Melchior had to admit: he hadn’t seen this coming.
In many ways, Raúl Castro was more fearsome than his older brother. He’d personally overseen the summary execution of scores, possibly hundreds, of soldiers and government officials loyal to deposed President Fulgencio Batista, and he was the man Fidel dispatched to Moscow to negotiate a military alliance that brought Soviet tanks, troops, and planes to Cuban soil. But more than that, he had the reputation of being fanatically loyal—not to Communism, which would have been familiar enough and easy to handle, nor even to the age-old concept of Cuba libre, but to his brother. To Raúl, Fidel was Cuban Communism, and Segundo would do more than lay down his life to protect him: he would kill, mercilessly and indiscriminately.
But reputations, as it turned out, are not always what they’re cracked up to be.
The office of the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Raúl’s only official title, occupied the fourth floor of a converted town house just off the Malecón, the long promenade on Havana’s northeastern coast. It was a long room, possibly a ballroom in its previous existence, or a gallery. The tread of thousands of military-issue boots had bruised the delicate parquet, and tiny pieces of sycamore and mahogany creaked and splintered beneath Melchior’s sandals like the shells of dead cockroaches. The sound reassured him somewhat—reminded him that, despite his diminished frame and the legs that wobbled beneath him, he still had a presence in the world. Was still capable of having an effect on things outside of himself. He shuffled as steadily as he could to a curule chair planted in front of the desk but didn’t sit down. While he waited for Raúl to acknowledge him, his gaze drifted of its own accord out the tall windows to the nearly deserted promenade. Once the boulevard of Cuba’s rich, the Malecón had begun to deteriorate after just three years of Communist egalitarianism. Not even Communism could dull the glow of the sun, however, and beyond the potholed, pockmarked concrete was the brilliant blue vista of the Florida Straits. Melchior squinted as if he might actually spy Key West, ninety miles more or less due north, and when he returned his attention to the baroque desk that sat in front of the glass, all he could see were shadows and shapes. An expanse of pink-flecked marble the size of a DeSoto, a tall man seated behind it in some kind of creaking industrial office chair, his broad shoulders and smallish head nothing more than a featureless silhouette until Melchior’s sun-blinded eyes readjusted to the light.
Unlike his older brother, Raúl Castro did not affect military fatigues, but wore a plain gray business suit. The jacket fit his tall frame poorly, pulling across the shoulders and riding up in the sleeves, and the narrow black tie had been crookedly knotted, so that it ran aslant the buttons of his shirt instead of covering them. All in all, he gave the impression of a man who would rather be shirtless, wielding a machete in the cane fields perhaps or a machine gun in the mountains. Though he was over thirty, he still had a baby face, but the eyes above his round cheeks were small and hard, and he regarded the shabbily dressed skeleton who walked into his office skeptically, as though he could not believe this was the agent of the all-powerful Central Intelligence Agency he had summoned. It was as if he was contemplating, not whether the visitor should live or die, but rather if it was even worth the effort to give the order.
After an interminable moment, he lifted one hand and pointed to the chair. Melchior sank into the seat, trying not sigh. The rickety hinges creaked beneath his wasted buttocks, and Melchior started slightly—he didn’t have the strength to get up again if the chair broke beneath his weight. But the sound reminded him again: he was real. He was here. And, however tenuous the link to his past seemed, he was an intelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had a job to do.
He took a deep breath to steel himself, only to have it turn into a thin, dry cough that shook his whole body. He had to grab the curule’s spindly arm to keep from falling off the back. He wondered if this was an attempt at irony on Raúl’s part—in Roman times the curule was reserved for men of the highest rank—or if Segundo had simply chosen it because it was backless, thus making an audience with him that much more uncomfortable. If that was the case, he had certainly succeeded.
For his part, Raúl continued to regard him silently. Then, in an easy, educated Spanish—for all his rough look, he and his brother, like most Communist leaders, were in fact the children of privilege—he said, “Your jailors call you the Magus. Do you know this word? The singular of Magi. The three kings who followed the star to Bethlehem to see the Christ child.”
“The Wise Men.” Melchior said, a flicker of a smile crossing his lips.
“They say you sit in your cell like a Buddha, meditating all day long.”
Melchior’s chuckle came out as another chest-wracking cough. “Clearly they don’t understand the enervating effects of malnutrition.”
“They grew up under Batista and Machado,” Raúl said in a sharp voice, “all those other puppets of your government. They understand malnutrition just fine. They see it in their parents and grandparents, in their co-workers in the cane fields, in their children, dying of colds and flu because they are too weak to fight off the littlest infection.”
This speech did not seem to require an answer—or perhaps the answer had already come, in the form of the ’59 revolution—and Melchior said nothing. Raúl allowed the silence to stretch for another uncomfortable moment before speaking.
“You are in a very curious position, Magus. A precarious position. Though we know you are an American, neither you nor your American superiors will admit to this fact. Normally such a situation frees us to execute you without fear of reprisal, yet in your case this is a less-than-attractive option.”
Melchior’s lip curled up in a weak grin. “I’ve failed at many things in my life, but never at being an ‘attractive option’ for public execution.”
Raúl’s fingers drummed lightly on his desk. The marble surface was bare, yet Melchior still found himself imagining Segundo’s finger pressing a big red button: a trapdoor opening beneath this uncomfortable chair, a long plunge into a pit with blood-caked spears at the bottom. An image of Aunt Juliette’s puppy all those years ago flashed in his mind. The pitfall had been meant for Aunt Juliette—she had sent him to bed without supper for saying a dirty word—but the look on her face when she saw her dead puppy had taught him a valuable lesson: sometimes you can hurt people more by going after the things they love rather than attacking them directly.
A smile creased his face as all this ran through his mind. Raúl noticed it, but didn’t ask. Instead, in a voice that had quieted somewhat: “Since the Revolution, we have been able to offer free education to all Cubans. Some of your jailers, perhaps eager to show off their new knowledge, call you not Magus but Melchior.”