by Dan Simmons
The boy looked away toward the shed, but I could see his dark eyes fill with tears that I knew he would never shed. “It is because of what they call Señor Hemingway… that is true for me. His is the name of that man I never had.”
For a moment I did not understand. Then I said, “Papa?”
“Sí, Señor Lucas,” said the boy and looked up at me, his thin arms tight around my waist. “When I do a good job for him, or when I play well with the baseball while he is watching, sometimes Papa looks at me and there is something in his eyes that is also there when he looks at his real sons. Sometimes then, I pretend—for just a moment—that I also may call him Papa and that it would be real and that he would hug me the way he hugs the boys who are truly his sons.”
I could think of nothing to say.
“Please be careful driving this, Señor Lucas,” said the ten-year-old. “I need it to follow Caballo Loco tonight and someday I must return it to the gentleman from whom I borrowed it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I haven’t bent it yet, have I? Hang on, my friend.” The small engine started with a racket and we accelerated down the road in the direction in which Delgado had disappeared.
WITH HEMINGWAY DEVOTING SO MUCH TIME and attention to his boys, I was free to run the Crook Factory and to sort out the confusing intelligence reports that were filtering back to me.
Very little had made sense since the beginning of this operation, and I was trying to rearrange the pieces on the board. Why had the director been so interested in Hemingway’s penny-ante operation down here? Why the visits from the BSC’s Ian Fleming and the OSS’s Wallace Beta Phillips? Why assign someone as serious and deadly as Delgado as liaison? Why should the radio operator from the Southern Cross be murdered and who had murdered him? What was the real mission of the Southern Cross and why assign a weak sister Abwehr agent like Theodor Schlegel to head it up? Was Helga Sonneman in on this Abwehr mission and, if so, what was her role in it? Did she take orders from Schlegel or give orders to him? Was it pure, stupid luck that got Martin Kohler’s radio codes to Hemingway, or was something more complicated going on? What the hell was the FBI doing funneling large sums of money to the Cuban National Police through a killer like Lieutenant Maldonado at the same time Schlegel and the Abwehr were paying the man?
I sent instructions out to the Crook Factory operatives over Hemingway’s name and tried to make sense of the information coming back. After a few days of this, I began to wonder—not for the first time—just who I was working for. I had never trusted Delgado, and I no longer trusted J. Edgar Hoover’s motivations. I had been cut loose from my usual SIS contacts, and I had no connections with the local branch of the FBI except for the occasional agent tailing me. Both the British secret service and Donovan’s new OSS had made overtures to me, but I never flattered myself into thinking that they were interested in my well-being. Both agencies had a vested interest in this confused and confusing operation… I just did not know what those interests were. Meanwhile, I spent every day with Ernest Hemingway, spying for him, spying on him, telling him only a fraction of what I knew about the situation surrounding us, and wondering when I would be ordered to betray the man.
I decided that I would continue gathering information, get some sense of just what the hell was going on, and then decide who I was working for.
Which led to following Delgado. For the past four days, I had spent all of my free time doing just that. One thing the FBI is good at is surveillance; it is because they always have enough agents to assign to each job. One person covertly following one person is a near impossibility—especially when the person being followed has been trained in tradecraft. To do any surveillance correctly, you need several teams following on foot, one or two teams in vehicles, at least one team ahead of the surveillance target, and other teams ready to take over if and when the subject becomes suspicious.
I had Agent 22. But so far we had done all right.
WE FELL IN BEHIND DELGADO on the Havana Road just as he reached the heavy city traffic. We were about sixty yards back, and the highway was filled with honking cars, lumbering trucks, and flitting motorbikes just like ours. Nonetheless, I kept us tucked behind a truck carrying a tall stack of lumber and swerved out just to keep the other agent’s motorcycle in sight. It looked as if he was heading downtown again. During the past few days, we had followed him to his room at the cheap Cuba Hotel, to various restaurants and bars, once to a whorehouse… not the one below the Chinese restaurant… twice to the FBI headquarters near the park, and once to the Malecón, where he had taken a long walk along the breakwater with Lieutenant Maldonado. Little Santiago wanted to run along the wall right next to them to hear what they were talking about, but I convinced the boy that the first job of a secret agent on a serious surveillance mission was to keep from being burned. We did not want Maldonado or Delgado to take notice of him. Santiago agreed reluctantly, and we watched the two men chatting from fifty yards away.
Now it was the afternoon of Monday, August 3, 1942. Before that day was finished, I would have a major new piece of the puzzle and very little would ever be the same again.
July had ended with Gregory’s illness and recovery and Hemingway’s continued irritation that the FBI and Naval Intelligence, much less his friends at the embassy, had not got back to him with congratulations for the Crook Factory’s advance warning on the Amagansett spies’ insertion into the United States. He had vowed not to feed them any more radio intercepts until we had checked them out ourselves. “Bring them the next bunch of Nazi agents tied up and gagged and see if they can ignore that,” said the writer.
August began with more bad war news. The Germans had completed their capture of Sevastopol on the Black Sea and were continuing their advance, pushing the Soviets back in a drive that was obviously designed to end in the capture of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow. The Japanese had invaded East New Guinea at the end of July. U.S. Marines were said to be ready to invade Guadalcanal or some other island in the Solomons, but fighting in the South Pacific had gone from terrible to obscene in its ferocity. The Japanese were not giving up an inch of conquered territory without a bloody fight. Meanwhile, the French… the good old collaborationist French… were using their entire Parisian police force to round up foreign-born Jews—thirteen thousand of them, according to newspaper reports—and to lock them up in the Winter Velodrome before helping the Germans ship them out to God knows where.
“Hadley and I used to go to bicycle races in the Velodrome,” Hemingway had said sadly when he read the report in late July. “I hope that there is a hell, just so that Pierre Laval can burn and rot there forever and ever.”
The FBI was announcing more arrests of “Nazi agents” almost daily—158 back on July 10 alone—but these “agents” were, I suspected (and Delgado confirmed), just German aliens of dubious allegiance whose crimes tended to be on the level of belonging to the German-American Vocational League in New York.
On the local front, Martha Gellhorn was still absent—cruising the subinfested Caribbean with her three Negro retainers, our continued surveillance of Maldonado had not shown any more money drops, Theodor Schlegel was spending most of his time aboard the Southern Cross these days, and Helga Sonneman had twice gone out on the Pilar for fishing cruises with Hemingway and his buddies. I had suggested that this might not be a good idea, what with all of the weapons and sophisticated radio equipment hidden around the boat, especially if Fraulein Helga was the German agent we suspected her of being, but Hemingway had shrugged off my advice and taken the woman out for evening dinner and marlin-fishing cruises. He enjoyed her company.
Elsewhere on the local front, Hemingway’s editor, Perkins, had written that Gary Cooper’s movie The Pride of the Yankees had premiered in mid-July. Perkins had praised Cooper’s acting in the film, but Hemingway had only laughed when reading that to me. “Coop throws like a girl,” said the writer. “Gigi’s arm is ten times stronger. Hell, our little left fielder… Santiago… coul
d outrun, outthrow, and outbat Coop. Why they put Cooper in a movie about Lou Gehrig, I’ll never know.” That same week, a telegram arrived from Ingrid Bergman. Evidently, the director of For Whom the Bell Tolls had hated the daily rushes of the other actress, had fired her, and had then offered Ingrid the part of Maria. “I told her I’d fix it,” said Hemingway smugly, folding the telegram away. Given the writer’s schedule over the previous two months, I doubted that he had taken time to “fix” anything. Hemingway had a habit of taking credit for events in which he had taken no part.
On the very local front, things had become complicated between Maria Marquez and me.
I COULD SAY THAT I did not know how it happened, but that would be a lie. It happened because we were sleeping in the same room, because she was a woman lying there in nothing but a thin cotton nightdress, and because I was a fool.
She had brought the cot in and put her hand on my shoulder that first night when we thought that Maldonado was coming to kill her, and I did not make her remove her hand that night or the cot the next day. Sometimes Maria would be asleep in her cot by the fire when I got back to Grade A. Sometimes I would be gone for days with Hemingway in the Pilar, but when I came up the road from the finca in the rain, Maria would be there, sometimes sleeping but more often waiting for me, coffee boiling on the stove Juan and the boys had brought in, the fire in the fireplace cracking softly if the night was chilly. It was as close to a home as I had had in the last dozen years or so, and I grew lazy and complacent with the companionship and comfort.
One night in late July—it must have been the weekend of the championship shooting competition at the Club de Cazadores del Cerro, because no one had been at the finca all evening—I had gone to sleep about midnight with Maria on the cot next to me. There was no fire that night. It had been hot and sultry all day and the windows were open to catch any breeze.
I awoke suddenly, feeling under the pillow for the S&W .38. Something had awakened me from a sound sleep. At first I thought it was the storm outside, lightning illuminating the dairy barns, thunder echoing down the hill, but then I realized that it was Maria’s hand that had awakened me.
I admit that I had grown used to her sleeping close—used to her breathing and to the soft scent of her and to the childlike touch of her hand on my shoulder each night, as if she were afraid of the dark.
There was nothing childlike about her touch this night. Her hand had slid down my belly into my pajama bottoms and her fingers were clutching and stroking me.
If I had been awake, perhaps I would have pushed her away. But my dream had been hot and erotic—begun, no doubt, by her touch as I slept—and this warm, sweet friction seemed like nothing more than an extension of that dream. I did have time to think—She’s a whore, a puta—but then all thought was lost as her hand tightened and moved more quickly. She shifted her weight from her cot to mine, and then my hands rose purposefully—not to push her away but to pull her loose shift over her head and off her body.
Maria’s hair swung free from her nightgown as she rose above me. Her hands tugged down my pajamas. For a second the cool night air was a shock, but only for a second, and then the hot warmth of Maria’s leg, belly, and groin replaced the warmth of her hand. We began moving smoothly and swiftly then, saying nothing, not kissing, Maria’s back arching as she straddled me, her breasts beaded with sweat and glistening in the flashes of lightning. I no longer heard the thunder. Or, rather, the thunder was pounding in my ears now as my pulse raced and the world dimmed.
I had not been with a woman for more than a year. This encounter lasted only a minute. Maria seemed as rushed and starved for release as I had been, and she cried out and collapsed on me only a few seconds later.
And that should have been the end of it. But as we lay there on the single cot, sweating and panting, entwined not so much in an embrace as in a mere confusion of limbs and discarded garments, everything began again. This time, it lasted much more than a few minutes.
The next day, neither the young woman nor I said anything about what had happened in the night. There were no smirks, no tears from her, no knowing glances, only a silence that deepened and communicated more each time we were around each other. And that night, after I returned from a long planning session in the guest house with Hemingway, Ibarlucia, Guest, and others, Maria was awake and waiting for me. Five candles burned on the old mantel and on the floor near our cots. It was another hot night, but there were no storms brewing in the dark, at least not outside. But these inner storms continued to rage night after night when I was not out in the Pilar or—more recently—following Delgado late past midnight.
I cannot explain those weeks of intimacy. I cannot excuse them. Maria Marquez was Xenophobia—a young whore being chased by several killers—and I had no business being with her in any capacity except as an agent charged with her survival. But something about what was going on every day around me there at the finca—Hemingway’s growing estrangement from his wife, the strange warmth of the boys’ visit, the long summer days and evenings out at sea, and the general sense of vacation and timelessness surrounding the farm and all of us—conspired to make me relax, to look forward to the shared meals and shared evenings in the Grade A cottage, and to look forward even more to the nights of sweat and urgent, silent lovemaking.
On a night in the second week of this, Maria did weep. She lay against my chest in the night, and I felt her tears and the small, unbidden sobs that moved through her. I lifted her face then and kissed her tears away. Then I kissed her on the lips. It was the first time we had kissed. It was the beginning of countless more.
I thought of her now less as a whore than as a confused young woman from a small fishing village who had fled violent men there only to find more in Havana. She had chosen few things in her life—probably had not even chosen to become a whore when she had first accepted Leopoldina la Honesta’s largesse, not understanding the consequences of that help—but now she had chosen me. And I had chosen a human side to life which I had never indulged in before: coming home to the same woman every evening that I was on the island, sharing meals with her in the cottage rather than alone or under the hostile gaze of the finca’s cook, and then going to bed—knowing what was going to happen each night, anticipating it—with the same woman. I began to learn her needs even as she worked to learn mine and anticipate them. This was also something new for me. Sex had never been more than a temporary liaison leading to a needed release of tension for me. This was… different.
One night, long after midnight, as we were lying together on my cot, Maria’s leg looped over mine and the top of her head tucked into the hollow under my chin, she whispered, “You will tell no one of this, yes?”
“I will tell no one, yes,” I whispered back. “It is between us and the sea.”
“What?” said the girl. “I do not understand… the sea?”
I blinked at the ceiling in confusion, sure that this was a common Cuban saying. Certainly she would have heard this in her small village. Then again, her village was in the hills some miles inland. Perhaps the men there did not speak in the same idiom as the fishermen in the coastal villages.
“It is our secret,” I said. Whom did she think I would tell? Was she worried that Señor Hemingway would no longer be courteous to her if he knew that she was “my woman”? What did Xenophobia fear now?
“Thank you, José,” she whispered, setting her long fingers on my chest. “Thank you.”
Only later did I realize that she was thanking me for more than agreeing to keep her secret.
THE OTHER TIMES Santiago and I had followed Delgado, even the time he met with Lieutenant Maldonado, the agent had not worked very hard to avoid being followed. This afternoon, August 3, Delgado was using every bit of his tradecraft to shake any possible tail. Still, I was certain that he had not spotted me or the boy.
Delgado drove his motorcycle through thick traffic to Old Havana, parked his machine in an alley off Progreso, went into the Plaza Ho
tel, came out through the kitchen exit, crossed Monserrate, and went into the elaborate Bacardi Building, with the statute of the giant bat atop its tower. I dropped Santiago off at the corner and circled the block in heavy traffic. When I came back onto Monserrate, the boy was waving wildly from the curb.
“He went out the back, Señor Lucas. He is on the Number Three bus going up O’Reilly.” The boy leaped onto the back of the motorbike as I gunned it and swung up narrow O’Reilly Street.
Santiago had not let the bus out of his sight. Delgado was still aboard—and almost certainly checking out the rear window of the crowded bus to see if anyone was following him. I kept in thick traffic, passed the bus, and stayed several car lengths ahead of it while Santiago watched over his shoulder. Delgado leaped out at the Plaza de la Catedral, and Santiago slid off the back of the bike to follow as I stayed with traffic up San Ignacio past the Havana Cathedral.
Circling back, I followed the boy jogging down the sidewalk. For a minute after I picked him up, Santiago was too winded to talk, but he gestured at a taxi headed down Aguiar. I kept the taxi in sight as it circled back through La Habana Vieja, past the Floridita, until it returned to the Parque Central, only half a block from where Delgado had parked his motorcycle. We stayed hidden in traffic as Delgado crossed the street and walked into the Parque Central district.
I pulled the bike up onto the sidewalk near the old stone walls that had once circled Old Havana, and we put the machine up on its kickstand. “He’s going to double back in the Parque Central to make sure that he’s not being followed,” I told the boy. “You cut across the corner of the park and keep him in sight. If he comes out the south or west side, go down to the corner by the Gran Teatro to watch. I’ll head up to the Hotel Plaza and watch both intersections. Wave your bandanna waist-high to let me know that he’s come out.”