The Good Assassin

by Paul Vidich

  “But you also gave me a view of what got Graham up in the morning and why he did what he did. I am grateful that you gave yourself that task, and provided your conclusions. We owe loyal men little but expect a lot in return, and few ever share their innermost thoughts—or doubts—about the work they do. Your note gave me things to think about. How should we manage the faith of men who join our ranks?

  “Let’s have another drink when you get back. It’s good to have your view. I have come to the dangerous time in my life when I look forward to reminiscing about the good old days—when we were young, naïve, green, and bull-headed about our mission. A little of that is still there—everything but the young part.

  “I was surprised to hear Pryce was killed. I understand you weren’t able to investigate, and frankly, given Castro’s victory, I suspect we’ll never know what happened. I don’t think I told you, but we put in a good word for Pryce and formally commended him for his work on Graham. I was willing to be magnanimous to keep our secret. He was on to us and that’s not a story we wanted out. We made sure he got posthumous credit for rolling up a threat that wasn’t a threat.

  “Graham knew what he was doing even if we did not at first, although he got us to come aboard. It’s hard to lose a man of initiative and principle. Or, perhaps, if I am unkind, he was already lost to us and that may be the case, if everything you said about him is true. Life is ludicrously complex at times and full of cruel ironies, as you pointed out. Honor is elusive. You said he wanted to be a new man. He might have had his Agency work on his conscience, but as I’ve said before, we are not in the conscience business. Too much conscience makes a man a coward. We all like to think of ourselves as better than we are. It’s that deception that keeps us from depression. The shrinks would have a field day with that thought.

  “Graham came to believe we’ve made an unutterable mess of the world and that our passage through it is bitter and unheroic. I know that because he said that to me a year ago. I said that if he was a tree he could take a stand, but he was a spy and it was not his job to stand out. I’m rambling. I know I didn’t tell you all this at our lunch meeting at Harvey’s. I didn’t want to prejudice the assignment, but you should know it now, given the outcome.

  “I think he would be appalled that we would try to appropriate his outrage for a mission to cozy up to Castro. Or, he might have found humor in the preposterousness of it. For him the horror of our work was always deeply illuminating. He sought absolution and it condemned him. George, get in touch when you’re back in town.”

  Mueller placed the director’s letter in an envelope and made sure that he found a safe hiding place for it among the folded clothes of his open suitcase. On top of the clothing he placed the Time magazine issue with the photograph of Castro in his mountain camp, which had come in the same pouch as the director’s letter.

  Nothing the director said or wrote was ever transparent or straightforward. Mueller knew that the director’s calibrating mind took refuge in allusive meaning. It was the mind of a man who kept secrets. Mueller was certain the truth in the letter lay between the lines and not in the text on the page, and the letter might well be a remote act of hypnosis to shade how Mueller thought of the entire episode. A magician’s trick. When the director admitted something Mueller knew the man was probably dissembling.

  The director’s note stirred Mueller’s memories of Graham. Mueller thought he knew Toby Graham, and certainly he’d known the sort of facts that fill a biography: birthplace, college, military service, hobbies, the abandonment of his father, and his discernible achievements. But over the course of the time they’d been together he had discovered he knew little—perhaps nothing—of the inner man.

  • • •

  Mueller looked at the hotel room’s French doors open to the balcony. Liz gazed across Havana. Mueller zipped his suitcase, but first took Time and placed it on the desk to show Liz, and then he joined her on the balcony.

  The crowning dome of Havana’s El Capitolio glowed luminously before them. A salt breeze stirred the evening and cloaked their moment of contemplation in serenity. Chopin’s Nocturnes played somewhere nearby and the piano’s bright notes mixed with the cacophony of riotous street celebrations. It was a few minutes before midnight. New Year’s Eve festivities in Havana had started early in the evening and partying swept away the worried gloom of an anxious city bidding farewell to one calamitous year as it waited for its uncertain future.

  Mueller heard the distant hum of a propeller aircraft laboring for altitude and farther away exploding fireworks that could also be gunshots. He felt Liz shudder at the sounds and he saw her look in the direction of the noise.

  Across the harbor channel the limestone walls of El Morro were refulgent and pink in spotlights. Beyond the spit of land the Caribbean was a great dark oblivion. Pale breakers crumpled into mournful surf along the old sea walls that opened into the anchorage. Masts of sleek sailing yachts moored in the calm water rose and fell in the wake of a brightly lit cruise ship heading out to sea, crowded with escaping Americans and wealthy Cubans. The yachts’ bows had shifted seaward with the arriving tide and telltales hung limp in the air. One larger motor yacht cut a course through the moored boats, and the smoke from its coughing engine made it hard for Mueller to make out the rear ensign, but Liz, who had followed Mueller’s gaze, had no doubt about its nationality. Without straining to look she said, “It’s Jack. Jack’s boat. He’s headed to Miami.”

  Mueller looked at the chubby motor yacht that moved slowly toward the open sea.

  “He asked me to go with him,” she said. “I think that was his clumsy way of putting it behind us.” She didn’t go on. Her unfinished thought remained a prisoner of her reticence. “What is the saying? ‘You can’t go home again.’ Well, I don’t think we ever had a home together. We had a bankrupt enterprise.” She said this carelessly.

  “We built up these memories for ourselves, but memories that weren’t memories but stories about who we wanted to be.”

  Mueller stood beside her, but apart, intimate and silent and close enough to hear her quiet confession. He turned and looked at her with forgiving eyes, kind eyes, thinking that he knew better what had drawn her to Graham. She was not a young woman anymore. She was mature in her suffering, and wise in her life. The dim glow from the brightly lit city burnished her forehead with sadness. Her hair was loose and fell to her shoulders, almost pale in the light.

  “You worked with him, didn’t you? You knew him well,” she said. Her hand clasped the photograph Mueller had taken from Graham’s Bible and returned to her.

  “I knew him less well than you think. His work didn’t let us get close. You don’t get close to anyone doing what he did,” Mueller said.

  “But you admired him, didn’t you? He admired you. He told me he thought you were the most honest man he knew.”

  Mueller paused. “The men he knew lied for a living.”

  “But he thought of you as a friend. He must have if he gave this to you,” she said. She gazed at the frayed photograph.

  He didn’t give it to me. “We were acquaintances more than friends. There was much about him I didn’t know, that he didn’t show me, things that he might not have known about himself. How well can you ever know anyone?” He paused. “What are we anyway, but a bit of chemistry burdened with consciousness, who find ourselves here in this moment on the balcony looking out at a city feeling the tremor of change.”

  She drew her arms around her chest. “I’m cold,” she said. “Hold me.”

  It was warm out and she was cold. He took her obstinate grief in his arms.

  “I miss him,” she said. She looked at Mueller. There was an ashen halo around her eyes. “Do you understand that I loved him?”

  Mueller wiped a tear from her eye.

  “Of course.” A lie.

  “He wanted to improve the world.”

  “We all do.”

  She took a deep breath. Her skin seemed to catch the luminous glo
w of the city and her face became solemn. “All his kindness, his doubt, his desire, and all his promise are gone. Nothing remains except this.” She fingered the keepsake bracelet, gazing at the frayed string. “One thing remains,” she said. “His work. The things he did here in Cuba live on. No one can take that away from him.”

  “Of course,” Mueller mumbled. “Noble mission.”

  “A noble heart.”

  Mueller wanted to tell her the truth—the evil he’d done would live on in the world and only his good was interred with his bones. He wanted to describe the world of lies that Graham inhabited, the lies to her, but in the moment he allowed himself to believe that she knew Toby Graham best of all and he would accept her version of his life. It was the version Mueller preferred.

  “You loved him too,” she said.

  Mueller pondered her remark, but didn’t say “yes” or “no,” and instead he let the thought that came to mind slip from his lips. “Of course.”

  “Hug me tighter.”

  He did.

  They stood there on the balcony for a few minutes. Clouds had swept in and dimmed the stars and turned the night gloomy and dark and threatening, but the two of them stood there looking out at the rioting city—distinct, apart, silent. Neither of them moved for a long time. Mueller thought he should keep thinking of not thinking of her to clear his mind and avoid a mistake if he spoke.

  She suddenly turned to him. “You’re awfully quiet.” She looked at him with fierce eyes. “Don’t ask me what’s next. I don’t know.”

  She slipped the bracelet from her wrist and let it go over the balcony. It drifted down like a feather, moving one way, then the other, carried on a breeze, turning round and round and then back again, and then it was swept up by a sudden gust and taken away. She returned to the hotel room.

  Mueller stayed on the balcony, elbows on the railing, feet planted, eyes fixed on the far vanishing point where dark ocean and black night were welded in a joint, and he stayed there without moving until the kiss of the moment faded.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WILLIAM MORGAN was a U.S. citizen who fought in the Cuban Revolution, leading rebels of the Second Front that drove the Cuban army from key positions in the central mountains, helping Fidel Castro’s forces defeat President Fulgencio Batista’s army. Morgan was among two dozen U.S. citizens who fought in the revolution, and one of only three foreign nationals (another was the Argentine Che Guevara) to rise to the army’s highest rank, comandante. Morgan’s short, tumultuous life inspired the character Toby Graham, but unlike Morgan, who was executed by a Cuban firing squad after suspicions arose that he worked for the CIA, Graham’s death is neither heroic nor intentional.

  Morgan arrived in Cuba in December 1957 when Fidel Castro’s July 26th Movement had established itself as a small but effective opponent to Batista’s corrupt regime. Like many Americans, Morgan was drawn to Cuba after reading New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews’s front-page account of meeting Castro in the Sierra Maestra Mountains and his romanticized description of the bearded six-foot-tall revolutionary who was “an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage,” who had “strong ideas of liberty, democracy, and social justice.”

  Morgan was a big, flamboyant man, who came of age in the Cold War, and like an earlier generation of young men who volunteered for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, he wanted to make a difference in the world. He found his cause in Cuba’s struggle. Morgan’s role drew interest from the U.S. media and various U.S. government agencies, including the FBI, the State Department, and the CIA. Morgan served under Castro until he was accused of being a CIA spy. After a brief trial he was executed at dawn on March 11, 1961, in La Cabaña, the eighteenth-century stone fortress that overlooks Havana Harbor. He was thirty-two.

  Several characters in the novel quote or paraphrase lines of prose. The sources are: William Shakespeare: “A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear,” “Give me the ocular proof,” “I have seen tempests when the scolding winds have rived the knotty oaks,” “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” “Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” and “The evil that men do lives on after them, the good is oft interred with their bones”; Ernest Hemingway: “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

  Several books and magazine articles were indispensable sources of information about the Mafia in Cuba, rivalry between the CIA and the FBI, and the final days of Castro’s uprising against Batista’s regime. They are: The Closest of Enemies, by Wayne Smith (W. W. Norton & Company, 1987); Havana Nocturne, by T. J. English (HarperCollins, 2008); What’s a Woman Doing Here? by Dickey Chapelle (William Morrow & Company, 1962); The Last American Rebel in Cuba, by Terry K. Sanderlin (AuthorHouse, 2012); The Winds of December, by John Dorschner and Roberto Fabricio (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980); Wedge, by Mark Riebling (Simon and Schuster, 2002); Havana Fever, by Leonardo Padura (Bitter Lemon Press, 2009); and “The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann, The New Yorker, May 28, 2012.

  Will Roberts created a place in the world for the book by the sheer force of his intelligent suggestions. Emily Bestler provided support and encouragement, and her keen editorial touch polished and deepened the final work. The entire Atria team, particularly David Brown and Lara Jones, have been marvelous partners.

  I am grateful to the Neumann Leathers Writers Group—Mauro Altamura, Rachel Friedman, Brett Duquette, Aimee Rinehart, Amy Kiger-Williams, and Dawn Ryan—for reading early drafts. Jayne Anne Phillips, Steven Schiff, Carin Clevidence, Alex Miller, Brendan Cahill, and Kelly Luce have been gracious with their support and encouragement. The book would not have found its audience without the knowing counsel of Lauren Cerand. My sons Joe and Arturo opened my eyes to aspects of the world that I had not before seen and I have benefited in my life and work from their love. And to my wife, the very special Linda Stein, partner, teacher, muse, and now collaborator. She first introduced me to William Morgan.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PAUL VIDICH graduated from Wesleyan University and received his MBA from Wharton. He was a senior executive in the entertainment industry for more than twenty years, most recently at Time Warner’s AOL and Warner Music divisions. After leaving his business career, he turned to writing full-time. He serves on the boards of directors of Poets & Writers and The New School for Social Research. A founder and publisher of the online literary app Storyville, Vidich is also an award-winning author of short fiction.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are prod
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  Copyright © 2017 by Paul Vidich

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vidich, Paul, author.

  Title: The good assassin : a novel / Paul Vidich.

  Description: New York : Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2017. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.