Mercedes got up from the chair and left the room.
She wandered the hallways and reception rooms, the private areas, the offices, all now deserted. Every square foot was full of memories. She could see him talking to people, bending down slightly to hear, for he had been a tall man. She could not remember when he had not been the president of Cuba. When she was a girl, he was there. As a young woman, he was there. When she married, was widowed, when he took her to be his woman … always, all her life there was Fidel.
Such a man he had been! She was a Latin woman, and Fidel had been the epitome of the Latin man, a brilliant, athletic man, a commanding speaker, a perfect patriot, a man who defined machismo. The facets of Fidel’s personality that the non-Latin world found most irritating were those Cubans accepted as hallmarks of a man. He was self-righteous, proud, sure of his own importance and place in history, never admitted error, and refused to yield when humiliated by the outside world. He had struggled, endured, won much and lost even more, and in a way that non-Latins would never understand, had become the personification of Cuba.
And she had loved him.
In the room where he died the television cameras and lights were still in place, the wires still strung. Only Fidel’s body was missing.
She stood looking at the scene, remembering it, seeing him again as he was when she had known him best.
Still magnificent.
Now the tears came, a clouding of the eyes that she was powerless to stop. She found a chair and wept silently.
Her mind wandered off on a journey of its own, recalling scenes of her life, moments with her mother, her first husband, Fidel ….
The tears had been dry for quite a while when she realized with a start that she was still sitting in this room. The cameras were there in front of her, mounted on heavy, wheeled tripods.
These cameras must have some kind of film in them, videotape. She went to the nearest camera and examined it. Tentatively she pushed and tugged at buttons, levers, knobs. Finally a plate popped open and there was the videocassette. She removed it from the camera and closed the plate. There was also a cassette in the second camera.
With both cassettes concealed in the folds of her dress, Mercedes strode from the room.
A wave breaking over the deck doused Ocho Sedano with lukewarm water and woke him from a troubled, exhausted sleep. Angel del Mar was riding very low in the water. Even as he realized that the bilges must be full, another wave washed over the deck.
Ocho dashed below. The old fisherman slumped over the pump, water sloshed nearly waist-deep in the bilge. Ocho eased him aside, began pumping. He could feel the resistance, feel the water moving through the pump. He laid into it with a will.
“Sorry,” the old man said weakly. “Worn out. Just worn out.”
“Go up on deck. Dry out some, drink some water.”
The old man nodded, crawled slowly up the steep ladder. He slipped once, almost smashed his face on one of the steps. Finally his feet disappeared into the wheelhouse.
Three rain showers during the night had allowed everyone on board to drink their fill, to replenish dehydrated tissue, and when Ocho last looked, there were several gallons of water in the bucket under the tarp that no one could drink.
Ocho was no longer thirsty, but he was hungry as hell. There had been no more fish. Without line, hooks, bait, or nets they were unable to catch fish from the sea. Unless the creatures leaped onto the deck of the boat they were out of reach. So far, there had been no more of those.
The tarp they caught the water in gave the liquid a brackish taste, which everyone ignored. Still, water on an empty stomach made one aware of just how hungry he was.
Ocho pumped, felt his muscles loosen up, enjoyed the resistance that meant the pump was moving water. After fifteen minutes of maximum effort he could see that the water level was down about six inches. He settled in to work at a steady, sustainable pace.
The horizon remained empty. Empty! Not a boat or sail. Endless swells and sky in every direction.
It was almost as if the Lord had abandoned them, left them to die on this leaky little boat in the midst of this great vast ocean, while planes went overhead and boats and ships passed by on every side, just over the horizon.
We won’t have to wait long, Ocho thought. Our fate is very near. If the chain on this pump breaks, if we run out of energy to pump, if the swells get larger and waves start coming aboard, the boat will break up and the people will go into the sea. That would be our fate, to drown like all those people who went overboard that first night.
They are dead now, surely. Past all caring.
Amazing how that works. Everyone has to die, but you only have to do it once. You fight like hell to get there, though, and when you arrive the world continues as if you had never been.
As he pumped he wondered about his mother, how she was doing, wondered if he should have told her he was going to America.
An hour later Ocho was still pumping, the water was down several feet and the boat was riding better in the sea. And he was wearing out. He heard someone coming down the ladder, then saw feet. It was Dora.
She clung to the ladder, watched him standing in water to his knees working the pump handle up and down, up and down, up and down.
“It’s Papa,” she said.
He said nothing, waited for her to go on.
“I think he has given up.”
Ocho kept pumping.
“Speak to me, Ocho. Don’t insult me with your silence.”
Ocho switched arms without missing a stroke. “What is there to say? If he has given up, he has given up.”
“Will we be rescued?”
“Am I God? How would I know?”
“I am sick of this boat, this ocean!” she snarled. “Sick of it, you understand?”
“I understand.”
She sobbed, sniffed loudly.
Ocho kept pumping.
“I don’t think you love me,” she said, finally.
“I don’t know that I do.”
She watched him pump, up and down, rhythmically, endlessly.
“Doesn’t that make you tired?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
He wiped the sweat from his face with his free hand. “All of us, sooner or later, yes.”
“I mean now. This boat is going to sink. We’re going to drown.”
He looked at her for the first time. Her skin was stretched tightly over her face, her teeth were bared, her eyes were narrowed with an intensity he had never seen before.
“I don’t know,” he said gently.
“I don’t want to die now.”
He lowered his face so that he wouldn’t have to look at her, kept the handle going up and down.
She went back up the ladder, disappeared from view.
Ocho paused, straightened as best he could under the low overhead and looked critically at the water remaining in the boat. He was gaining. He stretched, crossed himself on the off chance God might be watching, then went back to pumping.
The CIA’s man in Cuba was an American, Dr. Henri Bouchard, a former college professor who lived and worked inside the American Interest Section of the Swiss embassy, a complex of buildings that in former days housed the American embassy and presumably someday would again. The Cubans watched the American diplomats very closely, so this officer had no contact with the agency’s covert intelligence apparatus on the island. He kept himself busy watching television, listening to radio, collecting Cuban newspapers and publications and writing reports based on what he saw, heard, and read. His diplomatic colleagues were congenial and the life was semi-monastic, which he found agreeable.