Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit

by Barry, Mike

  The man on the floor coughed again, spewed blood across the carpet. Delgado looked at it with distaste. It was uncosmetic, that was all. You could not have a nice, clean interrogation anymore. In the old days people understood and cooperated but then again, Delgado reminded himself and this had to be taken into account, in the old days the people who understood and cooperated were on his side. The enemy had never been so reasonable. “Things have changed,” he said again. “Only the premier and the highest levels of the government know how much they have but this is still no excuse for you. You took orders from a fool, you have given us a most serious difficulty here and you may have set back certain facets of our international relations by several years. We will have to take the most extreme measures.”

  He opened the desk drawer again, this time very casually and took out a pistol. Feeling it slide into his hand, leaping into his palm almost as might a woman’s breast, Delgado had a flash of recollection: this was not 1974 but instead 1957 or so and it was not he who was standing behind the desk but another man, someone in the uniform of Battista’s secret police … and this person was levelling the gun at a form which only could have been Delgado’s. Please don’t do this to me; I am a loyalist, this recollected Delgado was pleading, don’t kill me, don’t kill me. The weakness of this remembered voice poured out, gasping through every syllable and Delgado had a sudden flash of revulsion, all the more difficult because it was unexpected. The same, he thought, it is always the same, the actors and the masks and the words change but when you come to the end nothing has changed whatsoever; we have merely turned the tables. I am no different from any of the others, Delgado is like everyone else. And he reacted against this. No! he screamed in memory and then realized that it was not memory at all but reality which had overtaken him and facing this quivering man it was the Delgado of the present who was screaming no! the cry driving slivers of pain all the way from hand and elbow and then he was firing the gun into the man in front of him, firing convulsively: head, throat, shoulders, heart, spleen and the man was changing before him; he was no longer a man but a bag filled with blood, the blood spurting and leaping like fire through all the little discovered openings of his body … and then the form was falling, burbling.

  “God!” Delgado found himself shouting as the man lay before him, “This cannot be,” and then his interrogator’s calm returned to him as it always would (because the masks would never change and now he was the Official, the Interrogator) and he found himself looking at the corpse now, the exploding form on the floor with something that was not revulsion at all but came closer to a sense of command. “You cannot do this to us,” he said in a calm, flat tone, “you simply cannot do this kind of thing to us anymore,” and did not know if he was talking about the hijacking and the drugs or whether it was an entirely different matter but then his attention flicked to the man lying on the floor, the man he had beaten. Death in the room had revived this man, unconsciousness had fallen from him and he was sitting in a cramped position on the floor, arms wrapped around his knees, looking up at Delgado with the expression of a child. Yes, he had made children of both of them: that was the essence of power, to strip personality and control from people and turn them into the helpless creatures they had once been.

  “No,” this man said. “No, please,” but although his mouth moved his eyes did not. They were curiously cold and resigned; they seemed to be saying that they were not responsible for the motions or the words of the mouth which was, after all, only performing a series of necessary gestures. You’re going to do it, the eyes were saying, so do it quickly and at least allow dignity and to this Delgado could respond. He levelled the Beretta.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and he almost was because he knew what he was killing now, it was not so much these men in the room as some earlier version of himself that he had had to repudiate for survival. But every death was a recoil, every murder a lashing back, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Of course it was, that was the key to the delivery of death; you could only do it well if you knew what you were killing and then very quickly and precisely. Delgado knocked three shots off the trigger, driving them into the man’s skull, deep into the brain pan. The expression of the face did not change, the eyes did not change at all but only held that curious, cold glimmer of knowledge and then the man sprawled out below him on the floor, sinking away, the mass of his blood pooling with the other’s on the floor. And in that posture, dead, he was no longer Delgado but merely an anonymous man who had been killed.

  Delgado put the pistol away in his drawer, closed it, and then went to the door. He opened it. The guard looked at him, caught in a posture of listening, his face looking very wet and strained. “Is it all right?” he said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I would have done that,” the guard said. “There was no need. I would have—”

  “It’s perfectly all right,” Delgado said. “It wasn’t necessary. I had to do it.”

  “All right,” the guard said. “Should I—”

  “Of course you should,” Delgado said. Tension broke his voice and then he was screaming. “Clean them up!” he said, “get them out of here! Do you think I want corpses in my office? Do you think that I want blood overtaking everything? Get them out of here!”

  He pushed past the guard, shaking and walked down the hall, toward the administration offices. He would tell them what he had done. He would tell them that he had followed orders. Now the problem was theirs and he hoped, hoped very strongly, that he was out of it. But there was just no way of knowing. There was no way of being sure.

  As the revolution had evolved, there was no way of being sure of anything.

  III

  All prisons were the same. He had seen their interior a hundred times in New York, conveyed prisoners in and out of the Tombs, even once as a participant in a project had spent a night in the Tombs and another on Riker’s Island so that police personnel could see exactly where the people they apprehended could go. He had never forgotten that. And he had spent a night in a jail in Saigon back in the sixties for reasons which were still obscure to him and once, long ago, he had spent a few hours in one of the well-known Mexican jails because, as an eighteen-year-old below the border on his own, he had not been able to immediately establish his identity. So he knew a little about jails, not much but far more than most people would ever care to understand and when you came right down to it, Havana was the same as New York City or Tia Juana. A jail was a place where people were held in close confinement in undesirable conditions where, if you got lucky, the only killer was boredom, but the boredom could destroy you. For many it extended through years and years, decades mounting toward a life sentence, for others it might only go six months or a year and they could pace out the time a little better, but life-imprisonment or overnight, it was a place in which you simply could not get out of yourself, where you were hurled back on yourself constantly, the real prison then being the cell of self. … And now, after two hours in this basement, nothing more, Wulff felt himself closer to an edge of panic than anything he had ever glimpsed since his war had begun. He was alone in a room with a barred gate, at the end of a hallway and he could not even hear voices. Now and then, far down, a door would slam and he would hear footsteps and curses. For the rest he sat in the cell, an uneaten meal in front of him and calculated the dimensions of what had happened. It did not look pleasant. Now, he was deep in.

  At least he had been able to talk the passengers off the plane, get the stewardesses out, get in a fresh crew who had had experience with something of this sort and had the training to do their jobs. It could have been a major disaster; at least he had saved them that although there was no saying what was minor or major, not in a situation like this, not ever. The flight to Havana had been sullen, the last hour on the edge of an explosion of some sort because the two gunmen, initially confident, had seemed to lose assurance progressively as the plane came toward Havana. Maybe it was only the first awareness
of what they had done sinking through; maybe it was the suspicion that they had not had prepared for them at Havana the nost riotous of welcomes but there had been a point, almost when they were about to land, when the gunmen had seriously discussed turning the plane around and being taken anywhere else, perhaps Canada. They had been so agitated that their voices had risen and they had made no effort to conceal from Wulff what they were worried about. They were worried that there was going to be no protection from the authorities at landing and that the people, whoever they were, who had sent them out on this were in no position to make guarantees. “We’re being played for fools; I tell you they just want that shit and that son of a bitch out of the country!” one of them had said and the situation had become even uglier because they had discussed then the possibility of killing Wulff, getting the plane turned around and escaping with the valise themselves, possibly to Canada. Sitting alone in the passenger cabin, gripping the seat Wulff had found himself judging the chances he would have in taking them on right then and only by a small margin had he decided that he could not, there was too much risk, they were armed and even in their panic could probably overwhelm him. As long as there was the slightest possibility that he could get out of this whole he could not attempt suicide. But the realization that the gunmen were beyond their depth, that they were functioning on orders which were confused and probably issued from a level which could become treacherous had been very much with him in those last moments and although there were good things about it—because he could at least hope now that the landing in Havana might not be a death sentence for him—there was the matter of surviving through this.

  But they had decided at last to go in, decided that Cuba looked safer for them at least than an unknown destination and he had been able to relax, at least until the plane had taxied in front of a dismal administration building somewhere at the far corner of the airport and they had been instantly surrounded by police in full riot gear. Well, that would have to be expected, notification to the authorities; the gunmen had until that last moment of fear, been convinced that they were heading toward a haven and there had been no attempt to block the crew from explaining who they were carrying and where they were landing. But when the police had charged aboard the craft, moving past Wulff in fact to seize the gunmen first, clap them into handcuffs and take them roughly off the plane before they came at Wulff in a more restrained manner … when all of this happened Wulff allowed himself to see that not only the gunmen but he had misread this situation. Nor was there any reason for this: he should have anticipated as should the others that the public landing of a million dollars worth of shit in Havana was not something with which the authorities could cooperate.

  They had taken him off the plane then, less roughly than the hijackers but firmly enough and sped him through the bleak back streets of Havana, toward confinement of some sort he had supposed. But for a moment, sitting in the back of the official car, his limbs cramped, his stomach convulsed from the profound tension of the last day, he had allowed himself to think that it would not be jail at all, had entertained the fantasy that they would turn him loose somewhere in the vicinity of the capitol buildings for apologies and congratulations of some sort after which he would be put on a private plane for return to the states and a destination of his choice…. Yes, it had been something worth thinking of anyway, even though he knew at the more rational levels of consciousness that nothing like this could happen. They were no fools here. It was possible that the gunmen would not get the warmest of greetings, that was quite likely in fact—there had just been too much pressure on this government recently—but that hardly meant that things would be going his way. They owed him no favors, none of them, he was the one who had, from their point of view anyway, been responsible for the hijacking simply by presenting the gunmen with an irresistible opportunity … and things would be getting a lot rougher before they became easier. If they ever did. Wulff had eased back in the car, closed his eyes, tried to resign himself but resignation was difficult; resignation was the most difficult thing of all to cultivate when you were in a situation which was literally out of control and in which you were controlled by others. That was something which had not so far happened in his war; he guessed that he would have to learn. There were many things which he would have to learn indeed, no one ever reached a point of utter knowledge, but then again he would have been crazy if he thought that this was going to be easy. Remember, he had counselled himself, remember that you’re a dead man; they killed you on the fifth floor of a rooming house and you’ll never be alive again but he was not even sure that this could be taken as a truth. What was death? what was killing? who was he to deny that he could be reached by pain when there was pain all around? Well, no point to any of this. As best as he could, he reconciled himself.

  They took him into a large, grey building near what seemed to be the center of town and he was escorted by three solemn guards into this cell and there he had been left. The guards were dishevelled, sweating heavily from what appeared to be more a personality defect than any tension: Havana had deteriorated through these days. Wulff, who had never been here, supposed that in the Battista days it had been a resort center; a place whose gaiety might have been shallow but which had, however manufactured, been the pose which the city had adopted, the gaiety oozing out even into the slum sections which ringed the city and in the slums, which were part of every city he had ever seen (except Las Vegas which had no neighborhoods but was merely a condition, laid in brights against the desert) they had probably accepted that condition as well so that from stem to stern the town had danced, danced in mud, danced under the armaments of the dictator’s police, but however wavering, the dance had gone on until the Revolution had come. And now the revolution had clamped, in this decade, a lead cover over those waters and the city had been baked dry. Empty rubble, ruined buildings, staggering forms passed by Wulff as they drove through the back parts of the city. It looked like New York now or like any large population center in the western world, like an occupied zone. Nevertheless it was still here; it was working after a fashion.

  Now he sat in a cell in the jail, looking through the bars and thinking of the price he had paid, the risks he had taken, the men he had killed to get this far. It did not seem worth it. Looked at in perspective nothing was worth it; you wound up in a cell or in the grave but somewhere you had to try, if you cared, to make a contribution and he wanted to believe very badly that he had made a difference. Still, if they simply left him here forever, would anyone notice? After a long time David Williams in the PD might remember that Wulff hadn’t checked in and use informants to start a thin network of inquiry. But what would it matter months from now, long after they had had their chance at him? He shook his head, bit his lips, looked at the walls and then away. He would not even consider this. You lived, rather, moment to moment like the drug freaks themselves, trapped within the cycle … and hoped, somehow, that there would be a reckoning.

  The guard was a fat man somewhere in his upper sixties. He carried weight as clumsily as age, his flesh weaving on him like a barrel, his ruined head and appendages protruding from the mass. He came down the hall, jingling like a music box, and poised in front of the cell. He put his hands on the bars, clamped them like an animal: an ape peering through these bars, pleading for attention as if he were the prisoner and Wulff the guard, and said, “You come with me now.”

  “Must I?”

  “Of course you must,” the guard said almost peevishly. “That is regulation.”

  “Do you live by regulations.”

  “We live by anything we can get.”

  The guard’s English was unaccented; despite his ragged speech pattern the words did not sound malformed. Everybody here seemed to speak an unaccented English. If Havana were truly to be cleansed of Yanqui it would be more than a ten-to-fifteen year haul. At the heart all of them were Americans; that, Wulff thought, was why the government here was a battering ram, their back streets gutted as they
led into the heart of the cities. For two decades everything had been America; face up to it.

  “Let’s go,” the guard said.

  “I don’t think I have any choice,” Wulff said. The gate was opened. “Should I resist apprehension?” The irony was lost on the guard. Everything was lost on them; they would take anything without expression. The basic humorlessness of all authorities was worldwide; then again, Wulff thought, there was very little for them to be whimsical about. Was he? The stakes were too high. The guard probably thought that he could be killed at any instant.

  They walked through the narrow halls of the prison. Apparently Wulff was in a special section; either that or Havana had become law-abiding under the new regime. The cells were empty. Row after row of empty cages confronted him; he kept on walking, three paces ahead of the guard, knowing that the man had his gun out, was following him one hand on the trigger. Even so, he could take him. The guard had fallen into lockstep; if Wulff stopped suddenly and hurled himself backward the man would be caught completely unaware. The gun would be jammed back against his body; before he could get off a shot, Wulff could roll over him on the floor and take the gun away. Easy. Nothing to it. Still, he thought, why bother? Wherever the guard was taking him would be more interesting than this alley. It would be difficult to break out of a prision; they could seal him in here. Go to high ground. Try to make escape from there. Who knows? he thought, there may be no need for escape whatsoever. They might want to deal with him. Their position was not too happy a one; there had been too many hijackings and he suspected that the gunmen had hardly been greeted with a procession.