Killing Castro (13 page)

She turned, left them. Turner shrugged and headed for the stairs to the basement. Hines got up, not particularly anxious to follow Turner. But where the hell else was he supposed to go?

Turner said: “What do you think of the setup?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll be sitting ducks. If we play it the way she calls it, we’ll be deader than hell before the bomb goes off. I don’t like it.”

“So?”

Turner hesitated, then stated boldly, “I want out, Jim.”

“You must be kidding.”

“No, I mean it.”

“You?” Hines was on his feet now, his eyes amazed. This was too much, he thought. Big old Turner, tough guy Turner, the desperate desperado.
He
wanted out.

“Me.”

“Why? Getting cold feet, for God’s sake? Going chicken?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I don’t get it.”

Turner shrugged. “There’s not a hell of a lot to get. I took this job to beat a stateside murder rap. I was going to run for Brazil. Well, why Brazil? I’m in Cuba. I can stay here.”

“Stay here?”

“Get work, find a place to live. I don’t know. I like it here, Jim. And I’m here already. Why commit another murder so I can start running all over again?”

“Jesus Christ. What would you
do
here, for God’s sake?”

“Anything. There’s a lot of new construction going up—and I’ve swung construction work before. I know how to handle heavy equipment and they’re short of that kind of labor.”

“So you’ll throw away twenty grand to work a steam shovel? That doesn’t sound like you, Turner.”

“Maybe not. Or maybe it does, I don’t know. And there’s a guy I got friendly with, a grifter type. He wants me to throw in with him. He works some semi-legitimate cons and he makes a living. And it sounds a hell of a lot better to me than tossing bombs around like an imitation anarchist. Castro’s not my enemy. He may be bad, but it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference to me. All I want is a nice quiet place to live, food to eat, liquor to drink and a woman when I need one. I can get all those no matter who’s in charge here.”

“So you’re quitting.”

“Maybe.”

Hines went over to his bunk, sat down. He was sweating. First the truth about Joe and now Turner doing a fadeout, gumming up the works by quitting cold on him. It was all falling apart at the seams—his whole little world.

He didn’t know how to tie it together again.

“Jesus,” he said. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“That’s up to you.”

“I can’t go ahead and throw the bomb—”

“Sure you can. I’ll put it together for you. It only takes one person to heave it. If we both go, it only makes it easier for them to spot us.”

“But—”

“You can even take my share of the dough. That makes it forty thou instead of twenty.”

“I don’t care about the money!”

“Hey,” Turner said. “Calm down, kid.”

“You don’t know, damn you. You don’t understand a goddamn thing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About everything. Joe was my brother, damn it, and Castro killed him. So I have to kill Castro. Can’t you get that into your fat head?”

“So kill him! I don’t care—”

“
Goddamn
it! You know what I found out, Turner? Castro had a right to kill Joe. Joe was a turncoat, he got power happy and tried a coup of his own. Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m over here getting some kind of cockeyed revenge for my hero of a brother who had it coming all along! Isn’t that one for the goddamned books? Here I am living in a cruddy cellar and scheming like some kind of comic-strip character and it’s all for revenge. And Joe doesn’t deserve being avenged in the first place. How do you like that, Turner? And what the hell am I supposed to do now?”

He sat there, glaring. He was waiting for Turner to say something but the older man was silent, watching him with cool eyes. He felt like a nut now, like some kind of an idiot. He’d been shouting at the top of his lungs like a kid with a tantrum.

“Jim—”

“I’m sorry, Turner. I lost control.”

“Forget it. Jim, get the hell out of here. I didn’t know about Joe. How did you find out?”

“From the Luchar broad.”

“Are you sure she was telling it straight?”

“Yeah. I’ve checked around and … oh, hell, she wouldn’t have any reason to lie to me. If she was going to lie she’d do it the other way, Turner. She’d want me to stay revenge-happy so I wouldn’t blow the assassination. She wasn’t lying. It’s straight. Joe must have gone a little nutty or something. He probably lost his edge the same way Castro did. Power does that to a person. It happens all through history. But it takes a little of the steam out of … out of
me
, damn it. It’s like shooting the governor because your brother went to the chair for a murder he committed. It makes it silly.”

“Yeah.”

“Turner? What do I do now?”

“What I told you. Get the hell out.”

“Out of Cuba?”

“Uh-huh. Get the first boat back to the States and stay there. You’re not a criminal, kid. You’re young, you can go back to school and start fresh. You’ve got a story to save up and tell your own kids someday. In the meantime you can live instead of dying. Because if you stay in Havana they’re going to kill you, Jim. This game was a last chance for me. I figured there might be a nice easy way to bump Castro and stay alive. But there isn’t, and I can stay alive without it.”

“But—”

“And so can you. Look, you don’t care about the money. Remember? And the revenge seems kind of pointless now. So throw your hand in.”

“I don’t know.”

Turner took out a cigarette, lit it. He took a deep drag, let the smoke out in a thin stream. The air in the cellar was dense and the smoke stayed in a long, snakelike column as it rose slowly to the ceiling.

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m staying right here until Saturday. There are three other guys in on this, don’t forget. God knows where they are, but they’re supposed to be somewhere around here in Cuba. Ray Garrison, Matt Garth, Earl Fenton. You remember them?”

“I remember.”

“Yeah. Well, there’s no law saying we have to be the ones to hit Castro. They might get him first. If that happens, we have our twenty grand apiece without any risk. So I’m sticking around to see if maybe that’ll happen. It would be nice.”

Hines didn’t say anything.

“Saturday night,” Turner went on, “I clear out. Don’t ask where I’m going because I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I’ll hole up somewhere for the time being so that Lady Luchar and her hired hands can’t decide they don’t like me any more. Then I’ll apply for Cuban citizenship. I’ll go straight to the government and tell them I’m wanted for murder in the States and I like the climate better in Cuba. I’ll have a work permit the same day and a set of citizenship papers within the week. And I’ll be set.”

“And what should I do, Turner?”

“Stick around until Saturday. You don’t want to miss out on twenty grand, do you?”

“I told you—”

“That you don’t care about the money. I got that. But you wouldn’t throw it away if someone dropped it in your lap, would you?”

“No,” Hines admitted.

“Fine. So you hang around until Saturday. Then you grab a boat or a plane, go to the Swiss consulate and tell them you’re an American refugee, something like that. They’ll get you back to Miami and you can go it alone from there.”

“That’s the sensible way, huh?”

“Sure.”

Hines nodded to himself. There was always a sensible way, and there was another way that seemed more honest. He decided it was a hell of a shame that the honest way was never the sensible way.

“Will you put those bombs together? And explain to me how they work?”

“Why—”

“Saturday night,” Hines went on desperately, doggedly. “Saturday night you’ll show me how the bombs work. Sunday you can disappear. I don’t care. Because Sunday I’m going to blow the hell out of Castro.”

“Didn’t you hear a thing I said? Don’t you remember what
you
said, goddamn it?”

“I remember.”

“Then—”

“I don’t even want to talk about it. I know—I’ll be getting killed, maybe, and all for a brother who had it coming. But I don’t want to think about it, it only makes my head ache. I can’t take it any more. I don’t know what’s right or wrong, Turner. I can’t tell the heroes from the villains. It’s not black and white like a morality play. It’s all kinds of shades of gray.”

Turner dropped his cigarette to the floor. He covered it with his foot and ground it out. He did not say anything.

“All shades of gray,” Hines went on. “And it all boils down to the same thing. He killed my brother and I’m going to kill him. That’s what I keep winding up with. I can’t take the boat back to the States, I can’t run like a rat to the Swiss consulate. I have to wait here and I have to blow that bastard in two with a bomb. That’s all I can do.”

It was Wednesday morning. Maria boiled a huge pot of water over a small fire of brush and twigs. She tossed a cup or two of coffee grounds into the pot and let it boil for ten minutes. Then she ladled out cups of the hot, black coffee. Fenton took one and walked a short distance away with it, sat down and got a cigarette going while the coffee cooled a little.

It was Wednesday morning. Castro would pass along the road late in the afternoon or early in the evening. A young boy had brought the news the night before, a twelve-year-old kid with hollow eyes and beads of perspiration on his brow, who ran through the underbrush like a startled deer. Late in the afternoon or early in the evening—that was the word from the underground, passed from mouth to mouth in whispers, brought this last step of the way by this boy with hollow eyes.

Late in the afternoon, early in the evening. Fenton sucked smoke from his cigarette, took a tentative sip of the steaming coffee. He burned his mouth and cursed quietly. Late in the afternoon, early in the evening. He was as tense as a tightly coiled spring, jumpy as a hand grenade with the pin pulled. Late in the afternoon, early in the evening.

Tomorrow Castro spoke in Santiago. Or, if they were successful, tomorrow Castro spoke to the dead, spoke to other corpses in the language cadavers speak. Castro lived or died, and this would be determined soon—late in the afternoon, early in the evening.

The whole camp was rigid with a mixture of anticipation and brittle fear. The days had been bad ones lately. Tuesday, around noon, a Jeep with two soldiers in it had rolled slowly down the road. A pair of Castristas on patrol. Manuel had ordered everyone to let Jeep and soldiers pass. They could not risk exposing their position, not until the big game was in the sights of the Sten guns. A Jeep with two soldiers was no target at all when Fidel Castro himself was due to come into firing range.

But Taco Sardo forgot the order, or else ignored it. His Sten gun belched bullets over the formation of rock and the Jeep halted, a tire gone. The soldiers came out with automatic rifles in their hands, and they had to be killed at once. They could not be allowed to escape, could not be permitted to pass the word to the garrison that rebels lay in ambush along the road to Santiago.

It had been a short, desperate fight. One of the new recruits had died, a Castrista rifle bullet tearing half his face away. Garth got one of the soldiers with a Sten gun blast but the other was back in the Jeep suddenly, ready to ride to Santiago on the rims if he had to.

Two of the rebels had stopped the Jeep. Manuel shot out another tire and Taco Sardo, who had started all the trouble in the first place, quickly raced into the road to put a pistol bullet into the driver’s throat.

The Jeep would not run. Four of them together managed to push it down the road a short distance. Then, with two others to assist, they lifted the crippled vehicle and carried it from the road, hiding it in the brush. They lifted the two dead soldiers and carried them far into the hills, leaving their bodies to rot. Maria scrubbed blood from the road, Fenton picked up shards of broken glass. When they were done, no evidence of the scramble remained. The road was clear again, empty.

That had been trouble enough. That alone had swelled the tension, had drawn everyone’s nerves back like a bowstring.

There was more Tuesday evening. Fenton was not sure what had happened, but while he sat among the rocks and kept a lonely vigil over the road, there was a sharp scream, curses in Spanish, a roar of pain. And later that evening he saw Garth with deep scratches across his face. And Maria wore a deep frown, and her eyes were pools of bitterness.

Now Fenton drank his coffee and smoked another cigarette. It was a moot point, he thought, whether Castro’s convoy would arrive before the rebels succeeded in killing each other off. Matt Garth obviously didn’t learn from experience; he was going to go on until someone put a bullet in him. Taco, blood-hungry after being wounded in the leg, would shoot at anything that came within range. Manuel sat lost in thought, still the leader but now gripped by his dream of power and glory. Maria burned with fear and anger. And Earl Fenton, the quiet man, the refugee of a teller’s cage in the Metropolitan Bank of Lynbrook, the man with cancer in his lungs, drank bitter coffee and smoked strong cigarettes and waited for Fidel to come and meet his death.

Late in the afternoon.

Or early in the evening.

Matt Garth liked things simple and direct. If you made things too complicated you just loused them up. When you wanted a woman, you took her. When you were killing someone for a price, you went ahead and killed him. And when you had a burn on for some son-of-a-bitch who had been giving you a hard time, well, you belted him one.

Which was what he was going to do.

He had just finished his session as lookout. He had crouched between rocks as mute and massive as Garth himself, his Sten gun perched along a rock ledge with a fresh clip in its breech. And four soldiers came rolling along in a battered Jeep, peering into the brush in a hunt for rebels. One of them, a beardless kid, had focused a pair of binoculars upon the precise spot where Garth was sitting. And Garth’s finger was poised on the trigger. One burst of the Sten gun would have sent the four rat bastards to hell. But the kid with the glasses had seen nothing, and the soldiers were gone now.