"You're the Americans we were told to expect?" asked a young SIM staff lieutenant.
"That's us. What have you got?"
"It is this Castro, as we suspected. He seems to have invented this thing quickly. A month ago most of these men were dream revolutionaries, fantasists, pretenders. Then the call came, and it is amazing how quickly they gave up normal lives to assist the man. He has a gift, that is for certain. Of course by now they thought they'd be sipping champagne in the presidential palace, not dangling on a chain while Ojos Bellos worked upon them. We will get him, though."
"How did he get away?" Frenchy asked.
"He fought till the end. Most left before he did. Most recall him there, shouting, giving fire. He has balls, that one. It must be said. That is why he is dangerous. He has the conquistador blood. That is why he must be hunted and shot."
"So nobody saw him leave."
"Ojos Bellos is working under the following theory: that it is logical that a man wounded earlier in the fight and not able to flee, he alone would have been there and seen what happened. So we are checking and cross-checking, and attempting to come up with a prisoner who was taken there at the site, after a wounding. Alas, many of those men did not survive the wrath of the soldiery."
"They were shot on the spot?"
"A mistake, I admit it. But if such a man exists, Ojos Bellos will find him. Nobody can hide a thing from Ojos Bellos. He learns everything, eventually."
"We'll wait. I want the latest intel to flash to Washington. You can imagine how upset they are."
"Yes, of course."
"I'm going to duck out for a cigarette," Earl said.
"No," Frenchy said, "you should―"
But Earl hit him with a look that told him coldly to back way the fuck off, and Frenchy melted in the power of that glare.
"I'll, um, stay here, and um, maybe I can―"
But Earl was already out.
He breathed deeply, even if the air was shot with gasoline, burned powder and blood, moved away from the torture factory and found a tree to squat under, facing only the green parade ground and, miles beyond it, the high mountains of the Sierra Maestra. They looked somehow clean from this distance. He swiftly opened a pack of cigarettes and fired up a Camel, drawing deeply as if the smoke had some salutary effect, some abrasive, scouring cleanliness. But there was no cleanliness here, and overhead, hawks or vultures, birds of carrion whatever, reeled and fluted in the pale, cool early morning sunlight.
But he had no chance to settle down, for as birds of carrion whirled overhead, one in human form approached on foot, fast, bent, dark, near apoplexy.
"Hey," he shouted, and Earl looked over to see that he had been followed from the tent by a familiar figure that he could not place in time or memory, until at last the man's sheer aggression imprinted itself, and he recognized him from his previous anger at the fancy embassy party some weeks ago.
"The fuck?" said the dark furious man. "You just fuckin' walk out on Captain Latavistada like you're some kind of fuckin' better than him? Who the fuck are you, a prince, a nancy, a fuckin' Mr. Too Fuckin' Good for everybody?"
Earl rose quickly and it occurred to him to punch the prick bloody under the banyan tree on the parade ground, and how much pleasure would be had in the feeling of the flattened nose and the broken teeth and the spew of blood, but instead he just stared at him hard.
"Yeah, you. You fuckin' goofball, this is the shit that has to be done down here to keep it all from going blooie in our faces and Captain Latavistada is a great man who gets that while some fancy dick like you, you like to cold-cock guys in train stations and ambush 'em while they're reading the newspaper on their sofas, but you ain't got the fuckin' hubcaps for this sort of thing. You yellow piece of shit, I ought to―"
"You shut that yap, mister, and shut it hard, or I will shut it for you, and all these Cubans can watch me pound the snot out of you ounce by ounce."
Whoever he was, he was taken aback by Earl's defiance, but the surprise instantly transmuted into rage, his face flashed the dead white of assault, and he waded in. His first blow, a wide, circular notification by wire, was easily evaded, and Earl instead snared the second one, only slightly less telegraphed, transformed its power by the primitive alchemy of judo back onto his attacker, and rammed the guy's noggin hard against the trunk of the tree.
He did it a couple more times, taking satisfaction in the gash he opened in the hairline and the spurt of blood. Then he dropped the man, hard, on the ground.
"Ow, fuck," spat Frankie Carbine, "you fucking―"
"You piece of shit, you get up now and in one second I will beat the side of your head in and fertilize this shithole with your brains. I am not your kidding type, so you listen now or you die in five seconds."
The man stayed down. He put his hand to his hairline, now producing copious blood, that before swelling and turning purple-yellow like a rotted grapefruit.
"You got me with a trick."
"Yeah, a trick called faster and tougher, you fucking human blister. I ought to pop you and drain all that pus out now, you New York grease factory."
He dared the man to rise; the man, though still deep full of aggression, was not stupid; he stayed down, but the look in his feral eyes and his ugly knitted features suggested that the next time he saw Earl would be over the sights of a pistol.
"Earl, Earl," Frenchy suddenly crooned, breaking though the small knot of Cubans who'd gathered to watch the amusing spectacle of a big man crushing a smaller one, a sure laugh-getter in most of the world's precincts, "it's all right, ignore him."
He turned to the man.
"Sport, Lansky would have you shipped back to the States in a straw basket if he knew what you'd just pulled. We are trying to stay on top of a fluid situation and get it done, and we don't need showboat New York thugs going screwball on us. You get back to Havana or I will make a phone call and you will not see Manhattan again in a dream."
Sullenly the battered man rose, scuffed insolently at the dirt, and launched a gob that wasn't aimed east enough to strike Earl but not west enough to avoid insult. He slumped off.
"Who's that jaybird?"
"He's a mob guy. He hangs out with the secret police and reports to some big people who run the casinos in Havana. He's nobody, really. He's a worm, that's all. He's not worth beating up."
"Son, if you call that 'beating up,' you don't know much about beating up."
"Well, yeah. Anyhow, we have something. Something good. We have to move."
"What is it?"
"Latavistada broke the witness. It was all in Spanish but I understood. Beautiful Eyes is making sure and dotting all the i's. But the gist of it is that someone saw Castro being led off right at the end by some kind of peasant. But a weird kind of peasant. Some tall, lanky, scrawny guy, with bristly gray hair. The description was, 'like a poet.' He looked like a poet, by which I take to mean slightly bohemian, or intellectual, what we might call a beatnik. Mean anything to you?"
Earl thought for a second.
"Yeah," he finally said. "It's somebody who knows what he's doing. These clowns will never find this guy, believe me. He's too good for them."
"Is he too good for you, Earl? You'll have to hunt him down, too. You have to be better than he is."
Chapter 41
At one point, the Russian moved into the cab with the old man who was driving, and gave directions. He seemed to sense ambush and roadblock and sudden troop appearances as if he had a radar in his brain for such things. He always knew which street to turn down, how the alleys connected, and following these methods, he got them to the outskirts of a town abuzz with police activity.