by Dan Simmons
The Monument to the Medical Students was in the oldest section of the cemetery. Several lanes converged there. In 1871, eight young Cuban men were executed for desecrating the tomb of a Spanish journalist who had criticized the burgeoning independence movement. There was a tall icon of Justice over the tomb, but the statue wore no blindfold of impartiality and the scales she raised in one hand were definitely tipped to one side. “Where Pale Death enters both hovels and the palaces of kings under the shadow of justice” had read the radio transmission.
It was 1:40 A.M. It had taken me bloody damn forever to find this tomb and now it took me longer to find a hiding spot.
Just down the pedestrian lane from the Monument to the Medical Students was a mausoleum that looked like a miniature of the Taj Mahal and must have been thirty-five or forty feet tall. The thing had carved niches, angels and gargoyles carved along each face with more standing guard on the two set-back roofs, and another robed angel perched atop the mosquelike dome. If I could clamber up that corner and get onto the first roof, I could conceal myself behind that tesselated parapet and look down on the Monument to the Medical Students, watch the empty streets and the broad intersection, and peer down into the many narrow paths and walkways on the approach to the monument. Of course, when the assassin or assassins did make their move, I would be stuck twenty-five feet in the air, able to shoot at them but not able to give chase… but, then, that was where the rope could come in handy. I could loop it around one of those corner statues and slide down in ten seconds. I congratulated myself on my prescience, moved to the shadowed side of the monstrous mausoleum, and began climbing.
It took ten minutes and a rip through the knee of my trousers, but eventually I pulled myself up and over the marble parapet. There was a ten-foot setback and then another wall rising to the dome, glowing in the moonlight. More angels or saints were above me, arms raised. The parapet was not fortress-wall high—it was only three feet from the top of the marble railing to the more prosaic asphalt and gravel of the roof—but I could crouch down and peer out through the ornamental cracks. If I had to, I could duck-walk my way around the roof and see in all directions.
I made my loop around a six-foot-tall statue on the southeast corner and coiled the rope out of sight by the wall. Then I knelt by the south rampart and watched the open areas around the Monument to the Medical Students. The hundreds of marble and granite statues seemed to be peering up at me like a pale army of the dead. A storm was coming in from the north. The moon was still bright, but lightning flashed occasionally and thunder rumbled over Havana. It was 2:00 A.M.
It was just as I was glancing at my watch at 2:32 A.M. that I heard a soft sound behind me. I started to turn, but at that second something cold and round touched the back of my neck.
“Do not move an inch, Señor Lucas,” said Lieutenant Maldonado.
GOOD WORK, Joe, I thought. It should have been the last thought that went through my brain just before the .44–caliber slug from Maldonado’s ivory-handled pistol followed it. I had managed to climb up to the Cuban National Policeman’s sniper’s perch, not check the back side of the roof, and then miss the sound of his footsteps on the roof because of the now almost constant rumble of thunder. What a fuck-up. Still no bullet. What was he waiting for?
“Do not move,” Maldonado whispered again. I could hear the click of the Colt’s hammer being cocked and smell the garlic on the man’s breath. He pressed the muzzle of the handgun deeper into the soft groove on the back of my neck as he patted me down with his left hand, removed my flashlight and the .357, and tossed both away across the rooftop. Evidently he thought the knife too small to worry about. I took every second that he did not shoot as a reprieve of my terminal stupidity.
Maldonado stepped back. I could no longer feel the muzzle against my neck but I could feel the aim of the .44 still centered on the back of my head. “Turn around very slowly and sit on your hands, Señor Special Agent Lucas.”
I did as he said, keeping my hands palms down on the rough rooftop. Maldonado was not in uniform; he was wearing the same sort of dark suit and hat as I had chosen, but he wore a tie with his dark blue shirt. Cubans are never very comfortable with informal dress, I had noticed. Hemingway was always shocking them with his shorts and grubby clothes.
Think, Joe, think! I forced my sluggish brain to concentrate on something other than giddy relief that the tall policeman had not yet executed me. I noticed that he was in his sock feet. He must have left his shoes on the other side of the dome so as to creep up on me even more quietly. He needn’t have bothered—thunder boomed so loudly that it seemed like the Battery of the Twelve Apostles cannon from El Morro Castle across the bay had begun a barrage of the city. The moon still cast some light, but the clouds were quickly covering it.
Maldonado had crouched down and gone to one knee, perhaps so that he could see over the parapet behind me without being visible from the ground. Perhaps it was just more comfortable for him to shoot me from a kneeling rather than a standing position.
Concentrate. He has some reason for keeping you alive. He’s not wearing shoes—a possible help if you close on him.
Another part of my mind was thinking, You’re sitting on your hands while he holds that large-bore Colt steady on your face. You’ll never close with him for hand-to-hand combat.
Shut up! I forced myself to think even while my body reacted as it always did to having a firearm aimed at it: my scrotum contracted, my skin prickled, and I had the overpowering urge to hide behind something—anything. I mentally shook away this reaction. There was no time for it.
“Are you alone, Señor Special Agent Lucas?” hissed the policeman. Only his long jaw and white teeth were visible in the shadow under his dark fedora. “Did you come all alone?”
“No,” I said. “Hemingway and the others are down there now.”
The teeth caught more of the fading moonlight as Maldonado grinned. “You lie, señor. I was told that you would come alone and you have.”
He was expecting just me. I had just got my heart rate under control, and now it accelerated again. “You’re not Columbia,” I said.
“Who?” said Maldonado without real interest.
I smiled. “Of course you’re not Columbia,” I said. “You’re just a stupid greaser spik taking orders and bribes. That’s what you pendejos do.”
The grin wavered and then widened. “You try to anger me, Special Agent Lucas. Why? Do you wish to die more quickly? Do not worry… it will be soon.”
I shrugged… or tried to. It was not easy when one was sitting on one’s hands. “At least tell me who ordered you to do this,” I said, allowing my voice to quaver slightly. It was not difficult to do that. “Was it Delgado? Becker?”
“I will tell you nothing, you pig-fucking North American,” said the lieutenant, but even in the fading moonlight I had seen the slight quiver of muscles around his mouth at the mention of Becker’s name. Becker, then.
“Pig-fucking?” I said, and after a moment of silence, added, “What are we waiting for, Crazy Horse?”
“Do not call me that,” the lieutenant said. “Or this will be more painful for you than it must.” Thunder rumbled. I could see the lightning playing amidst the low buildings of Old Havana now, less than a mile to the northeast.
Advantages? I thought, forcing myself into a cold, dispassionate analysis. Not many. A slug from that .44 will almost certainly end the argument at this distance, and he can easily pull the trigger twice before I can close the five feet that separate us. Still, he’s too close. And he’s on one knee—which will be awkward for him if things change quickly. And he’s used to bullying and killing drunks, teenagers, cowards, and amateurs.
Which of those categories do you fall into? asked another part of my mind. I was disappointed in myself. Not for the first time in my life and career, I wondered how many millions and millions of men had died with their last thought being a disgusted Oh, shit! at their own stupidity. I suspected that it went back to the caveman day
s.
I watched the storm approach. It was behind Maldonado. He could hear the thunder but could not see how close the lightning strikes and rain squalls were getting. I looked up at the darkening dome above him. No lightning rod that I could see. Perhaps he would be struck by lightning before he shot me.
That’s about what your odds add up to, Joe. I felt loose gravel digging into my palms. I curled my fingers of both hands around the gravel. It hurt to sit on my curled fingers like that and in a couple of minutes it would put my hands to sleep, but I did not have to worry about things so far away as a couple of minutes.
Without taking his eyes off me for more than a split second, Maldonado raised his left wrist and glanced at his watch. That’s what we’re waiting for. The 2:40 rendezvous time.
Certainly we had passed that. Perhaps Maldonado had been instructed to wait a few extra minutes to make sure that no one else was with me before killing me. I realized then that he probably had a rifle propped somewhere on the other side of the wall surrounding the dome. He had been waiting up there with the long gun, had watched me arrive and seek out just this roost, and had retreated to the far side of the roof while I grunted and sweated my way up the side of the mausoleum. It must have amused the Cuban no end.
“What kind of rifle did you bring?” I asked in easy, conversational Spanish.
The question seemed to surprise him. He frowned a second, apparently analyzing whether answering it would give me any sort of advantage. He must have decided in the negative. “A Remington thirty-aught-six with a six-power scope,” he said. “It would have been just right in the moonlight.”
“Jesus,” I said, forcing a chuckle. “Does AMT VI hand those out like union cards? It’s just like the one I took away from Panama before I killed her.”
There was no reaction. Either Maldonado was a consummate actor or he did not know her code name. I did not think he was acting. “Maria, I mean,” I said. “I found her rifle before I drowned her.”
This time he did react. His lips tightened and I could see his finger on the trigger also tighten. “You killed Maria?” The storm almost drowned his words. Perhaps that was what he was waiting for—no shot would be heard when the storm was directly overhead.
“Of course I killed her.” I laughed. “Why would I keep the lying bitch alive?”
I had been hoping to enrage him into some action short of shooting me, but his only reaction was to smile again. “Indeed, why?” said Lieutenant Maldonado. “She was a murderous little cunt. I always told Señor Becker that someone should douse that woman with gasoline and light a match.” He glanced at his watch again and smiled more broadly. “I place you under arrest, Señor Special Agent Joseph Lucas.” His thumb moved away from the Colt’s hammer.
“For what?” I said quickly, preferring conversation to a .44 slug in the forehead. I could see the wall of rain drawing across the rooftops of Old Havana like a black curtain. The moonlight was gone, replaced by the flash and blast of lightning just beyond the cemetery’s northern and eastern boundaries. There was enough noise now for Maldonado to kill me with a cannon without being overheard on the streets outside.
“For the murder of Señor Ernest Hemingway,” said the lieutenant with a grin. It was a final death sentence.
“Don’t you want the documents?” I said quickly, my heart hammering at my ribs. “Didn’t Becker tell you to get the German documents?”
Maldonado paused. I realized that his finger had already applied most of the necessary pressure on the Colt’s trigger. “Hemingway has the documents,” he said, the last word drowned out by a clap of thunder from a lightning strike only a hundred yards distant.
I shook my head and prepared to shout over the coming rain. He couldn’t know that. We had decided that Hemingway should keep the courier pouch only as he was ready to leave on the Pilar that evening. It had seemed safer than my hauling them around town for a week. “No!” I said. “They’re in my car. Becker will pay you extra for them!”
I could see his eyes now as his head tilted back a bit. Lieutenant Maldonado was mean and crafty but not all that intelligent. It took him four or five seconds to work out that he could indeed extort more money from the Hauptsturmfuhrer if he found the documents but that he did not need me alive to find them if they were actually in my car. He would simply shoot me, find the car, and take the documents.
Maldonado smiled and aimed the pistol more carefully—lower, at my heart.
The lightning did not strike the dome. It must have hit the statue of Justice above the Monument to the Medical Students. That was better—the flash was behind me, blinding Maldonado for a second or two while the clap of thunder sounded like an explosion in the mausoleum beneath us.
I threw myself to the left, hit hard on my shoulder, and rolled toward Maldonado. He fired, but the slug ripped over my right shoulder and took off a chunk of the marble parapet behind me. He fired again, but I was already leaping to my feet, and the bullet passed an inch under my crotch, burning the inside of my thigh. Maldonado was uncoiling to his full height as I tossed the two handfuls of gravel into his face. The third slug sliced a groove through my earlobe.
I got both hands on his right wrist and forced the pistol down and around even as I kicked the man’s long legs out from under him. We both went down heavily, but I made sure that I went down on top of the policeman. The air whoofed out of him like a garlic-scented bellows.
Maldonado snarled and clawed at my face with his left hand. I ignored that and broke his right wrist, flinging the gun across the rooftop. My .357 was now closer than his Colt.
The Cuban screamed and threw himself sideways, flinging me against the marble wall around the base of the dome. He screamed again, cursing in Spanish, and struggled to his feet, clutching his broken wrist. I took two steps forward, perfectly visualized following through for a forty-yard field goal kick, and kicked the tall man in the balls so hard that he literally levitated. Two lightning bolts struck around the dome—one behind us and the other on a tall cross held high by a marble saint below. The double explosion of thunder almost but not quite drowned out Maldonado’s bellow and grunt as he folded up like a six-foot-four accordion. His hat rolled across the rooftop.
Panting, I picked up the .357 Magnum and set it back in my holster, keeping both eyes on Maldonado as I did so. He might have a boot gun or switchblade in his cuff. It would have to be his left cuff to do him any good, I realized. His right hand was bent backward at an impossible angle on his wrist, and even as he rolled on the rooftop in silent agony after the scrotum punt, he tried to cradle the broken wrist.
I flicked open my gravity blade and stepped closer, putting one knee on the policeman’s prominent Adam’s apple as I pinned him to the roof with my weight. The rain began hammering down on us as I leaned over and set the blade just below his right eye. The razor-sharp point of the blade cut through flesh just beneath the curve of his eyeball.
“Talk,” I said. “Who went to kill Hemingway?”
Maldonado’s mouth opened, but he was obviously too terrified of losing his eye if he tried to move his jaw to speak. I released a bit of pressure on the knife and lifted my knee, ready to cut his throat in an instant if he began to struggle.
He did not struggle. He gasped and moaned.
“Shut up,” I said, slicing away a flap of skin between his ear and the corner of his mouth. “Who went to kill Hemingway?”
Maldonado screamed. The worst of the lightning had moved beyond the cemetery now, but thunder still echoed across the necropolis. He shook his head wildly.
“Who’s the other Todt Team member? How many are there?”
Maldonado moaned.
“Tell me,” I said, raising the blade toward his right eye.
“I do not know, señor. I swear. I swear to you. I do not know. I swear. I was to wait for you… Becker said that you would come alone tonight… I was to wait ten minutes more to be sure and then to kill you…. If anyone discovered us, I was to say that you wer
e shot while resisting arrest. If no one heard us, I was to bring the body to a place on the coast tomorrow afternoon…”
“What place?”
“Just a place far to the east. Nuevitas.”
Nuevitas was below the Archipiélago de Camagüey, where Hemingway was waiting at Cayo Confites.
“Who ordered this?”
“Becker.”
“In person?”
“No, no… Please, not so hard… the blade is cutting the corner of my eye…”
“In person?”
“No!” said Maldonado. “A phone call. Long distance. Very long distance.”
“From inside Cuba?”
“I do not know, señor. I swear to you.”
“Is Delgado part of this?”
“Who is… Delgado?” panted Maldonado, obviously looking for some opening just as I had been a minute before. His hands were still at his side. I knelt more heavily on his throat and laid the blade on the inside of his eye hard enough to draw more blood.
“If you move a finger,” I said, “I’ll pop this eye out like a grape on the end of my knife.”
Maldonado nodded ever so slightly and pressed his hands hard against the rooftop.
I described Delgado in one sentence.
Maldonado nodded again. “I met with the man. It was to arrange payments of money.”
“To you?”
“Yes… and to the Cuban National Police.”
“Why?”
The lieutenant shook his head gingerly. “We are providing… liaison. Security.”
“For whom? For what reason?”
“For the gringos and the Germans to meet secretly.”
“What gringos? Which Germans? Becker?”
“And others. I do not know who or why. I swear to God… No, no, señor!”
I realized that this was going nowhere. “When is Hemingway supposed to be killed?” I said. The rain dripped from my nose and chin onto Maldonado’s upturned face.
“I do not know—” began the lieutenant, and then he screamed as I knelt with all of my weight on his chest. “Today!” he screamed, his hands coming up to claw at me. “Sometime today… Saturday!”