Without Honor

by David Hagberg

  “They’ll leave us alone,” Trotter said, coming the rest of the way into the room.

  The other man was half a head shorter than Trotter and very slender. His complexion was olive, his hair jet black and shiny with hair lotion. He wore a long, thin mustache, and when he grinned McGarvey saw that two of his teeth were gold. McGarvey guessed him to be in his late forties, although he was dressed youthfully in baggy trousers with pleats in the front, a gaudy sport shirt open to the navel, and some sort of nearly collarless sportcoat, the sleeves of which had been pushed up to just below his elbows. His shoes were narrow and extremely pointed. He was a Latino. There was no mistaking it.

  “You don’t know each other?” Day asked McGarvey. “I’d like to establish that right off the bat.”

  “Never seen him before in my life.”

  “Good,” Day said. “Francisco Artimé Basulto, most recently a guest of the Dade County Jail in Miami, before that a resident of Havana, and before that an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  The Cuban grinned, his gold teeth flashing as he came jauntily around the couch, sticking out his hand. His fingernails were long and well manicured. He smelled of bay rum and whatever lotion was on his greasy hair.

  McGarvey didn’t bother to stand, nor did he shake Basulto’s hand. He had seen this type before. He could almost hear the story the little man was going to tell. It was going to be some sort of a shakedown, no doubt. McGarvey was surprised Trotter had fallen for it.

  “I don’t give a shit if you shake my hand, see?” Basulto spat, his accent heavy. “You think I care? As long as you came to help, why give a shit?” He swiveled on Trotter, who had taken on a suddenly hard expression.

  “Sit down,” Trotter snapped.

  Basulto stepped back, wounded, but then he sat down with a flourish, crossed his legs, and lit a very long, thin cigar.

  “I’ll get the cognac,” Trotter said, and he left. Day took his seat and Basulto stared defiantly across at McGarvey.

  It was a time for remembering. Twenty-five, thirty years ago, at the end of Batista’s Cuba. Trotter brought them back and McGarvey had to wonder what was so important about those days. Since then we’d lived through the riots of the sixties, the Vietnam War, the horror of assassinations, Watergate.

  Roger Harris, a CIA case officer working out of the embassy in Havana as a third secretary for economic affairs, was beating the bushes for recruits when he came across Basulto, an angry young man looking for a savior. Castro’s name was on everyone’s lips, and had Harris come three months later Basulto almost certainly would have taken to the hills.

  He was brought to Havana, and before he could get himself into any trouble, he was flown up to Miami where he spent two weeks in a southside safe house learning the entire wealth of what the agency had got from its OSS heritage and quite a few new things it had invented on its own. Weapons, hand-to-hand combat, radio communications, secret writing, letter drops, tails—anything that would help keep him alive and useful when he was returned.

  Basulto was a natural back in Havana, running with the high rollers down from the States. With his flash and gift of gab, the agency training he had received, and with Roger Harris running the plays in for him, he was a hit. He became the lapdog of the rich and famous who haunted such places as the Copa, the Lido, and the Paris Revu.

  Through his rich American connections, Basulto was invited to the kind of parties attended by Batista’s cabinet ministers and other high-ranking government and military leaders … along with their wives and girlfriends. For a couple of years, until Batista’s fall, Basulto’s product was said to have been the best they had ever seen.

  At the end of 1958, when the government finally collapsed, Batista left the country, and Castro came triumphantly down from the hills, Basulto took off his glad rags and went home to the farm. The U.S. embassy was closed and sealed, our concerns in Cuba being looked after by the scanty American Affairs Interest Section in the Swiss embassy, and our agency operations severely curtailed.

  “Our friend here would have been burned in any event, had the end not come when it did,” Trotter said.

  Basulto said nothing. He seemed to be waiting.

  The wife of a certain colonel in Batista’s defense planning establishment apparently lost her heart to Basulto. The colonel understood what was going on, but he actually encouraged it because Basulto was ostensibly supplying the Cubans with intelligence he supposedly gathered from his American contacts.

  “And for all we know, he probably did give them hard intelligence,” Trotter snapped.

  Basulto sat forward, an angry glint in his eyes. “I never told those bastards anything except what Roger told me to tell them. I love the U.S.A., I swear to Christ!” He crossed himself and raised his right hand. There was a heavy gold chain on his wrist, a gold-cased Rolex on the other.

  From what Trotter could gather, Harris did not leave when the other Americans left. He hung around for a time, laying very low of course, until things became too difficult, and he had to pull out. He was forced into it.

  But an odd thing happened. Harris brought Basulto out of Cuba and pointed him in the direction of Mexico City. It was a definite no-no because Harris apparently was working on his own.

  The name Roger Harris meant nothing to McGarvey, but he knew the type. They were almost a legend in the Company. The agency was fairly new at the time, and a lot of bright young case officers, many of them recently out of the military service, some of them transferred from the State Department, were trying their best to carve niches for themselves. The heights never loomed so brightly for the right young man as they had in those days.

  “I loved that man,” Basulto said softly. “I want you to know that Roger Harris was absolutely first rate in my book … the very tops … a real man.”

  5

  “They left Cuba in early June of 1959,” Trotter said. “Harris returned to Washington, but our friend here got a car and drove out to San Diego, where he entered Mexico at Tijuana.”

  “It wasn’t so easy getting out of Havana,” Basulto said. “Uncle Fidel hated Americans. He was telling everyone that Batista was an American puppet.”

  “Our friend here was on the hit list, of course,” Trotter interjected. “He had supplied Batista with information.”

  “That was playacting.”

  “He couldn’t have lasted very long. Perhaps Harris felt he owed it to him,” Trotter said. He shook his head. “No way of knowing for sure. But Harris got back to the Latin American desk and our little scumbag here was on the loose.”

  “I don’t have to take that!” Basulto cried. “Goddamnit, Mr. Day, I don’t have to sit and listen to that kind of talk, do I?”

  Day leaned his head back on the couch and closed his eyes. He crossed his legs. “Sorry we had to bother you like this, Mr. McGarvey,” he said apologetically. “John, I want you to take Mr. McGarvey back home, and then I want this scumbag on the very next flight back to Dade County. I don’t ever want to see his miserable face again.”

  “Yes, sir,” Trotter said.

  “No,” Basulto cried in real terror. “Goddamnit, listen to me. I’m not kidding around here.”

  McGarvey admired the technique, but he wondered what it was for.

  “Then stop your nonsense,” Day said equably.

  “I put my life on the line for this. They all think I’m ratting about the coke train. They don’t know. My life is on the line if I go back.”

  “Your life is on the line here,” Day replied.

  Basulto’s nostrils were flared, his eyes wild. He was panting. “All right,” he said, holding out his hand. “I just don’t like being called names. Especially when I’m with friends.”

  Everyone looked at him. The man was amazing. Hope springs eternal, McGarvey thought, and sat forward.

  “Excuse me, may I ask a question here?”

  Basulto eyed him warily, but Trotter nodded.

  “When the end came, you went hom
e. What happened next? Did Harris drive down and pick you up? Telephone you? What?”

  “I had a wireless. He told me to come.”

  “He told you to come to him. Told you: ‘Come along to Havana, Artimé, I am taking you away from all the bad things.’ Is that it?” McGarvey asked.

  Basulto seemed at a loss for words.

  “I just want to get this early stuff straight. I want to get the picture very clear.” McGarvey could hear the mean edge in his voice.

  “There was a code word,” Basulto said weakly. “We had a regular schedule.”

  “Christ,” McGarvey said, shaking his head. “You lying bastard.”

  “Goddamn you, you sonofabitch,” Basulto cried, jumping up, his fists clenched, his knuckles white.

  “Sit down,” Trotter shouted.

  “You were going to burn Harris, weren’t you,” McGarvey continued calmly. “You were going to trade your case officer’s safety for your own!”

  “I loved that man!”

  “I’m sure you did, once you were back in Miami with him,” McGarvey said. “The wonder of it all is that Harris went along with you. If it had been me, I would have shot your miserable ass.”

  “I couldn’t stay in San Luis … sonofabitch. They would have come after me. Any day. I was dead meat for sure. It was just a matter of time.”

  “You radioed Harris you wanted out?” McGarvey asked.

  “I tried, but there was no answer,” Basulto admitted. “He had apparently shut down the station. I buried my radio and went up to Havana.”

  “In June,” Trotter interjected. “Is that right?”

  Basulto nodded. “I knew where he was staying. I went to him. He was easy. Told him I wanted out. Told him I’d do anything for him. Anything.”

  McGarvey held his silence.

  “We drove down to Matanzas that afternoon and flew out that night.”

  Day opened his eyes and sat up. “Why didn’t Harris just leave him?”

  Trotter explained it. “The bastard didn’t have to say a thing to Harris, don’t you see? He could act the innocent and get away with it. He knew he was being followed. Harris knew it as well. So he had to get them both out.”

  A car, moving very fast, passed outside on the road. They could hear the driver changing gears somewhere farther up the hill, and then it faded.

  Basulto grinned, his sudden mood swing dramatic. He sat down with a flourish and crossed his legs. McGarvey had the urge to get up and smash out his teeth.

  “I’ll tell you, Roger was a good man. I did what I had to do. You would have done the same. I got no apologies to make. Without me you’d still be in the jungle with your pants down.”

  “He must have been an embarrassment to Harris,” McGarvey said.

  “He had a job for me,” Basulto was saying. “Wanted me to go to Mexico City for him. I told him no problem, I would do anything for him. Anything!”

  “I don’t care,” McGarvey said. He was tired. It was time to go. He started to get up.

  “Wait,” Trotter said sharply. “Please, Kirk, just let’s finish this. Then you can decide.”

  “You can’t believe this miserable bastard.”

  “Maybe not in all the details. But if we send him back he’s dead, and he knows it. He’ll tell the truth from now on.”

  “Absolutely—” Basulto started, but McGarvey cut him off.

  “What’d Harris tell you in Miami?”

  Basulto blinked. “He was mad at me. Said he had saved my ass, and now I was going to have to save his. I remember it as if it happened two days ago.”

  “What’d he hold over your head?”

  “Nothing … I swear on my mother’s grave!”

  McGarvey just waited.

  “There was this assignment,” Basulto blurted. “There’d be money and girls and action. Mexico City is a big place.”

  “He gave you money? Bought you a car?”

  Basulto nodded. “And papers, too. I was an American.”

  “In exchange for what?” McGarvey asked. “What exactly was it you were to do for him in Mexico City?”

  “There was a place on Morelos Avenue called the Ateneo Español. I was to set up shop any way I wanted and just see what I could see.”

  “What was this place?”

  Basulto shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. There were a lot of Communists there.”

  “Cubans? Mexicans? What?”

  “Them. And Russians, too.”

  “How were you supposed to report to Harris?”

  “There was a café I was supposed to go to on Wednesdays at noon if I had anything. I could leave it in cipher with the waiter.”

  “If there was an emergency?”

  “There was a number in San Antonio, Texas. I was to call long distance.”

  “Harris’s sister,” Trotter offered.

  “He was working outside his charter?” McGarvey asked.

  “Apparently.”

  Basulto set himself up in a small apartment just off the Plaza de la Constitución y Parroquia de San Agustin de le Cuevas, in an area called Tlalpan on the south side of Mexico City. The forboding walls of Morelos Prison were a couple of blocks away on the Avenida San Fernando, and even though it was no longer used as a lockup, it gave him the creeps.

  “I could just see the place from my apartment. And it made me so goddamned nervous, I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

  “It made you think how you owed your freedom to Roger Harris,” McGarvey suggested. He couldn’t keep the sarcastic edge from his voice.

  Basulto didn’t bother to reply. He glanced at Day, who seemed indifferent.

  “Let’s just get on with it,” Trotter said impatiently. “You told us you could see the Ateneo Espanol from your apartment.”

  “There was a lot of activity going on,” the Cuban said. “People coming and going, you know. At night they would hold meetings on the second floor. The windows were open, and if you walked past you could hear them arguing like crazy people about the future of Latin America, about the people’s revolution that would someday come to the U.S. But I didn’t believe any of it.”

  McGarvey raised an eyebrow.

  “It was all bullshit,” Basulto argued. “It was a cover. The real work was going on somewhere else within the building.”

  “White noise,” Trotter mumbled.

  There was no big deal about Basulto’s presence in Mexico City at the time. Strangers were coming and going all the time. One more was hardly noticeable. There was the café a block away where his contact worked, but after the first week he only went there to pass on his reports, figuring he’d probably be in the city for a long time and he was going to have to conserve his money. Of all the statements Basulto had made so far, that to McGarvey was the wildest.

  He went fishing then, he said. Looking for a hook that might lead him to bigger things, just as he had been taught in Miami.

  Basulto had taken a couple of dry runs past the building, which looked more like an ordinary cultural club than a hotbed of revolutionaries. Such places were very popular at the time. But in Miami, Harris had taught him that repetitious activity would almost certainly be noticed. Besides, he had been given the warning that whatever was happening down here was damned important, not only to Harris but to them all.

  He purchased a set of powerful binoculars, which he taped to the top of an ordinary photographer’s tripod, and set up the rig in the window of his living room so that he could see the front entrance to the Ateneo Espanol.

  “I ate my meals and slept by that window,” Basulto said with a touch of pride in his voice. “I’ll tell you, I even dreamed by that window. Thought about everything right there. It was my salvation up there as I watched the world go by. Looking … always looking. Two o’clock in the morning a dozen people might show up, see. The lights would go on upstairs and the meeting would begin.”

  “What were you looking for?” McGarvey asked. “Harris must have given you some idea. You were watching for s
omeone specific? Back in Miami he told you that he had saved your ass, and now it was your turn to save his.”

  A wild look came into Basulto’s dark eyes. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He sat forward fast. “If he had been more honest with me, I could have saved his life!” he cried.

  “Roger Harris was murdered?” McGarvey snapped.

  Trotter nodded glumly. “But he’s getting ahead of himself,” he said.

  “We’re chasing a murder mystery, John?”

  Trotter waved it off. “Nothing like that, Kirk, believe me. Just hear what this little bastard has to say.”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Basulto said defensively. “Goddamnit. He just sent me down there to watch and to report back to him.”

  “Every Wednesday at noon you were to give your report, in cipher to the waiter at the café?” McGarvey asked. “That was the drill?”

  “Yes.”

  “He gave you the pad?”

  Basulto shook his head. “We used a book, a novela: For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was funny because the guy was very big in Cuba.”

  McGarvey digested this for a moment. There were so many loose ends. Why did he bother? Why him, the thought hammered insistently in his head.

  “That was for routine reporting. The San Antonio number was for emergencies.”

  Basulto nodded, but then realizing where McGarvey was leading him, froze.

  “Emergencies,” McGarvey said sharply. “He must have told you back in Miami what constituted an emergency.”

  Again Basulto looked elsewhere for some assistance, some moral support. He was obviously a man on the edge of a very dangerous precipice; he was looking for help. But Day was suddenly quite aloof from the proceedings.

  “We told you that we would give you protection,” Trotter said.

  “I don’t know him!” Basulto cried, barely glancing toward McGarvey.

  “I do.”

  Basulto looked away for a long moment, then he lit another cigar with shaking hands, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke out through his nostrils. He seemed to be calming himself; McGarvey had the impression that it might be an act.