See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  He drove to a small apartment building, indicated the bags to a porter, nodded his head at the concierge and led Blackford to the elevator, pushing the button for the fourth floor.

  The appointments of apartment 4E were what you would expect if you had sent a letter to the local manager of Sears, Roebuck with instructions to decorate a two-bedroom apartment inconspicuously. The pictures on the wall were graphic reproductions of Diego Rivera’s paintings which in Mexico are inconspicuous, as giraffes are inconspicuous in giraffe parks.

  Blackford, accustomed to the protocols of secret service, merely sat down and waited. It wasn’t long. His host had only to draw the shades and light another cigarette. He sat down opposite him.

  “I am directed to apologize for breaking into your vacation.”

  Blackford gave the requisite bow of his head.

  “Briefly, I am on the Cuban desk—”

  “How is it I didn’t run into you last winter and spring?”

  “During the preparations for the Bay of Pigs operation in which, I am aware, you were tangentially involved, I was detached on Argentine duty.”

  His host rose from his chair and, puffing away, ambled nonchalantly toward the bookcase. He rested his left hand, outstretched, in a cavity at the corner of a shelf, its contents beyond Blackford’s vision. He wondered, suddenly, what other than books might sit on that shelf.

  “I see,” Blackford said, reflecting.

  True, he had asked by name after Alec Sharkey, Blackford’s stepfather. Yet it was just possible. Blackford now had ten years’ experience in the Agency and had walked the streets of intelligence and counterintelligence and become prudent. “Do you have a telephone here?”

  His host pointed with his right hand to the corner of the room, where a small coffee table was almost hidden by the curtain.

  “Over there.”

  Blackford stood up. Passing him, Blackford lunged quickly, pinioning the stranger’s left arm against the shelf. “My friend, I am going to make a telephone call. While I make that call—to ascertain whether you are who you say you are—you will put your arms behind … That’s right, easy does it … which I will tie together.” These, Blackford bound with his necktie over the wrists, behind the man’s back. “If everything goes well, we will be chatting together comfortably again in about five minutes.” Blackford, one hand on the necktie that bound his host, quickly inspected the corner of the shelf. He found a small semiautomatic pistol, probably a .32.

  His host smiled, and his blackberry eyes looked benevolently through the two narrowed slits. “There is just one thing, Mr. Oakes. You will have to make it so that I can continue to smoke my cigarette. Otherwise I get very nervous.”

  “Sit here.” Blackford then pulled over the side table, slid the ashtray to the edge nearest his host, took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and deposited it so that the man could puff away without using his fingers. He went then to the telephone, got long distance, and whispered a number in Washington. He gave a code, and asked for “Summerville,” who came on the line.

  “Joe, Blackford. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Nobody else sounds like you.”

  “Just checking. I’ve got someone here—he hasn’t given me a name. I was told someone might grab me at the airport. He gave me the right identifier but I want to make sure—funny-feeling department—I’ve got the right guy. About five two, tight, sallow skin, little cropped moustache, black hair, chain-smoker—”

  “So far so good. Ask him: Who did he lunch with yesterday—no, don’t do that. Ask him what he had to eat at lunch yesterday.”

  Blackford turned to his host-prisoner. “Señor, what did you have for lunch yesterday?”

  “Ah, what a question you ask! Food, I never notice food—ah! Dios mío, I cannot remember any meal anywhere, not even the meal I was given just before I was to be executed.”

  “Keep this up, Buster, and the meal just before you were executed will turn out to be whatever you had at lunch.”

  The man gnashed his teeth and growled, his eyes imploring the ceiling to help his memory. “Please, ask me another question.”

  “Joe. He says he can’t ever remember meals. What else?”

  “Ask him who was it who interrupted us during lunch.”

  Blackford asked the question. His prisoner smiled.

  “It was the secretary of the Director, with a message for—for our host.”

  Blackford relayed the word.

  “That’s right. That’s Cecilio Velasco. Now listen, Blackford. You hearing me? You won’t want to be commenting on what I say.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Velasco is very special, I rate him right up there with Rufus.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Joe. Anything more?”

  “No. Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  He walked over to Velasco and untied his hands. “Sorry about that.”

  Velasco rearranged himself and picked up the cigarette. “Why be sorry? I would be sorry if you had not made some check.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “We were talking about Cuba. I am on the Cuban desk. We have an overture. Made directly to the President. He wants it checked out. That means you are going to Cuba, to have a conversation—or perhaps several conversations.”

  “I’ll be damned. It sounds interesting, but why me? I don’t know a hell of a lot of Spanish, only just enough to order a meal, that kind of thing.”

  “You have been selected at the personal instruction of the President.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Apparently you had a meeting with him on the Berlin question. It appears you impressed him. If he has elaborated on his reasons for designating you, I don’t have those reasons.”

  Blackford thought back on that day, only a few weeks ago, in the Situation Room of the White House. He remembered the inquisitive, searching expression on the face of the President as he listened to Blackford’s story, the attentive relaxation with which he listened while Blackford was interrogated. And then the decisive way in which he put an end to the drill, nodding to Blackford that he was dismissed, and going on to utter a civility entirely nonexecutive in character—“Thank you very much,” or something like that. Rufus had stayed on at the presidential meeting. Perhaps Rufus had been quizzed about him. Curious, the whole thing.

  “The President has told the Director he is imposing total security on this mission. He’s not telling either State or Defense about it.”

  “Okay,” Blackford said. “So what is it all about?”

  Velasco told him the story of the Goodwin meeting at Montevideo. “I have with me two or three hours of reading material on the current situation in Cuba. We are paying a very heavy debt for the Bay of Pigs.”

  “You mean we are paying a very heavy debt for the failure of the Bay of Pigs.”

  “The Cubans are united behind Castro.”

  “And Castro is united behind Moscow.”

  “But that is why this development is of such great importance. The man you are to talk with is to be Che Guevara himself. As Industry Minister, he recognizes that our economic embargo is doing greater harm to Cuba than the Soviet Union is able to make up for. That is why the President thinks we may have a historic opening; have it quickly, and perhaps in two or three months things can be made to change, notwithstanding the Bay of Pigs. But he has got to find out first whether Guevara is on the level, and second whether he is in a position to guarantee what he promises. That depends on whether he is representing Castro, not merely himself. Or, if he is representing himself, whether he is likely to win over Castro if we decide to go along.”

  “Why are we meeting in Mexico City?”

  “This morning I made an approach to the Cuban ambassador to Mexico who, as it happens, I had previous experience with. It is obviously necessary to advise Guevara that the President is willing to take an exploratory step.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, of course, that he
would have to clear it with Havana.”

  “Concretely, clear what?”

  “Clear your going to Havana to see Guevara.”

  “What if he says it can all be done in Washington through some agent. Or in Mexico?”

  “It is one of the President’s conditions: either his representative—you—will speak with Guevara, or the whole thing is called off.”

  “And if he says yes?”

  “Then we discuss how to get you into Havana.”

  “What’s the most obvious way?”

  “Guantánamo.”

  “I always wanted to see Guantánamo before I died.”

  “Do you have better ideas?”

  “Che Guevara is high on culture. Couldn’t I go over as a German rock singer?”

  Velasco puffed on his cigarette, and his little cynical smile deepened perceptibly. “If you like, I shall make that suggestion to the ambassador when he calls me.”

  “Which will be when?”

  “Not before ten tonight. They love late hours, as you may know.” He rose. “Until then, we are at liberty. I make one recommendation and one request. The first is that you go through the material I have here. That will take you until about seven o’clock. The second is that under no circumstances should you advise anyone in Mexico that you are still here. I would be most happy to take you to dinner, if you would care to join me. We could go over some of the material you have read. Provided, that is, that tomorrow you will not ask me what we ate.”

  “All right,” Blackford said. “But before I start in, I need some exercise, maybe a half hour’s run. Any problem in doing that out of here?”

  Velasco paused, but only briefly. “No,” he said. “No, no problem, I think. We can go down together.”

  “Hang on,” Blackford reached for one of his bags and took out of it a pair of khaki pants, a sweater, and some tennis shoes. In a minute he was changed. As they went down in the elevator Velasco turned the apartment key over to Blackford. “You will be returning well before I do. It is extremely unlikely that the telephone should ring. If it does, please do not answer it.”

  In the lobby Velasco waved at Blackford and walked over toward his parked car.

  Eight

  Cecilio Velasco drove back toward Chapultepec Park, then turned to the right, up Asalto Boulevard. He was headed toward Coyoacán. He had known many years ago that if ever he returned to Mexico he would need to go there. Perhaps merely sitting in the car and looking at the site, he would sort out one of the residual confusions he still harbored about his long experience worshipping that awesome god. Or was it simply a morbid desire to revisit the scene of a crime?

  A great crime. But then, really, that was one of the questions that continued to vex him, whether it was a “great” crime in other than the conventional sense. The assassination of Leon Trotsky had been “great” in that it had been the center of international attention for weeks, with months, even years, of ripple effect. It had been a great crime in that Trotsky’s legion of followers had lost, irretrievably, their leader, who proved irreplaceable. And it was a crime formally defined to take a man’s life, inasmuch as Velasco, and Hurtado, and Mercader—it was Mercader who had planted the mountaineer’s pick in Trotsky’s skull—were hardly engaged in executing a civil commission. The phrase normally used in such situations, Velasco reminded himself as he turned west toward the district of Coyoacán, was “killing an innocent man.” But he was no longer certain that such a phrase described what he had engaged in. Trotsky was perhaps—probably—innocent of having committed any capital crime under Mexican law. Was he otherwise innocent?

  1922: When at age twenty-two in Barcelona Raúl Carrera was told that he would have to leave the law school because there was now no money, his father having left nothing but the tiny, heavily mortgaged house in which Raúl’s five sisters lived with their mother, he was saddened at the prospect of not finishing his law studies. But he was desolate at the prospect of losing touch with those of his companions who, like Raúl, had been inflamed by the great events in the Soviet Union. They had taken, ever since Lenin’s April theses, to meeting at least four times a week. At first only three or four of them, but now as many as twelve or fifteen, and the growth was steady, in order to discuss developments in Russia and the opportunities that surrounded them to universalize the great energies they were discovering among the disaffected—however few—with all those Castilian encumbrances, most notably the Christian God and the Bourbon king.

  Raúl admitted that he found it most difficult to break with the Catholic Church, to which his mother was passionately devoted. But he recognized that the rupture with old, traditional Spain could not be merely formalistic. He needed not merely to drift away from belief. He needed to disbelieve. To know that man is an accidental chemical-biological concatenation of cells that somehow, along the way, developed a will. And that the great narrative cycle of history was coming to a climax during this very century. Perhaps during the next ten or twenty years. That Lenin was showing his disciples how it could come about, that centuries of class consolidations could be wiped away; the poor would find that the future lay in their hands and that the exploiters and the imperialists were forever bereft of the slaves they were so accustomed to oppressing.

  Raúl’s earnestness combined with an unusual analytical eloquence, which he exercised in small circles only, and infrequently. He would never think of addressing a large public gathering. He had once been invited to develop formal forensic and oratorical skills by Beatriz, with whom he shared his vision, his meals, and his bed. She had offered to pretend that she was a great crowd—they could just go off to Blanes, toward the cliffs of the Costa Brava, and there in the pastoral wilderness where no one could possibly overhear them Raúl could mount a rock, use a makeshift lectern, and practice public declamation. Raúl did this three times, but always he tended to speak as if engaged in a seminar, and eventually even Beatriz was forced to admit that the project had failed, that Raúl’s golden tongue must be reserved for exercises more intimate than public orations.

  His companions, especially Antonio Durán, whose seniority (he was twenty-four) made him ex officio the leader of the group, were as torn as Raúl by the news that he would need to withdraw, and so Durán and three of Raúl’s special friends met on the Monday night before Raúl’s scheduled departure on Friday, the end of the term, to inquire what might be done. Every semester the cost of tuition and board came to a thousand pesetas. But however often they reviewed their collective resources they could think of no way of coming up with that much money, particularly not by next Friday when the payment for the next semester was inflexibly due.

  They sat about an austere, dilapidated empty classroom lit by a single bare bulb. It was getting cold—Barcelona gets fearfully cold in January—as the conversational hubbub mounted, and then Rico banged his open palm on the desk, demanding silence. Rico did not speak often, and so was presumed to have something worth listening to when he sought attention. It was also Rico who, of them all, was the most inventive, as when he had got up the idea of the anonymous letters alleging that the dean they all hated was a practicing homosexual, practically a capital offense in Spain in 1921, thus bringing on the dean’s premature retirement.

  “I have it! I have it! It not only is no problem, it gives us an opportunity to exercise the revolutionary arts! We will rob a bank.”

  There was a moment’s silence, followed by excited crosstalk. Rico was quite carried away. “By robbing a bank not only can we put Raúl through school, we can begin to finance the revolutionary movement to which we are consecrated. Robbing a bank is an excellent place to start since there is no greater affront to socialism than banks.”

  “Which bank?” Héctor wanted to know.

  “What does it matter which bank, my dear Héctor? They are all the same.”

  “If it is all the same to the rest of you,” Héctor said, “I would like to rob the bank that owns the usurious mortgage on my father’s house.
”

  “Which one is that?”

  “It is the Banco del Sagrado Corazón, on Calle Marina, near the bullring.”

  And so the plan was conceived.

  Rico, because he had thought up the idea, took charge. He assigned Antonio the job of monitoring the bank’s activities from outside the building, minute by minute, from nine in the morning when it opened until one, when it closed down for the midday break, to take note, for instance, how often and when policemen patrolled by and at which hours patronage of the bank was heaviest. It had been resolved to stage the robbery in the morning, and now they had to determine at exactly what hour in the morning. Héctor, who regularly delivered his parents’ mortgage payments to the bank, was assigned the job of surveying security arrangements inside the bank, in whose chambers he could find excuses to dawdle by making a mistake in the mortgage vouchers, an innocent mistake but time-consuming to correct.

  They would concert their findings the next afternoon. Meanwhile Concho was to lay his hands on firearms. “Handguns would be preferable,” Rico observed gravely, stroking his beard—all four of them wore beards and moustaches, in the style of Lenin—“but if we can’t get them, then rifles or, better still, shotguns will do. We need”—he paused, not without a sense of the drama that accompanies armed struggle—“a proletarian arsenal.”

  On Wednesday, at Antonio’s home because his parents were visiting his sick aunt at Santander and the house was empty, they convened to pool their information. Concho began by producing triumphantly, from a large bag, one .32-caliber pistol. “I got this from a policeman’s holster while he was taking a crap in the railroad station.”