Cuban Death-Lift (17 page)

Maybe things got too hot. Maybe Castro and his people put two and two together and decided that Halcón was a bad apple—and gave him a carbine trial. So, who was left to rescue?

Fact: One of the CIA agents, Ovillo Gomez, was now one very dead man, resting thirty feet beneath water and mud and my very own
Sniper.
If he and his two friends had really set out to bump off Castro, what in the hell was he doing trying to swim to my boat? No, it seemed more likely that they had, indeed, been snatched by Castro's people. But how had Gomez found out that Androsa Santarun was on my boat? Coincidence, maybe . . . yeah, coincidence.

So I was locked in that personal struggle when the VHF beckoned.

Androsa lifted her head off my stomach. “Did you hear that?” And then: “They're calling us, Dusky.”

She hurried down the ladder below. I heard the conversation, muffled, fast, and very damn short. When she was finished, she poked her head up over the flybridge deck.

“So what's up, lady?”

“Nothing important. I'm supposed to go into Havana and use the government phone so I can call my father and apprise him of the situation.”

She was very calm and cool; but it was a businesslike cool. And I knew that she wasn't telling me the whole truth.

“You're sure he really wants to go to America? Maybe he's just clam-happy over here working for the dream of socialism?”

She smiled at me and winked. “Maybe. But I have to try. I'm going to change and flag down one of those government taxi boats that keep going by. Apparently there are a few
tiendas
up harbor at Pier Two where they sell beer and food and stuff, and a government bus leaves there every hour for some hotel—I think it was called the Triton—where there are phones and the immigration people have offices.”

“So I'll just slip into my good shirt and pants and play escort—”

“No!” The firmness with which she said it surprised even her. “I mean, I'd feel terrible if you went off and left your boat unguarded and something happened to it.”

“Are you still trying to give orders?”

She reached out and ran her short fingernails down my thigh. “For now. How about it, ya big lug? Stay here and mind the store while I go into the city for an hour or so. Believe me, I'll hurry right back.”

She said it like some peroxide blonde in a 1930 detective film, and I had to laugh.

“You play a bad Harlow with that Spanish accent of yours.”

She wiggled her finger, telling me to come to her. When I did, she kissed me lightly, then harder, and even the breaking away held promise. “Keep that for me until I get back, okay?”

“It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

She smiled, cupping my chin in her small hand. “You're something special, Dusky MacMorgan. Very special.”

“And so are you, lady. So are you. . . .”

 

The moment her taxi boat disappeared behind the first shrimp trawler, I started looking for a taxi of my own. She had left in an old confiscated Woodson trihull painted bright red with a muscular Cuban at the wheel. He wore small black bikini trunks, and he gave me a dirty leer as I waved goodbye to Androsa.

By the time I'd flagged down a boat, she was halfway across the harbor, and I knew I'd have to hurry to catch her. When the skiff pulled up, I thought about locking
Sniper
—then decided that would probably be the worst thing to do. If the Cubans wanted to search her badly enough, they'd just bust in to do it. So, still zipping up my pants and trying to slide into my Topsiders, I swung down onto the waiting skiff.

There were two men aboard. One was obviously the government driver. He wore the standard baggy green pants, cut off at the cuffs instead of hemmed. He was about forty, haggard and unshaven, and a stub of cigarette butt grew from the corner of his mouth. He looked bored and uncommunicative.

“Quanto dinero?”
I asked him.

He held up a spread palm. Five bucks, American.

I shoved a ten at him.
“Tu hablas inglés?”

He shook his head. I got the feeling that if he did speak English he wasn't about to let me know it. I slapped my hand on the gunwall of the skiff.

I could reach into my memory and give him enough bad Spanish to make him understand I wanted to go to Pier Two, but what if the woman's skiff veered off, made an earlier stop? Shoving the driver aside and taking control of the boat might make me seem a bad risk in the eyes of Captain Lobo. And I couldn't afford to let him become any more suspicious of me.

“Do you need some help there, Yank?”

For the first time, I noticed the second man in the boat. He wasn't Cuban—no doubt about that. He was a little younger than I, in his early thirties, and he had copper-colored hair and a bright-red beard. The size of him and the musculature made me think of the Vikings: just under six feet tall, 190 pounds, maybe, with the shoulders of a wrestler. He had the gnomish face of a Scandinavian seaman, and an accent that seemed to be a mixture of heavy Irish and light British. His thighs were thick, heavily muscled beneath cutoff shorts, and he wore a black T-shirt inscribed:
Bodden Town Dive Trips.

“If you speak Spanish, and you've got some spare time, I can use all the help you can offer,” I said.

He grinned and stuck out his hand. “Westy is me name. Westy O'Davis. And I do speak Spanish—bloody bad Spanish, but Cubans speak the worst kind of Spanish, so they understand mine jest fine. So what kin' I do for ya, Yank?”

Roughly, I explained the situation to him after introducing myself. There were plenty of holes in my story, but he seemed to sense it wouldn't do to ask questions.

“So you want ta follow the lady, but you don't want ta catch her—that about right?”

“Pretty much.”

He looked amused, his left hand tugging at the red beard. He thought for a moment, then nodded his assent. “So be it! No, don't thank me. It's yerself who are favoring me. After twenty-two days in this hellhole of a harbor, it's a pleasure to have the company of an American. I'm a one who trusts his instincts, and me instincts say yer okay, Yank. So let me have a word with this mutton-headed driver and we'll be on our way. Right!”

It was more argument than conversation. Westy O'Davis kept his hands on his hips, bent slightly at the waist, nose aimed right at the nose of the government boat driver. Every time the driver tried to speak, the stocky Irishman shoved loud Spanish into his face, refusing to allow his demands to be challenged. Finally, the driver relented, worn down and taciturn.

“Done!” said O'Davis, swinging toward me, smiling. “Didn't tell 'em we wanted to follow a boat. Jes tol' 'em we wanted to travel 'round the harbor a bit—and that we would tell him where to go. These reds are suspicious people; didn't figure it would do to tell 'em we was shadowin' a lady.”

“Perfect,” I said. “I appreciate it. Now look, I'm not keeping you from some kind of business, am I? I know you're not riding around in a government taxi boat for your health—”

He held up his hand, the gesture implying the unimportance of his own plans. “Do you see that big black wind ship over there a piece?”

I did. And it wasn't the first time I had noticed her. She was a beauty: a gaff-rigged schooner, taller aft mast made of stout golden pine, the foremast flying the blue British ensign with the flag badge of the islands in the center.

“You're from the Caymans?”

He nodded. “And she's my pride and joy. The only time she and myself part normally is when I go tarpon guiding in the spring up to Boca Grande, Florida, in your own U.S.A. to make a few extra for her and me own pocket. But after three weeks aboard listenin' to that bloody loud Spanish, an' smellin' the foul smell of me own self, I'm about to go ravin' looney.” He spread his arms. “So you see, Yank, I'm a takin' you under me wing outta graditude. One scarred-up old seaman to another in a harbor full of fools. How 'bout it?” He spit in his palm, offered his hand, and I took it.

“My pleasure,” I said.

And I meant it. I had seen it before in foreign lands. Friendships among strangers are struck up with no better criterion than a lost look or the color of your hair. In a country of aliens and alien ideology, kindred spirits come together as if drawn by magnets. And surprisingly, the friendships usually continue long afterward. Joined in the common bond of circumstance, all the bullshit social hurdles fall away and you are left with an honesty that demands either mutual loyalty or mutual hatred. And with this stocky Irishman, I knew it would be mutual loyalty. I also suspected that, no matter what, I would have met Westy O'Davis sooner or later. Because that's the way things happen in a place like Mariel Harbor.

I kept a close eye on the bright-red Woodson. And so did he.

“Yank, I believe yer lady friend is headed for the Love Boat.”

“The Love what?”

He chuckled. “That bugger Castro has thought of jest about every way possible to make money in this hellhole. It's that medium-tonnage ocean liner over there—the
Comandante Pinares.
Folks 'round here call it the Love Boat 'cause there's whiskey an' food—an' women too, if you've money enough.” He tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him where we wanted to go. The driver acted as if it took every ounce of his strength to force the skiff onto plane, the little Russian outboard belching oil as we went. It was a good half mile to the liner, and as we pounded along Westy O'Davis tried to replace my growing anxiety with conversation. He told me how, as a kid of sixteen, he had shipped out of Dun Laoghaire on Ireland's east coast on a Honduran freighter. On the freighter he had learned two things: how to speak Spanish, and never to trust any vessel with a Liberian registry, Honduran or otherwise. Or, as he put it, “Them bloody Africans would register a bamboo raft as a thousand-ton oil tanker if you paid the bribe in cash!” He had jumped ship off Cayman Brac, swum to shore, then worked his way to Grand Cayman, where a friendly Englishman helped him get a work permit from Government House. In time, he got a job guiding scuba-diving trips in Bodden Town, and an American had talked him into going to America to run his big Chris-Craft as a tarpon boat in Boca Grande during the big spring run. With the money he had saved, he made a down payment on his black schooner. And this Cuban trip would pay it off.

“And no island woman snapped you up during all that time,” I said, teasing him.

The look which came into his eyes was a stoicism underlined with the tragic. “Aye, one did. But she's gone now.”

I didn't press for an explanation.

The
Comandante Pinares
was about three hundred feet of antiquated liner painted a shoddy white, bottom-fouled, anchored solidly fore and aft. Floating aluminum docks crushed up against the hulls, and the docks were surrounded by small boats, loading and unloading. Harsh Latin music was being piped around the crowded decks through tinny speakers, and soldiers and plainclothesmen stood conspicuously at the boarding ladders.

“What's th' matter, Yank? You look troubled.”

“I can't understand why she came here. She told me she was going to a place called Pier Two. She was supposed to catch a bus there and talk to the immigration authorities in Havana.”

He slapped me on the shoulder. “You never kin figure 'em out, mate—I've tried. But if it'll ease your mind any, there's immigration people here, too. Upper deck, where you see that line o' people. Maybe she jes' changed her mind.”

The red-hulled Woodson was tethered up at the floating docks, the muscular taxi pilot still aboard, but Androsa was nowhere in sight. So now what? Board the liner and take the chance of letting Androsa know that I was following her? Why not? I had a right to be concerned. If she saw me, I'd play the roll of the overprotective lover. It couldn't hurt. No way.

“What's the plan, mate?” Westy looked at me expectantly.

“The plan, my new friend, is for you to go on about your business. It's just a hunch, but I think my lady friend might be in a little trouble. And I'd hate for you to get involved—”

“Horsefeathers!” He looked genuinely offended. “Was it not I meself who spit in me palm and offered you me own hand? Sure it was. Blast your trouble!” He grinned at me. “Besides, I can't very well abandon a mate with a fine name like MacMorgan, now, could I—Yank or not.”

“Okay, okay—you can tag along on one condition.”

He spread his arms in grand gesture. “You've only to name it.”

“If it looks like there's going to be any rough stuff, you get your ass out of there quick.”

“Mush, mush—and do I look like a fool? A course I will, a course I will. I swear it on the grave of me own dead mother.”