Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit (3 page)

“It’s all right.”

“I would have done that,” the guard said. “There was no need. I would have—”

“It’s perfectly all right,” Delgado said. “It wasn’t necessary. I had to do it.”

“All right,” the guard said. “Should I—”

“Of course you should,” Delgado said. Tension broke his voice and then he was screaming. “Clean them up!” he said, “get them out of here! Do you think I want corpses in my office? Do you think that I want blood overtaking everything? Get them out of here!”

He pushed past the guard, shaking and walked down the hall, toward the administration offices. He would tell them what he had done. He would tell them that he had followed orders. Now the problem was theirs and he hoped, hoped very strongly, that he was out of it. But there was just no way of knowing. There was no way of being sure.

As the revolution had evolved, there was no way of being sure of anything.

All prisons were the same. He had seen their interior a hundred times in New York, conveyed prisoners in and out of the Tombs, even once as a participant in a project had spent a night in the Tombs and another on Riker’s Island so that police personnel could see exactly where the people they apprehended could go. He had never forgotten that. And he had spent a night in a jail in Saigon back in the sixties for reasons which were still obscure to him and once, long ago, he had spent a few hours in one of the well-known Mexican jails because, as an eighteen-year-old below the border on his own, he had not been able to immediately establish his identity. So he knew a little about jails, not much but far more than most people would ever care to understand and when you came right down to it, Havana was the same as New York City or Tia Juana. A jail was a place where people were held in close confinement in undesirable conditions where, if you got lucky, the only killer was boredom, but the boredom could destroy you. For many it extended through years and years, decades mounting toward a life sentence, for others it might only go six months or a year and they could pace out the time a little better, but life-imprisonment or overnight, it was a place in which you simply could not get out of yourself, where you were hurled back on yourself constantly, the real prison then being the cell of self. … And now, after two hours in this basement, nothing more, Wulff felt himself closer to an edge of panic than anything he had ever glimpsed since his war had begun. He was alone in a room with a barred gate, at the end of a hallway and he could not even hear voices. Now and then, far down, a door would slam and he would hear footsteps and curses. For the rest he sat in the cell, an uneaten meal in front of him and calculated the dimensions of what had happened. It did not look pleasant. Now, he was deep in.

At least he had been able to talk the passengers off the plane, get the stewardesses out, get in a fresh crew who had had experience with something of this sort and had the training to do their jobs. It could have been a major disaster; at least he had saved them that although there was no saying what was minor or major, not in a situation like this, not ever. The flight to Havana had been sullen, the last hour on the edge of an explosion of some sort because the two gunmen, initially confident, had seemed to lose assurance progressively as the plane came toward Havana. Maybe it was only the first awareness of what they had done sinking through; maybe it was the suspicion that they had not had prepared for them at Havana the nost riotous of welcomes but there had been a point, almost when they were about to land, when the gunmen had seriously discussed turning the plane around and being taken anywhere else, perhaps Canada. They had been so agitated that their voices had risen and they had made no effort to conceal from Wulff what they were worried about. They were worried that there was going to be no protection from the authorities at landing and that the people, whoever they were, who had sent them out on this were in no position to make guarantees. “We’re being played for fools; I tell you they just want that shit and that son of a bitch out of the country!” one of them had said and the situation had become even uglier because they had discussed then the possibility of killing Wulff, getting the plane turned around and escaping with the valise themselves, possibly to Canada. Sitting alone in the passenger cabin, gripping the seat Wulff had found himself judging the chances he would have in taking them on right then and only by a small margin had he decided that he could not, there was too much risk, they were armed and even in their panic could probably overwhelm him. As long as there was the slightest possibility that he could get out of this whole he could not attempt suicide. But the realization that the gunmen were beyond their depth, that they were functioning on orders which were confused and probably issued from a level which could become treacherous had been very much with him in those last moments and although there were good things about it—because he could at least hope now that the landing in Havana might not be a death sentence for him—there was the matter of surviving through this.

But they had decided at last to go in, decided that Cuba looked safer for them at least than an unknown destination and he had been able to relax, at least until the plane had taxied in front of a dismal administration building somewhere at the far corner of the airport and they had been instantly surrounded by police in full riot gear. Well, that would have to be expected, notification to the authorities; the gunmen had until that last moment of fear, been convinced that they were heading toward a haven and there had been no attempt to block the crew from explaining who they were carrying and where they were landing. But when the police had charged aboard the craft, moving past Wulff in fact to seize the gunmen first, clap them into handcuffs and take them roughly off the plane before they came at Wulff in a more restrained manner … when all of this happened Wulff allowed himself to see that not only the gunmen but he had misread this situation. Nor was there any reason for this: he should have anticipated as should the others that the public landing of a million dollars worth of shit in Havana was not something with which the authorities could cooperate.

They had taken him off the plane then, less roughly than the hijackers but firmly enough and sped him through the bleak back streets of Havana, toward confinement of some sort he had supposed. But for a moment, sitting in the back of the official car, his limbs cramped, his stomach convulsed from the profound tension of the last day, he had allowed himself to think that it would not be jail at all, had entertained the fantasy that they would turn him loose somewhere in the vicinity of the capitol buildings for apologies and congratulations of some sort after which he would be put on a private plane for return to the states and a destination of his choice…. Yes, it had been something worth thinking of anyway, even though he knew at the more rational levels of consciousness that nothing like this could happen. They were no fools here. It was possible that the gunmen would not get the warmest of greetings, that was quite likely in fact—there had just been too much pressure on this government recently—but that hardly meant that things would be going his way. They owed him no favors, none of them, he was the one who had, from their point of view anyway, been responsible for the hijacking simply by presenting the gunmen with an irresistible opportunity … and things would be getting a lot rougher before they became easier. If they ever did. Wulff had eased back in the car, closed his eyes, tried to resign himself but resignation was difficult; resignation was the most difficult thing of all to cultivate when you were in a situation which was literally out of control and in which you were controlled by others. That was something which had not so far happened in his war; he guessed that he would have to learn. There were many things which he would have to learn indeed, no one ever reached a point of utter knowledge, but then again he would have been crazy if he thought that this was going to be easy. Remember, he had counselled himself, remember that you’re a dead man; they killed you on the fifth floor of a rooming house and you’ll never be alive again but he was not even sure that this could be taken as a truth. What was death? what was killing? who was he to deny that he could be reached by pain when there was pain all around? Well, no point to any of this. As best as he could, he reconciled himself.

They took him into a large, grey building near what seemed to be the center of town and he was escorted by three solemn guards into this cell and there he had been left. The guards were dishevelled, sweating heavily from what appeared to be more a personality defect than any tension: Havana had deteriorated through these days. Wulff, who had never been here, supposed that in the Battista days it had been a resort center; a place whose gaiety might have been shallow but which had, however manufactured, been the pose which the city had adopted, the gaiety oozing out even into the slum sections which ringed the city and in the slums, which were part of every city he had ever seen (except Las Vegas which had no neighborhoods but was merely a condition, laid in brights against the desert) they had probably accepted that condition as well so that from stem to stern the town had danced, danced in mud, danced under the armaments of the dictator’s police, but however wavering, the dance had gone on until the Revolution had come. And now the revolution had clamped, in this decade, a lead cover over those waters and the city had been baked dry. Empty rubble, ruined buildings, staggering forms passed by Wulff as they drove through the back parts of the city. It looked like New York now or like any large population center in the western world, like an occupied zone. Nevertheless it was still here; it was working after a fashion.

Now he sat in a cell in the jail, looking through the bars and thinking of the price he had paid, the risks he had taken, the men he had killed to get this far. It did not seem worth it. Looked at in perspective nothing was worth it; you wound up in a cell or in the grave but somewhere you had to try, if you cared, to make a contribution and he wanted to believe very badly that he had made a difference. Still, if they simply left him here forever, would anyone notice? After a long time David Williams in the PD might remember that Wulff hadn’t checked in and use informants to start a thin network of inquiry. But what would it matter months from now, long after they had had their chance at him? He shook his head, bit his lips, looked at the walls and then away. He would not even consider this. You lived, rather, moment to moment like the drug freaks themselves, trapped within the cycle … and hoped, somehow, that there would be a reckoning.

The guard was a fat man somewhere in his upper sixties. He carried weight as clumsily as age, his flesh weaving on him like a barrel, his ruined head and appendages protruding from the mass. He came down the hall, jingling like a music box, and poised in front of the cell. He put his hands on the bars, clamped them like an animal: an ape peering through these bars, pleading for attention as if he were the prisoner and Wulff the guard, and said, “You come with me now.”

“Must I?”

“Of course you must,” the guard said almost peevishly. “That is regulation.”

“Do you live by regulations.”

“We live by anything we can get.”

The guard’s English was unaccented; despite his ragged speech pattern the words did not sound malformed. Everybody here seemed to speak an unaccented English. If Havana were truly to be cleansed of
Yanqui
it would be more than a ten-to-fifteen year haul. At the heart all of them were Americans; that, Wulff thought, was why the government here was a battering ram, their back streets gutted as they led into the heart of the cities. For two decades everything had been America; face up to it.

“Let’s go,” the guard said.

“I don’t think I have any choice,” Wulff said. The gate was opened. “Should I resist apprehension?” The irony was lost on the guard. Everything was lost on them; they would take anything without expression. The basic humorlessness of all authorities was worldwide; then again, Wulff thought, there was very little for them to be whimsical about. Was he? The stakes were too high. The guard probably thought that he could be killed at any instant.

They walked through the narrow halls of the prison. Apparently Wulff was in a special section; either that or Havana had become law-abiding under the new regime. The cells were empty. Row after row of empty cages confronted him; he kept on walking, three paces ahead of the guard, knowing that the man had his gun out, was following him one hand on the trigger. Even so, he could take him. The guard had fallen into lockstep; if Wulff stopped suddenly and hurled himself backward the man would be caught completely unaware. The gun would be jammed back against his body; before he could get off a shot, Wulff could roll over him on the floor and take the gun away. Easy. Nothing to it. Still, he thought, why bother? Wherever the guard was taking him would be more interesting than this alley. It would be difficult to break out of a prision; they could seal him in here. Go to high ground. Try to make escape from there. Who knows? he thought, there may be no need for escape whatsoever. They might want to deal with him. Their position was not too happy a one; there had been too many hijackings and he suspected that the gunmen had hardly been greeted with a procession.

“Up the stairs,” the guard said unnecessarily and Wulff climbed a long winding flight leading to a shallow landing, paused there, climbed another row of stairs and yet another, ascending toward the high ground exactly as he had hoped, seeing windows now, jutting spokes of light. At yet another landing he paused, waiting for the guard to catch up with him. The guard was gasping; turning pale with the shock of effort; a little more effort like this and he would collapse and die, probably of arterial blockage. They had some security here. Regimes might change but the basic imcompetence of these people would go on. Incompetence would go on anywhere; that was the only thing you could count on … that the organization itself, the enemy, mostly did not know what the hell they were doing. Groaning, the guard gestured Wulff toward a door off the landing which led down a long hall ringed by officers. At the end of the hall was a small room, an open door. He slowed to allow the guard to catch up to him; then went the rest of the way almost side by side. A man was waiting for him at the doorway, a man in military uniform whose face looked closed in and purposeful. He motioned toward Wulff and Wulff went past him, into the bare room with the one window looking out on mountains. Behind him he heard the small man dismiss the guard. Wulff sighed and fell into the chair behind the desk. The man closed the door behind him, came briskly around the desk and sat. He opened a drawer, withdrew a pistol and held it lightly, like a professional, the point turned from Wulff toward the wall but obviously poised.

“That isn’t necessary,” Wulff said. “I’m not going to do anything.”

“I wouldn’t think so, Mr. Wulff. I’m sure you wouldn’t.”