Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  “Quickly,” Victor said. “Stay quiet,” he added, then ducked through the opening and into the brush.

  Deal felt Angelica’s shove at his back and moved out into the night in turn, finding himself wincing at the touch of the dappled moonlight. After the darkness of the passage, it might as well have been a floodlight, he thought. But the only gunshots were those still sounding in the distance.

  They were moving down a hillside now, away from the farmhouse that commanded its crest, hurrying along a narrow passage that twisted through the junglelike underbrush in a mazelike fashion. Stubby branches lurked in the shadows at every turn, jabbing at his cheeks and scalp and eyes, and roots reached up for his ankles like clutching hands. None of that was any obstacle for the deer or the wild pigs who had probably cut the trail, he thought, but it was no help for the clumsy humans using it as a lifeline, either.

  “Wait here.” He heard the quiet command from the tall man who’d been leading the way.

  He stopped, grateful for the rest, his breathing harsh in his ears. “Where are we?” he asked, as Angelica came up in the gloom to join him.

  “Quiet,” she said, peering anxiously into the darkness ahead.

  They waited together in a silence that was cut by the occasional rattle of distant gunfire and the gathering whine of insects. After a moment she squeezed past him. “Stay where you are,” she commanded. He saw that she carried a pistol in her upraised hand.

  “Oh, sure,” Deal muttered to himself as she disappeared into the darkness. He waited for a few seconds, then moved after her as quietly as he could.

  He had made his way another fifty feet or so without catching so much as a glimpse of her or Victor, the man he took to be her lover. The thought crossed his mind that he could escape them now, but just as quickly he canceled the notion out.

  Escape to where? Back to that slaughterhouse on top of the hill, try to use his fractured Spanish on a band of killers, explain he was just an innocent bystander who had wandered off from a trade mission to Cuba? Not likely.

  And as for escaping through this jungle thicket, he could forget it. You couldn’t move a D-9 Cat a dozen feet through this stuff. No, there was only one way to go, and that was straight ahead.

  In the moment he’d paused to think things through, his eyes had picked up a glimmer just ahead. He slowed his pace, picking his way carefully over the roots that criss-crossed the path, trying to keep his breathing quiet, ignoring the whine and the sting of the insects boring into the flesh of his ears and neck.

  A clearing out there, he saw, just visible through the underbrush, perhaps thirty feet ahead, a broad turnout at the end of a narrow graveled road. At one side, he could make out the silhouette of a car, one of the nondescript boxy Ladas that were everywhere on the streets of Havana.

  Deal stopped, sensing movement in the shadows near the flank of the Lada. Victor, he realized, as the tall silhouette stole quickly from the shadows. The Lada was their getaway car.

  Victor paused, seemingly to make one last check of the surroundings, then moved quickly for the door of the Lada. It was so quiet, Deal could hear the jingling of keys, and the scrape of a lock tumbling open. In the next moment, he caught sight of a second figure entering the clearing in Victor’s wake.

  Angelica, Deal thought at first, following after her lover to the car. Deal glanced around the darkness where he stood. He could worm his way into a crevice of this tangle; they would never find him. He could hide for as long as it took, then make his way back to civilization once things had died down.

  He was still calculating this possibility, and had cast his gaze back to the clearing, when he realized that something was wrong. Victor had just swung open the door of the Lada, and the figure that had followed him into the clearing was running full-tilt now across the gravel, an arm upraised.

  Deal saw the glint of steel in the moonlight and realized how wrong he had been. Not Angelica at all. Not a woman, but a man. With the heavy blade of a cane cutter raised and a guttural curse flying from his lips.

  Deal heard the cry of warning from his own throat at the same time Victor must have realized what was happening. He spun from the open door of the Lada, flinging up his arm in reflex, but the gesture was useless.

  The heavy blade arced down, hardly slowing as it clipped off Victor’s forearm and buried itself in his head. The thudding echo reached all the way to Deal’s place in the dense grove.

  He had begun to run down the path without thinking, when he heard the first explosion from the clearing. It was followed closely by a second, then a third. He burst out from the path to find the man with the cane cutter slumped against the side of the Lada and Angelica bent over Victor’s body, the pistol she had used to kill his assailant still in her hand.

  She was sobbing when he reached her, her shoulders heaving as she clutched Victor’s unresponsive form. “Angelica,” Deal called.

  Down the narrow lane where the Lada’s nose was pointed came the sound of approaching car engines. Headlights waved crazily through the underbrush. Whoever it was would be here in seconds.

  “They’ve heard,” he called again, shaking her by the shoulders. She stared up at him in a daze, tears tracing her dark cheeks. After a moment, she seemed to register the sounds of the approaching engines and rose to her feet.

  She paused for one last glance at the tall man who lay crumpled in the gravel at her feet, then turned to Deal. “Come,” she said.

  And they were hurrying back into the jungle.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  They were no more than a hundred yards back up the hillside when Deal heard the slamming of doors and the shouts from the clearing below. Hellfire ahead of them, doom below, he thought. The men who wanted Angelica and her friends would simply advance from either end of the trail. It was just a matter of time.

  He slipped on a knobby root and went down on one knee, feeling the fabric of his khakis give way against something jagged. He felt the warmth of blood down his leg as he rose, but it was nothing compared to what might come. He staggered around a bend in the path, his breath heaving, and found her waiting for him in the darkness.

  “This way,” she said, dragging him through a screen of brush. No sooner had she pulled him aside than she was off again, hurdling a tangle of roots that rose like nesting snakes across an even narrower track. He went across the tangle on hands and knees, ignoring every scrape and blow.

  In seconds, he was on his feet again, a few paces behind her, and realized that the path had dived downhill once more. He couldn’t hear anything behind them yet, but he was certain they’d be coming. How long he could keep up this pace he wasn’t sure.

  “Be careful.” He heard Angelica in front of him.

  She was stopped again, her foot pressing a string of fence wire to the ground, her hands pulling another high, so that he could duck through. He stopped when he saw the porcelain insulators on a nearby post.

  “It’s electrified,” he said, pointing. “How…?”

  “This is Cuba,” she said. “Who can afford to electrify a fence?”

  Deal didn’t stop to argue. He rolled under the upraised wire, then scrambled to his feet as she ducked to join him.

  They were standing on cleared ground now, he realized, the outskirts of someone’s farm. Just ahead he saw the vague outline of a service building, and beyond that the improbable yawning pit of an empty swimming pool. Not a farm, then, but some secluded estate.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  Before she could reply, they heard shouted Spanish from the hillside above. “Quickly,” she said, pulling him down the hillside past the looming service building.

  They were running down a sanded path beneath towering trees now, an unimpeded, flat-out sprint. Where it would all end, he had no idea, but he knew as well that he’d go until there was nothing left to give.

  There was another structure looming up in the gloom ahead, some oddly shaped building plun
ked down in the middle of nowhere, he was thinking…until his strides brought him closer and he was finally able to see clearly what it was.

  “A boat?” he called to Angelica in disbelief.

  And indeed that is what it was, a forty-foot cabin cruiser mounted on blocks on the side of a mountain, the whole thing surrounded by a raised catwalk with a wooden walkway stretching from the path to join it.

  For her part, Angelica never even hesitated. She bounded onto the wooden walkway and in seconds had reached the catwalk that encircled the landlocked yacht.

  Deal took one glance back up the way they’d come, another at the path that dwindled to nothing a few feet in front of him, then ran to join her. By the time he’d made it to the catwalk, she was already on the deck of the boat, motioning for him to join her. What were they going to do now, he wondered? Cruise a dry-docked yacht to safety?

  By the time he joined her on the deck of the boat, he saw what she had in mind. She’d dug her fingers beneath a crevice in the floorboards of the rear decking, exposing an empty compartment that lay below. “Get in,” she commanded, her voice an urgent whisper.

  Deal hesitated, glancing back up the hillside. He heard muffled shouts and the tramp of boots. “If they find us in there, we’re done,” he said.

  “There’s nowhere else,” she said. She showed him her pistol. “I’ve got three bullets left. Say what you want to do.”

  He stared at her, saw something in those dark eyes that had held him from the first. Something told him if he suggested it, they’d make a stand there at the railing of the boat. Go up against the men who were coming after them with three shells and a pair of bare hands. Whatever she believed in, he thought, she believed a lot.

  He nodded then and jumped down into the compartment. In the next moment, she was beside him, the top of the compartment swinging down like a coffin lid.

  “It is the boat of Hemingway,” she told him in the darkness. “The Pilar. My father once sailed aboard it with the man himself.”

  If she’d said Hemingway was asleep in the midships cabin, Deal wouldn’t have raised an objection. “What’s this we’re hiding in?” he asked.

  “A smuggler’s compartment,” she said. “According to my father, many things were carried inside here, to and from our country.”

  “What’s Hemingway’s boat doing in the middle of the woods?” he asked.

  “We are on the grounds of the Finca Vigia,” she said. “Hemingway’s estate. It is a museum now. They moved the boat here only recently.”

  “A museum? How about this compartment? Is that part of the tour?”

  “My father told me no one knew about it,” she said. “You must be quiet now.”

  He heard the rumble of footsteps on the wooden gangway then, and a few minutes later the thud of boots landing on the deck above. There were muffled conversations in Spanish and the rattling of a locked door that must have led from the yacht’s cockpit to the staterooms forward. He heard the creak of the engine-compartment door being raised and saw the glint of a flashlight beam through a crevice in the compartment wall at his side.

  He felt Angelica shift silently beside him. She was on her back now, her shoulders propped against the end of the compartment, poised as calmly as if she had just sat up in bed. If that compartment door came up, he thought, pity the first three men in sight.

  After a moment the flashlight winked out and the engine-compartment door slammed down. There was a moment’s desultory conversation from above, then a creaking noise from the deck and, finally, the sound of departing footsteps on the gangway.

  He turned to whisper something to her but felt her fingertips press against his lips and her head bury itself against his chest.

  “Victor,” he began. “I’m sorry…”

  “He was my brother,” she managed.

  He felt her shoulders begin to quake then, and the heaving of her silent sobs began. It seemed like hours that they lay that way, though it was still well before dawn when she rose to lead him away.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Russell Straight awakened to find himself alone in his bed, a mild headache gnawing at the back of his head. After a moment he swung his feet onto the cool marble tile, then rose and padded to the bathroom, which he found empty. He turned and went down the short hallway to the sitting area and found that empty as well.

  It had occurred to him, as he looked about for Delia in his still-groggy state, that he and his brother and his mother—and during rare periods, his father as well—had lived in a house that was no larger than this hotel room he now occupied. His brother, Leon, had escaped all that, of course, no matter how briefly. Leon had gone to college, and though he’d barely learned to read, much less manage to graduate, had gone on to play professional football, until the injuries and the resultant drug habit had caught up with him.

  Leon had died where he’d started out early, back in the company of bad people, but at least he’d had a taste of the good life, Russell thought, and who could begrudge him that? For Russell, though, such luxuries as he was enjoying just now seemed manna from heaven itself. He couldn’t imagine ever taking such things for granted. In the eyes of the woman he’d been with last night, for instance, he was a man of wealth, a perspective he would strive to be mindful of.

  He walked back into the bedroom, then, and though he thought less of himself for doing so, pulled out his wallet and checked the contents. He should have known better than to suspect Delia, but he had spent some years in prison and certain habits died hard.

  He went back into the bathroom then and allowed himself the satisfaction of a luxurious whizz with no one on either side of him casting surreptitious glances at the wand he held in his hand. When he was finished, Russell pulled the dangling chain that worked the old-fashioned toilet, and when the cycle was finished, pulled the chain again, just for the hell of it. By the time he had showered and shaved and put on a fresh polo shirt with “DealCo” embroidered in the cloth that strained across his pec, and pulled on a pair of khakis of the sort that his boss had gotten him accustomed to, he was feeling about as good as two or three of himself.

  He made his way down the hallway to Deal’s room and knocked, and even the fact that there was no answer did not faze him. As he was showering, he had developed an inner certainty that coming to Cuba had been one of the most inspired actions of his relatively short life. He had the sense that Antonio Fuentes, slimeball or not, was going to bring a lot of business down DealCo’s lane. And something told him as well that he had not seen the last of the lovely dancer he’d been with last night, and never mind her momentary vanishing act.

  Russell strolled toward the elevator doors whistling tunelessly, his only downcast thought having to do with his brother, Leon. And wasn’t it a pity they could not share such times together? Though his brother had been drug addled by the time he died, Russell might have been able to turn him around, if he’d been on the outside, anyway, but whose fault was that? He was on the ground floor now.

  He pushed sad thoughts aside and stepped out of the elevator and crossed the pristine lobby with its tasteful jungle plants and its squawking, mother-huncher birds and found the entrance to the restaurant that he and Deal had ducked through last night. Fuentes’ driver was right there in the reception-area chair he’d parked in last night, another newspaper in his hands. You want to know what’s going on in Havana; Russell thought? There is the man to ask.

  He walked on inside the restaurant, and sure enough, there was Antonio Fuentes, all right, looking starched and chipper in a fine wool suit, and ready for some kind of business summit meeting, whatever that might turn out to be. Yes indeed, Russell Straight told himself, just one more good day in a long run of them shaping up.

  It wasn’t until Fuentes glanced at his watch and asked him where John Deal might be that anything like worry shook a finger in Russell Straight’s way, but it sure as hell went way downhill from there.

  Chapter T
wenty-four

  Deal stepped from the tiny shower in the bathroom of the apartment Angelica had brought them to, reaching for the towel she’d left folded neatly on the toilet tank. Hardly the luxurious bathroom of the Santa Isabel, he thought, but then again, it was a decided step up from the grave.

  He blotted himself with the thin fabric, then stared at the trousers and shirt she’d left along with the towel. Victor’s clothes, he supposed, not surprised when he had to roll the cuffs of the pants up a notch.

  On the other hand, he wouldn’t cause much of a stir in makeshift dress; he had already learned that much this morning. They’d crawled out of the smuggling compartment into the predawn darkness, then made their way on down the hillside where the Hemingway compound sat, using a path, she informed him, the museum workers took.

  “What if we run into one of them?” he had asked.

  “Too early,” she’d assured him. “Besides, they are not the ones to worry about,” she’d added.

  A twenty-minute walk brought them to the side of a dusty highway where a score of people milled around in the gloom, waiting for one of the double-sectioned “camels” to take them into the city. Some of the crowd were wearing what looked like service-staff uniforms, and here and there a woman might be attired in a smart blouse and skirt, but there were more than a few men whose appearance made Deal look like a barely rumpled country squire. In any case, the still-sleep-worn crowd barely noticed the arrival of two more of the downtrodden.

  Angelica found a discarded baseball cap trampled beneath a bench at the bus stop and slapped its dust away against her thigh. “Put this on,” she said, handing the battered cap his way.

  The thing had been black once, he supposed, but had faded to match the color of the concrete curb where they stood. “Havana Club” read the script above a rendering of the Betty Grable-like babe he’d seen on the card yesterday. “Ron” was scripted beneath her heels. He’d seen the same label on rum bottles in his parents’ bar.