Murder in Havana

by Margaret Truman

  It had been years since such a feeling had overtaken him. It had happened in Budapest while on assignment for the CIA, working through an embassy cover, handling an informer from Hungary’s military bureaucracy who wanted to defect, accepting the secrets the informer brought to the safe house, feeding the man’s ego along with good whiskey and food, flush with the excitement of clandestine meetings and shadowy relationships, the danger and intrigue a kind of nourishment for his own soul—until the informer was found dead one morning in a vacant lot near his modest home, discovered by his ten-year-old son.

  It was that night, after the informer had failed to show up at the safe house—and after Pauling had learned the reason why—that this damnable wave of weakness and vulnerability had swept over him while lying in bed in his apartment in Budapest, hearing music and people laughing outside, and he had thought of Doris and his sons.

  Now, he wondered, what was Jessica doing at this moment? Did she miss him?

  He went to the small bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, but avoided looking at the mirror.

  Music from the nightclub followed him across the lobby, through the front door of the hotel, and along the expansive Malecón. But after a half hour of walking, fatigue from the long flight caught up with him and he returned to the hotel. The cocktail lounge was still open. He sat at the bar and ordered Hatuey, a Cuban lager. A group of Canadian tourists, loudly proclaiming their presence, occupied a large corner table. An affectionate couple—they looked French to Pauling—held hands and kissed in another corner. To Pauling’s left was a heavyset man who attempted to speak in Spanish to the bartender. On the right was an extremely attractive woman, perhaps thirty, no younger, possibly a few years older. He assumed she was Cuban; certainly of Hispanic origin. Her hair was raven black, thick and luxurious, shimmering beneath the targeted light from a recessed spotlight above her. He saw her in profile; her features were fine; good genes had prevailed. She wore a blue-and-yellow silk dress and a dozen thin gold bracelets on her left wrist. The half-finished drink on the bar in front of her was dark, a rum concoction, he assumed. He’d noticed since arriving in Havana that Cuban women, at least those in the prime of their sexual lives, tended to be lusty and voluptuous. It wasn’t so much physical assets that defined their attractiveness. It was an exuded sense that, for them, sex was to be freely and openly enjoyed, even celebrated, giving further credence to the theory that the major sexual organ is between the ears.

  She’d ignored him when he sat down, never bothering to turn. Was she a prostitute? he wondered. Prostitution was rampant in Cuba, particularly with young girls, the jineteras, meaning literally “jockeys.” Seemingly they were everywhere; he’d been propositioned twice during his short walk on the Malecón. No; too old at thirty-plus, in too good shape. If she was a whore, she was a spectacular one. He’d been told that the major hotels—was his a major hotel?—kept out prostitutes. Maybe she worked in concert with the bartender, a hefty fellow with a healthy head of salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a loose-fitting, white guayabera, the ubiquitous dress shirt of Cuban men.

  Pauling motioned for the bartender and asked for the check. He was asked whether he was a guest of the hotel. “Sí,” he replied.

  While the bartender went to the end of the bar to fetch a hotel charge slip, the woman called out softly after him, “Chico?”

  The bartender did not turn. Not his name, Pauling thought. But then it registered. Chico. He turned and faced her. She smiled.

  “You’re—?” he started to ask.

  The slightest shake of her head indicated that he was to be silent.

  She stood, smiled at him again, and left the bar. Pauling signed the charge slip and followed. She’d gone to the street and was walking up Paseo. She moved slowly, allowing him to easily catch her.

  “You’re Sardiña?” he asked as they walked side by side, not looking at each other.

  “Yes. And you are Max. I asked for you at the hotel desk and they said you’d left. I waited for you in the bar.” Only a trace of an accent infringed on her English.

  “Why did you assume I’d come into the bar?” he asked.

  “I didn’t. I felt like a drink. It didn’t matter whether you came in or not. I would have called your room until I reached you.”

  Pauling chuckled.

  “What’s funny?”

  “All this secrecy about meeting you. I didn’t know you were—a woman.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Did she sense he was lying? That she was a woman in the general sense of it was fine. That she was a woman in whom he would be placing his professional faith was another thing. He hadn’t known many female operatives in his career, and had worked with even fewer. But one experience in El Salvador had soured his view.

  He’d been sent there under embassy cover to “handle” a woman from that country named Gina, who’d come over from the other side; his superiors in Langley had assured him that she could be trusted. They’d worked together to set up a sting in which she seduced a government official from El Salvador’s military establishment in a hotel room rigged with a camera. It went smoothly. The official had been compromised. The photos would go to his wife and children unless he provided information from within his agency.

  A meeting with the official was arranged for late one night in a secluded suburb of San Salvador. Pauling showed up at the scheduled time, but Gina did not. Nor did the government official. Waiting were a dozen armed militia members instead, intent on taking him captive and, he was certain, torturing him to death. His antennae, however, had been fully extended, he saw them before they saw him, and he made his escape, avoiding physical confrontation with the militiamen.

  Later, during a debriefing at Langley, he learned that Gina had been the official’s lover for more than a year. Their lovemaking had been practiced, old hat. Rather than setting up the official, she’d used the situation to target Pauling. So much for Langley’s intelligence inside El Salvador. That he’d run the risk of being killed didn’t keep certain colleagues from kidding him about the episode. Somehow, he didn’t find it funny.

  Gina’s pretty face came and went when he looked at Sardiña.

  Cognitively, he knew that he was supposed to view the opposite sex as equal—equal opportunity and equal pay—it was expected, and he’d tried, not wanting to be out of the mainstream of thought these days, even espousing his belief in the notion of no difference between men and women, at least in the workplace.

  But there was a difference.

  Workplace?

  Going undercover to spy and putting your life on the line in the bargain hardly represented a workplace.

  The smell of her perfume reached his nostrils, carrying such pragmatic thoughts into the humid Havana air.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “An apartment.”

  “You live in Cuba?”

  “No. It belongs to a friend of mine. She’s away on business.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Very. I’ll be staying there for as long as it takes you to finish your assignment.”

  They turned into a solar, a dark, narrow alley.

  “The apartment’s here?” Pauling asked.

  “At the end.”

  He stopped walking, allowing her to get a few steps ahead. She stopped, too, and turned. “Are you all right?” she asked. Her voice was low for a woman, and well modulated.

  “Yes, of course.” His defenses were up, his senses sharpened. He didn’t know this woman, yet blindly followed her into the darkness.

  They reached a doorway, which she opened. A key wasn’t necessary. Pauling looked up. Silhouetted against the sky was a wrought-iron balcony; clothing hung from it. A bare bulb in the tiny foyer’s ceiling fixture gave scant light, as though receiving only some of the intended electricity. A set of stone steps led to upper floors. As the woman called Sardiña ascended the steps, Pauling took notice of the sway in he
r hips and the nicely turned calves and ankles below the dress hem. It was insufferably hot in the cramped staircase; her perfume dizzied him as he followed her to a steel door, which she also opened without a key. She reached for a wall switch and the room took shape; small, square, with two doors leading from it. The only window was open and a blessed breeze rippled white chintz curtains. There was a pullout couch, a tall, slender dresser, two red vinyl sling chairs, and a black rug that lay in the middle of the wood floor like a square on a checkerboard. She went to the tiny kitchen, light from it spilling across the floor.

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked.

  He came to the doorway. “Sure.”

  He watched her take a bottle of rum from a cabinet, and two cordial glasses, which she filled. She handed one to him, smiled, raised her glass, and said, “Salud!”

  Pauling nodded and tasted.

  “Habana Club,” she said. “Anejo. Aged seven years.”

  “It’s good,” he said, returning to the main room and sitting on the couch. She took one of the chairs.

  “You have a first name I assume,” he said.

  “Of course I do,” she said, laughing.

  “All Vic told me—you know Vic, of course—he called you Sardiña. That’s all.”

  “I suppose he didn’t want to scare you off,” she said, “my being a woman. Celia. My name is Celia.”

  “Celia. What’s your story?”

  “My story?”

  “Are you Cuban?”

  “Born here, to the States when I was eleven.”

  “You, ah—you spend a lot of time here?”

  “Some. I’m with the Cuban-American Health Initiative. I get to come back often, especially since the embargo allows the sale of medical supplies to Cuba.”

  Pauling nodded. The Cuban-American Health Initiative. Another CIA front? There were so many you couldn’t tell them apart without a scorecard. What was her story?

  “How did you get involved with Gosling?” he asked.

  “So many questions.”

  “I like to know who I’m working with.”

  “So do I.”

  He grinned, pulled one of the business cards from Cali Forwarding that Gosling had given him, and handed it to her. She dropped it to the floor next to her chair.

  “You’re working with Celia Sardiña, who can put you in touch with the right people,” she said. “Would you like another drink?”

  “No. I need some sleep. Does that couch pull out?”

  “For me, it does. Can you find your way back to the hotel?”

  “I’ll manage. When do you start putting me in touch with the right people?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “And what do I do, hang around the bar waiting for you?”

  “Be here at four. We’re having dinner with a friend.”

  “And what do I do for the rest of the day, send postcards of Fidel to my friends?”

  “El Comandante has had people killed for less flippancy. I suggest that if you must refer to him, you stroke your chin. The bearded one. It is the way it’s done here.”

  “Thanks for the lesson.”

  “One of many I suspect you need. Please close the door on your way out.”

  Walter Fuentes was in his second term as the junior senator from Florida. Born to Cuban-American parents, he’d received a law degree from Vanderbilt University and had practiced in Miami until making a successful run for mayor of that city. When the senior senator, Cagney Jones, suffered a fatal heart attack, Fuentes was encouraged to run for the unexpectedly vacant seat. Photogenic and appropriately domesticated—his wife and teenage children, nicely divided between the sexes, were seldom out of camera range—Fuentes had become, by virtue of winning the senate seat, the country’s leading voice for Miami’s Cuban exile community.

  On this day, he led two men and two women into the Oval Office where James L. Walden warmly greeted them, shaking hands and addressing each by name; his ability to remember names was well known, a useful political attribute. With the president were his national security advisor, Paul Draper, and State’s assistant secretary for Cuban affairs, Kathleen James. After everyone had been seated, two white-jacketed mess attendants served coffee, brewed especially strong at the president’s suggestion, and bite-sized fruit Danish. Fuentes said, “It’s good of you to see us this morning, Mr. President. We know how difficult it is to make time in your busy schedule like this.”

  “There’s always time, Senator, when the issue is important.” He turned his attention to the others. “I’m not unaware,” he said, “of the goals of your organization and your purpose for asking to meet. Senator Fuentes has been a committed and effective advocate for you, and for your people and their point of view. But as you know, my administration doesn’t necessarily agree with some of the actions you espouse regarding Prime Minister Castro and the future of Cuba.” He laughed. “But you certainly have many Republican members of Congress in your camp. Or maybe I shouldn’t refer to camps at this moment.”

  They all chuckled. The four people with Fuentes represented the Cuban-American Freedom Alliance (CAFA). Politically implacable, well-financed, and powerful, CAFA considered itself the Cuban government in exile, an unofficial title bestowed by President Reagan when he helped establish the group during his presidency. It had been treated as such by subsequent administrations until Walden came to power. His view of CAFA was not nearly as supportive.

  “Mr. President,” CAFA’s leader, Ramon Gomez, said, “my organization represents almost a million Cuban-born American citizens in this country, more than half of them living in the Miami area. We—”

  Walden was quick to correct him. “Mr. Gomez, I am fully aware that your organization is an important voice for Cuban-Americans, but not for all of them. There are hundreds of thousands who do not share your goal of liberating Cuba through force. I met only a few weeks ago with members of Cambio Cubana, which I believe stands for Cubans for Change, and the Cuban Committee for Democracy. They share a more moderate view of how to resolve the Cuban problem, if I may call it that. With all due respect, you don’t have a monopoly on Cuban policy.”

  “That may be true, Mr. President,” Fuentes said, “but those in power never have a monopoly in a democracy. What was your margin of victory, sir, nine percent?” He smiled to soften the rebuke. “Of course, the dictator Castro does have a monopoly. Ruthless dictators always do.”

  Draper stepped in. “Surveys show, Mr. Gomez, that half of the Cuban population in the United States wish an open dialogue with Castro, not liberation by force. They want Cuba freed through diplomacy.”

  “But no survey is needed to show who among our people is willing to put their money behind their convictions,” Gomez said.

  Walden glanced at Draper; a small smile came and went. The not-so-subtle message from the Cuban leader was that CAFA had been a substantial contributor to politicians championing its cause, at least in campaign rhetoric. And that included key Democrats as well as Republicans. The numbers had been delivered to Walden before the meeting: more than $1.5 million in campaign contributions since 1981, including $125,000 to President Clinton, who tightened the trade embargo while his opponent, George Bush, withheld support for the harsh Torricelli bill that, among other things, fostered the overthrow of Castro by financing dissidents in Cuba.

  Assistant Secretary James spoke up. “Mr. Gomez,” she said, “our intelligence from Cuba clearly indicates that a majority of the Cuban people fear what would become of them should CAFA succeed in overthrowing Castro and become the new government in power.”

  “Fear us?” Gomez said mockingly. “Why would they fear us? We fight for them and their right to live in a free society.”

  “Their fears are well-founded,” Walden said, casting a quick, surreptitious glance at a clock on the wall. He’d shoehorned them in that morning in the middle of an especially busy day, but didn’t want to offend them by seeming impatient. Their constituency and its political clout was too
important for that, to say nothing of their money muscle. “You’ve taken a stand stating you’ll deal harshly with any foreign country that’s done business with Cuba during the Castro years,” Walden said. “The people are afraid that you’ll take back all that was taken from you and grab everything the Castro government has stolen, including what they’ve lost over the years. They’re aware that you’ve been a prime supporter of the embargo that not only has made the average Cuban’s life difficult, it’s given Castro exactly what he wants, an enemy responsible for his people’s problems. He loves the embargo, Mr. Gomez. It was a gift to him. Now, I must leave shortly for another appointment. What precisely is it you want from this meeting?”

  Senator Fuentes answered, “There is a growing concern, Mr. President, that you and your administration are paving the way for a so-called dialogue with Castro in the hope of establishing some form of working relationship with him. You’ve eroded the embargo at every opportunity.”

  “I’ve heard all this from your Republican colleagues in Congress,” Walden said, “only not as pleasantly put at times. I have no intention at this juncture of advancing any further initiatives to soften the stand against Prime Minister Castro and what he stands for.”

  He meant it. Although he quietly harbored the desire to pave the way for a resolution of the forty-year-plus standoff with Castro, the thought of possibly having to give even the smallest concession to the Cuban leader was anathema. He was aware of all the horror stories emanating from Havana—political foes tossed into shark tanks for Fidel’s pleasure, the thousands summarily executed for “crimes against the state,” the beatings and other torture of Cuban citizens—and he also knew that the devil sometimes had something to offer, in this case the possibility of bringing Cuba into the sphere of democracy and free enterprise.

  Walden again spoke to his guests. “Bear in mind that the embargo hasn’t done a damn thing to topple Castro and turn Cuba into a democracy. Engagement is what’s needed. There are nations all over the globe that aren’t democracies and that have brutal regimes, but we don’t put them under embargo. It’s Fidel under everyone’s skin, isn’t it? What has he outlasted, eight, nine American presidents? I don’t carry a brief for Castro, but I know that if you want Cuba restored to a democracy, the embargo is not the way to go.”