The Good Assassin

by Paul Vidich

  She cocked her head and tossed her hair. “That’s an odd word for you to use. I didn’t know heart was in your vocabulary. It’s not a word I expect to hear from you.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not how I think of men like you. The work you do. Or did. Have you really gotten out? And now you teach bloody Shakespeare.” She laughed. It was a brittle laugh. “I’m sorry.” Her face flushed and her arms collapsed over the steering wheel.

  Mueller watched her agitated state. She maneuvered the Land Rover around potholes deepened by the hurricane. He was aware that she was driving faster than she should, swerving to avoid the perils, and she took one sharp bend in the road at high speed. A Brahman bull stood in the middle of the road. Liz honked but the large, stubborn animal lifted its head without concern. Liz brought the Land Rover to a skidding stop a few feet from his horns.

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The bull flicked its tail and remained in front of the Land Rover as an obstinate roadblock. Mueller opened his window and threw a stone. The bull kicked up a hind leg and lumbered off.

  “Thank you, George. It almost killed us.”

  “I had nothing to do with it. He spotted a cow in the field over there.”

  Liz laughed. She had been driving a short distance when she turned to him. “I’m sorry I called you heartless. Sometimes I think Jack wishes he’d gone into your line of work. Ranching bores him now.” Her voice drifted. “He finds other distractions. He won’t admit it, but the idea of Cuba changing excites him. He is good at bribes, but he is tired of them. Like he is tired of me.”

  She was driving fast again, having allowed her foot to get heavy on the gas, and the Land Rover sped along. Mueller was uncomfortable with her mix of fraught emotion and reckless driving, and he gripped the handhold to keep his head from bouncing against the roof. “You’re going too fast, Liz.”

  “Am I? Sorry.”

  Liz braked, bringing the Land Rover to a sudden stop. Her shoulders shook and there came one convulsive heave that racked her chest. She stayed that way for a long moment—righteous weeping—and then it passed. She composed herself. Her brave face was streaked with tears and her cheeks flushed, but her eyes were fixed and determined.

  Mueller placed a hand on her shoulder. He didn’t say anything, nor did he know what to say. It took a special kind of person with a giving heart to offer sympathy, and he thought, yes, she was right. He didn’t have that type of heart.

  “I mean it. I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to call you heartless.” She looked at him. “How many sorrys is that? I always say I’m sorry and sometimes I say I’m sorry when it’s the other person who is at fault, but to say I’m sorry is my way of dealing with things. Apologizing for other people’s mistakes. I am too empathetic and you, I think, not enough.”

  She looked at Mueller. “I know you mean well. I couldn’t be you. I wouldn’t want to be someone who was numb to the misery around her, able to ignore what I saw.”

  “Better to be you than me,” he said.

  “Men are so stuck.” She snapped the word.

  There was a beat of silence. “Don’t repeat any of this to Jack. It would only confuse him. And of course you can’t say anything to Toby. Do I have your word?”

  Mueller gazed at her. He considered whether to offer advice, but that would require he reveal an alarming detail. He had no answers for what would surely be her urgent questions, so he nodded, but said nothing.

  “Everything seems to be coming undone at the same time,” she said. “My marriage. This life.” She turned to Mueller, eyes diverted from the road, and said fiercely, “I don’t love Toby.”

  Mueller looked at her. Be careful. “Of course you don’t. How could you.”

  “What was between us could not endure. Affection like that happens in one moment in a time and a place—like a Christmas globe with snowflakes—but that magic isn’t life. This is life.” Her hand waved at Hacienda Madrigal’s front gate and the tall palms that lined the driveway approach to the home. Jack’s pickup was parked in front. “My home.”

  Mueller thought he heard her sarcasm incorrectly, but when he looked to confirm, she was already talking over her comment.

  “I have a duty to all this and an obligation. The only thing I don’t have is a child. That would seal the contract, wouldn’t it? You put up with a lot to protect a child. But I have all this.” She waved her hand across Jack’s pickup, rusted machinery at the barn, unweeded gardens gone to seed, a hammock strung between two trees, and the crumbling brow of the main house. “This stuff.”

  She looked at Mueller. “Dinner is in an hour. What will you do now?”

  “Write, I suppose. I’ve pushed off the deadline. Events are overtaking the premise. Soon I’ll have to write an advice piece on how to escape a war zone.”

  “I don’t mean that. What will you tell Toby?”

  “Nothing. None of it,” he said. “None of what you shared.”

  “I hate the word shared. I haven’t shared anything. I’ve spoken up.” She looked directly at Mueller. “Is he CIA?”

  Mueller considered an easy lie, but he wasn’t sure whom he wanted to protect—him or her. Or both. When their eyes met he saw her judgment.

  “I thought so,” she said. “You aren’t usually that slow to answer. I can read your hesitations. I can interpret silence.”

  She looked at Mueller again. “He didn’t tell me what he did. I didn’t ask. We had an interlude. That’s all. The baggage of our lives was elsewhere—gone. We lived a pristine moment.” She clasped her hands, touching one finger, then another, eyes looking at nothing. A sad smiled adorned her face. She glowed. “Everyone should have that feeling once in their life. To feel clean. In love. I will never forget it.”

  She nodded. “And apparently he hasn’t either. But you can’t make the mistake of trying to reclaim what is gone. He has come here with his baggage and he is contaminating that memory.”

  Liz opened the Land Rover’s door and alighted to the driveway. Mueller found himself catching up with her as she strode to the house. Through the open front door there was a view into the courtyard where the little band of frustrated beachgoers relieved the heat with a swim in the pool. Cocktails were being served and food had been brought out. Jack held court, laughing, a boisterous big bull of a man clutching his double scotch on the rocks.

  Liz suddenly stopped and turned to Mueller. “Why did I marry Jack? That’s what you must wonder. Well, I thought he would make a good father.”

  Liz took Mueller’s hand and led him to the ancient algarrobo tree that shaded the ground in a quiet spot beside the main house. Gnarled limbs hung off the thick muscular trunk and old roots were like veins in the earth. The canopy’s shadow provided a hallowed peace from a hostile sun.

  Liz stopped at an old, weathered marker set in the ground. Mueller calculated the boy’s age from the two hundred-year-old dates. He looked at Liz, who had turned away and gazed at a new stone.

  “There wasn’t much to bury,” she said.

  Mueller saw the name Clara carved into the fresh marble and there was a single date—the beginning and end of life.

  “I was appalled at the thought that the little fetus would be incinerated as medical waste, so I gave her a name and we buried her. To remind me. Jack was supportive. I think the miscarriage was the only time in his life he wondered what I was going through.”

  She contemplated the fresh flowers that had been placed around the marker. She waved off the hen pecking at the ground and shooed away a wandering pig. She knelt and slowly picked up small branches and leaves scattered by the storm. When she was done she stood and looked down, lost in thought. At last she lifted her eyes to Mueller.

  “I have found good in this. The purpose of my life—any life—is to help other people get through their lives. If you know the comfortable life you enjoy is built on a foundation of misery deliberately imposed on a less fortunate people can you, in good conscience, do not
hing, say nothing, remain silent? I can’t. I haven’t. People can change, you know.”

  She stared hard at Mueller, almost contemptuously. She turned her back and walked into the house.

  • • •

  Dusk came and with evening the arrival of Toby Graham in a military jeep that had no markings. He strode right up to the front door, open wide for a cooling cross breeze, and stood like a statue watching the frivolity around the pool. Mueller looked up and saw him at the edge of the courtyard observing everything. Much later, he recalled Graham’s quiet demeanor, his hands at his side, and his face cast in the expression of a man reserving judgment, or making one.

  “So you didn’t forget,” Jack greeted. “We thought you’d stood us up.” He pointed with his half-smoked cigar. “There’s a seat for you and an empty glass. You missed the Papa Dobles.”

  Graham approached with a quiet, pensive face and took the empty seat, nodding first in a courtly manner at the guests around the table, acknowledging Mueller, Jack, Katie, the Englishman, and then a quick glance at Liz.

  Jack was at the head of the table and he poured himself a glass of imported red burgundy with the sloppy hand of a drinker who’d had his quota, and then he passed the bottle to Mueller, who passed it to Graham, who passed it along without pouring any for himself. The Clos de Tart passed to Liz and across to the Englishman, who noted the vintage and the producer, and nodded his approval. He poured himself a selfishly generous glass before passing it to Katie, who had paused in her story while the wine made its way around the table.

  “Go ahead,” Liz said. “What happened?”

  “They wanted a photo of Castro.”

  “Who wanted it?”

  “Time magazine.” Her surprise silenced the table. “They want something for their cover.” She had already given an account of trekking during the hurricane in search of her guide. Everyone had been hanging on to the details of the adventure when Graham arrived, and Jack, who’d grown restless and disapproving, had opened the wine.

  “Yes, go ahead,” Jack said. “Finish the story. Let’s hear the rest of your lark.”

  Katie looked around the table, taking in one face, then the next. Only Jack had slumped in his chair with ill-tempered skepticism. The others were entertained, and curious, and gazed at Katie. The story of her disappearance and return held everyone’s attention and they were captive to the tale. The sedation of a big meal and alcohol made them fit only for placid listening. Dusk was falling and with it came the cobalt blue of arriving evening that left only flickering candlelight on Katie’s face. She told her tale, occasionally referring to her notebook.

  “We trekked in the rain on horseback, covered in plastic. There were two of us—a guide who met me and then he handed me off to two rebels. We make it past a roadblock before daylight. The worst of the hurricane had hit, but the river was swollen. We had to detour upstream and cross at a narrows, which was still dangerous. The rushing water came up to the horses’ necks and I lost one bag of film. We began our climb up the mountains on the other side. We trekked for six hours and the last part was thick forest, hardly a path at all, and the horses struggled on slick rocks.

  “I didn’t know we’d arrived at the rebel campsite until we were upon it and I saw we were in a clearing hidden under dense tree cover. There was an open-air shed with a sheet-metal roof and two kerosene lamps. This was the field hospital and there was one young doctor who attended the wounded. There were four or five on cots from what I could see. It was crude and not particularly sanitary, but it looked orderly, well-arranged, and there was mosquito netting over a table laid with surgical instruments. A gas burner boiled water. The hospital, I was told, had been erected two days earlier and it would be gone in a week so the air force would never spot it from the air.

  “One plane did appear that afternoon. I could hear the engine approach and then it came low overhead just above the trees, but it didn’t see us. A few minutes later we heard an explosion and a dense plume of smoke rose. They told me pilots dropped bombs on huts, or cattle, or randomly on the jungle. It was safer for a pilot to waste napalm bombs than to explain on his return to the airfield that he hadn’t found a suitable target. You could see the jellied gasoline mushroom in thick black chemical smoke that left an acrid taste.

  “The rebels laughed when they told me this. They have no respect for the air force or the army. They all had a story about some army platoon that surrendered its weapons when surrounded, shedding uniforms and taking an offered amnesty to go home.”

  Katie looked around the table. The remains of dinner wilted in the evening humidity. Flickering orange light of the wicked candle gave the listening faces a warm glow.

  “And this too,” Katie said suddenly, lifting her eyes from the notebook, “surprised me. Fidel came the next morning. He’d been told I was there. He appeared like a hulking bear who wandered into the campsite. There were a dozen forest paths through the trees and he appeared from one of them—but not the one I expected. He just appeared. I looked up and saw him. He was unmistakable—the straggly beard, the cap, tall, wearing olive fatigues.

  “He proudly carried an assault rifle and came with unsmiling bodyguards who protected him from me. They thought I might have a bomb in my bra.”

  Katie presented her small chest in a comic pose as if to make a mockery of the thought she was capable of that offense. Jack grunted dyspeptically and the others laughed.

  “They were polite when they searched me,” Katie continued. “They had a woman pat me down and as she did she apologized in English, excusing their caution by telling me of all the attempts that had been made on Fidel’s life. No one called him Castro or comandante. He was Fidel to all of them.”

  Katie looked around the table. “So what is he like? That’s the question you’re asking yourselves.”

  “Does he talk nonstop?” Callingwood asked. “That’s what they say about him. He can’t stop talking. His speeches go on for hours. He drones on.”

  “Godless communist,” Jack said lethargically, drawing on his cigar. “Implacable ego. Surrounds himself with trigger-happy assassins.” Jack was animated with tobacco and alcohol and the full power of his impaired speech was on display. He turned to Graham. “You’ve met him?”

  Mueller looked at Graham, trying not to appear overly interested in how he might respond.

  Graham looked around the table. He shrugged. “There is no proof he is a—what did you call him? Godless communist? But it’s convenient, certainly convenient for some in Washington, to make him out to be one to justify why we reject him.”

  “Is that yes?”

  “No. It’s not yes. I haven’t met him. I should like to. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Like to meet him?”

  “Yes.”

  Jack stared at Graham, contemplating the question. “Sure. Why not? He sounds like a man you could talk to without fear of having your throat slit.”

  “Go on, Katie,” Liz said. “Tell us, for God’s sake. Keep going. What is he like?” She shot a glance at her husband. “If you’re bored go to bed.” She looked at Katie. “Now, you’re going to be famous.”

  Katie repeated the things she’d heard—the fables that surrounded the man. He was known to be unapproachable, a leader about whom little was known personally, and all communication to him passed through his secretary, Celia, a brisk woman, small and tough.

  “Everyone suspects a romantic relationship, but I didn’t see that at all. They are professional together, but there is the rumor. Of course, I wanted to get her photograph. Can you imagine the headline: ‘Fidel’s Mistress.’ But no one let me get close to that opportunity.

  “Other rumors?” she asked. “They recruit teenage boys and arm them with scoped rifles. His brother resents Fidel’s authority and the two have screaming arguments. He doesn’t let on what his politics are, but the men around him who whisper in his ear are wedded to one ideology or another. He told me, and I have no reason to doubt him, that Americans wi
ll understand what he is trying to accomplish when they see the reforms he wants to carry out. He told me this with his big brown eyes open wide, his voice deepening, and I felt he was a hypnotist planting ideas that I’d take back. It was creepy. He is a persuasive speaker and he can be charming. He complimented my ad photos. How did he even know?”

  Katie paused. “I let him think he’d convinced me because it was in my interest to do so, and I let him go on. I was a patient listener and he has a big ego. The only thing he finds more interesting than to hear himself speak is to have others listen. I asked about the rumors. Why not? Had he memorized Dante’s Inferno in prison? Did he never sleep twice in the same spot because he was afraid someone close would betray him? Had he spent his first honeymoon in the Plaza Hotel in New York? Did he have an illegitimate child in Mexico? He let me ask all the questions but he had nothing to say. He simply smiled. He enjoys letting himself be surrounded by mystery.”

  Mueller leaned forward. “Did he say anything personal?”

  “He admires Mickey Mantle. They offered him five hundred dollars and a three-year contract. He said if he wasn’t leading a revolution he’d be playing second base for the Yankees.”

  Callingwood laughed hilariously, surprising the others, who looked at him.

  Katie added, “We didn’t talk long. Men came with messages and interrupted us. There was a staccato rhythm to the brief conference as he sent or received messages, or radio transmissions came in. He sat beside me on his stump with an unlit cigar like a satisfied impresario. At one point he got the news that five of his men had been killed in an ambush. His anger was volcanic and with that news the interview was over. He insisted I go and take close-ups of each body and that I should do that—his words—‘so their martyrdom will not be forgotten by the world.’ ”

  “Did you get his photograph?” Liz asked.

  “I did, yes, I did. At the beginning of the interview. I tried to get him holding the assault rifle. He was proud of it. Czech, he said, but he refused to be photographed with it.”