Without Honor

by David Hagberg

“He told me I would know an emergency when I saw one.”

  “Get on with it,” Trotter prompted.

  “Nothing much happened in the first few weeks,” Basulto picked it up again. “I watched the people come, I watched the people go. Really rough characters. But from where I was sitting they could have been anyone, you know. Mexicans, Cubans, Guatemalans … but all Latinos, all of them third-rate revolutionaries who preferred to stay behind and talk while Uncle Fidel went home and won the war.”

  After a while, Basulto said, he fell into a routine of catching catnaps during the daylight hours when there didn’t seem to be as much activity. Around seven or eight in the evening, things usually stepped up at the Ateneo Español. Most of them came in by foot, a few of them had motorcycles, and very few came by car. It got to the point where he began to identify some of them. The midget, the fat man, the greaser who always wore dirty white shirts (he looked Panamanian), the two women who came hand-in-hand. They were an odd lot, and he began to make up stories for each of them. The midget was with the Peruvian circus. The fat one was a pimp. The girls, of course, were dykes, and the one he swore was Panamanian was a mad bomber who killed children.

  One night in the fourth week, very late—probably around two or three in the morning—a large American car pulled up and parked just across the street from Basulto’s apartment building. He had not been looking through the binoculars because no one had come to the Ateneo for the last hour, though there was quite a crowd over there that evening. It was very hot, and all the windows were open. He remembered hearing a lot of shouting and laughing and even a radio playing loud music. It was all background noise. All cover.

  Two men got out of the car. (Basulto recalled thinking it was a Chevrolet or a Buick—long, with a lot of chrome and very big, flashy bumpers.) One of the men was short, on the husky side, with thick, dark hair. The other was tall, good-looking and very well dressed. Obviously an American. He stood out a mile. Together they walked down the street and entered the Ateneo, Basulto watching them all the way, now through the glasses.

  “It was a change. It was something different. And it scared hell out of me. Here was an American and another man coming to the headquarters for Communist revolutionaries for all of Latin America. Something very big was going on.”

  “Did you know either of them?” McGarvey asked.

  Basulto shook his head. “I watched the place all night, but it wasn’t until morning—just about dawn —when they came out, walked back up the street, got in their car, and left.”

  “Who drove?”

  “Not the American. The other one.”

  “Any sense of who he was? Another American?”

  “No, he was no American. He was a Russian,” Basulto said, positive. “A big man.”

  “How did you know he was Russian?” McGarvey said in wonder. He glanced at Trotter, whose eyes were bright.

  Basulto wet his lips. “I didn’t know at the time, see. But I could have known it. The way he dressed, the way he looked. I was used to dealing with them. They were all over the place in Havana.”

  “Did you get the license number? Did you try to follow them?”

  “I didn’t know what to do. Roger told me not to make waves. I was supposed to be the invisible man. His eyes and ears.”

  “Had he mentioned this American or the Russian to you in Miami?” McGarvey asked. “Were they your targets?”

  “No,” Basulto snapped, but then he corrected himself. “There were no targets at first. That came later.”

  For a moment no one said a thing.

  “Get on with it,” Trotter said. “What happened next?”

  “I was goddamned scared, like I told you,” Basulto said. “I took the bus downtown to the post office and telephoned the San Antonio number Roger gave me.”

  “He told Roger to come,” Day said, sitting up. Like Trotter’s, Day’s eyes were bright. It seemed they were on the verge of something very big.

  6

  “I didn’t know what to expect, but after the call I felt relieved, you know. Roger was coming and he’d know what to do. I was even afraid to go back to my apartment that morning. Revolutionaries are one thing, but a Russian and an American together, that was something else.”

  McGarvey was brought back in his mind to his old days in the field. To his own tradecraft, which had been considered very good. “After the San Antonio number answered, what’d you say? Were you given instructions?”

  “No instructions, nothing like that,” Basulto said. “We worked it all out ahead of time in Miami. I called the number he gave me and a woman answered. I told her I was alpha. That’s all. Then she hung up.”

  “That was your emergency signal? Just alpha?”

  Basulto nodded.

  “Then Roger Harris must have had some idea of what you might run into. I mean, without any sense of your emergency, just on the strength of that one code word, he was going to drop everything and come to you? Was there a time limit on his arrival?”

  “Twenty-four hours. He’d meet me at La Alameda, a park downtown on the south side. Juárez Avenue. At noon.”

  “He’d just be standing there, big as brass. No fallbacks?”

  “If he was wearing a suit and tie, it would mean he was clean, and I was to walk around the park in a clockwise direction. He’d follow to make sure I hadn’t been made.”

  “He thought there was a chance someone would be there watching him as well as you?” McGarvey asked. He was trying to make sense of this. “I mean, as early as Miami he set up these precautions?”

  “I was just following his instructions!” Basulto shouted in frustration.

  “But you liked it. This was exciting.”

  “I tell you it wasn’t what I expected. Nothing was like I figured it would be in Mexico City. There were a lot of angry people there. Big things were happening.”

  “Yes,” McGarvey said dryly. “Did you stay on the streets all night?”

  “I went back to the apartment that afternoon. I figured I’d better lay low.”

  “What was going on at the Ateneo?”

  “Nothing. Not a goddamned thing. It was spooky as hell. It looked as if the entire operation had been shut down. The American and the Russian show up and bang!—the very next day everything cools off. Nothing happened all that night. I know. I couldn’t sleep. I was awake the whole night, watching. But there was nothing.”

  “Harris showed up on schedule?”

  “Just like he said he would. He was wearing his suit and tie, and he looked goddamned beautiful to me. I practically ran around the park. He caught up with me in front of the Hotel del Prado, which was right on the corner. He told me to calm down and took me upstairs to his room on the third floor. It looked out onto the street. He told me to calm down, and he was nervous and crazy. I thought he was on something and I made a little joke, but he practically exploded. ‘This isn’t some kind of a goddamned game,’ he shouted. He said it was my graduation exercise. After this was done, I’d be able to write my own ticket. We’d both be able to call the shots. This was the Company talking, you know, Mr. McGarvey. I mean, if it hadn’t been for Roger I’d be dog meat back home. He asked me to do something for him, and I did it. We were going to have a long association together. ‘Profitable,’ he kept saying. And goddamnit, I believed him.”

  “But it didn’t work out that way,” McGarvey said softly.

  “It wasn’t my fault, goddamnit. I mean, Christ, how was I to know—”

  “Roger Harris was evidently in over his head,” Trotter interrupted. “As far as we can tell he made no contact with the Mexico City chief of station. He was working this on his own. It led to his downfall.”

  McGarvey glanced up. “That was July of 1959?”

  “Closer to August,” Trotter said.

  “Roger sat me down and went through everything I had done, everything I had seen and heard, step by step from the moment I had left him in Miami. I told him about selling the car in Hermosillo, a
nd about my new identification in Guadalajara, and about my apartment. He was mad at first that I hadn’t done exactly what he told me to do, but then when he thought about it, he admitted that I had probably done the right thing. He was a good man, I mean it. A big man. He could admit his mistakes. I don’t think I liked him better than that morning.” Basulto looked from McGarvey to Trotter and then to Day for emphasis. “I was just a kid then. What the hell did I know. Roger was everything.”

  “Harris, among other things, was his bank,” Trotter said dryly. “If I know my man here, he probably held out for more money.”

  “That’s a goddamned filthy lie!” Basulto cried. “We’ve gone over this ground already. I told you, I loved that man. I wouldn’t have done a thing to hurt him.”

  Harris had probably been blind, McGarvey figured. He had seen it in others. The man was working way outside his charter. Looking for the big coup that would give him his battlefield commission.

  “Don’t be tiresome,” Day said softly. “Your neck is still on the line here.”

  “I told Roger what I had seen the night before,” Basulto plunged on. “I told him that the Ateneo had all but closed down. I had to go over and over it again, ten times for him. He wanted every single detail. The color and make of the car. What kind of clothes they were wearing. How they parted their hair, for Christ’s sake. Were they clean shaven or not? I could see a lot through those glasses, but they weren’t that good. So then he brought out the photographs. And there the Russian was. There was a picture of him getting out of the car. One of him standing in front of a hotel. One as he was coming from an airplane with a group of people. But there was no mistaking him. No mistake at all. It was in his eyes.”

  “As best as we can gather, they were surveillance photos probably taken right there in Mexico City two years earlier,” Trotter said.

  “KGB?” McGarvey asked.

  Trotter nodded. “A very sharp individual. One of the very best, bar none. Name of Valentin Illen Baranov.”

  “How about the other one?”

  “That came later. We’re assuming—only assuming, mind you—that it was the American for whom Harris was looking. And he was probably the one who killed Harris.”

  “I know he was,” Basulto said sullenly.

  McGarvey jerked forward. “What—”

  Trotter interrupted again. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Kirk. Believe me, I want you to hear the entire story in chronological order. It’s essential that you understand the timing. I want you to be perfectly clear.”

  Nothing, of course, was ever perfectly clear for McGarvey. He had built a career in the Company on seeing beyond the obvious in supposedly “clear” operations. He had listened to the sages lecture at the Farm outside Williamsburg. They had called such things “anomalies.” Look for the glitches in the fabric of any operation, and there you will find an anomaly that more often than not will lead to the core of the situation. To the truth.

  Basulto was watching them with a strange, expectant look in his eyes, as if he were a condemned man, knowing the ax was going to fall and waiting for its coming.

  “There was no photograph of the American?” McGarvey asked.

  “No, but Roger had an idea who it was, I think,” Basulto said.

  “But he wasn’t sure.”

  “No. He had a camera with a very long lens and high-speed film. He showed me how to use it, and the next time they showed up I was to take as many pictures as I could.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  Basulto didn’t catch McGarvey’s meaning.

  “You were to return to the apartment and take some pictures. Meanwhile, what was Harris going to do? Come along with you? Stay there at the del Prado? Go home? What?”

  “He was going to stay there for forty-eight hours. If something turned up, I was to come back to him. Eight, noon, then eight again at the park. First the east side, then the north, and finally the west.”

  “If nothing came up in that time?”

  “It didn’t. Nothing happened. The Ateneo was a closed shop. And Roger went home.”

  “You met with him a last time, though?”

  “Sunday night at eight o’clock. We went back to his hotel, and I told him that no one had shown up.”

  “And how was Harris then? I mean, was he disappointed? What?”

  “Nervous,” Basulto said. “He told me that I would probably be pulled out of Mexico City before too long. He hinted that something very big was happening.”

  “But he wanted you to stick around at least a little while longer?”

  Basulto nodded. “He said we still had a real shot at breaking this thing. If only I could get a clear photograph, we could write our own tickets. He kept saying that. It was a very big thing for him.”

  “But it scared him.”

  “Scared him silly, Mr. McGarvey.”

  “He never told you who you were after … I mean other than Baranov?”

  Basulto shook his head. “He said the Russian was a very big cookie. He kept saying how Baranov was so young, and yet he was running the entire Soviet system of networks in the Caribbean. He took over everything that Oumansky set up in the forties.”

  “Constantine Oumansky,” Trotter interjected. “He was the Soviet ambassador to Mexico. Killed in 1943 in a plane crash. He set up the entire Carib. network.”

  “Which was still going strong under this Baranov in the late fifties?” McGarvey asked.

  “It’s still going strong now, from what we gather,” Trotter said.

  “There is a connection … then to now? A bridge?” McGarvey asked incredulously.

  “The Golden Gate,” Day chirped.

  They waited for Basulto to continue.

  “I was to call the San Antonio number from different telephones around the city every day. When it was time to leave I would be given the word.”

  “And then where were you to go?” McGarvey said. “Back to Miami?”

  “Guatemala City.”

  Again McGarvey was startled. It showed on his face because Trotter sat forward, his eyes bright.

  “They were starting to train for the Bay of Pigs invasion. A camp had been set up on a coffee plantation at Helvetia.”

  “He must have been among the first to arrive.”

  “Harris was involved from the beginning because of his operations in Cuba under Batista. He pulled Basulto into it to provide them with the local knowledge they’d need,” Trotter said.

  7

  The rain had finally stopped, and the sun had begun to peek out from under the clouds. From where he sat, McGarvey could look out the window, across the road at the trees growing up along the wall of the valley. The branches were dripping, the leaves glistening in the light. Marta would be at the apartment, worried about him. Or perhaps she had gone shopping. She would stop at the odd moment to cock her head (it was a characteristic gesture of hers that he found attractive) and think about him. Or at least he hoped that was the case. He hoped she wasn’t looking for him. It would make it that much more difficult when he came home this afternoon.

  Trotter had gone into the kitchen to get more coffee, and Day had jumped up and was grazing among the books on the shelves, leaving Basulto and McGarvey alone for just a moment.

  “You weren’t too unhappy about leaving Mexico City?” McGarvey asked softly.

  Basulto poured some cognac into his cold coffee. He raised his head. “No, but I wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of going to Guatemala. They’re a bunch of farmers down there. They don’t know anything.”

  “About Mexico City. Did you ever get the feeling that someone was watching you? That someone down at the Ateneo knew what you were doing?”

  Basulto smiled. “You could be Roger’s twin, you know, Mr. McGarvey. He asked me the very same question. He was worried that I’d be tumbled sooner or later.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  “Worried?” Basulto laughed harshly. “I was worried the entire time I was t
here. Let me tell you, they were some desperate characters.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Basulto’s eyes narrowed. “You could see it just by looking at them. Roger told me to be very careful of this Russian. He said the man had eyes and ears everywhere.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “What’s this?” Day said, bounding back across the room. “Getting acquainted, are we?’”

  “Just waiting for the coffee so we can get on with it,” McGarvey said.

  Something flickered in Basulto’s eyes. Cunning? Fear?

  Day turned. “Trotter, for God’s sake, let’s speed it up here,” he shouted.

  Moments later Trotter appeared in the doorway with another carafe of coffee. He hurried in, poured more for Day, Basulto, and himself, and then settled down.

  “Helvetia,” he said, out of breath, starting them off again. “Harris was there waiting for his boy to show up. But there was no further debriefing. No words. Nothing about the Ateneo Español. It was taboo. Here was Basulto, one of Harris’s experts from the Cuban days, down to help out with the big project.”

  “Didn’t you find that odd?” McGarvey asked, directing his question to the Cuban. “In Mexico City he was excited. All of a sudden it’s over?”

  Basulto shrugged. “There was the American working hand-in-hand with Baranov. I figured him for a double. I didn’t think Roger wanted that spread around. And I didn’t know who to trust.”

  McGarvey was barely able to keep from making a sarcastic remark about trust coming from the lips of such a blatantly untrustworthy opportunist.

  At first the remote training camp up in the Guatemalan mountains was nothing more than a collection of shacks at which a handful of Cuban radio operators were being trained. But throughout that year, and all through 1960, people kept streaming in. Eventually more than fourteen hundred recruits were in combat and infiltration training, and a big airstrip was carved out of the hillside. Basulto spent most of his time briefing the combat troops on the terrain and the waters around the Bahía de Cochinos (the Bay of Pigs) southeast of Havana. In the old days he had run a number of operations in the region for Harris, so he knew the bay fairly well.