See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  They would be free to swim at the beach, provided they did not swim out of sight of the guard and followed his instructions. If they needed to speak with Major Bustamente they would ask the guard for the telephone, which he would plug in, although it might be “a little while” before the telephone connections could be made. He would give them information “later on” as to what provisions, exactly, had been made for them to communicate with “your principals”—the arrangements had not yet been completed.

  The car was elderly and arthritic, the city streets full of holes, the ride shaky and hot, and Blackford was beginning to feel tired and uncomfortable and just a little irritated, though he had no plausible complaint, not yet.

  What had once been a decorative knee-high wall, painted white, still stood, disheveled now, around the cottage situated along with three or four others a stone’s throw from the eight-story hotel that looked, in the post-midnight hours, as though it were permanently asleep, save that a few lights shone from here and there; burglar-alarm lighting, Blackford called it. Blackford could smell and hear, but not see—the night was very dark—the ocean.

  He picked up his bags for the fourth time and took them through the little hallway into a pleasantly large living room which, though once a tourist’s home-away-from-home, had evidently metamorphosed into a kind of military officer’s utilitarian quarters; and then again into quarters for a diplomatic delegation. An effort had been made to return to it a little color, but one saw the army-khaki couch covers extending down behind the floral chintz hastily sewn over it. A lampshade on the desk sat with the merchandiser’s cellophane wrapping still covering it. There was a colored reproduction of an oil painting of Fidel Castro on one wall, and on another a poster-sized photograph of Fidel signing land reform decrees. Blackford wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. Inside the small unit there was a case of (Russian) beer, a bottle of rum, another of vodka, some fruit, some odd cans of this and that. He closed his wrist around one of the beer cans. Only just cooler than room temperature. “Joe” was talking in Spanish to the orderly. And now he turned to his guests. “Well, Señor Caimán, Manuel here will look after you, and I will be in touch with you, either personally or by messenger. He smiled, stepped back a foot, and raised his hand in a salute at once self-mocking and friendly.

  “Good night, señores.”

  Velasco poured out two glasses of rum and poked about, without success, for something to mix it with, settling finally for tap water. They sat down on the couches and Blackford told Manuel they needed nothing more from him, that he was to go to bed. Manuel disappeared into a room beyond the kitchen, closing the back door.

  Blackford withdrew a small portable radio from his bag and turned it on, fetching up a pronounced Congo beat from a go-go all-night Havana station.

  Without exchanging a word, the two men began the search. They found the first microphone behind Castro’s picture, appropriately enough just on the other side of his left ear; a second under the desk lamp, a third behind the couch, just under the slipcover; yet another nestling in a compartment carved out for it behind the headboard in the larger of the two bedrooms.

  Blackford spoke out, in Spanish. This was an opportune moment for it. He didn’t feel he had time to consult Cecilio to straighten out his diction, so he said only, in unexcited tones into one of the surreptitious mikes: “Uds. no tienen derecho de, de—interferir—en conversaciones entre representantes de jefes de estados.” Having thus advertised to the monitors that they had no right to intercept conversations of representatives of a chief of state—which admonition, Blackford thought, would confirm any latent suspicions of his amateur standing—he proceeded to cut the connections, one by one, with his scissors.

  Blackford addressed Velasco for the first time. “I guess that’s the lot, though we can’t be sure. It’s times like these I wish we could speak in Swahili.”

  They sat now, relaxed, more or less opposite each other on the couches—Cecilio Velasco trim, upright; Blackford slouching, his feet on the coffee table.

  He was attempting to complete, in his mind, the portrait of Ernesto Che Guevara, about whom he had read so much during the past ten days. A pointillist painting, it would need to be, though on a single point—that Che Guevara, Castro’s philosophical mentor, adviser, brother-in-arms, hated the United States—there would be no ambiguity.

  Velasco whispered, “Do you think it’s all right now to speak?”

  “There are certain things I wouldn’t say. But most of what we’d probably want to be saying right now it wouldn’t much matter if they heard.”

  Blackford sipped his drink and then said in a quiet voice, “There’s something going on here I don’t like. And I don’t mean what I don’t like that’s going on is Castro’s revolution … How does this particular reception compare with those you’ve—”

  Cecilio Velasco raised his index finger to his lips.

  “Sorry,” Blackford flushed. Great effort had been made, beginning many years earlier, to wipe out any trace of Raúl Carrera, the Spanish communist from Barcelona. Cecilio Velasco, by official record, was an apolitical Spaniard who had fled the civil war and settled, as a bachelor, in America, doing clerical work and translation for the 4th Army in San Antonio. He would not logically be asked about other paradiplomatic experiences. According to the plan, Operation Alligator would be terminated before his fingerprints were paired with thirty-year-old records in Moscow. The identity and profession of Blackford the Cubans were expected to know, or discern eventually. “So what?” Blackford had commented, vexed at the delay that had resulted from the Agency’s refusal to permit him to use his own name. “They treat all Americans as if they were members of CIA.”

  Cecilio rose from his chair and sat down next to Blackford, putting the portable radio and the loud music between them. He spoke too softly for his voice to be picked up by any microphone they might have missed.

  “There is nothing yet here that surprises me.” Blackford finished his rum and said nothing.

  Blackford slept fitfully. He woke at four and scratched out a letter to Sally. At some point they would have access to a pouch.

  He went into the kitchen and ate an orange, absentmindedly biting into the peel.

  He looked at his watch.

  Nearly five.

  He had slept just over one hour.

  He went to the front door and knocked on it. It was, of course, locked. The guard, his hand on his holster, responded, opening the door. Blackford tried out his Spanish again.

  “Se puede nadar en esta hora?”

  No, the guard shook his head quietly. No swimming at this hour. Blackford bowed his head in acknowledgment of a performance on the whole civil; he closed the door, and the guard relocked it. He went to his bag in the bedroom and fished out an eyeshade against the rising sun, went to his bed, and woke up, sweating, at noon.

  Lunch was served. Beans and a fish of sorts and hard bread and a caramel paste. They ate pretty much in silence.

  “Do you swim?” he asked Velasco.

  “No, but I will accompany you.”

  Blackford put on his trunks and grabbed a towel. They knocked on the front door and this time the guard nodded and followed them to the beach, fifty yards away. There were no other swimmers. To the west Blackford could see at a distance what appeared to be fishing boats, clustered about what must have been a concrete commercial pier. A few soldiers in uniform loitered about the hotel on the other side, far enough away to give Blackford a sense of privacy. A sense of isolation was more accurate.

  The water was warm, yet refreshing, and Blackford swam first idly then, in a conscious bid for exercise, vigorously. On his second lap Velasco waved to him. “The guard says you are swimming too far away; you must shorten your laps by one half.” Blackford complied.

  He returned and asked Manuel whether Joe Bustamente had called. Negative. He then asked the guard to call Major Bustamente. The guard replied that he did not yet have the telephone
, that he had only a little receiver that could not initiate signals.

  Blackford beckoned to Velasco to walk back toward the beach where they could talk with confidence that they were not being overheard.

  “These bastards are in a real hurry.”

  “The tempo is slow in Cuba, Blackford. Besides, they may be trying to make a point.”

  Blackford had endured many tedious situations. But always they had been, if not exactly of his own making, of his own abiding. One time, in Berlin, he and a companion had needed to go over written profiles of a dozen suspects per day, tediously exploring the possibility that each might be the person they needed to lay their fingers on, and that had gone on for three maddening months. But their schedule had been their own. Indeed, the work arrangements were their own. They were free whenever they chose to roam the streets and brothels of Berlin; to telephone to America or wherever, using due discretion of course. The situation in Cuba was very different.

  And hot. Horribly, enervatingly hot. No air conditioning, needless to say.

  Blackford had packed six detective stories in Spanish and a Spanish-English dictionary and—for this he thanked God for the forethought—a paperback containing the ten tragedies of Shakespeare. So he spent the afternoon with Hercule Poirot, tracking down the butler or whoever or whomever, as Agatha Christie would have put it, and the early evening with King Lear; had dinner (just this side of inedible), drank more rum than he normally would have, did some push-ups, and asked Velasco what he was thinking about. Velasco replied that he did not need so many stimulants; he had with him Gironella’s Los Cipreses Creen en Dios, and a great many cartons of cigarettes, and a Bible. He sat quietly on one of the couches and read.

  That next day was Sunday, and in the afternoon Blackford once again attempted to get the guard to summon Bustamente. “Cuando viene tu compañero, mándele comunicar con Major—how do you say ‘Major,’ Cecilio? I’m telling him to get his relief guard to go to a phone and call Joe—el Mayor Bustamente, por teléfono, que viene aquí a vernos, muy importante, muy urgente.” The guard only nodded, and replied that their orders were to wait until Major Bustamente was in touch with them.

  By lunchtime on Monday, Blackford Oakes was angry. Again he summoned Velasco to come away, toward the beach, so that they could talk freely.

  “If we were mercenaries or even just plain agents working on some common proposition, you might not be surprised by this. But we are here at Guevara’s invitation and I am carrying messages from the President of the United States.”

  “We know that,” Velasco said, squinting his eyes in the sun, an arm resting on the trunk of a palm tree. “And they know that.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “That they wish to condition you.”

  Blackford thought long and hard about the situation that afternoon and his thought went to the psychology of imprisonment. He happened in his Shakespeare on a passage from King Richard II in Pomfret Castle jail. He read with fascination the passage in which King Richard expressed at once the impossibility of thinking, and his determination to do so. “I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out./My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,/My soul the father; and these two beget/A generation of still-breeding thoughts/And these same thoughts people this little world,/In humours like the people of this world/For no thought is contented.” And he understood the bitter despair of the later lines of the soliloquy: “whate’er I be,/Nor I nor any man that but man is/With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased/With being nothing.” He felt as nothing, powerless, churning, yet incapable of thought.

  On Monday night Manuel served pork, which was intended as roast pork, and they finished the vodka.

  On Tuesday he woke perspiring in bed. It was very hot, he remarked to Cecilio, who agreed, although he wore, as usual, shirt and tie. Blackford wore only his undershorts and a T-shirt, and he swam for almost an hour. The batteries on the radio were suddenly dead and he asked Manuel to get more. He was told that would be difficult because there was a great scarcity in Cuba “because of the American blockade.” Well, he recalled that King Richard remembered, had said, that prisoners have no need for music. The day was endless.

  That night when Cecilio offered him a drink, as usual at about six, Blackford declined it. Cecilio looked up. “You must not reject the simple distractions,” pouring himself a generous rum and walking over to the water pitcher. Blackford, stretching out on the couch, asked Cecilio whether he had ever read Chekhov’s tale of the young lawyer who had accepted a two-million-ruble challenge that he could live voluntarily in solitary confinement for fifteen years without ever letting himself out.

  No, said Cecilio. And did he?

  The rules, Blackford said, were that he could have anything he called for, and he proceeded to conjugate all the pleasures of the flesh. For a while it was women, for a while wine; and then came a brooding introspection. And, finally, the slow ascendancy of his spirit to supremacy over his body, and then he wanted only his books and his thoughts.

  “Did he make it the fifteen years?”

  Five minutes before the time was up, Blackford told Cecilio, moments before his old adversary would be ruined by having to pay the challenge money, the lawyer walked out of his cloister, thereby revealing the true philosopher’s indifference to the things of this world. Blackford winked at Cecilio:

  “You see, I am trying to compress fifteen years’ experience into—into what? Will they keep us here for fifteen days? Is that possible? In any case, no more booze for me until we get out of here. And you, Cecilio, should take this opportunity to give up smoking. It will clear your lungs and the air you and, incidentally, I, breathe.”

  Velasco half smiled, lit a cigarette, and said that long ago he had smoked because it calmed him to smoke and in any case he had become addicted. But now, he said, he would not stop smoking merely because it is supposed that to smoke is to shorten life. No more stop that cause of biological attrition than cause the clock to stop. There was no reason for him, he said, to live forever.

  “Maybe not forever, Cecilio, but long enough to see this mission through and get back. I have a very important engagement in 1964 and at this rate I worry about being late for it.”

  It was Thursday. They had made no further mention of the tedium. Thursday was another hot day.

  On Friday morning Manuel advised them at breakfast that he had been told to notify Sr. Caimán that Major Bustamente would be here to confer with them at two o’clock.

  At a quarter to two Blackford carefully shaved and put on a fresh shirt laundered by Manuel, who also pressed, as best he could manage, a pair of khaki pants. Blackford sat on one of the couches, a book on his lap. He could not forbear, at 2:30, to signal to Manuel, whose eye he caught in the kitchen, to come over to him. Blackford did not wish to shout out his question, possibly into a furtive microphone.

  Manuel approached and Blackford asked him, quietly, “Did you say the major was coming at two o’clock?”

  Manuel nodded. “Sí señor, sí señor. A las dos. Parece que viene tarde.”

  Cecilio, sitting opposite, said in English, “They are often late.”

  Blackford said nothing.

  He arrived just before four, with an unsmiling aide. Blackford remained in his chair, reading, as he had instructed Cecilio to do. He looked up at Bustamente, saying nothing.

  The anticipated rhythm broken, Bustamente stopped, stood more or less at attention, and smiled. “Ah, good afternoon, Señor Caimán. I hope you—and your interpreter”—it came to Major Bustamente as a genial afterthought to acknowledge the existence of subordinates—“have been comfortable. I am instructed to advise you that Comandante Che Guevara will call on you at two o’clock in the morning.”

  Blackford raised his eyes to Bustamente’s. “Please advise Comandante Guevara that at two in the morning I shall be asleep. I retire just before midnight. And I rise at seven.”

  “Joe” Bustamente did not, there and then, know what to say.
He spoke rapidly in Spanish, in whispers, with his companion. Blackford resumed reading.

  “Sir, you must understand that Comandante Guevara is a very busy man.”

  “I shall be glad to report that to the President.”

  Again conferences. This time Blackford spoke again.

  “Oh, and Major Bustamente, this being Friday, I have decided that if negotiations with Comandante Guevara are not under way by noon on Sunday, I shall conclude that your government has no interest in pursuing the questions initiated by Comandante Guevara to the President’s representative in August. Kindly arrange, in that event, to have me and Mr. Velasco taken back to Guantánamo on Sunday afternoon.”

  With that Blackford turned again to his book—Diez Pequeños Indios, by Agatha Christie. Bustamente cleared his throat and, with his companion, walked out the door.

  Twelve

  Aleksei I. Adzhubei had toured Latin America and, before returning to Moscow, would spend time with President Kennedy at Hyannis Port, the first exclusive interview ever granted to a foreign newsman. All this was still secret when Adzhubei arrived in Havana, where he was given full honors, beginning when he descended from the Soviet transport. He was, after all, the editor of Izvestia, the national newspaper of the Soviet Union. And it was widely expected that he would one day be elected a member of the Central Committee. And then on top of all of that, Adzhubei was the son-in-law of Nikita Khrushchev.

  So the flags flew in the suddenly brisk October breeze, and the distinguished visitor drove in Castro’s own car to the national palace, beginning a ten-day visit.

  There was the luncheon. Not the long state dinner that was planned for the end of Adzhubei’s trip. A more modest affair, featuring Fidel, Che Guevara, President Osvaldo Dorticós, and Interior Minister Ramiro Valdés. When Castro got up to toast his guest before the hundred or so Cuban officials, together with the first echelon from the Soviet Embassy, President Dorticós slipped his left hand down under the table, and with his right hand manipulated his versatile Swiss watch to the stopwatch mode, depressing the GO button. He did not share the secrets of what he called “Dorticós’s Law of Speech Duration” with many friends, indeed with only two not counting his wife, but having listened to Fidel Castro speak perhaps five hundred times during the past three years he knew the Comandante’s habits. It went (this was very secret) as follows: