping Fidel Castro to commit the Revolution. Is it her receipt of such a letter? Our mail is always being read, you know, Ingenio. Did you meet Lieutenant Vassilov today? Well, he is the KGB—the principal KGB—in the camp: It happens that I know certain things others do not know, or need to know …” Kirov was rambling now a little, Tamayo noticed, and by no means would Tamayo discourage him from doing so. On the contrary, he encouraged his own plastic facial muscles to move with appropriate reactions to everything Kirov was saying: surprise, indignation, grief, shock, curiosity. Tamayo was pleased with his running accompaniments, and was ready at any moment to strike.

  “Yes, perhaps it was that letter,” Kirov was going on, beginning a fresh drink, “because although the official—philosophy of the Kremlin is that what matters most is that someone is a Communist, not that he is Ethiopian, or Cuban, or Russian, or anything else, in fact—and here, Ingenio, is another great abuse of Marxist principle—in fact, we Russians are especially nationalistic. But why will they actually kill my wife because I express such thinking? Well,” he said, looking sternly down at the floor, “they will be sorry, they will truly be sorry.”

  Ingenio moved closer to Kirov, and to the question he was edging toward.

  “It is a terrible, terrible story, Anatoly, one of the worst I have ever heard. And,” he spoke with great concentration given to every syllable, “although the Soviet leaders have been in some respects very generous—after all”—Tamayo pointed vaguely in the direction of the San Cristóbal military compound—“that is why you are here, that is why most of you are here, to help us with problems of basic ordnance. But it is also regrettably true that the Soviet Union is capable of letting down its allies. That certainly was the case during the great crisis in October.”

  Kirov looked up at Tamayo. He began to speak, but stopped and, instead, drank again from his glass.

  Tamayo decided to fire. “And then, Anatoly, they leave one missile underground here and do not tell us.”

  Kirov’s face turned red.

  “Who told you that?” His voice was suddenly at Present Arms.

  “We have our sources, Anatoly. You do not disbelieve Zinka about what the KGB has done, Fidel does not disbelieve his informant about what the Soviet Union has done.” Now, now, now it will come, Tamayo thought, staring hard at his new friend.

  Finally Kirov spoke. He was no longer touching his glass. He said softly, “Ingenio, we must meet again, and soon. But we must take extra-special cautions. We are permitted every other weekend to go to Havana for recreation. Tell me—I will remember—the number to reach you this Saturday morning.”

  “The number, Anatoly, is 65-0886. I will repeat that: 65-0886.”

  “What you tell me about Fidel Castro is very very important news for me. I will see you again in two days. Now I think we must separate ourselves. I know,” he nodded discreetly in the direction of the bar, “the Soviet captain who just entered and is standing at the bar. You leave, and I will return to the camp with him, and go now and drink with him. It is this simple, Ingenio—only from now on it will be ‘Major Tamayo’—I ask you as a hospitality to dine with me at the officers’ club, and you reciprocate by asking me to drink with you at the Burrito. You pay the bill. We spoke of matters of common interest having to do with logistical necessities of the Cuban Army. As they say here, Buenas noches—Major Tamayo.”

  “Buenas noches, Major Kirov.”

  He drove back to the compound. Ingenio Tamayo was elated. It was as good as an execution. He would not wait. He drove into the headquarters building. Entering the fluorescent-lighted little outer office, he showed his identification to the duty officer and said he required a private telephone line on which to call “headquarters.” He was shown to an adjacent office, and the duty officer depressed an outside line button and left the room. Reaching the operator, Tamayo identified himself and gave the name of the person he wished to speak to.

  A second operator asked where he was calling from. Tamayo peered down to the telephone’s base and gave the number. He said, not without drama, that his call was urgent.

  “Just a minute, please.”

  In a moment or two, the Comandante’s voice sounded.

  “Yes, Ingenio?”

  Tamayo’s heavy breathing was audible at the other end of the line. “Comandante. It is true. That is all for now.”

  Tamayo hung up the telephone, dizzy with self-satisfaction.

  26

  Aboard the Eastern airliner to Mexico City, Blackford wore a disguise (he was a Hasidic rabbi, wearing a black frock coat, a beard, and yarmulke under a black felt hat). When lunch was served, rather than commit any inadvertent dietary solecism, he ate nothing, and so emerged from the plane, with his false passport, hungry. Blackford thought Rufus overcautious, but—true—he had not worn a disguise to the San Angel Inn meeting, and Rufus had got word from counterintelligence in Mexico that one of the many Cuban agents sheltered in the Cuban Embassy had logged Blackford’s arrival in Mexico City.

  A great deal had been done in the fortnight since the meeting with Consuelo. Contacts with the resistance inside Cuba had been invigorated, and the seed had been planted in the ear of Jesús Ferrer that local “dissatisfaction” with Castro in Havana could result in “definitive action” being taken against him, perhaps by an outraged Cuban citizen at a public rally. The bluster by
Castro about assassinations, the word went out, “planned by the United States Government,” had simply been a cover to disguise Castro’s own frailty at home.

  Ferrer received this news gladly, Rufus had hardly been surprised to learn. Ferrer was not easy to contact, but it never took more than a couple of days to get a message to him. This was accomplished through the use of a resistance radio (moved every two or three days to a different transmission site) within Cuba. The radio could reach Ferrer in his nomadic base in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. And Ferrer traveled every ten days or so to one or another of several addresses in Havana where he was well sheltered and from which he could coordinate, or attempt to do so, the activities of the resistance working out of Miami.

  At one of these meetings he was told that in the event Castro were assassinated, Jesús Ferrer should instantly declare himself president of the Provisional Government of Cuba pending, in six months, national elections. His Cuban adviser in Miami, a member of Alpha 66, told him that there was every reason to believe that anti-Castro Latin American governments would come through with quick diplomatic recognition, but that it was exceedingly important that he should move quickly. Above all it was imperative that he should broadcast on national radio. A resistance unit operating within Havana would give this enterprise top priority. Ferrer, who thought and acted decisively, suggested that at the next meeting within Havana he record a tape which could be played over the radio wherever he himself happened to be. His idea was greeted enthusiastically.

  Ferrer, back in the mountains, worked carefully on three scripts.

  The first would confine itself to the fact of the “death” of Castro, announcing the new government, declaring amnesty for all former members of Castro’s government who “disarmed within four hours” of this announcement. (Ferrer would have preferred to say “before six o’clock this afternoon,” or “before midnight tonight,” but he could not anticipate the time of day at which the announcement would be made.)

  The second script, unlike the first, which lasted only one minute, lasted approximately five. It called on the “democracies” in the world to recognize the Provisional Government and welcome the return of democracy to Cuba.

  The third script was a spirited twenty-minute indictment of Castro. A recitation of former friends, and even family, he had executed, imprisoned, tortured, or exiled. There were economic figures to give out which, Ferrer knew, would not be challenged by Cubans who had suffered almost five years of Castro’s communization and its economic consequences. Then Ferrer spoke warmly of former companions-at-arms of Fidel Castro who had been betrayed by him. Ferrer would, at this point, dub in excerpts from Fidel’s broadcast promises of 1953 and 1959, as had been done so successfully when Ferrer had taken over the radio station briefly.

  These scripts he brought to Redondo Street, to the self-effacing house of retired diplomats Ernesto and Teresa Lascasas. Ferrer recorded the scripts on an old but serviceable German tape recorder. The old diplomat, his wife, and two young Cubans—one operated within the city, the second had come in two nights earlier on one of the speedboats from Miami, depositing a cache of arms at Nuevitas in Camagüey—listened to the eerie sounds of the new young leader announcing the “death of Fidel Castro.” When the three tapes were over, Doña Teresa said that it was the most musical half hour she had ever heard.

  Rufus, meanwhile, had devoted many hours to the New Direction. Anthony Trust traveled from Latin American capital to capital, giving word—discreetly, dramatically, enticingly—of the new young leader in Cuba who was attempting to do what Fidel Castro had promised but failed to do. No account of Ferrer’s background, from that point on, failed to stress the family ties of the Ferrer and Castro families.

  Young Jesús Ferrer, with his cosmopolitan background, his derring-do in the mountains, gradually limned into the consciousness of the press. His name became, gradually, conspicuous—for if It was to happen, Jesús Ferrer must not be a stranger.

  The job of canonizing him within Miami, Blackford decided, was better not attempted. There were at least four figures in Miami who thought themselves the logical—indeed the indisputable—leaders of post-Castro Cuba. To impose over them a twenty-eight-year-old virtual unknown would simply generate sibling jealousy, already so rife in Miami as to make Blackford despair of a united effort against Castro.

  Let it happen elsewhere, and let the diplomatic initiatives, planned by Mongoose, effect the anointing of Jesús Ferrer. Better that than Blackford attempting, from a hidden apartment, wearing idiot disguises every time he left, trying to bring about a diplomatic consensus among the expatriate groups. Pano thoroughly agreed. “There is no purpose at all in doing the one before the other. Esperamos, let us hope.”

  Much but not all of this had been relayed to LASH through the Miami-Havana contact. What Blackford didn’t know was how much of it had, in turn, been relayed to Consuelo by LASH. Would it transpire, at their meeting tomorrow, that Consuelo was wholly ignorant of the political plans that had been made? These, after all, had replaced those LASH had begun by insisting on—namely, that the head of the Provisional Government be an ex-Castroite, scooped out of prison to serve as the president of the Provisional Government. Blackford would of course report to Consuelo that the rifle had been delivered, together with the appurtenances, at the designated spot in Luyano near Havana. And—Blackford found his eyes turning down to his traveling briefcase stowed under the seat in front—he had the money. One thousand, five hundred one-hundred-dollar bills. Odd how little room they occupied, Blackford thought. He could have squeezed a million dollars into that briefcase, though not that much in the special compartment in which the money was hidden.

  Blackford found himself looking forward to his meeting with Consuelo. This had nothing to do with the justifiable relief he would feel at no longer carrying around a hundred and fifty thousand in cash. It was that he had found, in the aristocratic, earnest, nimble Mexican, an affinity of spirit and temperament. Blackford was reading, on the airplane, the book of letters from Whittaker Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr. He had marked a particular passage. Buckley had taken a friend to visit Chambers, and of the experience Chambers had written him, “I liked Galbraith at sight. This happens so seldom with me that I wondered why it happened. As I listened to him laugh, watched him study the titles of my books, watched his mind fasten on one or two points of no great importance in themselves, but somewhat as an ant, at touch, clamps on the rib of a leaf that may be littering its path, I liked him better. I decided that what I liked was a kind of energy, what kind scarcely mattered. One of our generals was once being ho-ho-hearty with the ranks, as I understand generals are sometimes, especially if newsmen are present. He asked a paratrooper, ‘Why do you like to do an insane thing like jumping out of airplanes?’ The paratrooper answered, ‘I don’t like to, sir; I just like to be around the kind of people who like to jump out of airplanes.’ I felt something like the paratrooper about Galbraith.” Blackford knew instantly that such had been the effect on him of his three hours with Consuelo.

  An hour later, at the airport, he casually opened his briefcase for inspection by Customs. The inspector was evidently himself Jewish, because he gave an extra-courtly bow, waving the rabbi on. Blackford hoped he would not be accosted by another rabbi, anxious to talk shop. But in the event, he was prepared. (He was in Mexico to see his sick mother, who had emigrated to Mexico after the war, leaving her son to pursue his rabbinical studies in Cleveland, Ohio. Just enough chatter to permit non-abrupt conversational disengagement.)

  The taxi driver he addressed in Spanish, and asked to be taken to the Hotel Geneve where, checked into his bedroom, first he ordered from room service a carne asada with frijoles and guacamole and a beer. Only then did he dial the number he had memorized. He had, in any event, been asked to dial that number between seven and nine.

  “I was expecting you, Bledsoe,” he heard the calm, musical, authoritative voice of Consuelo.

  “Everything okay?”r />
  “Yes and no. I did have this telephone checked, and unless there is something wrong at your end, we are all right. I have no reason to be suspicious of anything at all, but the last communication from LASH asked that I take special precautions. Reason not given. So—tomorrow we will not meet at San Angel Inn. How well do you know the environs of Mexico?”

  “Well, I’ve been around a little. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Do you know where Tres Marías is?”

  “Yes, I do as a matter of fact. That’s where you bumped off the last genyooine competitor for the presidency of the republic who wasn’t a member of PRI.” Blackford’s reference was to the assassination of General Francisco Serrano, in 1927, before the Partido Revolucionario Institucional became the single-party political boss of Mexico. “You’re talking about Tres Marías on the road to Cuernavaca?”

  “Exactly. And no more wisecracks about our assassinations, or I’ll give you some comparative figures,” Consuelo commented playfully. “There is a little huddle of open-air tortilla and beer stands. Are you familiar with them?”

  “I have twice stopped and snacked there.”

  “I propose that you park before the first stand, I’ll park beyond the third, this side of the gas station. I will arrive at exactly noon and order two lunches. I’ll take them across the road to where the wooden picnic tables are—it is a state park. You arrive at twelve-fifteen. You will see me beginning to eat. Sit down opposite me unless, directly behind me, on the ground, you see the morning newspaper. If you see that, it means that I have spotted something—anomalous. In that case, return to your car, and call me again tomorrow evening.”