Mercedes handed Fidel a glass of water. He picked up several of the pills, put them in his mouth, then wallowed some water. Then he put the last pill in his mouth and took another swig.
Vargas was a moral nihilist, Castro thought, a man who believed in nothing. There were certainly plenty of those. He had known what Vargas was for many years and had used him anyway because he was good at his job, which was a miserable one. We entrusted it to a swine so that we need not dirty our hands.
Another mistake.
“I need rest,” he said, and tried to rise.
“No,” Vargas said fiercely. He leaned on the desk with both hands, lowered his face near Fidel. “You still have a statement to make before the cameras.”
“Nothing for you.”
“You think you have nothing to lose, do you not? You think, Alejo could kill me, but what is that? He merely speeds up the inevitable.”
Fidel looked Vargas square in the eye. “I should have killed you years and years ago,” he said. He took his hands from the arms of his chair and wrapped them around his stomach.
“There is no regret as bitter as the murder you didn’t commit. How true that is! But you didn’t kill me because you needed me, Fidel, needed me to ferret out your enemies, find who was whispering against you and bring you their names. Help you shut their mouths, cut out the rot without killing the tree.
“Kill me? Without me how would you have kept your wretched subjects loyal? Who would have kept these miserable guajiros starving on this sandy rock in the sea’s middle from cutting the flesh from your bones? Who would have provided the muscle to keep you in office when the Russians abandoned you and nothing went right? When everything you touched backfired?
“Kill me? Ha! That would have been like killing yourself.
“Now I have come for mine. Not centavos, like in the past. I want what is mine for keeping you in power all these years, for keeping the peasants from slicing your throat when in truth that was precisely what you deserved. You are a miserable failure, Fidel, as a man and as a servant of Cuba. And you are going to die a revered old man — God, what a joke! Hailed as the Cuban Washington for the next ten centuries ….”
Vargas sneered.
“Now I have the power of life or death, Fidel. I think you will make your statement in front of the camera. You will name me, Alejo Vargas, your loyal, trusted minister of interior as your successor, you will plead with all loyal Cubans everywhere to recognize the wisdom of your choice.”
Sweat ran in rivulets from Fidel’s face, dripped from his beard. His voice came out a hoarse whisper. “Forty years’ service to my country, and you expect me to hand Cuba over to you? To rape for your profit? Not on your life.”
“Don’t be a fool. You have nothing to bargain with.”
“Kill me. See what you gain,” Fidel said, his voice barely audible.
“You’ll die soon enough, never fear. But before you do Colonel Santana will butcher Mercedes on this table while you watch.”
“Have you no honor?”
“Don’t talk to me of honor. You have told so many lies you can’t remember ever telling the truth. You have profaned the Church, denied God, sent loyal Cuban soldiers to die in Angola, demanded that generation after generation give their blood to fulfill your destiny as Cuba’s savior. You have impoverished a nation, reduced them to beggary to salve your ego. I spit on you and all that you would have us become.”
And he did.
Fidel brought a hand up to wipe away the spittle. “Fuck you!” he whispered.
“And you too, Líder Maximo!” Vargas shot back. “I do not pretend to be God’s other son, strutting in green fatigues and spouting platitudes while the people worship me. But enough of this. Before we get to the camera, tell me where the gold is.”
“The gold?”
“The gold, Fidel. The gold from the peso coins that the Ministry of Finance melted down into ingots, the gold ingots that you and Che and Edis López and José Otero carried away. How much gold was there? Forty or fifty tons? You certainly didn’t spend it on the people of Cuba. Where is it?”
A grimace twisted Castro’s lips. “You’ll never find it, that’s for certain. Edis and José died within weeks of Che. I am the only living person who knows where that gold is; I am taking the secret to my grave.”
“The gold isn’t yours.”
“Nor is it yours, you son of a pig.”
“We will let you watch us cut up Mercedes. We will make a tiny incision on her abdomen, pull out a loop of small intestine. I will ask you questions, and every time you refuse to answer Colonel Santana will pull out more intestine. You will tell us everything we want to know or we will see what her insides look like. Colonel?”
Santana grabbed Mercedes by the arms. With one hand he grabbed the front of her dress and ripped it from her body.
Fidel Castro’s jaw moved. Then he went limp, slumping in his chair.
“Fidel!” Mercedes screamed.
Vargas leaped for Castro, pried open his jaw and raked a piece of celluloid from his mouth with his finger.
“Poison,” he said disgustedly. He felt Castro’s wrist for a pulse.
“Stone cold dead.” He tossed down the wrist and turned toward Mercedes.
“You gave him the poison! He had the capsule in his mouth.”
Alejo Vargas slapped her as hard as he could.
“And this is for insulting my mother, puta!” He slapped her again so hard she went to her knees, the side of her face numb. “If you do it again I will cut your tongue out,” he added, his voice almost a hiss.
Then Vargas took a deep breath and steadied himself. The sight of Fidel Castro’s corpse drained the rage from him and filled him with adrenaline, ready for the race to his destiny. He had waited all his life for this moment and now it was here.
“Listen to this,” the technician said, and handed the earphones to William Henry Chance. They were crammed into a tiny van with the logo of the Communications Ministry on the side. The van was parked on a side street near Chance’s hotel, but with an excellent view of the Interior Ministry.
Chance put on the headphones.
“We recorded this stuff early this morning,” the technician told Chance’s associate, Tommy Carmellini. “Getting to you without stirring up the Cubans was the trick. Wait until you hear this stuff.”
“What is it?” Carmellini asked.
“Vargas and his thug, Santana, in the minister’s office. They’re talking about a speech they want Castro to make in front of cameras. A political will, Vargas called it. They are writing it, debating the wording.”
“What do they want it to say?”
“They want Castro to name Vargas as his successor, his heir.”
“Will he do that?”
“They seem to think he will.”
“Have we heard anything back from Washington about that ship reference — the Colón? … Nuestra Señora de Colón?”
“No. Something like that will take days to percolate through the bureaucracy.”
“I was hoping the reference to North Koreans and biological warheads would light a fire under Somebody.”
“It always takes a while before we smell the smoke of burning trousers.”
Carmellini watched Chance’s face as he listened to the tape. William Henry Chance, attorney and CIA agent, certainly didn’t look like a man who would be at home in the shadow world of spies and espionage. But then appearances were often deceiving.
Carmellini had been a burglar — more or less semi-retired — attending the Stanford University Law School when he was visited one day by a CIA recruiter, a woman who took him to lunch in the student union cafeteria and asked him about his plans for the future. He still remembered the conversation. He was going into business, he said. Maybe politics. He thought that someday he might run for public office.