Havana (30 page)

He arrived at 2:45 and nodded at the duty marine, who only barely nodded back. Inside, people he'd known for months, whom he'd laughed with and drunk with, girls he'd tried to date, men who'd admired his closeness to the fabulous Roger, all looked away, as if whatever he had might be catching.

It was of course all around the building that he'd been leading a hunter-killer team after the revolutionary, and that he'd failed, and been lucky that some old Cuban cop was there to save his bacon. It made the Agency look so bad. They hadn't seen Moncada coming, and never caught up to it, and the business community was expecting some action, and instead they just got Boy Scout stuff in the mountains, to no consequence.

He tried to be lighthearted about it, and he was dressed surprisingly casually for such an important meeting, in old blue jeans, a knit shirt for polo playing—as if he'd ever played polo!—and a blazer. He wore his Bass Weejuns and no socks, and looked as if he'd just stepped off the quad at Princeton. If they were going to hang him—and they were—he'd be comfortable, dammit.

Frenchy climbed the steps and went back to his office on the third floor, but it was empty. Soon enough, Shirley, a Vassar girl of famously high spunk quotient, leaned in. She and she alone had the guts to face him, and to speak civilly, and possibly risk all for it.

“Don't you remember, Walter? It's in the ambassador's office.”

“Yeah, I just thought—” he said, and trailed off.

“Walter,” she said, “for what it's worth, I always thought you were a good guy. I'm sorry you had to bury your light under that prick Roger. It's too bad when this stuff happens. Good luck.”

That seemed to be it: Shirley knew the score, it was all over except the part where the negro help washes the blood off the walls.

“A little late for luck, I think,” he said, smiling. “But who knows what's up the old Short sleeve?”

He left for the ambassador's office, which took up the whole east wing of the second floor and had to be accessed through a series of increasingly lavish offices, and as he passed through each, people scurried to look the other way or suddenly found the files or documents before them utterly fascinating.

When he at last reached the big office, he heard laughter. It seemed the old boys—the ambassador himself, who probably didn't really know Frenchy's name, and Roger and Plans—were sharing a giggle. Something had amused them.

The door was open. Frenchy leaned in sheepishly.

“Uh, hi,” he said.

“Well, well, well,” said Plans, looking amused, “our last team member is here. I was all set to bawl you out for being late, but I see it's exactly 3
P.M.
sharp.”

“Yes, sir,” said Frenchy.

“Well, do come in.”

“Dick,” said the ambassador, “since you boys are going to go all skull-and-bones, I think I'll absent myself. I have many things to attend to and I don't want to hear anything I can't tell my wife.”

“Thanks, Jack. Your cooperation is noted and I will whisper your name in many ears.”

“Thanks, Dick.” He smiled facilely, made deeply insincere eye-contact with each of them, and sauntered out, as if he weren't totally nonplussed at being evicted from his own office.

“Short, do come in, and sit down. Understand you ran a hell of a race in those mountains,” said Plans.

Frenchy went over and sat in an overstuffed chair. He felt awkward. The ambassador was some kind of big-game hunter, so animal heads hung everywhere in the office, which was done up like a Russian-Jewish set designer's Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer version of a Harvard eating club. It was heavy on flags, ships in bottles or too big for bottles, eighteenth century battle paintings, beautifully bound books in red leather, and a big eagle symbol embossed on a disk in bas relief, painted richly. Frenchy had never been in here, he realized.

Plans smiled sadly. “Now, Short, suppose you just run through what exactly it was that happened up there, just for the record, and so I know what sort of a situation I'm facing.”

“Yes, sir,” said Frenchy.

He told, as quickly as he could, in measured terms though colloquially, how he and Earl had come in from the other side of the mountains, how Earl had read the land brilliantly and understood exactly where the target would be led, how when they'd made the intercept, Earl had it all before him and wouldn't pull the trigger.

“Hmmm,” said Plans. “I've seen this man's record. He killed many, many times in the war. I don't understand his refusal.”

“I don't understand it either,” said Roger. “It was his willingness to kill, as evinced by his war record, that made us bring him in in the first place.”

“Well,” said Frenchy, “you don't get much in the way of explanations out of Earl. He does what he does by his own standards, without doubt. All the career offers, the possibility of a better life for his family, the ideas of helping the Agency and the country, all that meant nothing. His mind works in very strange ways. He just wouldn't do it.”

“You
said
you could—” Roger began, but Plans cut him off with a gesture, then asked, “Where is he now?”

“The Cubans have him detained on our suggestion. We haven't figured out what to do with him.”

“Excellent, as I haven't yet figured out what to do with
you.
”

“Sir,” said Frenchy, “not to discount a failure, but could I point out that in the end this may work out to the good. If we'd actually killed the revolutionary, he'd be a martyr. Who knows what mischief that would unleash? Now he's just another convict in the Cuban prison system. Anything can happen to him if he's not executed, though he still may be. So the same thing has been accomplished, but there's no trace of our connection. And in fact Earl
did
essentially stage-manage the capture.”

“Yes, all that may be true, Short. But it's irrelevant. As I recall, you were given an exact and specific assignment. The point, need I remind you, was to send a message. Remember the Big Noise? We were going to make a big noise. ‘We will not be trifled with.' That was the message we meant to send, and that was the message that did not get sent. So you see, there is a problem here.”

Both young men looked at the floor.

“Well?” Plans said. “Someone has to answer. That is the way of the organization. Will one of you please speak? Let's not mince words. I want to know exactly whose fault this was. Where does the blame go? Someone has to pay. Which of you will it be? Who gets the ax?”

It was Roger who finally spoke.

“I have to be frank here, Dick. It was Frenchy—
Walter
—who ran this mission, it was Walter who found and pushed Earl, it was Walter who swore for weeks that Earl could be brought under discipline. I think the record will show that I had severe doubts about Earl Swagger and raised questions many times. When I raised questions, it was Walter who downplayed them, who minimized them, who invested totally in Earl. I blame myself, of course, for not monitoring the situation more aggressively, but as you know, you sometimes have to take a certain level of staff performance on trust. I trusted. My trust did not bear fruit. Now, I like Walter very much, but I do wonder if he's a shrewd enough judge of character for this kind of work. It takes a certain I-don't-know-what, a certain sophistication to get certain things accomplished, and the honest truth is that while there are many things Walter can do and do well, this may not be an area where his capabilities come to the fore. Walter, I'm only telling the truth, painful as it is for me.”

Frenchy nodded.

“Sure, Roge. Tell it the way you see it.”

“Mr. Short, possibly you have a counterpoint to make. You'd best make it now or the situation will have gotten away from you.”

“I only know that I did my best.”

“Ah. Well, one cannot ask for more. But sometimes even that isn't enough. And so I suppose that a judgment has been reached, that—”

“Oh, one thing, sir,” Frenchy said, “should I give you the report for counterintelligence and you'll see they get it, or should I just send it through normal channels? I'm not sure what's best and, gosh, I'd hate to make another darned mistake.”

 

Earl was taken to the same prison in Santiago that now housed Castro, and indeed found himself in a cell three down from the young revolutionary leader. Not that anyone paid any attention to him: eager to show its humanity to the world, the administration of Presidente Batista had ordered the revolutionary shown to any and all, so for nights and days on end, a parade of newspaper, news magazine and radio and television reporters flooded through to ask the young Cuban questions tinged with admiration. No one realized that the man three cells away had so recently had him in his sights, with his finger on the trigger.

Earl went largely unnoticed. His demands—to see a lawyer, to make some calls, to reach an official at the embassy, to speak to any other American—were routinely ignored, but otherwise he was not ill-treated. He was able to shower daily, was fed well, exercised in the yard, and soon made friends with a few other prisoners, with whom he shared cigarettes and rough humor, most of it directed at the young man who was the special guest and carried on like a movie star, quickly attracting a host of hangers-on and factotums, quickly adjusting to his celebrity and his wisdom, coming to be on first-name terms with the American reporters especially, who seemed to find him so admirable.

“That one, he'll wake up with his throat cut,” one man said to a crowd that included Earl, smoking cigarettes in the sun as, across the way, the young man spoke earnestly to a young Frenchwoman, braless under her blouse, who wrote down his wisdom with relentless diligence.

“Watch his head grow,” another said. “When he got here, he was a failure. But they all treat him like a hero, and now he believes it.”

“They say he is a secret
communista.
He'll have us all dancing to the red jig if he gets his way, you watch.”

“You,
norteamericano,
what do you make of such a young fool?”

“He does carry on, don't he? He reminds me of a movie star. They get famous too young and they never recover. They always think they're important.”

“He has much learning to do, that is true.”

Once it even passed that Castro and the man who'd hunted him at gunpoint stood next to each other in the food line, though Castro didn't realize such. He was engaged in intense political conversation with two companions, and if he even knew Earl was an American, he never acknowledged it.

A moment came when their eyes happened to lock, and Castro gave him a politico's warm nod, and Earl nodded back, and the transaction was complete. Castro went back to his dialectics, having thought up several more important points to make.

Then one night, Earl was moved. He was not chained or brutalized, but was taken at a decent hour to a paddy wagon, locked in its rear—again, without the binding chains of a dangerous man—and driven to Havana. It took a full day, but the driver and guard were decent and joked with him, bought him cigarettes and beer and a fine lunch, pointed out beautiful girls as they passed, and were it not for the lock in the back, it would not have been an uncomfortable experience. In Havana, finally, he was taken not to the gloomy and distressing Morro Fortress but to a substation far from downtown, and again ensconced in comfort. The cell was roomy, he was the only prisoner in this wing, and he could read, smoke, drink or sleep as he wished. One night a guard even asked if he desired a woman. He said no.

Finally, after four days, a man from the embassy showed up.

“Oh, hope it wasn't too much trouble for you to come down here, sir. Don't rush or nothing,” asked Earl.

“Now Mr. Swagger, a sarcastic attitude won't be of any help here.”

“Look, just get me out of here. I never want to see this goddamned island again.”

“Well, we are trying to get it sorted out. The Cubans are very forgiving on many issues, especially where Americans are involved, but they do have a few rules. You never got a visa. Usually it's just a formality, but for some reason they are adopting a hard line on this one.”

“Well, you go on up to the third floor, Office 311, where Evans and his little pal Short hang out, and that's the source of your hard line.”

“I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. I believe you accompanied Congressman Etheridge and you whisked through Cuban Customs on the strength of his VIP protection, but someone in the embassy should have gotten you an entry permit and no one seems to have done it. Whoever made the mistake, it will take some sorting out, and we are working on it.”

“Swell,” Earl said. “I know you'll do your best.”

So he sat. And sat. And sat.

 

Frenchy enjoyed the silence.

Finally, Plans spoke.

“Are you sure you want to play it this way, Short? This isn't the attitude I was looking for from you and I will be honest with you, I can be very nasty.”