Havana es-3

by Stephen Hunter

  "Actually, it ain't so damned easy. Most folks, they squeeze the trigger and the gun runs away on them. They miss the target but redecorate the room. I had a gun something like that in the war; they're pretty hard to master."

  "Your point is?"

  "Whoever saved my bacon knows how to shoot. Has been around a long time. Knows infantry weapons, the way a soldier would. Would that fit you?"

  "Ah, well," said the man. "One hates to tell stories on oneself. I learned some of those skills recently. If I recall correctly, it was called World War II."

  "Yep, believe I heard of that one. You said you was in the German army."

  "Did I? Well, possibly I meant a European army. There are so many countries over there, one can hardly keep them all straight."

  "But there's a big red one, isn't there? Seems I read about that one. They had lots of commie tommys. Know anything about that one, mister vacuum cleaner salesman?"

  "Oh, it all gets so mixed up, you know? And it's late."

  "So I don't reckon I'm getting a straight answer. My question being, who the hell are you, and why have you saved my ass twice? Why do you keep showing up like a movie sidekick? And why did you follow me to this little place? I made you an hour ago as I'm moseying down Emperado, and I'm not even any damned good at this game. I been sitting here waiting. And that's another peculiar thing. I had the distinct impression you wanted me to see you, and a smart fellow like you, if you didn't want that, why there's no way I'd have caught on."

  "I'd give you a straight answer if I had one. But I don't. I did, yes, come here for you. Not for questions or answers, but just to tell you something."

  "I'm all ears."

  "It's just this. I mean to warn you, as one ex-soldier to another ex-soldier: this is not your kind of fight. If you want to fight the wicked communists, go to Korea or Cyprus. They have them also in Malaysia, Kenya, Burma and Indochina. They're all over the place. Fight them straight on, in a war, and kill them, or die, if you're finally unlucky. That's something you're so good at. But, Swagger, not here. This is Havana. Things are different here. Duties aren't as clear as they are in a war."

  He smiled, finished his mojito.

  "Thanks awfully for the drink. Now I must go."

  "It's the least I can do, friend. And I still owe you and I do prefer to pay off my debts."

  "Swagger, you owe me nothing. I operate at so many levels that what helps you can also be construed to help me. Enjoy the night, my friend."

  He put his Panama on, smiled rakishly, and left.

  Earl watched him slide elegantly through the half-empty bar, wondering how the world conjures up a fellow so mysterious and capable at once.

  Chapter 29

  The trunk of the black, unmarked 1938 De Soto, parked near the university, was nearly full: a Mexican Mendoza 7mm light machine gun and a thousand 7mm rounds; a Star RU-1935 9mm submachine gun; ten thirty-round magazines, full; three Model 97 Winchester shotguns, riot-gun configuration; three hundred double-ought shells; three Ruby revolvers in.38; seven automatic pistols in 9mm and.45, mostly Stars and Obregons. Also truncheons, bullwhips, hand and leg irons, hand grenades, flares and billy clubs, blindfolds, ropes, chains-the usual duty issue of the Cuban Military Intelligence Service.

  In the front of the same car were Ramon Latavistada and Franco "Frankie Carbine" Carabinieri, both in linen suits, with open white shirts, sunglasses, and panama hats pulled low over their eyes. Though it was night, and much cooler, the two men sweated, and kept running handkerchiefs over their damp foreheads as they sat and waited and smoked and sat and waited and smoked. It never occurred to them to take off their sunglasses.

  "He ain't gonna show," said Frankie.

  "I fear you are correct," said Ramon.

  "What the fuck?"

  "Exactly. What the fuck?"

  "It's like he knew."

  "It is like that. It is like someone is watching over him."

  "And he done gone thataway."

  "What?"

  "Oh, something stupid we say in the States. Meaning, he's vamoosed. From the pictures. You ever go to pictures?"

  "No picture can compete with the reality of my daily life."

  The crowd was thinning. The speakers had been dreary. First was Ortez, the liberal, with much praise for the paradise of England. Then Lopez, the socialist, with even more praise for Russia. Then the Senora Ramilla, who had been bombed in the Spanish War and was blind in one eye, with colorful remembrances of parades on the Ramblas and the sense of unity among the young people.

  Alas, and so disappointingly, the young orator who counted, who could spellbind and inspire, who could make the blood sing and the heart throb as he laid out his vision of a Cuba for Cubans and an end to El Presidente-he did not attend, though he was on the program. And since most of the crowd had come to hear him, there was a palpable air of disillusion. A leader's first obligation was to lead, not to disappoint.

  "Man, what a wasted day. My people are not going to be happy."

  "Nobody will be happy till we find this cabrone."

  "What does that mean, 'cabrone'?"

  "Homosexual."

  "Is he?"

  "No, I call him that because to call him that is to spit on him."

  Latavistada started the car and nudged it rudely into the street, not particularly caring whether or not he hit any members of the dispersing crowd. A few young men raised their fists against their arms to display contempt, one so rudely that the captain nearly got out and beat him senseless with a sap, but instead coolness prevailed, and the two new pals sailed out into the Cuban night.

  "I will call the Political Section," said Latavistada. "Possibly they have something new on him. If not, we'll go to a fellow named Kubitsky, a newspaper reporter on the Havana Post who is known to keep tabs on things. Then we'll swing by Castro's apartment one more time. We may not get him tonight, but we will get him, and soon, I guarantee."

  But the rat had fled. Nothing produced the necessary information: not phone calls, not sightings, not stakeouts, not interviews with witnesses and colleagues, willing or not. Even the man's wife, Mirta, a sullen abused creature with an unruly baby, had no idea where he was when she was approached obliquely in the laundry by a female SIM agent, and drawn out. There was no need to interrogate her more directly, for surely that information would reach the young man with the speed of light, and then he would learn he was being hunted.

  "Maybe he went home."

  "Where is home?"

  "This is a good question. I have heard he is from the east. But where exactly is not known. Who is this man? We know what he does and what he believes, we do not yet know who he is."

  "This information, would it be tough to come by? You could get it―"

  "You could get it many ways," said Ramon. "You could torture for it or bribe for it, or spy for it. Alas, I find these ways uncertain as well as slow. You think Cubans are lazy and shiftless, my friend, no?"

  "Pal, I never―"

  "Well, I will show you the one organization in Cuba that teems with efficiency. We will have this information in―" he paused, looked at his elegant watch, and continued, "-two hours. This you will find so amusing, Frankie Carbine."

  Frankie watched them go in. They arrived in six black two-ton trucks and poured out, ten men from each vehicle, with clubs and rifles, commanded by sergentos with whistles and pistols, the whole thing working with brutal precision. The soldiers liked to hurt people, that was their secret. As they thundered up the famous hundred marble steps of the University of Havana, atop its green Arcadian hill, so untouched by the tarnish of reality, they flailed at anyone who came within their range, breaking limbs, shattering noses and teeth, sending screaming students bouncing down the way amid a spray of loose papers and flung-aside books. They screamed. They were primitive men, from the country, nurtured in violence, held in monstrous discipline, seething to release themselves in brutality. They never disappointed. Now they reached the top, diverted slightly,
and swarmed into the law school building.

  By the time Ramon and Frankie reached the administration offices on the third floor of that building, it was pretty much in ruins. Blood splashed everywhere, like some kind of modern art painting, forming anarchistic splotches on tile and wall and window. A few poor students, bruised and bashed, still tried to crawl out, and now and then a policeman would kick them in the ribs.

  "Wow," said Frankie.

  "It's a good thing, generally, to teach youth that it must show respect for authority. This place is a fountain of revolution. It produces treason and sedition and liberalism with boring monotony. These young people, they think they are entitled to so much, they think so much should be changed, they have no respect for the lives their parents have built for them. I would be even harsher than El Presidente. I would shoot ten every month, regular as clockwork."

  They went through torn-up office after torn-up office, at last finding the inner sanctum of record-keeping where, industriously, the two men pillaged first the C's and then the many Castros who had, over the years, applied to the university for admission. It didn't take a long time, for there were very helpful photos, and, as it turned out, Latavistada had an attribute ever so valuable to a secret policeman: a photographic memory.

  "Ah, here, I think. Frankie, this? Does this seem right?"

  "I ain't ever seen the guy."

  "No, this would be him."

  He handed over a photograph, while he studied the file. What Frankie saw made almost no impression on him, as images seldom did. He drifted a little, then made an effort to concentrate and saw an oval face not without its appeal, the eyes dark and sharp, under a crop of dense black hair. The nose was strong; the guy almost looked Italian, or Sicilian even. Yet the face also was so young. It had no lines, no strength, no passion to it, only a voluptuary's indolence.

  "He looks rich."

  "What an excellent observation. He is. It says here he comes from Biran, above Santiago, almost in the Sierras. His father has an estate and works, or worked, for many years for United Fruit. You see, it's always the same, this business. It's always about fathers and sons. This little prick wants to show his papa he's a bigger man, that he will amount to something. So where papa controls a thousand acres, sonny will someday control the nation."

  Frankie had no idea what the Cuban was talking about.

  But then he said, "And here is where he will flee. Back to Oriente and the mountains, where he is son of the favored lord, out of reach of the law. Well, Frankie, we shall reach him, no?"

  Chapter 30

  "And another thing wrong with you," Papa said, "you're lazy. You're evilly lazy. You lie around all day dreaming. You are incapable of doing a man's work. Additionally, your bathing habits are the source of much laughter. I labored so hard for so long to produce this? What a sorry specimen you are. Are you a cabrone? You are not a homosexual, are you?"

  "Papa," he said, "I am not a homosexual. I am a masculine man."

  "You are not masculine at all. A masculine man is dynamic. He makes things happen by will and effort―"

  "And by licking the boot of the North Americans of United Fruit."

  "Yes, it's true, I worked for them, but only to acquire money to buy land and build this place and marry and bring all you worthless children into the world. And to borrow tractors from. Without their tractors, where would we be? Senor Jennings, he smiled when the tractors disappeared and he never took them back until the plowing was done."

  "The generosity of the Americans is wonderful. They come to our island and steal and degrade us and you are grateful they let you borrow a tractor now and then!"

  "Bah! A man knows gratitude. He feels it. He is not ignorant and petty and selfish and vain. You are all of them. I should have worked you harder. That was my mistake, to my shame. You never had chores. I should have worked you like a dog and made you into a man. Instead, you are womanly."

  "I am not womanly. I am between opportunities, but I swear to you, I am a man of destiny."

  The house was large but crude. It was full of dogs and guns and cats and chickens and dirty boots and crumpled clothes and books and blankets and horse tack. It was really a barn with rooms and beds, and it suited Angel the father perfectly, for it is exactly what he'd wanted to build in the world, from the raw jungle, and he had done so. Animals more or less roamed through it, and its shabbiness was worn proudly, as if to say, true people of the earth live here. Savagery was everywhere; even his wife wore a gun and when she called the younger children to dinner, it was with a gunshot.

  Outside, not everywhere but in a certain direction, the jungle loomed, and beyond the jungle the peaks of the Sierra Maestra penetrated the clouds, remote and forbidden. You could hide an army up there and no one could get you out.

  "What did you do today?" Papa demanded. Papa loved to fight. It was his amusement. He worked, he fought, he made children and then ignored them. That was his way.

  "Papa, I told you, it's a vacation. I relaxed."

  "You could have helped the boys weed around the cane."

  "I am a lawyer and a thinker. I am not a sugarcane worker."

  "Your mother says you swam in the morning and played beisbol in the afternoon."

  "I am a superb baseball player. Why should I not do what pleases me? The children love me."

  "You tell them lies, and you are always the hero in those tales but in no other."

  "I will be the hero, father."

  "Bah, heroes."

  "Tomorrow I will fish and in the afternoon, I will borrow a rifle and hunt. Tomas tells me there are boar by the Sierra de Mayari."

  "Meanwhile, I worry about the price of sugar and the campesinos and the health of their families and whether or not the generator will last another year and what to do if the price of fuel goes up and the North Americans develop a cheaper chemical sugar, and all you do is sleep and hunt and drink! God himself would be ashamed of such a son."

  The old man spat into the fireplace, but missed.

  He fished, he hunted. He caught sixteen sea bass with the old campesino Jose, who'd been there so long he claimed to have witnessed the Americans running off of San Juan Hill and used to amuse the kids with those stories when they'd been young. In the afternoon, he hunted, and the dogs drove a boar into a bog and he shot it with an old cowboy rifle. It squawked and shivered and shat while it died, but die it did, and rather swiftly too, for the young man did most things with casual elegant precision, and shooting was but one of them.

  The boar butchered by he himself: knifing and peeling, and reaching into the bloated guts and pulling them out with his fingers so they oozed with shit and food and blood and filled his fingernails as he yanked. The gutpile abandoned for others in the jungle, he brought the hollowed thing home slung over his shoulder, like a cape that oozed blood down his body. He was a magnificent red god, man as savage, gone to jungle, killed in jungle, and returned with meat. His papa did not look twice at him as he trudged with the animal's carcass into the farmyard. But that meat fed the family one night and the fish another, not that there was any shortage in the larder, because Angel Ruiz Castro was a man of importance and substance, even if he browbeat anyone who came within his range, unless they were North American.

  And then the boy took a trip. His destination was Cueto, the railroad town that ran up to Antilla and was larger than the muddy shanties of Biran. He knew a certain lady in this town. If she was not there, he would visit her sister. It wasn't that he wanted to do this thing, it was that he had to. A man has certain needs and they can't be satisfied always in matrimony. What is a man to do when he is far from his home and waiting for the clarification to set in?

  She was not there; nor was her sister. But a neighbor was. He was big and handsome with that Spanish nose and those imperial ways that all commented upon. He moved gracefully, and had once been elected the greatest high school athlete in Cuba. Had not a war and then a political awakening occurred, he might have been a great beisbol pl
ayer. He could use the money to finance a fight against the North Americans who paid him; what a wonderful idea!

  Anyhow, this lady's husband was away in Santiago for his American-owned company, Dumois-Nipe, a subsidiary of United Fruit, and so the young man's dalliance had a double-meaning: he was screwing her and he was therefore screwing Dumois-Nipe. In bed, he was magnificent, a tiger, an athlete again, and the sheets grew heavy with the sweat of his labor and the woman sang, and the birds fluttered and the clouds parted. Like a matador, he worked her slowly, turning her this way, then that, encouraging her, partaking in her power, until the two were joined in a dance that was both spectacular and tragic. He rammed in for the kill.

  "Oh," she said afterwards, "I had forgotten what a young man can do. You look so tender with those warm eyes and that soulful smile, and yet you are so strong. What a man you are!"

  He sat back, lit a cigar and loved the wonderful warm wash of afternoon light, the smell of sex and sweat and cigars, the nearness of the jungle with all its savagery, the farness of the Sierras, cool and remote and vast and beckoning, as if they knew secrets.

  "Will I see you again?"

  "Of course. But only for a while. Soon I must go back to Havana where a destiny awaits me."

  "I assume you will marry a rich girl and join the country club and learn to play golf and drink with the Americans."

  "That is where you are wrong. I will take the rich girl's money and give it to many poor girls, I will turn all the golf courses into agricultural collectives and I will frighten the Americans back to America."

  "Don't let them hear you talk like that, my hero. They don't like it, and they have their ways."

  "I have my ways, too," he promised.

  And that is how he waited for his clarification. He played the beisbol with the youngsters in the morning and fished or hunted in the afternoon. Then he wandered to Cueto and had a coffee and read the Havana papers. The furor over the violence of El Colorado and the swiftness of the justice had worn down somewhat, he determined, and he wondered how soon he could head back, with his many new ideas. He was ready for action.