“And your proof?”
“My proof is that I know the name of the man you report to. I know your assignment. How would I know those things if your organization is as sharp as it claims to be?”
She had no answer for him. “So the entire organization is a front for Castro and DGI? And this front can arrange a clandestine meeting with—” She stopped before she could say “the vice president of the United States?”
“I’m not saying the whole organization is corrupt, Caro. But I am telling you, in confidence, that it’s been infiltrated. The infiltrators are brilliant, evil, vicious people who make their plans decades in advance, who will use anyone to achieve their goals.”
She was shaking her head. It was a case of crying wolf. The expatriate Cuban community had been so battered by the rise, conversion, and apparent immortality of Fidel Castro that they’d taken to lying about things, exaggerating, bending the truth to fit their own ends, their own anger. It was true, of course, that Castro’s agents had infiltrated various organizations on this side of the water. But it was true only about 10 percent as often as the old Cubanos claimed it was.
“You remind me of my uncle,” she said.
“I take that as a compliment.”
“In the sense that. . . . Listen, Oscar, you can’t just keep using Castro’s treachery every time you want something. Sure there have been spies, but it’s a heavy accusation, the heaviest, where we come from. You can’t just lay that on somebody unless you’re a hundred percent sure of it.”
“It’s not jealousy,” he said. “I know you think it is, from before. But it isn’t. I’m not like that anymore. I’m older. I’m over it.”
“All right,” she said, half convinced. “We’ll talk when I get back.”
He pressed his lips together impatiently. She could see him biting back the words. He put a hand on her arm and let it rest there. “Call me if you change your mind. Will you do that? Even if you just want to talk. The number is the same. Will you, Caro?”
She nodded, not blinking.
“Watch yourself,” he said, and with that he planted a proprietary kiss near her lips, and left the way he had come, slowly, quietly, just another Cuban Catholic seeking counsel from his God.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next morning an unbearable tension, vaporous and sour, saturated the air of Carlos’s kitchen. He sat at the rust-colored metal table watching Elena’s back as she squeezed the juice from orange halves into two small glasses. She put one glass in front of him and one on her place mat. She poured two cups of cafecito and set one in front of him and the other, again, on her place mat. She had four slices of bread grilling in a pan and she put extra butter on two of them, because that was to his taste, and because, for some unknown reason, there was plenty of butter in the special stores this month. She watched the toast slices for a few seconds, then flipped them over and pressed them into the hot metal so hard that the muscles of her arm flexed beneath the sleeve of her dress.
At last, when she had dragged everything out as long as possible, she sat down opposite him. Her face seemed especially worn out that morning, the forehead furrows deep, the hair dull. She turned on the radio and said, beneath the music: “I want you not to do this.”
“It’s too late, Elena.”
“I want you, for me, not to do this.”
He reached across the corner of the table and took her hand. Neither of them had touched their food. “People are depending on me now. Brave people. Good people. Some have already lost their lives for this.”
“Who are these people?”
Her voice broke on the question and there was something there, some note he did not like, some urgency. He felt as though thin metal plates, like the plates that held X-ray films, were being slammed down into place between them, one after the next, pushing them farther and farther apart. “You know I can’t tell you.”
“They mean more to you than I do?”
He shook his head. “I thought you would . . . I thought we saw things the same way.”
She was shaking her head more vehemently.
“You don’t see the foolishness?” he whispered beneath the music. “The abuses of power? The egotism? The fact that we are all but isolated in the world, living on one of the richest islands on earth and our people going hungry, crops not being grown, or being grown incorrectly? And all of it being blamed on the North Americans? You don’t see this?”
“I see everything,” she said. “Everything.”
“But?”
There was a loud bang outside their windows. Merely a car backfiring, but Elena jumped in her seat and began to weep. “We have made a life,” she said in a broken voice. She was not looking at him, her hair hanging down so that the ends just touched the buttery top of her toast, tears dripping into the corners of her mouth. “Here, in Cuba, the people have made a life, in spite of everything, against the greatest odds. You’re going to destroy that now? And build what in its place? Do you even know? Could you even tell me the names of the ones who thought this plan up? Even if you wanted to, even if you trusted me enough, could you?”
“No, I could not,” he said.
“Are you the leader?” she whispered.
“No, I am not.”
“Who then? In whose hands are you placing your life and my happiness?’
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t or won’t, Carlos?”
“Can’t and won’t.”
She broke into bitter sobs and stood up. For an instant she seemed to be looking around, as if for a weapon with which to attack him, or a knife with which to do herself in. Then she hurried into the bedroom and slammed the door and he could hear her weeping there.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After Oscar left, Carolina sat for almost an hour in the quiet church, her only companion an old woman in black who shuffled through a side door and began quietly mopping the tiles. Carolina thought about what Oscar had said, and the look on his face when he was saying it. He had always been a jealous man. Now, somehow, he had found out that Oleg was her boss—perhaps seen them together somewhere, if he’d been following her—and assumed they were lovers. And he’d reached for a way to discredit him, the easiest way, the way that made all Cubans pay attention: Oleg was secretly working for Castro.
She thought about it and thought about it, and at last it seemed clear to her that there was a perfect parallel between her work and her faith. Doubt was always trying to intrude. In order for anything good to happen you had to banish it completely.
From the church, Carolina drove to a spotlessly clean Guatemalan restaurant on Calle Ocho for a quick, inexpensive lunch, and then to her apartment in Doral, intending to stay just long enough to get her bathing suit, umbrella, sun lotion, and a book, and head to South Beach, as she had been instructed. The apartment door was locked, as usual, but once she was inside she saw that papers were strewn everywhere, her laptop computer was gone, her medicine chest rifled through. So much for the security of the gated community. There was no thought of notifying the police. She used her cell phone to call Oleg on his secure line and tell him. He was outdoors, and when he spoke—she could not help herself—she searched his voice for signs of deceit.
“Did you have any information about the project on the computer?” he asked her.
“Of course not. I don’t even have it on my computer in Atlanta.”
“Did you have notes lying about, anything—the time you were to meet your uncle, a phone number, anything at all?”
“I’ve been doing this work long enough to know not to write anything down, Oleg. Even your phone number. The only really important things I keep here are some old snapshots and souvenirs. But they’re in an accordion file, and the file was at the back of my closet and has not been touched.”
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll make some small adjustments. Everything else is as we discussed.”
“Someone should check the apartment in Atlanta,” she said, but he
hung up abruptly and she couldn’t be sure he’d heard. She wondered if Oleg himself had had the apartment searched, if it was just the Orchid making absolutely sure she was the right person for this job. Or if Oscar had broken in. Or if it had just been common thieves.
None of them would have been this clumsy, she thought, unless they’d been almost caught in the act. Or unless they were trying to send her a message.
THE DAY WAS warm and bright and South Beach was a hive of half-naked bodies and laconic activity. After twenty minutes, she found a parking space in front of a diner on Eleventh Street where she had gone many times with her father and mother when she was a girl. The break-in had shaken her, but she was used to the rest of it, used to knowing things only an hour or a day before she had to know them. She had learned to take things one step at a time, to have faith that the Orchid would provide her with the information she needed when she needed it, would pay her what and when they said they would pay her. Eight years now and not one disappointment, not one broken promise, nothing but good money, high praise, and care taken with her life.
Get some rest, Oleg had advised on the plane. And while you are getting your rest we want you to go to the beach, South Beach, and lay your towel in front of the Atlantica Hotel. Read, improve your tan, body surf, anything. Just stay there until it becomes apparent that you no longer need to.
He had been so calm. Even now, on the phone, he had seemed strangely unperturbed about the break-in. Too casual. She thought it likely she’d be contacted soon and told that the Cuba assignment had been given to somebody else. They had backups, she was sure. Their plans were made in multiples of three and four, fallback position upon fallback position. If she was being followed, if Oscar knew so much, if people were breaking into her apartment looking for documents, then the shell of secrecy around her had already been cracked open.
Once she’d made herself comfortable on the sand, she spread the lotion on her skin, vaguely ashamed that she needed it, a woman of her blood. But most of her working time was spent indoors—in airplanes, airports, hotels, cars—and she did not want to sit through a long flight with sunburned thighs. She dozed, she read a travel magazine through her sunglasses, she went in the tepid water twice and splashed around not far from some loud, happy Latin teenagers. The warm sun on her bare skin lit a small sexual fire in her. It had been a long time since she’d made love, and now the sound of the happy teenagers carried her back to Calle Ocho, to a makeshift sofa in a back room. Jose, his name had been. The smell of a teenager’s cologne and the trembling of her body, that first incredible sense that she’d been admitted to a secret society of real adults. Jose ran a little restaurant now—she’d checked—had a family, a house of his own. On the sunny beach, for just the smallest stretch of time, she wondered if she would have been happy with him, with a life like that.
At two o’clock she walked across the street for a salad and a sweetened iced tea, then she went back to her towel, ready for anything, or nothing. Ready for the Orchid’s next move.
Its next move arrived in the form of a handsome black man. He came and casually lay his towel down next to hers, and she understood she was supposed to act as if they were old friends, perhaps lovers. He barely said hello, made no move to kiss or touch her, just spoke her name, the briefest of greetings—as if they’d last seen each other at breakfast. On the sand near his head he placed a canvas bag—the kind bookstores give away as advertising. He took off his shirt and trousers to reveal a chiseled body, all ripples and sinews. His eyes were green. When he was lying there, facedown in his tight bathing suit, he turned so that he was looking at her, and smiled slyly. “Federico,” he said quietly.
She nodded.
“Federico from Oleg.”
The Latin boys had come out of the water, shouting and dripping wet, and were throwing a football back and forth on the sand. The ball came bouncing crazily toward her and Federico, and rolled to a stop at the edge of her blanket. Federico turned, picked it up with one hand, half sat up, and fired a perfect spiral into the boy’s arms. “Gracias, Señor!” the boy called back.
Federico was all smiles. “Rub some lotion on your back or anything?” he said.
“Thanks. All set.”
“The tickets are in the bag. We’ll leave the beach together in a little while. I’ll walk you as far as your car.”
“I’m still going?”
“You’re going. My job is to get you the tickets. We can swim a little, go out for a meal. You can invite me over to your apartment for the night, for appearances’ sake only.” He winked at her. She hated men who winked. “But I’m here for the tickets, nothing else. I can’t even look at them. I don’t even know where you’re going. I don’t even know who you really are, except that you’re someone important.”
She nodded and looked out over the aquamarine ocean, huge cottony cumulus clouds drifting past overhead. It was an exercise in trust, she decided. The whole thing, her whole life, was an exercise in trust. But still, some quiet, nagging tone sounded in the back of her thoughts.
They dove into the surf, swam and rode a few waves, then came back to their towels and talked about the weather, the Marlins, music. When the air started to lose a bit of its heat, Federico accompanied her to her car and, as if by accident, tossed the canvas bag into the back of the SUV with her beach chair and towel. “Tonight I need to sleep alone,” she told him, when they’d kissed lightly on the lips and were still embracing. “But maybe another time.”
“Otra vez,” he said happily. Everyone who had anything to do with the Orchid was happy like this. It was, she thought, merely the satisfaction that came from being overpaid.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Carlos was to meet his contact at the José Martí Bar at the Oriente Hotel in thirty-six hours. The Oriente was hard-currency-only, and for the most part no one but foreign tourists went there. So he would need an excuse. He’d lain awake much of the night thinking of the right excuse, and by the time he kissed his still-upset Elena good-bye and headed off to the Ministry of Health, he was in full deceit mode. It was strange: He’d always thought of himself as a truthful man. Now, lately, lying had become as natural to him as taking a breath.
“Disease,” he said to Jose on the ride in, “disease in this country comes primarily from abroad.”
“AIDS, you’re thinking of,” Jose said.
“Primarily, but not only. Rats come in on the ships, and rats carry the plague. Norteamericanos sleep with our beautiful prostitutes—”
“Who are the finest in the world,” Jose said.
“Who are the finest in the world, and have supplies of the finest rubbers in the world for their own protection—”
“Which are North American rubbers.”
“And French. But those foreigners who do not use prophylactics—”
“And they are legion,” said Jose.
“They pass on gonorrhea, syphilis, the cousins hepatitis. Others bring with them various strains of the flu to which our immune systems are not accustomed.”
“If we could isolate ourselves completely, there would be no illness in Cuba,” Jose said.
“I would be out of a job.”
“But you would never be ill.”
“Verdad,” Carlos said. “Therefore, we must begin a campaign.”
“Por supuesto. Una campaña.”
“Sí. We must begin a campaign of sanitary health, a campaign of cleanliness and tidiness for all areas where the body of Cuba touches the outside world.”
“You are going to wash the thighs of our prostitutes with disinfectant. A brilliant campaign, Ministro. I volunteer for service.”
They pulled up in front of the Ministry of Health, a modern, ugly building on Calle Virtudes, built on the site of a mansion formerly owned by a mafia chieftain from Coral Gables. Before getting out, Carlos looked across the seat at his friend. He remembered how kind Jose had been to him during Teresa’s long illness and after her death; how loyal he had been throughout t
hese years, closer to him than a brother. He fought back a sudden urge to tell him everything. “We are going to begin a campaign of inspections in those areas touched by our foreign visitors—ports, tourist hotels, beachfront restaurants. We will do mandatory blood testing of workers there. I’ll draft the order this morning. Raul will approve it with a phone call. You and I will make our first visits this afternoon.”
“Claro,” Jose said. “Spitting in the face of the outside world, harassing our hard-currency workers, el Comandante will love it. This is why you are a ministro and I am a driver. You are a brilliant man.”
Brilliant, Carlos thought, walking up the grand front steps into the building over which he had presided for almost a decade. Brilliant, probably not.
HE SPENT THE morning drafting the campaign memos and instructing his coterie of deputies on how to get the message out quickly. As a symbolic example, he said, he himself would make some cursory inspections in the coming weeks. He would begin, that very afternoon, with the Port of Havana. Around the table his deputies nodded and dozed. He knew that two minutes after the meeting was adjourned, they’d rush off to telephone their friends at the port: The ministro is coming, clean your toilets, wash your faces and hands, take the afternoon off if you can.
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