by Dan Simmons
“So you saw what happened next?”
“Only bits of it, señor.”
“Continue, Maria.”
“The other man came in. They began speaking very sharply to one another… but not so that I could understand it. Not in Spanish or English. In a different language.”
“What language, Maria?”
“I think that it was German,” said the girl. “Or perhaps Dutch. I have not heard either before this night.”
“So they argued?”
“Very violently, Señor Papa. But only for a moment. Then I heard the struggle and peeked through the crack in the open door. The larger man had pushed my… my client… back onto the bed. The other man was going through the valise on the table, throwing things as you see them. Then the man on the bed cried out and reached for his pistol—”
“Where was the pistol, Maria?”
“In his jacket.”
“He aimed it at the other man?”
“He did not have time, Señor Papa. The other man’s arm swung quickly. I saw this through the crack in the door. Then my client dropped the pistol and fell back as you see him. The bleeding was very bad.”
I looked at the arterial spray across the bedclothes, carpet, and wall. The girl was not exaggerating.
“What happened then, Maria?”
“I screamed. I closed the door and locked it. This is the reason that this room has a bathroom—none of the others do. Special clients are brought here. But if they request something… not appropriate… the girl can hide in the bathroom and call for help. The door is very thick. The locks are very strong.”
“Did the killer try to get in?” said Hemingway.
“No, Señor Papa. I did not see the door handle turn. He must have just left the room then.”
“I saw him pass through the lobby,” said Leopoldina la Honesta. “He was very calm. There was no blood on his uniform.”
“Uniform?” said Hemingway. “Was he a sailor?”
“No, Señor Papa,” said Maria. “He was a policeman. Un guardia jurado.”
Hemingway’s dark eyebrows arched very slightly. He looked at the older madame.
“Caballo Loco,” said Leopoldina la Honesta.
I had understood the girl’s comment. Guardia jurado was Cuban slang for a policeman on private duty, such as a cop who acted as a bouncer for a bar. But Caballo Loco meant “Crazy Horse,” and I did not understand this. I looked at Hemingway.
“Oh, fuck,” said the writer tiredly, glancing at his watch. To Leopoldina he said, “Get the girl out of here and dressed. Pack her things. She’ll come with us.”
The older whore nodded and took Maria out of the room. Hemingway closed the door behind them. He stood scratching the stubble on his cheek and looking at the corpse.
“ ‘Crazy Horse’?” I said.
“The man who did this, evidently,” he said. “Caballo Loco is a local nickname for a certain Lieutenant Maldonado of the Cuban National Police. Maria said ‘guardia jurado’ because everyone in Havana knows that Maldonado does private work for various rich families and government agencies.”
“What kind of private work?” I said.
“He kills people,” said Hemingway. “And he takes orders from Major Juan Emmanuele Pache Garcia, ‘Juanito, the Jehovah’s Witness,’ the real power in the National Police. Garcia orders that people be killed. Sometimes he does it as a favor for the local politicians or friendly agencies.”
“What friendly agencies?”
Hemingway looked at me. “The local branch of the FBI, for one, Lucas.” He looked back at the corpse and sighed. “Maldonado killed a young friend of mine.”
I waited. When someone says something like that, he always wants to finish the story.
“Guido Perez,” continued the writer. “He was a good boy. He used to take part in our rocket attacks on Frank Steinhart’s place. I taught him boxing at the finca.”
“Why did Maldonado kill him?”
Hemingway shrugged. “Guido was a passionate boy. He hated the type of Havana bully that Caballo Loco represented. He said something to someone about his contempt for the lieutenant. Maldonado hunted him down and shot him.” He rubbed his chin again. “But why this?” Hemingway gestured at the corpse.
I glanced at my watch. “We only have a few minutes. Word will travel. The cops will be here, and Maldonado might be the one investigating.”
Hemingway nodded and crouched by the notebooks and documents lying in the blood on the carpet. “Let’s see if any of these things suggest a reason for the murder.”
I shook my head. “Maldonado wouldn’t have left them if they did.” I went over to the valise and looked inside. It was empty. “Do you have a knife?”
Hemingway handed me a pocketknife with a three-inch blade. I shook the valise, cut through the false bottom. There was a single notebook hidden there. It was small—about six inches by four. Hemingway took it.
“What the hell?” he said.
The pages were flimsy and perforated like a Western Union message tablet. Some pages held a grid with ten blank squares across and five rows down. On some of the pages, the grids were wider, rectangular, with twenty-six empty blocks across and four rows down. It was obvious that about a third of the book’s perforated pages had been torn out.
The grids were all empty except for the one of the first page. On this one, the second square in the first row, the last two squares in the second row, and the fifth square in the fifth row were blacked out. Written in heavy ballpoint pen in the other squares was the following cipher:
h-r-l-s-l/r-i-a-l-u/ i-v-g-a-m / v-e-e-l-b / e-r-s-e-d / e-a-f-r-d / d-l-r-t-e / m-l-e-o-e / w-d-a-s-e / o-x-x-x-x
“All right, Lucas,” said Hemingway, handing me the book. “You’re my official consultant. Tell me what the hell this is. And what this says.”
I did not even glance again at the book. I knew exactly what it was, of course. My mind was racing, trying to decide what to tell the writer. What was my charge exactly? To spy on Hemingway, of course. To see what his idiotic Crook Factory was up to, to report to the director via Delgado, and to await further orders. I was supposed to play at being a consultant, an expert on counterintelligence. But was I supposed to provide Hemingway and his team with real information? No one had briefed me on that. Obviously no one had considered that the Crook Factory might uncover any actual intelligence.
“It’s a German cipher book,” I said. “Abwehr. Two types of transmission blocks there—both book-based. The first one’s based on the first word or phrase on a specific page of a book both the transmitter and receiver are using. The second one uses the first twenty-six letters on the page of the book they’re using that day. The message on the first page was probably a recent one that he had either received or was ready to transmit.”
“What does it say?” said Hemingway, taking the book back and frowning at the cipher. “It looks like a simple letter-substitution code.”
“Simple,” I said, “but almost impossible to decipher unless one knows what book it’s based on. And it’s not just simple letter substitution. Before the actual text of the message, German intelligence operatives send their ciphers in clusters of five. The letters each represent the number of its position in the alphabet.”
“What do you mean?” The writer was frowning at me.
“Say k was equal to zero,” I said. “And there will be a dummy letter. Say e.”
“Yeah?”
“So this cluster…” I said, pointing to v-e-e-l-b, “would stand for eleven thousand one hundred and seventeen.”
Hemingway shook his head. “No book has eleven thousand plus pages.”
“Right,” I said. “So that’s not the page code. Several of the clusters will be false. But with each transmission, there will be a new page of the book cited. Usually the key word for the cipher is the first one on that page of the book.”
“What book?” said Hemingway.
I shrugged. “It could be anything. They cou
ld change it weekly or monthly. Use different books for different types of transmissions.”
Hemingway took the book back and rifled through the blank pages. “Where are the missing pages?”
“Destroyed after each transmission,” I said. “Probably burned.”
Hemingway looked at the corpse again, as if he wanted to ask the dead man some questions. “His seaman card said that he was a radio operator.”
“First class,” I said.
“The Southern Cross,” said Hemingway. He put the cipher book in his shirt pocket. “Do German agents use this sort of code to communicate with subs?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Do you think the book or books that would be the key for this cipher are on the yacht?”
“Probably,” I said. “Kohler would have wanted to keep it nearby for his deciphering. It’s almost certainly a common book. Something a seaman would keep in his berth, maybe even something common to Kohler’s radio shack, if the entire crew is in on this.” I looked at the corpse. The man’s eyes were beginning to film over. “Or maybe your Lieutenant Maldonado took his reference book when he killed him.”
Hemingway turned toward the door. “Let’s get that young whore out of here before Maldonado and his friends come back and kill her.”
THE GIRL BABBLED in Spanish all the way out to the finca in the dark. The purr of the Lincoln’s strong motor threatened to put me to sleep, but I listened to Maria’s nervous chatter and the writer’s occasional questions with a small part of my mind, while simultaneously trying to sort things out for myself.
This was all very melodramatic. The radio operator for the Southern Cross, the same luxury yacht we had seen near the German U-boat, murdered in a Havana cathouse by a National Police lieutenant with an absurd nickname. Caballo Loco my serene ass.
But the cipher tablet was real. I had seen them before in spy nests we had cleared out in Mexico City and Colombia. Basic Abwehr issue. Or Geheimaus ruestungen fuer Vertowenslaute, as the ever-literal Germans would call it: “Secret equipment for confidential agents.” If this poor, dead Martin Kohler—or whatever his name was—had been a real agent, especially a Grossagenten or “super agent,” then the rest of his standard-issue equipment would include a manual for assembly of a wireless set, a cipher reduced to film size by microphotography, a set of call letters, a prayer book or other standard German book on which his code was based, chemicals for making and developing invisible inks, a powerful magnifying glass for reading microfilm, a Leica mini-camera, and an ungodly amount of currency in traveler’s checks or gold coins or jewelry or stamps or all of the above.
Melodramatic. But I had seen this corny stuff strewn near the bodies of dead Abwehr agents before.
Or perhaps Martin Kohler was just a radio operator who happened to be freelancing for the Germans. It was possible. But whichever possibility was true, the cipher book looked authentic. It held some message, either from Abwehr headquarters to him or vice versa. Or perhaps to or from the sub. We would never know if we did not find the book he had used as a basis for the cipher.
Maria was explaining that she had come from the tiny village of Palmarito, near the village of La Prueba, on the far part of the island, a few hours’ walk from Santiago de Cuba, and that her older brother Jesus had attempted to have carnal knowledge of her, but her father believed her brother’s obscene story instead of her truthful one and had disowned her and threatened to cut off her nose and ears if she ever returned—which he would do because he was known as the most violent man in Palmarito—and she had come with the last of her money all the way to Havana, where Señorita Leopoldina had been kind to her, asking her to meet with only a few clients a week—those willing to pay for her unspoiled beauty—but now if she went home her father would kill her and if she stayed in Havana Caballo Loco would kill her and even if she tried to hide, the National Police or her father or her brother would track her down and cut off her nose and ears before killing her….
It was a relief when the stone gates of the finca rolled past the cone of headlights. Hemingway cut off the engine and coasted into the last bit of driveway so as not to wake his wife.
“Take Xenophobia to the guest house, Lucas,” said the writer. “Get some sleep. We’ll head down to the bay when it gets light and check out the boat.”
Xenophobia? I thought. I said, “Is the plan to keep both of us in the guest house?”
“Just for a few hours,” said the writer, going around to open the door for the young whore just as if she were another movie star visiting the finca. “We’ll find a safer place for both of you before the day is out.”
I was not pleased to have my future plans mixed up with this terrified whore’s, but I nodded and led the girl across the courtyard and under dripping palms to the guest house.
She looked around with wide eyes when I switched on the lights.
“I’ll get my stuff out of the bedroom,” I said. “You can have it to get some sleep. I’ll nap out here on the couch.”
“I will never sleep again,” said the girl. She glanced shyly in at the bed and then at me. Something knowing and calculating entered her dark eyes. “Does this place have a bath?”
“A bath and a shower bath,” I said. I took her in and showed her the bathroom and extra towels. I lifted a pillow, using it to cover the pistol I had left there, made an effort to toss the bedclothes right, slipped the revolver under my jacket when she was looking the other way, and said, “I’ll be out here. Feel free to sleep as long as you want. I’ll be going with Señor Hemingway as soon as it gets light.”
Lying on the couch, watching the predawn light come up, I heard the bath running and then the shower pounding and then a muffled exclamation. Perhaps it was her first shower. I was half dozing when the door opened and she stood there, backlighted by the soft light from the bathroom, black hair wet and shiny. She was clad only in a towel. She let the towel drop open and looked down in a study of modesty.
Maria Marquez was beautiful. Her body was slim and firm with youth but had retained none of the baby fat of childhood. Her skin was as light as any Norte Americana’s. Her breasts were larger than I would have thought, even after having seen her in a blood-soaked negligee, and they actually rose to the brown-tipped nipples in the way an adolescent male’s imagination would hope. Her pubic hair was as dark and thick as the hair on her head, and beads of water glistened there. Maria’s eyes remained downcast, but her lashes fluttered in a perfect and silent invitation.
“Señor Lucas…” she said huskily.
“Joe,” I said.
She tried the word but found it difficult.
“José,” I said.
“José, I am still frightened. The sounds of that man’s screams are still with me. Could you… would you consider…”
When I was a very young man, on my uncle’s fishing boat, I had heard him tell his own son, who was only a year older than me, “Louis, do you know why we call a prostitute puta in our own language?”
“No, Papa,” said my cousin Louis. “Why?”
“It comes from an old word in the mother tongue of our mother tongue—the old language from which Spanish and Italian and all of the lovely languages descend—and that word is pu.”
“Pu?” said my cousin Louis, who had bragged to me many times of his visits to whorehouses.
“Pu,” said my uncle. “It is the ancient word for ‘rot.’ For the smell of decay. The Italians call a whore putta. The French say putain. The Portuguese also say puta. But it all means the same—the smell of rot and decay. Putrid. The smell of pus. Good women smell of the sea on a clean morning. A puta always stinks of dead fish. It is the dead semen in them… the anti-life wombs of whores.”
In the decade and a half since that day, usually through my work, I had known my share of whores. I had even liked a few of them. But I had never fucked one. Now Maria Marquez stood there naked in the dim light, her eyes downcast and demure, but her nipples staring boldly.
“I mean,” she was saying, “I am afraid to sleep alone. José. If you could just lie with me and hold me until I fall asleep….”
I walked over to her. She glanced up as I came within arm’s length. Her dark eyes were gleaming.
I picked up the towel and handed it to her in a way that covered her breasts and belly.
“Get dried off,” I said. “Sleep if you can. I’m going out now.”
HEMINGWAY AND I STOOD ON THE HILLSIDE, leaning on the dark Lincoln to hold our binoculars steady, and watched the Southern Cross catch the first, low rays of the rising sun. The yacht was absurdly long—a football field in length—but it was also sleek and subtle in execution, its bridge swept back in a sweet, post–art deco curve, its decks of teak gleaming, the rectangular portholes of its many above-deck salons reflecting the tropical sunrise. The ship had not put in to the Havana Yacht Club or any of the commercial moorings, but had dropped anchor far out in the bay near the open sea. It took a special exemption from the harbormaster for ships to park there.
The writer lowered his glasses. “Big son of a bitch, isn’t it?”
I kept watching. The cluster of radio antennae behind the bridge suggested serious communications facilities. The radio shack would be there. The yacht was naval in its cleanliness. Two officers in blue blazers had stepped out of the bridge to take in the breeze that came with the sunrise, and there were half a dozen men standing guard, two on either side, one at the bow, another at the stern. As if that were not enough, a fast motorboat purred slowly in circles around the big craft. Besides the man at the wheel, two large men in canvas jackets lounged in the back of the motorboat and kept watch on everything that moved in the harbor. Each man had a pair of powerful naval binoculars slung around his neck, as did all of the lookouts aboard the yacht. Hemingway had parked back under some trees on the hilltop, behind a low stone wall, in a position where our own binoculars would not reflect the sunlight and where we would be two shadows next to the shadowy car.