The Good Assassin

by Paul Vidich

  Shortly before midnight Mueller rose and made his way inside, but passing the living room he saw a light on and he entered thinking that Graham was up. He saw no one at first. Sleeplessness and stress distorted and magnified the room. The marble fireplace had a cold monumental whiteness and the grand piano’s gleaming black surface mirrored the chandelier. Tall windows were obsidian columns looking out to the night. His most vivid memory of the room was looking about and not seeing Graham at the fireplace—so still he was invisible.

  Thinking he was alone, Mueller moved to the window and in the distance he saw the headlights of a far-off vehicle headed to the hacienda. He gazed at the speeding vehicle illuminated by moonlight, which laid a false peace on the landscape. It was long past curfew.

  “Police, I suspect.”

  Startled, Mueller turned around. He saw Graham had pulled away from the wall like a painting come to life.

  “You suspect?”

  “They’ll probably want to talk with me.”

  “You gave a report.”

  Graham grunted. “A clerk. They might have more questions. I suspect they will.” Graham raised an eyebrow. “There’s too much to risk. I have to leave.”

  Mueller stepped up to Graham, jaw set, eyes narrow. The two men stood close. Mueller embraced Graham, startling him, but then Graham too raised his arms and the two men felt the bond of their long, troubled acquaintance. Two old schoolmates found in the affectionate moment a measure of calm. They held each other, but were separated by a peril. Silence clamored. Graham pulled away.

  “Stay in my hotel room. They won’t look there.”

  Graham almost laughed. “They’ll look there, of course. And I suppose I shouldn’t be suspicious that you would suggest an unsafe place thinking it would be safe. Best you not know what’s next. I only need one thing from you, George. One small favor. When I’m ready to go I need you to bring Liz to me. Will you do that?”

  A chastened Mueller looked at Graham. “Of course.”

  “I will be gone for a few days.”

  Mueller didn’t believe that Graham would leave Cuba for good on his own. Graham’s eyes were fiery, the eyes of an idealist. He wouldn’t give up. He might leave, but he’d be back. The front door of life had burst open and Graham’s fortune had blown in. Mueller stood on the hacienda’s porch and watched Graham disappear into the night, ahead of the approaching vehicle. His jeep stirred dust as it sped off and the moving cloud stained the empty plain. Everything began to end that night.

  11

  * * *

  INVESTIGATION

  THE CONDUCT of justice carried on in predictable ways in the ensuing week. Rebel movements and ongoing skirmishes in the province didn’t diminish the diligence of the local police detective, but his work was slowed by the increasing petty crime that accompanied anxiety about the war. The detective carried on by himself in a plodding and dedicated way, believing that civil strife was no excuse to abandon law and order. Then he got the unexpected support of SIM, and he was happy about that. Captain Alonzo showed up when the news of the death, and the circumstances, got wider attention. The investigation picked up. A witness came forward with a statement that he’d seen a Land Rover on the road late, and he’d noted the time, 9:30 p.m., because it was past curfew. The Land Rover was the only vehicle out at that hour. That’s what the police detective said when he interviewed Jack.

  The witness, a squatter, had a shack off the main road. He’d been checking his chickens against the rats that preyed on the chicks, when he saw the Land Rover speed by. Then later the witness admitted he’d seen a pickup truck pass on the same stretch of road.

  Few things are absolutely clear in the aftermath of an accident at night, and Mueller knew it would take time for the dedicated detective to assemble the partial and often contradictory statements into a plausible narrative, and then, within the limits of the available evidence, establish that a crime had been committed. And in the process he also had to discern which of the contradictory statements were lies, which poor memories, and which honest errors in a confusing situation.

  • • •

  Mueller’s conversation with Liz took place in the morning a day later. She approached him as he was finishing breakfast in the Hotel Colon. He was alone in the small dining room enjoying coffee. The hotel was closing. Most of the guests had already left for Havana, if they could hire a car, or a private airplane, or managed to find a spot in the bus organized by the embassy. The place felt deserted, but the service had improved as he was now the only guest. Two waiters stood at the ready when Liz sat opposite Mueller. They were instantly at her side offering coffee. She had come for him and his bags. He would be moving into the house until he found a way to reach Havana.

  Liz sat. She removed her sunglasses. The morning heat added a rosy blush to her cheeks.

  “I’m leaving Jack,” she said.

  Mueller waited for her to elaborate.

  “I’m not asking for your approval. I don’t need to have that, but I am asking for your understanding. I think of that woman—that poor dead girl. She jumped out because she thought Jack was driving.” She stiffened. “He begrudged me my moment of weakness and he was still going to set up that girl in Miami.”

  Her eyes were furious. “I can’t forgive him. He poisoned the earth of our marriage.”

  “You think Toby is a better man?”

  “He’s better toward me.” She contemplated Mueller and added in a low voice, “A man can change. You don’t know the Toby I know.”

  “But do you know him?” he snapped.

  She was startled by Mueller’s sharp tone. “Are you jealous? Is that what this is about?”

  Mueller hadn’t expected to hear that from her. Their brief romance had been early in her engagement to Jack. She had begun to complain about Jack’s restlessness, but had not yet begun to openly suffer. The infidelity had come at the end of a boisterous New Year’s Eve party in Vienna. Warm laughter had turned to silliness and then came a startling kiss and the passion culminated in rushed, awkward sex in the bathroom. He had been open to continuing the relationship, but Liz excused the incident as a friendly mistake before marriage. But for Mueller the friendly mistake was a durable memory.

  “Toby is a good man,” Mueller said, “but he is a dangerous man. He has a good heart. A lonely heart. He lives under a dark shadow.”

  “I know the shadow.” She looked at Mueller. “Who are you to judge him?”

  Mueller was certain the direction of their conversation would only further divide them, and he wanted to respect their history. He suspected she’d already made up her mind. “How can I help?”

  “They’ve come by looking for him. I said to speak with you. Tell them I was driving. Would you do that? It will come out better if things don’t point to him.” She paused. “When his plane arrives I am leaving with him.”

  And in that moment Mueller suddenly understood that Liz knew what was in the wood crate. He looked at her and the innocence he’d seen was strangled. Everyone can change, he thought. The sight of dead boys hanging from lampposts can change you. It had changed her. She had become Graham’s accomplice. He saw that in her pleading eyes.

  12

  * * *

  FUNERAL

  MUELLER WAS seated in the rear of the cathedral on the side aisle, but he was conscious nevertheless of drawing attention. He was with Katie and Liz and they were the only Americans among the large, restless crowd gathered solemnly at Ofelia Betancourt’s funeral. Knowing the deceased, many of those seated in the packed church knew each other, and among them the death of a young woman of great beauty, whose life was abruptly cut short, struck a chord. Grief was abundant among the mourners and fierce sorrow was worn proudly among a contingent near the nave who appropriated her death for their own outrage. The uncertain circumstances of her death, its having come at night on the road, and the shocking prematureness of it, even in a time of war, contributed to the atmosphere of apprehension.

&n
bsp; Incense hung heavy in the cathedral and was a cloud over the overflowing crowd who came to witness the farewell Mass. Black clothing was everywhere and women, even young girls, had lace scarves and veils. Only the contingent of young men near the front wore fatigues. This clutch of men seemed to have come straight from the mountains. Their boots had red earth, and their faces had straggly beards and the likeness of rebels. Police were nowhere to be seen inside the cathedral.

  Liz had come at Mueller’s urging to pay her respects and to atone for whatever fault she bore as a complicit witness. Katie came to observe. To be a camera, not to hold one. Mueller was compelled to attend by the same ambiguous feelings, and then Graham sent word that he would use the funeral as a pretense to collect Liz. So their little group was formed.

  They were seated in the back and as Mueller waited for the service to begin he happened to glance at the cathedral’s doors. It was then he saw Frank Pryce, silhouetted, who acknowledged Mueller with a simple nod, and then Mueller looked around to see if there were police, but there were none, or none in uniform. Only Frank Pryce. He watched from a distance and ignored the crowd. The trap was baited. Mueller looked at Liz and in the corner of his eye he picked out the arched door to the cloisters where Graham said he would wait.

  Mueller was mystified by the rituals of the Catholic Mass, but he saw how the mystery seemed to comfort the mourners. It wasn’t a memorial service. No one eulogized the dead girl, who lay in an open coffin in quiet repose in a white dress. Mueller looked at her, as did everyone, struck by her beauty. Liz had bowed her head and only she did not look. There was no mention of how she died. Nor was there mention of her rebelliousness, or her scandal. Mueller assumed that most of the mourners knew what he knew, or some version of it, and he suspected many among them were thinking of an unforgiving God. Liz too prayed.

  A long, mournful chime from the cathedral’s bell punctuated the silence and signaled the end of the Mass. Six men, who sat near the nave, most likely male relatives, given their prominent position, lifted the casket. A spontaneous chorus of Mamá son de la loma rose from the rebel contingent that walked behind the somber pallbearers.

  Mueller watched Betancourt come up the aisle behind his dead sister—a young man in black with an old man’s vacant eyes. He looked straight ahead to the sunlight pouring in through the cathedral’s doors.

  Mueller observed him in his grief and in one unexpected moment he saw Betancourt’s face turn, a slow conscious shift of a few degrees, and their eyes met. It was a brief encounter, hardly a second, but Mueller did not mistake the look on his face—angry grief, vengeful grief.

  Mueller, Katie, and Liz were in the middle of the crowd leaving the cathedral, and they were hidden among the many mourners making their way to the doors. Frank Pryce moved toward them, against the crowd, and he pulled Mueller to one side and spoke confidentially. Words were exchanged. Mueller nodded into the church at the arched door.

  “Who chose the spot?” Pryce asked.

  “He did. He has the advantage.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then you don’t know him,” Mueller snapped. He pointed to Pryce’s linen jacket. “What’s the gun for?”

  “In case something happens.”

  “Something will happen. Where’s Ruden?”

  Mueller didn’t get an answer from Pryce, and the rebuff was the first thing that irritated Mueller. He rejoined Katie and Liz, whose quizzical expressions he ignored, and he pointed toward the exit. They were among the last to leave the cathedral and they joined other stragglers who congregated on the wide stone steps. The rebel contingent had already reached the plaza and they fired guns into the air to release defiant grief. Mueller had put on his sunglasses against the glare to look at the commotion. It was then that he saw two green Oldsmobile sedans parked across the street. One driver in his tan SIM uniform was being taunted by the crowd.

  Mueller pondered the unlikely presence of the Oldsmobiles and suddenly a hard knot formed in his gut. He looked back at Pryce, but sunlight made the inside of the church impenetrable, and then, again, he stared at the two cars. Only one driver. The scale of the treachery struck Mueller all at once. Accumulating evidence pointed inexorably to betrayal. Pryce’s silence. The presence of the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar. The absent second driver.

  Mueller turned to the two women. “Go to the Land Rover. I will meet you there. Wait ten minutes. No longer. If I don’t show up, go straight to the house.”

  Mueller entered the empty cathedral and ran toward the arched door, his footsteps echoing in the holy space. Through the door he came upon a private garden surrounded by a covered walkway. The quadrangle of green was a well-tended medieval garden that sat inside the cloisters’ colonnade. Mueller looked past the flower beds and beyond the shaded columns, eyes alert. He heard urgent voices somewhere and rapid footsteps. A young boy no older than ten, in a long coarse cotton robe, emerged from behind one column, where he’d been hiding. He pointed to stone steps at one end of the cloisters that rose to the square Moorish-tiled bell tower.

  Mueller took the stairs two at a time. Sweat formed on his brow and his lungs took in gulping breaths as he dashed up stone stairs that wrapped around the center well. He climbed one landing to the next, making his way up five flights, raising his eyes toward the huge bronze bell that dominated the belfry. Camagüey’s red-tile rooftops came into view on his way up, and a hot wind whistled through each open floor. The bell’s hemp rope dropped through the well to the ground floor.

  Footsteps he’d heard when he started up were silent and now he heard voices. Two men, Graham and Pryce. Then another. Mueller learned the identity of the third man when he reached the top landing and stood before the bell’s thick knotty beam. Captain Alonzo stood across the center well, a slight man in a trim suit whose worry filled the space. Mueller didn’t see everything at once. Sweat blurred his vision, and he bent over gasping for breath, feeling dizzy and faint. Then he raised his eyes and was suddenly aware that he had interrupted the men. Clues sorted themselves in his mind and he felt the calculus of danger.

  Toby Graham knelt on the stone floor. Captain Alonzo was a few feet away with a handkerchief at his lips and he pointed a snub-nosed pistol at Graham’s temple. Frank Pryce made his presence known when he moved around the bell and took a position to block Mueller’s escape. Pryce’s white linen suit was dark with perspiration, his legs were spread comfortably, and he stared at Mueller. Mueller saw the man’s tan shoes, and later he would remember his only thought was that Pryce had the largest feet he’d ever seen. Giant leather shoes, and in that moment, Mueller knew that his exhaustion made him a little delirious.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Pryce said.

  Mueller took two breaths, then a third longer one, and slowly rose to full height. It was Pryce’s ways of condescending to Mueller that gave him pause. It was typical of that stratagem of law enforcement that conducted itself according to the principle of threat and response. Where he needed an outcome, he bullied one. When he needed permission, he repudiated it. This obstinate behavior was offensive to Mueller. It made him forget his cooperative nature, and he found himself with his fist clenched, wanting to punch Pryce, to punish him. He indulged a sadistic thought, but said nothing.

  Mueller had surprised Captain Alonzo, just as he himself had been surprised, when he arrived on the scene. Not knowing everything he needed to know about what he saw, he nodded, and he kept an eye on the snub-nosed pistol. Captain Alonzo was vibrantly calm, brooding with menace, and his eyes greeted Mueller with the kindness of evil. It had been a month since he’d gotten Captain Alonzo’s lecture on the inconvenience of certain truths and he had begun—almost unconsciously—to catalogue the truths of Cuba. The violent sun, the poverty, the music, the torture. And now to that list he added treachery. The Cuba he had found was not the Cuba he expected to find—but then he thought: evil does not betray you.

  Mueller saw Captain Alonzo raise the pistol and take a
im. Graham’s face was a mix of confusion and fear—the stunned look of the condemned man feeling the rope around his neck. Graham stared at Mueller with contempt. Mueller felt the anger, but the compounding jeopardies and his own confusion were paralyzing and left him with no words of solace.

  Captain Alonzo coughed once, clearing his throat of gagging mucus, and dabbed his lips with the cotton handkerchief. He put the cloth in his pocket and turned again to Graham. “Look away,” he said calmly. “It’s better if it’s not in your face.”

  “This wasn’t the agreement!” Mueller yelled.

  “Stay out of it,” Pryce said. “You’re in over your head. You don’t have a clue what’s going on.”

  At the base of the tower a priest pulled the rope, and the bronze bell swung ponderously on its hinge to meet the iron clapper, producing a deep, resonant booming note that banished all other sound. Graham had started to speak, but his words were lost to the tolling bell.

  It all happened in one moment. Mueller did what he had to do, what he’d trained for, without thinking and without hesitation. His face had the calm visage of an assassin. He had killed men twice. His metamorphosis in the first kill had been the caterpillar breaking out of its carapace. He’d left behind the deep-thinking desk man with the squeeze of a trigger. His second kill had come more quickly and more easily. He had only one conscience to numb, one soul to subvert. The sin of the first murder was deep enough to contain a whole lifetime of killing.

  Mueller’s hand had gone to his Colt pistol, wedged under his belt. He brought it to eye level, gripped with his second hand, arms locked and extended, as he had practiced on Sunday afternoons at the campus gun range. He fired twice. The first bullet struck Captain Alonzo in the shoulder, causing him to drop the pistol, and the force spun him around. The second bullet entered his astonished face just below the eye. The force of that blast pushed Captain Alonzo to the tower’s edge, and then he tipped backward and fell to the street.