Dance with the Dragon (31 page)

“That’s why I came here to see you. I’m working on it and I need your daughter’s help.”

“But you’re not sure of her, is that it?” Marti asked sadly.

“Something like that.”

They had reached Calle Ocho, and Marti headed left, farther into Little Havana. If anything, traffic here was heavier than outside the Jugar. McGarvey glanced over his shoulder at the bodyguards, who seemed unfazed that their general was putting himself in danger. In these crowds an assassin would have very little trouble getting close enough for an almost certain kill.

“We call this place La Pequena Habana, how you say, Little Havana, because we can’t stand to be away from our homes, and Havana is our capital city. But in fact this is changing too, as all things must. Now the Nicaraguans are coming, and a part of our Pequena is called Little Managua.”

“Your daughter is working out of our embassy in Mexico City.”

“She got fired recently,” Marti said. “Did you have anything to do with that?”

McGarvey nodded. “I wanted her distanced from the CIA for what will be coming her way if she agrees to help me.”

“If you ask her to help, your decision will be based in part on what you learn from me.”

“That’s right.”

“My daughter’s in love with you, and you want to know about her relationship with her husband, and with me. What’s a father to think?”

“It will be a dangerous assignment, one that will not be officially sanctioned. She could get killed, or at the very least badly damaged.”

Marti stopped and looked McGarvey in the eye. “What is your interest in my daughter, other than professional?”

“Nothing more than that, General. I have a wife and grown daughter of my own. And I’m almost old enough to be Gloria’s father.”

“But she’s in love with you. Why?”

“I think she’s a lonely woman, and I believe that she’s probably in love with who she
thinks
I am.”

Marti digested this for a moment, then turned and, arm in arm with McGarvey again, continued along Calle Ocho. “You are probably right on both counts, if I can still read my daughter correctly. She is a lonely woman, and eight months ago she told me that she was in love with a married man who was not in love with her, but she thought that he was a superman whom she was willing to wait for.”

It wasn’t quite what McGarvey had expected. “I thought you and she were not close.”

“It’s true. But we are still father and daughter, and she calls when she is troubled and needs me. It’s sometimes a comfort.”

“What happened, General?” McGarvey asked. “Was it because of your visit when she was in Paris?”

“Exactly why do you need this information from me?”

“I’m running an operation in Mexico, as I said, and I need Gloria’s help.”

“
Sí,
I understand this much, but what else?”

“I need to know if I can trust her.”

“Ah,” Marti said, more of a sound at the back of his throat than an actual word. “I was told that you were a blunt man.”

They walked in silence for a minute, Marti apparently ordering his thoughts. By coming this far the general had tacitly agreed to answer some questions about his daughter. McGarvey hadn’t believed Shahrzad’s story until it had been confirmed by what Monique had told him. Nor, had he interviewed Monique first, would he have believed her without Shahrzad’s confirmation.

“First you must understand how it was in Cuba before I decided to take my family away,” Marti said. “By the time Gloria was born I was already in an important position with the military. Because of it we lived in a large house in the country, with servants, a very good cook, two gardeners, and a vaquero who took care of the horses and taught Gloria to ride. She had a nanny at first, and then tutors who were superior to the teachers in our schools. Our neighbors were either high-ranking military officers and their families, or ranchers and their wives and children. Gloria was never lonely, never bored, never unhappy, so far as I knew. She lived in a paradise. We shielded her from what was actually happening in Havana and elsewhere across Cuba.”

“Being taken away from all that must have been a shock for her,” McGarvey suggested.

Marti nodded. “Along with losing her mother the way it happened: do you know the story?”

“Most of it.”

“Along with that tragedy, for which she blamed me, she had a difficult time adjusting to life in a new country. For the first time she realized that there were people living in poverty, and she couldn’t understand why.”

FIFTY

DOWNTOWN

At the edge of Little Havana Marti steered McGarvey into an eight-story apartment building. They took the elevator to the top-floor penthouse, where one of the bodyguards went inside first to make a quick sweep while the other bodyguard stood watch in the corridor.

“These procedures are tedious, but perhaps if you and my daughter are successful in Mexico the situation for me here will ease up somewhat.”

The first bodyguard came to the door. “It’s clear, sir,” he said.

The apartment was large, more than four thousand square feet, modern, and luxuriously furnished. Thick rugs were scattered on marble flooring; soft white leather furniture, including a long sectional couch and huge easy chairs, faced a sixty-inch plasma television screen mounted on a wall. Shelves were filled with leather-bound books, and the inside walls were adorned with paintings, mostly showing Cuban scenery and life, while the outer walls were floor-to-ceiling glass doors, open now to an expansive wraparound balcony, equally well furnished in teak and glass, with tall potted plants and dwarf palm trees and water fountains.

The effect was spectacular with its view of Little Havana, and pleasant with the soft evening breezes, subdued lighting, and sounds of splashing water.

“Very nice,” McGarvey said.

“Yes, it is,” Marti replied. “But sometimes lonely.”

“Will you be leaving the apartment this evening, sir?” one of the bodyguards asked.

“No,” Marti said. “After Mr. McGarvey and I have concluded our business, I’ll retire for the night.”

“Very good, sir,” the bodyguard said, and he and the other guard withdrew.

Marti invited McGarvey to have a seat on the balcony while he fixed them tall drinks with dark Cuban rum, lime juice, fresh mint, a little simple syrup, and seltzer water in tall glasses filled with ice.

They sat for a while sipping their drinks, the evening warm and pleasant. McGarvey had put thoughts about his wife in that special compartment of his mind, sealed away from his tradecraft, yet just now he couldn’t help but think how close she was, and how normal she was compared to the three women he’d become involved with in this business. All of his life he’d had a tough time balancing his need for normalcy—an ordinary family, an ordinary job, an ordinary life—with an equally strong drive to fix things, make things right, figure out what had gone wrong, or was about to go wrong, and do something about it. Katy was probably right; he would never completely retire. Maybe in the end he would go up to the Farm from time to time to teach the new kids coming into the Company something of what he had learned being in the field for more than two decades.

“We only spent the day and that first night in Key West before the CIA sent a couple of field officers down with a jet to bring us to Washington,” Marti picked up his story. “It was about what I had expected would happen, though I’d made a bet with myself that with the turf wars supposedly still going on between the FBI and CIA, it might be the Bureau who got to me first. I was wrong, but it didn’t matter. I was willing to trade what I knew about our military for sanctuary, and the hope that I might be able to speed up Castro’s downfall.”

“How about Gloria?” McGarvey prompted.

“She missed her mother, of course, but gradually she started to come out of the shell she’d built around herself. That was in the first few months, at the safe house outside the city just above the Potomac. It was summer, the staff was pleasant, and our lives there weren’t terribly different from what they had been in Cuba. During the days I was debriefed by a series of teams, but the afternoons and evenings were mine to spend with my daughter. It was more time than I’d ever spent with her. In Cuba I was a busy man. This was a luxury for me, and I think it was for her.”

Marti fell silent for a bit, sipping his drinking, staring out over the city.

“The changes began when we finally moved to Washington. The CIA got us an apartment in Georgetown and hired me as a consultant to the Cuban desk, for a nice salary, which by itself allowed us to live quite comfortably. In addition, in the year before I defected, I had managed to transfer most of the money I’d accumulated in Cuba to a Cayman Islands account. We were not rich, but we were well off, even by U.S. standards.

“At first living in the city was a novelty for both of us, but especially for Gloria. I enrolled her in a high school run by Jesuits near Georgetown University’s campus, and it was close enough so that she could walk there every day. The teachers were strict, but I knew she was getting a first-rate education, and I thought that a little discipline never hurt anyone.

“I bought a car, so on weekends we took minitrips to all the tourist sites at first, and then to some of the other neighborhoods in the city: Columbia Heights, Bloomingdale, Dobbins Addition, Eckington. For the first time in her life my daughter became aware that truly impoverished people existed. I didn’t notice, because Havana has always been a city of slums. But Gloria had never been to Havana, not once, so she’d never been exposed to the things she saw in Washington. To her, Cuba was the land of milk and honey, while the U.S. was the land of black people who were kept poor by the white masters who worked in the important buildings downtown.”

Marti looked at McGarvey, one father to another, searching for understanding. McGarvey saw it and nodded.

“The real world.”

“Her mother and I had perhaps insulated her too much. She wasn’t prepared to witness the seedier side of Washington, and it had a profound effect on her.”

Marti shook his head.

“Then came winter, and the first cold temperatures and snow she’d ever experienced. The first week was okay. We went shopping for a winter wardrobe, and I drove her to school on most days, though the other children who lived as close as we did walked. But all of it was too much for her.

“That Christmas we flew down here to be with her mother’s brother and his wife and four children. They’d come to Miami eight years earlier, which had caused me some trouble with the government. But I held an important enough position even then that my troubles didn’t last.”

“It must have been good to be with family again,” McGarvey said. He thought about the years he’d been away from Katy and Liz.

“It was, and Gloria loved it. The weather was warm, the food was
cubano,
and everyone spoke Spanish.” Marti shook his head again, his expression sad. “But then the next part was my fault. When we got back to Washington I became very busy working for the CIA. I hired a housekeeper-cook to take care of the apartment and Gloria, and sometimes I would be gone for days at a time. By spring she was beginning to rebel, and by summer break she had been caught twice shoplifting. In each case the charges were dropped when I paid for the little trinkets she’d stolen, plus a hefty bonus, which the shopkeeper called fines. But it was extortion against the family of a troubled girl.”

Marti stopped again, lost in his thoughts.

“What did you do about it?” McGarvey prompted after a moment.

“The only thing I thought I could do. I sent her to live with her aunt and uncle here in Little Havana.”

“Did it work?”

“In the beginning, although I was never there to witness anything firsthand. She was growing up and I was missing it, the same as I would have missed it had we remained in Cuba, because I was always busy there too.”

Marti lowered his head, apparently unable to speak.

“What happened?” McGarvey asked.

“She got pregnant when she was fifteen, and without telling anyone she found a Cuban doctor to give her an abortion. Her aunt and uncle found out because when she came home that night she was bleeding, and they had to take her to the emergency room. They also discovered that she had stolen five hundred dollars from them to pay for the abortion.

“They’re very strong Catholics. They couldn’t accept what she had done, so they sent her back to me. I enrolled her in the Jesuit school in their program for gifted but troubled children, and she excelled. In fact she graduated at the head of her class.”

Marti got up and fixed them new drinks at the sideboard.

Gloria had spent the first thirteen years of her life as an indulged but apparently happy and well-adjusted child. But the defection, her mother’s death, and the shock of seeing the real world up close had unhinged her, so she’d rebelled. Her mother would probably have been able to do something to help, but she was gone, and Gloria’s teenage years had disintegrated.

Marti came back to the table and handed McGarvey his drink.

“I’d lost her by then, though I’m not sure that I knew it yet. I was too busy. But I knew enough to understand that she had grown into a young woman, every bit as beautiful as her mother had been at that age, but without her mother’s warm smile.

“She’d developed a hard attitude somewhere along the line. She’d become sharp-tongued, brittle, easy to anger. I despaired for her, but when I tried to talk to her she just brushed me off. ‘Don’t worry,
Papá,
’ she told me. ‘Life goes on.’”

FIFTY-ONE

THE APARTMENT

She went to the University of South Florida in Tampa, where she graduated in three years with a B.S. in foreign studies, on the dean’s list every semester.

“She never once came back to Washington to see me, or drive over to Miami to try to make amends with her aunt and uncle,” Marti said. “I didn’t even know where she was in school until I got a postcard from her inviting me to the graduation.”

“She was just eighteen when she left Washington,” McGarvey said. “Didn’t you wonder where she’d gone? She might have been kidnapped and brought back to Cuba to be used against you.”