Hostage in Havana

by Noel Hynd

“You’re full of charm and evasion, aren’t you, Paul?”

  “Consider it intentional and call it ‘a sense of purpose.’ Can we let it go at that? We pick up the money, I do with it as I need to, you babysit and evacuate your CIA stooge, and we all get out of here in one piece in four days if we’re lucky — or in forty years if we’re not.”

  “You’re not answering my question. Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to. How’s that for a game plan? I help you, you help me.”

  “It’ll work,” she said.

  “The guy you’re here to help is more disreputable than the people I’m here to help. So don’t give me grief about my family or what I need to do.” His voice settled slightly. “Okay?”

  “Okay. But you’re still a pig. Boorish, crass, self-serving, and self-possessed.”

  “Sorry you feel that way. You’re everything my wife wasn’t. I like you. Ready to travel? You and I are going to drive out to my uncle’s place. It’s on a strip of land past the tourist spots. It’s called Playa del Rio. It takes three hours, and we can stay there overnight.” He paused. “It’s a few miles from where we landed.”

  “We’re going back there?”

  “Not much I can do about it. We’ll go by different roads part of the way at least. You got something better to do?”

  “I need fresh clothes.”

  “Of course. No hay problema. Where exactly is your posada?”

  “Not far from here. It’s on the Calle San Martin,” she said. “Treinta y uno. One block that way, turn left, then straight three more blocks.”

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Paul pulled the Jeep out onto the narrow street and executed a U-turn. He drove back to the main square and merged into the light traffic. Within five minutes, he had pulled up in front of the hotel. He leaned back in the front seat and cut the engine.

  “I’ll wait,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’m not going to check out, I just checked in. I’m just going to grab some things.”

  “That works,” he said.

  She jumped out of the Jeep and easily took the two flights of stairs. Having reunited with Paul, and having survived a passport check that afternoon, she felt better about things, about this assignment. Maybe things would work out, though a ton of questions remained.

  In an open second floor hallway, out of precaution, she went to a window on the front of the building. She pushed aside the flimsy curtains. She looked down and could see the old Toyota.

  Paul was standing outside it now, watching his back also, fingering an unlit cigar, and looking as if he was going to smoke it.

  She watched him as he walked away from the car for a moment. Her suspicions were again aroused. Where was he going? He stopped at the pushcart of a street vendor. She watched as he bought a bag of ice, several bottles of chilled water, and a touristy straw hat that he popped onto his head. He put the water and ice in a plastic bag and walked back to the car. He must have felt her eyes on him, because he looked up, saw her, gave her a grin and a wave.

  She waved back. She scanned the street too. Paranoia? Maybe. But no one appeared to be trailing them. She went back to her room and then to the closet. She pulled out her second and third dresses. She threw them, undergarments, and her few toiletries into her tote bag, along with her gun.

  Glancing at her watch, she realized it was check-in time with the elusive Roland Violette — it was his window to phone. She checked her cell. No calls, no messages. Nothing. She bounded down the stairs.

  When she arrived back on the street, Paul gave her a big smile, as an old buddy might, more than a working companion.

  “You set?” he asked. “You okay?”

  “I’m good,” she said.

  The cigar was still in his hand, unlit. “You mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  “Go for it.”

  She climbed into the vehicle. He watched her, then came around to the driver’s side. He stood outside the vehicle for a moment, clipped the end of the cigar, and lit it. He took an extra moment to make sure the puro was drawing, then slid in. Then he flipped the match out of the Jeep, tilted his hat back, and started the engine.

  “Ready to roll,” he announced.

  She settled into her seat, one leg up on the dash, her skirt pulled back slightly. She pulled her new baseball cap tight, let the bill ride low over her eyes, and poked her sunglasses on her face against the glare of the setting sun. She felt wired again. Perhaps she enjoyed Paul’s company and the excitement of his presence just a little too much. But then, she realized as the car broke loose from traffic in Havana’s old town, she felt more alive than she had felt since before she had moved to New York.

  FORTY-NINE

  Paul guided the Toyota through the back streets of Havana.

  Alex took it all in with fascination. Like much else in Havana, the poorer neighborhoods were a confrontation with time. Like the better-kept sections, these neighborhoods were sprawling, eclectic, and disorganized. Grand old mansions with majestic high columns had been converted into small apartments, an air of neglect existed immediately adjacent to suggestions of past splendor. All of this splashed up against a vibrancy of the streets, music coming out of small storefronts and homes, men at tables playing dominos, and kids kicking soccer balls or playing impromptu games of béisbol in the streets and alleys. Old church towers functioned as landmarks every few blocks, rising above most other buildings. They were ornate and suggestive of the Moorish architecture that had been imported from Spain. Some churches had their doors open and obviously still had congregations.

  “Didn’t the Marxist government crack down on religion?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, but not successfully,” Paul answered. “The churches were never officially banned, but always harassed. Like everything else, religion in Cuba is a mass of contradictions. The constitution recognizes religious freedom and diversity, but the government does what it can to keep a lid on it. Meanwhile the old buildings remain because no one would be foolish enough to knock down a sturdy old building when it’s so difficult to build a new one.”

  They approached the entrance to the big highway that traversed the island, la autopista. Guarneri made a move to access it westbound, then at the last second gave the wheel a sharp twist.

  The Toyota hit a low divider, jumped into the air, and bounded over. Suddenly they were headed ninety degrees in a different direction.

  “Paul! What’s the problem?” Alex asked, startled.

  Guarneri scanned in every direction. Then he calmed. “Just making sure no one’s on our tail. The new highway is the faster route, but we’re taking the old road. La Carretera Central. More scenic. We have time. And the other thing is I can tell better if we’re being followed.” He poked his head out the window, even checking the sky. His expression darkened.

  “What?” she asked.

  “A helicopter over the water,” he said. “About ten miles behind. Probably just a coincidence. There are shore patrols all the time. But you can never be too careful.”

  She pulled a hand mirror out of her duffel bag and held it out the window. She found what bothered him, but it was only a speck.

  “Should we be worried?” she asked.

  “If we keep seeing it, yes,” he answered. “I’d rather be paranoid than spend time in a Cuban jail.”

  “Ditto,” she said, pulling the mirror in.

  “Okay,” he muttered. “I have a few tricks too, just in case.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  He looked at her and winked.

  They rode in silence for several minutes. The road swept through a few small towns, then a sugar plantation. The surface was narrow and often barely paved. Modern it wasn’t. It reminded Alex of some of the back roads and old rural routes she had seen on visits to Louisiana and Mississippi. She had worked for Habitat for Humanity on spring and winter breaks as a teenager and had seen that part of America while helping construct homes.

  They took the road that
ran east from Havana. The highway snaked its way around the beaches and shoreline. Guarneri worked the stick shift with deft flowing motions, and though the ride was bumpy, it was fascinating. There were few other cars and not many trucks. The highway, like much of the rest of the island, seemed frozen in the 1950s. There was one lane in each direction with no dividing line.

  “Highways that I’ve traveled,” Alex thought to herself. She thought of the super-highways of southern California, the swift sleek autobahns of Germany, and the packed expressways of the northeastern corridor of the United States. Then there was the insanity of the highway in Ukraine, scorched into her recent memory, as she raced to the airport, and then, a little more recently, the packed highways of Cairo where cars passed over the lane dividers when traffic was already three abreast. She recalled the highways surrounding Lagos in Nigeria. Those had often been littered with piles of garbage that had been set on fire, or tires ablaze, or even dead bodies.

  This was peaceful and gentle, with tranquil vistas of sea and shore on one side and verdant fields and foliage on the other. Keeping the island in the previous century, she mused, had had its upside as well.

  There was only one problem. Half an hour later, without asking, she stuck the mirror back out the window and scanned the sky.

  “Still there?” he asked. “The chopper?”

  “I think I see it,” she said.

  He slowed and again poked his own head out the window. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That looks like the same bird. It’s probably okay. Probably shore patrol. Bear with me.”

  “You think you can slip away from it?” she asked.

  “I know I can.”

  The road elevated and there was a stunning view of the Caribbean. They had been driving for twenty minutes more when Paul pointed to a small village that hugged the shore, a cluster of small shacks and low buildings with a small harbor cluttered with modest boats.

  “That’s Cojimar,” said Guarneri. He nodded toward the small village.

  “Cojimar is where Hemingway sailed from when he lived in Cuba, right?” Alex asked. “When he wasn’t drinking, cheating on his wives, or writing.”

  “You nailed it,” Paul laughed. “Papa Hemingway kept a fishing boat here for years. It was called La Pilar. It’s now at the museum in Havana, I think.” He gave another nod to the hamlet by the water. “It’s a popular tourist spot. So I think we should stop. We’re tourists. It also gets foggy this late in the day. Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  They left the highway and pulled into the hamlet, which was thick with trees, old buildings, and small shops. Paul parked, carefully choosing a spot that was near other cars that would all look similar from the air. When they stepped out, Paul offered his hand. They walked to the marina, bought drinks, stood and chatted in Spanish with fishermen returning for the afternoon. Their eyes kept to the sky and they watched as the helicopter approached and went past them. They stayed until it was far to the east of them. It had either overshot, abandoned them, lost them, or never cared about them in the first place. At the same time, a small late afternoon fog rolled in as Paul knew it would. They hustled quickly back to their vehicle. Forty minutes after stopping, they were back on the road.

  FIFTY

  Havana: late afternoon. The old man who had walked in the Cristobol Colón cemetery was again taking his last look at many things. He knew he would soon leave Cuba. For a better place? For a worse place? Only God above knew. That’s what he would have said if anyone had asked him. Only God knew. Mortal men make plans. God laughs. The old man was deeply religious, always had been.

  “Heaven,” he thought to himself. “Heaven, heaven, heaven. I wonder if there is a heaven.”

  He had a few nervous ticks. He kept fingering the parrot’s head on his cane with one hand. With the other, he kept patting his left pocket to see if that little Colt .22 was still there. It was. Reassured, he returned to his thoughts. In his way, he would miss this place where he spent so many years. Despite the poverty, the isolation, the dangerous political games, he loved this place as much as anyone who had been born here. That’s why he was taking last looks. When death came, he told himself, he wanted to have that image of Cuba in his eyes.

  Today he ambled along the famous boulevard, El Malecon, perched along the stony fortress-style bluff above the ocean on the Havana waterfront. He relied more and more on his hickory cane, the one with the carved parrot’s head, as so many old men in Cuba did. The bright sun was still bright in the west on this late afternoon, and he watched couples walk arm in arm along the colorful boulevard. To the old man, Havana made him want to go back to a time when each day seemed slower and less compressed. Life was simpler then and the living was easier. Or at least that’s the way he remembered it.

  He recalled days when he was one half of one of those happy couples. It didn’t seem so long ago. A lifetime? Recently, he had lost the woman he loved. He still mourned.

  He was educated, this old man was. He had gone to university. He had read many languages, but mostly English and Spanish. He loved the great writers, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Twain, Dickens, Cervantes, Lorca, and the modern Afro-Cuban Nicolás Guillén.

  He loved his writers, the novelists, the poets, and the historians in particular. In the waning time of his life, there was a line he couldn’t shake from Mark Twain’s work, Eve’s Diary. Twain’s story ended with Adam’s speaking at Eve’s grave, “Wherever she was, there was Eden.”

  Well, the woman the old man had loved had departed. His Eve was gone and so was Eden. He sat for several hours on a bench along the waterfront as the daylight faded, watching the sea and the horizon. There was a tear in his eye. Even timelessness seemed to have a finite number of hours today. And always, his thoughts faded into the past more than the future. The old man moved to a nearby café where the owners knew him. He took a seat way in the back and slumped down in his wicker chair. He nodded and snoozed as the evening wound down, the cane leaning against him, the .22 caliber pistol in his left pocket.

  The whole world left him alone.

  FIFTY-ONE

  There was an old Cuban named Gregorio Fuentes who lived in Cojimar for many years,” Paul said as the sun began to set over the outskirts of the town. They had just returned to the car and were beginning the final leg of their drive. “He was a fisherman and the first mate on Hemingway’s boat. Some people say he was the model for Santiago, the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea. Fuentes insisted he was, of course. He gave tours in the latter part of his life, let the tourists have their pictures taken with him. He was his own industry. Lived to a great age. A hundred, I think, till he died a few years ago.”

  “You ever meet him?” Alex asked.

  “About five years ago,” Paul said. “No photo though. I just thought that would be a bad idea, a picture of me in Cuba.”

  “Probably,” Alex agreed.

  Alex admired the way Paul could be a mass of amiable contradictions. He was disreputable and high-minded at the same time, thuggish, boorish, quick-witted, intellectually omnivorous, mobbed-up, and innocent. He was a devoted family man yet divorced and currently unattached, or so he said.

  Alex laughed. “Your cultural references are all over the place. How do you know all this stuff?” she said.

  “Same as you. I read a lot. I majored in American lit at Cornell and minored in history with a second minor in finance,” he said. “I spent five years there and was in an accelerated program that gave me a BA and a master’s. I liked college. No one knew the family links, so no one bothered me.”

  “Cornell’s Ivy League. Must have been expensive,” she said.

  “You got that right. Twenty-five grand a year. My old man had a million-dollar life-insurance policy when he got killed. He must have known what was coming someday, so he sought to provide. And provide, he did. Whatever else you thought of him, gangster, gambler, underworld guy — who knows what else? — he loved his families, both of them. And we loved him. He left us all we
ll-off.”

  Paul thought for a moment as he drove. Alex was not inclined to interrupt.

  “I owe my dad,” he said. “To this day, I owe him a lot. He could have ignored us, left us in Cuba, or just walked. I can remember when it happened … when he was murdered. The last time I saw him was on a summer day in 1973. We’d just bought tickets to see the Mets at Shea Stadium. He had bought tickets from a scalper, some guy he knew from the racetrack. We had some real good seats just behind the Mets dugout. Next thing I knew, he had been shot to death.”

  The distant light of Cojimar had now disappeared behind them. The road evened out.

  “I had a lot of time alone as a kid,” Paul said. “I stayed inside a lot, out of places where I’d be vulnerable. Know what I mean? With my old man being connected and all. He was always afraid some enemy would strike the family. So I’d fill an afternoon by picking up a book.”

  She smiled. “I used to do the same thing.”

  They came to another town. The architecture ran the gamut, from old Victorian houses by the sea to blocks of sterile Soviet-style apartments from the 1970s. They took a turn and were on a narrow, bumpy, sandy road that led between huts with thatched roofs and huts of concrete and discarded wooden panels. Some of the huts had windows with no glass, entirely open to the elements. Alex looked at them and shuddered; the flies and mosquitoes must be fierce.

  They accessed the main road. Traffic was minimal, mostly old cars and slow trucks, an occasional diesel bus spewing smoke. For the next hour the Toyota rambled past small farms and villages. For a long time they rode in silence. Alex glanced at the speedometer and noticed that it barely nudged above forty-five.

  Eventually, the road rose onto a plateau. In the distance, to the left and the north, Alex could see the blue sea. The view to the south descended into rolling fields and dark foliage.

  From time to time, they scanned the sky. No whirlybird. They were convinced no one was tailing them. Several minutes went by as Alex relaxed and gazed out the window. For a while, she sought to put her assignment and the pressing danger out of her mind and enjoy the view of part of the world she had never seen before.