Frenchy and Earl sat in their station wagon on the street near Guardhouse 3, waiting as a major spoke on the radio headset to a headquarters somewhere, checking their credentials before allowing them to pass.
The Cuban soldiers were full of themselves, their juices all aflow, their eyes bulging with drama, self-importance, pride of victory and machismo. Every one of them swaggered, carried or wore his weapon at a rakish angle, smoked cigars or cigarettes or drank from an extra rum ration released by Major Morales, the hero of the day, who had rallied the men inside, killed the first invaders, then poured fusillade after fusillade down on the rebels crouching behind their automobiles. The major was almost certainly drunk himself by this time—on victory and praise, but also on rum, a shield again his pain: his younger brother, a lieutenant, was officer of the day and had been shot down by Guitart in the first seconds of the fight.
Earl could read the battle from what he saw, as he and Frenchy waited. He saw how it really hadn’t been a battle at all, which meant there’d been no real victory either. The attackers never got inside and the defenders just blasted them from the relative safety of the barracks windows or the wall along the parade ground. Worse still, the attackers had no support, no artillery or mortars, not even grenades or much in the way of automatic weapons. It was more a gesture than anything, and it had produced nothing but failure.
“Whoever dreamed this one up ought to be busted back to recruit,” he said bitterly to Frenchy, for it offended him to see something done so stupidly, and to see so much blood spread across the pavement because of it.
“It wasn’t exactly von Clausewitz, was it?” said Frenchy.
“Well, I don’t know who von Klauzerwittz is, or was, but it wasn’t even Dugout Doug, that’s how bad it was.”
“Roger wilco,” said Frenchy, then turned to a major who had just hung up the radio headset, “Are we clear now? Have you called your headquarters?”
The major turned, instantly transformed by whatever message he had gotten at the other end, and began to backpedal pathetically.
“I am so sorry, Señor Short, I did not know, I have only this minute learned, and I have been ordered to assist in any way possible.”
“No problem, mac,” said Frenchy. “Just let us inside so we can see what’s what and get a message off to my headquarters as soon as possible.”
“Yes, sir, yes, sir,” and with that he turned, made signals of urgency and importance to all the soldiers lounging arrogantly about and pretending to be war heroes, and they parted, pushed back the crowd and opened a path. Frenchy drove the black Ford forward, through the checkpoint, and into the courtyard of the barracks, where only a few rebels had penetrated.
“Are you ready for this?” Frenchy said to Earl. “You thought you saw it all in the Pacific, Earl. But just like the man says, you ain’t seen nothing yet. This’ll clear your sinuses.”
They pulled over, and got out.
The screaming was general.
By this time, the military had captured at least sixty men in various places around Santiago, some just blocks away, some in the military hospital where they’d gone for medical assistance, some in the Hotel Rex down the street, some a far distance gone. They were in the process of running the interrogations there in the yard.
Most had been beaten in the capture, and some now were being beaten even more savagely. Yet this was not torture. This was simply how things happened and as Earl looked about he saw a dozen or so brutal dramas playing out. In one corner, two soldiers held a rebel down or against a wall while two others beat him with rifle butts—not so hard as to knock him out, but just hard enough to deliver maximum pain. All over the yard it was the same: rifle butts smashing the nose or shattering the teeth, or breaking the knee, the ankle, the instep. The prisoners didn’t scream much, as most were beyond it. One man’s face was lost in a mass of blood, and was so seriously injured, by Earl’s reckoning, that he could not possibly survive.
“See, these guys don’t mess around, do they?” said Frenchy.
“That’s just the warm-up,” said Earl, and nodded toward a tent erected a little farther down the Avenue Moncada, in front of the central entrance to the barracks. That was the source of the screams. That was where security guards formed a cordon around machine gun positions, the whole area already marked off from the general traffic by a wall of barbed wire.
“They do the hard work in there, I’m betting.”
“You’re right,” said Frenchy.
“Let’s mosey over and take a lookie-see,” Earl said. “I want to get a good sense of whose side I’m on.”
“Yeah, sure. We can get a header on where he is.”
“If he’s the guy at all.”
“Oh, he’s the guy.”
They moseyed over, and of course a lieutenant warned them away, but Frenchy whispered the magic three letters of the outfit, flashed a credential, and the lieutenant looked nervously about to the major from outside, who nodded, and the man let them pass.
No one interfered. They walked forward but stopped as a man was led outside. Bandages covered both eyes, but they had been sloppily applied, and from underneath each a river of blood flowed jaggedly down his face. The man could hardly walk. He was babbling pathetically, and then he went down to his knees, sobbing.
“Watch yourself,” said an officer. He pulled a Star automatic from a holster, thumbed back the hammer and leaned over and quickly shot the man in the back of his neck. The victim pitched forward, his skull hitting the asphalt with a thud. He was still, yet more blood coursed from the head wound, to mingle with the blood from his eyes.
The officer holstered his pistol, yelled and two men came over and dragged the corpse away.
“That was,” the officer said to the two Americans, “the traitor bastard Santamaria. Oh, he thought he was so clever, but look how he ended up. That is the way we handle treason in Cuba.”
“We could learn a lesson from you,” said Frenchy.
“You could indeed.”
“What are you finding out?”
“See the intelligence officer inside. Latavistada. He is in charge. He has all the answers. He does the cutting.”
“It’s the man we think it is? This is what I have heard.”
“That is the name given up from the lips of the condemned.”
“Does anybody know where he has gone?”
“They had no plan. There are no escape routes. He fled, that is all, the coward. We will catch him, and then Ojos Bellos will have a conversation with him and then he will be shot, like that dog Santamaria.”
“Thanks,” said Frenchy.
“Of course. We are partners in this, your country and mine.”
Through this exchange, Earl stood mute, as if paralyzed. His face had gone dull and it showed nothing, not horror, not repugnance, not judgment. He had seen so many bodies in his time and so much killing that nothing here was worth reacting to; it was only to be remembered.
He and Frenchy ducked inside.
There Ojos Bellos, Captain Ramon Latavistada, his uniform smeared with blood like a butcher’s, worked his magic. The screams were intense, the pain horrific, and the man chained before him writhed and shivered and begged. For his part, the captain was not frenzied or excited in the least. He worked slowly and precisely, with a doctor’s delicate touch. He cut, he whispered a question, he listened gravely, he consulted with staff, he checked this information against other information, he cross-checked, he indexed, he made certain good notes were being taken, and then he went back to work. He affected the anguish of a country doctor telling a longtime patient the news was bad. He pretended that what he had to do was hurting him as much as them, and he begged them to cooperate, and then he cut them, cut them some more and cut them yet again.
“You’re the Americans we were told to expect?” asked a young SIM staff lieutenant.
“That’s us. What have you got?”
“It is this Castro, as we suspected. He seems to have
invented this thing quickly. A month ago most of these men were dream revolutionaries, fantasists, pretenders. Then the call came, and it is amazing how quickly they gave up normal lives to assist the man. He has a gift, that is for certain. Of course by now they thought they’d be sipping champagne in the presidential palace, not dangling on a chain while Ojos Bellos worked upon them. We will get him, though.”
“How did he get away?” Frenchy asked.
“He fought till the end. Most left before he did. Most recall him there, shouting, giving fire. He has balls, that one. It must be said. That is why he is dangerous. He has the conquistador blood. That is why he must be hunted and shot.”
“So nobody saw him leave.”
“Ojos Bellos is working under the following theory: that it is logical that a man wounded earlier in the fight and not able to flee, he alone would have been there and seen what happened. So we are checking and cross-checking, and attempting to come up with a prisoner who was taken there at the site, after a wounding. Alas, many of those men did not survive the wrath of the soldiery.”
“They were shot on the spot?”
“A mistake, I admit it. But if such a man exists, Ojos Bellos will find him. Nobody can hide a thing from Ojos Bellos. He learns everything, eventually.”
“We’ll wait. I want the latest intel to flash to Washington. You can imagine how upset they are.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’m going to duck out for a cigarette,” Earl said.
“No,” Frenchy said, “you should—”
But Earl hit him with a look that told him coldly to back way the fuck off, and Frenchy melted in the power of that glare.
“I’ll, um, stay here, and um, maybe I can—”
But Earl was already out.
He breathed deeply, even if the air was shot with gasoline, burned powder and blood, moved away from the torture factory and found a tree to squat under, facing only the green parade ground and, miles beyond it, the high mountains of the Sierra Maestra. They looked somehow clean from this distance. He swiftly opened a pack of cigarettes and fired up a Camel, drawing deeply as if the smoke had some salutary effect, some abrasive, scouring cleanliness. But there was no cleanliness here, and overhead, hawks or vultures, birds of carrion whatever, reeled and fluted in the pale, cool early morning sunlight.
But he had no chance to settle down, for as birds of carrion whirled overhead, one in human form approached on foot, fast, bent, dark, near apoplexy.
“Hey,” he shouted, and Earl looked over to see that he had been followed from the tent by a familiar figure that he could not place in time or memory, until at last the man’s sheer aggression imprinted itself, and he recognized him from his previous anger at the fancy embassy party some weeks ago.
“The fuck?” said the dark furious man. “You just fuckin’ walk out on Captain Latavistada like you’re some kind of fuckin’ better than him? Who the fuck are you, a prince, a nancy, a fuckin’ Mr. Too Fuckin’ Good for everybody?”
Earl rose quickly and it occurred to him to punch the prick bloody under the banyan tree on the parade ground, and how much pleasure would be had in the feeling of the flattened nose and the broken teeth and the spew of blood, but instead he just stared at him hard.
“Yeah, you. You fuckin’ goofball, this is the shit that has to be done down here to keep it all from going blooie in our faces and Captain Latavistada is a great man who gets that while some fancy dick like you, you like to cold-cock guys in train stations and ambush ’em while they’re reading the newspaper on their sofas, but you ain’t got the fuckin’ hubcaps for this sort of thing. You yellow piece of shit, I ought to—”
“You shut that yap, mister, and shut it hard, or I will shut it for you, and all these Cubans can watch me pound the snot out of you ounce by ounce.”
Whoever he was, he was taken aback by Earl’s defiance, but the surprise instantly transmuted into rage, his face flashed the dead white of assault, and he waded in. His first blow, a wide, circular notification by wire, was easily evaded, and Earl instead snared the second one, only slightly less telegraphed, transformed its power by the primitive alchemy of judo back onto his attacker, and rammed the guy’s noggin hard against the trunk of the tree.
He did it a couple more times, taking satisfaction in the gash he opened in the hairline and the spurt of blood. Then he dropped the man, hard, on the ground.
“Ow, fuck,” spat Frankie Carbine, “you fucking—”
“You piece of shit, you get up now and in one second I will beat the side of your head in and fertilize this shithole with your brains. I am not your kidding type, so you listen now or you die in five seconds.”
The man stayed down. He put his hand to his hairline, now producing copious blood, that before swelling and turning purple-yellow like a rotted grapefruit.
“You got me with a trick.”
“Yeah, a trick called faster and tougher, you fucking human blister. I ought to pop you and drain all that pus out now, you New York grease factory.”
He dared the man to rise; the man, though still deep full of aggression, was not stupid; he stayed down, but the look in his feral eyes and his ugly knitted features suggested that the next time he saw Earl would be over the sights of a pistol.
“Earl, Earl,” Frenchy suddenly crooned, breaking though the small knot of Cubans who’d gathered to watch the amusing spectacle of a big man crushing a smaller one, a sure laugh-getter in most of the world’s precincts, “it’s all right, ignore him.”
He turned to the man.
“Sport, Lansky would have you shipped back to the States in a straw basket if he knew what you’d just pulled. We are trying to stay on top of a fluid situation and get it done, and we don’t need showboat New York thugs going screwball on us. You get back to Havana or I will make a phone call and you will not see Manhattan again in a dream.”
Sullenly the battered man rose, scuffed insolently at the dirt, and launched a gob that wasn’t aimed east enough to strike Earl but not west enough to avoid insult. He slumped off.
“Who’s that jaybird?”
“He’s a mob guy. He hangs out with the secret police and reports to some big people who run the casinos in Havana. He’s nobody, really. He’s a worm, that’s all. He’s not worth beating up.”
“Son, if you call that ‘beating up,’ you don’t know much about beating up.”
“Well, yeah. Anyhow, we have something. Something good. We have to move.”
“What is it?”
“Latavistada broke the witness. It was all in Spanish but I understood. Beautiful Eyes is making sure and dotting all the i’s. But the gist of it is that someone saw Castro being led off right at the end by some kind of peasant. But a weird kind of peasant. Some tall, lanky, scrawny guy, with bristly gray hair. The description was, ‘like a poet.’ He looked like a poet, by which I take to mean slightly bohemian, or intellectual, what we might call a beatnik. Mean anything to you?”
Earl thought for a second.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “It’s somebody who knows what he’s doing. These clowns will never find this guy, believe me. He’s too good for them.”
“Is he too good for you, Earl? You’ll have to hunt him down, too. You have to be better than he is.”
Chapter 41
At one point, the Russian moved into the cab with the old man who was driving, and gave directions. He seemed to sense ambush and roadblock and sudden troop appearances as if he had a radar in his brain for such things. He always knew which street to turn down, how the alleys connected, and following these methods, he got them to the outskirts of a town abuzz with police activity.
Next came the river, where he cleansed himself and felt somehow repaired, or at least improved in spirit. By then it was the middle of the day.
“Time to rest, my friend,” said the Russian.
“Where? We need shelter.”
“If we seek shelter, we alert someone who in turn mutters something to some
one else and before you know it, you’re before the wall, only this time, I’m standing beside you. Oh, and neither of us has any eyes. No thank you. You rest here, by the river. You keep low. Sleep if you can. We have a long journey ahead of us.”
“To where? I should be with my men.”
“Your men are dead. Your task is to survive and consecrate their sacrifice. We won’t comment on the stupidity of it all, and if you win in the end, you can order the historians to portray last night as a triumph instead of a folly. If they refuse, shoot them and find new historians. Now rest.”
Speshnev thanked the truck driver, and bid him off, and when he had gone, led the young revolutionary down closer to the river. Here, he was invisible yet had a view across the water to the city, and a view down the dirt road that ran atop the crest. In the distance lay some peasant bohios, thatched-roof huts, surrounded by broken fencing, donkeys and chickens.
“You wait. Go nowhere. Shit in your pants. You don’t need to tell anyone about your heroism. You wait here. I have arrangements to make.”
“You can get me there,” Castro said, gesturing to the beckoning mountains that seemed to be just yards away but were still miles off.
“To do what, live in a cave? Just wait.”
And with that, he vanished so quickly that Castro had a sense that he was magical. Could he be an angel? Castro didn’t believe in God, but he believed in God’s angels, paradoxical or not. Possibly this man was such an angel. Whoever he was, he was a capable fellow. He certainly knew a lot of things. He had a gift for suddenness, either in the appearance or the disappearance department.
The young man lay and tried to sleep. But he was too agitated. He kept seeing bodies shot and sloppy, arms and legs flung out, blood spattering everywhere. He kept hearing the sound of the bullets ripping into the car. He kept feeling the spray of glass whizzing at him as a bullet shattered a windshield. He kept thinking of what he could have done that he had not or what he had done that he wished he hadn’t.