CHAPTER TWO
The night was hot and sultry, with lightning playing on the horizon. From his seat on the top row of the stadium bleachers Hector Juan de Dios Sedano kept an eye on the lightning, but the storms seemed to be moving north.
Everyone else in the stadium was watching the game. Hector’s younger brother, Juan Manuel “Ocho” Sedano, was the local team’s star pitcher. The eighth child of his parents, the Cuban fans had long ago dubbed him El Ocho. The family reduced the name to “Ocho.”
Tonight his fastball seemed on fire and his curve exceptional. The crowd cheered with every pitch. Twice the umpire called for the ball to examine it. Each time he handed it back to the catcher, who tossed it back to the mound as the fans hooted delightedly.
At the middle of the seventh inning Ocho had faced just twenty-two batters. Only one man had gotten to first base, and that on a bloop single just beyond the fingertips of the second baseman. The local team had scored four runs.
Hector Sedano leaned against the board fence behind him and applauded his brother as he walked from the mound. Ocho looked happy, relaxed — the confident, honest gaze of a star athlete who knows what he can do.
As Hector clapped, he spotted a woman coming through the crowd toward him. She smiled as she met his eyes, then took a seat beside him.
Here on the back bench Hector was about ten feet from the nearest fans. The board fence behind him was the wall of the stadium, fifteen feet above the ground.
“Did your friends come with you?” he asked, scanning the crowd.
“Oh, yes, the usual two,” she said, but didn’t bother to point to them.
Sedano found one of the men settling into a seat five rows down and over about thirty feet. A few seconds later he saw the other standing near the entrance where the woman had entered the stadium. These two were her bodyguards.
Her name was Mercedes. She was the widow of one of Hector’s brothers and the current mistress of Fidel Castro.
“How is Mima?”
Tomorrow was Hector’s mother’s birthday, and the clan was gathering.
“Fine. Looking forward to seeing everyone.”
“I used the birthday as an excuse. They don’t want me to leave the residence these days.”
“How bad is he?”
“Está to jodío. He’s done in. One doctor said two weeks, one three. The cancer is spreading rapidly.”
“What do you think?”
“I think he will live a while longer, but every night is more difficult. I sit with him. When he is sleeping he stops breathing for as much as half a minute before he resumes. I watch the clock, counting the seconds, wondering if he will breathe again.”
The home team’s center fielder stepped up to the plate. Ocho was the second batter. Standing in the warm-up circle with a bat in his hands, he scanned the faces in the crowd. Finally he made eye contact with Hector, nodded his head just enough to be seen, then concentrated on his warm-up swings.
“Who knows about this?” Hector asked Mercedes.
“Only a few people. Alejo is holding the lid on. The doctors are with him around the clock.” Alejo Vargas was the minister of the interior. His ministry’s Department of State Security — the secret police — investigated and suppressed opposition and dissent.
“We have waited a long time,” Hector mused.
“Ese cabrón, we should have killed Vargas years ago,” Mercedes said, and smiled at a woman who turned around to look at her.
“We cannot win with his blood on our hands.”
“Alejo suspects you, I think.”
“I am just a Jesuit priest, a teacher.”
Mercedes snorted.
“He suspects everyone,” Hector added.
“Don’t be a fool.”
El Ocho stepped into the batter’s box to the roar of the crowd. He waggled the bat, cocked it, waited expectantly. His stance was perfect, his weight balanced, he was tense and ready — when he batted Hector could see Ocho’s magnificent talent. He looked so … perfect.
Ocho let the first ball go by … outside.
The second pitch was low.
The opposing pitcher walked around the mound, examined the ball, toed the rubber.
The fact was Ocho was a better batter than he was a pitcher. Oh, he was a great pitcher, but when he had a bat in his hands all his gifts were on display; the reflexes, the eyesight, the physique, the ability to wait for his pitch ….
The third pitch was a strike, belt-high, and Ocho got around on it and connected solidly. The ball rose into the warm, humid air and flew as if it had wings until it cleared the center field fence by a good margin.
“He caught it perfectly,” Mercedes said, admiration in her voice.
Ocho trotted the bases while everyone in the bleachers applauded. The opposing pitcher stood on the mound shaking his head in disgust.
Ocho’s manager was the first to greet him as he trotted toward the dugout. He pounded his star on the back, pumped his hand, beamed proudly, almost like a father.
“What else is happening?” Hector asked.
“The government has signed the casino agreement. Miramar, Havana, Varadero and Santiago. The consortium will provide fifty percent of the cost of an airport in Santiago.”
“They have been negotiating for what — three years?”
“Almost that.”
“Any sense of urgency on the part of the Cubans?”
“I sense none. The Americans were happy with the deal, so they signed.”
“Who are these Americans?”
“I thought they were Nevada casino people, but there were people in the background pulling strings, criminals, I think. They wanted assurances on prostitution and narcotics.”
The Cuban government had been negotiating agreements for foreign investment and development for years, mainly with Canadian and European companies. Tourism was now the largest industry in Cuba, bringing 1.5 million tourists a year to the island and keeping the economy afloat with hard currency. Now the Cuban government was openly negotiating with American companies, with all deals contingent upon the ending of the American economic embargo. Fidel Castro believed that he could put political pressure upon the American government to end the embargo by dangling development rights in front of American capitalists. Hector Sedano thought Fidel understood the Americans.
“The tobacco negotiator, Chance — how is he progressing?”
“He is talking to your brother Maximo. Then he is supposed to see Vargas. Tobacco will replace sugarcane as Cuba’s big crop, he says. The cigarettes will be manufactured here and marketed worldwide under American brands. The Americans will finance everything; Cuba will get a fifty-percent share of the business, across the board.”
“Is this Chance serious?”
“Apparently. The tobacco companies think their days are numbered in the United States. They want to move offshore, escape the regulation that will eventually put them out of business.”
Hector sat silently, taking it all in as the uniformed players on the field played a game with rules. What a contrast with politics!
Mercedes was a treasure, a person with access to the highest levels of the Cuban government. She brought Hector Sedano information that even Castro probably didn’t have. The big question, of course, was how she learned it. Hector told himself repeatedly that he didn’t want to know, but of course he did.
He glanced at the woman sitting beside him. She was wearing a simple dress that did nothing to call attention to her figure, nor did it do anything to hide it.
She was a beautiful woman who needed no makeup and never wore any. Every man she met was attracted to her, an unremarkable fact, like the summer heat, which she didn’t seem to notice. Extraordinarily smart, with a near-photographic memory, she had almost no opportunities to use her talent in Cuban society.