He didn’t want to think about what they would do to her.
Before, he might have risked it. Before, when it was just him. Now, he didn’t want to.
But he had to—it was his job, wasn’t it?
Not any more. He was quitting. The Cubans—Hiraldo and his boys—were not the syndicate. He could blow the job without worrying about any backlash. They wouldn’t kill him for it the way the outfit boys would.
But the money—he needed the dough, didn’t he?
No, he thought. No, not really. He had maybe seven or eight grand set aside here and there throughout the States. With that much dough you could get set up nicely selling rifles and shotguns and shells in a medium-sized town. It wasn’t a bad business and it was one he knew inside and out. Maybe pick up a few spare bucks giving shooting lessons or taking out hunting parties. And gunsmith work, gun repair. He knew the business and you didn’t need more than what dough he already had to get started. And Estrella could help out in the store until they got going. And someday his kids could come into the business with him.
He looked through the scope sight again. Castro was speaking now. He saw the muscles knotted in the thick neck, heard the booming voice. The crowd was silent now. Everyone listened to the man, to Fidel Castro. Everyone heard his voice and followed his words.
Estrella was going to be at the airport at seven. They would catch a plane to Miami. Then they could clear out the bank accounts, look for a shop. Maybe some medium-sized town in Washington, maybe Oregon. It was good country up there. His country, the country he had been born in.
But twenty grand—
He looked at Castro. Automatically his finger found the trigger, caressed it.
No.
No, because there was too much to lose now. He brought the rifle back from its perch and returned it to its place in the slashed mattress. He put the sheets and blankets back on the bed and tucked them in. He returned the pillow from the windowsill to the bed, closed the window, drew the shade. Now to check out. Or, better yet, now to leave. If he checked out they might unmake the bed and find the gun. If he left he would be in Miami before a maid saw the inside of the room. They could keep his luggage as payment for the bill he would be skipping. All except the volume of Rimbaud. He got the book, slipped it into a pocket. He would have to try reading Rimbaud to Estrella. She might like the poems.
He was halfway to the door when the bomb went off.
The noise was tremendous. Garrison wheeled around, ran to the window. He raised the shade and stared out.
Castro was dead. That was the first thing he saw—Fidel Castro, his legs blown away, his blood flowing freely. Castro, sprawling legless across the nearly demolished speakers’ platform. Other men, near him, screaming, wounded, dying.
Then Garrison looked for the bomber. The whole crowd was in a turmoil, women shrieking, children crying, men shouting. Police officers fired their guns into the air. A riot seemed imminent.
And then Garrison spotted the one who’d thrown the bomb. It was a kid, he saw, a young kid hardly old enough to shave. And then he recognized the kid. It was Hines, one of the four others from Hiraldo’s confab in Tampa. Hines had done it—Hines had thrown the bomb and killed Castro.
Now Garrison stood watching Hines pay the penalty.
It was an awful penalty. The crowd mobbed the boy, grabbing at him, kicking at him. Garrison looked on in silence as the crowd beat Hines to death before his eyes. By the time the police forced their way through the crowd, Hines was dead. He lay on the ground. Broken, dead.
Garrison sat for a moment. He smoked a cigarette, ground it out in an ashtray. Then he left the room and the hotel.
The money was waiting for him in Miami. But he knew instinctively that it was money he would never touch. He had done nothing to earn it. Whatever fraction of the hundred thousand was his, he didn’t need it. He would manage on what he had of his own.
He waded through the turmoil around the hotel, fought his way through the screaming, anguished crowd. Three blocks away, he found a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport.
Would Estrella be there? Would she have heard the news and fled, to whatever dim corner of the city she called her home? Or would she loyally be waiting for him, nervousness showing in her eyes, attracting the attention of airport officials around her?
Were any flights even going to be permitted, or would all planes now be grounded, all would-be passengers scrutinized by armed police officers, subjected to interrogation at any sign of anxiety or hint of guilty knowledge?
The airport building loomed in the taxi windshield.
Garrison had never been nervous before, on any of his jobs. He’d killed many men, and his hands had never shaken, before or after. Now he’d done nothing, killed no one—but he felt his palms sweating.
Estrella would be there, he told himself.
She would be there, and he would take her away with him.
He opened the door.
A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR
In February or March of 1961 my then-wife and I were living in a spacious apartment in a luxury building with Central Park across the street and a slum on our other three sides. She was more than slightly pregnant, and I was too young to worry much about the upcoming obligations of fatherhood. I was writing, and selling what I wrote, and there was nothing wrong with that.
One day my agent, Henry Morrison, came to me with an assignment. Charles Heckelmann, an editor at Monarch Books, itself a second-rate paperback house, had a book he wanted written. The title was to be Fidel Castro Assassinated, and that pretty much tells you what he had in mind, but that didn’t keep him from spelling it out. “A group of Americans go to Cuba,” he said, “and their mission is to assassinate Castro, and they do. They pull it off.”
Now he might have gotten the idea from The Day of the Jackal, but that would have required more in the way of precognition than Charlie could bring to the table, as Frederick Forsyth’s novel wouldn’t appear for another ten years. Matter of fact, I believe I know where he got the idea, and the question of precognition, or more specifically the lack thereof, is very much a part of it.
He got the idea the same place he got the one for a quickie biography of Elizabeth Taylor.
Now I was never offered that job, but my good friend Don Westlake was. And Don took it on, did a creditable job of sifting clippings and pasting together something that made Heckelmann happy, and it was published in due course: Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America’s Most Talented Actress and the World’s Most Beautiful Woman, by John B. Allan. Don never used that pen name before or since, nor did he write any other biographies of actresses. And I don’t know that Monarch published any other actress bios, either.
So why did they want this one? Because Ms. Taylor had been ill a lot at the time, and Heckelmann figured there was a good chance she was dying. If she kicked off, well, he wanted to have a book on the stands before the body was cold.
Get the picture? Fidel Castro was neither America’s most talented actress or the world’s most beautiful woman, but he was very much in the news, and there were rumors—well-founded, it would turn out—that some important and well-placed persons were plotting his assassination. Well, by golly, if someone was going to kill Castro, why shouldn’t Monarch make a buck on the deal?
I suppose it was worth a gamble. I got fifteen hundred dollars for the book, and I think Don got about the same for the Taylor opus, and it’s not as though either book required its subject’s death in order to sell a few copies. And if either long shot came in, well, Heckelmann would look like a genius. A ghoulish genius, but a genius all the same.