The Betrayal Game - [Mikhal Lammeck 02]

by David L. Robbins

The policeman patted his shoulder. “Good luck. And thank you.”

  Johan turned on his heel. He left the kitchen, pushing open a swinging door. Lammeck stayed a stride behind.

  The place was decorated in classic Chinese-restaurant style, with red leather seating and murals of pagodas and floating junks on every wall. The room was empty save for eight grizzly men seated around a long table. Each wore olive drab fatigues and high laced boots with pant legs tucked in. All kept their campaign hats or berets on. Over the backs of chairs, a collection of rifles were slung by their straps. A pistol rode on every hip. Only one of the bearded faces that looked up wore large, black-rimmed glasses.

  Beside the table stood a heavyset Negro waitress. She busily set plates from a tray onto bamboo place mats before each barbudo. Castro had no food in front of him.

  “Johan,” Fidel called. “Come in.” Fidel picked up his fork for the waitress to place a heaping dish on his mat.

  Lammeck’s gut squirmed.

  Fidel asked, “Who is this?”

  Before Johan could move or speak, Lammeck charged from behind. He yanked up his bandaged palm, held it at arm’s length to Fidel, a white warning. He disobeyed Johan. He had no choice. “No.”

  Lammeck took only a single step before halting. The soldiers scrambled for their weapons. In a second of racking metal, Lammeck stared down a collection of barrels long and short.

  Fidel, the only one at the table who hadn’t moved, laid his fork beside his plate. The waitress scurried out of the way.

  Fidel studied Lammeck.

  “No what, señor?”

  Johan pushed Lammeck back a step, to stand beside him. He answered for Lammeck.

  “No, Commandante. Do not eat that food.”

  Fidel did not flinch. The others at the table dropped their silverware to push their plates to the middle of the table. The dark face of the waitress was impassive.

  “Why, Johan? Is it poisoned?”

  “I do not know. It may be. This man, he must speak with you. And you must listen to him.” Fidel nodded at one of the soldiers at the table with him. This barbudo, the only one with a blond beard, rose and moved behind Lammeck. He ran his hands up and down Lammeck’s legs and raised arms, checking for weapons.

  Watching the search, Fidel said, “I ask you again, Johan. Who is this? Is he a crazy man?”

  The search was finished quickly. The blond soldier stepped away.

  “This is Professor Mikhal Lammeck, Commandante. An American.”

  Fidel nodded, amused. “Of course he’s an American. He thinks he’s bulletproof.” Fidel waggled two fingers in the air for Lammeck to come closer. A bead of sweat trickled down Lammeck’s back where the ancient priests’ knife would have been. Again, he was relieved he’d left the dagger behind.

  Lammeck stared at the plate in front of Castro: mushrooms, pork, shredded greens, bamboo shoots, brown rice.

  “Professor,” Fidel asked, “do you speak Spanish?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent.”

  Lammeck said, “I must talk with you. It’s urgent.”

  Fidel looked to Johan. The captain nodded.

  “Alright.”

  Castro stood. Lammeck was impressed with the man’s height and physicality. He moved like an athlete, limber and long, away from the crowded table. He led them to a separate, scarlet booth. The three sat. Behind them, the waitress retreated into the kitchen. Fidel snapped fingers at his compañeros. Two men went with her. At the table, all the plates sat cooling, untouched.

  Fidel cut his eyes to Lammeck’s wrapped left hand. He pointed at Lammeck’s forehead.

  “What happened to you? You’ve got a lump and a bad hand.” Castro grinned, charming and concentrated. “If you’ve been fighting, I hope at least it was in my behalf.”

  “No. Just clumsy.”

  “Well, be careful. Johan here is the most careful man I know.”

  Castro set an elbow on the table. He leaned forward, scratching a finger deep in his beard.

  “Did you see the parade today, Professor?”

  Lammeck answered, “I did.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I was impressed.”

  “You realize, it was all farmers. Under Batista, and before him Prio, for my entire lifetime and longer, the people of Cuba did not get parades. The army did, and the Americans, but never the workers. The cane cutters, charcoal makers, fishermen, plowmen, tobacco pickers, all of them were ignored until the revolution. I was very proud today. Did you hear my speech?”

  “No. I had to leave early. My apologies.”

  Fidel appeared to be laying out his credentials as a revolutionary. He gave the sense he might launch into an hours-long lecture across the table, for just Lammeck’s ears, to recruit the heart of one man at a time.

  Odd, Lammeck thought. He and Johan had said the matter they’d come for was urgent. Johan even announced that Fidel’s meal could be poisoned. But the man was not pressed, and he was not afraid. His manner seemed to Lammeck self-consciously bold, a performance, as if he had not climbed down off the afternoon’s rostrum.

  “You are a professor,” Fidel observed. “Of what subject?”

  “Political science.”

  Castro’s eyebrows arched. Inside the rough curls of his beard, his lips puckered.

  “The two of us are interested in much the same ideas. Politics. History. The worthiest of endeavors. How to save mankind from itself, eh?”

  Despite Johan’s warning not to consider Castro a student, Lammeck tamped down a burr of irritation. In his own long career, Lammeck had read most of the major historical treatises and documents from two thousand years of civilization, had written one himself. Fidel Castro was, essentially, a courageous young attorney versed in rebellion. The man was no scholar, despite his self-stylings. Lammeck would share little with him in a contest of ideas.

  Lammeck said, “My specialty is assassinations.”

  “Ahh, have you come to save me, Professor?” Fidel’s eyebrows bent a notch higher.

  Castro asked this theatrically, loud enough for the barbudos to hear at their table. They, the men who would die for Fidel, who would save him and perhaps had already done so in the mountains, laughed at the American viejo come to rescue their commandante.

  Even so, Lammeck noted none of them touched their plates.

  He reached into his pocket, and set the poison capsule on the table.

  “Yes.”

  Fidel picked the pill off the tablecloth. He jiggled it in his wide palm. “What is this?”

  “Botulinum.”

  Castro put the pill down, as if it could infect him through his hand.

  He asked Johan, “CIA?”

  The captain stared at the pill on the table, surprised. Lammeck had not told him of the one he’d kept. Johan nodded to Castro.

  Lammeck continued: “The CIA gave me six pills. I hung on to one. The other five were delivered to one of your favorite restaurants here in Havana. At a signal, you were to be poisoned.”

  “Who gave this signal? You?”

  “No. I’m not even sure it has been given. But it’ll come from the CIA.”

  “Yes,” Fidel agreed, lifting a long, pale finger. “I know your CIA. I was supposed to die today. The American sniper on El Capitolio. But he is in prison, and I am not in the ground. Be assured, Professor, the CIA has given the signal.”

  Lammeck believed it, too, but did not say so.

  Fidel put his tongue into his lower lip, considering.

  “You say I was to be poisoned in one of my favorite restaurants?”

  “I wasn’t told which. Johan said the Peking is one.”

  Castro leaped to his feet. He stamped away, past the quizzical barbudos, who watched their leader shove open the kitchen door and disappear. They turned their eyes on Lammeck.

  Fidel returned in seconds. With him were the two men he’d sent into the kitchen. They herded out the entire staff of the restaurant. Castro had his gua
rds put them in a line in front of the red booth, then returned to his seat opposite Johan and Lammeck.

  “I wanted them to hear what you say, Professor. They should know how their fate is to be determined.”

  Castro asked the row of five workers, pointing at Lammeck, “Do any of you know this man? Have you ever spoken to him?”

  The two cooks, the black waitress, and the pair of Asian dishwashers replied in unison, “No, Commandante.”

  “He says you wish to poison me. Yes? Is this true?”

  Heads shook violently. Again all said, “No, no, Commandante.’’

  Castro drubbed his finger into the table beside the botulinum capsule. The pill danced on the vibration.

  “Did you bring the pills here, Professor?”

  “No. I gave them to someone else. He had the connection. I don’t know which restaurant he took them to.”

  “What is the man’s name?”

  Johan glared along with Castro at Lammeck. The restaurant staff, the barbudos at their table, all mounted angry stares.

  “I’ll tell you,” Lammeck said. “But in return I want something.”

  Castro sat back against the leather booth. He pulled down his black-rimmed glasses, tossing them onto the table. He pinched the top of his nose, closing his eyes as if from strain.

  “You wish to haggle with me, Professor?”

  “Negotiate.”

  When Fidel fixed his gaze again on Lammeck, he smiled. “You see, Johan, this is capitalism. There are no Americans left who want nothing in return for their good deeds. Professor, I want to believe you. I would like nothing better than to think that one more plot to kill me has been prevented. Your CIA. They come at me.”

  He circled a finger in the air beside his head.

  “I know they will land several thousand exiles somewhere on the island soon. Your country would like me dead before that happens, in their mistaken faith that I am what holds the revolution together and not the people. But, it is in them where I place my own faith, you see.”

  Fidel indicated the black waitress. “It is Maria, yes?”

  The woman started. “Yes, Commandante.”

  “Bring my plate of food here.”

  All eyes watched her fetch the dish of pork and vegetables. She set it in the center of the table.

  “Bring my fork.” The woman did so.

  Castro held the utensil up, tines beside his temple.

  “So, Professor, I am to be killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “You say you have made a study of assassinations. Do you have an opinion? Is it not a barbaric practice?”

  “It’s politics. There’s never been a culture that didn’t resort to it at some point.”

  “Perhaps. But it seems frantic. Lacking confidence. It’s a sign of a decaying culture. If the United States is so certain it has the best way of life, then it should focus on spreading that, not violence. Do you know why I am a Communist?”

  “No.”

  “I will quote my friend Nikita Khrushchev. He told me that he had worked in the mines for the Belgians, in the factories for the Germans, in the fields for the French. The capitalists made him a Communist.”

  “Why haven’t you announced it?”

  “I have been trying to avoid kicking the hornets’ nest of the United States. You are a close and powerful neighbor, and not one I care to upset unduly. But, with that ugly pill on the table and the Marine sniper in jail, and a hundred other ways, I see that the hornets buzz at me regardless. Can you tell me this is not so?”

  “I’m not a politician.”

  “No, you are decidedly not. You are a conspirator. An assassin. But you are also an American, a citizen of a desperate nation. I suppose I have been foolish to expect anything beyond the back of a hand from your country. But what I find most painful is that here, in Cuba, in the midst of the revolution, we still have wreckers. Those who cling to the old abuses and privileges of capitalism.”

  Castro leveled the fork at the restaurant staff, all five of them listening in their lineup. Eyes went wide with Fidel’s interest on them now.

  He addressed them. “Do you recall how we made the revolution? We were certain. Not a man or woman among us doubted or feared, never for a second. We fought and died with conviction. Now, my friends, if I am to believe that all of you are innocent, if I am to restrain myself from taking you out back and having you shot, you must show me your conviction, that you are not wreckers. That if the professor is correct that the CIA has turned one of my favorite restaurants against me, it is not this one.”

  Fidel reached the fork to the first in line, the tall cook.

  “Your name?”

  “Cruz, Commandante.”

  “Take a bite, Cruz.”

  The cook scooped a large portion into his mouth, then put down the fork with vigor as if he’d used it to sign a declaration. With less enthusiasm, each of the staff ate from the plate. The waitress Maria came last. She accepted the fork and hesitated.

  “Him,” she said, pointing at Lammeck.

  Fidel asked, “What about him?”

  “He came in shouting no, you should not eat, Commandante. I am afraid he has done something to the food that we do not know about. He is CIA. They are devils.”

  All in line nodded, Castro, too. He said, “A valid concern, my dear. May I?”

  He took the fork from her, extending it to Lammeck.

  For a moment, Lammeck let the fork hang in Castro’s hand. He looked across the faces of the staff, seeing nothing to ease his apprehension. Their options were the risk of poison or the certainty of a submachine gun. Lammeck shared their predicament. How could he rely on them?

  Spearing a strip of pork, he closed his lips around it and shut his eyes, to fix on the meat, desperate to taste anything untoward, to separate spices from the shadow of toxin on his tongue. He chewed. When he swallowed, he felt an hourglass turn over in his stomach.

  Then Maria ate. When she was done, Fidel ordered the staff to sit together at a table across the room. Quietly, the barbudos dug once again into their own plates. Fidel pushed his meal away.

  He spoke to Lammeck. “You were not afraid?”

  “There’s nothing to fear where there’s no choice. Like you said, conviction.”

  Fidel glanced at Johan, intrigued.

  “This continues to get more interesting. Captain, do you trust him?”

  “Yes, Commandante. It was Lammeck who went on the roof of the capitol today and brought down the sniper. He will do what he says. And he is not CIA. He is a teacher who has been threatened by the CIA.”

  Fidel lifted his black frames from the table to slide them over his eyes. He blinked behind the lenses, keen.

  “Proceed, Professor. Make your deal.”

  Lammeck forced aside his distraction with the poison that might be ticking in his gut now. Dying or not, he had to press forward.

  “The boy arrested today, his name is Alek Hidell.”

  Fidel stopped him. “You call him a boy? Johan tells me he is a U.S.-trained sharpshooter brought to Havana to murder me in front of ten thousand people, on the eve of an invasion. Do not call him a boy and expect this will get sympathy from me.”

  “He’s young, and he’s confused. The CIA took advantage of him.”

  “As they did you, Professor?”

  Lammeck began to answer, but Castro waved him off. “Continue with Hidell. We will return to you before we finish.”

  “Hidell was made part of Heitor Ferrer’s assassination plot. But the CIA never intended the assassination to happen. The meeting with Ferrer and Hidell was betrayed.”

  “Yes,” Castro said, indicating Johan, “through the excellent intelligence work of the captain here. Heitor.” Fidel said his old friend’s name as if it had a sour taste. “Traitor.”

  “Commandante,” Johan spoke up, “Ferrer was not uncovered by my department. He was purposely exposed by CIA.”

  Fidel shook his head. “Impossible.”

/>   Lammeck said, “Hidell was meant to be captured. He and Ferrer’s cell were set up by the CIA.”

  “Why would the CIA bring a sniper to Havana just to have him arrested? It’s absurd.”

  Lammeck opened his mouth, but Johan gripped his wrist, silencing him.

  “Hidell is an American defector, Commandante. To the Soviet Union. He was accompanied to Havana by his Russian fiancée. She is KGB.”