He figured the shot would bring the others to him, so he sat down on the dead croc, took off his right boot, reached for one of the rolled strips of fabric he always carried with him. It had been one of the Wiz’s first field lessons all those years ago. Flat ribbon was more compact than a similar length of rope, and more versatile too: you could use it to bind wounds as well as wrists, write ciphered messages, or rappel out a third-floor window. Sturgis found him before he’d finished wrapping his ankle. One of the exiles—García, it turned out—came in about five minutes after, but there was no sign of Robertson or López or Donny.
They found Robertson hiding in the low branches of a mangrove, a half dozen empty candy wrappers littering the base, which smelled strongly of urine. They found López a half hour later. He’d broken his wrist in the landing but was otherwise okay. Melchior set it with a pair of sticks and a couple yards of fabric, and then they spent another two hours combing the swamp before they finally found Donny—or what was left of him, which was mostly the smell of his cologne. He’d drifted two miles east of the drop point. Whether he’d landed in a nest of crocs or they’d simply come across his dead body (Sturgis joked that the weight of all those names was too much for his parachute to carry) was anybody’s guess.
“Guess it’s only fair,” Sturgis said, leering at Melchior. “We killed one-a them, they get to kill one of us.”
“But we didn’t eat it,” Robertson said, his protest reeking of Spam and nougat.
“Surprised they managed to keep him down,” Sturgis said, “what with that nasty-ass perfume he wears. So, Poco?” He turned to Melchior. “You think it’s about time you let us in on the plan?”
Melchior looked at Sturgis, who was trying to work Donny’s crucifix free from what remained of his head and neck. Even so, there was more of him left than Pablo.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Sturgis gave up and just snapped the chain. He rinsed the gore off in a puddle of swamp water and dropped it in his pocket. When he stood up, his rifle was hanging loosely off his shoulder, the snout pointing directly at Melchior.
“Try me.”
Melchior combined what he knew with what he surmised, presented it all as though he’d been in on everything from the beginning. Bad enough that he was the Company representative for such a stupid plan; no need for him to look like a patsy as well.
What he knew for sure was that before the revolution Donny had worked in the Sans Souci with a man whose wife’s sister or daughter or cousin was a chorus girl turned housekeeper, now employed in Castro’s private offices off the Plaza de la Revolución. What he surmised was that the housekeeper had agreed to add one of the Company’s exploding cigars to the box on Castro’s desk, presumably in exchange for payment, or else because the Company had something on her. Castro’s love of a good cigar was well known, as was the fact that the box in his office always contained a representative selection from the island’s top growers: Diplomatico, Bolívar, La Gloria Cubana, and of course Montecristo, which was the name on the band Sidney Gottlieb’s whitecoats in TSS had wrapped around their boom-boom sticks. When Sturgis asked him how powerful the explosive was, an image of Pablo’s headless torso flashed in Melchior’s mind.
“Let’s just say the housekeeper should be working below the belt by the time Castro’s on his third or fourth puff. And she shouldn’t use too much hairspray that day.”
“Ha!” Robertson burped. “That shouldn’t be a problem! I bet they don’t even got hairspray in Cuba no more!”
The real problem, of course, was that Donny didn’t have arms and legs no more, so it was going to be a little hard for him to deliver the cigars to the housekeeper, and God forbid one other member of the team should’ve known her name. Welcome to the new CIA. Streamlined and simplified. Apparently the endangered Cuban crocodile hadn’t been let in on the new bureaucratic structure.
Once they made it to Havana, García and López tried bribing random female members of the Ministerio’s housekeeping staff, which got García arrested the second day and shot, as far as they could figure, sometime on the third. Then Robertson took half a dozen of the cigars to the Mexican embassy. First he tried to reach Howard Hunt at the Mexican field office, and then he tried to convince the Mexican Ambassador to Cuba to present them to Castro as a gift, which got him deported the fourth day. On the evening of the fifth day, after García’s execution had been announced in the papers under the headline TRAITOR TO THE REVOLUTION BROUGHT TO JUSTICE, López got so drunk that he smoked one of the cigars himself, or at least that’s what Sturgis and Melchior assumed when they found his headless, armless torso slumped in a chair, the fingers of his left hand still wrapped around the neck of a bottle of Cuban rum. At that point, Sturgis just bolted, which left Melchior by himself, nothing but a half-full box of exploding cigars for company, along with a little rum still left in the bottle in López’s hand.
Three days later, as he was leaving a whorehouse in Barrio Chino, he passed a couple of police officers on their way in, one fat and dopey looking, the other more solid, and scowling.
“You smell like shit, my friend,” the fat policía said genially enough. “What were you doing, fucking your girl up the ass?”
In fact, Melchior had penetrated Rosita anally. Another of the Wiz’s field lessons: the Company only provided one condom per man per mission, but bastard children, whether fathered on a Cuban prostitute or a field slave like the one the Wiz’s grandfather had owned, always came back to haunt you, so one had to improvise. And besides, Melchior’d doubled the girl’s rate, so as far as he was concerned, he’d paid for any inconvenience.
Nevertheless, the two policías reminded him a little too much of Robertson and Sturgis, and he was half blind on rum to boot: before he knew what he was doing, he’d kicked the fat policía’s nuts through the roof of his mouth. Over the course of the next fifty years, he would realize that that single action, more than anything since the day the Wiz picked him and Caspar out of the orphanage, set him on his destiny.
He turned to go for the second policía, only to find a Makarov trained on him.
“I would much rather give one of these ladies an evening of pleasure then take you to the station. So please. Give me an excuse to pull the trigger.”
Melchior looked up from the stubby, rust-flecked pistol to the policía’s piggy little eyes. All four of them. Really, the resemblance to Sturgis was uncanny.
Even shit-faced, he had enough self-awareness to know that his smile wasn’t the kind of smile that set other people at ease.
He smiled anyway.
“I’m sure we’re all reasonable men,” he said. “Why don’t we discuss this over a nice cigar?”