The Good Assassin

by Paul Vidich

  Callingwood sipped his depleted drink. He spoke tartly. “Tell me, is there a distinction between a man who applies electrodes to a prisoner’s genitals and the man in Washington who sits behind his desk and pretends he doesn’t know it’s happening, although he knows very well that he paid for the battery?”

  Mueller knew all at once what he disliked about Callingwood. He personified the category of Englishman living overseas who clung with affected smugness to colonial prejudices, precious in his manner, sardonic, alcoholic—who thought everyone else, but especially the Americans, inferior.

  “That’s an odd question,” Mueller said.

  “Odd? Why odd?”

  “You seem to know the answer.”

  “Look,” Callingwood said. He drew closer. “You Americans are bungling this arms embargo. You excoriate Batista for turning guns on civilians, but you’re doing nothing to get rid of him. You pay lip service to democracy here.” Callingwood leaned into Mueller with his gin breath and said smugly. “Hypocrisy, sir, a vice dressed up as a virtue.”

  In the dark archive of his mind that stored resentments Mueller remembered his editor’s comment—crumbling cold water castles not fit to sleep in. Mueller smiled benignly. He took a step back from Callingwood, but found the Englishman, now engaged, had more to say.

  “You’re a friend of that fellow, Toby Graham. Is he here?” The Englishman’s eyes came back to Mueller. “Any truth to the rumors?”

  Everyone had a rumor on Graham. Mueller didn’t react.

  “Works for the CIA,” Callingwood said.

  “That’s what they say about every American who doesn’t have a good story.”

  “Is he?”

  “If I knew I wouldn’t tell you. If I said he wasn’t you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “It’s well known.”

  Mueller scoffed. “The only thing well known about Toby Graham is that he isn’t well known.”

  Callingwood smiled. “So I haven’t shocked you. You don’t look like someone who is easily shocked. Join us in a game of rummy?”

  Mueller had no interest in a game of cards, but he was happy to use the invitation to escape further conversation with his female interrogator. Callingwood was the only one in the group with his heart in the game, and when a thoughtless error was made in the order of play he got irritated. A third gin martini helped him accept the indifference of the group’s play, and he took to talking, compelled by the others’ silence.

  “It’s strange and violent weather,” he said. “These hurricanes. I have seen tempests’ winds fell the knotty oak and I have seen ambitious oceans swell and rage and foam, but never until tonight, never until now with you, did I feel the strife of a card game like this.”

  That got the others to look at him, but they thought he was drunk so they carried on with their indifferent play.

  The wife of the United Fruit executive looked up from her cards and spoke to the woman opposite, the president of the Camagüey Tennis Club.

  “The Bancrofts left. And the Baileys. Luis and Bella Fulup opted to fly to Minneapolis last week and left their place minded by a caretaker. Helen Longanecker was recalled by the Baptist ministry. The Louis Jeffrey Millers are gone. And the Victor Rankens and the Harold Pitts, with their retrievers, on a plane sent by his company. You can’t get a ticket out on a commercial airline. They’ve stopped flying. The rebels control the approach and they have threatened to send up rockets at any aircraft that tries to land. Unless you have your own airplane I’m afraid you’re stuck.”

  The woman threw down a card. “There is a rumor the embassy has arranged to send a plane, but I don’t believe it. They have become useless.”

  She looked around the table. “Have any of you seen the William Andersens? Or the teacher Dorothy Whitten? Have they gone too?” She took a card from the discard pile. “Well, things will work out. We do a service here that they need. Who is going to run the telephones when my husband leaves? We do have a role to play. Even communists need telephones.”

  Mueller smiled tolerantly. He took the opportunity to excuse himself and then with a borrowed flashlight made his way upstairs to his room. He still hadn’t seen Katie, but he’d seen Graham outside lending a hand at the hard work of trying to close a storm shutter torn loose by the wind.

  Mueller lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He flicked the flashlight on and off, and then when that bored him, he lay in the dark and listened to the howling wind and lashing rain. He lay that way for a long time, thoughts drifting, the end of one becoming the start of another.

  At one point Mueller rose and opened his journal. The desk faced the shuttered window and he illuminated the pages with his whiskey candle. He picked up his pen, listened to the wind, forming a thought. He wanted to capture some of his impressions of the darkened day in the event he could find a way to weave the storm’s drama into his travel piece. Then it struck him that little, perhaps nothing, of what he’d so far experienced in Cuba was suitable for his editor’s assignment.

  His thoughts drifted. He went back over the story. The detail of the assault rifle and its Czech origin kept him from feeling tired. He began to see there was a way to think about Graham’s life as spun from a single filament of fact woven loosely into a fabric of sheer audacity. His mind returned to the spy’s world of reasoning that calibrated everything—hope, despair, loyalty, trust. His thoughts swirled, keeping him from rest, and he felt the terrible confinement of his room.

  Mueller walked to the end of the hall and wandered the house until he found himself in the library. Tall shelves of old books called out with their histories, distracting him. Suddenly, he was aware that he was not alone. He turned and saw a woman at a window looking out at the dark shape of the wind-bent algarrobo tree, standing perfectly still, meditating or praying. The howling wind was muffled by the glass.

  “Liz?”

  He had startled her.

  “Everything okay?”

  A pause. “No, everything is not okay.”

  Mueller was at her side.

  She looked at her hands. “I am afraid of what will happen here. Can there be a good ending?”

  They stood side by side, faces dimly lit in the flickering storm lamp. Mueller felt their hearts bonded by the sadness she carried, which made him tolerant of her long silence.

  “This is what you want to know.” She turned suddenly to him, placid eyes alive. “Toby followed me here.” And then words tumbled out. “Somehow he learned my address. I didn’t know what to think at first. He showed up the day after we met in the Nacional. I had gone back to leave you a message and there he was in the hotel lobby. I didn’t know what to think. I was stunned, then angry. He could see that. I had pushed so hard to get him out of my mind. All that hard work for nothing. It has been four years. The world changes—my world changed.”

  She took a breath. “I agreed to see him that evening. What choice did I have? We walked along the Malecon and suddenly Havana at dusk looked heartbreakingly beautiful. We strolled along the seawall cooled by the mist from the crashing waves. There were a few laughing couples, but we had the evening to ourselves. He didn’t have a plan, nor did I, but when we saw a small restaurant we went in. There were only a few tables. I remember the smell of the sea air. All my senses were heightened and each moment came to me and lingered. We sat on the patio and the breeze swept away the mosquitoes. I was too nervous to be interested in food. After all, it had been four years since I’d seen him—and I didn’t look at the menu. Nor did he. When the waiter arrived he ordered a drink and I had a Coke. Alcohol would make me say or do something I’d regret.

  “We ordered food not because we were hungry but because dining gave us time to stretch the evening, and when the food arrived I hardly touched mine. He was gentlemanly and apologetic and he gave me some crazy story about why he’d come—something about the days we’d spent together and how he was different—better. Changed. I felt a panic and I looked around. I was afraid we’d be seen by some
one I knew and then I’d have to lie about why I was there. He saw me and said, ‘No one will know me.’ I replied, ‘But they will know me.’

  “It was a strange conversation, one of those moments in life that you dream about, and when it does happen you are unprepared. He asked me why I hadn’t said good-bye in Guatemala, or left my address. I told him he was out of danger. The wound had healed and he didn’t need me. He was asleep when I left, I said, and I didn’t want to disturb him. It was a lie and I don’t think he believed the lie. I wasn’t ready to accept that he had come back into my life. I am thirty-six years old, for God’s sake. I’m married. I’ve built a life here. Is it perfect? No, but I’m not ready to throw it away on a romantic impulse.”

  The storm had strengthened as the day grew late, and the howling wind drew Mueller and Liz closer. The jeopardy of the moment deepened and turned profound. Smells of rain drifted to them and branches ripped from trunks flew into the air. A woman with wounded memories finds it helpful to succor the pain by sharing thoughts with a friend. And so it happened.

  Liz led Mueller to a leather couch in the middle of the room.

  “I’ve never told this to anyone, but it’s time. I want you to know. You of all people should know. For whatever happens.”

  Liz described how she’d met Graham while traveling from Guatemala City north through the mountains. Jack, she said, was attending an agricultural summit sponsored by the State Department. She found the speeches boring, the participants a dull crowd of ranchers and corporate farmers, so she took a long weekend trip alone to the ruins at Zaculeu. She traveled by bus from Quetzaltenango and during the trip the axle broke, stranding passengers. Toby happened to drive by in a jeep. She was the only American among the passengers and he offered a lift.

  The jeep lurched and bounced on the curving mountain road and she was tossed around. The proximity of their bodies made her jittery—alone with a stranger. She remembered being thrown into his lap and she remembered too there was music coming from the jeep’s radio. She apologized for the contact, acknowledging to Mueller her impulse to apologize for things that weren’t at all her fault. His reply was among his first words in what was to become an animated conversation between two people sharing a ride in a remote place—life stories coming out between strangers.

  “Truthfully,” she said, “I liked the idea of visiting the Mayan ruins, but I also wanted to get away from Jack. Toby and I just hit it off, and I saw all these things in him that I didn’t see in Jack—or hadn’t seen in a long time. I was trapped in my marriage and this drive in the mountains with this handsome, quiet man was a pleasant diversion. Jack had wanted me to accompany him on his business trip and then he abandoned me, so I went off on my own little adventure.”

  She paused. “I remember what he was wearing: khaki pants, a rumpled short-sleeve shirt, his arms tan, and he was lean from heat and work. He gripped the steering wheel and I remember thinking he had strong hands—hands without calluses—and I wondered how he had come to be driving the Guatemalan mountains that day. After all, it was the middle of nowhere. We both laughed at the coincidence. It was a long ride and I found myself, and I think he did too, surprised at the ease with which we openly talked about ourselves—our past, our hopes, our sadness, our yearning. All things I wouldn’t dare say to a close friend, but I could say to a stranger because there was no consequence. We would come to our destination and go our separate ways—never to see each other again.”

  She looked at Mueller. “It’s happened to you, I’m sure. It happens to everyone.”

  She turned the red string bracelet on her wrist, lost in thought. She lifted her eyes. “Two hours into the drive we were sideswiped by a speeding bus on a narrow curve. I remember one moment there was music on the radio and then a deafening crash. The sudden explosion rang in my ears for hours. I opened my eyes and saw the jeep had gone off the road and tilted against a wood guard rail. Through the window I saw we were hung up on a post over the edge of a wide embankment that dropped sharply to a gorge. We knew those seconds might be the last seconds of our lives. The crash removed any hint of formality between us. Possibly because of the intimate conversation we had shared, my only thought was that our lives had been entangled in some previous life, and that we were meant to die together. That thought came and went in a flash, but in the moment it was pure. We were connected in a way that I had never connected with a man. We were, in my mind, alive, then dead, then alive again. I knew that something had changed between us. The intimacy of death brought us close. There was no room for fear; moreover, the thought I might die in that remote spot was overwhelming.”

  The jeep, she said, had tipped from its perch and suddenly rolled down the embankment. It turned over and over on the slope, and her only thought as the jeep approached the gorge’s edge was, again, that they were fated to die together.

  “Yes, as strange as it may sound, that notion created a bond. The thought calmed me like a giant hand placed on my forehead, quieting the fear. And in the moment it seemed inevitable.

  “It was okay. This was my time to die, I thought.” She paused. “The jeep continued to tumble down through snapping branches until it came to an abrupt rest. It had propped against a tree at the precipice, and hundreds of feet below was the river. Everything was quiet except for the rapids. It was chaotic in the jeep. Bags and luggage were thrown around. I didn’t hear him. There was only the sound of a spinning tire, and beyond that, deep in the gorge, rushing water.

  “I called his name. He wasn’t in the driver’s seat. I managed to extract myself from the vehicle when the metal groaned. There was a loud snap, like a whip, and the jeep fell to the river. The whoosh of the jeep falling ended when it hit the rocks. I was shaking. I was left feeling alive, but empty.

  “For a moment I thought Toby was in the jeep and that I had survived and he had not. I found him on the slope just below the road where he’d been thrown, unconscious. I was paralyzed for a moment, happy he was alive, then overwhelmed by a responsibility to get help. He had a terrible gash on his forehead.

  “I stopped a passing truck and the driver took us to Quetzaltenango. There was a small hotel and I got him into a bed with the driver’s help. There was no hospital and the local clinic was closed. I found a French doctor from an archeological expedition who came to the hotel and stitched the gash on Toby’s head, and an arm wound. He referred to Toby as my husband because that was how I had registered us, and I didn’t correct him.

  “I stayed with Toby five days. He had a high fever the first night and I stayed up and cooled him with a wet cloth. When he finally drifted off I saw his canvas bag, which the driver had retrieved from the slope. Inside I found a pistol, maps, and a radio.

  “I asked him about the things the next morning, when the fever passed. He admitted little of what he did—I assumed it was little, and that there was much more to his story than he let on, but I didn’t ask further. I nursed him and in those days and nights I found myself close to him.”

  Liz looked at Mueller. “You could say I found myself drawn to him. Caring for him, cooling his fever, and when he was healthy, we became lovers. It was startling and frightening. I woke on the fifth morning and realized it was a mistake. I left early at dawn the next day while he slept. I left a note.”

  She looked down at the bracelet, one hand turning the string round and round. She looked up at Mueller, eyes defiant. “I was married. I wasn’t ready to give up my life. I was frightened of the work he did. The coup was in all the newspapers.”

  “So,” she said, “that’s what happened. I left him there. I didn’t give an address and I didn’t ask for his, but he had my name. It’s what one does when one is disoriented. I was disoriented, although at the time I didn’t know it. I thought I was being responsible. Toby was present in my thoughts the next years, but each day a little less. You could say I’d begun to forget him. I lost track of his presence in my past as if the incident only had consequence when it happened. Packed away in a
n archive of my heart. I picked up my life where it had left off. I met Jack in Guatemala City and life went on. I told Jack nothing.”

  Liz paused. “I kept it from him because we weren’t intimate then. I hid everything. I made up a visit to the Mayan ruins. I lied about being out of touch.” She touched the bracelet. “I lied about this. Toby gave it to me. I kept it to remind me of what happened. In the months that followed I forgot about Toby, but then without warning he’d pop into my mind when a jeep passed, or I saw a man similar in build on the street, or when I read about Guatemala in the newspaper.”

  Liz let out an anguished laugh. “In a way it always seemed inevitable that one day he would show up in Havana. Then he did.”

  Liz explained that she had received a letter from Graham six months after the accident, but she had not answered it. She placed it in a locked jewelry box and occasionally she had unfolded it, flattening the edges, and read the plea by the man who had briefly blazed into her life.

  “That’s it,” Liz said. She stood abruptly. “Now you know.”

  6

  * * *

  RECKONING

  “YOU’RE SURE?” Pryce asked.

  Mueller sat across a gray metal conference table and watched the FBI agent contemplate the smoke that rose from the cigarette he held with two fingers. The ash had lengthened and he tapped the end into his coffee cup. He brought his eyes back to Mueller and waited for an answer.

  “I’m sure.” Mueller felt the claustrophobia of the U.S. Embassy’s top-floor conference room. No windows. No sense of day or night. The freezing air-conditioning made the meeting seem unnatural. He had flown out from the damaged airstrip after a weeklong effort removed downed trees and repaired holes left by the receding flood waters.

  “You don’t sound sure.”

  “Maybe you don’t believe me.”