I turned on the seat to watch him. He used a knife to cut adhesive deftly and shape it into a good-sized diamond by using other tape as backing. Then he took a small bottle of Mercurochrome from the first aid kit. He covered the adhesive with it, working it in with a fingertip, studied it for a moment, and added another coat. He handed me the diamond with a roll of Scotch tape. “Tape it to the windshield,” he said.
“That might do it,” Wilson approved. “That’s a red diamond, right enough. It sure—”
The ambulance lurched sickeningly as it dropped off the macadam surface onto greasy mud. Slater swore luridly as he tamped the brake repeatedly to keep us from turning broadside. “Here’s your damn stretch of bad road!” he called sourly to Wilson.
“We’ll be hittin’ the checkpoint in a few miles,” Chico predicted. “When we see the lights, I’ll get outside on the runnin’ board to do the talkin'. Karl, you an’ Drake get in back on the stretchers. You don’t look Cubana enough. If they ask what’s in back, I’m gonna tell ‘em two cases of typhoid.”
We rearranged ourselves. Erikson laid his gun on his chest. I drew my .38. Erikson raised himself on an elbow to look across at me. “When we reach Havana, Wilson will take you—”
“Lights!” Slater sang out. The ambulance slowed, then stopped. Wilson jumped down into the road, circled the front, and climbed up on the running board on Slater’s side. Chico’s body shielded Slater from full view.
The ambulance inched forward again. Two pillboxes narrowed the road to one-vehicle width. A strong light from the nearer pillbox beamed outward and played on the ambulance’s windshield. It picked up the red diamond there, then shifted to Chico on the running board as Slater braked at the checkpoint.
I held my breath as a pillbox window went up and there was a rapid exchange in Spanish. Then the ambulance moved forward again. A hundred yards down the road Slater stopped and Wilson ran around the front of the cab and climbed into the front seat again. “Nothin’ to it!” he proclaimed jubilantly. “I’d have given odds those guards weren’t gonna get their asses wet.”
After that the ride was just monotonously uncomfortable. The cracked voice on the radio echoed metallically with only an occasional silence. Even on the stretcher I couldn’t get used to the constant jolting caused by worn-out shock absorbers.
“Hey, listen!” Wilson exclaimed. Erikson and I sat up on our stretchers. A new note had entered the radio’s monolog. The torrent of wordage poured forth in a higher decibel content. “He’s sayin’ that the U.S. Navy notified Havana that three sailors broke out of Gitmo takin’ an officer along as a hostage,” Wilson translated. He listened again. “But the Cubans are sayin’ they found two of their men dead inside Cuban lines an’ that the U.S. story is a cover for a CIA sabotage team dropped into the interior.”
“What does it mean to us?” Slater asked.
“That Castro is invitin’ the populace, if it catches us before the military does, to tie us hand an’ foot to four horses goin’ in different directions.”
That ended the questions. Through the windshield I could see dirty gray daylight. The rain had slackened considerably. I didn’t think it was possible for me to fall asleep, but I must have. It was Slater’s voice that wakened me.
“When we gonna skoff?” he was asking.
“When we get to Havana,” Erikson replied. “Pull in your belt.”
“Where are we?” I asked him in a low tone.
“Almost to Holguin. That should be the last checkpoint.”
“We’re making good time?”
“Almost too good.” He raised his voice. “Remember that we don’t want to reach Havana until after dark, Chico.”
I saw that Slater and Wilson had changed places and that Chico was driving. I crawled up to the front of the ambulance and tapped the dozing Slater on the shoulder. “Want to try the stretcher for a while?” I asked him.
“I’d give a hundred-dollar bill for a beer,” he said morosely as he climbed over the seat. He had dark circles under his eyes.
I reversed Slater’s route and sat down beside Wilson. Through the windshield the highway looked to be in better condition. We were on a desolate-looking stretch of road with trees growing down to its edge and only an occasional shabby hut to be seen. The rain had slowed to a heavy mist. “We’re gonna have to gas this buggy up pretty soon,” Wilson announced. “See if there’s a gas requisition pad in the tray there.”
“What does it look like?”
“A blue pad. Squarish in shape.”
I found a blue pad and a white one. “The blue one,” Wilson repeated. “The white one’s for a private car. Castro likes to know who’s doin’ the drivin’ in this country, so all gas has to be signed for. Civilians pay, but the military runs a tab.”
The gas stop was made without incident. If Cuban civilians have any curiosity about military activities, they keep it to themselves. There was a pillbox checkpoint between Holguin and Camaguey, but it was unmanned. “They must’ve pulled the boys into the interior to help out with flood relief,” Wilson deduced. “Never saw this road with so little traffic on it.”
In the late afternoon he pulled the Dodge onto a side road. A hundred yards along it he bounced us across a field into a grove of trees. “Sack time,” he said. “We’re ahead of schedule.”
He turned off the radio, and for two hours there was uneasy silence in our steel domicile. A freshening breeze whistled through rusted-out holes in the ambulance shell. From my observation, Wilson was the only one of us who slept.
He woke just when I was beginning to wonder when Erikson was going to wake him. He turned on the radio, listened for five minutes, then maneuvered the ambulance back onto the highway. “Home stretch now,” was his only comment. It wasn’t raining, but there was cloud cover enough to bring an early twilight.
Three more hours brought us to the outskirts of Havana. It was full dark. Only an occasional streetlight relieved the blackness. Wilson drove confidently. “I made a lot of dough smugglin’ into this town,” he told us. “We’re comin’ in on the airport road. The water on the left is the Almendares River.”
The cleated tires of the ambulance whined on the city streets. The storefronts were dark. The ambulance made a gradual left-hand turn onto a two-lane street. “Carlos Manuel de Cespe Avenue,” Wilson volunteered. “We’re gettin’ close.”
Erikson and I stacked the gear at the rear doors. We made a sweeping left-hand turn. “Zapata Avenue,” Wilson said like a tour guide. “Soon as we cross Paseo in the Vedado section—an’ here it is—we turn right”—the ambulance wheeled into a dimly lit street with houses closing in on both sides and pulled into the curb—“an’ abandon ship. From here we walk.”
“How far?” Slater demanded.
“Four blocks. Don’t leave nothin’ because we won’t be comin’ back to this limousine.” He climbed out and ran around to the back to open the doors. “Load up an’ let’s go,” he urged.
We set out along sidewalks littered with trash. Our boots echoed loudly in the empty, silent streets. “Where is everybody?” Slater asked uneasily.
“Curfew. You better have business to be on the street at night. Patrols pick pedestrians up on suspicion. If we get stopped, I’ll have to do my best talkin’ of the trip.” At each intersection he moved ahead of the group and checked left and right on the cross street. “Second doorway, next block,” he said at last. “If there’s anyone in sight, walk past an’ make another pass at it comin’ back.”
We hadn’t passed a parked car in the four blocks, nor had I seen one driving by. The quiet was a brooding quiet. Ahead of me, the group disappeared one by one from the cracked sidewalk into a narrow doorway. When I followed, we were crowded into a small hallway that smelled of chili and garlic. Peeling paint hung in tatters from the walls. Wilson palavered with a fat woman whose beady eyes took in the appearance of our group. He turned away from her in my direction. “Money,” he said.
I pulled out my khaki tun
ic, wrinkle-dried from the hours of rain. I unzipped the pouch in my money belt, took out a handful of fifty-dollar bills, which I handed to Wilson, and zipped up again. He separated six of the bills and gave them to the woman. Her greedy little eyes were not upon the money in her hand but upon the remainder, which disappeared into Wilson’s mud-stained khakis.
She buried the bills somewhere in the front of her dress, then led the way through a long corridor along which the odor of garlic-flavored chili first waxed and then waned. She tapped in a quick rhythm upon a door with a see-through window with wire mesh imbedded in heavy glass. Wilson entered first when the door opened.
Erikson tapped the door with a questioning finger as he moved through it ahead of me. “Steel-plated,” he whispered. “Both sides.” I was looking at the two men standing just inside the door to whom Wilson was passing out more fifty-dollar bills. Both had swarthy, piratical-looking faces. One even had a Pancho Villa mustache. The man nearest the door threw over a lever that forced massive bolt-arms into matching sockets at top and bottom of the door.
The mustached man was looking at the loads we were carrying. He said something to Wilson and pointed to Erikson’s backpack radio in its concealing haversack. More fifty-dollar bills changed hands, and the man shrugged and turned away.
Slater was staring around the room. Its decor was in such contrast to the scurfy hallway through which we had passed as to seem almost incredible. It was a large reception room. The floor was thickly carpeted and gilt-framed mirrors decorated the walls. The furniture was heavy, old-fashioned-looking, and its upholstery ran to velvet and plush. There was an indefinable odor in the air, sweetish but not perfumy. It had almost a medicinal base.
“What the hell kind of joint is this?” Slater asked.
“A whorehouse,” Wilson answered.
“A whore—you’re kiddin'!”
“No, I’m not. This has been my layover half a dozen times after smuggling runs. It’s the safest place in Havana. Whorehouses are illegal since Castro, but you know how that is. So these people are undercover an’ can’t lead anyone to us without leadin’ him to themselves.”
“Where are the women?”
“Upstairs. You’ll see them.”
From Erikson’s silence I gathered that the news concerning the life-style of our hideout was no news to him. The man who had levered the reinforcing bars across the door beckoned to Wilson. We followed him through another large room with murals and tapestries on the walls. A grand piano with a single sheet of music on the rack stood in a corner. Both piano and music looked as though they hadn’t been touched since 1870.
Beyond the second room we came to a carpeted stairway. A curve in the stairs led us back toward the front of the house. At the top was another steel-reinforced, barred door. “Hi, Ramirez!” Wilson said eagerly to the thick-shouldered, pockmarked man who opened the door. “Is Melia still here?”
Slater was staring down a long hallway with cubicles on either side. There were no doors on the cubicles. At each doorway stood a girl in a transparent short shirt beneath which was just girl. The coloration ranged from café-au-lait to chocolate and the breast size from pear to grapefruit.
“Hi, girls,” Wilson said expansively, smiling and waving. Several of the girls waved back.
The pockmarked Ramirez shepherded us past the array of skin tones to a good-sized room at the front of the house. I noticed that several of the girls retreated from their doorways at Ramirez’ approach, and from the expressions on their faces the feeling they had for him was not adoration.
The room to which he led us had drawn curtains. Six bunks were scattered about, and the remainder of the furniture was similarly spartan. Erikson stepped to a curtained window and drew it back slightly. Over his shoulder I could see the street on which we had approached the house. There was an overhang at our level so that the sidewalk and even the doorway through which we had entered could be seen.
Slater kept looking back at the hallway through which we had passed. “What about all those rooms with no doors?” he asked Wilson. “Doesn’t a guy get any privacy for his money?”
“What’s private about what goes on in the rooms?” Wilson returned. “The no-doors policy is to keep the girls from holdin’ out on the house if there’s any tips.”
Ramirez said something to Wilson and left us. “He said we have the run of this floor,” Wilson explained.
“You mean—?” Slater cocked an eyebrow toward the hallway.
“Correct,” Wilson said with a grin. “Take your pick by size, shape, color, or spark plug gap.”
“Listen, you two hot sparks,” Erikson interjected. “Tomorrow we have work to do and sleep tonight would be helpful.”
“Helpful but not crucial,” Wilson said. Slater laughed. They started to leave the room together.
“Before you leave, let’s all get out of these uniforms and have them laundered, Wilson,” Erikson said, bowing to the inevitable.
Slater and Wilson departed in their underwear with a pile of uniforms on Wilson’s arm. When we were alone, I asked Erikson a question that had been bothering me. “What’s Wilson telling these people to account for the Cuban uniforms and American dollars?”
“We’re supposed to be a group infiltrating from Miami. Chico says everyone in the house is anti-Castro because they have to live underground since his decree outlawing brothels. Most have also had a relative chewed up in the People’s Republic machinery.”
He crawled into a bunk and I followed suit.
I flaked out almost before I had eased stiff, sore muscles into a semicomfortable position.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE SOUND of voices woke me.
When I opened my eyes, I could see daylight around the edges of the drawn curtains. Erikson was seated on his cot in his underwear, drinking coffee. On the next cot sat a girl with high-cheekboned, Indian features and long black hair that streamed down her back. She wore the single garment that seemed to be the uniform of the establishment.
Chico Wilson came bounding into the room, his handsome face flushed. “There you are, Melia!” he exclaimed. He took the girl by the arm. “Come on. I’ve been looking for you.”
I thought the girl hesitated for a second, but she rose and accompanied him. “I will send coffee,” she said in English to me.
“Where did she learn the language?” I asked Erikson as the pair disappeared down the corridor.
“In convent school. Melia was working as an airline receptionist until her father joined one of the anti-Castro factions and got caught at it. She had an aunt who got caught in the wringer, too. Castro’s militarists took over the old city prison at Twenty-ninth and C streets, just eight blocks from here. The aunt had an apartment a block from the prison in which one window overlooked part of the outside prison yard where the drum-head court martials took place. Melia says that oftentimes her aunt’s reports were all the knowledge they had of what had happened to some of their people.”
Erikson began to dress. For the first time I noticed that our freshly laundered uniforms were spread out on a cot. “Then the aunt got caught at it, and Castro has been systematically hunting down all branches of the girl’s family ever since. This is the only place in Cuba where she’d be safe.”
“Why here?”
“The men running this brothel pay off a couple of top Castroites. The military rank-and-file are told to close their eyes. It’s one of the few places in Havana where everyone doesn’t have to show papers to military types a dozen times a day.” He looked at me. “Get dressed and round up the others. Your turn at bat is coming up now.”
I found Slater three rooms down the hall. He was seated on a chair, naked. His hirsute bulk overflowed it. His glazed eyes were on the bed where three nude girls were entangled in a fleshy mass. Their average age appeared to be about fifteen. Slater didn’t hear me come in. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Time for business,” I told him.
He removed his gaze from the bed. “Yeah,” he agree
d. He rose and looked for his underwear. He reached out and gave a fatherly pat to a blocky-looking bare behind as it rose momentarily above the forest of entwined limbs. “How d’you like these squirmers?”
“Very acrobatic,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Wilson and Ramirez were arguing beside a bed on which Melia was sprawled on her back. The girl’s dark eyes expressed such sheer malevolence that I took a second look at her. Wilson flung away angrily from the powerful-looking Cuban. “He wants more money, goddamn him,” he exclaimed. “He knows I go for her.”
“Council of war,” I said. “Right now.”
Wilson accompanied us reluctantly. We sat down in close order on the cots. “Where’s the money, Slater?” Erikson asked.
“In the National Museum,” Slater said, as though he had been expecting the question. “In the basement packed in jars of earth. There was a Pan American celebration once in which Spanish-speakin’ countries contributed soil from their own land to the museum. The jars used to be on display in the main hall of the museum, but even before my time in Havana they’d been moved out of the limelight into the basement. Nobody’s thought about ‘em for years. That’s where we buried the cash.”
“The National Museum,” Erikson said thoughtfully. He looked at me. “As bad as a bank?”
“It could be. I’ll have to look it over.”
“How far away is it?” Erikson asked Wilson.
“Fifteen, eighteen blocks. Walkin’ distance. Maybe tomorrow we can—”
“This afternoon,” Erikson cut him off. “If Drake says he can handle it, we’ll go for it tonight.”
“What the hell’s the rush?” Wilson protested.
“Because I say there’s a rush,” Erikson bit off. “If we—”
He stopped as Melia entered the room carrying a tray. On it were two steaming tureens, a stack of plastic bowls, and a few plastic spoons. The girl swiftly ladled the contents of the tureens into the bowls. One contained a creamed rice with tiny bits of meat, the other a thick bean soup, fiery against the palate. Melia sat down with us, closest to Erikson. Wilson glared at her.
Operation Fireball Page 14