The Good Assassin

by Paul Vidich

  “Hide the negatives,” Jack huffed, extinguishing his cigar to save it. “Fly to Miami. You’re not safe here.”

  Conversation ended and with it the evening was over, but no one moved for a long time. Jack sat apart from the rest in a sort of exile, an indistinct dark form at the end of the table, still like a contemplating Buddha. At last he stood and with a wordless nod of good night he made his way along the stone path. The Englishman also left, a prisoner of the curfew, and he struggled valiantly to improve the slack step of his drunken walk.

  Mueller breathed deeply when Jack was gone and he felt the mood among the others relax as well. Jack was a big presence—a sun to their planets, hot when he wanted to be, and cold too. Mueller saw him a prisoner of his character who couldn’t change, or wouldn’t, Mueller didn’t know which. Jack’s departure created a void and quiet settled in among those who remained.

  “Won’t someone say something,” Katie snapped, looking around. “I can’t stand the silence. He’s gone. Let’s have a toast.”

  Liz stood and turned to Graham. “Your room is at the top of the stairs. There’s a clean towel if you want to swim in the morning.”

  Mueller detected a clipped politeness in her speech, as if she were addressing an unwanted visitor. She excused herself with a vague smile and followed the path Jack had taken to their bedroom. Mueller met Graham’s expression, almost sullen, he thought. Mueller saw his weary nod, and watched him retreat into the darkness. He’d come late, said little, and now he was off to his own guestroom.

  Mueller found himself alone with Katie. They looked at each other across the table and Mueller raised his empty glass. “Very clever,” he said. “I’m impressed. Good work. I didn’t expect it, but I’m not surprised.”

  “You would have stopped me if I’d told you.”

  “Probably, if I could, but I don’t think I could. Stop you.” It crossed his mind that they were the last ones out and it would be an easy thing to pair up in her room, but he didn’t allow himself that impulse. He suspected that she wouldn’t accept the offer, and he didn’t want to put himself out only to be rejected. They had found the limits of what they found interesting in each other.

  She rose. Her eyes sparkled in silence. “See you in the morning.”

  He watched her glide away on her victory cloud—graceful, confident, self-assured. She’d gotten what she wanted. He knew their romance was over.

  8

  * * *

  BOYHOOD

  A FEW DAYS later, Mueller sat with his boots in the red dirt of a dry hill and glassed the small airfield with binoculars. He gripped the olive green metal and thumbed for focus. Sweat came through his shirt and darkened his back, and when the image sharpened he leaned forward. Bright midday sunlight gave a flat affect across the hundred yards where a DC-3 was parked by a small adobe terminal with limp windsock. Graham and two bearded Cubans unloaded a wooden crate from the plane. It took three men to receive it from a tanned blond man standing in the open cargo bay. The crate was the size of a coffin and it was placed on the tarmac. Nearby stood the Land Rover.

  Mueller scanned the scene through the field glasses. The pilot had not shut down the engines and fierce wind from the cowling whipped their clothing. The fuselage markings were painted over, but Mueller knew this type of work at a remote airfield was a covert operation. Rifles strapped over the shoulders of the bearded men were U.S Army M1 Garands with wood stock and stubby bullet clips.

  He searched the spot. No cover. No, this spot wouldn’t do for Pryce.

  Again he looked at the airplane. The sun was to his back so he knew they couldn’t see him, but one of them pointed in Mueller’s direction and he saw the bearded man direct Graham’s attention to the hill. They hadn’t seen him, but they’d seen something—light reflecting off the binoculars. Maybe his shadow.

  Mueller stood. He waved. He made a descent from his perch where he left the field glasses on a flat rock.

  “Hey there,” he shouted.

  Graham had left the two men to finish their work, and he jogged to meet Mueller as he made his way down. They met halfway by the far end of the tarmac.

  To the question that was obvious on Mueller’s face, and the obvious mystery of the scene, Graham said, “A little business, George. Embassy stuff. What’s up?”

  “Isn’t that Jack’s Land Rover?”

  “Indeed it is. Liz lent it to me for the afternoon.” Graham paused. “Jack’s not holding a grudge. In a different time, a different place, different circumstances we’d be friends. He and I are alike.”

  “Arrogant sonsofbitches.”

  Graham laughed. “He invited me—us—to lunch tomorrow. A little place in Nuevitas by the water. All of us.”

  In that moment Mueller had a choice of things to say—and there was a part of him that wanted to warn Graham that his little operation was putting his life at risk, but in the moment Mueller’s stronger urge was to punish Graham for his treason—or have him punished. Punish him too for his threat to Liz and Jack’s marriage. He felt loyal to them. They’d had him to dinner, befriended him, looked after him, and tried to revive his romantic life.

  “Let’s talk,” Mueller said.

  The flat tone of Mueller’s voice got Graham’s attention.

  “Talk? About what? Are you concerned about me? Is that it?”

  “It’s part of the conversation that we haven’t had.”

  “Well, let’s have it. But not here. Let’s walk. Let the men finish their work. You’re a man of mystery here and I don’t need you to feed their suspicions.”

  Graham led them a short way along the tarmac, then climbed the hill toward Mueller’s perch.

  “Up here,” Graham said. “The view is superb.” He scampered up the rough red dirt terrain, dry now, baked by the sun. He got to the top and let his hand sweep across the breathtaking panorama—and it did in fact take Graham’s breath away for an instant, a pause in his chest as his lungs caught up with his eyes. Mueller was surprised by Graham’s reaction, because he assumed Graham had seen it before. The sea lay like a great sheet of rippled blue glass. Luminous breakers crumpled into shiny surf along the white sand beach. Above, a pale moon was opaque against the blue sky. Somewhere below from one of the adobe homes with walls topped by colorful glass shards pointing from cement—a sound. The bronchial voice of an old man, wheezing out a melancholy song.

  Perhaps it was the view, or the view in combination with the singer, but Graham was transfixed. He stood silent for a long time.

  “Every time I see this I feel the same thing.”

  Graham pointed to the railroad tracks that snaked from the port of Nuevitas inland and then disappeared behind dry hills.

  “As a boy growing up on a farm in Ohio I’d hear a train pass through the rear of the property, and I always wished I was on it. Their whistles bewitched me. The call to travel. The need to leave home to find adventure in the world—and in my life, as it turns out, I’ve had my fill of it. You could say I’ve overdone it. But I did get away from that farm. Now when I think about those moments I don’t think about myself standing there, a dreamy ten-year-old, but I think about my mother, my bedroom, the books on the shelves. The little boy with his life ahead of him. I miss all that. It’s gone, of course, never to come back. Swallowed by time.”

  Graham became quiet, pondering thoughts that he kept to himself. When he spoke again his voice was deep and resonant.

  “Those books gave me a life I didn’t have at home. I read all of them, devoured them, and they opened up my imagination. I was twelve when I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. Robert Jordan was a hero to me. I was fascinated by a young man who would fight and die for a cause in a country he hardly knew. He was cynical about the Republicans and distrustful of the Soviet allies, but I admired his courage and his sacrifice. Remember the final scene. The wounded Jordan chooses to die to save the poor Spanish souls he fought beside. Jordan’s cause wasn’t an ideology any longer, but a noble sacrifice for love. R
emember what he said. The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. But he does, willingly. I got into this dirty business because of that book. The call to do good. Then I went to some dark places. I am part of this ugly world and I can diminish it further, or I can take a stand. You think it’s strange, George, don’t you? Me, thinking of myself as a good man. I see the skepticism in your face. I did my job. The work required me to do some bad things, some terrible things—”

  Mueller waited for Graham to finish the thought, but the silence lengthened and Mueller was left to wonder what Graham held on to—regret, guilt, fear, darkness in his soul?

  “Is that what you wanted to hear from me?” Graham suddenly asked. “Is that what they want to hear in Headquarters? Do they care?” Graham let his eyes drift from the view and he settled on Mueller. “We all walk with our devils.”

  Graham nodded at the DC-3. “We all have a job to do. It’s leaving soon.”

  “Will you be on it?” Mueller asked.

  Graham turned slowly to face Mueller, pondering. “Should I be?”

  “I would if I were you.”

  “George, you can’t say that and not say what’s on your mind. What do you know?”

  “Frank Pryce is in Camagüey. He thinks you’re at risk.”

  “He doesn’t care about me. I’m trouble for him. He’s a sonofabitch. Add him to your list.”

  “He thinks you’ll be picked up. Or worse. Alonzo’s thugs are looking for you.” Mueller pointed at the two men unloading the airplane. “Do you trust them?”

  “I don’t trust anyone. I got out of Budapest. I slipped onto a ship in Algeria. I expect to get out of here. I’m not the romantic who wants to die on this bleeding piece of earth.”

  “Then leave now.”

  “I have business to finish. More planes are coming in. Now is not the time to leave. But when I do go I won’t be alone.”

  Graham turned and began a slow descent from the hill to the airfield. He had gone a few yards when he turned and shouted to Mueller, who had not stirred. “I love her, you know. And she loves me.”

  Graham continued down, heels digging into the earth to slow his descent until he knew that Mueller had gained on him and he stopped. He let Mueller catch up.

  He looked at Mueller. “Jack knows about Liz and me. She told him. He wants to be mature about all this.”

  • • •

  It was always the quiet of night that stilled the fever of the day. Mueller lay in his room in Hotel Colon and read over the notes he’d made for his report to the director that he would file when hurricane-damaged communications to the U.S. were restored. He was careful to separate what he knew about the man, and what he knew about the case officer. As he read the entries he realized that without any active intention he was building a case against Graham. He had crossed the line from biographer to investigator without knowing it. The man he’d uncovered was a dark shadow reflected in a hall of mirrors—vaguely like the man he remembered. He pondered Graham. He was curious about the hard puzzle that was Graham’s mind.

  Mueller’s notes in his diary from that day had stopped there.

  9

  * * *

  ALL THIS

  ALL THIS was the phrase Mueller kept in the back of his mind when he stood among the group assembled at the waiting vehicles in Hacienda Madrigal’s driveway. Jack was in his Land Rover with Katie and a sullen Liz, and he honked impatiently at Graham and the Englishman, who chatted by the pickup.

  They were all together again, Mueller thought, all of them plus Callingwood, who’d showed up with the terrible excuse that he had the afternoon free, and no one was rude enough to reject his request to join lunch at a roadside restaurant that served fish caught only hours before. It was the promise of adventure that lured them from the confinement of the ranch.

  “Here,” Jack said. He threw the keys to the pickup at Mueller. “Give them to Graham. He says he knows the place. He can take Callingwood. Tell him to stay close. We’re not stopping for anything. Keep going if you see trouble.”

  The little party was using the charm of a fisherman’s shack to escape the oppression of the war. They all wanted to embrace the trip as a way to lighten the day, contain their drama, and preserve decorum, but Mueller felt jeopardy in the fragile peace. Pleasant conversation and careless laughter carried on and found expression in the absurd scene of gimpy Maximo chasing the three-legged dog chasing a squawking hen. All the laughter. All the false unconcern. Mueller felt all this during the thirty-minute drive to Nuevitas. He listened to Jack and Katie dispute some nonsense that Mueller did not remember, except to remember that it was hotly said.

  • • •

  The argument began in the usual way, from a surprise that shouldn’t have been a surprise that came in the midst of an otherwise pleasant conversation. Jack was driving fast along the flat coast road when Mueller asked a question that he thought was innocent enough, but he’d unknowingly touched a nerve.

  Jack stared. “I’m not sure what business it is of yours how I chose to spend my time, but I’ll tell you. No, that’s not why I flew to Havana. I happened to be seeing that man Pryce on other business, and he had done me the favor of buying that book. He has his contacts in the Mafia. They trade in all sorts of stuff. I’d told him to keep an eye out, and he knew a family in Vedado liquidating their assets to move to Miami.”

  Jack pointed to an old leather-bound volume. “The 1889 edition of The Coffee Plantation. I’ve wanted it for some time. So, Pryce arranged to get it for me through his contacts, but as I said, I wasn’t there for that. He happened to have found it, which I was happy about, but I’d gone to see him about another matter. He gave me the rundown on Graham.”

  Jack turned to Liz, who gazed out the window. She seemed to know she’d been drawn into the conversation and she met Jack’s gaze.

  “Yes,” Liz said. She whispered her answer quickly and economically.

  “I asked Pryce about him. Pryce has his ways of getting information. He wrote something up.”

  Mueller found himself staring at Jack. He felt the sly hand of Pryce’s chicanery at work.

  “He owed me a favor!” Jack protested. “Why not a little dirt on our mysterious new friend, Toby Graham. He’s not my friend, but he’s your friend.”

  Jack handed a file to Mueller. “Take a look.”

  Mueller removed a typed report from a large manila envelope and he saw how the typist’s heavy hand on the s key had struck through the paper. As was his habit, he took in the scope of the document before he read—no date, nothing to reveal its provenance, only a cryptic heading—re: Toby Graham.

  Mueller scanned to the end and then read the first paragraph.

  “Read it out loud,” Jack said. “I think we’re all curious.”

  Mueller looked at Liz.

  “Go ahead.”

  “It says here that he was inserted into Naples in 1944 working for the OSS in advance of the Allied invasion. Apparently he kept a diary of his work, which was a violation of every rule of caution because it put him and his colleagues, the entire operation, at risk if it fell into the hands of the Nazis. It says that he was reckless.”

  “There’s more,” Jack said.

  “Yes, there’s quite a bit more. It says he was well liked, self-confident, undaunted, presumptuous, impudent, bold, cocksure.” Mueller looked up. “Sounds like him.”

  “Go ahead, finish,” Jack said.

  Mueller paraphrased. “He operated behind enemy lines, putting his life at risk, and he did so courageously.” Mueller looked up from the page. “I’m sure he had fear too. A man who puts his life at risk is afraid, and if he says he isn’t, he’s a liar. To be brave, really brave, a man has to be terrified.”

  “You’re making that up,” Jack snapped. “That’s not what it says.”

  “I added what I know.”

  “Read it. Or I’ll read it.”

  “This report cites another report.” Mueller r
ead, starting again at the beginning. “ ‘He landed on a hostile coast and got to Naples with no one there in advance to hide him. He displayed courage in the face of the enemy. He lived for months as an impostor using his wits and knowledge of Italian to gather intelligence, and he did that even as his local agents were caught, tortured, executed. In return, he tracked down and assassinated the head of the local Gestapo. And he killed two men with his bare hands. He had something beyond courage—foolhardiness, bravado. An appetite for danger. You know the type of man—a taste for danger that is sweeter than a shot of whiskey. And with it,’ ” Mueller stopped and he looked at Jack.

  “Go ahead.”

  Mueller added, “Well that’s what the original report said, and now we get to Pryce’s judgment.” He read. “ ‘Graham thought top-level OSS officers in Allied Headquarters incompetent and confused about the state of the German defenses. He ignored instructions delivered to him by coded radio transmitter because he disagreed with the orders, and he conducted his own operations that he believed better disrupted German defenses. He called his superiors amateurs in his rants in his radio transmissions. In the final months of the siege Allied Headquarters ignored Graham and stopped sending him spare parts for his radio. Before Naples fell, the colonel in Headquarters who supervised Graham was transferred out of the command when the first Allied assaults failed miserably. Graham was right. Entries that described his disobedience were expunged from his record.’ ”

  Jack spoke up. “He was reprimanded. Read the end. He was dressed down, then forgiven. Right, George. You’ve skipped a paragraph. He was called immature. Arrogant. After the war he was drummed out of the OSS because he hadn’t toed the line and in the military it matters if you win the war, but it matters more if you disobey. No one forgets someone who disregards orders, and he paid the price.”

  “What’s he doing in Cuba?” This from Katie.

  Jack turned to Mueller. “You must know.”