Hostage in Havana ct-1

by Noel Hynd

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ironically, Tio Antonio always felt safe in lawless Mexico. As the Perez family bodyguard, he liked the place, the people, the family he worked for, the food, and the chicas. The truth was, he preferred Mexico to a quiet place like Belize. Oh, he could ogle the wealthy American and European women on the beaches, but even that had its limits. They were beyond his reach, after all. So now it was good to be home, keeping an eye on the Perez family while his boss was away again on assignment, this time in America.

  This morning, he had escorted Senora Perez to the school, where they dropped off her children, and then to her job at the pharmaceutical company. Now, in his Mercedes, he had arrived back at the gates of the family compound in the southern suburbs of Mexico City. Time for relaxation. He could watch soccer on satellite TV until he had to pick up the children in the afternoon. He had to bring them home, and they would stay with the housekeeper, Maria, behind the locked gates until it was time to pick up Senora Perez. On most days, this job was pretty easy.

  In his car, he pressed the remote and waited for the two locked gates to open. There was no movement. He tried again. Still no movement.

  He muttered to himself. The electricians had been here twice in the last ten days to fix this infernal electronic gate, and once again their fix hadn’t lasted. Time to fire them. That was one thing that he didn’t like about Mexico – chronic incompetence. Manana was a popular religion, in addition to No es mi asunto - “it’s not my thing.”

  He stepped out of the vehicle. No one around. Good. He went to the brick pillars that supported the steel gates, still sighing about Mexican workmanship. He blinked in the bright sunshine.

  He put on a pair of sunglasses. He tried the key that would bypass the electronic system. He jiggled it. The keyhole was resistant to his touch too, which started to make him suspicious.

  Then he heard the familiar crude click and a metal bolt withdrawing from a clasp. The giant latch that held the two steel doors in place had given way. Much better.

  He walked to the spot where the two wide gates met. He gave them an aggressive push with his foot. With the usually noisy, rusty, aching creaks, the doors gave way and slowly opened, just the way they had so many times before. He put his shoulder to one and leaned hard, pushing it so that it swung wide. Then he pushed the other one the same way. He now had room to drive through into the Perez compound.

  From somewhere nearby came the sound of bicycle tires and then a gentle skid. He turned at the same time that he heard a woman’s voice, young and sexy.

  “?Senor?” a girl asked.

  He turned, slightly startled. A girl on a bicycle, a pretty blonde, had stopped. She wore short shorts, a snug T-shirt, a helmet, and shades. He had seen her in the neighborhood for the past few days. She was in her early twenties and probably lived in the gated compound up the road where a lot of foreigners lived, wealthy people who worked in Mexico City for big corporations. She apparently exercised by biking around the neighborhood, always in tight black bike shorts and a red and yellow shirt. Plus the helmet. There was no way Antonio or any other male in the area could miss her. She was sexy. Some man was lucky. Or was she someone’s daughter? She had smiled at him and waved in gratitude as his car gave way to allow her a lane to ride.

  But he also reminded himself that he must have been slipping. Pretty chica rubia or not, where had she come from? He hadn’t seen her this time until she had rolled to a stop. His mind processed quickly: well, did it matter where such a pretty girl had come from? Then again, people who appeared all too quietly set off alarms for him.

  He pocketed the key and smiled. “Buenos dias,” he said curtly.

  “Buen dia,” she chirped. She smiled back. “?Tiene aqua fria?” she asked. Cool water. That’s what she wanted. She did have an accent. Probably American. That made sense. Most of the wealthy people up the hill were American.

  He stared at her in surprise. Why was she asking him about cold water? Why didn’t she just carry some of her own? On the other hand, the house was empty. If he could entice this chica into the hacienda, well, it wouldn’t be the first time he had had some extracurricular fun during the daytime hours.

  She held up her water bottle, laughed, and shook it upside down to show him that it was empty. Then she shrugged and giggled, helplessly and flirtatiously. He assessed her carefully. Well, he had some cold bottled water in the car. The Perez family always kept some. They could spare some. “Momento,” he said.

  He motioned with his thumb to the hacienda. Yes, she was coming onto him, he decided. The girl was probably the trophy wife of some nasty Yankee businessman who didn’t have the physical stamina to keep her happy. He had seen this before among American women in the neighborhood. They’d go on the prowl during the day, looking for a local toro to take care of them.

  Well, he decided, why not? He gave her a nod. She dismounted from her bike, swinging one lithe leg over the other. She was, he noted, absolutely spectacular.

  The wooden baseball bat that came from behind Antonio was aimed straight at the back of his knees. It smashed home with a sickening crack, followed by another bat that came from his right side and whacked his arm just above the elbow with an even louder crunching sound.

  At the same time as Antonio bellowed in pain and groped for his pistol, the woman with the bicycle quickly charged him. From behind him, helmeted men in the uniform of the Mexico City Police swarmed. They grabbed him and hit him hard again from behind. Then they shoved him down onto the pavement. Antonio fought like a madman. Despite the searing pain in his legs, he threw his powerful elbows at the men behind him. His broken right arm pulsated with pain and flew wildly at obscene angles. But he caught one of the men in the jaw and one in the gut. He clenched his good fist, threw a backward punch at one of the men, and caught him in the center of his face. The man howled profanely and loosened his grip.

  But one of the men hammered at Antonio’s right knee again with the bat and caught it dead on. Antonio screamed again and cursed even more profanely in Spanish. He groped with his left hand for the gun he carried under the left armpit of his jacket. His hand touched the weapon, but one of his assailants grabbed his wrist with both hands and forced it back and up. Another forced Antonio’s thumb backward so hard that it felt as if it were about to snap.

  Then the blonde girl slipped a quick hand under his jacket and yanked his gun from him. She threw it away. Other hands were on his throat and fingers were in his eyes.

  One of the intruders had a police club and seemed to enjoy using it. He walloped Tony on the left side of the collarbone, then thrust the club butt first into his groin.

  On the ground, Antonio retreated into a shell, trying to protect himself. The fight was over, and he knew these people were probably here to beat him to death. He felt his hands yanked behind his back and cuffed. His mouth was hot. Salty little shards of a tooth floated on his tongue. There was no fight left in him now.

  The bicycle girl knelt and leaned over him like a death angel, a hypodermic needle in her hand. Everything hurt. He could barely see, but he then managed to catch a glimpse and the sounds of something nearly surreal.

  “Should I give it to him now?” the female calmly asked in English.

  “Yes, do,” came the response, also in English.

  Antonio felt the jab as it came through the seat of his pants into his left buttock. That was followed quickly by a tingling iciness radiating down in his backside, from the middle of the left buttock outward. Within seconds, the iciness exploded into a warmth that enveloped his whole body. Antonio had tried opium once and the sensation was similar. Suddenly, nothing hurt as much. Suddenly nothing mattered much at all. His vision blurred. All hands seemed to be off him now, and he lay in one big puddle, his own wrists manacled behind his back. He felt as if the sun was only a few feet over his woozy head.

  The young woman stood. Then his eyes widened. An angel, he thought to himself in his incipient delirium. The blonde had come to delive
r him, but he couldn’t decide whether he was to be delivered to death or to somewhere else. That was his final thought. The whiteness exploded like a couple of big steel gates slamming shut. Then everything went black.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Alex met Sam Deal in the vast street-level floor of one of Manhattan’s biggest jewelry emporiums, a fortress of a building on New York’s 57th Street. Alex arrived a few minutes before 2:00 p.m. and slowly wandered among the display cases, one eye on the diamond rings and the other looking for Sam.

  She spotted him as he emerged from one of the elevators east of the lobby. The store employed him as one of their heads of on-site security.

  Sam was burley and had an eager bounce to his gait as he approached her. He was wearing a suit. He was pink-faced and glowing. He smiled when their eyes met.

  “Alex, right?” he said. “Beautiful as ever.”

  “Hello, Sam,” she said.

  MacPhail and Ramirez lurked in the background. Sam noticed them right away. “What’s with Sonny and Cher?” he asked, jerking his head toward them.

  “I got backup today,” she said. “I’m on a case. They’re watching my back.”

  “Lucky you,” he said.

  “Not a problem, is it?” she asked.

  “No. Shouldn’t be. We sit at one table, they sit at another, right?”

  “That’s how I pictured it, Sam,” she said.

  “Okay, that’s kosher,” he said. “I’m doing a late lunch. We’re getting out of here, right? You want to talk?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “I know the place,” he said. “Come on.”

  For years, Sam had been the presumed head of an unofficial group of CIA-financed operatives known as “the Nightingales.”

  They worked out of Miami, focused on Latin America, and were far too disreputable for Alex’s tastes. But they had their uses. For years they’d handled hit-and-run jobs that were too dirty for the CIA to touch directly. They knew things, they knew people, and Sam, now in his late sixties, was the poster boy of the whole operation.

  Semi-retirement agreed with him. He seemed busy, content, and eager to display the dark knowledge he had accrued over a lifetime. He let Alex go through the revolving door first; then they were on Fifth Avenue. Ten minutes later they were seated in the back of a small, noisy delicatessen on West 56th Street. A waiter, without being asked, placed a Corona directly in front of Sam. Alex declined. MacPhail and Ramirez settled into a table close to the door as Sam started his oily schmooze.

  “You should have been a model, Alex, really. You got the face, the legs, the figure. You wear clothes as if they were invented for you. Why did you choose to get into our scummy line of work when you could have been sitting by a pool in Malibu having your picture taken? Answer me that before I answer anything for you.”

  “Just crazy, I guess, Sam.” In spite of herself, flirtatious Sam made her laugh.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he snorted, “aren’t we all?” He sipped directly from the green bottle.

  “So who you work for? I know it’s government. It always is unless it isn’t, right?”

  “Fin Cen, New York.”

  “Oh, yeah. Financial crimes. Money. You’re down on Wall Street, right?”

  “Nearby. Right,” she said.

  “Yeah. That’s right. You got brains too. That’d disqualify you from modeling. Wall Street, huh? Plenty of financial crime there. The whole place is a financial crime. Banks. Stock markets. Convertible debentures. Predatory lending. Bailouts for people who shouldn’t even be out on bail. They should all be in jail, but I don’t run the world. Plus, I wouldn’t put them in jail; I’d just have them shot. Anyway, what’s on the plate today?”

  “For starters, does the name Paul Guarneri mean anything to you?” she asked.

  “No. Should it?”

  “Probably not.”

  Sam thought for a moment. “Mafia guy?”

  “Connected family,” Alex said.

  “New York?”

  “The city and Long Island.”

  “I don’t know him,” Sam said. “Does he say he knows me?”

  “I never asked.”

  “Then don’t. He’s probably connected. Italian. If he’s on some list of yours and he’s Italian, he’s connected. I’m Italian, did you know that?” Sam asked. “All Italians are connected to the Mafia in some way, large or small.”

  “Really?” Alex asked, bemused.

  “No,” Sam countered. “But why you asking me?”

  “Because I want to pick your brain about Cuba,” Alex said.

  “Ha! What about it?” Sam asked.

  “I heard you’ve been there,” Alex said.

  Sam sipped more of his beer and smiled. “You’re a clever little fox, Alex,” he said. “You going to Cuba?”

  She remained silent. She winked.

  “Enjoy your trip,” Sam said. “The rum is fabuloso.”

  “You were around for the Bay of Pigs in ‘61, weren’t you?”

  “I was a kid. I was around for the aftermath. So what about it?”

  “I’m a newbie on Cuba, Sam. Impress me with your inside knowledge.”

  It was just the encouragement that Sam needed. He laughed.

  “What do you want to hear about?” he asked. “The really bad old days of the ‘40s, when Lucky Luciano came back to the island after exile in Italy, or do you want to hear about how Sinatra used to be a courier for money from the American mob to the Havana casino operators, then would sing at private performances for his mobster friends?” Sam laughed again. “Or how about when JFK was a U.S. Senator and a hood named Santo Trafficante set up an orgy for him at the Hotel Comodoro?”

  “Start with JFK, but skip the rest,” Alex said.

  Sam smirked. “That’s the best part. But I’m not surprised. Get down to business, no fun and games with you, Alex LaDuca.”

  “Why don’t you take me to the Bay of Pigs?” she said. “Playa Giron. That’s what they call it in Spanish, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.” Sam shrugged. “But I don’t know too much more than anyone else,” Sam said. “Kennedy was president by then because Mayor Daley in Chicago stuffed all those ballot boxes and tipped Illinois to the Dems. Anyway, it’s a year after the election, and JFK rushed an invasion plan into play on the idea that Castro would later acquire a stronger military capability and be able to defeat it. Fact was, Castro already had that capability. The CIA also told the president that Castro only had an obsolete, ineffective air force. The agency said they weren’t in combat condition and had no communications in the Zapata Swamp area and had no forces nearby. That’s where the Bahia de Cochinos is, the Bay of Pigs. Everything about the intelligence was wrong. They expected mass defections among Cuban military, and none materialized. The Cuban air force had Lockheed T-33 jet trainers, the same planes the U.S. had given to Batista to fight the rebels. We figured they didn’t have pilots, but we were wrong. They were more effective than predicted. Then Castro’s army moved to the beach and crushed the exiles with greater efficiency than any estimate had anticipated. In fact, the Cuban jets were largely responsible for the exiles’ ammunition losses. Kennedy, having approved the plan with assurances that it would be both clandestine and successful, quickly discovered that it was too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful. Ten thousand exiles might have gotten it done. Twenty thousand would have walked over the Cuban force. But fourteen hundred? Forget about it. There. That’s the front half.”

  He paused. Sandwiches arrived. They fell silent. When the waitress was gone, Alex asked. “What’s the back half?”

  Sam continued, “The Bay of Pigs had every element for a perfect disaster, and that’s what it turned into. Then the suits at the CIA flipped around and claimed Kennedy had betrayed them when they had set him up with implausible intelligence.”

  “They came in at dawn, right …,” Alex asked, “the invasion force?”

  “Yeah. And that was a problem too
. The brigade relied on a nighttime landing through uncharted reefs in boats with outboard motors. South shore of the island. Even with ample ammunition and control of the air, the brigade couldn’t have broken out of its beachhead or survived much longer without substantial help from either American forces or the Cuban people. Neither happened.” He shook his head and continued. “The invasion was intended to provoke an uprising against Castro. Instead, it gave him a military victory and a permanent symbol of Cuban resistance to American aggression. Great move, JFK. Way to go, CIA. Idiots!”

  “Do you still have contacts on the island?” Alex asked.

  He took several seconds to answer. “Not really,” he said. “It’s been a long time. There have been so many other fish to fry in the last few years. Colombia. Venezuela. Honduras. Nicaragua.” He shrugged. “I could make some phone calls if you want. I used to know a guy named Gilberto in Old Havana. Used to sell postcards and rum to tourists – and guns, Argentine passports, and black-market dollars to people who wanted to leave the country. I have no idea if he’s still alive. If he is, he’ll talk to me; if he’s dead he probably won’t. I could do some asking.”

  “If you would, that would be nice,” Alex said easily. “And look, maybe you could run the Guarneri name past a few of your old Playa Giron contacts,” she added.

  Sam laughed and grabbed the notepad in front of him. “What’s the full name?”

  “Joseph Guarneri,” Alex said. “G-U-A-R-N-E-R-I,” she continued, spelling it as Sam’s pudgy hand quickly wrote. “He could be down as ‘Giuseppe.’ Born in Italy.”