“No, we’re soldiers,” said Cielo. “But we weren’t at war with the American Peace Corpsman.”
“Emil won’t betray his own family.” Cunning thinned the old man’s eyes. “The two of you would welcome an excuse to ease him out, wouldn’t you. His presence threatens your authority.”
Cielo felt a twinge of disembodied pain. He felt trapped between his brother and the old man. He was losing ground, as he always did before the old man: Draga might as well have been his father, he always made Cielo feel eleven years old. He was like a Renaissance cardinal.
He made a feeble attempt: “We must do something, you know.”
“Leave my grandson to me. I’ll make sure he understands.”
Julio spoke up resolutely: “We must take a position, that’s all there is to it.”
Draga frowned at Julio, then turned to his brother.
“What do you say, Cielo? You know I’ve always trusted you.”
“With all due respect, sir. We believe we are the ones to settle the matter.”
“You have the floor.”
Cielo drew a breath deep inside, expanding with reluctant resolve. He knew he must step in, if only to protect his older brother. The old man would accept it from Cielo—he must have sensed Cielo’s lack of ambition. Julio was another case and his presence at this meeting goaded Cielo into taking a stronger position. “You’ll recall none of the hostages was to be killed,” he said finally.
“There was an excellent reason for that. One can’t very well litter the landscape with American corpses and expect the Americans to reconfirm their neutrality afterward. I don’t expect support from Washington but we must have their assurance that they will keep hands off. That’s why this crime distresses me so deeply.”
And never mind that an innocent boy died, Cielo thought sorrowfully. To the old man the boy was a casualty of war. He could hear himself thinking: Why don’t we tell him the truth? He looked at his brother, expecting a mocking expression; fortunately Julio had put his nose in his coffee cup.
Cielo said, “The thing would have worked out according to plan if I hadn’t been saddled with your grandson.”
The old man went very calm. “Yes?”
“From here on I’ll move only with my own people. Not your grandson, not anybody from this villa. I know this deprives you of eyes and ears—I’ll keep you abreast. But I must maintain absolute discipline and I can only do it by excluding outsiders.”
“Emil is hardly an outsider.”
“He is to us. He wasn’t in the Sierra Maestra—he didn’t fester in Fidel’s prisons.”
He heard the breath sawing through Julio’s nostrils, saw the encouragement and surprise in Julio’s eyes.
The silence stretched until he thought his nerves would crack. Then the old man put on a brittle smile. “This demand—is it non-negotiable, as they say? Or may I have a moment for rebuttal?”
Cielo sagged back. It hadn’t worked.
The old man pushed both palms against the table, rising to his feet. He began to pace, chewing on his teeth, emitting hard little bursts of dogmatic thought:
“The organism’s a fragile thing. I should have checked into a hospital long ago. They tell me I’ve got to have surgery for this and that—hernia, prostate, whatever. We’re all dying, aren’t we? I’m sure I shall be forced to settle for the limited satisfaction of having set things in motion. I won’t live long enough to see these efforts come to fruition. I envy you—you’ve both got so much more future than I have.”
Cielo had heard it before. He didn’t dare look at his watch.
“That a man like me should have instigated this movement is peculiar, isn’t it? I never took much interest in politics. I’ve no desire to correct injustices or reform the world. In fact I’ve never viewed the human plight as anything one ought to improve—as Léautaud said, I’d like to be a lover of mankind but unfortunately I have a good memory.… This started with me because I wanted to redeem the family name by recovering our lost properties. The arrogance of that snaggle-bearded jackass, expropriating things he’d never have the ability to build.… I suppose they’ve learned their lesson under Castro—they’re far worse off now than they were before, they’ve got no shred of dignity left but they brought it on themselves. You know, I begin to see as I approach the grave that I never honestly cared whether I reoccupied the mansion in Havana. Cuba wasn’t my home, it was our family’s corporate headquarters. Even if we win this fight in my lifetime I’ll have no wish to leave this house. Yet I’ve gone on with the fight. Do you know why? It’s a matter of challenge. It’s not very different from raiding a corporation—you don’t need the money, you do it to prove yourself.”
The old man paused at the screen. “The rain’s stopped.” Then he swiveled slowly and paced again, hands in his pockets. “I could have paid for this operation out of my pocket. The kidnapings were necessary not to raise money but to legitimize the raising of money. The question would have been raised as to who was financing our movement. There d have been inquiries—that might have led them here. After all, how many expatriate Cubans are wealthy enough to mount the operation we’re planning? But now we have ten million in cash and they know where it came from, so it won’t occur to them to seek its source. If necessary we’ll be able to spend twenty million. Spread it around and no one will notice the discrepancy. Clever, isn’t it?”
Momentarily pleased with himself, he walked out to the corner and pressed a switch. The screens slid up into the veranda roof—a soft humming of motors. The old man hunched his shoulders in the breeze and stared down at the sea. “I won’t live to see it finished. Emil will.”
Cielo glanced at his brother. Julio rolled his eyes toward Heaven and shook his head.
The old man turned to face them. “My blood is in him. I want him to be there. To see it when that infamous regime of thieves and pimps is brought down. My satisfaction, you see, is in knowing Emil will be there—to slap Fidel Castro in the face with the name of Draga.”
Such foolishness, Cielo thought sadly.
“You will keep him by your side. Discipline him if you must. But you haven’t the authority to dismiss him. I don’t grant it to you. Understood?”
Cielo said, “We had to try. You can see why.”
“Your positions are threatened by his presence.”
“No,” Julio replied. “It is our discipline that is threatened.”
“Nonsense. Discipline him. I’ll help—I’ll remind him he is under your orders and can expect no protection from me.”
“You’re protecting him right now,” Cielo pointed out.
“Don’t split hairs.”
Julio made a face but held his tongue. Julio had dreams of political power—and of course Emil was a threat to that.
The old man approached. He stood before Cielo and addressed him directly, excluding Julio. “I trust you.”
“Thank you.” He felt miserable but he met Draga’s watery eyes. By playing along with the farce he was, in an ironic way, betraying the old man. It filled him with guilt.
“I trust you,” the old man said, “not to try to circumvent Emil after my death.”
“And what if he turns against us?”
“Then you’ll do what you must. I’m not an oracle, nor a psychiatrist. I think he has it in him to be a leader but he wants more training, more discipline, more experience. These things you can give him.”
Emil might have the makings of a tyrant, Cielo thought, but he didn’t have it in him to be a leader. The old man was wrong—blinded by the sentimentality of blood relation. But no purpose would be served by arguing the point now. Familial prejudice was stronger than reason.
I’ll have to give him my word now—and break it later. Dismally Cielo said, “All right.”
The old man straightened—now he was brusque: “The next step is the acquisitions. You know enough to be circumspect. You’ve got my list of dealers? Yes, of course—you wouldn’t have misplaced those. Very well, I
hope to hear from you.”
Cielo stood up with Julio at his side. The old man gravely shook their hands; Cielo saw a wistful sadness in Draga’s eyes when they withdrew.
At the front of the house a Volkswagen was drawn up, keys in the ignition. They settled into it and when Julio put it in gear he said, “The old man’s still quite an adventurer.”
“I suppose we’ll just have to string him along.” Cielo fastened his shoulder belt. “We’ll buy the ammunition and the ordnance. After all, we’ve got the money. We may as well go through the motions—it’ll please him.”
“Do we owe him so much?”
“We owe him everything,” Cielo said, “beginning with our lives. Take me home first, then we’ll go on to meet the others.”
He wanted to see Soledad first—he needed to draw strength from her.
The smell of Soledad’s talc was thick in the room. He called out and heard her answer, faint in the back of the house; he went through and found her waiting for him, combing her fingers into her long dark hair and lifting it loosely, high above her head. She gave him a blinding smile and it immediately lifted his spirits.
“You see? I’m home unharmed. You can release the hostages.” He made a joke of it but after she kissed him, running her tongue around his mouth, she stepped back out of his grasp and hugged herself.
“What’s wrong?”
“You were gone so long,” she said.
“I’m back now.”
“For how long?”
“Who can say. What difference does it make? Lets take what we have.”
Her smile, then, was sweet and shy. Fourteen years, three children, and she still had the slender quickness of a fawn doe. She took his hand and led him to the bedroom.
He sat at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around the coffee cup and his eyes returned at intervals to the clock. When Soledad came into the room she made a face. “I wish you’d learn to put the toilet seat down.”
“Did Elena get over her cold?”
“Sure. It’s been weeks. She has a new boy friend. Very rich and fourteen years old.”
“I hope he doesn’t keep her out at night. At fourteen these days they’re more worldly than we were at twenty.”
“She has a head on her shoulders,” Soledad said. “She inherits that from—well, God knows not from you.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I don’t care if she retains her virginity—”
“At thirteen?” He was shocked.
“—but I do care that she not give it away too cheaply. I’ve told her that. She knows what I meant.”
“Por Dios.”
“Well it’s not the same world anymore, querido.”
“I feel old.”
“Not in bed, thank God.”
She was going past the table; he arrested her, reaching out for her hand, pulling her into his lap. Her arms slid around his neck and he tasted her mouth. The hoot of the VW’s horn outraged him. Soledad looked toward the window. “Julio?”
“Yes. I asked him in but he preferred to wait in the car. He’s reading a science fiction.”
“How long will you be?”
“I’ll be home tonight. Fairly late.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s something I have to do.”
“Something you don’t want to do.”
“Well it’s got to be taken care of.”
“Let someone else do it. Julio, Vargas.”
“It’s not something I could shift onto someone else.”
“Then I’m sorry, querido. I’ll go out and buy a bottle of Bourbon for tonight.”
“Two bottles,” he said on his way out the door.
Julio shifted down into second and made an abrupt unsignaled turn into a one-way street and stopped the VW almost immediately at the curb. Cielo twisted around in the seat to watch the boulevard. Traffic streamed past. No cars turned into the one-way street. If any had, Julio would have backed out into the boulevard and gone on his way, leaving the tail stranded halfway down the one-way street. It was a simple device designed to prevent pursuit, one of many in Julio’s bag of tricks. He was always the one who took the wheel; Cielo was a mediocre driver.
They went along Highway Three to the east, bottled in by heavy traffic as far as the El Verde turnoff where Julio turned south and picked up speed. In town they doubled back on several packed-earth streets; there was no tail and they emerged from the town with church bells ringing noon behind them. On the country road a horseman drove a bunch of cattle across, delaying them five minutes, and then they caught up with a farm tractor and couldn’t get past it until they were over a hill. The mountains ranged up ahead of them, tier upon tier, shades of pastel green. Sugar cane on the right, pasture on the left; Julio turned the VW into a narrow driveway between fences. There was the smell of manure.
Vargas and two others ranged along the porch of the farmhouse trying not to resemble lookouts. No weapons were in evidence but they were near at hand out of sight. Cielo walked along to the end of the porch. Julio sat down on the wooden bench, pressing back the dog ear on the page of his paperback galactic-empire saga. Vargas turned to go into the house and Cielo said, “Ask Kruger to come outside.” Old Draga had infected him with a paranoia about indoor microphones.
When Kruger came out Cielo said, “Any problems?”
“Luz was complaining there’s no television set. When do we go up to the camp?”
“Maybe tomorrow. Julio and Vargas will scout it first. We want to know if anybody’s been there.”
“Nobody’s likely to find it unless they know where to look. And the guards we left there—”
“The guards could be dead or in jail and there could be an ambush waiting for us,” Cielo said. “Let Julio scout it first—he knows how to go in for a look without being spotted.”
“You have a good head for security,” the German admitted. Kruger was slight, almost delicate with a little round head and wide thin lips that gave him an ascetic appearance. He talked with a Bavarian hiss. He was forty-six, much too young to have been a Nazi, but some of the others joshed him by greeting him with stiff-armed Heils and addressing him as Mein Führer. Kruger didn’t seem put off by it; he had a healthy sense of humor. At first he’d been a mercenary but the Bay of Pigs had made a believer of him.
Cielo said, “Keep your eye on Emil. I want him here at nightfall.”
“I understand.”
Darkness came. A light from the porch fell obliquely through the window bars, painting stripes across the floor. Emil stood at a cracked mirror in the hallway. A sprig of hair stood up disobediently at the back of his head, glistening with the water he’d used to try and stick it down. He was hacking at it with his palm.
Julio moved toward the door and Cielo faced Emil. The others had gone back to the kitchen; it was only the three of them, and Kruger who stood at the far end of the hall blocking it, his back to them and his shoulder propped casually against the doorframe. Emil at the mirror finally got his hair stuck down and turned to glance at Cielo. Something in Cielo’s expression betrayed him and Emil went rigid. His face, almost always studiedly calm, went slack and his thief’s eyes went restlessly around the room. Julio lifted the .44 Magnum revolver into sight and made a show of cocking it, the noise quite loud in the room. “Stand still now.”
Cielo walked toward Emil, a gun in his fist. He felt foolishly melodramatic. Emil flattened himself back against the wall. “What’s this? What’s this?”
Julio said, “I guess nobody trusts you, Emil. I’m sorry.”
The flash in Emil’s eyes, Cielo thought, was that of someone in the climax of orgasm.
They went out to the yard. “Bring his car around.”
Emil’s car was a sporty little Mustang convertible, dented here and there, the paint flaking off; it had seen better days. Kruger got in behind the wheel and Cielo pushed Emil into the back seat, feeling foolish with a gun in his hand.
Julio stood outside the car. “All right?”
/>
Cielo nodded to him and Julio walked away to get into the VW. It followed the Mustang down the driveway and they went in convoy up the El Verde road through the town onto Highway Three; then a few miles of divided road and another turnoff to the seacoast road, passing through villages. The morning’s rain had left puddles in the chuckholes. They went out into the banana farms and Kruger stopped the car at the verge when Cielo tapped his shoulder. Kruger got out of the car; Julio’s VW stopped alongside and Kruger got into it and the VW drove away leaving Cielo alone in the Mustang with Emil. The keys dangled in the ignition. Cielo climbed out and reached for the keys, put them in his pocket and spoke. “Stay there. We’ll talk a minute.” Through the open door he kept the revolver pointed at Emil.
Emil, breathing through his open mouth, stared at him without blinking.
Cielo said, “Other people’s lives don’t seem to mean much to you but I wonder how you feel about your own.”
Emil’s mouth snapped shut. “I came here to get killed, not to listen to a speech.”
“Listen to this one and maybe you won’t get killed.” He studied his revolver. “So?”
“So I’ll listen.”
“I brought you out here as a favor to your grandfather. Otherwise I’d have had to shoot you in front of the others. You understand? It’s nothing to do with you—I don’t care if the others see this or not—but I prefer not to offend the old man.”
“That’s smart.”
“Don’t sneer, Emil. The order not to harm the hostages came from your grandfather, not from me. You knew that. It was your grandfather you disobeyed. He’s run out of patience with you. Just the same I owe him something—I’d rather not be the instrument of murder against his family, but he’s told me he won’t stand in the way of my disciplining you.”
“What do you want?” Emil feigned disinterest.
“I want you to remember that Julio and I are the padrones and that you are with us by our sufferance. I want you to learn, and never forget, who runs this outfit.”
“I believe my grandfather runs it.” Emil had a hot kind of courage and this icy calm was unlike him; Cielo stepped back a pace to keep his revolver out of Emil’s reach.
Marchand Woman Page 9
