by Paul Vidich
He saw the officer strike again. She was too small, too frail, too childlike to resist. The sight stirred him from his complacency. He turned away from the girl, but her screams continued. Mueller cursed the impulse that rose in him. He had trained to be indifferent, to be cautious, to inure himself to the terrible things in the world.
“Enough,” he said. He stood tall, dignified, a surprising authority over the stocky officer. “She is a girl. Una joven.”
The officer, startled at the intervention, paused to take the measure of the man challenging him.
“She did nothing,” Mueller said, seeing he had the officer’s attention.
The officer gave Mueller a blasphemous look that said he could do what he wanted to the girl. She had already hunched over against the coming blow. Mueller grabbed the officer’s forearm and stopped his swing from landing.
He was promptly arrested. Tan-uniformed SIM surrounded Mueller and handcuffed him. He tried to be calm as he was dragged to the paddy wagon and placed among other handcuffed men. Mueller saw the girl lying on the sidewalk like a broken doll. He also saw Frank Pryce, who’d seen the whole episode from the bar. He stood in the doorway, arms akimbo. His face had a flat expression that revealed the burden of his contempt.
Gray light in the paddy wagon was extinguished when the double doors were slammed shut. Faces of men inside were illuminated only with the cab’s peephole. The closeness of their bodies, dank with sweat and rain, made the men less human. Faces around Mueller were grim, eyes wide, fear palpable. The man across from Mueller had the toughened expression of a prisoner rallying courage against coming indignities. Mueller saw he was the same man who’d jumped from his seat like a jack-in-the-box.
Mueller knew there was nothing to do but allow himself to go through with the arrest. Press credentials in his pocket would provide some measure of protection.
Mueller recalled Pryce’s comment that the country had to burn a little. It was the sort of thing Toby Graham would say, to justify the violence. Graham had always been one of those men whose dedication to work took him into the darkness, and as a matter of course, doing the work he did, he brought some measure of darkness into himself. How do you keep the darkness from consuming your humanity? Mueller had seen it, he’d feared it, avoided it, and he recognized it. There were rumors about Graham. Terrible things he’d organized, administered, deployed, carried out in Guatemala. Did he have a hand in this?
3
* * *
HOTEL NACIONAL
“SHE WAS a dopey blonde.”
Mueller sat on a sofa in the Hotel Nacional’s vast marble lobby with an espresso that he sipped parsimoniously to play out the little drink for his conversation with the woman at his side, who flipped photographs of her portfolio and accompanied each with a remark. He leaned forward to get a better look at the bikini model at the wheel of the pink Cadillac convertible. He tried his best to be impressed.
The photographer wore cuffed pants, camouflage utility vest, and a 35mm silver Leica around her shoulder, like a handbag. She had a boyish body, a wisp of a woman whose sunglasses were entirely too large for her face, and a ponytail. “She wouldn’t cooperate. It’s about the car, I told her, but she kept acting as if it was about her face.”
Mueller was subdued. He tried to see merit in the way the breeze had caught the model’s hair to convey the charm of a luxury car, and in the next photo he pretended to like how a cigarette in a woman’s poised fingers captured her sex. He listened to the photographer explain how her work in advertising made her competent to capture the spirit of Havana. Mueller wanted an honest picture of the city to accompany his article, he said, and he wanted to know how the glossy tear sheets were evidence of her eye for grit.
Suddenly, Mueller heard his name called. He looked across the crowded lobby, eyes sweeping the archipelago of rush chairs that dotted the room. His name again, brightly spoken, clear like struck crystal. There she was at the bank of French doors open to the gardens and a view of the Caribbean. She stood by a weeping palm just inside a half circle of chest-high sandbags.
“George!”
Her hand was raised above her head, and she was motionless, like a statue. She wore snug jodhpurs that flared at the hip and a blindingly bright blouse that filled with sea breeze. Her face was tan and thinned by tropical heat and she looked right at Mueller. When she saw that she’d caught his eye her hand waved vibrantly.
“We were so worried.” She stopped short of him, face beaming, ambivalent about how close to get. She took him in, the whole of him, and her hand covered her mouth. A short gasp escaped her lips. “What’s that?”
“This?” Mueller’s hand touched an angry bump above his eye crowned with a cut closed with several stitches. “They couldn’t resist getting in a good shot before they let me go.” He lifted his bruised hand. “It’s nothing. The embassy has a doctor on call who came to my hotel. He said if they wanted to hurt me I’d be in the morgue. I’ll live. How are you?”
Her hand came off her face. “That’s terrible.”
“Terribly lucky.”
“You didn’t mention it on the phone.”
“Doubtful what you see be true unless confirmed with ocular proof.”
“Oh, stop it, George. This is serious. You haven’t changed a bit. Same smug humor. Hug me.”
Mueller took Liz Malone in his arms, sweeping her up in a brief friendly hug she was returning. The drama of the lobby, the excitement of the reunion, and her glowing smile stirred his memory of their old entanglements. They looked in each other’s eyes, fixed and staring for a moment. She suddenly pulled away, uncomfortable. She stepped back and spoke politely. “Jack pulled every string he could to free you. He called up Washington. He got the ambassador involved. He made a big stink.”
Mueller was suddenly aware they were not alone. His training prepared him to know everything about a room while pretending only to see the person he spoke to, and he felt a presence behind before the hand touched his shoulder.
“Chico, how are you?”
Mueller was face-to-face with a broadly smiling Jack Malone. The man’s fingers worked a hard massage into Mueller’s muscles in the unwanted way of an old friend acting out a college locker room greeting. Jack nicknamed everyone he met as a way of owning a relationship. Mueller had always hated being called Chico.
“You got yourself into a big fix, old boy. You’re lucky I got you out before they wired your balls to a generator. Or put a bullet in your head. One dead American is all the pretext the embassy needs to call in the marines.”
Mueller smiled. The same old Jack, he thought. Likable and unlikable in equal measure, but always predictable, and in the long years of an acquaintance there was something to be said for knowing he hadn’t changed. They’d circled each other freshman year wary of their different backgrounds, which acted like repelling magnets, Mueller the product of public school and Jack the Texas boy sent to New England prep schools by a New York socialite mother who had been dragged to Houston by her oil man husband. Mueller had been drawn to Jack’s big personality, so different from his own reserve. The ruddy color in Jack’s face had been there in college and never left—perhaps because he spent so many summers in the hot Texas sun and now, years later, his features were set and he would be that way until he died. His red hair might fade without turning gray, and his skin tone lighten, but his face would look the same. He was a tall man, with a classic build, who’d been good at sports in school and kept his body fit with a rancher’s active life. He knew he was attractive to women. Mueller had seen it in college and that idea of himself persisted after marriage. Mueller had seen it coming after Liz and Jack married young and a decade passed without children. He’d seen Jack’s affinity for pretty young girls—and Jack had been open about it in private conversations over drinks, when they talked about their lives. He said he liked the company of young women. They amused him, he said, diverted him, stimulated him.
“You’re safe now,” Jack said.
“For the moment at least. Don’t think you can play God here. Different rules.” Jack embraced his old friend and took a step back to observe Mueller. “So,” he said. “What is it you said brought you down?”
“Writing an article.”
“Who for?”
“Holiday.”
“I’ve heard of them. Still trying to turn bored freshmen into brilliant thinkers? Or you give up that too?”
Mueller felt old grudges stir.
“Oh, come on, George, lighten up. Let’s get a drink. Girls, let’s have a drink. We need to get you out to the ranch. You’ll see the other Cuba.”
Same old Jack, Mueller thought again. Loud, pugnacious, confident, thinking he was more charming than he was. There was no social gathering not made better by alcohol. When the drinks came he lifted his scotch whiskey. “To your health, George. What’s left of it.” He nodded at the wound. “They don’t like to be interfered with. Fortunately, the men who run things here are practical.”
Liz smiled. “You mean they can be bribed.”
Jack shrugged off the insinuation. “He’s free, that’s what matters. He’s free and he’s safe.” To Mueller: “The ambassador is a dilettante, but he owed me a favor so he helped with the head of the secret police. They don’t call themselves secret police. That doesn’t sound good in a democracy. They’re call SIM, pronounced SEEM. I played you up as an important correspondent whom they wouldn’t want to piss off. I told them they didn’t need the scandal of you, George, found in a morgue hitting the front pages of America’s finest newspapers. Reporter murdered by Batista’s police. They got the point.”
The men talked politics for a moment. “Ten bombs across Havana timed to go off when that song played on the radio. No one wants to say Batista’s army was defeated badly, but they were. Had their lunch handed to them.” Jack whispered confidentially, “People are nervous.”
More drinks had been served, Jack had lit a Macanudo, and the conversation had turned suddenly to America. Throughout the wandering discussion Jack dominated with loud opinions on American interests and the Cuban identity. “It’s a country that can’t shake off the paralyzing influence of the mob and Las Vegas. Let’s go to a show. We’ll all go and we’ll feel better. You need to see it to write about it.”
Mueller saw Liz had sunk into the sofa, morose and quiet, and waved off her husband’s gamy cigar smoke. She took a small, colorful paper napkin and absentmindedly folded it in halves, quarters, and eighths. Suddenly she turned the full force of her attention to the photographer who sat opposite and was a patient witness to the reunion.
“So you’ve met,” Liz said, catching Mueller’s eyes. “I’m glad. Katie is a fantastic photographer. She’ll be perfect for you. She’s done advertising and now she wants to do life. She got that photograph of the married mobster coming out of the Capri with his girlfriend that the New York tabloids made front-page news.”
“Now she’s famous,” Jack said.
Katie smiled. “I’m too busy to be famous.”
“That’s a good line,” Jack said. “Who’d you get it from?”
Liz looked at Mueller. “So, you’ve hired her. You won’t be disappointed. I’ve known Katie forever. Since college. God, that feels like forever. She’s always been the ambitious one.”
Mueller looked at Katie. “We’ll give it a try.”
Jack had his scotch refilled by one of the vigilant waiters who came off a rank of servers standing at the ready by the bar. Smiling men working hard to mask contempt and all alike in white shirts, black pants, and garroting bow ties. Jack looked right at Mueller. “Frank Pryce. Know him? He asked a lot of questions. Wanted to know if you were a stand-up guy.”
“What’s a stand-up guy?”
“Why would he think you weren’t one?”
“Who?” This from Liz.
“George,” Jack said. “I’m talking about George.”
Mueller paused. “I think I was in his face.”
Jack mocked. “You, George, in someone’s face?”
“What happened?” Liz asked.
“George has made an enemy here. Didn’t take you long, did it. He said you were waiting in El Floridita. The whole thing happened in the rainstorm. You were there to meet a man.”
Mueller raised an eyebrow.
Jack leaned forward. “You were there asking about a man named Graham. Toby Graham.”
Liz was suddenly alert. “Who?” She looked at Mueller with strange, wide eyes.
“Graham,” Jack said offhandedly. “His name is Toby Graham.” He looked at his wife. “Do you know him?”
Color had left Liz’s cheeks and the pallor of sudden surprise gradually faded.
Jack stared at his wife for a moment, but when she didn’t answer he addressed Mueller. “You were asking questions about him.”
“An old acquaintance,” Mueller said. “Like you, Jack. A year before us. Skull and Bones.” Mueller looked at Liz, who gazed back, taking in everything he’d said, and Mueller paused in thought. He saw Liz take in the name and he saw she’d been startled, as if a dead man had been resurrected.
“You know him?” Jack asked again.
“I can’t imagine I do,” Liz whispered. She slumped in the sofa, gave a bright, vacant look of apology, leaned forward again, uncomfortable, and commenced to carelessly flip pages of the portfolio that lay open on the coffee table.
Jack brooked Liz’s behavior, but he wasn’t oblivious to his wife’s sudden distraction, for he looked directly at Mueller, who felt the attention, and he met Jack’s eyes. Jack nodded at his wife. “She’s under the weather.”
Liz stood. She walked toward the French doors that opened to the gardens. Jack rose to follow her, but he paused and turned to Mueller. “Glad you’re safe, George. Friday night. The Sans Souci. Join us.”
Mueller had always thought Jack and Liz had a complicated, but durable marriage. He’d always been a stray to them, whom they took in on weekends in Washington, D.C., when they’d lived in the same city, or they’d had him over for a midweek meal. As a marital entity they had performed for him. They asked each other’s questions and put up a polite wall around who they were as individuals. Mueller had always been amused by how they pretended to have his best interests at heart when they tried to hook him up with blind dates. Polite dinner conversation on modern art or Washington’s ugly politics, or religion, were just a distraction from the task of finding him a suitable companion.
To have been intimate with Katie Laurent had been a pleasure, but mostly it had been a mistake. Liz insisted they meet, so he felt he had to go through with the evening, and with dinner came her endless questions that passed for conversation. Katie surprised him when she said her wedding ring was a defense against clients’ unwanted advances, and then she removed the ring, and that was the start of her seduction. The next morning, he said they should put their night of tropical besottedness behind them and stick to a professional relationship. They both seemed to know that they would make better colleagues than lovers. She’d given him what she thought he expected of a freelance photographer—and done with the sex they could relax and get on with the work. He found her appealing in the odd way of his complicated cycle of want—not wanting her, getting her, and then, to his surprise, wanting her. What fascinated him was her ambition. He knew that a romance would not end well.
Katie watched Liz leave, and she watched Jack try to catch up. She confided to Mueller, “I think he’s cheating on her.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know her name. She’s a dancer at the Sans Souci.”
“Jack?”
“Yes, Jack. I am talking about Jack.”
Later, back at his hotel room, Mueller cleaned his head wound with peroxide and dabbed it dry. He saw in his reflection the angry cut that had shocked Liz and in the moment he chastised himself for thinking he could make a difference. The country has to burn a little.
Mueller again tried to reach Graham on the telephone. It was his
third try. The number he had, the one he had called for their one conversation, rang and rang. He called again, careful to dial correctly, and he got the same endless ringing. Each ring went off in his mind like an alarm. He looked at the receiver in his hand and then set it down in its black cradle, perplexed.
4
* * *
A BODY APPEARS
THE SWIMMING pool on the grounds of the Hotel Capri was more like a pond than the crystal blue pool set against a tableau of sunbathers that appeared on the hotel’s promotional brochure. A pond in the shape of a turtle made of tiny azure glass tiles. The body was near the deep end where a mature algarrobo tree cast its cooling shadow.
“Is it a porpoise?”
Mueller had heard that remark in Frank Pryce’s summary of the police interviews among surprised hotel guests who had come down for a morning swim and seen the floating object.
Pryce’s call had roused Mueller from bed and he’d gotten him to come over by taxi for a chat, but Mueller knew very well that Pryce’s use of the word “chat” was code for something more serious. There was still the requirement that they cooperate, but after the incident in El Floridita, it was less clear how they would succeed. On the way over in the taxi it occurred to Mueller that under the guise of a chat Pryce intended to scold Mueller for not informing him he was meeting Graham, and perhaps he was going to be dressed down for his uncooperative attitude. There was no point in avoiding Pryce. Sooner or later they’d have to establish a working relationship.
“That’s it,” Pryce said to Mueller, pointing. They were together poolside at the opposite end, away from the crowd. Pryce recounted how the pool keeper had looked in the direction of the gray, bloated object and reassured the startled woman who’d asked the question.
“Funny,” Pryce had said to Mueller, “if it weren’t so absurd. How could a porpoise get into a pool a quarter mile from the ocean?”
Summer heat was melting the blacktop on the edge of the patio where they stood away from the water. The bright sun blinded him and washed color from the cabañas. Mueller saw pink shrimp bodies of hotel guests crowded around the pool area as the sun burned down on the bloated object, human only in the clothing that had swollen.