Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  At the time, it was necessary, he thought. Never regret the strong, the necessary action, the deed of steel.

  The child stooped and picked a shell from the sand at his feet. He turned it in his hands, and bowed his head to examine the iridescent pearly fragment.

  Nicholas’s curls were dark and dense, and, although damp with sea-salt, the sun struck little reddish sparks from them. He had inherited many features from his mother. Even Ramón could recognize that chiselled classical nose and the clean sweet line of his jaw. However, the green eyes were Ramón’s eyes.

  Suddenly the child threw back his arm and sent the shell skimming out. It hopped across the still water leaving a series of tiny dimples where it touched the surface. Then Nicholas turned away and began to walk alone along the edge of the water, but at that moment there came an anguished squeal from the group of children further up the beach. One of the little girls had been knocked over in the rough and tumble, and she sprawled on the white sand and howled.

  ‘Nicholas!’

  With a patient sigh Nicholas turned back to her and lifted to her feet. She was a pretty little imp, with sand on one cheek and tears welling from her huge dark eyes. Her costume had slid halfway down to her knees revealing the cleft between her chubby pink little buttocks.

  Nicholas hauled up her costume for her, restoring her modesty but almost lifting her off her feet in the process, then he led her by the hand to the water. He washed the sand off her cheek and wiped the tears from her eyes. The girl gave one last convulsive sniff and stopped howling.

  She took Nicholas’s hand and trotted beside him as he led her up the beach.

  ‘I will take you back to your mamma,’ Nicholas was telling her, and then he looked up and saw his father. He stopped abruptly and stared at him.

  Ramón saw the flare of terror in his eyes that was instantly hidden. Then Nicholas lifted his chin in a defiant gesture, and his expression went dead.

  Ramón liked what he saw. It was good that the boy felt fear, for fear was the basis of respect and obedience. It was good also that he could control and hide that fear. The ability to conceal fear was one of the qualities of leadership. Already he showed a strength and resolve far beyond his tender years.

  He is my son, Ramón thought, and raised one hand in a gesture of command.

  ‘Come here, boy,’ he said.

  The little girl shrank away from him. Then she released Nicholas’s hand and fled up the beach, bawling once again, but this time for her mother. Ramón did not even glance in her direction. He often had that effect on children.

  Nicholas steeled himself visibly and then came to his father’s bidding. ‘Good day, Padre.’ He held out his hand solemnly.

  ‘Good day, Nicholas.’ Ramón took the proffered hand. He had schooled the child to shake hands like a man, but Adra had taught him the term of address. ‘Padre.’ He should not have allowed it, but was pleased that in the end he had done so. It gave him another little twinge of sentimentality to be addressed as Father, but that was an indulgence he could afford. There were few enough that he allowed himself.

  ‘Sit here.’ Ramón indicated the wall beside him, and Nicholas scrambled up and sat with his little legs dangling.

  They were silent for a while. Ramón did not approve of childish chatter. When he asked finally, ‘What have you been doing?’ Nicholas considered the question gravely.

  ‘I have been to school every day.’

  ‘What do they teach you at school?’

  ‘We learn the drills and the songs of the revolution.’ Nicholas thought about it a little longer. ‘And we paint.’

  They were silent again until Nicholas added helpfully: ‘In the afternoons we swim and play soccer, and in the evenings I help Adra with the housework. Then we watch the TV together.’

  He was three years old, Ramón reminded himself. A Western child who was asked the same question might have replied ‘Nothing’ or ‘Just stuff’. Nicholas had spoken like a man, a little old man.

  ‘I have brought you a present,’ Ramón told him.

  ‘Thank you, Padre.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

  ‘You will show it to me,’ Nicholas pointed out. ‘And then I will know what it is.’

  It was a plastic model of an AK 47 assault-rifle. Although it was a miniature, it was perfect in detail with a removable magazine that was loaded with metallic painted bullets. Ramón had bought it at a toyshop on his last visit to London.

  Nicholas’s eyes shone as he raised it to his shoulder and aimed it down towards the beach. Apart from the first flash of fear, it was the only real emotion he had displayed since Ramón’s arrival. When he pulled the trigger the toy rifle made a satisfying warlike clatter.

  ‘It is very beautiful,’ Nicholas said. ‘Thank you, Padre.’

  ‘It is a good toy for a brave son of the revolution,’ Ramón told him.

  ‘Am I a brave son of the revolution?’

  ‘One day you will be,’ Ramón told him.

  ‘Comrade Colonel, it is time for the child’s bath,’ Adra intervened diffidently.

  She took Nicholas and led him from the veranda into the cottage. Ramón put aside the temptation to follow them. It was unseemly for him to participate in such a bourgeois domestic ritual. Instead he went to the small table at the end of the veranda where Adra had set out a jug of lime-juice and a bottle of Havana Club rum, indisputably the finest rum in the world.

  Ramón mixed himself a mojito and then selected a cigar from the box on the table. He smoked only when he was at home in Cuba and then only the premium cigars of Miguel Fernandez Roig, and Adra knew this. Like the Havana Club, they were the finest in the world. He took the tall sugared glass and the cigar back to his seat and watched the sunset turn the waters of the bay to bloodied gold.

  From the bathroom, he heard the splashing and the happy cries of his son, and Adra’s soft replies.

  Ramón was a warrior and a wanderer on the face of the earth. This was the closest he would ever come to a home of his own; perhaps the child had made it so for him.

  Adra served a meal of chicken and Moros y Cristianos, or ‘Moors and Christians’, a mixture of black beans and white rice. Through the DGA, Ramón had arranged a preferential ration-book for the little household. He wanted the boy to grow up strong and well nourished.

  ‘Soon you are going on a journey with me,’ he told Nicholas as they ate. ‘Across the sea. Would you like that, Nicholas?’

  ‘Will Adra come with us?’

  The question irritated Ramón. He did not recognize his annoyance as jealousy. He answered shortly: ‘Sí.’

  ‘Then, I will like that,’ Nicholas nodded. ‘Where will we go?’

  ‘To Spain,’ Ramón told him. ‘To the land of your ancestors and the land of your birth.’

  After dinner Nicholas was allowed to watch the television for one hour. When his eyelids drooped, Adra took him to his bedroom.

  When she returned to the small, starkly furnished living-room she asked Ramón: ‘Do you want me tonight?’

  Ramón nodded. She was over forty years of age. However, her belly was flat, and her thighs were firm and powerful. She had never given birth, and she had extraordinary muscular control. At his request she often excited him with a little trick. He would hold one end of a lead pencil while she snapped it in half with a spasmodic constriction of her vaginal sphincter.

  She was an adept, one of the most natural and intuitive lovers he had ever known – furthermore she was terrified of him, which enhanced both her pleasure and his.

  In the dawn Ramón swam down to the head of the bay and then made the hard two-mile return against the tide, ploughing in a crawl through the choppy water.

  When he came up from the beach, Nicholas was ready for school and there was an army jeep and driver waiting at the back door of the cottage. Ramón was dressed in plain brown paratrooper fatigues and soft cap. This was revolutionary uniform, so different from the flamboyant Russi
an braid and scarlet piping and tiers of medal ribbons. Nicholas sat proudly beside him in the jeep for the short ride until they dropped him off at the nursery school near the main gate.

  The drive up to Havana took a little over two hours, for the sugar harvest was in progress. The sky over the hills was smudged with smoke from the cane fires, and the road was congested with behemoth trucks piled high with cargoes of cut cane en route to the mills.

  When they reached the city, the driver dropped Ramón at the far end of the vast Plaza de la Revolución, with its 350-foot obelisk to the memory of José Marti, hero of the people, who founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party way back in 1892.

  The square was the scene of many of the moving rallies of the party, where a million and more of the Cuban people gathered to listen to Fidel Castro’s speeches. The president’s office was in the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, of which El Jefe was the first secretary.

  The office in which he welcomed Ramón was as austere as the revolutionary principle dictated. Under the revolving ceiling-fan, the massive desk was piled with working documents and reports. However, the white walls were bare of all ornament, except for the portrait of Lenin on the wall behind his desk. Fidel Castro came to embrace Ramón.

  ‘Mi Zorro Dorado,’ he chuckled with pleasure. ‘My Golden Fox. It is good to see you. You have been away too long, old comrade. Much too long.’

  ‘It is good to be back, El Jefe.’ Ramón truly meant it. Here was one man he respected and loved above all others. He was always startled by the size of the man he called the Leader. Castro towered over him, and smothered Ramón in his embrace. Then he held him at arm’s length and studied his face.

  ‘You look tired, comrade. You have been working hard.’

  ‘With excellent results,’ Ramón assured him.

  ‘Come, sit down by the window,’ Castro invited him. ‘Tell me about it.’

  He selected two Roig cigars from the box on the corner of his desk and gave one to Ramón. He held the burning taper for him; then lit his own before he settled into the straight-backed chair and leant forward with the cigar stuck out of the corner of his mouth, puffing smoke around it.

  ‘So tell me what is the news from Moscow. You saw Yudenich?’

  ‘I saw him, El Jefe, and the meeting went well . . .’ Ramón launched into his report. It was typical of them that there was no small-talk, no preamble to serious discussions. Neither of them had to manoeuvre for position or advantage. Ramón could speak with total honesty, without worrying about giving offence or trying to improve his own position. His position was unassailable. They were brothers of the blood and of the soul.

  Of course, Castro could be changeable. His affections could shift. It had been that way with Che Guevara, another of the eighty-two heroes who came ashore from Granma. Che had fallen from grace after he had disagreed with Castro’s economic policies and he had been driven out to become a wandering knight of the revolution, a Walt Whitman with grenade and AK 47. Yes, it had happened to Che, but it could never happen to Ramón.

  ‘Yudenich has agreed to back our new export drive,’ Ramón told him, and Castro chuckled. It was a little joke between them. Castro was an inspired political genius with that rare gift of being able to communicate his passionate vision to the masses of the people. However, although he was an educated man, a qualified lawyer who had practised his profession before the revolution had swept him up, he was no economist.

  His grasp of the whole arcane science of economics was weak. He could not bother himself with the balance of payments and employment and productivity. His vision was sweeping and transcended those petty aspects of the body politic. He liked the bold and the big. Ramón had conceived the entire plan to appeal to El Jefe. It was bold and it was direct.

  The problem was that Cuba’s island wealth was based on three staples: sugar and tobacco and coffee. These were insufficient to provide the hard currency to fuel Castro’s ambitious plans for urban renewal and social welfare, let alone to provide full employment for an exploding population.

  Since the revolution the population had doubled. According to the forecasts it would double again in the next ten years. Ramón’s plan had been devised to counter these problems. It would provide hard cash, and go far to ending unemployment on the island.

  The ‘new export drive’ was simply the export of men, of fighting men and women. They would be sent out in their tens of thousands as mercenaries to pursue the revolution at the ends of the earth. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand, nearly ten per cent of the island’s total workforce, could be exported. At one stroke they would end unemployment and swell the public coffer with the fees of a mercenary army.

  Castro had liked the plan from the first day that Ramón had propounded it to him. It was the kind of economics that he could understand and applaud.

  ‘Yudenich will recommend it to Brezhnev,’ Ramón assured him, and Castro stroked his beard as though it were a shaggy black cat.

  ‘If Yudenich recommends it, then we have no worries.’ He leant forward with his hands on his knees. ‘And we both know where you want them sent.’

  ‘I have meetings this afternoon, at the Tanzanian embassy,’ Ramón said.

  There were seventeen African embassies in Havana, all of them representatives of socialist governments newly liberated from colonial oppression.

  Tanzania under Julius Nyerere was amongst the most Marxist of them all. Already Nyerere had declared that any person who owned more than one acre of property was a ‘capitalist and enemy of the people’ and that they would be punished by having all their property confiscated by the State. The Tanzanians were active in their support for those others struggling for liberation in the colonial slave states in the rest of Africa. They provided shelter for the freedom fighters from Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, from that racist pariah South Africa, and from the medieval serfdom of the ancient tyrant Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. In all those countries there would be work for the army of Cuban mercenaries.

  ‘I am meeting officers of the Ethiopian army who are dedicated to the cause of Marxist socialism, and who are prepared to risk their lives to break the yoke of the oppressor.’

  ‘Yes,’ Castro nodded. ‘Ethiopia is ripe for us.’

  Ramón considered the ash of his cigar; it was firm and crisp, almost two inches long.

  ‘We both know that destiny has dictated that you play a rôle beyond the shores of this lovely island. Africa awaits you.’

  Castro leant back with satisfaction and placed his huge powerful hands on his knees, as Ramón went on: ‘The Africans have a natural distrust of Mother Russia. The Russians in the Kremlin are all Caucasians – the word originates in that country. It is an unfortunate fact that despite all their other virtues most Russians are racists. We cannot escape that fact. Many of the African leaders, especially the young ones, have studied in Russia. They have heard the name obezyana, “monkey”, whispered as they pass in the corridors of Patrice Lumumba University. The Russians are white men and racists – deep in his heart the African does not trust them.’

  Ramón drew evenly on his cigar, and they were silent awhile. Castro broke the silence.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘On the other hand you, El Jefe, are a great-grandson of Africa . . .’ but Castro shook his head.

  ‘I am Spanish,’ he contradicted.

  Ramón smiled and went on. ‘If you were to claim that your forefathers were sold on the slave block in Havana – who would doubt it?’ he suggested delicately. ‘And how vast might your influence become in Africa?’

  Castro was silent, contemplating that vision, and Ramón went on softly: ‘We must arrange a tour for you. A triumphant cavalcade beginning in Egypt and going southwards through twenty nations in which you could declare your concern, your commitment to the African people. If you could demonstrate your Africanism to two hundred million Africans, how great might your influence become.’ Ramón leant forward and touch
ed his wrist. ‘No longer the president of a tiny beleaguered island. No longer the plaything of America, but a statesman of world influence and power.’

  ‘My Golden Fox,’ Castro said softly. ‘No wonder that I love you.’

  The Tanzanian embassy was temporarily accommodated in one of the Spanish colonial buildings in the old city.

  There the Ethiopians were waiting for Ramón. There were three of them, all young officers in the imperial army of Emperor Haile Selassie. Only one of the three interested Ramón Machado. He had met Captain Getachew Abebe on several previous visits to Addis Ababa.

  In Ethiopia ethnic lines cannot be distinguished. A thousand years of invasion and interbreeding between Caucasian tribes from across the Red Sea and those from the heartland of the African continent have resulted in a mélange that cannot be separated. Definitions such as Galla and Amhara refer to linguistic and cultural groupings rather than to blood-lines.

  However, in Captain Getachew Abebe the pure African ancestral influence dominated. He was very dark-skinned with full lips and pock-marked skin. He was a product of the University of Addis Ababa. Joe Cicero had succeeded in infiltrating a strong cadre of American and British Marxists into the university in the rôles of professors and lecturers. As one of their star students, Getachew Abebe had been transformed into a dedicated Marxist Leninist.

  Ramón had studied and courted him over the years until now he judged that he was the right man. At the very least, he was intelligent, hard and ruthless – and totally committed to the cause. Although he was only in his middle thirties, he was Ramón’s provisional choice for the next leader of Ethiopia.

  As they shook hands in the shuttered sitting-room at the back of the Tanzanian embassy, Ramón cautioned him with a glance and a small gesture towards the collection of African tribal masks that covered the walls. Any one of these could conceal a microphone.

  The conversation that followed was trivial and inconclusive and lasted less than half an hour. As they shook hands, Ramón leant close to Abebe and whispered four words – a place and a time.