The Good Assassin

by Paul Vidich

  “It’s a man,” another woman among the crowd called out energetically, and once she’d made that declaration other hotel guests arriving for their morning swim convened for the best view, attracted and repelled.

  Pryce smiled. “Sorry to get you here on such short notice.” He nodded at the SIM officer whose back was to them. “Captain Alonzo wanted you here.”

  Mueller listened to Pryce report how the body had been discovered, and he was surprised by Pryce’s casual manner. He seemed to go on longer than needed, as if he were waiting for Mueller to react, or interrupt, but then Pryce got to the point of their little chat. Pryce nodded again at Captain Alonzo. “He thinks it might be Toby Graham.”

  Mueller was surprised by the way Pryce said it, almost smugly.

  “Graham?”

  “Yes, Toby Graham. I’m as surprised as you.”

  “He suspects or he knows?”

  “If he were certain he would have said so. He said he thinks it’s him. The body is beyond recognition. It’s been dead a couple of days. Probably killed after all the bombs. Too bad you didn’t meet him in the bar.”

  Mueller ignored the comment. Graham dead? Mueller pondered the turn of events and then realized that Pryce was speaking again.

  “Captain Alonzo thought you might want to take a look and see if there is something—his shoes perhaps, or a ring—that you might recognize.”

  A great queasiness arose in Mueller. He had seen frozen, starved bodies along the Danube in the bitter winter of ’48, and there were gunshot victims too, but he’d never gotten over his reluctance to look into the face of death. “Sure.”

  Mueller could already feel the uncertainty of what lay ahead as they approached. It was one thing to see the corpse of a stranger, but the death of an acquaintance made it hard to avoid his uncomfortable feelings about the end of life.

  Pryce added, “We don’t have much to go on. If we are to understand this discovery of a body dumped in a hotel pool during the night, and it’s clear that he’s been dead a couple of days, we need to clarify certain things, such as whether or not it’s Toby Graham.”

  Mueller found it an odd statement. “You don’t agree with him?” Mueller nodded at the captain, whose back was to them. Mueller didn’t know the man and couldn’t see his face. He saw a wiry stranger in a starched suit, who stood perfectly still, hands clasped behind his back, and watched his men work to recover the body.

  “He would like to believe it is Graham,” Pryce said.

  Policemen had taken the long pole used to clean the pool bottom and used the brush end to hook an arm and pull the floating corpse poolside. It took three men to coordinate the movement because the brush end lost purchase and the gray, bloated corpse drifted back to the center. A second pole was brought to the operation and the combined effort of one policeman pulling, the other pushing, succeeded in getting it to a spot where it was tied down like a runaway barge. No one seemed to want to touch the body, but then Captain Alonzo ordered a man to search the pockets, a procedure that required the corpse to be rolled over. Mueller saw the exit wound on the back of the head, where the skull had exploded and brain matter was missing.

  “A leather wallet was found in the bottom,” Pryce said. “Probably thrown in by whoever dumped the body. It was stripped of cash and identification, but there was a photo of a girl. She was blond and the photo was taken against the backdrop of the Washington Monument. And this.”

  Mueller looked at a letter written in neat script. Immersion in the pool had made the ink run, but there were enough legible words to see it was written in English.

  “So, they think he’s American. I checked with the embassy to see if anyone had been reported missing. The police checked their records of the last few days. No one. Nothing. Nada. So you see where I’m going. It’s a mystery locked in a puzzle inside a crypt.”

  Mueller stared at Pryce. “The evidence they have to make them think it’s Graham is that they can’t identify the body as someone else?”

  “Can you tell me where Graham is?” Pryce snapped.

  Mueller looked at Pryce. “No. I can’t.” Mueller looked down at the floating corpse, which had righted. The distended cheeks and wide eyes were vaguely human. “But this is not him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Am I sure? No.” Mueller saw Pryce’s skepticism. “Toby Graham is shorter than me. This man is my height. I don’t know what happens to a body when it deteriorates. Does it stretch, get taller? I don’t know. But I wouldn’t start with the presumption that it’s Toby Graham just because you don’t know who else it might be. Dead American. No identification. That makes it Toby Graham? Sounds like wishful thinking.”

  Mueller turned and walked off. He stopped. “Is this the best these guys can do?”

  • • •

  In the taxi on his way back to his hotel. Mueller was certain the body was not Graham, although his certainty was more an act of faith than force of fact. As he drove through Old Havana, eyes catching the waking city coming alive, a thought came to him. There were times when your past catches up with you, and he wondered if that’s what had happened here—if it was indeed Toby Graham and his violent past had caught up with him. The thought lingered and was a fitting epitaph to the contradictory threads of Graham’s life. The logic of the language—time catching up—the implied moral principle that in the end you are the sum of your actions, was a satisfying notion, but still, Toby Graham dead? That was hard to believe. Graham was too smart, too clever, too prescient to be a hapless gunshot victim found floating in a swimming pool.

  The day was young when Mueller got back to his room. There was nothing to do until noon when Katie would drop by for their first excursion to photograph the city. Mueller used the time to draft his first impressions of Cuba. Holiday had paid for his trip and it would be bad form to take the money and not deliver an article.

  “The story of Havana is hard to decipher,” he wrote his editor, setting himself a tone that would infuse some tolerable truth to the piece, “even for people who have spent years here, but especially for the visitor who’s just arrived. Havana is a city in transition, busily trying to assert itself. The old city by the harbor has colonial churches, dark alleys, and fortress defenses left over from pirate attacks. The smart western districts of Vedado and Miramar have modern glass edifices and Cadillacs, and the local boast is that there are more here per capita than in Miami. And more police. Police everywhere. Comparisons here are all to the neighbor to the north, which is admired, excoriated, or dismissed, but it is always there in any conversation. And Spain too is here, not only in the language and the churches, but the guitars, the colorful clothing, and the easy Latin moods. It’s a blithe city, carefree and fun, and you see that in the bars, the lively commerce, the music, and everywhere you see billboards promoting packaged goods, declaring prosperity to people who walk barefoot. It is a young country bursting with ambition, but it hasn’t yet found itself as a nation. It seems Cuba’s principal business is selling itself to Americans—its sugar, its rum, its beaches, its women. In Havana anything is possible. That’s the line the taxi drivers use when they grab you at the airport and drive you ten miles to your hotel for a scandalous fare. They use the phrase like a proud trophy. White sand beaches, live sex onstage, razzle-dazzle casino gambling. I haven’t done any of it yet. We’ll see what I get to. And now to those attractions you can add car bombings. Ten in one afternoon. But the attacks haven’t closed any of the popular clubs, and police—swarms of police—are there in an instant to round up suspects, replace sandbags, and collect the sheeted dead.”

  Mueller added, “The little stink of a few rebels traipsing around the Sierra Maestra hasn’t driven off the intrepid tourist who booked his room months ago. The message of the city is clear. We are open for business.”

  Mueller drafted a letter to the director. There wasn’t much to report, setting aside his own arrest, which he didn’t want to explain, so he gave an account of his arrival, hi
s several meetings with Pryce, and then, knowing it would interest the director, he said he’d gotten into the swing of the work. He knew it was better to communicate often, even if there wasn’t much to report, or much he chose to report, because a lack of news had the potential to turn the director’s imagination into an adversary.

  But looking over what he’d written he saw that he had unintentionally misled the director. He hadn’t mentioned that Graham was missing. He’d written, without context, that Graham was the type of agent who was capable of faking his death as a way to cleanse the scent from his trail.

  • • •

  Mueller found Katie in the Nacional’s lobby impatiently pointing at her wristwatch. They made up for his being late and spent the day taking photographs, moving about the city looking for its truth—its faces, its poverty, its seductions. Mueller noticed how she got portraits without the subject knowing, and her stamina impressed him, as did the clever way she disguised herself in floppy straw hat, sandals, and baggy shirts so her hidden sex allowed her to move unnoticed among boisterous Cuban men who slapped dominos down at each turn of play. They entered a poor neighborhood near the Central Railway Station and moved from the busy boulevard into a maze of dark alleys filled with smells and loitering men. This was the other Havana, with its poor, its rhythms, its colors, where the white tourist face was an uncommon sight. In here, she’d said. Hostile eyes in dark doorways followed them as they walked and everywhere menace stirred.

  The silver body of her Leica drew the attention of a barefoot child who called to have his photograph taken. His dirty face glowed, Look at me. Katie ignored Mueller’s caution and had the skinny green-eyed boy pose with a defiant face at the sewer’s edge—a child with a surly expression. Older boys gathered and surrounded the scene and offered hammy poses, pleading to have their pictures taken. And when she complied they demanded to be paid, hands out, palms greedy. She waved off their request and their eyes were suddenly alive and threatening. Mueller saw it happen all at once—the stones gathered, arms raised—and they found themselves escaping down the alley with angry men in pursuit.

  She kept a cool, shrewd smile throughout. He’d reluctantly followed her into the alley with her reassurance that she’d been there before—a lie, he realized when she lost her way. He came to understand her insolence, her daredevil ambition, and he became convinced of her incurably dishonest nature. It made no difference to him. It was hard to carry resentment against a lively, forthright woman who openly used flattery as a tool of persuasion. He saw all this as he walked at her side and watched her snap photographs.

  Night followed day with a growing familiarity between them, and the buzz of midday street markets slowly became the exotic steamy feel of evening. They saw the promise of excitement in bars where coy Cuban women huddled with other women and drew the restless gaze of American sailors. And everywhere the closeness of couples walking along El Paseo del Prado, oblivious to vigilant police at street corners. Everywhere spontaneous laughter, sirens, and sullen lovers in the heat of the night.

  They hadn’t planned to go to his hotel room. They found themselves tempted by the idea that they were more interesting and spontaneous than the physics of a professional calculation. They read risk in each other’s face in the elevator. The room was dark when he opened the door and they left it that way so light wouldn’t cleanse the mood. In the dark they could be dirty. Passion’s talons were planted. She undid her blouse, fumbled with her bra, tossed shoes, and watched him strip down to socks. Moonlight glistened on their pale, naked bodies and they came together in a wordless embrace, cooled by the open balcony’s breeze. Her hand clasped his neck, her other hand held his to her breast, lips on lips, and they stumbled to the bed, kissing eyes and nose, and then they collapsed together, laughing.

  He was up early the next morning. Wind chimes from the hotel’s garden drifted in the balcony’s French doors and gladdened the room’s silence. Sunlight pouring through the slatted blinds cast banded shadows on the unmade bed.

  He thought Katie was pretending sleep, but when he drew close he saw her eyes calm, her mouth parted slightly, breathing lightly. She had turned onto her stomach and cast off the top cotton sheet so her arms lay at her side. Her body had pale sculpted modesty. She was a statue to gaze upon that he knew he could never possess. Yes, the first time they’d been intimate had been a mistake. Now what?

  Mueller had returned to his journal. He added to his observations to his editor—pondering how to include the phrase, “that worm of an island,” which had stuck in his mind ever since the editor had used it.

  “What are you writing?”

  Her voice startled him. She was sitting up in bed and had pulled the sheet to cover her breasts. Her eyes were wide and curious. He had the impression she had been observing him for some time.

  “You’re so preoccupied. Writing. Writing. Where did you go?” She had confused him. “I woke up and you were gone. I went back to sleep.”

  Police had called early and asked to see him in the lobby with a few questions to add to the ones he’d answered the day before. Mueller considered a lie. “The police found a body in a hotel pool. They thought I might know something. Coffee?”

  She shook her head, eyes narrow, and then she shrugged her change of heart. “Sure. I don’t care where you were. None of my business. What body?”

  “An American, they think.”

  She rose jauntily from the bed and wrapped her body in the hotel’s terry cloth bathrobe. She looked for a cigarette, but crumpled the cellophane package when she found it empty. She threw the package at him and he shifted in his chair so the hostile projectile sailed harmlessly past. She approached him and sat on his lap. She took his face in her hands so they faced each other and she touched her nose to his. She impaled him with her eyes.

  “What?” he asked.

  “What are you thinking? I saw you looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what am I doing here?”

  “I’ve never met anyone like you. Untamable.”

  She laughed hilariously. “You say the most stupid things. It’s hard to know what’s really on your mind.” She glanced down at the open journal that he’d covered with his hand. “About me? No, it wouldn’t be about me. I don’t think I’m even in your mind.”

  He removed his hand. “Read it.”

  She read a few lines, enough to confirm her suspicion, and then she evaluated him like a painter studying a model.

  “Hungry?” he asked. He saw he’d confused her. “Room service? Restaurant?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Before noon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay which?”

  “You choose. I’ll shower. Liz warned me you were hard to read. I saw you look at her the other day in the hotel when she first caught your eye. I swear you had the look of a—” She stopped herself, searching for the right word. “Your expression was vulnerable. I saw this real person. I thought, hell, who is he? Liz said the two of you once had a fling.”

  Mueller gave the story—a reluctant sketch of two friends with too much alcohol at a holiday party who found themselves crossing a line. He knew Liz would confirm the facts, or had already offered them, so he felt an obligation to be honest. He had only to provide the additional detail that it had happened before Liz married Jack.

  “She’s concerned about you,” Katie said. “She doesn’t know why you’ve come to Cuba. She’s happy to see you. I think she’s worried you’re still smitten.”

  “That why she set us up?”

  Katie shrugged. “She wants you to be happy.” She looked directly at him. “This is pleasant—you’re fun. We’ll look back at this little interlude and laugh. She knows you can help my career.”

  Katie’s eyes sparkled. “So gloomy. So much on your mind.” She nodded at the notebook. “Too busy to be happy.”

  Mueller had an impulse to laugh, but instead he stopped her mouth with a kiss that sh
e returned with surprising ardor.

  Suddenly she pulled back. She tweaked his nose. “Busy. Busy.”

  She hopped off his lap and began a stretch routine on the floor, rolling her head side to side, and then pulling each elbow forward to release shoulder tension. She bent over straight knees and placed her palms on the floor.

  It took him a moment to realize that she had forgotten about him.

  5

  * * *

  RESURRECTION

  SURPRISE IS a funny thing. It’s quickly lost in the rush of thoughts that follow the sudden and the unexpected—and that is what happened to Mueller when he opened an envelope that he found slipped under his hotel room door. Graham’s note gave a time and a place to meet.

  “Meet him, of course,” Pryce said.

  Mueller had gone to the embassy to show Pryce the note. An olive branch. An air-conditioned room on an upper floor, plain and empty. No windows. No natural light. No sense of time. Only a brace of limp flags and the vapid portraits of two heads of state.

  “You knew it wasn’t Graham in the pool,” Mueller snapped. “Why did you mislead me?” The question upended the moment. Mueller was irritated that the whole affair was becoming a grotesque soap opera in which he was a reluctant player with a bit part.

  Pryce’s bushy eyebrows arched. “Of course it wasn’t. Alonzo suggested it. I went along. It was helpful to see if you bought the story. You were uncertain so I knew you weren’t collaborating against me. After the incident in the bar I wanted to know if I was being played.” Pryce folded his hands and gazed solemnly. “I don’t want to be a patsy to the misguided intentions of a hotshot and his brainy fool friend.”