Hostage in Havana

by Noel Hynd

  “So it was worth my visit?” she asked.

  “Very much so,” Fajardie said. “A-list intelligence on a B-list enemy. Not akin to a top intelligence coup against our Muzzie adversaries, for example, but certainly when a hostile regime is ninety miles from our doorstep, an up-to-date snapshot is of great value. Most of Violette’s material was dated and harks back to the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Think bell-bottoms to big hair. But it puts some old cases in order, lets us know who’s still living in Cuba, and fleshes out some other cases. As for the stuff from Major Mejias, we’ve only had a week to look at that, but it’s excellent stuff. Here, let me show you. Look at some of the initial conclusions.”

  Fajardie handed Alex a series of documents. Alex riffled through. She read a few of the conclusions that American intelligence analysts had come to:

  … Cuba remains in the midst of its worst economic and social crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union …

  … The Cuban people, frustrated with massive unemployment and food shortages, could revolt at any time …

  … Raúl Castro drinks very heavily since the death of his wife. He is more in touch with the people than his brother was, but he would not hesitate to use the military to repress threats to the Communist regime … On the other hand, the overtures of reconciliation to the United States that he has made through the Spanish ambassador to Washington are sincere …

  … More than 90 percent of all Cuban diplomats assigned to New York and Washington are engaged in espionage …

  She looked up. “What about Violette?” Alex asked. “I assume he genuinely wanted to return. Am I correct?”

  “You are,” he said. “But old antagonisms die hard around this agency. We had agents butchered in Angola, Colombia, Spain, Cuba, and Venezuela due to this man. Do you think that anyone here was ready to see him return and receive free health care at a federal prison hospital? Do you think anyone had any real affection for seeing that vacuous, deranged, sneering face returning in pseudo-triumph?”

  “I doubted it all along,” Alex said. “I posed that question to him myself, but he was too far gone to comprehend.”

  “When the possibility of reeling in ‘Figaro’ arose, the possibility of a trade-off took shape. So if someone such as yourself was going to be kind enough to go to the island, scoop up Violette’s final bag of goodies, and return with an even greater additional haul — well then! Stuff began to arrange itself behind the scenes. The Agency beat the FBI to Manuel Perez and made its own deal. Pretty good one, don’t you think? We turned him back to our side and had him take care of some business in Cuba for us.”

  “Hitting Violette, you mean?”

  “That was part of it.”

  “What was the other part?”

  “Have you heard the name Julio Garcia recently?”

  “Too many times, yes. I believe I should talk to Paul Guarneri about that.”

  “I believe you should,” Fajardie said. “Have a nice chat.”

  “I have one other stop first,” she said. “Some final points of interest. I’m going to take my queries directly to the source.”

  “Be my guest,” said Fajardie.

  That afternoon, Alex drove back across the Key Bridge into Washington, where she located a Cuban restaurant called Los Matamoros on a tiny side street in Georgetown. She spotted ex-Major Mejias and Juanita, his wife, at a rear booth.

  The émigré couple faced front. Their backs were to the rear wall. They looked as if they were settling into their new life but knew they still had enemies. Mejias’s eyes worked the room as he rose to greet her. A slap of a new cologne assaulted Alex during a token embrace. They sat. In the background, someone had fed the jukebox. Shakira was rocking the place. Nice and loud, great for talking off the record.

  For the next ninety minutes, over plates of spicy Montuna chicken and glasses of cold drinks, Señora Mejias kept quiet as her husband told his own story to Alex, who slipped easily into Spanish for the encounter.

  Mejias had been five years old when Fidel Castro marched into Havana in 1959, he said. In his youth, he became fervently pro-Castro.

  “I believed socialism would eradicate the problems of the Cuban people,” he said. “But after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the crash of the Soviet Union in 1991, I had my doubts about socialism. Because of my profession, and my position in state security, I was able to travel. I could see that the socialist system had not functioned in my country or any country that I had seen.”

  He paused.

  “As years went by, I learned that my parents had come to Cuba from Spain as political refugees, fleeing the fascist Franco. I had the rights to a Spanish passport. You know this, I think. I wanted to return to my parent’s homeland now that sanity had been restored. Juanita wished to leave with me. But the Cuban government routinely blocked passport applications from any of us in sensitive positions. And they took away security clearances and financial allowances for anyone who applied. So I held back because I wished to bring my wife with me. I never applied. That was six years ago. I’ve been preparing my exit since then.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Are you applying now? You should.”

  “I already have,” he said. “We may stay in America, or more likely we may emigrate to Spain. We will decide. I cherish the freedom to make that decision.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Alex said.

  Señora Mejias kept nervously watching the door. Alex had a hunch the little lady was packing a pistol just in case. But Alex didn’t ask.

  Juanes followed Shakira on the restaurant’s play list, then the sounds went retro with the Buena Vista Social Club. Mejias seemed happier with the latter.

  “Cuba remains in the grip of an economic calamity,” Mejias said, shaking his head. “Tourism is shrinking with the global recession. There are crises in the pricing of nickel mining and in the sugar industry. The government is closing half of the sugar mills. No one has anything. People pretend to work; the government pretends to pay them. Human rights are nonexistent and the European Union plays along with Castro to protect their trade agreements. It is disgusting. The situation becomes worse by the year. The people are frustrated,” he said. “Even Castro admits, after a half century of misery, that the Cuban model has failed.” He sighed and looked deeply troubled. “How long must Cuba wait?”

  “It took the Soviet Union almost seventy years to collapse,” Alex said. Her words were meant to console and they failed.

  Then, perhaps feeling that he was coming across as too dour, Mejias lightened. “There aren’t even any Marxists left in Cuba,” he said, with a wink. “They’ve all emigrated and found teaching positions at American universities!”

  Alex smiled politely. Señora Mejias, who had probably heard the same joke a thousand times before, never looked up from her chicken.

  Mejias laughed strangely, and so did Alex. The ex-major went back to business. Alex let him talk. One never knew what he might reveal, though she also sensed that Mejias was singing the tunes that he believed everyone wanted to hear. It wouldn’t have been the first time the CIA had bought such a catalogue. Yet Fajardie and his analysts seemed pleased with their acquisition so far and, who knew? They might even be correct in their assessments. It happened from time to time.

  Alex then moved to the only question that remained of which the answers might interest her. “What about the Venezuelans?” she asked.

  “What about them?”

  “Were they really interested in taking me into custody?”

  “Very much so,” he answered. “And a deal was in the works and very near completion. Since you were never officially in Cuba, your government couldn’t very easily track you. You would have been of great value to Hugo Chavez, and you might never have returned. That was why we left so expeditiously. I know solitary confinement was unpleasant, but it kept you alive. And as long as you were my prisoner, it was more difficult for the government to find you and move you. I’m deeply sorry to hav
e frightened you and to have held you there.”

  “Forgiveness is nothing new to me,” she said. “So, muchas gracias.”

  “De nada.”

  Then he leaned forward slightly. “You see,” he said, “the fix was in from the very beginning. My squad was to take you into custody on the beach. Señor Guarneri would be allowed to have his moment with Julio Garcia and make his romp in the graveyard. We would connect you to Roland Violette, and the CIA would be allowed to settle their long-standing grievance with him. All the events came together at once and allowed me the perfect moment to leave Cuba, a moment that hadn’t existed previously and would not have lasted indefinitely. Too bad the hotheads on the boat started shooting at us. They would have been home to Miami in a few days if they’d only surrendered.”

  “So when I arrived on the beach, you knew I was the one who was there to bring you to America,” she said.

  “That is correct. I wished to take you into custody. I was constantly being watched by secret police. So I wished to do my job and keep you under my personal supervision. Then we could both leave. Along with Juanita, of course.”

  “The CIA people told me they didn’t know who you were. They only knew a code name. That was true?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “There are traitors everywhere. If Cuban intelligence knew there was a major in the militia who wished to defect, I would be dead now. That’s why they needed to send somebody and let me find him. Or her.”

  “Then why didn’t you arrest me in the bar of the Ambos Mundos?” Alex asked. “We were codo con codo in there. Cheek by jowl. You could have arrested me then.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “There were two men at the bar. Undercover police. Not very good and not very undercover. But they report to the federal authorities. They would have taken you away right then. Better to make a night-time arrest, fill the files with paperwork, and move you around at my whim until we were ready to leave.”

  Alex nodded. “Muchas gracias otra vez,” she said.

  “De nada.”

  Alex switched to English. “And after I was in custody and the original escape dates were blown?” she asked. “Who arranged a new date for the CIA to make the pickup?” She smiled. “I’m guessing it was the only person who really knew when the prisoner, me, would be ready to escape,” she said.

  Mejias smiled. Juanita retained her silence. If Señora Mejias spoke English, she didn’t let on.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “You,” Alex said.

  Mejias nodded.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Alex took the train back to New York that evening, but she was in no mood to face her office anytime soon. She made an appointment with Christophe Chatton of the Swiss Bank and went to visit her money. She wanted to see what would happen, how she would be received, and in truth, if it was all still there.

  It was. She rearranged some of the accounts so she could accrue better interest. In fantasy, she played with the idea of buying a condo in Maui or a race horse, then decided against both. But for the first time, she fully understood that she was a wealthy woman, although she knew in her heart that wealth was never measured by a bank balance.

  On that same afternoon, to put to rest some final perplexities about Cuba, she phoned Paul Guarneri. They arranged to meet in Brooklyn and take a walk together on the promenade across the bay from Manhattan. Alex worked on him for a while, allowed him to take her hand for the stroll, and got him talking.

  Long ago, he said, when he had been just old enough to begin to understand such things and had repaired his relationship with his father, the old man had imparted some wisdom.

  “If anyone ever comes after me,” his father had said, “it won’t be from America. It will be from Cuba.” It was the 1970s after all, Paul explained, and people were looking into the dirty secrets from the 1960s. Castro and Kennedy. Hookers and hotel rooms, cash and casinos, Jimmy Fratianno. Santo Trafficante. Judith Exner and Jimmy Roselli.

  “The whole venal backbiting worthless load of them,” Guarneri called them.

  As Paul and Alex walked along the promenade, he opened up to her as never before. It was a bright summer day with low humidity, perfect for a game at one of the new ballparks or an afternoon at Aqueduct, had the old man been around. It was equally perfect for skaters, strollers, and joggers.

  Joseph Guarneri had made his peace with the American mob and was allowed a quiet retirement, his son explained. Even more quietly, however, shortly before his premature death, he was talking to investigators from the U.S. Congress about the Cuban connection with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

  “My father had theories and personal stories,” Paul said. “They weren’t backed by any evidence, but if true they filled in some dirty little pieces of history. You can only invade an island, poison cigars, hire homicidal mistresses, and plant contagious scuba gear for so long before the opposition hits you back.”

  “True enough,” Alex said.

  “Castro hated my father personally,” Paul said. “Maybe no more than any other North American gangster, but I had the idea it may have been over a woman. Maybe even my mother. Who knows now? Everyone’s dead. My father once told me, ‘Castro’s got a man named Julio Garcia who’s been assigned to kill me.’ “

  Paul paused, admired the skyline, took in some air, and then continued. “We lived under the shadow of that for a long time. Garcia lived in Dallas and New Orleans in the 1960s. He took care of a lot of Castro’s dirty work in the U.S. He knew Lee Harvey Oswald personally. Also knew Che and E. Howard Hunt. That’s what my father used to tell me. What do you make of that?”

  “Intriguing,” she said.

  “Later on, after my father was murdered, there was some underworld scuttlebutt. Garcia had gone back to Cuba. Castro gave him some sort of medal. Top stuff, was what I heard. Hero of the revolution and all that.”

  “But what direction does that go in?” Alex asked. “Does that mean that you went to Cuba to capture Garcia? Or kill him, like Major Mejias says?”

  “I went there to kill him,” Guarneri said. “Honest to God. I wanted to kill the man who took my father from me, even so late in life. Whether I could have looked him in the eye and done it was another question. So, when we were set to travel, your friends in Langley approached me. They said they had a man they were ‘turning.’ A sniper who had worked for them in the past. They were bringing him to Cuba, and he was going to take care of one assignment, so why not have him take care of another?”

  “Then what was your part?” Alex asked.

  “I just had to be the spotter,” Paul said. “My team of diggers, the fellows you met in the cemetery, knew Garcia and led me to him the second night. I fingered him for Perez. Perez went in and finished the job and I paid my diggers handsomely.”

  “Thirty-eight years after the fact,” she said.

  “Better late than never,” he said. Then he looked troubled. “You know, I’ve been thinking about it long and hard since then, and I still can’t decide whether I’m glad I didn’t pull the trigger or sorry that I didn’t.” He pondered. “Instead of my hands being dirty, I suppose they’re only slightly soiled.”

  Paul slouched slightly, but strolled with a carefree air, as if some great burden had been lifted. He was remarkably calm and at ease.

  “Oh, I think your hands are a little dirtier than that,” she said. “You eliminated an old enemy, maybe your last enemy on the island. I can’t tell whether it was a gangland hit or a political payback or something with elements of both.”

  “The world is gray like that, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “You also laid a solid groundwork for your own future in Cuba. After the thaw. In those inevitable first years when democracy creeps back in and corruption and criminal organizations come with it. You’ve already got your own boys on the street, don’t you?”

  “If and when,” he said. “If and when. But of course, it would be ninety miles offshore. S
o why should you care? It’s not your jurisdiction.”

  Alex processed all this. But Paul wasn’t finished. “A good businessman needs to be prepared,” he said. “Fidel Castro will be dead before the American presidential election of 2016, maybe before the one of 2012, if we’re lucky. That’s what everyone on the island was telling me. How’s that for a ‘feel good’ moment, Alex?”

  “I need to be getting over to Manhattan, Paul,” she said. “I’ve got to be back at my desk tomorrow.”

  “So soon?”

  “Yes. It’s overdue actually,” she said. “Señora Dosi is still out there somewhere, and I owe her some attention. So I need to find a taxi.”

  “The subway’s on Clark Street; it takes you straight to Wall Street. If you live in New York now, you should know that.”

  “What else should I know?” she asked.

  “You should know about a Tuscan restaurant in Greenwich Village called Vincente’s,” he said. “It’s on Greenwich Avenue near Tenth. I know the owner. He’s a connected guy like most of my friends. How about Saturday night? I can pick you up at seven. Car and driver. Then maybe some dancing afterward at some unlicensed dive in the Bowery with techno stuff, type of place where you can’t hear yourself think.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “No. I’m goofing around. Dinner’s the real invitation, but I know some jazz clubs in SoHo you might like. What do you think?”

  “Paul? May I share a secret with you?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “After our trip to Cuba, and after the many, various, ingenious, and imaginative ways you lied to me, including the fact that a murder was on your agenda …”

  “Yeah …?” he laughed.

  “I wouldn’t touch you socially with a ten-foot pole.”

  Guarneri scoffed. “Garcia was a bad man. He got what he deserved.”

  “Everyone does eventually. And you will too. Good-bye, Paul,” she said.

  Alex took a step to move away. His hand found her wrist. He held her firmly and stopped her.