by Paul Vidich
Mueller smiled at the insult. Self-deprecation was a strategy too. He knew better than to allow spite to jeopardize a deceit. “Well, then we’ve got that settled, haven’t we?”
“Settled?”
“We know where we stand. We distrust each other. That will make it easier to work together.”
Pryce took a moment to laugh. “I like you, George. I like your sense of humor. Dry like ice.” Pryce leaned back in his chair, exciting a crack in the joinery, and then came forward toward Mueller. “You’ll appreciate this.” He pushed the morning’s English-language newspaper across the table.
Mueller saw the headline: “Capitalist Pigs.” He read how rebels of the July 26th Movement had released ten hogs in the Sans Souci casino during a crowded floor show. Pandemonium ensued.
“Someone’s idea of a joke,” Pryce said.
“The headline or the incident?”
“Both,” Pryce said. “Batista tortures children. Rebels stage political theater. Humor, George, a tactical weapon in the battle for hearts and minds. Bombs help. And rifles.”
Mueller pondered what point he was making. He pushed the newspaper back across the table. “And?”
“There is no and. It’s easy to be sympathetic to the rebels. That’s the point.”
Mueller looked at Pryce. There was a beat of silence.
“Are you?”
Mueller allowed himself to smile. “Is that what this is about?”
“Let me show you something.”
They left the embassy together. It was near midnight. This was Frank Pryce. Newly appointed FBI attaché serving the ambassador and making a name for himself with long hours. He took up his position in Havana at the request of the head of the FBI, accepting a lower post, but a sensitive one, to become a trusting set of eyes and ears for certain powerful men in Washington. And there was more Mueller had gotten from Lockwood. Pryce made a name for himself in the FBI’s antimob campaigns, leading investigations into corrupt gambling in Nevada, getting his picture in the newspaper when he made surprise arrests. He epitomized the FBI’s cop mentality and its rigid policing, and he was of that early generation of government agent who thought himself incorruptible. He was good at making arrests, but not so good at playing out cases for the longer view of counterintelligence. Three years before, he’d moved inexplicably to the FBI’s operations in Mexico when it was one of the few overseas operations the FBI was allowed to retain after the CIA took over in Costa Rica, Honduras, Haiti, Brazil, and Venezuela. He committed a bureaucratic act of war in Caracas, destroying files, rolling up networks, and abandoning cases, before turning the office over to the CIA. Mueller’s soundings on Pryce, from Lockwood and his own sources, were mixed at best. “Bagman for the top man, but a quick study. Carries a copy of the Constitution.” And from a State Department G-15, who was in a position to know. “Very cooperative when he needs to be.” And when he doesn’t? “Well, he can be a poke in the eye. It’s all about the law. Being on one side of it.”
A taxi dropped them at a dark alley in Old Havana that curved past the colonial Custom House. Cobblestones in the street were bisected by an open channel, wide and foul, and as it was dimly lit, they didn’t know if the smell was waste or death. In the dark there was laughter, music, and loud voices that erupted from suddenly opened doors and then silenced when the doors slammed shut. Two Americans stumbled from a bar, boisterous and exuberant with drink, making horrible uncouth sounds, howling and wailing in the night, pretending to box. The pretense vanished when an insult begat injury, and playful slapping got violent.
Pryce groaned his disgust. Taking Mueller’s arm he led him farther into the alley’s darkness, toward the harbor, and as they rounded one corner, the sounds of conflict grew faint and Mueller felt a great silence around them, pierced only by the quickening pace of their footsteps.
“In here,” Pryce said.
They had arrived at a stone façade of arched openings faced with iron grates from which cool air flowed into the torpid evening. The warehouse brooded in amber light cast by a single streetlamp. It was located with obvious logic facing the narrow harbor channel and the jutting quay, deserted at that late hour except for a restless dog moving in the shadows and a cream-colored Packard sedan with chrome trim. The driver sat in the dark.
Mueller followed Pryce through a doorway and found himself in a large space with a ceiling of skylights. Moonlight provided illumination to look around and gauge the emptiness of the place. A forklift held the center of the room with its quiet, monumental coldness. Before it, like an offering, a pallet that held a long rectangular crate, its coarse surface a crude wooden sarcophagus. Mueller felt the presence of a third man before he heard footsteps. A door had opened, closed, and a short, thin man approached from the darkness. He was swarthy but dressed in white—pale skinny tie, ivory suit, and cream shoes. The only color was a crimson pocket square. He carried a black crowbar in his hands, and his eyes were unkind.
“This is Mickey Ruden. Open it,” he instructed.
A great aching screech of nails pulled from unyielding wood came when the crowbar pried the lid, which came off with the ease of a thing that had been opened before. Ruden dropped the crowbar to the concrete floor and the clang reverberated in the warehouse.
Mueller saw the guns. New M1 Garand rifles packed in protective oilskin. Pryce handed one to Mueller, who refused it. What was the point of holding a rifle? He was uncomfortable in the presence of embargoed goods.
“He found them on a fishing boat in the harbor. They came from a DC-3 that landed near Nuevitas. His guys got a tip from the harbormaster. They were stolen from an arms depot at Fort Rucker in Alabama, then sold into the international arms market, bought in Vienna, and shipped here. No one filed off the serial numbers.” Pryce raised his eyebrow. “It’s just the sort of thing you’d expect from the CIA.” He waved deeper into the warehouse where there was a second crate. “One hundred rifles.”
Mueller let himself be led a few steps away so they could speak without being overhead. Pryce went on with his speculation in a voice that shifted, probed, threatened, and cajoled, pressing Mueller on what he was doing in Cuba, his imperturbability showing flashes of irritation. Why had he come down? “You expect me to believe what they said?”
Then Pryce pounced. “There are rumors, George. Batista came to power in an army coup and he’ll leave the way he entered. He surrounds himself with incompetent army loyalists and he’s promoted inept officers who don’t know how to do their job. He’s pushed aside career air force officers he doesn’t trust. He takes from the National Lottery and makes lavish gifts to the Roman Catholic Church, newspapermen, and American politicians. The stink of corruption is suffocating this country.”
Pryce nodded at the hoodlum and lowered his voice. “The Havana mob is worried. They wouldn’t bring me this evidence if they weren’t worried. They have a good business here. Batista is reliably corrupt. The air force is not.”
Pryce paused again to make sure Mueller understood. The two men were the same height, but Mueller had an ascetic thinness and Pryce was a big man with a threatening bulk. The two men were made to appear small and intimate standing a few feet apart in the vast empty space.
Mueller pointed at the crate and snapped, “If the CIA was going to arm a coup they wouldn’t send down a crate of rifles.” Mueller stopped Pryce’s protest with conviction in his voice. “Graham is capable of many things, but not incompetence. A crate of rifles? Cuba is a warren of predators looking to see who will eat, or be eaten. Fear all, trust few, be kind to none. Do your job, Frank. Don’t get lost in byzantine speculation.”
Pryce nodded at the mobster holding the crowbar. He looked again at Mueller. “All good points. If you’re right, George, and you seem to think you’re right, and I’ll grant the logic of your observations, tell me so I understand, who would want me to believe the CIA was behind a coup?”
“I’m the amateur, remember. The guy who can’t get his tradecraft right.”
Sc
orn and disdain accompanied Pryce’s smile. “Be careful, George. I’m not the only one asking questions. Bodies appear in swimming pools. That’s how things are done here.”
• • •
It was eleven o’clock in the morning when Mueller, having been awake for twenty minutes thinking about the evening’s events, as if going over a dream, finally opened his eyes. Sunlight flushed shy thoughts from his mind. He turned to his right, thinking Katie was in bed, but she was not, and he realized she too had been in his dream. He stood and approached the hotel room desk in his underwear. There, where he’d left them, were the careful notes he had made for the telex he’d sent to the director before going to bed.
The notes were a reminder that he’d done some hard thinking the night before, trying to make sense of Pryce’s show-and-tell. He’d mocked Pryce’s theory, not because he believed his ridicule, but because he thought it was best to reject the suggestion until he had the facts. Helpful lies, disguising truths. Mueller felt in Pryce the gravitational pull of a calculating intelligence. He was prepared to respect the danger he posed even if he wasn’t prepared to like the man. Mueller felt in that part of his mind that calibrates threats before they are obvious the risk of being made complicit in a crime.
That the mob was cooperating with Pryce should have been a clue, but he couldn’t believe that a man of Pryce’s rigid character would allow himself to be knowingly used. The answer, he thought, was to see everything about Pryce through the prism of his heartfelt policing. Arms brought in. Embargo breached. The law broken. He was a cop. His job was to make an arrest. Pryce gave cursory thought to the question that most interested Mueller. Incompetence resulted in an easy interdiction. Who benefited from exposure of the amateur effort?
Mueller had kept to the facts in his telex to the director, but even what he thought passed for fact was really only tentative observation about a bizarre opera. He kept thinking of himself as offstage, waiting to step out and sing his part.
He again read the director’s response. It had been delivered before nine o’clock when he was abruptly awoken by the concierge, and after reading it half asleep he’d put it aside and gone back to bed. Now, with it in his hands again, he puzzled over the paragraph. “Dear George,” it began.
Dear George? When had the director ever started a correspondence as a personal letter? That false note had stopped Mueller on his first reading, and being less than awake he’d put the letter aside until he could fathom the dissembling implications of the endearment. Mueller found the director’s note baffling.
“I suppose we should be flattered. If I thought there was anyone who was a good candidate worth propping up we’d do it. I don’t have qualms about that. But the whole tomato is rotten. Generals who aren’t loyal to the president are loyal to their greed. We have no good alternatives. But still it’s good to know that we’re viewed as the chess master who would try that gambit. Let Pryce believe the story if he wants to believe it. It will keep him busy.”
Then, “We checked on the guy Ruden. Owns two casinos. Clever like a fox. He can fall asleep in the middle of a meeting and wake up at precisely the right moment and join the conversation completely coherent. The New York DA wants him for questioning in the murder of a mobster in Long Island. Shot the man in both cheeks and then in the back of the head. How are you getting along? How’s Graham?”
6
* * *
WAITING REDUX
MUELLER SAT in the booth in El Floridita with a mordant sense of déjà vu. Same seat. Same table, being served by the same waiter. Graham was late again.
Mueller knew the place now—the drink menu, the sullen waiter who waited impatiently for Mueller to place a drink order, the tinny radio playing “Volare.” The song was everywhere. The plate-glass window was replaced, but the bar’s name had not been stenciled in gold yet, and a fresh coat of paint covered the wall that had been splattered with the woman’s blood.
The obvious hit Mueller. He leapt to a conclusion—but that was what he was trained to do. And he constructed in his mind a summary of what he’d come to think—speculate really—and he repeated it, testing the proposition. Could it be true? A thirty-seven-year-old CIA officer once earmarked for great things was engaged in an act of deception so outrageous that if attributed to him it would be viewed as an act of insubordination that would cost him his career and possibly his life: namely, delivering embargoed weapons to the opposition to provoke rumors of a coup d’état. Who gained from this?
Suddenly, Toby Graham slipped into the booth opposite Mueller. The two men took each other in. “Good to see you, George. Here we are. Finally.”
“Good to see you’re alive.”
Graham nodded, smiled. “Staying ahead of the Grim Reaper. My specialty.”
Mueller saw in Graham’s darting eyes a cautious man in a public bar acutely aware of his surroundings. He watched Graham take in the few tourists who braved the target the bar had become. He thought Graham had aged, his face thinned and his trademark cockiness frayed.
Graham leaned forward and whispered. “You look lost in thought. Just like the old George. Always a thinker.”
“You’re still good for a surprise.”
“Keeps things lively. Boredom is the enemy here.”
Mueller accounted for his first memory of the unexpected in Graham. It was in a literature survey course taught by a pigheaded professor, himself a graduate of the college, who valued in equal measure classroom decorum and bright minds. Graham’s disrespectful correction of the professor’s comment on The Merchant of Venice had caught Mueller’s attention. Graham showed himself to be well-spoken, and he’d actually read the play, which Mueller had not. He was nimble with words, had easy charm and fit physique, which taken as a whole, made him seem destined for greatness. His careless attention to clothing, the relaxed fit of his trousers, and the way he always seemed to look good in whatever he wore were details Mueller had noticed. If Mueller had allowed himself to think the thought he would have admitted he was attracted to Graham—his confidence, his cleverness, his smile. Now, he dressed the part of a local. Sandals, blousy guayabera shirt, and a green-banded straw fedora so he could pass for a Cuban.
“You’ve gotten sloppy, George.” Graham nodded at a table across the room. “The man there, sipping his coffee. He followed you. Your effort to help the girl was noble and heroic, but now you’re a person of interest.”
“It’s not because I’m here with you.”
Graham smiled. “Alonzo has his eye on both of us.” Graham looked directly at Mueller. “So, George, what brought you down? How did they get you out of retirement? Don’t expect me to believe that cock-and-bull story you’re writing a travel piece. Don’t impeach my trust with a lie.”
“They’re worried about you.”
“Worried? So they sent you down to reassure them. Tell them not to worry. Worried about what?”
“Following the playbook. Isn’t that what it’s always about?”
“What it’s always about is never what it’s about. You know that. Or have you forgotten? The right hand does one thing, the left hand another, and the two men to whom those hands belong talk out of both sides of their mouth. There is only one thing clear here.”
Graham pointed out the window at the gleaming cupola of the Presidential Palace, which peeked above Beaux Arts apartments along El Paseo del Prado. “Dante divided his hell into nine circles. He put the criminals in the seventh circle, thieves in the eighth, and traitors in the ninth. When the devil has to pick a circle for Batista he will have a difficult choice. Batista is a monstrum horrendum.” Graham’s eyes sparkled. “But he is our monstrum horrendum.”
Mueller didn’t hear a trace of irony in Graham’s voice.
Graham added, “Tell them that things are falling apart. They won’t want to hear that, but the director might believe it if he hears it from you. No one in Headquarters wants to believe that Batista will fall.”
“Is it imminent?”
&
nbsp; “Imminent?” Graham laughed. “The whole damn country is about to blow up. Yes, I’d say it was imminent.”
Graham paused and spoke circumspectly. “Lockwood was down here last week. Surprise visit. I joined him with the ambassador to meet Batista. Protocol visit. The ambassador’s limousine with its American flags on the front bumpers drove us past the barbed-wire barricade guarded by soldiers with tommy guns. We went in the rear entrance to make it easier for his wheelchair. Batista came out and greeted us. Shook our hands. His English is very good, helped by his previous exile in Miami. He wore his general’s uniform and was remarkably calm, collected, and funny. He sent for coffee when we got to his office and he offered Cuban cigars.
“He showed the ambassador his gold telephone, a gift from ITT. Then he showed off a portrait of José Martí that hangs on the wall, and the point of their conversation was that it could be improved if it was lit better. I couldn’t believe this was the thing that interested them. Batista brought up Abraham Lincoln, one of his heroes, and he said he hoped history would judge him Cuba’s Abraham Lincoln. After coffee and cigars Batista gathered us for a group photograph as a souvenir of the meeting. You know we don’t like to have our photos taken, but there we were, Lockwood and me, in his office, and there was no way to avoid the moment. So he had us. The meeting ended. Nothing was accomplished, no agreement on elections, nothing of substance said. The next day the photograph appeared in the newspapers with the caption: El Presidente Enjoys the Full Support of the American Ambassador and His Ally, CIA Inspector General Lockwood.”
Graham paused. “Batista made himself look good to everyone here who believes the embargo means he’s lost support in Washington. Well, George, Washington doesn’t have a clue. They are being played.”
Graham’s eyes narrowed, his voice deepened, his words had a mocking tone. “The State Department would have us believe that a third force will emerge around Andrés Rivero Agüero. Here’s their scenario. Batista succumbs to the pressure of our arms embargo. Elections are held. A new government is formed. Well, George, that won’t happen. Rivero Agüero is a fraud. Batista will hold on, fingers grasping at power, because who among us is ready to willingly give it up?”