He saw movement at the trailhead. The patrol coming back?
No.
He yanked Dylan’s hand, dragging her to the ground.
The first shot hit Gonzales in the chest and spun him, and the second and third hit him in the side, and he was dead as he fell. He was the farthest from the trailhead where the soldiers first appeared, but maybe they had targeted him because he carried the submachine gun and they worried about it. Pilar froze on the top step, and they killed her there. Bullets ripped overhead and kicked up dirt as Cassidy and Dylan scrambled under the porch. More slammed into the wood above them as they wormed back under the house. The man on guard at the back of the house ran toward the front. They could see his legs as he turned the corner. He stopped abruptly, crumpled, and lay in the dirt with his rifle a few feet from his outstretched hand. Cassidy looked out into the clearing. Conchi was facedown in the fire and one of the rebels lay across her legs. The other managed to fire a couple of shots that checked the rush of soldiers. Then he was cut down.
Cassidy and Dylan belly crawled under the house through the cobwebs and dirt. Shots banged into the walls above them. They crawled out the other side and ran across the ten yards of clearing with the house between them and the soldiers and plunged into the jungle. They kept going until they were well away from the house and then went to ground.
* * *
The afternoon sun filtered through the trees, throwing light and shadows on the bodies sprawled in the mud of the trail. They had been dead for a long time, probably since within the hour of when they had left the camp that morning, and the birds and insects and small animals had already begun the work of cleanup. The ambushers had stripped them of weapons and had turned their pockets out, maybe searching for the intelligence prizes of identification or indiscreet diaries, notes of plans, but also because looting is the privilege of the victors. The ambush site was easy to read. The army had been in cover on the high side of the trail with a clear field of fire. They had put blocking positions at either end of the trail section to prevent flight. The thing must have been over in seconds, the sudden blast of shots, the confusion and screaming. Then they came down and finished off the wounded one by one with a bullet to the head. Armando lay on his back in the middle of the trail, his arms crossed on his chest. A bullet had smashed one lens of his glasses.
“Nobody on point. All bunched up together again. Walking down the trail like a Sunday-afternoon stroll. What did I tell them? Why didn’t they listen?” Why did their carelessness make him angry? They were people he had known only a little, people who had looked at him with suspicion. Why should it matter to him that they had thrown away all that they were and all they ever would be?
There was no way to bury the dead, nothing to be done. They set off down the trail. An hour later they ran into a patrol of bearded men in mismatched fatigues. The leader embraced Dylan and said, “Selena, we heard you were in the mountains. We came to find you.”
4
Carlos Ribera’s house was in Vedado, a suburb of Havana developed for the rich in the mid-1800s. The house looked out to the sea and was cooled by ocean breezes, God’s benefit to those who could afford the real estate, as Ribera sometimes remarked, invoking a deity he dismissed as irrelevant to the anarchist he professed to be. Entry from the crushed shell drive was through massive, iron-strapped wooden doors into an airy, two-story front hall with a wide marble staircase that curved up to the floor above. The hall led to a big interior courtyard paved with Italian tiles where a bronze dolphin balanced on its tail and spewed water from its mouth into a round pool where lilies floated. There were plants in clay pots, flowers of every color, and three palm trees whose green crowns overgrew the red tiled roof. And there were Ribera’s sculptures. Some were abstract tangles of metal and wood, some stone heads, roughly chiseled, the features beginning to appear as if forcing their way out to the surface of the stone. And there was one startlingly realistic bronze nude of a woman.
Ribera had been Dylan’s employer in New York five years ago, and Cassidy had met him then. She had welded his metal sculptures with a skill learned as a child while working in a Russian tank factory during World War II. Ribera, a Cuban, was a self-declared Marxist-anarchist, and a self-declared genius artist. He had worldwide reputation as a painter and sculptor. It was harder to tell about his politics. He took positions to provoke and to annoy, to tip people off balance about who he was and what he truly thought. He had told Cassidy in New York that he was not a Communist, that the dictatorship of the proletariat was just another dictatorship, but he had provided cover for Dylan and the KGB officer who ran her cell. Two days ago, when they had come down out of the mountains, Dylan had led Cassidy to Ribera’s house. “We’ll be safe there,” she explained, but she did not explain the KGB’s relationship to Ribera.
* * *
“My great-grandfather Oscar Mena built the house in the 1850s,” Ribera said. The evening was a time for iced rum drinks in the courtyard, Dylan in a light silk dress she had found in the closet in their room, and Cassidy in linen trousers and a cotton shirt, softer than any he had ever worn, which, by some magic, fit him perfectly. “It was a time when the people with money were moving to Vedado. The streets in what we now call Old Havana were becoming too crowded, too egalitarian. What was the point of having money if you were to be jostled by the great unwashed every time you left your house?” Ribera raised a hand, and a serving man in black trousers and a white shirt brought a new silver pitcher rattling with ice and beaded with moisture, and took away the one from the table in front of them. “Oscar had made a great deal of money. He was in the sugar trade when the economics of slavery made that very lucrative indeed. Nothing better for the profit margin than owning the labor.” He smiled to indicate his irony.
A serving woman brought a plate of grilled shrimp and lime and left it on the table without a word.
“Great-grandfather Oscar was something of a revolutionary himself, though not, my dear,” a nod to Dylan, “one that you would have approved of. Spain was going to enforce its laws against slavery, and Oscar and his planter friends who depended on slaves thought it might be a good idea to annex Cuba to the Confederate States to prolong their way of life. He was encouraged by the woman who held his heart in her hands in those days, an American widow from New Orleans.”
“What happened?’ Dylan asked. She ate a shrimp and threw the tail over her shoulder where it was pounced on by one of the house cats. It was a habit she had picked up from her host.
“There was an uprising. They took an armory in one of the towns south of the city with the full expectation that the general sent to attack them was on their side. It was a miscalculation. They had offered him a title if they won, Duke of Havana, or something. The other side offered cold cash. He turned out to be more a pragmatist than a romantic.”
“And Great-grandfather Oscar?” Cassidy asked. “Paredón?”
“No, no. He was much too grand, related to too many people, and much too rich to shoot. He paid a large fine, which expunged his transgressions, and they asked him not to do it again. He died upstairs in his bed at the age of ninety-three.” He stood. “Let’s go eat. Livia has done something fantastic to a small tuna. You have never tasted anything like it.”
Carlos Ribera was a big man, thick through the shoulders and chest, with a big, square head, heavy chin, bold nose, and a tangle of gray and black curls. His powerful hands were scarred from work with metal and sharp tools. He dressed in guayabera shirts and linen trousers and leather sandals with perfect confidence that his informality would be acceptable wherever he went. His house was overrun by servants. In the days they had been there Cassidy had tried to figure out how many, but he discovered new ones daily. Dylan, champion of the proletariat, was uncomfortable with that, but Ribera laughed off her protest. “I give them employment, shelter, medical benefits, education, things they cannot otherwise have until after the revolution. Do you want me to throw them into the street to protect your dem
ocratic sensibilities?” He laughed at that absurd notion and poured her more wine. He was a man who worked to evade classification.
Ribera had fought in Spain against Franco’s Fascists, and when Cassidy asked him about it, he dismissed it with a few words and a wave of his hand as if to say all wars are the same in their details. “It taught me that you can be on the side of right and still be beaten, that force can defeat ideals, that courage is not always rewarded, bitter truths that I wish I had not learned.”
Their room on the second floor was vast. It had a high ceiling and eight-foot windows that looked out toward the sea and let in the cooling breeze. The floor was dark tile, and there was a gigantic four-poster bed with mosquito netting. A grouping of chairs and a sofa waited in front of a tiled fireplace. The closets held clothes that fit. The bathtub was big enough for both of them, and the towels were large and soft. They made love in the big bed and slept tangled together, and when they woke there was always a tray outside their door with a silver thermos of coffee, because, Ribera said, it was uncivilized to have to come to breakfast and talk without at least a cup of strong coffee to start the engine.
Cassidy carried coffee back to the bed. Dylan stretched till her muscles cracked, pushed herself up against the pillows, and took the cup. “God, I could get used to this.”
“What are the poor people doing today?”
“Hey.” Mild outrage. She took a sip. “Even the coffee tastes better here.”
“Careful, your proletariat sensibilities are slipping.”
“Don’t tell. I consider this a loop out of my real life. I’ll be back to the other soon enough.”
It was the same for him—his life in New York was a distant insubstantial dream. His vacation lasted until January third. Then what would happen? Best not think about it.
He took the cup from her and put it on the table.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting back into bed. I want to go over the dialectics with you, make sure I really understand them.”
“Ooooh, I love it when you talk dirty.” She slipped down in the bed, and he pulled the sheets up over their heads.
* * *
Ribera’s studio was a large, airy, one-story stucco building at the back of the garden. It was fronted by big French doors that opened and wide skylights that pierced the ceiling. Cassidy lay on an old, plush, much-stained sofa, smoking a cigarette and watching Ribera work on a large canvas under one of the skylights. Ribera stood back from the easel and studied the painting, and then picked up a palette knife from the paint-smeared table next to him, slid it through a drift of red, and stroked a bold, broad line on the canvas. He stepped back to study the result, sighed contentedly, and threw the palette knife on the table. “I’m a genius.” He picked up his burning cigar from the ashtray and drew on it till it burned to his satisfaction. “So, the cop and the KGB agent together again. If there is a God, he has a wonderful sense of humor.”
“You knew she was here.”
“Yes. She came by when she first arrived.” Ribera waited for the questions he knew would come.
“Are you still working for the KGB?”
Ribera laughed and waved the accusation away. “I never worked for them. I helped them in New York by giving Dylan a place, but I did not work for them.” A distinction that was important to him.
“Is Castro a Commie?”
“Michael, Michael, Michael, you’ve been infected by the American need to reduce everything to black or white. Democracy or communism. America or Russia. For us it is not so clear, and sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend.”
“And America’s your enemy?”
“America has used and exploited us for fifty years. It has propped up dictators and supported repressive regimes so that American companies could have a peaceful marketplace here. Your country doesn’t give a shit for us. It cares only about the money you can make off us.”
“Do you think the Russians love you?”
“They don’t have to love us, and we don’t have to love them. You don’t have to love everyone you go to bed with. Sometimes you just need the screwing.”
“Hope the Russians don’t give you exactly that.”
* * *
New Year’s Eve.
They drove downtown in Ribera’s stately old Packard limousine with the chauffeur, Miguel, behind glass. The streets boiled with people. The cafés and bars overflowed to the sidewalk. A conga line, twenty men and women, hands on the hips of the one in front, led by drums and guitars and gourd rattles and a man wearing a papier-mâché head of a bull, came out of a side street and blocked traffic as they snaked across and followed the music into the open courtyard of a house hung with garlands of flowers. Through the tinted windows of the Packard, the scene had an underwater quality. Uniformed cops with submachine guns stood in groups at the intersections. Army trucks waited in the plazas, their backs filled with soldiers sitting with guns upright between their knees. SIM Jeeps cruised. For days there had been rumors of a final push by the rebels. It was a song that had been sung before, but it was not going to spoil the fun.
* * *
“No one will look for you on New Year’s Eve, and if they do, they certainly won’t look for you in the places I go,” Ribera said with an assurance that made protest seem craven. They ate at a restaurant in Old Havana with wooden tables, beneath framed sepia photographs of cane workers in ragged straw hats, portly men on horses overseeing them, sailing ships in Havana Harbor, a garden party with women in long dresses shaded by parasols, and men in suits and Panama hats and staring stiffly at the camera. The food was described by Ribera as the food of the people—moros y cristianos, ropa vieja, camarones empanizados, picadillo, platanos—accompanied by two bottles of 1929 Château Latour that Ribera carried in a wicker basket, definitely not a wine of the people. The owner, a thin, smiling woman with hair escaping from its bun like tendrils of gray vines, hugged him when they arrived. He had to stop to hug and kiss people at half the tables on the way to his own. The waiters and waitresses greeted him as a friend. Platters came hot from the kitchen. Water glasses were quickly refilled. A raised eyebrow would bring someone immediately, but no one intruded without being called.
The restaurant was full. Glad cries greeted new arrivals. Conversations were shouted from one table to another. Occasionally there was the sound of breaking glass. There was something desperate beneath the celebration. A dance on the rim of the volcano.
Two men came out of the kitchen and stood near the door until Ribera noticed them. They wore guayabera shirts and cotton pants. They were in their twenties, and they looked out over the room warily. They both were bearded, but their beards were trimmed. Camouflage for a trip to the city? Ribera excused himself and went to talk to them. He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to one of them. The men nodded and went back into the kitchen and Ribera returned to the table and poured the last of the wine into their glasses but said nothing about the men and their mission.
When they left the restaurant an hour later, they heard gunfire. Maybe blocks away, maybe in the next street. Six or seven shots fired quickly, a pause, the ripping reply of a machine gun, then silence.
* * *
“Castro is the first real hope for the people in my life. Oh, many have promised, of course, but in the end it’s the same old story. They talk about The People. They win the election, and suddenly the people are reduced to their friends, their cousins, others with money and power. It will come as a surprise to you, I’m sure, that power tends to corrupt. They get a little taste, and then they want more.” He smiled at Dylan and patted her hand. “Not Castro. Of this, I am sure.”
The Packard moved implacably through the streets. Other cars seemed to give way to its majesty.
“He is a democrat, a true democrat.”
“People say his brother Raúl and that Argentine, Che, are Communists.”
“Fuck people who say this. These are rumors spread by Batista and by peop
le in the American business community who have been feeding off Cuba for a long time and don’t want to stop. No, no. He is a democrat, a true democrat. You will see.”
Dylan looked away and said nothing.
The traffic slowed ahead of them. They crept along at a crawl. Barrels had been placed in the street to funnel cars through a slalom to a roadblock, a striped wooden barrier manned by uniformed police who peered into the cars as they stopped. A pickup truck had been pulled to one side under a streetlight, and two men in work clothes stood by while soldiers searched the back. The Packard advanced car by car.
Dylan shifted nervously in her seat. Cassidy put a hand on hers. He looked out the side windows picking out escape routes, checking for cover. Just in case.
“This is not for us,” Ribera said. “They are not looking for rebels in limousines. This is routine.” But his fingers drummed on the armrest.
The Packard rolled forward a few yards and stopped again. There were two cars in front of it. The one at the barrier was a high prewar Chevrolet with a bulbous trunk. One of the cops talked to the driver through his open window. He pulled away and walked to a gray sedan parked at the side of the road. A moment later Colonel Fuentes got out and walked to the Chevy.
Dylan’s hand clenched under Cassidy’s, and she drew breath in a hiss.
“He knows us,” Cassidy said. “He was Dylan’s jailer at La Cabaña. He knows us both.”
“Mmmmm” was Ribera’s only response.
The car behind was on the Packard’s bumper. There was no way to go but forward.
Fuentes looked in at the driver of the Chevy. The man passed him papers. Fuentes read them, and then handed them to the cop at his elbow and said something. The cop spoke to the driver. After a moment, the Chevy backed up until it touched the bumper of the car behind it. It turned as it went forward, backed again, turned again, maneuvered out of line to a place by the curb. The car in front of the Packard moved forward to the barricade. The Packard followed.
Fuentes walked back to the gray sedan. He leaned against it and lit one of his thin cigars as he watched. The driver got out of the Chevy and opened the trunk, and two soldiers began to search it.
Night Work Page 8