Valley of the Templars ts-7

by Paul Christopher

  “Now?” Eddie said at last. “We must go to see my mother and I must pay my respects to her and tell her I am here.”

  Eddie’s mother lived in a second-floor apartment on the Calle Maloja, a narrow street well off the Avenida Salvador Allende to the north. This was no place of cafés and tourists but something akin to a run-down backstreet somewhere in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

  The colored stucco was broken and old, showing the water-stained limestone beneath, there was a maze of wires and cables running up and down the outer walls and sagging over the street to the other side, and the sidewalks beneath were cracked and broken and clearly hadn’t been repaired since they were put down.

  There were one or two ancient vehicles parked, pulled haphazardly off the street and the archways at the main level, which might once have been home to small businesses that were long since shuttered and locked. Oddly, on the ornate wrought-iron balcony that ran the length of the second story, there was more than one satellite TV dish, poking its seeking parabola toward the bright blue, blazing sky.

  By comparison the inside of Anna Margarita Alfonso’s apartment was pleasant, well appointed with a few pieces of old Victorian-style furniture, framed photographs of her children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles and other ancestors displayed on one pale blue wall.

  Eddie’s mother wore a blue housedress and slippers. She was very slim, her face dark as chocolate, with her son’s aristocratic cheekbones and a narrow patrician nose. Her hair was snow-white and done up in a scrap of cloth. Eddie compared her to the pictures on the wall. Two photographs in particular caught Holliday’s eye—a wedding photograph of a young man in his early thirties, very dark, and his even darker-skinned bride in a blazing white dress standing on the steps of some official-looking building, both figures looking ecstatically happy.

  Parked to one side at the foot of the steps was a gigantic black 1960 Cadillac Special with whitewall tires and a raised wheel well set into the front fender, dating the photograph easily enough. The other picture showed the same striking black woman in a dramatic poses, backlit and wearing the maid’s costume of Dolores in the Spanish opera of the same name.

  On the other wall was a large plasma TV. A silent man in his seventies or eighties wearing a grimy wife-beater was sitting in what looked to be the original Barcalounger drinking from a tall brown bottle of Bucanero beer and smoking cheap veguero cigarettes. He was watching Miami channel 7.

  “My teo, Fidelio. He used to work for the garbage, but he was let go two years ago. He comes here because my mother has a big TV and the satellite.”

  “How the hell did she get a plasma TV? I thought the whole country was starving to death.”

  “Her nephew Victor, my cousin, works for Air Cubana. They can bring back anything. In Cuba you have to know people,” Eddie explained.

  Eddie embraced his mother. “Madre,” he said softly.

  “Mi niño hermoso!” she wailed, and burst into tears. They stood like that for a moment and then she pushed Eddie away and slapped him lightly across his broadly smiling tearstained face. “Whay no han visitado a su madre en tan largo tiempo?”

  Holliday didn’t need a translation. Teo Fidelio noticed nothing. Eddie’s mother turned to Holliday.

  “Y qué es su amigo?”

  Eddie made the introductions. His mother answered in excellent English.

  “You are a doctor?” Anna Margarita Alfonso asked.

  “Se trata de un apodo, Mama,” explained Eddie.

  “You were a soldier? You look like you were a soldier,” she said, eyeing him carefully, especially the eye patch and the new slash of gray above the scar on his temple.

  “I was.” He nodded.

  “An American?”

  “Yes.” He nodded again, glancing at Eddie.

  “You come here to fight Fidel?”

  “He is my friend, Mother. He has saved my life more than once.”

  “Tranquillo, niño,” the old woman said, admonishing her son. She turned back to Holliday. “You come here to fight Fidel?”

  “I came here to find Eddie’s brother, Domingo.”

  “Aye, Domingo!” wailed the woman, and launched into another bout of tears. She slumped down on an old overstuffed couch against the wall full of pictures and dropped her head into her hands. Eddie sat down beside her and put a comforting arm around her shoulder.

  “Mama, Mama, we will find him,” he soothed.

  “Your brother was a fool!”

  Teo Fidelio broke wind, lit another cigarette and switched to channel 6. America’s Got Talent.

  “Why was he a fool, Mama?”

  “Because he thought working for them would protect him when…the Comandante died.”

  “Who is them, Mama?”

  “The people who run this country, Edimburgo. The people who have always run the country. Fidel was one, Raul another, and Domingo thought they’d let him join if he worked for them. When the end came we would all be protected.”

  “Who, Mama? You must tell us who these people are if we are to find Domingo.”

  “The families.”

  “What families?” Eddie urged, exasperated.

  “The old families. The families going back to Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar. The Ten Families.”

  “How do you know all this, Mama?”

  “Because when I was a girl I did the laundry in the house of Ramon Grau and many other wealthy families in Havana. A black laundry girl was invisible. I saw and heard a great many things and I remembered. The Ten Families might have different names now, but they still rule Cuba with an iron fist.”

  “The Knights of the Brotherhood of Christ,” whispered Holliday. “The Spanish Templars!”

  Eddie’s mother made a hissing sound and waggled her long, gnarled fingers in some strange ritual motion, then quickly crossed herself on both chest and forehead. “There is no Christ in these people—they go to La Templete to make their three circles around the ceiba tree. They are devils!”

  “Ceiba tree?” Holliday asked.

  “I will explain later,” said the Cuban. The old lady looked as though she was going to have a fit. Eddie laid a calming hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Mama, tranquillo, tranquillo.…” He turned to Holliday. “It is like your friend in Toronto said, Doc. Fidel’s family were named Vazquez. They came from Lancara in Galicia. Galicia borders Portugal. They were sailors and conquistadores.”

  “Sí.” The old woman nodded. “The devils met at La Templete. Domingo thought they would protect us. The fool, the fool!” she wailed again.

  “What happened?” Eddie asked.

  “I do not know,” said Eddie’s mother, weeping openly. Teo Fidelio appeared not to notice. He lit yet another cigarette and sighed a huge cloud of smoke toward the plasma TV. Eddie’s mother wiped her tears away on her apron and spoke again. “I only know that Domingo said if there was any trouble you were to go and see Leonid.”

  “Leonid?” Holliday asked.

  “Leonid Maximenko,” said Eddie. “Which means my brother is in very bad trouble.”

  6

  Leonid Maximenko lived in Atares, a barrio, or slum, on the western edge of a low hill that overlooked the southeastern end of Havana Harbor. The barrio was named for the stone fort that still stood on the summit of the hill. The bottom of the hill was skirted by the multiple tracks and switch points of the Christina Railway Station.

  The barrio itself was enclosed by Avenue de Mexico Cristina on the east, Arroyo Atares on the north, Avenue de Maximo Gomez on the west and Calzada de Infanta to the south. Fifty square blocks or so encompassed some of the poorest and most wretched people of Havana; it was not a district often mentioned in any of the guidebooks.

  Maximenko lived on Calle Fernandina, roughly in the center of the area. The residence was a barabacoa, a word originally meaning grill or barbecue, but in the barrios it meant a two- or three-story building subdivided with extra wooden floors and rooms that are invisible
from the street. Maximenko’s room was on the top floor of a crumbling building reached by a narrow set of stairs that wound its way upward, past a dark shared toilet with no cover and a pile of torn pieces of newspaper on a bench beside it and an open area that was clearly some kind of communal kitchen. Smoke from a makeshift brick stove and oven went up through a series of rusted stovepipes directly through a rough-sawn hole in the wooden floor, presumably venting outdoors. Several older women were cooking simultaneously while a gaggle of crying, laughing children dressed in scraps of clothing milled around their skirts playing some kind of game. In one corner of the room an old iron bed had been set up with a thin mattress and was occupied by an elderly man in a grayish diaper and nothing else. His eyes were the blind white of cataracts and the right side of his face sagged like putty.

  Eddie and Holliday kept climbing.

  “Viva la revolución,” snorted Eddie.

  “I thought Fidel made sure everyone was equal in his great society.”

  “Some of us were more equal than others,” said Eddie.

  “Where do they come from?”

  “They’ve always been here, mi colonel,” sighed Eddie.

  Maximenko’s room had bare walls, the plaster rotted down to the stone and mortar that had made up the outer shell of the building for two hundred years. The floor was covered in small, cracked and broken diamond-shaped ceramic tiles that were a faded turquoise color. There were four pieces of furniture in the room, a bed like the one on the floor below, a sagging couch with no feet, a wooden card table that held a green-labeled half-empty bottle of Santero Aguardiente, a cloudy plastic drinking glass, a package of Populars, a book of matches and a tin ashtray. Beside the table was an ancient-looking Victorian cracked green leather chair that looked as if it might have belonged in a men’s club a hundred years ago. There was a small window at the far end of the room that looked out on a courtyard crisscrossed with hanging lines of laundry.

  Sprawled in the chair, asleep and snoring, his head thrown back and his mouth open, was a large man in his late sixties with the ruddy complexion of a heavy drinker, presumably Maximenko. He was wearing a pair of filthy cotton pants, a stained and equally filthy guayabera and a pair of bright pink rubber flip-flops. His toenails were crusted and thick as horns and his feet were dark with grime. His hair, what Holliday could see of it, was long, stringy and gray. Bad hygiene or not, the man had a barrel chest, bulging biceps and huge ham hands that looked as though he could have cracked walnuts with them. Once upon a time Maximenko had been a powerful man.

  “Leonid!” Eddie said sharply. Maximenko didn’t move. “Leonid!” Eddie called again. Holliday saw the man’s eyelids flutter and his snoring changed its rhythm slightly. “Leonid!” Eddie called a third time. One of Maximenko’s hands slipped between his heavy thigh and the side of the chair and came up holding an ancient-looking Tokarev semiautomatic. He sat up, coughing up something nasty and then swallowing it again. “Pochemu vy ne mozhete pozvolit’ starym spat’ chelovek?”

  “Because you’re not sleeping—you are drunk,” said Eddie, speaking English for Holliday’s benefit.

  “Kto poluslepo odin?” Maximenko growled, looking at Holliday. The Russian expatriate poured half a glass from the green bottle, swallowed it like medicine and lit a cigarette.

  Eddie spoke. “He is my friend, Leonid, and be polite. Speak English.”

  “Who are you?” Maximenko asked Holliday, wetly clearing his throat.

  “A friend of Eddie’s.”

  “You sound American.”

  “I am.”

  “You fought in wars, yes? You look like you fought in wars.”

  “A few.”

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “Afghanistan,” said Holliday, not bothering to explain the idiotic accident that had taken the sight from his right eye. Besides, with the scar from the attack at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, the wound looked much fiercer than it really was.

  Maximenko grinned around the fuming cigarette and used one hand to pull the Cuban shirt up over his expansive belly. The Tokarev didn’t waver in his other hand. A thick keloid scar snaked through the wiry gray hair from his navel halfway to his armpit. “Fucking mujahideen and those Stinger missiles you gave them,” he said, smiling. “A piece of the Flying Tank I was sitting in did that,” he said almost proudly. “An illiterate peasant with a goat for a wife shoots down the most sophisticated helicopter gunship in the world.” He pulled down his shirt. “The Taliban are still using them.” He laid the Tokarev on the table beside the bottle as though the comparison of war wounds had made them friends. “What is your name?”

  “Holliday. My friends call me Doc.”

  Maximenko nodded sagely. “The dentist gunfighter with tuberculosis. Best episode of Star Trek ever. ‘Specter of the Gun,’ twenty-five October 1968, Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon. Very surreal, like a Chekhov play. You see it?”

  It was Holliday’s turn to smile. “In reruns a hundred times. I was in Vietnam when it aired originally.”

  “Vietnam!” Maximenko said with a barking laugh. “In 1776 the Americans are the guerrilla fighters and the British are the imperialist colonial war machine. Two hundred years later the war is fought again but with the Americans as the imperialists and the Vietcong as the guerrillas. We never learn, do we?”

  “It seems that way,” said Holliday.

  There was a short silence. Finally Maximenko spoke up. “You didn’t come to this shit hole to talk to me about old war wounds and tell stories. Why are you seeing Leonid Maximenko in his retirement home?”

  “Domingo,” Eddie answered.

  “Domingo is an idiot,” said Maximenko.

  “You were KGB in Cuba until 1989—you know people,” Eddie insisted.

  “I defected,” said Maximenko. He poured another glass of Aguardiente and swallowed it down noisily as though he were drinking mouthwash. He butted his cigarette and lit another. “I retired. I saw the handwriting on the wall, but I saw it too late—call it what you want, but I cannot help you now. I’m too old. I’m out of touch.”

  “What do you know about the Ten Families, about the Knights of the Brotherhood of Christ?” Holliday asked.

  “I know enough not to say their name too loudly,” the Russian answered.

  “My brother has disappeared, Leonid. I must find him,” pleaded Eddie.

  “Forget Domingo. Forget he ever existed,” said Maximenko. “Believe me, it would be better for all of us.”

  “You know I can’t do that, Leonid. I must find him. You worked with him at the Ministry of the Interior. You worked with him at that place in El Cano…you must know something.”

  “What were you doing, listening at keyholes? No one was supposed to know about the El Cano unit.”

  “I was only a niño. No one paid attention to me, but I had ears. And none of this matters. What matters to me is my brother, Domingo. I must find him.”

  “I cannot help you.” The Russian shrugged.

  “Can’t or won’t?” Holliday said. Maximenko threw him a dark look, then turned back to Eddie.

  “All I can tell you is this—his last job at the ministry was as bodyguard and driver for Deborah Castro Espin.”

  Eddie looked horrified. “La madre que te parió!”

  “Who’s she?” Holliday asked.

  “I tell you later, compadre,” answered his friend. Eddie turned back to Maximenko. “You still have your motocicleta?”

  “In the courtyard.”

  “We need to borrow it.”

  “Take it; that much I can do for you.” He dug around in the pocket of his grimy cotton trousers and then tossed Eddie a set of keys. By the time they left his room, he was snoring again.

  The motorcycle turned out to be a massive Soviet Ural Cossack with a sidecar. The bike was a nondescript army gray-green and it was so old it still had the mount for the MG42 ShKAS machine gun and a cradle for the sidecar passenger’s Mosin-Nagant rifle.

 
; “We’re really going to ride around in this?” Holliday said, trying not to laugh.

  “There are hundreds of these in Havana. Leftovers from la Invasión Rusa. They are very often seen on the streets of Havana. We need something to give us…mobility? As I told you, taking taxis is dangerous.”

  “We can’t park this at the Hotel Nacional.”

  “I know a waiter there. Give him twenty dollars and he will protect it better than he would his own mother.” Eddie grinned and climbed onto the heavily sprung saddle. He fitted one of the keys Maximenko had given to him into the ignition, stood up on the starter pedal and then slammed down on it. The eight-hundred-cubic-centimeter engine roared into life. “Into the sidecar, my friend, and I will take you for a ride.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Holliday.

  The sleek pearl white Piaggio P180 Avanti turboprop landed on the private paved airstrip a mile from Lake Carroll, Illinois, and taxied to a stop. As its two Pratt & Whitney engines spooled down, the door behind the cockpit opened, the automatic steps hissed down into place and a uniformed steward silently assisted a thin and aging Katherine Sinclair to the ground, then opened the door of the waiting Escalade and helped the woman inside. The black SUV with the dark-tinted windows quickly pulled away, leaving the steward on the tarmac. A few moments later the Escalade turned behind the rudimentary automated control tower and disappeared. The pilot of the executive aircraft joined the steward on the tarmac, and both men lit cigarettes.

  “What a bitch,” said the steward.

  “No kidding,” agreed the pilot.

  The northern corporate headquarters and training facility for Blackhawk Security Systems was located eight miles from the airstrip. It was a six-thousand-acre parcel of land in the hill country north of Mount Carroll, Illinois, and was almost completely uninhabited.

  Officially known as the Compound, the facility comprised five separate shooting ranges, three outside and two enclosed, a live-fire course, three obstacle courses, a rock wall–climbing course, four “conflict reproductions,” including a war-torn urban area, an underground bunker and an Afghani-style hilltop firebase.