Diminov looked at Tania, but her face revealed nothing. She sat trying to push down thoughts she did not want to understand. She was ashamed that there was some small place in the broken part of her that wanted Guevara dead.
“Did you hear the question?”
The words seemed to be tumbling from someone else’s mouth as she answered. “In camp the food is prepared communally. Guevara makes a point of eating after the others have been served. It could not be done without…drugging all the men.”
Diminov grunted. “You would not object to the assignment?”
“Is my loyalty being tested, Comrade?”
Diminov smiled insincerely. “Of course not. You have extraordinary access to an important person. It is important to know what options we possess.”
Tania could hear the wind blowing through the trees and the traffic circling the edge of the plaza, a thousand small sounds building into a roar in her head.
She said at last, “I can be counted on.”
12
WITHIN THE MINISTRY of the Interior, Hoyle followed Smith down an impossibly long corridor, a cloister actually, the warm wind following them through the archways. Distracted, Hoyle hardly remembered entering the building from the street, and then they were inside a big, sprawling compound, all columns and arcades and courtyards. This place might once have been a nunnery. They turned right and then left, and Hoyle had to marvel that Smith seemed to know where they were headed. They came at last to an impressively carved door and pushed it open. Behind the door was a large room, a reception area, and beyond the offices of His Excellency Enrique Ruíz de Estrada Alameda, minister of information, and deputy minister of the interior.
Three secretarial desks faced the reception area. Oddly, the place was lit by fluorescent lights held in boxes suspended from a gracefully arched ceiling. Smith approached the closest secretary, a severe-looking woman, obviously the head gatekeeper. Hoyle turned slightly to his left and was taken aback to see the woman from the party at the presidential palace. The woman with the sea-green eyes.
Hoyle smiled as she turned from a filing cabinet and walked to a desk at his right. She nodded at him as she sat, but in her expression was no trace of recognition.
“Hola.”
“Salud,” Hoyle said.
Maria did remember him but perfectly gave the opposite impression. She fed a form and carbon paper into her typewriter, turning away as she did so, and Hoyle sighted a nameplate on her desk: Maria Agular. As Maria worked, Hoyle slightly averted his gaze, but his eyes stayed on her. He noticed her graceful, long neck and the way her black hair curled over her shoulders. Her eyes were so striking that he had almost failed to notice the simple perfection of her features. She was wearing a gray wool skirt and a shimmering silver top, and he could see the shape of her small, upturned breasts under her blouse. He made a deliberate effort to look someplace else and felt an odd twitching in his throat.
Smith finally prevailed upon the gatekeeper to use her intercom, and Hoyle cast his eyes about the office. Prominently placed were photographs of Minister Alameda with various luminaries. There was the de rigueur shot of the minister smiling with General Barrientos, but he was posed with other, better-known people as well: the United Nations secretary general, U Thant, Raquel Welch, and Fidel Castro.
The door to the inner office opened, and Alameda stepped out, impeccably turned out in a dark suit and a Harvard crimson tie. He crossed immediately to Smith, holding out his hand and smiling broadly as he came on. “Mr. Smith. I am delighted that I have a few moments between appointments.”
As they shook hands, Hoyle had a second to wonder how it was the minister had known which of the two gringos was Smith.
“I know you’re busy, Excellency, this will only take a moment. I was hoping we could discuss coordinating a press strategy for the areas affected by the bandits…”
Alameda’s eyes flicked to Smith’s briefcase, and he smiled again. “I do have a moment,” he said.
Smith and Alameda disappeared into the inner office. Hoyle drifted closer to Maria’s desk.
“Please don’t let me interrupt,” he said as she looked up at him. He did his best to charmingly continue the interruption. “When it’s something that’s only going to take a moment, I usually get to wait in the lobby.” This made Maria smile. He nodded to a photograph on the wall. “Is that—?”
“John Wayne.” Behind her, Alameda and a man with a big neck smiled from a posh restaurant booth. “When the people are famous, I usually wait in the lobby, too,” Maria said.
They both smiled. Hoyle wondered if people walked by her blinking in amazement. Her eyes were preternaturally green, the color of a mid-Atlantic swell, a wave that could kill a ship.
“Can I get you something? Coffee?”
“Nothing, thank you.” Hoyle looked around. “This is quite an office.” The space was grand, carved stone columns supported a ceiling comprised of several vaulted sections.
“It’s a little imperial,” Maria said. At that moment the gatekeeper stood behind her desk and crossed to some distant filing cabinets.
“You don’t sound Bolivian,” Hoyle said. “I’m sorry…your accent…I’m kind of an amateur language sleuth.”
“Nicaraguan.”
“Nicaraguan? Really? I’ve never been.”
“I was hired as a translator—at first, in the Ministry of Health. I am a nurse, actually. I speak French and German. Someone found out, and then I wound up here.”
They shared language as a calling, an attribute Hoyle self-consciously attributed to a need to please.
Smith appeared from the inner office. “Mr. Hoyle?”
Hoyle looked over Maria’s shoulder. Smith and Alameda were shaking hands by the door. Hoyle noticed that Smith was now without his briefcase.
Hoyle smiled at Maria. “I’d better go,” he said. “Nice talking to you.”
“A pleasure, sir.”
In the time it took Smith and the minister to walk to the door, Hoyle had scanned Maria’s desk, as well as the desk of the gatekeeper. His glance seemed so casual, they could have no idea that he had committed to memory the numbers on the dials of their telephones, and had scanned the papers on their blotters.
“You must be Mr. Hoyle?” Alameda said, smiling through impeccable teeth.
“Mucho gusto, Excellency.”
Alameda was about Hoyle’s age and slightly smaller; he had a disconcerting habit of standing too close as he spoke. “Colonel Arquero speaks of you very highly.”
“I’m flattered, Minister,” Hoyle said. The remark was a bit of a jab. Alameda knew Arquero well enough to despise him. Still smiling, Hoyle marked Alameda down as someone to remain wary of.
Alameda’s fingers came down on the corner of Maria’s desk. “Maria, I’ll need the lists for the UPI pool. In my office.”
“Yes, Minister.”
Smith opened the formidable door and stepped out of the office. Stealing a glimpse at Maria, Hoyle followed and pulled the door closed behind them.
They walked down the cloister some distance, allowing two uniformed police officers to pass before they spoke.
“Problems?” Hoyle asked. Inside the briefcase had been ten thousand dollars in crisp twenties, as well as a Cartier wristwatch.
“He liked the watch. From now on, we type it, and he preaches it like the gospel.” The gratuity accepted by the minister would allow Smith and Hoyle to control, or at least influence, the news from the battle area. Other payments would follow—the minister was a machine that burned money—but Smith would decide when the truth would be told and when the truth would be in short supply. There was an old saw in the CIA: “If it’s typed, it’s true.” What people were told would always be more important than what actually happened. In Bolivia, perception would now become reality.
“What’s with the picture of him and Castro?” Hoyle asked.
Smith shrugged. “His options are open.”
They walked on through the
cloister, shadows streaming at them in slabs of light and dark.
“Anything interesting on the desks?”
Hoyle shook his head. But there had been something on Maria’s desk. Jumbled together on her blotter were a list of journalists seeking expedited visas, a memo regarding mail deliveries, and an envelope with Maria’s home address: 312 Calle Cochabamba, No. 2. Hoyle meant to see Maria Agular again, and he intended to do it without Smith knowing.
They walked on, Hoyle again feeling his awkwardness and the disconcerted, agitated way he felt when he looked into her eyes. He did not mention this; nor did he reveal to Smith that Maria Agular from Nicaragua had lied to him about her accent.
Hoyle had recognized her inflection at once, and it was not the rapid-fire patois of Managua.
Maria’s voice was richly, and distinctively, that of an upper-class Cuban.
13
THEN IT WAS evening; pale blue with the first, bravest stars beginning to shine above the peak of Illimani, and La Paz finding its own lights, the modest neon of shops and cafés of the Prado and the yellow-orange of kerosene lamps blinking down from shanties on the hillsides. Maria Agular walked without hurry toward her meeting, scarcely even sauntering, she moved so slowly. She found reason to pause in front of a shopwindow on the Avenida Ismael Montes; the reflection was a genuine surprise because her expression was so grim.
The night deepened, and so did her mood, from distracted to disappointed and, finally, to something like glum surrender. Maria crossed the street at the Calle Potosí, a taxi slowing to toot its horn at her. She did not turn her head but kept on toward the lights of the Hotel Presidente. She wanted to be late, because she was certain he would be, lateness being the prerogative of great men, the privilege of any person who holds himself above another. The offhandedness with which he would greet her was even now an ache she felt. As she walked the last half block down the Calle Genaro Sanjinés, a pair of soldiers watched from across the street. They looked like boys, wide-eyed at the goingson of the city, innocents except for the weapons in their hands, short, fatal-looking contraptions with magazines curved under them like the horns of beasts. She glanced at the two soldiers but willed herself not to see them, because seeing them would make her think. It would make her think of things that were no more and things that would never be again.
It never became familiar to her, La Paz. She had no affection for the place and never would—the high, cool mountain air, the incomparably sapphire skies—sometimes she felt she was on another planet. It was so far from her home, the home in her heart, a tropical place of verdant, steep-sided mountains, of music and laughter and of the sea. And that was what she missed most, the sea—it was the only thing left for her to long for. Almost everything else in her life had been taken, and she had mourned for it so desperately that now she was numb. Her family was gone, wiped away like the film on a dirty window, gone and made an example of, her family name whispered from house to house, and all manner of things blamed on them, as many things as possible, because they were dead and now others had to live in the shadow of death and the knock on the door. Every person in her hometown of Playa Baracoa knew that any one of them could be denounced as a counterrevolutionary, lose their job, their possessions, and their home, or, worse, simply vanish into the night. Perhaps that was better—to disappear into the night. Better to go gently than be shot down, as was Maria’s father, Colonel Ignacio Augusto Cienfuegos. They killed him, los rebeldes, then his corpse was dragged behind a jeep and left on the beach for gulls to pick at. A day later, they came for Consuela, Madre, and her brother, too, and when they were gone, the house was divided into flats and given over to cane cutters. Maria’s home in Cuba was gone. Everything was gone except her memories of things that were no more, and she held on in La Paz like a discarded object, a tropical thing that had been drawn up by a hurricane swirling through the atmosphere and dropped in a high mountain place where the air was so pure and thin that it sometimes tasted to her like metal.
As she approached the revolving brass door, she blamed herself, for want of courage, for want of judgment, for everything, but now, more than anything, she blamed herself because she was on time, and at the indulgence of someone for whom she was a whim. But she put a smile on her face, her beautiful angel’s face, and the doorman held the door for her and tipped his hat. She crossed the lobby and promised herself that she would ask about the passport. She would insist, insist. And as she entered the grand lounge with its candlelit tables, she was so astonished to see Enrique Alameda—the great man himself—waiting that she forgot for a moment even where she was.
“Beautiful Maria,” Alameda said, and he stood. His fingers touched her elbow, and he lightly kissed her cheek.
There were only a dozen other people in the bar, half of them North Americans, and Maria felt a small flush of shame. She felt eyes upon her, as she always did; eyes that put her in context with him, Enrique Alameda, Excellency, ministerio de información, and her, esa mujer, that woman. It was a demeaning thing for her to see the sideways glances, to know what they thought—that she was the plaything of a powerful man, not much beyond flesh and paint and perfume.
Alameda smiled and gestured into the leather booth. Maria smiled back, her face a perfect mask, and sat. He took her wrap off her shoulders, and he was not the only person in the bar to notice the whiteness of her skin.
Two drinks appeared magically, Scotch for him and a glass of champagne for Maria. Predictable magic, these drinks would have appeared on any table in town.
“You are lovely,” he said. In response, she only looked at him through the candlelight; she knew it was not necessary to acknowledge so empty a blandishment. Alameda quickly went into an apology, just as meaningless, but he kept his eyes on hers as he spoke.
“I’m so glad that I’m able to see you,” he said. “After the misunderstanding at the reception.” He had invited Maria to the reception, then asked her not to wear evening clothes, and when she’d shown up, he’d calmly asked her to leave because she was underdressed. The hurt in this was lost on him. He apologized now only because she had made a trip all the way to the Plaza Murillo. Maria did not pay attention to the apology itself, or the heartfelt, regrettable circumstances that supported it. She took a sip from her glass and heard him saying: “I’m glad we have some time together now.”
She swallowed champagne.
“Please don’t be cross with me,” he said.
“We don’t have to talk of it,” Maria answered. “I am not angry.” Alameda had no idea that this meant exactly the opposite. He was happy to move on to other things, and inside a small part of her heart, she was happy that she would not have to unravel his thin excuses. She was angry at herself still because he had made her cry that night.
“Enrique,” she said, slightly louder than needed to carry across the small table. At this Alameda stopped speaking. He owned her, really, had dominion over her, but she had some small hold on him, a slight bit of purchase, and she used it now, again saying his name. “Enrique?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t wish to annoy you.”
“What makes you think you do?”
“You are busy, and to nag you is to annoy you.”
“Nag me about what?” he asked, sipping his drink. The ice rattled against the short, fat glass.
“My passport,” Maria said. She made her face empty, blank, and beautiful, as she did not want this to become a contended issue.
“I have it,” Alameda said. “It’ll all be taken care of.”
Maria’s Bolivian passport had expired, and Alameda had collected it from her, promising a new one. That was two weeks ago, and Maria had no papers, nothing to show at the roadblocks except her card from the ministry, and although that had worked until now, there might come a night when it would not.
Maria considered her words. She could not directly ask for her passport back—it was not hers, technically. The picture on it was hers, but the name Maria Celestine Agular
, that was not her name. The passport had been issued fraudulently, a genuine document with an alias typed on it. Maria was her Christian name, but the rest of the neatly filled spaces were fiction. Her birthday, the supposed place of birth, all lies save the address of the flat on the Calle Cochabamba that Alameda paid for out of ministry funds.
It was on the basis of this Bolivian passport that Maria had been able to travel from Mexico and work in Bolivia. After she had fled Cuba, there was an ugly incident with the Mexican immigration authorities—her Cuban papers were a hastily purchased forgery, barely good enough to allow her to purchase an airplane ticket, and when she arrived in Mexico, her documents were taken and she was made to register with the police. She had no money to ensure that she was granted asylum, and was three days from being deported back to Cuba when she met Alameda at a party at the French embassy. He took care of everything. Soon the police stopped harassing her, soon she had a residence permit and an apartment, and soon she was his lover. He promised her work in Bolivia and a place to stay. All of these things became debts that bound her to him. There were many: continuing protection and clothing and a bigger apartment, her job at the ministry and money to spend and food and jewelry—these things made her safe and kept, but now he had her passport, and that made her vulnerable again. Everything he had given her rested on the nationality, the false identity, the uncomplicated disguise that the passport sustained.
“I only ask about it,” she said evenly, “because of the state of emergency.”
“You have your card from the ministry.” He smiled.
“Of course.”
“It will do for the roadblocks.” He took a sip of his drink. “If you should ever have trouble, all you need is to call me. Even at home.” Now the power was his. Alameda knew women well enough to know a proud one. Maria would be eaten by rats before she would call him at home.
“Are you planning a trip?” he asked, toying with her.
Killing Che Page 11
