This time he was in a shabby chair by a dirty window, in semi-darkness, looking out on Santo Suarez. He barely acknowledged Lansky.
Lansky sat next to him.
There was never any ceremony, as with the old men, no elaborate ritual of politeness and asking after family, not at all. He would remain silent for hours if Lansky didn't, by habit, just get to it.
"What is it this time?" Lansky asked.
"You know what it is," said the Important Man.
"I don't have any idea."
"Then your intelligence is very poor. Three days ago in the rural province of Oriente, some cops shot the hell out of a house, killing a woman. She was naked in her own house, they blew the living hell out of her, and shot the house to tatters. I've seen the reports, of course."
"An American woman?"
"A Cuban woman."
"What has this to do with me or my enterprise? What has it to do with yours? Why is this important?"
"Because it wasn't a raid, as everyone is saying too loud, but a hit."
"Hmmm," said Lansky.
"Yes, hmmm," said the other. "It was a botched, pathetic, out of control screw-up of a hit. It was bullets flying, the wrong person killed, the neighbors in hysteria, rumors flying, the Secret Police Political Section in a frenzy, and when they go nuts, we hear about it, we have to file reports to Washington, Washington goes nuts and asks more questions, the business climate suffers, the whole goddamned apparatus gets shaky."
"I don't know a thing about it."
"Of course you do. You ordered it."
Lansky didn't say a thing.
"I have sources. I know things. I told you to clear anything through me."
"I was under some pressure from my people after that congressman almost got clipped. They have a lot of money invested down here and more set to come. They don't want to lose it."
"We don't want them to lose it either. We don't want AT&T or Hilton Hotels or United Fruit or Hershey or Domino Sugar to lose. We cannot allow that to happen."
"There is a threat. Nobody was doing a thing. We acted."
"You acted ridiculously and poorly. Was it that weasel New York guy who made a scene at the party? He's more volatile than the usual cheap thugs New York sends down. He'll scare these businesspeople. We don't like that."
"He has his uses. He is supposedly very good."
"Well, here's what he accomplished. He failed to hit the target because the whole thing was poorly planned and pitifully executed. He drove the target underground. Completely underground. Political Section has no idea where he is. Worse, we have no idea what he'll do now that someone has tried to kill him."
"He has no organization."
"But he has leadership skills. He will get an organization fast, and that upsets us a great deal. He can start things that can't be stopped. That's the way it happens sometimes. Now he's beyond reach, unless we turn the island upside down."
"Nobody was doing a thing!"
"Again, you are misinformed. In fact, the opposite is true. We are very much doing something. We've brought a man down. An excellent, tested, experienced man, not some screwball New York eyetie button. We're tracking it all very carefully, manipulating it quite smoothly, building for the moment. Our man won't miss."
"I did not know this."
"You don't have to know it. You have to clear initiatives through me, so I can ascertain whether or not we are working at cross-purposes. If we are working at cross-purposes, as we now are, it happens as it has now happened, with each move making it harder, not easier, on the other's move."
"All right," said Lansky.
"Yes, all right. So you back way off. You put this New York gunman on the shelf, do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Let's be clear: your team, off the field. Our team has operating room. It will happen, and everybody will prosper."
"For a certain amount of time. You people have to move quickly, as I am under pressure. Pick a date. I give you a month. Say, by late July. You must do this job by then, or I will let my people go at it again. After that time, my man is back on the case, and he may not be tidy, but he will be successful."
"I will―"
"This happened because you were sleeping and it got too far. So now we may have to clean up after you. My advice: do your job, so that we don't have to do it. It's much better for all of us that way."
"We will do the job. It's in the cards. We have an expert."
"Excellent. I'd offer to buy you a drink, but it appears to me you're too young to drink."
"I look younger than I am," said Frenchy Short, "but I think older than I am, too."
Chapter 36
For the longest time, nothing happened. A week passed, then another. It seemed Roger and Frenchy were busy each day, coordinating with sources, making plans, contacting Washington, reading reports. That left little for Earl to do, so he just wandered Old Havana most days, enjoying the denseness of it, staying out of bars, sitting on benches, learning the town. It always helped to know the town. He watched the cops too, with their dark green uniforms and their tommy guns carried everywhere, sloppily but meaningfully. He could tell, just by reading bodies: everybody hated the cops.
Then one day it changed. Suddenly, action. Roger and Frenchy acquired a boy's aura of spy mystery in their behavior, telling him what they'd set up Washington absolutely necessary. It turned out to be a trip to the airport, but not the one Earl had imagined. Instead of catching the Air Cubana Connie for New York and then home, he encountered a deep blue Navy Neptune, diverted from sea patrol, its props spinning brightly in the sun. It had landed at one of the lesser strips, far from the big bright commercial jobs that brought the johns to Cuba by the thousands. He climbed aboard without anything by way of ceremony, though with some difficulty, as the pain in his hip was still present and when he wormed up that ladder under the plastic bubble nose, he felt it but good. The flight to Guantanamo lasted two hours, as opposed to the twelve-hour ordeal by car of the original journey. Everyone involved was polite, almost differential, but professionally discreet. He had been stamped with both the mystery and the glamour of the Agency, which meant that the young crewman, even the two young pilots of the Lockheed, regarded him with a certain necessary awe, just a step or two down from trembling in his presence.
This was funny to Earl, who had professionally hated the navy second only to the Japanese for all those years in the Pacific. In fact, his hatred of the navy dated back further than that, to a certain forgotten episode at Norfolk in 1934. But that was nineteen years ago; no need to think of it now.
Instead, he sat back as Cuba rushed by beneath him. It was green and dense, cut by mountains humped up toward the eastern extremes, a kind of endless Guadalcanal.
The plane vectored in through mountains unlike anything he'd seen on the island's jungly flatness, and it came to rest on an airstrip that seemed to be in the middle of America. America was everywhere he looked. Officers awaited him. They were from what he guessed would be called Naval Intelligence, and they took him once again to blank but comfortable officer's quarters in the little America that was the Gitmo. He settled in to a steady barrage of the respect his mystery earned him, had a nice lunch with the two fellows in the Officer's Club, where he was waited on by a marine. Everybody called him Mr. Jones.
One of them, the one called "Dan," seemed especially curious about Roger Evans. How was Roger? Was Roger all right? Did Mr. Jones know Roger at Harvard? Oh, he knew Mr. Jones couldn't answer that, it's just that at Harvard after the war, Roger was such a piece of work, what with his medals, his war record, his ferocious tennis and his mysterious connections. Dan hoped Mr. Jones would say hello to Roger for him. Dan kept meaning to get to Havana to have a drink with Roger, but his duties-the Cold War, you know-kept him pinned here at Guantanamo.