North of Havana

by Randy Wayne White

In my ear, I heard the man who was strangling me say, “Kill him.”

  I tried to twist and throw my elbow into his stomach; tried to lever his arm away from my throat so that I could explode away from him and turn—a wrestling move. The last thing I did was try to reach behind me; I wanted to get my hands on his face, my thumbs in his eyes… while slowly, slowly, the dreamy veil faded to gray… then all awareness vanished into darkness.…

  * * *

  I had several brief flashes of consciousness… of being steered, like a drunk, through some dark place, my arms over the shoulders of a big man… of silence, silence then a guttural scream, an animal’s scream, the horror of that noise instantly absorbed by the slap of my own shoes on wet pavement… of sitting heavily in slime, hearing the sound of rock grating against rock while the big man stooped in the shadows… of descending a ladder of iron rungs, then of slipping, falling, clawing frantically for a handhold as I spun into blackness, waiting to hit, waiting to hit… then of feeling a crushing impact and another explosive burst of white light.…

  Then… then, there were voices; voices fading in and out, blending with dreams. The voices of several men and at least one woman. One of the voices slowly separated itself from the others, became steadily louder and insistent… also, very familiar. I listened to the familiar voice say: “Doc? Hey, Doc—wake up!”

  I knew that voice; had I been sleeping?

  I listened to the voice say, “You die, it’s no big deal. I’ll just bring you back to life again. Hey… you hear me? Put my hands on your head, suck the death right out of you.”

  Yes… I could feel my head being cupped; a light pressure.

  I heard, “Don’t doubt it, man. I’ve got the inside track on that mortality bullshit, so you might as well wake up, save us both some energy.…”

  I opened my eyes to see a man’s gaunt face, skin stretched tight over bone, a small, elongated burn scar on the left temple like two circles linked; an infinity symbol that reminded me of something… of a friend of mine who had been dead but… was connected to electroencephalogram wires? Yeah… wires that… that were struck by lightning.…

  Yes… I was beginning to remember things.

  I saw arctic blue eyes, dirty blond hippie hair hanging shoulder length, a wild unkempt beard that I associated with crazed hermits or with certain orthodox religions. I said, “Tomlinson?” my voice sounding froggy, as if I had been sleeping.

  I watched the face grin. Saw it turn away and heard, “I told you about this guy. To kill ‘im, you’d have to cut his head off and hide it.” Then the face turned back to me. It said, “How you feeling, man? I told my comrades you’d be fine, but you think these beaners would believe it?”

  I ran my hands through my hair. Big bump on the back of my head, tender to the touch. “I… I’ve got a pretty bad headache. Somebody must’ve hit me—” Then I sat up quickly. Where the hell was I?

  I looked around into a blur of shadows and flickering light. Patted my shirt pockets until Tomlinson pressed my glasses into my hands. Put them on and saw that I was in what seemed to be a cellar: rock walls, water stained, low ceiling, damp floor; large room with corridors leading out from either side. There were candles on rough wood tables, walls and ceiling stained with candle soot.

  On one of the walls, someone had used the soot to write 8 A in huge figures.

  Two men, one of them black, a mulatto boy, and a Hispanic woman sat on oil drums, looking at me. The black man had his head back, holding a towel to his face. The towel was blood soaked. I thought: the guy I hit. I recognized the boy—he was the one who’d signaled me from the street.

  Tomlinson had his hand on my shoulder. “When Valdes was bringing you down, you slipped and fell off the ladder. Landed right on your noggin—like about a ten-foot fall onto this shit.” Meaning the slimy rock floor.

  Valdes… the name was familiar.

  I was on a table that had been cleared. I swung my legs over and stood. Felt a little shaky but not too bad. Turned to Tomlinson—he was wearing a baggy brown smock over his frayed jeans. The clothes hung on him, he was so skinny. He’d lost weight since I’d last seen him—over six feet tall but couldn’t weigh more than one forty, one fifty. All bone, beard, and Buddha eyes. I said, “Down where? Where are we?”

  “Underneath Havana, man.”

  “In a basement, you mean.”

  Tomlinson’s eyes had a familiar glow. “No, we’re underneath Havana. In an old aqueduct these people found, runs beneath the old part of the city. Dug out of solid rock by Indian slaves then forgotten. Now here it is protecting us.” The irony of that pleased him, I could tell.

  It was starting to come back to me, what had happened—being lured into the alley, then jumped. I said, “These people are friends of yours?”

  “As of Saturday, yeah. Friends, comrades. Partners in crime—you name it.” Tomlinson was patting my shoulder as he said, “You know me, man. Couple of days, it’s impossible not to do some effective karmic networking.”

  I was looking at them. The guy with the towel was busy trying to get his nose to stop bleeding, but the other man—tall, fast-twitch muscularity beneath olive-colored skin-gave me a little nod, withdrawn but friendly. I guessed he was Valdes, the one Tomlinson said had helped me down the ladder. The woman just stared at me. Shopping mall jeans, black T-shirt, attractive face, short hair, very dark eyes that didn’t miss much. She had to be Rita Santoya. Not pretty but handsome, just as Jimmy Gardenas had described her. Outdoorsy, looked like she maybe did triathlons; this modern Generation X girl sitting with revolutionaries in a rock chamber that had to have been dug three or four hundred years ago.

  I said, “So if they’re friends, why’d they try to kill me?” Tomlinson said, “See, that’s where you’re confused—” before the woman interrupted, “Them? You’re the one should apologize. They saved you. It wasn’t for them, you’d be dead right now. You maybe broke Molina’s nose and we need him.” A little pissed off; a slight Hispanic accent combined with an Atlantic coast accent—New Jersey. Yeah, she was Rita Santoya. Talking about Molinas, the man with the towel. I had to think about it: Valdes and Molinas; both of them names of anti-Castro leaders given me by Armando Azcona and Juan Rivera.

  How had Tomlinson managed to hook up with them?

  In Spanish, the tall man, Valdes, said to her, “What’s he saying? What are you talking about?”

  I spoke to him in Spanish before she could answer. “Up in the alley, you were the one who tried to strangle me. That’s what I was asking her—why you attacked me. You really expected me not to fight back?”

  Valdes gave me a very dry smile. “No, no I’ve never tried to strangle anyone.” As if he found the idea of himself doing such a thing humorous, it was so unlikely. “That was another man, Juan Pablo. Juan Pablo told me it happened because he believed that you were a man named Rosario. Rosario was trained by the Russians to be very good at killing. He enjoyed it.”

  He used the Cuban slang for Russian—Bolas. Bolas meant “balls” and described the basketball appearance of many of the Soviets.

  Valdes said, “With a man like Rosario, Molinas and Juan Pablo couldn’t take chances. They had to attack first, ask questions later. On this island, among people who know about things, he is a very famous killer.”

  I said, “The big man who tried to kill me.”

  “Exactly. That’s why our men were there. That’s why there was so much confusion. They arrive in the alley—it’s very dark—and they see one big man standing over a beaten man…” He made a gesture of dismissal—how were they supposed to know? “They assumed that Rosario got to you before they did. They assumed it was you who was trying to crawl off like some injured animal. Poor Molinas”—he nudged the man who held the bloody towel—“paid for the confusion with his good looks. See his nose? How crooked it is?”

  Molinas removed the towel long enough to say, “You son of a whore, I’ll kil
l you next time.” Meaning me. Then he groaned, saying, “I feel like I may vomit.”

  To Molinas, I said, “I’m sorry. You took me by surprise.”

  Valdes gave me a very hard look—don’t flatter yourself—before he said, “It’s not what you did to Molinas’s face that makes him sick. It’s what he and Juan Pablo had to do to Rosario.”

  There was something else I now remembered—a sudden scream followed by a silence that resonated. Rosario’s scream.

  Valdes seemed shakier, far more upset about it than Molinas. He sat there looking at me, letting the implication settle, before he added, “Understand, we’re not killers. Certainly not trained killers. We are… educated people who know something has to be done to save our country. Some of the things that have to be done make us sick to our stomachs, but we care enough to do them. And sometimes we make mistakes.”

  As I started to reply, he held a hand up, shushing me. “Please let me explain first. Earlier this evening,” he said, “we received word that you had arrived in Havana. We were also told—and this came from a very good source—that Rosario had been assigned to kill you—”

  “By who?”

  The hand again. “Please let me finish—”

  “I’m not going to let you finish because I have a friend at the Havana Libre who could be in trouble. If they’re after me, maybe they’ll go after her. I need to know—”

  “They’re getting Dewey right now, Doc. She’s probably already on her way.” Tomlinson had moved to the other side of the room and was standing beside the woman. He had his hand on her shoulder, very friendly, very familiar. “They sent a couple of people to get her, nice and quiet. I didn’t even know she was coming to Havana, so it was quite a shock, man—not that I mind.” To the woman, he said, “You’re going to like Dewey. You two, you’ve got a lot in common.”

  I started to press for an explanation, then stopped. Valdes and I had been speaking in Spanish. Tomlinson, who could order food in a Cuban restaurant but not much more, had spoken to me in English. How had he understood? The way he was smiling at me now, same thing—like he knew what I was thinking before I said it. I watched him shrug, still smiling at me; listened to him tell me, “Weird, huh?”

  In Spanish, I said to him, “Don’t pretend you understand, because I know you don’t.”

  In English, he said, “Like a native, man, a damn native. Since like… two days ago when they had me eat a couple of peyote buttons. Can’t speak a word, but, hey—they say it, I understand it. Call it intuition, call it cerebral osmosis, but, personally, I like to think it’s a lifetime of good drugs finally kicking in. Like the book says: God helps those who help themselves.”

  Valdes said to me, “This is something we’ve wondered about. He says he never understood Spanish before.”

  About himself, Tomlinson had once told me that his whole life was like being asleep, dreaming, except for the two or three times he’d woken up just long enough to scream. To Valdes I said, “What Tomlinson does and doesn’t understand has always been a mystery.” I looked at Tomlinson—seven years of university, he had to have taken a language. Probably Spanish and now it was coming back to him a decade or two later, like an amnesia victim. I watched his smile broaden as I added, “To the best of my knowledge, though, he neither spoke nor understood. And I’ve known him for years.”

  “The crazy wisdom.” Rita Santoya reached and placed her index finger on Tomlinson’s burn scar, the small elongated infinity symbol. I realized, for the first time, that it could also be a lopsided figure eight, as Rita added, “He’s been touched by God. It’s what Taino said.”

  Taino?

  Valdes—this articulate, educated man—said, “And Taino has never been wrong.” He said it matter-of-factly, either with a hint of sarcasm or a hint of reverence, I couldn’t tell. I wondered which it was he felt.

  Tomlinson said, “Yeah, Taino. He’s magic, man.”

  12

  The first chance I got, I took Tomlinson aside; led him off into one of the dark corridors. I said, “You couldn’t just send a messenger to the hotel? Or send a note, tell me and Dewey to meet you someplace? Jesus, setting me up like that.” They had given me a wet cloth. I was holding it to my head, wishing the pounding would go away.

  Tomlinson said, “You okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay. When Dewey gets here, I’ll be better but, no, I’m not okay.”

  “What choice did we have, Doc? Rita and I’ve been on the run since Saturday morning, then like a little bit ago, Molinas comes in and says, ‘Hey, one of my contacts just told me your friend Ford is going to get hit tonight… or someone wants your friend Ford hit.’ Molinas says, ‘And I just saw them leave the Havana Libre, headed this way.’ So what the hell are we supposed to do?”

  “Yeah, lead me here, someplace nice and dark for some assassin to jump me. That makes sense.”

  “You think we knew he was following you? Come on, man.”

  When I didn’t reply, he said, “I… felt bad, the way Valdes laid all those heavy questions on you. Like you were the criminal but, hey, these people have to be very careful.”

  Back in the room, Valdes had pressed hard for an answer: Why was I so important that someone would send a professional killer like Rosario?

  I was vague; I repeatedly said I didn’t know. Not the whole story, but I saw no need to confide in Valdes. Finally, Valdes decided it was probably because of my association with Tomlinson and Rita Santoya. Maybe it was true. I sure as hell hoped so.

  But acknowledging it seemed to frighten Valdes. I heard him say to Rita, “There’s no use pretending. The wrong people know that you’re here. They know why.”

  I remembered the story Jimmy Gardenas had told me about the two Cuban brothers, Eduardo and Angel Santoya. Angel would be Rita’s great uncle. He was the one who had been an informant; sided with Castro. He was probably pretty high up in the corporation by now. If Rita returned to Cuba, he’d be after her.

  Tomlinson was still talking about why he hadn’t sent a messenger. “These people, the Ochoas, they know best. Very smart people. No one knows anybody else’s real name—they’re that careful. They say we can’t be seen with you, that’s all I need to hear. So we had to wing it. All night long, they said Geis never left your side, so we had to find a way to get you off the street. I said use the boy—Doc’s a sap for kids. Like I said, it was last minute.”

  “You were so sure Geis wouldn’t come into the alley with me.”

  “Yeah, pretty sure. I’ve met a handful of men who’d go charging into a dark alley to help a stranger, but Geis isn’t one of them.” Tomlinson waited a few moments before he said, “It’s really good to see you, man. I appreciate your coming.”

  Like he’d invited me to a weekend party or something.

  I wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries. Standing there telling me how careful these people were when, judging from what I’d seen, they were pretenders, amateurs; worse, their security was terrible. No one knew anyone else’s real name? Then how did they know who anyone really was? I felt like slapping that drug-bleary, holier-than-thou smile off Tomlinson’s face. I took a deep breath, calming myself before I said, “You don’t look like a man who’s suffering terrible headaches. Or maybe that was just a line to get me to Havana.”

  I watched him twisting strands of his long hair, a nervous habit. “No headaches since Taino gave me the peyote, man. Did this truth ceremony thing—you know, see if I could be trusted. My scar”—he touched his temple—“he was very impressed by my scar. He told me it was exactly the omen he’d been waiting for. That name? Taino? He took it from a dream he had when he was a child; turns out it’s the name of some lost Caribbean tribe and he’s the spiritual heir.”

  “Quite a coincidence,” I said. How could anyone as smart as Tomlinson believe such crap?

  “Now he’s a Babalao, like a very important high priest for the Palo Monte. That’s like
a branch of the Santería religion. Palo Monte, I’m talking about. But where magic plays a lot bigger part. Magic is Taino’s thing. Since then, my head’s felt healthy as a horse. Real tingly.”

  I was whispering, trying to control my anger. “No more panic attacks, no more paranoia?”

  “Paranoia? Man, that was back when the dark forces of about a hundred solar systems were after me. You thought I was imagining that? That wasn’t paranoia, it was a rational assessment of my position in the universe. And it sucked, man.” He said, “It really sucked.”

  I had to remind myself that this was a troubled version of the Tomlinson who lived aboard a sailboat back in little Dinkin’s Bay, Sanibel Island. Reminded myself that the real Tomlinson—the dropout prophet, gentle and wise, whom everyone on the island treasured—was still alive, still healing somewhere deep in his brain, behind those glowing, arctic eyes.

  I said, “I was talking about your boat. On the phone you seemed a tad paranoid about the Cubans taking your boat. You still want to get it back, don’t you?”

  “No Más? Damn right I want it back. I know where they got her anchored, too. This customs outpost where they keep the confiscated boats. Saw her yesterday. Me and Taino were out cruising, trying to tune in on the vibes. We drive up this bluff, I look down at the sea, and there she is.”

  Out cruising around with a leader of an anti-Castro voodoo faction.

  Tomlinson said, “She looked pretty, man. Blue on white, like this toy sailboat, but it was like I didn’t even have to look because I could feel her at anchor. Waiting for me. No Más, she knows, man. She knows. At this place called Mariel Harbor, west of Havana.”

  I winced. Jesus.

  “Mariel,” I said.

  “Yeah. Big natural harbor with a narrow mouth, kind of remote. Not much activity. Taino said it’s because the Russians pulled out. That’s where we’re going when Dewey shows up. They got a place there.”

  I said, “Oh yeah?” wanting to grab Tomlinson by the arms, shake him until his teeth clattered; yell into his face, “You idiot! You’re going to get us all killed messing with these two-bit revolutionaries!” Instead, I said, “Mind telling me what happened to your original plan? I bring the ten thousand, pay off your fines, and you sail back to Key West. On the phone, you’re like, ‘Please help me, Doc. I need help.’ So it’s kind of surprising to walk into this mess.”