The Good Assassin

by Paul Vidich

  Mueller turned at the sound of his name. Pryce was ten feet away with his pistol raised. He was livid. “I don’t bargain. Put the gun down. Men have died with the guns he brought in.”

  Mueller’s eyes and ears were companion witnesses to the attack. A gun discharged loudly behind Mueller, and Pryce stiffened. Graham had taken Captain Alonzo’s pistol from the floor and shot Pryce in the forearm. Mueller walked around the clanging bell and found the big FBI agent on his back. He had propped himself on his good elbow, and he coveted the pistol that had fallen just beyond reach. Somehow he knew what Mueller would do even before Mueller acted. His eyes pleaded for mercy, and he raised his palm to protect his face. Mueller hesitated. No good would come from all that had happened here. His own jeopardy was palpable. One dead Cuban. A wounded FBI agent. Mueller realized that Pryce was not the clean cop he claimed to be, but he was the sum of his corruptions. That is what the director had said. Mueller cursed his life that it was for him to right this wrong and mete out justice to this wretched creature. He closed his eyes. He knew that if he let in pity he was lost. The germ of mercy would corrupt his resolve. A silent prayer passed his lips, and he fired once. The big man shuddered violently and looked at Mueller with amazement and anger. Vile words spilled from his lips in a torrent of curses, and Mueller fired again. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of a siren, but Pryce heard nothing now, and a rush of rude blood from his mouth soiled his linen suit. Mueller dropped to his knee and placed two fingers on Pryce’s carotid artery to confirm death. He had fired into Pryce’s chest. Pryce would leave Cuba a good-looking corpse. Mueller owed him that little bit of dignity.

  Mueller remembered Graham, but when he turned, he saw that Graham was gone. There were only the urgent footsteps of a man taking the stairs three at a time. “Toby!” he yelled. He listened, waited, and pondered. Outside, he heard guns being fired into the air by grieving men, and he heard cries of distress. Mueller saw a small crowd gathered around Captain Alonzo’s body splayed on the street in the shape of a hooked cross. Several bystanders had hands over their eyes, and looked up at the tower to see where the body had fallen from. One pointed. Confusion claimed the small crowd. No one knelt to help the stricken policeman. All gazed at the bloody, broken body with curiosity and contempt. One spat.

  Mueller pulled back from the edge so he wouldn’t be seen. He glanced around the bell tower, quiet now. He wasn’t sure what he looked for, but he had the presence of mind to search for any evidence that might connect him to the scene. Then he looked at his watch. It was 6:02 p.m. Somehow the time seemed important. A detail, he thought, that would be important for the report he’d write. Already he was assembling a false narrative of the incident.

  Moments later, he found himself in the cloisters’ garden. The altar boy was gone and wouldn’t be a witness. Mueller didn’t want the horror of that choice. He returned his Colt to his belt, took a calming breath to clear his mind of all the death, and strolled through the garden to the exit, a casual visitor moving through the sacred place, marveling at the flower beds.

  He approached the parked Land Rover from behind, first looking back down the narrow alley to see if there was anyone suspicious, and when he saw no one, he slipped in the backseat. He was surprised Katie and Liz were still there. Had it been only ten minutes?

  Liz turned and looked at Mueller. “Everything okay?”

  He smiled, desperate that none of his gruesome work mapped to his face. “I think so,” he said. “We’ll see. Shall we go?”

  13

  * * *

  SWIMMING POOL

  EARLY THE next morning. Mueller woke up just after dawn and he knew something had changed. It was more than his unsettled memory of the holocaust in the bell tower. It was the urgent voice of Maximo speaking outside his window. He had a heightened pitch to his instructions and then there was the sound of someone running in the courtyard. Further away, a cock trumpeted dawn and there was the laboring engine of a tractor. Mueller sat up in bed. He listened.

  The door to his room was wide open, as he had wanted to attract a cooling breeze against the evening’s torpor. He dressed quickly, Colt pistol stuffed under his belt, ears alert to the several voices below. When he got to the kitchen he found the breakfast table abandoned after being half set, a sudden interruption of the morning routine. The morning paper lay on the table with its headline of the latest news of the war. He glanced at the first paragraph, but shifted his attention to people scurrying in the courtyard. He looked through the kitchen, through the open library doors, and beyond to the swimming pool. The old caretaker had a lawn rake that he carefully extended in long reaching motions onto the surface of the water.

  There was something floating in the middle of the pool. On second glance, Mueller saw that it was a body. Mueller made his way through the library and approached the pool cautiously. Then he saw it was Toby Graham. Graham was dressed as he had been the day before. His shoes weighed him down so that he was not so much floating as he was vertical in the water, his head below the surface, his hair arrayed like loose netting. Water around his head was stained a diluted crimson. Maximo was urgently trying to reach the body to draw it from the center to poolside, but his rake didn’t have the reach, and each time he thrust it forward it fell short. He was a small man with short arms. Graham stayed in one spot in the middle.

  Mueller thought they’d have to find a longer pole, or someone would have to jump in and pull the body—a thought he did not find appealing. His disbelief grew as the reality of the scene sank in. Toby Graham’s death settled things, but there was nothing convenient about it, except, perhaps, the several threads that he had been unspooling would now stop. And it relieved Mueller of his unwanted obligation. Mueller’s surprise was brief, as was his relief—a passing mood he would keep to himself.

  There was a part of him that believed Toby Graham was not dead, merely pretending, a practical joke from which he would awake, head rising suddenly from the water to suck in a deep breath and laugh at Mueller’s appalled surprise. Hadn’t Graham already died once in a swimming pool? Resurrected once. Why not twice?

  Out of an excess of caution Mueller looked closer at the body and saw Graham’s face, gray-toned, bloated, eyes open and unfocused. Yes, he thought, death owned him now. The bullet had entered his forehead and exited explosively from the rear of his skull.

  And then it started to rain. Mueller felt drops on his shoulders and rain pelted the pool’s surface. An urgency to get him out of the pool before the coming downpour hit overcame the squeamishness of touch. The drama of the storm made it seem important to act, but, of course, Mueller thought, it made no difference to the corpse. But it made a difference to Maximo and the maid, who joined them, and the two gentle people pushed and prodded with additional poles brought from the verandah. It seemed disrespectful to leave Graham in the pool to be rained on.

  The body was heavy and rigid. All the violence of the act of murder was gone, and whatever his desperate final thrashing moments of life had been, they remained locked in the water’s memory. A cotton towel was draped over the corpse, but a second was needed to complete the shroud. Graham was laid just under the overhang beyond the drenching rain.

  Liz insisted on viewing the body. Mueller was the one who woke her and he was surprised when she didn’t break down in weeping shock, but then she was herself just gaining consciousness, and the news came to her as she opened her eyes from sleep. Her expression suggested she expected bad news and had already accepted the consequence. Their near-death experience in Guatemala had been a rehearsal.

  Everyone remembered hearing an airplane flying low, startling the sleeping hens. Maximo said that an hour later he heard a single report in the night—now in hindsight the report of a gun—but in the cloying dreaminess of sleep it could have been the backfiring of a truck that was so common among old farm vehicles.

  Mueller lifted the towel for Liz, who stood in her bathrobe, arms tightly wrapping her chest. She gazed down at
the gray face with kindness. “Toby?” His name slipped from her lips.

  Her lover did not reply. All the words that were to be said between them—the full text of their entire relationship—had already been said. Their world was done, finished. They had felt everything they would ever feel. Liz’s grief was green and numb.

  Jack had been awakened by the commotion and he emerged from his study where he’d slept on the couch, rejected by Liz. He stood at the door open to the courtyard and understood instantly the meaning of the small group gathered around the body.

  He addressed his wife as she passed him heading into the house. “Liz, you okay?”

  She continued past him without any kind of acknowledgment and disappeared into the kitchen. There was the sound of quiet weeping.

  PART III

  1

  * * *

  HAVANA

  WHO KILLED Toby Graham?

  That was the question that Mueller addressed in his brief report to the director, which he completed in one sitting after meeting the extended deadline for the Holiday magazine article. Circumstances conspired against an article boosting Cuba’s tourism. The lush life of acceptable sin in a tropical paradise was a hard picture to credibly portray when angry crowds were tearing down casinos’ neon signs. Mueller shifted his perspective and wrote not as a tourist, but as a traveler. It was a distinction, he explained to his editor, between sitting in an air-conditioned casino with a tall drink and a shortening stock of chips, and making a rendezvous with an angry local who insults you and then pleads his story. The first is more costly, the latter more exhilarating. Both are memorable. You do one in the company of others and the second alone. Alone you are an invisible observer. You can eavesdrop and see more of a place, its sadness, its people, its truth. And being the solitary traveler in Cuba, he wrote, was the best way to encounter the unexpected adventure.

  Mueller still had this thought in mind when he drafted his report to the director, but he substituted the word “outcome” for the word “adventure.” The unexpected outcome, he wrote.

  “There is no way to definitively say who killed Graham, except I can state with confidence it wasn’t Pryce, and I can say with equal confidence that he didn’t kill himself. I collected his things—what little he had—and nothing in his personal effects pointed to a depressed man. Quite the opposite.”

  Mueller wrote: “He had organized his life for the next phase. He believed he had a role to play. He had observed three revolutions in the short span of four years. Hungary, Algeria, Lebanon. He saw the larger truth of national movements fighting tyranny and he saw the revolutions fail. Hungary failed to the Soviet tanks. Brother fought brother in the Algerian conflict. Spontaneous hopeful riots were quashed in Beirut. He thought the Cuban revolution was the most significant revolution of them all, and he felt he had a role to play. The Cubans continued to hope and fight for a better world. The catch, of course, was that we are officially backing the wrong horse—and that bothered Graham. He had brought too much darkness into himself and I believe he wanted to find a way to hold on to his humanity. He’d never admit that—he’d laugh at it—but he thought he had a role to play keeping an open channel to the July 26th Movement. That was his game. Give them Czech guns and M1 Garands.”

  Mueller had written the word “game,” but it poorly captured Graham’s serious intent, so he crossed it out and replaced it with “desire.”

  Mueller did not mention in his report two things that he found among Graham’s personal possessions. There was a tattered leather King James Bible meant for traveling. It was small, with thin pages and tiny print. Mueller was surprised when he opened a cloth pouch and found it. He’d never heard Graham discuss religion, and in the absence of any obvious affection for Christianity he assumed Graham had no use for it. And Mueller realized he’d made the mistake of projecting his own skepticism onto the man. Religious? Graham? No, that was not how Mueller thought about him.

  He had thumbed the pages and stopped at one underlined passage in Second Corinthians 5. “Therefore if any man be in Christ he is a new creature: old things pass away; behold all things are become new.”

  Mueller had read the passage twice and then he read it a third time. First, as a professor might, beholding the King James version in action—words from a doubly alien culture of Greek and Hebrew texts made to sound in translation as they were meant to be heard, majestic and intimate, the voice of the soul. His second reading was as an acquaintance. Mueller had dropped the charade of referring to Graham as a friend. Friendship presumed some level of familiarity, but as he had gotten closer to Graham he found only things—stubborn things—that he had not known about the man. A man at war with himself. No priest at his side. And with his third reading Mueller paused on the words “old things pass way; behold all things are become new.” He read into the words a call to action.

  The other thing Mueller did not put in his report was the handwritten note Liz had left behind in the Guatemala hotel room when she left Graham. It was scribbled in her cursive script on a small bit of hotel stationery. It was brief, said little, offered a thank you. It wished him a good life. She had signed it with her name without any endearment. Mueller had found the folded letter in the Bible. The fold was creased brittle and the edges of the paper worn from touching. Inside, there was an old photograph of a young, glamorous Liz, a large hat above her smiling face. The photograph fell out when Mueller unfolded the letter. On the back she had written, “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  “Who killed Toby Graham?” Mueller wrote. “There was a witness interviewed by a police detective, the same one who investigated the car accident, and the embassy sent someone to observe. The ambassador flew out to add gravitas to the event and show public support among the dwindled community of expats. Everyone wanted to pretend that Americans and their property were safe and the embassy would protect them. But the actual investigation was a local matter and it was done by the detective with help from the Policía Militar. It was a perfunctory effort at best, and I believe their work was colored by their suspicions about Graham. The continuing advance of July 26th Movement forces in the weeks that followed diminished their interest. The witness was a ranch hand who had been up late drinking. The ranch hand saw a young man, slightly built, wearing a suit, enter the courtyard gate, and there was a loud crack. The young man emerged a few minutes later and ran to a waiting car.

  “Graham was assassinated, of course. The assassin was that young man. I can’t be certain who he is, but I suspect he is the dead girl’s brother, Romolo Betancourt. I am less confident about the motive. He might have heard a rumor that Graham had been driving the Land Rover when it struck his sister, but although Graham was in fact the driver, no one outside the four of us in the car knew that. It is also possible Betancourt went there to kill Jack Malone and made a mistake. Graham had gone back to get Liz. His DC-3 arrived that night and he’d come to the house to take Liz to the airport to leave together. But upon entering the courtyard he was seen by Betancourt, who mistook him for Jack Malone. It was late, the patio was dark, and the sight of an American was enough. Betancourt fired once. I believe this is most likely what happened. The gun fired was Czech made, the model CZ 52 that used 9mm shells, one of which was found in the bottom of the pool. The murder weapon was found in the driveway by a hibiscus plant, where it had been thrown. It’s the type of gun Graham put in the hands of the rebels.”

  Mueller ended his report with a few anodyne observations that he knew would live on in some forgotten archive, read once by the director and then never retrieved from the vault. But, Mueller felt an obligation to offer a summing up—a poor version of the eulogy Graham never got—his body buried outside the walls of the Catholic cemetery in Camagüey.

  “A good man,” Mueller wrote. “I liked him, but I never really knew him. Now he is dead.”

  Mueller folded his hand-written report into an envelope that would go into the embassy mail pouch. He looked over at the slim package. The death of a
spy in a war zone was a lonely thing.

  • • •

  Mueller got his response from the director a week later. It came on the director’s letterhead addressed personally, scribbled in the man’s cramped style.

  “Your note gratified me. I hadn’t asked for it, but I was glad to have it. A goddamned awful mess we’ve made of things from what I can see. There’s no evidence Castro’s a communist, but I’ve got a senator making gloomy, slanderous predictions that Che Guevara is a convinced Marxist and it is only a matter of time before Castro consolidates power and shows his Marxist-Leninist stripes. There is abundant rhetoric and abundant lack of wit in his claims—and soon we’ll know if that crab can walk backward.

  “Yes, soon things will reveal themselves and we’ll all know the truth. I for one suspect he is a self-serving dissembler who will find an after-the-fact argument to suggest his turn to Marxist-Leninism had been his intention all along, so he can insinuate a consistency of thinking when in fact he’s made a sharp turn. The guns we had Graham deliver were a bold, noble effort. I never thought it would succeed, but Graham convinced us to give it a try. Castro played us, I suspect. He’s a wily lawyer who talks his enemies into a defeated stupor. That sort of nonsense is harmless on a soapbox, but dangerous in a head of state.

  “I didn’t expect you to get to the bottom of the Toby Graham question. If you’d simply kept Pryce off our backs I would have considered your effort a success. I never trusted the sonofabitch. Too eager to embarrass us. But you did what I wanted you to do. You kept Pryce off-balance so he was never certain what we were up to—and when he did catch on it was late in the game. I could have been more forthright with you when I asked you to fly down, but if you’d known what we were up to you would have carried a terrible burden. Better to be in the dark and confused than in the know and conflicted. Right? That’s it. Now you know.