Havana es-3

by Stephen Hunter

  "Be back in couple of hours. Is that enough time?"

  "Yes."

  He went for lunch, wandered a few blocks, getting shoved this way and that by the crowds, finally wandered into a lunchroom. Was he in Cuba? He had a hamburger and a Coke and some french fries. Everybody in the lunch room was an American, except the help.

  Then he walked a bit, picked up the washed and folded clothes, no longer new, and the softened boots, went back to the hotel, laid everything out, took the rifle from its case, ran the bolt several times to feel its smoothness and solidity, checked the security of the sling, checked the scope settings, wiped the lenses with lens tissue, and tried to relax.

  Impossible.

  He put a call in to America, to Junie, because it had been some time and he felt restless and unsure. Something far inside was unsettled, as if he had a gripe and didn't want to be far from a john. But it wasn't that, it was just a little something.

  Someone picked up.

  "Hello?" It was the boy's voice.

  "Bobby! Oh, Bobby, it's Daddy!"

  The boy's voice, dullish in the answer, suddenly lit up with pleasure.

  "Daddy! Hi, Daddy!"

  And so Earl talked with his son. Except he could not. At key moments, he found words often difficult to produce.

  "So, how are you?"

  "I'm fine, Daddy. Seen lotsa deer. Them woods is full of deer."

  "I'll get you one this fall, you bet on it."

  "Yes, sir. Daddy, you aren't mad at me 'cause I din't shoot that one in the spring?"

  He saw that the kid had assembled the two phenomena in his mind: his inability to shoot the springtime deer and his father's immediate disappearance.

  "No, sir. Not one bit. No, I am not. You'll be fine, young man. We'll get you a nice one in the fall, if that's what you want. Now, is Mommy there?"

  "No, sir. She's over to the church."

  "Well, you tell her I miss her. I miss you, too. Bob Lee, Daddy loves you very much. You know that, don't you."

  It was the only time he had ever used the word love with the boy.

  "Yes, sir."

  "I think I can polish this off soon. I'll be home. Bob Lee, I'm going to bring you a nice present, you'll see. And then it'll be like I was never gone, and I won't go nowhere no more, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Now tell Mommy I called."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Bye now."

  "Bye."

  He hung up, feeling like he'd just failed some test. He'd meant to say so much. But he'd said nothing.

  Lord, he needed a drink. Just one damn little one, a splash of gin against the cold ice, leavened by the tonic, almost a soda pop with just the softest little buzz to it. But that way was the road to hell, with no way back.

  Instead he went to the window to observe the full spectacle of carnival. And there was a lot to be enjoyed: the music seemed everywhere and everywhere there was music there were the crowds. He could sense that the gaslit plaza across the way was jammed with them, and there were neon-lit amusement rides, temporarily erected across the way, as well as vendors selling all manner of drinks, the whole thing a great ocean of human want and need in the warm dark. The gaslamps flickered, giving the whole thing even more sense of life. It was like one huge parade.

  Just watching it all, he didn't feel so cut off. He wasn't the killer. He wasn't the one man among them designated to put the crosshairs on a living being and press the trigger. This one was different from combat. He'd killed, too many times, but always an armed man trying to or planning to kill him, or his men. He'd never shot a prisoner, he'd never shot a wounded Jap. He shot what would hurt him and his and nothing else.

  And now?

  What am I? Dear lord, who have I become and in whose service am I prepared to do this deed? Why is this what you have to do to get a nice house in Washington and pretty clothes for your wife and a good school and college education for your son?

  He had no answers and the questions hurt. He decided to go down to the restaurant, have some dinner, and turn in early.

  The bar on the porch of the Casa Grande was jammed. A variety of smaller carnival parties had somehow collected into a single one, and two or three competing mambo quintets wandered the floor, issuing manifestos of pleasure and rhythm. Everybody was smoking, everybody was touching, everybody was shaking. It was an orgy of human groping. It overlooked the park and all the tables were crowded.

  He headed toward the bar with his usual routine in mind, which was to enjoy the sense of celebration, the closeness of other if strange human beings, but not to drink and lose himself. He slid through the throng, dodging dancers, slipped through darkness, found a relatively isolated spot at the bar at the end of the long porch, and parked on a stool.

  "Senor?"

  "Ah, rum and coke. Charge me the whole ticket, but no rum. Put an umbrella in it. Okay?"

  "Of course, senor."

  Soon enough it came, soon enough he was sipping, looking out to the square where the real action was, where the life of the city at play really took off. The smoke seethed, the bar was strung with lights, the music rose and jiggled.

  He smoked, had another drink, enjoyed a brief if debilitating fantasy about bringing Junie and the boy down here, hoping they'd enjoy what was so special about it, yet knowing they wouldn't. An hour or so dragged itself by, and he thought enough time had passed so that he could get to sleep.

  Instead he saw someone waving at him from a busy table of Americans, all of whom were staring at him with equal parts adoration and passion. She detached herself and he recognized her immediately: the woman Jean-Marie Augustine, the Filipina, rapturously beautiful tonight in a low-cut tropical dress that showed her smooth mahogany shoulders, her cleavage, and the tightness of her body through hips and legs, down to pretty red toes in some kind of high-heeled sandals. She had a flower in her hair and as she approached, he tried not to feel excited at her attraction to him and his to her, and he tried not to be intoxicated by the intensity of her sweet perfume, and he wondered, near panic, what the best way to get out of here fast would be.

  "Well, hello," she said.

  "Hi, there. I thought you were a Havana gal."

  "Oh, I am, definitely. But carnival. I mean, you have to come. It's the best show on earth."

  "These folks know how to throw a party, that's for sure."

  "Oh, and this year, they say the fireworks might be on the ground as well as in the sky. I had to come up and get a look at it."

  "I wouldn't pay too much attention to rumors. They're always wrong."

  "Except that what would the famous Sergeant Swagger be doing up here if there weren't something big going on? You don't seem the type to come up for a big party."

  "I just do what these young kids tell me."

  "You're quite the celebrity. The man who bested the mighty Hemingway. Now they say you're up here on some secret mission for the boys on the third floor, to defend our interests. The bodyguard who became a government agent and saved the banana for America. God bless the banana, staff of life."

  "I don't even like bananas, not a bit. But between you and me, I don't think these boys could find the sky if they didn't have a sign marked 'up.'"

  She laughed.

  "Look, why don't you join us? It's some businesspeople, all wealthy and connected. The Bacardi crowd. They know who you are. They'd like to bask in your glamour. It would be like John Wayne or Joe DiMaggio coming over and sitting with them. You'd find it pretty amusing, I think. Most of them are worthless."

  "Once they saw what a down-home buckra I was, they'd go back to yakking about the stock market. I really ought to head upstairs. I don't think there's a chance in hell of a thing happening here, because nothing on this island happens on time, but I ought to be ready just in case."

  "So mysterious. But that's what I'd expect from the manhunter."

  "You are well informed, I have to say."

  "Down here, everybody talks, everybody gossips. You
can't keep a secret. All right, Sergeant Swagger, mystery man of the Caribbean, I'll go away and let you do your duty, as all marines must. You still have my card, right?"

  "Yes I do, Mrs. Augustine."

  "Please call me Jean. Everybody does. I'm just Jean, the famous Jean of the Havana smart set."

  "Jean, then."

  "So if you need help and these young kids you're working for, even though you detest them, can't do a thing for you, you call me."

  "Sure."

  "And thanks for being such a good guy that night with that big jerk. You were terrific. Guys like you, always married, always decent. Always. Just my luck."

  She gave him a kiss on the cheek, squeezed his arm and slipped away through the crowd.

  He finished the rumless-and-Coke, threw down too much money on the bar, and found a quiet way out.

  He showered but could not sleep. He lay in the darkness, waiting for it to come but it didn't. He tossed, turned, tried to quell his mind. The smell of the woman was still in his mind, and possibly what she represented: a whole world of unimagined possibility. And this business too, with its promise of the fancy job in Washington, some idea of a big house, a fine school for the boy, a sense of becoming something so far beyond what he was supposed to become it disturbed him.

  Somewhere in there he actually drifted off. But it was a shallow, restless sleep, broken by dreams. In one of these he was back in the water off Tarawa, that moment of the war's darkest horror, where the Higgins boats had gotten caught on the reef and they had a whole thousand-yard walk in neck-deep water under heavy Jap fire. The tracers were white-blue, like snakes or whips that lashed or struck across the water, and it was so deep and heavy you could hardly move and there were times when the island ahead disappeared behind swells and the ships behind disappeared too, and there you were, one man, neck-deep in water, defenseless-alone, it seemed, on the face of a watery planet.

  Gunfire.

  Then he realized the gunfire wasn't in his brain.

  He snapped awake and listened as the shots rang through the night.

  He got up, raced to the westward-facing window and opened the curtain, pushed the shutters open wide.

  Facing the square, he saw nothing but the flicker of gas lamps in the park, but he knew the gunfire came from behind, to the east.

  Frenchy called three minutes later.

  "It's happening. The idiot attacked the Moncada Barracks. There's a gunfight going on there now. We can get him. How soon can you be set?"

  "I'm ready now," said Earl. He hung up the phone, picked up the rifle case and headed downstairs.

  Chapter 39

  The mulatto Cartaya stood before them all and once again sang his song, a catchy tune that bore an embarrassing similarity to a famous English seaside rhythm.

  Marching towards an idea

  Knowing very well we are going to win

  More than peace and prosperity

  We will fight for liberty.

  Onwards Cubans!

  Let Cuba give you a prize for heroism.

  For we are soldiers

  Going to free the country.

  Cleansing with fire

  Which will destroy this infernal plaque

  Of bad governments

  And insatiable tyrants

  Who have plunged Cuba

  into evil.

  On and on it went, through several more verses, and by the end, most of the men were weeping. They felt it so profoundly. It stirred them, deep in their Cuban souls.

  They were not radical students or intellectuals, members of any elite or vanguard. They were just men. Most were factory workers, agricultural workers, shop assistants. There was a watchmaker, a teacher, a taxi-driver, a doctor, a dentist, a bookshop assistant, a chimney sweep, three carpenters, a butcher, an oyster seller and a nurse.

  They came not because of him, but because of it. It was Cuba. They felt it. He was only the instrument of will. He made it happen by conceptualizing it, by focusing on plans much discussed but always lacking behind them the necessary force, and by supplying that force. What he stood for, they didn't know; what his programs were, they didn't care. He may not have stood for anything. He was just the one who had appointed himself the leader, and by reputation he gathered them. They didn't even know him, they didn't care about him; he was just the man who'd made it happen over the past month.

  Having talked this over a thousand nights in coffeehouses and over chessboards and cigars and after rallies, he knew who to call. He had begun to make phone calls-thank you, Mr. President, for the wonderful Cuban phone system, the best in the Caribbean-from the town of Artemisa, ten miles east of Santiago, on the plain that separated the mountains from the seas, as was this farmhouse where they were now meeting. He made phone calls to men he knew and trusted, who in turn made phone calls to men they knew and trusted, who then…and so forth and so on, and now there were eighty or so of them, gathered here in their shabby khaki uniforms, with their shabby weapons, a few American M1s or carbines, a Winchester.44 lever rifle, but mostly.22 hunting rifles or old double-barreled shotguns used for doves. They followed him because there was no one else to follow. They followed him because whatever was said of him, this much was true: he had a big set of balls.

  "Companions," he said, "fellow crusaders. Tonight is the night of nights. Perhaps we die, perhaps we triumph. But we will not pass without having made the ultimate attempt. Companions, brothers, long live freedom! Long live Cuba!"

  He was best at moments like that. Perhaps his true gift was the ability to put into simple, rugged language those things they all felt, and by doing that, become the vessel of their emotions.

  They raised their rifles and cheered by the light of campfires in the barnyard, and then there was nothing left to say. They went to their cars, twenty-six in all, rickety old vehicles, some barely drivable, and climbed in three or four to each one, and off they went.

  He was in the second car. He drove. Nobody talked, though some men smoked. The convoy, obeying rules of traffic, not politics, accordioned this way and that, expanding and contracting as it went over the dusty roads, found the slope, passed through the outskirts of Cuba's second largest city, rotated around the traffic circle, and headed down the Victoriano Garzon for Avenue Moncada and the future, whatever it might bring.

  He worried that the man ahead would lose his way. He worried that the cars would lose contact with each other and wander, the whole unit breaking down into nothingness. He worried that he would be a coward. He worried that nothing would go as planned, that he would be captured and the legendary Ojos Bellos, whom all knew of and all feared, might cut his eyes out and make him sing a song of defeat and surrender and betrayal. He worried that he would die a forgotten nobody, and all his dreams and all his convictions of destiny and change and power would disappear for naught.

  They drove through streets sleepy but not as sleepy as he had imagined. He thought that by now everybody would be drunk or in bed with a new partner. Yet it was still surprisingly crowded. Now and then a soul would notice this strange parade of beat-up old vehicles rumbling through the streets and watch, wide-mouthed, wondering at meanings. Still, no alarm was given, no commotion created. If the assemblage confirmed certain rumors, the cars outraced them to their destination.

  They rolled onward into the night.

  In the way that time collapses when that which is anticipated and seems forever away is suddenly upon you, they turned right off of the central thoroughfare of Victoriano Garzon and down the Avenue Moncada, passing the military hospital on the left, then a number of small wooden officers' houses, buried in trees, and finally, at the intersection, arrived at Checkpoint 3, access to the barracks. The building itself loomed ahead at the oblique, the castellated ramparts visible in the night, so that it looked like something the great Don Quixote himself would charge, lance ready, heart athrob. Its yellow-and-white color scheme stood out in lighting from the porch that ran along its front. A low wall surrounded it, a pa
rade ground lay to one side of it, and only a gate-house marked it off from the rest of the world. It housed a thousand men, but tonight, or so the plan assumed, they would all be drunk.

  The plan was simple, and at least it was a plan. The first car sped ahead, opening a distance between itself and the rest of the column. As it went, Castro prayed to God in his heaven that the advantage of surprise-his only advantage-was to be protected.

  He slowed to a creep, the speed of a man walking, as ahead, the first car reached the checkpoint, and six men leapt out in the best of the uniforms.

  "Make way for the general!" shouted Guitart, their leader, "open the gate for the general."

  It worked, almost magically. The three guards snapped into a present-arms in honor of the general and as they froze, their old rifles locked in place vertically against their chests, they were overcome and disarmed. Guitart and his party shoved them ahead and went inside to open the gate.

  And then, just as magically, it fell apart. Castro saw chaos and disaster emerge in the form of three men, two soldiers with American submachine guns and a sergeant with a pistol at his belt. They shouldn't have been there, but they were, and so it goes in the affairs of men and revolutions. They were evidently on some sort of perimeter patrol, and stopped abruptly and just stared at what they could see and no one else could: a line of twenty-five cars creeping along, lights out, jammed with men.

  He had no choice but an act of sudden, stunning violence. He had no hesitation. He veered savagely, running up onto the pavement, bouncing over the curb, turning on his headlights and pinning the three in the glare. They panicked, but it was too late, and he rammed into them, knocking them asunder, felt the ragged jolt as the car crushed against them. Weapons flew, bodies flew.

  But not the sergeant. He alone was quick enough or sober enough to react, and rolled to the right, just a hair, and the charging vehicle did not hit him.

  Castro leapt out; the sergeant had to be stopped.