1
“They’re going to kill me. Do you know this? Do you understand? If you take me back, they will kill me.” Echevarria stubbed his cigarette butt into the corpse of his hamburger in the Miami airport coffee shop. “Paredón. You know what that means? To the wall. It’s what they say when they come to take you out to shoot you.”
“You told me,” Cassidy said. He was reading the sports section of the Miami Herald to avoid talking to Echevarria. He didn’t like him. He hadn’t liked him when he picked him up in New York at The Tombs for the extradition, and he didn’t like him any better after being handcuffed to him off and on for twenty-four hours. He was one of those arrogant shits who had no understanding of his effect on others. He viewed the world through the narrow crack in his own forehead and assumed that everyone saw the same things he saw, that anything he said or did was acceptable.
Echevarria had been chained to a rail in a Tombs interview room when Cassidy came in with one of the grubby, overused manila envelopes that held a prisoner’s belongings from the time of his arrest. On the front of the envelope was a list of names written in different hands and later crossed out, a history without details of men processed through the system.
“Who are you?” Echevarria demanded. He had an accent, an undercurrent of Spanish.
“Detective Michael Cassidy. I’m escorting you.”
Echevarria looked Cassidy over as if inspecting meat. Cassidy was just under six feet tall and weighed a hundred seventy pounds. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist, unruly black hair, and a face of planes and angles as if the bones were trying to break through. He was restless, intense, with a motor that always ran at high speed. He suffered the examination without comment while he looked over the man he was to return to Havana on a murder charge. Fausto Echevarria was in his mid-thirties. He was tall and round-shouldered. His thick black hair was combed straight back from a high sloping forehead. He had a heavy red mouth and carried himself with his head tipped slightly back so that he looked at the world down his prominent nose. He wore an expression of mild disgust as if everyone around him smelled bad, with no understanding that the rot might be his own.
“Give me my things.”
He held out his hand and Cassidy put the envelope in it. Echevarria took out a thin gold watch with an alligator band and fixed it to his handcuffed wrist. He removed a gold pen, a leather-bound notebook and matching checkbook and put them in the inside pocket of the tan linen suit he wore. Cassidy lit a cigarette while Echevarria checked his wallet.
“A hundred dollars is missing. Someone stole.”
Cassidy took the wallet, counted the money in it, and checked the property list from his pocket. “You had six hundred when you came in.”
“Now I have five hundred.”
“Your suit’s been cleaned and pressed. Your shirt’s been laundered. Your shoes have been shined. You have a fresh pack of cigarettes. You probably didn’t eat jailhouse food. That’s where the hundred went.” Jailhouse prices. An orderly or guard doing business.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m entertaining the possibility.”
It did not get any better as the day went on.
Echevarria complained about the squad car that took them to Idlewild Airport, and Cassidy had to admit that it stunk of piss, puke, fear, and the disinfectant that failed to burn those smells out, but the man had killed three people in Havana and had tried to shoot the New York cops who arrested him. Did he expect to be transported in a limousine? Echevarria looked out the window as they drove east toward the Midtown Tunnel. “They say New York is the greatest city in the world. I say it’s a shithole.”
It was going to be a long trip.
* * *
“Extradition escort is crap duty, man,” Orso had said. “They’re sticking it to you again.” They had been at the curved bar at Toots Shor’s that evening, a warm refuge from a December night with an arctic wind off the river. The bar crowd was three deep, and most of the tables were occupied. The joint was alive with laughter, shouts to newly arrived friends, the hum of conversation, the clink of ice in glasses, boozy good cheer as 1958 drew to a close. “They give escort duty to the stumblebums, the lushes, the guys treading water till retirement. They keep giving you shit details, ’cause they want you to quit.” Tony Orso was a big sleek man, over six feet tall, and more than two hundred pounds. He was dressed in a tailor-made dark wool herringbone suit, an off-white silk shirt, and a maroon Countess Mara neck tie, an outfit that must have set him back six months’ salary. Cassidy never asked him where the money came from. Maybe he had a rich aunt.
“I’m not going to quit. I like being a cop.”
“Yeah, I know you’re not going to quit, but they don’t. They think you hate being a cop, ’cause you don’t do what other cops do. You don’t take the money. You don’t look the other way. You don’t give a shit what the brass thinks. It’s been a few years, but they all remember you threw Franklin out a window. Twice. No other cop’s thrown another cop out the window once. Nobody wants a loose cannon in his precinct, so they run you through the different departments. They give you the assignments no else wants, the shit ones, or the ones that are too hot, might burn someone’s career. The only reason they don’t stack your ass and set it on fire is they think you have juice. Nobody knows where it comes from. Nobody knows who your rabbi is in the Department, but everybody’s heard the rumor. Don’t fuck with Cassidy. He’s got juice.”
“If only they knew.”
Franklin was a Vice Squad lieutenant who Cassidy had thrown out of a hotel window when he caught him torturing a prostitute who had tried to quit working for him. He had thrown him out another window six months later when he discovered Franklin was blackmailing Cassidy’s sister, Leah. Franklin had survived, but tossing him had solidified Cassidy’s reputation in the Department as a wild man and had given rise to the rumor that he had a powerful rabbi protecting him, because no disciplinary action had been taken against him. The rumor was unfounded, but it had the same effect as having protection, and some people stepped wide around him.
Orso raised his hand, and Al, the bartender, brought two fresh martinis.
“Tony, you want to get another partner, go ahead. No way you’re going up the ladder as my partner.”
“Fuck you, another partner. Who do you think I am? Besides, I like all these fucked-up assignments. If it goes bad, you catch the shit. If it goes good, I get some of the glory. I’m having fun. I don’t give a shit about promotion. I’ll put in my twenty, take the pension, and then set about the business I was made for.”
“What’s that?”
“Making women happy. Speaking of which, the only good part of this escort duty is you’re going to Havana. I hear they’ve got so much good looking cooze down there Marilyn Monroe would be the dog. What’d this Echevarria guy do?”
“Killed three guys.”
“Who?
“I don’t know. What’s it matter? Three guys.”
“Fuck him. He deserves what he gets.”
* * *
Echevarria leaned forward from the backseat. “How much money do you make in a year, Detective? Four thousand dollars? Five thousand?”
Cassidy ignored the question.
“I will pay you five thousand dollars to let me out at the next corner.”
The patrolman driving flicked his eyes to Cassidy.
“We’re going to Idlewild, Officer. No stops.”
“Ten thousand. You give the driver what you want.”
“You don’t have ten thousand dollars on you.”
“I’ll write you a check.”
Cassidy laughed.
“No, no. We go to my bank. Irving Trust on Fifty-seventh. You go cash the check. Ten thousand dollars. We drive someplace. I get out. You tell them whatever you want. I overpowered you. I had friends stop the car. Ten thousand dollars.”
The car stopped at a light. The driver looked at Cassidy again. Cassidy looked back at him until he dropped his eyes. The light changed, and the car went on.
* * *
“I only fly first class.”
“Not on New York’s dime.”
When the seat belt light went out, Echevarria lit a cigarette and rang for the stewardess. “Bring me a double rum,” he demanded in a way that made her clench her jaw. When she brought it with the bourbon Cassidy ordered, he tasted it and said, “This is not Cuban rum. This is Puerto Rican. You think I don’t know the difference?”
“It’s all we have, sir.”
“I don’t drink this shit. Take it away. Bring me a double gin and tonic.” He thrust the glass at her. Cassidy saw that she wanted to say something, but her training checked her. She turned and stalked up the aisle.
“You’ve got a way with people, don’t you?”
“Her job is to bring me what I want. Why should I beg?”
The arrogance faltered at the Miami airport police unit when Echevarria understood that he would spend another night in a cell, but it was only for a moment. “Why are you doing this? Where are you going to go, some sad little place with bedbugs, no air-conditioning? I’ll buy you the best room at The Fontainebleau, a room you cannot afford on your cop’s salary. I’ll buy you dinner there too. Like you’ve never eaten. Wine. Twenty dollars a bottle. Have you ever had twenty-dollar wine? I’ll buy it for you. There’s no reason to stay here. This is stupid.” He emptied his pockets reluctantly onto the receiving desk.
The cop on duty was a gangly redhead named O’Hara. He had big knuckled hands and bony wrists, and he wore black cowboy boots with his uniform. He led Echevarria to a holding cell, pushed him in, and locked the door.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Cassidy said.
“Anything special with him?” O’Hara asked.
“Feed him and water him, and stand well back. He talks an awful lot of bullshit. You listen to him for five minutes you’re going to want to reach in and slap him silly.”
He caught a taxi to the Fontainebleau where he had reserved a room, took a shower, and then went out to Joe’s and ate stone crabs and drank a twenty-dollar bottle of Puligny-Montrachet. He went back to the hotel and lay in bed in the dark room and listened to the thump and hiss of waves on the sand eight floors below and waited for sleep to come. He had been running on empty for weeks, wired on coffee, cigarettes, and booze. If he slept, there were bad dreams of running and gunfire, hard, bright, ugly images that disappeared so quickly when he woke gasping and panicked that he could not capture one of them. He had had vivid dreams since childhood, dreams in which he was both asleep and awake. Days, weeks, or months later he would be somewhere in the city, and he would recognize that this was what he had dreamed, this street, that person; an overheard conversation as he passed two people in a doorway; that window with the three women behind it; that man with the oily smile who beckoned him from an alley mouth. The dreams were random. Sometimes they came true, sometimes they did not, but disappeared to wherever dreams go. For years he tried to find markers in them that would allow him to separate the prophetic from the run of the mill, but he could not, and then a few years back something had changed. He had walked a dark street one night, and as he walked he understood that he had dreamed these moments, dreamed the walk, the dark night, the danger that lay ahead in the shadows. The dream had predicted this, had warned him, and because of that warning he had been able to kill the man who waited in the darkness to kill him.
For a while after that, the prophetic dreams had come often, and he had been able to hold on to them after waking. Usually they predicted something mundane, an unlooked-for meeting with an old friend, the recognition of a room as he entered that he had only seen before in a dream, a conversation in a restaurant, but they had also helped him solve the murder of a young woman found dead on the ice at Wollman Memorial Rink, and to track down a serial killer. He had begun to think of the dreams as a talent, a resource, something that he could develop. Through his brother, Brian, he had found a sympathetic neurologic researcher at Cornell Medical College who had run tests and found nothing out of the ordinary, no explanations. “We don’t know the capabilities of the human brain. We do know that we use only a fraction of its capacity.” He had asked Cassidy to keep notes on all his dreams and especially on the ones that came true, and he had done that for a while, but then the dreams changed. They became more fragmented, more chaotic, and he woke unable to remember them.
For the last few weeks, sleep had come hard, and the dreams were harsh and splintered, and they left him with feelings of dread and impending loss, but with no understanding of what it was he was going to lose.
That night Cassidy dreamed of Dylan—Dylan, his lost love, who had not troubled his dreams for years. He was in a tunnel, a place he had never seen before, dark and oppressive, claustrophobic. A line of figures shuffled past him. They were pale and insubstantial, the color of faded roses from head to foot. They scuffed by heads down, identical, featureless. Then one raised its head, and it was Dylan. Gunfire, and the figures began to fall until only she was left standing, eyes wide and pleading. He awoke drenched in sweat, gasping for air.
* * *
In the morning O’Hara was still on duty. “Overtime. I’m trying to pay off a goddamn boat I bought. A friend told me a boat’s just a hole in the water into which you piss money. What’d I know? I’ll go get him. He offered me five grand to let him go. I might’ve done it if I could’ve figured out the story.”
“He offered me ten.”
“Shit. For ten I would’ve done it and taken my chances.”
O’Hara brought Echevarria out. Echevarria’s suit was rumpled. His hair was mussed, and he was unshaven. He wouldn’t meet Cassidy’s eyes and he avoided looking at O’Hara.
“Did you feed him?” Cassidy asked.
“Jailhouse oatmeal and jailhouse coffee. I wouldn’t call it food, and he didn’t eat it.” He took Echevarria’s personal effects from a drawer and slid them across the desk and Cassidy saw a look pass between them.
“I’ll feed him. We’ve got time. They canceled our flight, mechanical trouble. I’m waiting to see what they can get us on.”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Good luck, then.” O’Hara was suddenly eager to see them go.
“You all right?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Fine. Just beat, man. Just beat. Too many hours on, not enough hours off.”
Cassidy read the evasion but let it go. He snapped the cuffs on and led Echevarria down to the coffee shop. The booths were hung with tinsel. A small plastic Christmas tree crowded the cash register at the check-out desk. Their waitress wore a Santa hat with a soiled white fringe. Christmas was still a few days off, but the spirit in the Miami airport was already worn out.
Christmas—the children ripping the paper off carefully wrapped packages in their eagerness, the adults quietly satisfied giving and receiving well-considered presents, the Christmas dinner at Leah’s table, the only one big enough to accommodate the entire family. The toasts full of humor and love. Cassidy would miss it this year.
He had already bought presents for his brother, Brian, his sister, Leah, their children and spouses, and for his father and stepmother and had left them in Leah’s care. He loved being with his family, but Christmas was rough. He usually accepted, even prized, that he was alone, free of responsibilities to someone else, but Christmas highlighted what he did not have. When he got the assignment to extradite Echevarria, he put in for vacation. Who knows what might happen during ten days in Havana? He might get laid. He might turn a corner and fall in love.
Echevarria complained about the booth Cassidy chose, the service, and the food when it came. The coffee was swill. His hamburger was overcooked. Cassidy’s eggs were disgusting.
“Fifteen thousand dollars.”
“I don’t need fifteen thousand dollars.” Cassidy put the paper aside.
“Don’t be stupid. You’re a cop. You make no money. Everybody needs fifteen thousand dollars.
Cassidy shook his head.
“Okay. Twenty.”
“Get up.”
“Why?”
“I have to buy cigarettes.”
“Twenty thousand. I have it in a Miami bank. We can go there now.”
“Do me a favor, Echevarria. Shut up.” Money did not tempt him. He had grown up in a household that had money. His mother inherited hers from family holdings that got their start when Boston was still a village. His father made his in the Broadway theater after a brief, lucrative career running booze during Prohibition. Neither had any reverence for the stuff. His mother spent hers wildly to show contempt for the hard, narrow, tightfisted rules of her upbringing. His father spent his, because what the hell, there would always be more tomorrow. When his mother killed herself, Cassidy inherited more money than he thought he would ever need and his indulgences were few. He liked to buy art from the studios of the artists he knew who worked in Greenwich Village where he owned an apartment from which he could see the river. He liked to eat in good restaurants. He hoped that when he got older some perverse and expensive passion would kick in so that he could fling money around like confetti. Somebody once said that money was for throwing off the backs of trains. Maybe he could work up to that.
There were few people traveling at that time of day, and the concourse was not crowded. A boy of about ten walking with his parents noticed the handcuffs and pointed. “Look, Mom, Dad, a bad man. Look.” His mother hushed him and pulled him along, but the boy kept looking back over his shoulder as they went, drawn by the mystery of evil.
Echevarria, wrapped in thought, made no comment, but a minute later he slowed and pulled on the handcuffs and Cassidy stopped. Echevarria’s face was pale and his voice was tight and harsh. “Do you think I’m kidding you? Paredón. This is what they will do to me. This is where you take me. To the wall.”
“You’ve been extradited to stand trial for murder.”
“Trial? There will be no trial. They don’t need a trial to send you to the wall.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have shot those guys.”
“You think this is about the men I killed?” He snorted. “They were nothing. Peasants, hired gunmen, nada. They have killed many themselves. They would have killed me. No, they don’t kill me for them. Nobody cares about them.”
“Their mothers, brothers, sisters, lovers?” Cassidy said it mildly.
“Their mothers are whores. Their sisters are whores. Their lovers are whores. Their brothers are the same as they are. The reason they are going to kill me is that I stole from a bigger thief than I am. The second biggest thief on the island. The first is, of course, President Batista. Do you know who the second is?”
“No.” Cassidy tugged on the cuffs and started walking again.
Echevarria stopped talking while Cassidy bought cigarettes at a newsstand. He offered one but Echevarria waved it away impatiently and pulled him out into the concourse so he could go on. His face was pale and he was sweating from his urgency. He looked around quickly to see that they were not overheard. “General Roberto Fernández Miranda.” He waited expectantly, but he saw that the name meant nothing to Cassidy. “He is President Batista’s brother-in-law. He has the concession for all the slot machines in the casinos and bars. He owns the parking meters in Havana. Do you know now much he makes from the parking meters? Half a million dollars a month. From parking meters. Coño! Half a million a month.”
“So you took some of it and killed the men who were protecting it.”
“He owed me money. He refused to pay. He thought because he was a big man he did not have to pay. This is the thinking of peasants when they get power. My family came to Cuba in 1705 with a land grant from King Felipe number five. Batista and his people are jumped up negros from the cane fields, greedy shits without honor. They put on suits and think they are no longer monkeys.”
“You’re an unpleasant bastard, Echevarria. Stop talking to me.” Cassidy had never met a criminal who could not rationalize what he had done. And why did men think killing was a simple solution to a complex problem?
“You won’t help me.”
“No.”
“All right, then.” He nodded as if something had been decided.
“Detective Cassidy?” A young woman in an airline uniform looked from Cassidy to Echevarria as if unsure who was the handcuffed, who was the handcuffer.
“Yes.”
“We’ve found you a flight. It’s the Tropicana private charter, but I’ve explained the circumstances and they’ve agreed to take you. We’ll have to hurry. They’re holding the plane for you. I’ve had your bag put aboard. If you’ll follow me.” She was blond and pretty and wore a light blue cotton uniform of a broad-shouldered, quasi-military design, and she walked fast, her heels clicking on the linoleum floor. She had a smile that went on and off like a light. Every once in a while she would throw a look over her shoulder to make sure they were still with her. The smile would light. Her eyes would find the handcuffs. The smile would snap off.
“I have to use the men’s room,” Echevarria said.
“There’ll be one on the plane.”
“No. Now. I have to now.”
The young woman from the airline stopped and flashed her professional smile to cover her mild embarrassment. “If you need to use the facilities, there’s time. The gate’s at the end of the corridor. I’ll meet you there.” She smiled and went away.
Echevarria paused at the men’s room door to let Cassidy go first. Cassidy put his hand on the door to enter.
Politeness suddenly from this arrogant shit? The look between Echevarria and the jailor O’Hara. Cassidy hesitated. Echevarria’s hand slammed against his back and shoved him toward the door. Instead of resisting, Cassidy went with it and crashed the door, yanking Echevarria with him.
There were three of them in the men’s room. One man was on the left next to the sinks under a mirror. Another was near the urinals on the opposite wall, and the third was waiting behind the door. The one by the urinals held a small automatic. The one by the sinks showed no gun, and the man near the door had been rammed back when Cassidy crashed through. The one with the gun brought the pistol up. Echevarria, surprised by Cassidy’s lunge through the door, staggered as he came into the room, and Cassidy used the momentum to sling him by their handcuffed wrists into the gunman before he could pull the trigger. Echevarria’s weight knocked the gunman back into the urinals. He hit his head and went down, and the gun spun away across the floor. Cassidy snatched his gun from under his arm as the man by the sinks tried to get a pistol from his pocket. It caught on the cloth, and before he could untangle it, Cassidy stepped forward in the small room, dragging Echevarria by the cuffs, and touched his gun barrel to the man’s forehead.
“Don’t.”
The man’s eyes crossed as he looked at the gun.
“Drop it.” The man dropped the pistol, and it clattered on the tile floor. Cassidy shifted his aim to the man behind the door. The door had hit him in the face. He was crouched by the wall whimpering with his hand covering a smashed nose while blood ran down his chin. When he saw Cassidy point the gun, he raised his hands and stood up, and Cassidy could see that he was not more than sixteen years old. The man on the floor by the urinals moaned. Cassidy kicked his gun into one of the stalls and pulled Echevarria to his feet. The adrenaline was burning out, and he could feel shakes coming on in reaction. He ground the barrel of his pistol into the side of Echevarria’s neck. “Who are they?” His voice sounded harsh.
“Cousins. They live here.”
“You paid the jailer to let you make a call.”
“Yes,” in a defeated voice.
“You, what’s your name?” Cassidy said to the man by the sinks.
“Javier.”
“Javier, pick up your gun. Two fingers by the tip of the barrel. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I understand.” He had a thick Cuban accent and his voice was tight with strain. He was slim and not more than five feet six inches tall. He wore a white shirt and black trousers. His black hair was oiled tight to his skull and a neat, narrow mustache was a black line on his lip. He looked at Cassidy with a mixture of fear and anger.
“Bring it to me. If you do something stupid, I’ll shoot you.”
Javier crouched and picked up the gun by the barrel tip and carried it to Cassidy, who put it in his jacket pocket. “Go get the other one in the stall. Same deal.” The man on the floor shifted. Cassidy kicked him. “Lie still.” Javier brought the second gun to Cassidy. “Does he have a gun?” Cassidy gestured toward the boy with the broken nose.
“No.”
“You, turn out your pockets. Slowly.” The boy obeyed. “Lift your shirt.” There was no gun tucked in his waistband. “All right. The three of you into that stall. Shut the door. Stay in there for five minutes.”
“You are not going to call the police?” Javier asked.
“No.” If he called the Miami cops he’d be held up for at least a day.
“We had to do it. You know this?”
“Why?”
“He is family. They will kill him if you take him back.”
“He killed three men.”
“Men of no importance.”
“They were important to somebody, and he has to answer for it.”
The man on the floor must have hit his head hard, because he wobbled when he tried to stand. Javier and the boy helped him into the stall and closed the latch.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
He sensed the tension rise in Echevarria. This was his last chance. He was steeling himself for it. Now or never. Cassidy held his eyes and pressed the gun barrel against Echevarria’s side. The courage went out of him, and he slumped. Cassidy tugged on the cuffs, and Echevarria went with him. He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. He pulled Echevarria toward the end of the corridor, stopping to drop the two guns he had taken from the Cubans into a mailbox.
The young woman from the airlines was waiting at the gate. She flicked them with her smile and said, “Have a nice flight.” The gate agent took the tickets from Cassidy and they walked out into the afternoon glare. The sun was still high in the sky, and the temperature was in the seventies, forty degrees warmer than New York the day before. They crossed the tarmac to where the plane waited in heat shimmer. Bright script on the fuselage read TROPICANA SPECIAL. They went up into the DC-6, and the attendants began rolling the ramp away as they went into the plane and the stewardess shut the door and then showed them to seats at the rear.
The plane was full. Most of the passengers were men, and most of them were drinking. Maybe some of the women aboard were married, but probably not to the men they were with. This was party time. They were headed for Havana, out of the loop of their normal lives. There were no rules. One of the women spotted the handcuffs. She was a tall brunette in a tight skirt that hobbled her at the knees and a tight gold shirt that strained to hold her breasts. She swayed down the aisle carrying a drink in a tall glass and tapped on the handcuff chain with a long red fingernail while she leaned in to examine Cassidy with eyes as wide as an owl’s.
“Have you been a bad boy?” Her breath was warm and smelled of rum.
“No. I’m the good boy. He’s the bad boy.”
“What’d he do?”
“You know those tags on mattresses that say ‘Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law’? He removed one.”
She blinked while it penetrated. “You’re kidding me. You’re a kidder, aren’t you? And you’re kidding me.”
“Cross my heart.”
“Kidder.”
“What’s going on here?” He gestured at the plane, the party, at the man with an orchid clenched between his teeth as he danced in the aisle.
“The Special? It’s from the Tropicana Club. They send it for the high rollers. You know, to get them in the mood.”
“Hey, Alice, come sit down,” a man called from near the front of the plane.
“I’m coming, Georgie.” She slapped Cassidy on the shoulder, said “Kidder,” and stilted away up the aisle on high heels, looking like something from the original blueprint for sex, her ass swaying just a little more than it had to. She checked once over her shoulder to make sure Cassidy was getting the benefit.
I’ve got to get laid. Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep. It would be worth the experiment. Even if I didn’t sleep, at least there’d be something for the effort.
The engines revved, spat smoke, the propellers flicked and then blurred into their rhythm, and the pilot came on the intercom to welcome them aboard the Tropicana Special and to announce in a western twang that “it’s time for all you good folks to strap this plane to your bodies so we can take off for Havana and have some fun.”
* * *
“May I bring you a drink, Detective?” The stewardess smiled and bent over enough to let Cassidy look down her dress.
“I’d like a martini, dry, on the rocks, a twist, if you have it.”
“And for your, uh, um,” she struggled with it. “Would he like something?”
“Please bring Mr. Echevarria a Cuban rum on the rocks. A double. Thank you.”
She went to the back of the plane to fill the order. At the front of the plane a small stage was set where a few rows of seats had been removed. A man in a bolero jacket and skintight pants got up on it and sang a suggestive song about rum and a woman and a beach and the moon.
The drinks came and the stewardess went away. The singer finished his song, and three women in split skirts and bikini bras got up and did a dance that would have been banned in thirty of the forty-eight states, and a couple of the passengers got up and tried to match them until they were shouted down.
A man rose from a seat near the woman who thought Cassidy was a kidder and walked back to perch on the arm of the empty seat across the aisle. He was in his late thirties, Cassidy guessed. He was about six feet tall and had a boyish Irish face and thick hair that looked like he combed it with his fingers. He wore linen trousers and a dark blue cotton shirt open at the throat, and he had the easy open manner of someone comfortable in his skin, a man with some power and used to wielding it without second thoughts. He raised his glass in a toast and took a sip. “The lady up there says you’re a cop.”
Cassidy nodded and said nothing. Handcuffed prisoners drew people the way animals in the zoo did—proximity to danger, but the danger caged.
“Do you mind if I ask what he did? I kind of didn’t believe the business about the mattress tag.”
“He killed some people.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Uh-huh.” That didn’t seem to bother the man. Maybe that was one of the benefits of having power. People died, you lived. “Why’d he do it?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“Why’d you do it?”
Echevarria pulled at his drink and looked at the man with a flat stare. “Go fuck yourself.”
The man laughed. “Yeah, you’re right. Prurient interest about another man’s misfortune. But I can’t do that. It’s against my professional code. See, I’m a senator, and the code says we fuck other people, never ourselves. What happens when you get to Havana?”
“There’ll be some cops meeting the plane. I turn him over to them, spend the night, the next day I’m on vacation.”
“A vacation in Havana’s not bad duty.”
“You know Havana.”
“I do. I like Havana. I get down here a couple of times a year. Fact-finding missions for the good of the Commonwealth, of course. And the fact is there is nothing a man could want that Havana cannot give you.” He grinned. “Where are you from, Detective?”
“New York.”
“Nothing I can do for you, then. You’re not a constituent. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll have to struggle along without you, then.”
“I’ll buy you drink. They’re free.”
“Thanks, I’ve got one.”
“Okay. Nice talking to you. See you around.” He went back up the aisle, stopping to talk to people, touching others on the shoulders, offering a sip of his drink to a pretty woman. His laughter carried to where Cassidy was sitting. A man who took life in big bites, Cassidy thought.
* * *
When the plane landed, the stewardess asked Cassidy to wait until the rest of the passengers were off. Maybe they thought someone coming off The Special in handcuffs would kill the party spirit. The young senator paused by his seat. “Where are you staying?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“There’s the Hilton. American owned, if that’s important to you. To me, what’s the point? You could be in the Miami Hilton, the Los Angeles Hilton. I like the Nacional. It’s got a casino, of course, but if you’re really looking for that kind of action, the Tropicana’s the place to gamble. Besides, they flew you here. You might as well give them the custom.”
“I’ll give it some thought.”
“You don’t gamble?”
“Not for money.”
“See you. Have fun.” He went on, youthful and confident, worlds to conquer.
Fresh air blew in through the open door, soft and tropical, and carrying the smell of the ocean and the scent of flowers Cassidy could not name.
Two soldiers were waiting at the bottom of the ramp, a colonel for command presence and a sergeant to do any heavy lifting. They were dressed in gray military uniforms with polished leather belts crossing their chests and pistols in polished leather holsters at their waists. The colonel was a tall man in his late thirties. His uniform was severely tailored to emphasize his slimness. His cavalry boots gleamed. He had a narrow, tanned face with a pointed chin and a nose like a hawk’s beak. The sergeant was a big man, thick through the chest and shoulders, heavy-legged. Coarse black hair like wire forced its way out from under his hat, and his face was flat and broad with small dark eyes set deep. Indian blood. A gray Jeep was parked near the fence, a driver behind the wheel.
The colonel smoked a thin cigar, which he waved genially at Cassidy as they started down the ramp. Cassidy felt the drag on his wrist as Echevarria held back, and heard Echevarria suck in breath. He jerked on the cuffs to move him. He wanted this over with now. He wanted to be free of Echevarria. He looked forward to being in Havana, anonymous, solo, no rules, no responsibilities. Who knows what he might find? He might even get lucky.
“Detective Cassidy, yes?”
“Yes.” Cassidy shook the colonel’s hand.
“I am Colonel Diego Fuentes. SIM.”
It sounded like “seem” to Cassidy. “Seem?”
“Servicio de Inteligencia Militar. Military Intelligence. Yes?”
“You’re not a cop? I was expecting cops.”
“True, I am not a member of the Havana Police Department, but in our system my duties often overlap theirs. In this case, the men this cabron killed were soldiers, therefore the case falls under our jurisdiction.” He showed Cassidy even white teeth in a smile that did not reach his eyes. Then he stepped around to face Echevarria, who waited at the base of the boarding ramp.
“Ahh, Señor Echevarria, bienvenido.” He punched Echevarria hard in the mouth. Echevarria cried out and stumbled back, pulling Cassidy with him. The punch split his lips, and blood flowed and he buried his face in his sleeve to staunch it. Fuentes stepped forward, fist cocked to hit him again.
Cassidy blocked him. “No.”
“Please?”
“He’s my prisoner. You don’t hit my prisoner.”
“You’re in Cuba. He is in Cuba. In Cuba I do what I want.”
“Uh-uh. He’s my prisoner until you sign for him. Please don’t hit my prisoner.”
The big sergeant shifted and put a hand on his gun butt. Cassidy held Fuentes’s eyes. He did not know how far the colonel would push it, or how hard he’d push back. Why? Why for a shit like Echevarria? Because he’s my prisoner. He waited.
The muscles in Fuentes’s jaw bunched and jumped. He licked his lips. He glanced at his sergeant.
Cassidy waited.
Fuentes took a deep breath.
Was it coming now?
Fuentes let the breath out and smiled and made a throwaway gesture. “Of course. Of course. You are right. We are civilized men. We must adhere to the rules. We must obey the proprieties.” He smiled and waved toward the waiting Jeep. “Come. We’ll go to La Cabaña and sign papers. I will relieve you of the burden of Señor Echevarria. You will stay in Havana, yes? You will see what a wonderful city we have. Anything you want. You tell me. I will arrange.”
They started for the Jeep. Cassidy noticed that the sergeant fell in behind them, but there was nothing to do about that.
Fuentes prodded Echevarria with a finger like a gun. “You are a lucky man, Echevarria. You have an American to protect you. Of course we are all lucky to have America as our friend. All of Cuba. Where would we be without our big brother to watch over us, to tell us what to do, to sell us Coca-Cola? Poor little Cuba without America, eh?”
He was smiling all the time, but Cassidy could hear Fuentes’s anger burn just below the surface of the smile and the cheer. He recognized anger. Anger was no secret to him. It coiled under his skin. He listened to its whisper all the time.
* * *
The fortress of La Cabaña crowned a two-hundred-foot hill on the eastern side of Havana’s harbor. Centuries under a tropical sun had yellowed the stone blocks of its massive walls. Old cannon stuck out from the embrasures. It was a place of power from which men ruled until other men breached the wall and threw them out and took the power and waited for the men who would come to throw them out. The endless cycle.
It had been a prison for two hundred years. How much blood had soaked into its stones? How much more to come?
Cassidy saw Echevarria stiffen as they approached the gates. Nothing good waited for him here. All that he had fought for, connived for, killed for was going to turn to ash behind these walls.
Fuentes signed the papers at a scarred wooden desk in an office deep underground at the end of a cold stone cellblock built into the fortress walls. The two electric lights were dim yellow and did not penetrate the shadows in the corners. The air smelled of earth and damp. It was a place that would suck hope from a strong man. Cassidy countersigned and stowed the papers in his jacket pocket. He unlocked the handcuffs. Echevarria rubbed at the red circle on his wrist. He was diminished now, driven inward, hopeless. Cassidy had seen it before with prisoners when they felt the walls close around them, heard the key turn in the lock.
“Is he my prisoner now?” Fuentes asked.
“Yes.”
“Paredón!”
The Sergeant slammed Echevarria back against the wall. Echevarria’s eyes went wide. Fuentes drew his pistol, stepped forward until the barrel nearly touched him. Echevarria put his hands up as if he could ward off what was coming. Fuentes shot him twice in the face. He sagged down, boneless and broken, and left a smear of blood against the wall. His shattered head leaked a thick, dark pool onto the stones of the floor. The room stunk of cordite. Cassidy’s ears rang from the pistol blasts. Echevarria’s last look, a plea, a horror, would be with him for a long time. He did not like the man, but the brutal suddenness of his death shook him. There one moment, then gone.
Fuentes touched the dead man with the toe of his boot. He looked up as if mildly curious about Cassidy’s reaction. The gun dangled, but it was still in his hand. Cassidy looked back at him. Give him nothing. Show him nothing. There was nothing to say, nothing to do. That moment at the airport when he had stopped Fuentes from hitting Echevarria had led directly to this. It was a demonstration for Cassidy’s benefit that Fuentes held the power here. Did Cassidy have a greater responsibility for Echevarria’s death than he should have had? Yes. Was there anything he could do about it? No. Not right now. Maybe the time would come. In the war he had seen how casually men destroyed each other without thought or compunction. Shouldn’t that have scrubbed the capacity for surprise out of him? Yet it still shocked him when it happened.
“Sergeant Lopato will have someone drive you into the city. Wherever you want to go.” Fuentes put the pistol on the desk and lit a cigar. He gestured toward the body on the floor. “This was justice.”
“A funny kind of justice.”
“He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. Would it have been better to lock him in prison for a year, to let him think about it every day? One more day gone. One more. Closer and closer it comes. This was a kindness. I hope someone will be so kind to me if my day comes.”
“I hope so too.”
Fuentes drew on the cigar and let the smoke filter out of his mouth. He smiled. “Good-bye, Detective Cassidy.”
Cassidy followed the broad back of Sergeant Lopato along the corridor. Dim light came from caged bulbs widely spaced in the vaulted ceiling. The stones seemed to press in and down, but the tropical heat did not penetrate. The doors to the cells were thick wood, banded with black iron. Small, barred observation windows pierced them. Hands clenched some of the bars, white fingers on the black bars, but the interiors of the cells were dark and he could not see the faces of the prisoners.
A door clashed open somewhere ahead of them, and a file of prisoners came into the corridor behind a warder who swung a three-foot billy club from a leather loop on his wrist. The prisoners shuffled, heads down, the walk of the defeated, resigned to their lot, beyond hope. Their sandals scuffed on the worn stone floor. They wore light cotton pants and cotton shirts once red, now faded to rose from years of use. They shuffled along without raising their heads, and suddenly he was haunted by the dream he had had the night he had spent in Miami, the dim tunnel, the shuffling, rose-colored, featureless figures.
The last one in line was slighter than the others. As they passed, Cassidy noticed that the prisoner’s close-cropped hair was copper red. She raised her face and looked at him without recognition, her face as he had known it, as it had lived in his dreams and memory, but older now, drawn and tired, scared.
Dylan McCue, spy, lost love, dead these past four years. Or so he had thought.
* * *
Cassidy followed Sergeant Lopato up narrow stone stairs, along another dank stone corridor, and up broad stone stairs, worn down by centuries of shuffling prisoners, and into the sunlight. He saw none of it. He saw only Dylan’s face, worn, blank-eyed, beautiful. Was it Dylan? How could that be possible? Why was she here? How did she get here? Was it Dylan? Was it? Yes, it was.
The sunlight and heat after the dim coolness of the cell block woke him to where he was. He stopped and looked around. The wide parade ground of the fortress; worn paving stones with grass growing in the cracks; the massive wall rising twenty feet to the broad parapets; prisoners cutting grass, herded in groups by warders carrying batons, overseen by men on the walls cradling rifles. The prisoners wore loose shirts and pants made of unbleached cotton the color of dust. Why had she been wearing a red shirt? Segregation in prison was not usually a good thing. It often meant you were a danger to people, or people were a danger to you. Was that it? What the hell was she doing here?
Lopato stopped when he stopped and watched him without expression.
“Do you speak English?”
No change of expression. He looked like a man who could not be provoked by the blow of an axe.
“Habla Ing—” He was stopped by Lopato’s abrupt nod. “The prisoners we saw with the red shirts. Why the red shirts?”
Lopato looked at him with obsidian eyes, calculating whether the question was worth an answer. “Politicals.Communistas. Very bad ones.” His voice was surprisingly high and reedy coming from that massive head. “Condenados.”
Condemned.
Cassidy spoke Spanish, but now it seemed important to keep that information to himself. There had been a Spanish housekeeper in the brownstone on Sixty-sixth Street for five years who was paid extra to speak to the children only in her language, and he had spent two summers working on a ranch in Mexico. His father felt he needed to learn the discipline of hard, physical labor.
“What will happen to them?”
“Paredón!” He smiled and pointed a finger like a gun and pulled the trigger. “Paredón.”
“When?”
“Yo que se.” Lopato shrugged as if it was of no importance. “Tomorrow. The next day. Next week. ¿Quien sabe?” Who knows? What did it matter? Condemned was condemned.
Copyright © 2016 by David C. Taylor
