Night Work (13 page)

“Did you see it?” Doreen asked. “Jesus, there must be ten, twenty million dollars in there. I wouldn't mind slipping a couple of stacks up my skirt when no one's looking.”

“It'd be better than the other things going up there lately,” Marsha said. “Forget about it. Those guys love their money. Like a dog with a bone. You don't want to put your hand in there. Don't even think about it.”

 

5

Cassidy dreamed of walking by a blue-green tropical sea. Waves beat against slabs of stone and spray blew high over a stone wall. He walked a broad, unfamiliar pavement. A car stopped in the distance and Dylan got out and started toward him—Dylan, beautiful, vivid, alive. Of course she was alive. He knew she was alive, and some part of him was aware enough to reach out in the bed and touch her. So why did the dream insist that she was alive?

Dream logic.

When she was close she said something he could not hear. He started toward her. She waited but he did not get nearer to her. He kept walking, but he could not close the distance.

Dream geography, dream reality.

Again she said something he could not hear. She waved and Cassidy ran toward her, but he could not close the gap. A man got out of the car and stood near her. He said something to her, and she turned and walked to the car. She looked back at Cassidy. He ran harder, but she remained at a distance. Just before she got into the car with the man, she lifted a hand to him, and then the car drove away, and she was gone.

Cassidy woke with his heart racing. The dream was still close enough to touch, and he remembered that he had dreamed it before, dreamed it a number of times in the months after Dylan had gone away on the Russian freighter and he had not been sure that she had survived what waited for her in Russia. After a while he stopped dreaming it. After a while he believed that the dream was a wish, not a prediction. But she was alive. She was with him. So what was the dream now?

The sun looked over the tile roof and into the window. It was after ten. Dylan was not in the bed. When Cassidy went downstairs, the maid who brought him coffee said that Dylan and Ribera had gone down to the city an hour before. The maid wore an armband that said “July 26.” She could not stop smiling.

The celebrating mobs had wrecked the Hotel Nacional casino. They had smashed the windows replaced after the bombing the week before, had dragged slot machines outside and hammered them open, and had attacked the gambling tables with axes. If they could not have revenge on Batista, the people would revenge themselves on the casinos that had made him rich, the symbols of the corruption that had elevated a few while crushing many. There was nobody in the wreckage, but the same clerk who had checked Cassidy in manned the front desk. He remembered that Cassidy had been sent by Colonel Fuentes and treated him with the sullen contempt the new order allowed him, but he went and found Cassidy's bag in the storeroom behind the desk and only overcharged him for four of the nights he had not used his room.

Cassidy stopped at a café on La Rampa that had tables on the sidewalk and ordered a cup of coffee. People in the streets banged buckets and sticks, impromptu percussion in celebration, and the cars honked wildly and flew the red-and-black flags of the 26th of July Movement. The waiter who brought the coffee said he heard that Che was already in the city. Moments later an armored car appeared around the corner and ground slowly down the street on its treads. Bearded men in fatigues rode the fenders and the roof, their rifles slung or held across their thighs. Los Barbudos, the waiter said with awe and ran out into the street to join the crowd that surrounded the armored car. They looked like the men Cassidy had seen in the hills—thin, worn, ragged—and they stared around them at Havana with a mixture of wonder and pride. The people around the car reached up to touch them, to capture some of the magic. Two pretty girls were hoisted to the roof to kiss the heroes, to the cheers of the crowd. The city was electric with hope and joy.

*   *   *

“Fidel's going to appoint Manuel Urrutia Lleó provisional president. The doctor's a good man, and his appointment will show the world that they do not have to fear a dictatorship by Fidel. He wants no part of government office.” Ribera poured more wine in their glasses. They were eating a late, cold dinner at the table in the kitchen, a chicken from the icebox, a thick cold potato omelet, and a salad Ribera had thrown together with the casual deftness that marked everything he did. “You can feel the electricity in the air in the city. This is the beginning of something great, something that will inspire the world. And I am proud to be part of it.” He thumped his chest with his fist.

Dylan was subdued and said little. She picked at her food, but pushed her glass forward whenever Ribera picked up the bottle.

“Did you see them?” Cassidy asked her.

“Who?”

“The people you went downtown to see.”

“Some of them. Some won't arrive until tomorrow.”

“And Fidel?”

“Nobody knows. He's in Santiago.”

“Che is here,” Ribera said. “He is at La Cabaña. And Raúl will come tomorrow, they say.”

“La Cabaña?”

“It is not the same, Cassidy.”

“No. Of course not.”

Dylan gave him a look, said she was tired and was going to bed, got up and left the table.

Cassidy rejected the cigar Ribera offered in favor of cigarettes. They drank dark smooth añejo rum and strong coffee, and for a while they smoked and drank in silence, listening to the night sounds, the rustle of palm fronds against the roof tiles, the distant rush and ebb of waves, the calls of night birds, and the occasional pop pop of shots from downtown, someone celebrating, or someone in trouble.

“She's beautiful,” Ribera said.

“Yes.”

“Very straightforward, very clear. This is unusual in a woman. Men are often clear. Women are often, what? Opaque.”

“Maybe we just don't see them clearly.”

“Of course we don't see them clearly. They don't want us to see them clearly. They like the mystery. They are the mystery. Look at us. We have pricks between our legs, there for all to see, nothing hidden. What do they have between their legs? Chaos.”

“Jesus, Carlos.”

“Don't laugh. And don't be so goddamn Anglo-Saxon. Don't try to solve the mystery. Don't understand it. Embrace it. Love it. To hell with figuring it out. Go with the romance. Ride it like a wave. You should stay here.”

“In Havana?”

“Yes, in Havana. We will make you a latino and a socialist. You will be a much better man for it.”

“What would I do?”

“You'd be a cop. An honest regime will need honest cops. If such a thing exists, you might be one of them.”

“I like New York. I don't know if I could live anywhere else. It's in my bones.”

“Yes, but she's in your blood. And she's here. Have you thought about that?”

“No. I've tried not to think at all. I've tried to live one day at a time.”

“Well, at least in that you're showing some latino sense. Perhaps there's hope for you, Cassidy.”

He went up to their room braced for a fight the look she had given him seemed to promise. Dylan was standing at the window smoking a cigarette. The moon was high, and the light silhouetted her body through the thin cloth of the robe she wore, the swell of her hips, the long curve of her legs. When she turned at his entrance, the robe slipped open and she did not bother with it.

“Where've you been?” A mild, low voice.

“Talking to Ribera.”

“I was waiting for you. I thought you'd be right up.”

“You said you were tired.”

She stubbed the cigarette out and stepped toward him. “I said I was going to bed. Why is it that men always hear the wrong signal? We say go, and you hear come. We say come, and you hear go.”

“Men still live in the cave and respond best to grunts and sharp blows to the head.”

She put her arms around his neck and pressed against him. He could feel the heat of her, the soft push of her breasts and the ridge of her pubic bone, her thighs against his. She kissed him. Her tongue probed his mouth. She tugged and stepped back and he went with her, and when the bed hit the back of her knees, she went down on it, pulling him with her without giving up the kiss. Her robe fell away easily, but they struggled to get him out of his shirt and pants without breaking from each other, and when that was done, they went at each other hard, as if there was no time left in the world. And then again, slowly, rising to peaks and pulling back, and rising again and again.

*   *   *

Havana, January 2, 1959.

A call for a general strike. All businesses were closed as the city waited for the appearance of Raúl Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos, heroes of the Sierra Maestra sent ahead by Fidel while he waited in Santiago for the proper moment, for the hero's welcome. Cassidy stood in the mob at the Central Park downtown as the first trucks filled with rebels rolled through to ripping cheers, flags waving, shots fired in the air. On the corner opposite he could see the bullet-pocked façade of the big department store building where Los Tigres
,
the private army of Senator Rolando Masferrer, made a stand the day before. A man next to Cassidy saw where he was looking and clapped him on the back and waved at the building. “Were you there? Did you see?”

“No.”

“I was there,” the man said and showed him his bandaged forearm proudly. He wore a madras shirt, khaki pants, and sandals, and he had a Thompson submachine gun barrel down on a strap over his shoulder. He wore the fuzzy beginnings of a beard, the new fashion in Havana. “We stormed them from two sides, and they could not hold us out. We hunted Los Tigres through the building like rats and killed them all,” he said cheerfully. “I myself killed one in the ladies' department, and he went to hell with a woman's girdle on his face.” He laughed and offered Cassidy a cigar and insisted he drink from the bottle of rum he pulled from his back pocket, and when the next group of trucks entered the square, he righted his gun and fired a burst into the air.

Cassidy worked his way through the crowds and out past the Hotel Nacional to the Malecón, the broad esplanade and seawall that stretched from the mouth of the harbor in Old Havana to the suburb of Vedado. He found a café with outdoor tables, deserted except for a bored elderly waiter, and ordered a coffee and a beer. He lit a cigarette and listened to the thump of the waves on the breakwater. Occasionally a fan of spray would rise above the wall. The surge and ebb of the swell was a peaceful rhythm after the riotous celebration downtown, a well-deserved celebration earned in blood. He thought about how men would fight for freedom, kill and die for it, and then let it slowly leak away in time. Maybe it would not happen here.

He alternated sips of hot coffee and cold beer and lit another cigarette and got up and walked to the seawall. He looked out over the green-blue water and then turned to look along the Malecón, the broad slabs of fitted stone curving away along the seawall, the clear bright water. Suddenly he realized he was back in the dreamscape of the night before, the same dreamscape from years ago. What exactly had he seen in the dream? He reached for it but it slipped away.

He paid for his drinks and walked along the Malecón toward the intersection where Dylan said she would meet him. He was a few minutes early. Calle L ran in a straightaway for blocks, and he leaned on the wall and looked down it and waited. Here the dream feeling was even stronger than it had been at the café, and it reminded him of the dreams he'd had as a child, when he would wake with the dream still working in him, and he would know that he was awake in his own bedroom, but the dream would still hold him, and he would still be in it and awake at the same time. Sometimes he would get up and splash cold water on his face and that would bring him out of it, and sometimes it would not, and he would lie in bed, scared to go back to sleep, afraid that the dream would overwhelm him.

A Buick Roadmaster sedan turned a corner four blocks down and slowly drove toward him. It stopped twenty yards short of the Malecón. The driver cut the engine. The only sound was the surge of the waves against the stones at his back. The sun glared the windshield and he could not tell how many people were in the car. The passenger door opened and Dylan got out. She raised a hand to him and then leaned down to say something to someone in the car. She walked toward him, straight and tall, her copper hair bright in the sun, her stride long. His heart rose as it always did when he saw her. He pushed himself away from the wall and smiled, and she came to him and kissed him and took his hand and led him back to the wall so they could sit. The car remained on Calle L pointed toward them, the driver invisible behind the sunstruck windshield.

Dylan took the cigarette from him, inhaled, and blew a plume of smoke, a sharing he had always liked. “It's beautiful here, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go this morning? Did you go downtown?”

“Yes. I was down at the Central Park. Wall-to-wall people.”

“They're so happy, aren't they? They worked and fought so long, and now they have it, finally.”

“Have what?”

“Freedom.”
Don't be stupid,
her look said.

“Yes. I hope they know how to keep it.”

Her jaw clenched. “Don't be like that. This is not a day to be like that.”

“No, you're right. No need for that.”

She touched his hand. Apology accepted. They sat for a while without talking, and finished the cigarette between them. She took the last drag, flicked the butt over the seawall, and turned to look at him with her face set.

“I have to go.”

“Go where?”

“Santiago.”

“Where Fidel is.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I'm needed there.”