Flight from a Firing Wall

by Baynard Kendrick

  By 1960, the year I had picked up my two bullet holes leaving for a cooler climate, Fidel’s government had organized forty-four fishing cooperatives in various ports. He couldn’t turn all the fish into reds, but any fisherman who wanted his share had sure better look like he was a member of the Party.

  Now, in the middle of a black rainy night, already soaked through to the skin, while I was glad to learn that this particular cooperative had cooperated enough with the mythical Juan Jiménez to send out a boat for me, I would have gladly traded my precious Panama in exchange for the faintest idea of how I was going to use that boat to get ashore.

  The Lucretia marked herself as British by some good round English oaths that floated over her side along with a loading net at the end of a boom. Half-a-dozen naked bulbs shining through the rain added a theatrical touch to the nocturnal scene. There were four other Comrades on board Barge 12, in addition to the one who had greeted me. They were busy putting cartons and barrels of frozen seafood into place ready to be hoisted aboard the freighter in a sling.

  Their wet black slickers gave off a steely glow, and each of them was enveloped in his own private cloud of tropical steam. I stood there fearlessly tense and alert, with all my finely trained muscles ready to throw me flat on my face as soon as the expected hail of bullets began. Once again I was to feel overlooked and neglected, as I had when the Kerritack arrived in Miami.

  Nobody gave me a tumble except The Man. Neither the crew of the Lucretia, nor the four busy fishermen seemed aware of those scandalous doings happening on Frances Key. They had simply ignored the arrival and departure of the thirty-five-thousand-dollar Tantivy, and the landing of such a dangerous agent as Tony Carrillo, dedicated to the immediate overthrow of the Castro regime.

  I had already fed Comrade #1 his ration of jotas in Juan Jiménez. Two minutes of strained silence went by before my razorsharp intellect tuned in the fact that he had fed them right back to me with Juan Jiménez. That struck me as being dirty pool, but if I didn’t get a rule book and do some quick boning up, I was going to lose by a jaque mate, checkmate, in this jota chess game.

  We stood there in close comradeship, glaring at each other like a couple of tomcats out for a night on the town, listening to the clatter of the winch and the falling rain. It was my move. I thought of the words jirafa and jaula, but my mind blanked out when I tried to get a sentence with “giraffe” and “a prison cell” in it at the same time.

  Comrade #1 finally caught on that I was just plain stupid. He looked me over again from head to toes and broke the tension with a beaut, “Ese sombrero de jipijapa hace juego con el traje”— “That Panama hat matches the suit.” He gave me a patronizing grin.

  Stunned with that barrage of jotas—jipijapa and juego from an ignorant fisherman, I clicked with an answer that was right on the ball, “Este sombrero de jipijapa me está muy justo. Estoy con jaqueca desde ayer” —“This Panama hat is too tight for me. I’ve had a headache since yesterday.” Let him try slinging any more of those jotas back at me! We were not only comrades but buddy-buddies after that justo and jaqueca. I belonged to the elite inner-circle, and he knew it.

  He said, “I’m Javier,” and left it at that. It could have been a cover name or his own. “I’ve got an outboard moored at the other end of the barge. Let’s go.”

  I said, “I’m glad I don’t have to row.”

  He shook his head. “You’d never make it, Comrade. I’ve been towing barges in and out from here to Caibarién for twenty years, day and night. That’s the only reason on a night like this that I know where to go.”

  I followed Javier to the end of the barge where he climbed over into blackness. A moment later, with the aid of a flashlight, he gave me a hand down into a fourteen-foot skiff. It had an outboard on the stern that looked quite capable of towing any barge to Key West or Miami.

  During the past few days I’d become the greatest living expert on boats of any size and speed. It only took a single glance for me to estimate that this one hadn’t cost as much as the Tantivy. Still she had her points. Even Joe Slade’s Angelus II couldn’t compete with her authentic ripe sporty fishy smell. Neither the Angelus II nor the Tantivy could offer you four inches of water to soak your tired feet in.

  I located myself comfortably in the sitz bath amidships, and set my black bag on the seat beside me. Javier took his place in the stern. Before cranking up the outboard he gave me a thorough going-over with his probing flashlight. He didn’t relish what he saw. He reached under the stern seat, pulled out a light rubber poncho and tossed it to me. “Better put this on.”

  “It’s a bit late. I’m already drowned. What’s the matter? Don’t you like the clothes I’m wearing?”

  “Lo siento mucho— I am very sorry, but you look like one of those men who used to peddle dirty postcards to the tourists around the theaters in Havana. I’m afraid you’d be arrested there, since our glorious leader has cleaned up the town.”

  One nice thing about us Cubans, we are always polite even when we call you a pimp. Due to the courtesy of his nasty slur, I managed to keep my violent temper down. I took off my Panama, put it on top of my bag, and slipped the poncho over my head.

  “These happen to be all the clothes I have, Comrade Javier. What do you suggest that I do?”

  “Por favor, I understand that you are going to the Hotel Union. If you dry out that American money you are carrying in your shoes, they will change it for you, I feel sure. Justo will be glad to send out and buy you another outfit: shoes, proper trousers, and a guayabera. Then you won’t look so much like a prison escapee, who has somehow found his way into town.”

  He cranked the outboard which was badly in need of those fiberglass mufflers which calmed the Daytona horses down. Any scathing remarks, no matter how polite, from there on in were lost in the sound and the fury. That skiff may not have had the speed of the Tantivy, but she was certainly built closer to the ground. It didn’t take me long to discover that she also lacked a deep-V hull. Buenavista Bay, in addition to more than its fair share of hidden islets is beset by a billion ripples. Through some sorcery of Comrade Javier who could see in the dark, even with lenses in his eyes, we missed the islets. We never missed one of the billion ripples.

  The skiff welcomed them all with joy, turning them into bounding billows, higher than any waves in the Straits. On every one the bow would rise two feet in the air and slap the offending ripple down. In twenty minutes, if I’d been worked over with a barrel stave it couldn’t have done a more painful job on my tender rear.

  Only once did Javier’s cat’s eyes fail him. The torch shone out, lighted a stake, and we went around it on a forty-five angle turn. We didn’t ship more than a gallon or two when the starboard gunwale dipped under. Still, our sturdy craft righted somehow and straightened out toward our unseen target accurately as a bullet shot from a gun.

  I took it all philosophically. My advance press notices had been complete enough to include the money in my shoes, and my two-hundred bucks couldn’t get any wetter. One had to learn to accept those moments of excitement. I forced my mind to conjure up a couple of bathing beauties that we were towing through the night on a water-ski run.

  What is called the “rainy season” occurs in Cuba from May to October, but even during the wettest months much of the rain falls at night. Most of the days are pleasant and sunny. I had not only landed in the middle of the rainy season, but in the middle of the night. Raindrops were beating on the back of my head like pellets from a shotgun. They were collecting into a rushing river and forming an accurate watercourse down the back of my neck and the length of my spine.

  I tested the elastic porous mass that had formerly been my hair for moisture content. It had reached about 100 per cent of saturation. Using both hands I squeezed it out like a sponge. Desperately, I jammed on my Panama and turned down the brim. It stayed there all of two minutes before it blew away, sailing off into the Stygian night never to be seen again. From there on in I just huddl
ed and let the rain work its will until the lights of Caibarién hove into view.

  We tied up to one of the special piers on which fish, lobsters, and frogs’ legs are frozen and packed for export. I muttered a heartfelt thanks to Javier, clutched my black bag, and climbed up on the pier. He asked me if I knew how to find my way to the hotel. I told him I did. He said that Caibarién was lightly guarded since the water was too shallow for landing craft to get in. The noisy outboard started again. I had finally set foot on Cuban soil.

  Or had I? As I walked the length of the dimly lighted pier and turned right along the waterfront, lined on my left with tanks of molasses and warehouses full of sugar, and on my right with the barges and special piers, I found it all unreal and eerie.

  My feet were carrying me forward but they weren’t connecting properly with the glistening sidewalk. I was walking through the figment of some long lost dream with Milagros laughing beside me, her hand resting lightly in the crook of my arm. Once I thought I heard soft footsteps following but when I turned there was nobody there. I knew there couldn’t possibly be, for no one was alive in this ghost town. The warehouses were unpainted, neglected, scabrous and brown.

  I put down an inclination to run when I finally spotted the dim lights of the lobby, shining like a will-o’-the-wisp through the windows of the Hotel Union. I quickened my pace toward that oasis of light and dryness, but the lobby proved to be as deserted as the streets. I crossed the lobby to the marble desk, all too aware of the musty unused smell. At least they were still in business. An open register lay on the desk and beside it a call bell. I coughed and waited briefly. When no night clerk rose from behind the desk to greet me, I softly tapped the bell.

  The noise bounced back at me from off the walls, startlingly loud. Behind me a door opened quickly and a girl stepped in. She was dressed in an OD uniform and wore a campaign cap that covered her hair, but her sex was unmistakable from her walk and her ample rear.

  I was just about to ask for Justo Jiménez when she deliberately raised the tommy gun she was carrying and stopped with the muzzle about two feet from my middle and her finger on the trigger. A quick look showed me that a couple of others just like her had come in the entrance and were standing with their backs against the street door. Both of them had tommy guns, and they were pointed straight at me. Counting those menacing weapons carefully, they added up to three.

  The señorita with the bead on my navel examined me with black fanatical eyes, holding her target unwaveringly. It took her all of five dragging seconds to decide she liked no part of me, and with every second her slender finger with its unpolished nail was tightening on that death-dealing trigger more longingly.

  I must have finally gotten under her skin, facing all those guns so bravely. “Por favor, siéntese alli, Compañero gusano—Please sit down there, Comrade worm,” she hissed out at me politely. The muzzle was thankfully removed from my belly to direct me to a nearby chair. “We have orders to hold you for the capitán, who is delayed by the rain. If I did not know that you would be taken to Santa Clara, where you will receive a fair trial and be promptly shot, I would very gladly shoot you myself. I have found great pleasure in killing spies and traitors, and only regret my immediate orders forbid me to do it again.”

  “Well, that’s the way the bullet bounces,” I muttered as I meekly took my chair. “Still, one always appreciates a warm welcome home.”

  I started to search my pockets for a cigarette but gave it up. They were probably all soaked anyhow, and I didn’t like the warmth of the gorgons’ glare. I just sat and listened to the sluicing rain and silently prayed that the capitán hadn’t slid off the road. No one man could be as bad as three trigger-happy Harpies.

  At least that’s what I thought until he got there.

  BOOK III

  CUBA

  21

  The lights of an approaching car flashed across the windows. It stopped with a protesting shriek of brakes and an audible splash of water. My three lady guards stood up and came to some sort of attention, their soldierly faces suffused with eager anticipation. I hoped they weren’t trembling as badly as I was or they would have put four hundred machine-gun bullets into me.

  The lobby door was pushed open with violence and I had my first look at God’s gift to women, Leo Rodríguez. In addition to his beard, which wasn’t quite as lush as Fidel’s but better bar bered, he wore a loose OD shirt open at the throat. It had four small gold dog-legs on each collar tab, the insignia of primer capitán, just one step lower than the lowest of the comandantes. Slacks, which couldn’t hide good tailoring, were shoved in the tops of a pair of boots still retaining traces of a shine in spite of all the rain.

  A holster hung from his brass-buckled belt. I later learned that the butt protruding from it was that of a 9-mm. Makarov automatic, the same as packed by His Majesty Fidel. A product of the munitions works at Gorki, which is also the home of the Molotov automobile works, the largest in the USSR, those Makarov automatics were a present to Cuba from Russia with love, sweetened with plenty of sugar, as were the excellent Russian machine guns carried by my lady captors. Those tommy guns, advanced designs of the famous Finnish Suomi, extensively used by the Russians in World War II, were a far cry from those San Cristobal metralletas, which the Germans called Kugelspritz, or bullet squirters, that had mowed down Milagros and me. While the free world hates to admit it, the Soviets have always been tops in the manufacture of automatic, and semiautomatic military weapons. Their pistols far outclass the Luger in spite of Germany’s vaunted superiority.

  There was a dancing flame in the capitán’s steady appraising black eyes. Just for a second his white teeth shone through the brush, and his whole face lit up with a devilish joy at the sight of my ponchoed crumpled figure. He seemed consumed with an overwhelming inner delight at the very thought of devouring me. Where Orvie had been intimidating through sheer size and weight, Primer Capitán Leo Rodríguez had the impact of a nine-foot cobra. His very presence advertised what peril you were in. He exuded an aura of poisonous undisputable authority that froze all watchers into a cowed immobility.

  His three robots threw him a good parade-ground salute in unison. He brushed it off with a carelessly raised left arm in return. They didn’t rush forward to kiss him as I half expected, but kept their mouths shut as he strode across the lobby to examine their catch. I would have tried a couple of jotas on him, but found I was struck completely dumb by the size of a machine-gun toting Negro giant, who had followed him in two paces to the rear.

  The Negro wore the three yellow stripes, hooked together by two underneath, of a sargento de primera, a top-kick among the NCO’s of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces. This is the cream of the crop which has replaced the Rebel Army, downgraded the Militia, and is known to those who have lived through it as the F.A.R.

  The sargento towered half a head above the capitán. The only thing Negroid about his features was his skin, black as polished ebony. It may not have been military etiquette, but his mouth was closed tight on a half-smoked cigar. Any promoter of wrestling worth his salt would have given his shirt to have matched him with Orvie for two falls out of three. He leaned more toward the gorilla than the cobra type, but he didn’t need any war paint on his placid face to convince me that he was thoroughly lethal.

  It took but a moment for the primer capitán to measure me for a satisfactory casket before turning his attention to the original gun moll who had gotten the drop on me. I saw then she had a couple of stripes on her arm, indicating she was a corporal or cabo in charge of the three.

  “You’ve done a good job in taking this gusano, Cabo,” he said in his dulcet venomous voice. “We will drive him to the Palacio de Justicia, in Santa Clara, for further investigation immediately. Since you are stationed there, you may accompany us back to your barracks.” He swung around on the other two. “You, Com pañeras, will return to your patrol duty along the waterfront until you are relieved in the morning.
¡A paso doble! Double quick! Things have been left unguarded too long already.”

  The two distaff privates bustled off to guard Caibarién’s frogs’ legs, their ample rears wiggling with the haste of their departure. I couldn’t have cared less if they had stripped and danced the watusi.

  “Take him out and put him in the front beside you, Sargento Méndez,” the capitán ordered. “He looks like a trouble maker so you’d better shackle him carefully.”

  I decided that this was the proper moment to put in a word or two. I announced: “I’m Dr. Antonio Carrillo—”

  “Cállate, ya has hablado bastante, gusano. Shut up! You’re talking too much, gusano,” the friendly sergeant growled around his cigar. “Who cares who you are around here? It’s what you’ve done. Better just come along quietly.”

  "¡Vamos!” Rodríguez snapped out at me. I could sense a touch of incompatibility among us three. Then, just as though any of her superior officers might possibly be in need of help, Machinegun Cabo started toying with her weapon again. I exited quietly into the rain with the sergeant following me.

  An army jeep, with its top up, stood facing the hotel entrance. Capitán Rodríguez opened the curtained door on the right-hand side, pushed down the back of the bucket seat and ushered the cabo in to the rear. He relieved me of my precious black bag and followed her in.

  The sergeant said, “You now!” and bent over in the front. I heard the rattle of chains as he fiddled with some leg shackles on the floor. It took me all of a second to figure that this was the last chance I was going to have to disappear into the shelter of blackness and rain. I let him have it at the proper place in the back of his neck with the edge of my hand. It was supposed to break a two-inch plank, but the jerk who wrote that book on karate must have flunked that particular lesson.