Night Work (8 page)

Almost five years ago the murder of a Broadway dancer who turned out to be a blackmailer had led him into the middle of a KGB operation. Dylan had been sent into his orbit to find out whether he had discovered the blackmail photographs that were to be used against men high in the U.S. power structure. The unintended consequence was that they fell in love. When Cassidy blew up the operation, Dylan was pulled back to Russia. After that, there was silence.

“You could have gotten a letter out, just to let me know you were all right.”

“What for? You hated me.”

“No.”

“You were so angry.”

“I got over that.” There had been anger, but it burned out until all that was left was loss. “Tell me what happened when you got back to Moscow.”

They sat down on the mattress with their backs against the wall, a tin ashtray between them and the rum bottle within reach.

“At first they weren't sure they believed me, and then even if they did believe me they didn't like it much. The operation had failed. Apfel was dead and beyond their displeasure, so they took it out on me. Reeducation.” A shadow passed over her face. She chased it with a smile. “It's amazing the things you can learn about yourself if they are pointed out forcefully enough.”

“But they decided you were all right.” He lit another cigarette.

“They decided I was too valuable an asset to throw away. An American trained from an early age. So they started me out again. Small things. And they put temptations in my way. I met people who were willing to share their unhappiness about life in Russia. I met people who could help me make money if I would help them. I was offered chances to go abroad. I understood what they were doing, so I reported them all and, after a while, they began to think I was all right.”

“So they sent you here.”

“Yes. I speak Spanish, and they wanted to test my commitment in a controllable situation. I've been here six months. Why are you here? Why did you come to Havana? Except, of course, to save me.”

“I brought a prisoner down. He'd been extradited for murder.” He told her about Echevarria and what had happened to him. She was unsurprised.

“Colonel Fuentes. Sometimes there was no firing squad, just him and his pistol one by one. Sometimes you're taken outside. Sometimes he does it in your cell, and then other prisoners are made to clean it up. He used me for that, on my knees, scrubbing the stones. He called it woman's work.”

“Why were you in La Cabaña? What happened?” He passed her the cigarette.

“The usual things that make an operation go wrong. A blown tire. An army truck stopped to help the poor woman with her car in the ditch. But one of the soldiers knew the man with me. They'd been in school together, not friends, and he had heard that the man had gone into the hills with Castro. They searched the car. There were guns under the seats and in the trunk.”

“A KGB operation?”

“What do you think, Mike? Do you think I came as a tourist and decided to smuggle guns because I was bored? I am who I am. I do what I do. I was sent here to help a revolution we believe in.”

“All right.”

She hesitated. “Sometimes I find it hard to believe in the people who say they believe the same things.”

“Okay.”

“Think of how hard it is for me to be with a Capitalist Running Dog, a lackey of the fat cats of Wall Street.” The twitch of a smile.

“Good point.” Did she feel the low current of tension he felt? What was it? The memory of an intimacy only lovers share. Was it there in the way she looked at him, or was he imagining it?

She stretched till her muscles cracked. “God, what a day. What did someone say? Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of hanging. Dead this morning. Alive tonight because of you. Until now I never knew how good a cigarette could taste, or rum. I never knew how much I liked being alive.” She stretched and yawned. “I have to sleep. You don't get much sleep the night before they're going to take you out and shoot you.” He moved so she could lie down on the mattress. As she drifted toward sleep she said in the soft sleepy voice of a child, “Michael, would you hold me, just hold me?”

*   *   *

A noise in the darkness woke him. Dylan was spooned against his back. Her breath came and went in a slow, calm rhythm. The noise came again, a distant clang of metal, and then a scraping sound. Someone was moving things in the garage above. He felt around next to the mattress until he found where he had left his holstered gun. There was more scraping and banging. Were they looking for the hidey-hole? Did they know they were there? What about Tomas? Dead? Forced to give them up? He rose and groped in the darkness until he touched the wooden chair. By feel he wedged the back of it up under the doorknob, a futile gesture. If they knew where the hideout was, a chair against a door wasn't going to do much good. He thought of turning on the light to see what other resources he might find, but he did not want to wake Dylan. If things were going bad, she would know it soon enough. Let her sleep.

Waiting is hard for an impatient man. After a while he pulled the chair away and opened the door to the darkness of the pit. The sounds from above were louder now. He heard voices but they were too muffled to know what they were saying. If they lifted the trapdoor, he would rush them. Six shots in the revolver, maybe enough if he surprised them.

There was more banging and scraping. Someone yelled in pain. The noises slowed and then stopped. It was quiet. Maybe they'd gone. Maybe they hadn't found the trap. Maybe they were waiting for him to poke his head up. He counted to three hundred, but no one came and he heard no more. He went back into the room and wedged the door with the chair and lay down on the mattress. Dylan breathed slowly and regularly next to him. He put the gun on the floor where he could reach it easily and lay in the darkness and tried to sleep.

*   *   *

At dawn Tomas, his face bruised and cut from the night's inquiries, led them away through the narrow streets of the Old Quarter. Shopkeepers wet down the pavement in front of their stores. The sun was till too low to bring much heat, and the morning smelled fresh. Cassidy wore the cotton pants and shirt of a worker, and Dylan wore a shapeless cotton dress. Tomas had not found the woman who was to dye her hair, so she had hidden it as best she could under a kerchief. She carried a basket on her shoulder to shield her face. At a glance she looked like one of the many women hurrying to work or to the market before the choice bits were gone. They crossed a small plaza with a waterless fountain in the center, its broken-nosed angel perched on a chipped and tilted pedestal. On the wall of the church nearby someone had started to paint
Viva La Revolución
, but it ended in a scrawl and a smear of red, and the body of a young man lay in the gutter below it, his blood mingled with the paint. A priest in a black cassock came out of the church followed by two men carrying a door, and as Tomas hurried them through the plaza, Cassidy looked back to see them roll the dead man onto the door and carry him into the church.

Tomas left them in the care of a woman named Marta at a small brick sugar warehouse near the old city wall. He shook hands with both of them and wished them Godspeed. He had been lucky with the searchers, he said, and maybe it would pass to them. They had been regular police, not SIM, and while they had punched him a few times out of habit, their hearts had not been in it, or in the search. Someone had reported that they had seen a man and a woman who might have fit the description of the fugitives going down Tomas's street, and the cops were checking every house, but the years had taught them to have little faith in eyewitnesses.

Marta was a black woman, six feet tall, and over two hundred pounds. She wore a man's one-piece coverall with the sleeves chopped off, and men's shoes with the toes cut open to ventilate her feet. She called Cassidy and Dylan
my children
and seemed unruffled by the problem of moving the fugitives. She smoked a pipe stuffed with harsh, coarse tobacco while they drank bowls of sweet milky coffee and ate a breakfast of fried bananas and bread at a workbench at the rear of the warehouse. She loaded them into the back of an ancient truck under a mountain of burlap bags destined for a sugar refinery. The truck's springs had worn to nothing, and they felt every bump and jolt as it banged and rattled over the old cobblestone streets, and the dust from the burlap filtered down. They were saved from suffocation by a metal shelf that jutted out over them from the back wall of the truck bed and gave them room to lie together and breathe. There were two checkpoints. At the first they could hear Marta banter with the soldiers. They knew her, knew her routine runs, and their search was cursory. At the second one, the voices were hard and commanding. They made her get out of the cab and let down the tailgate. The truck rocked as someone got up into the bed and began searching. Cassidy dug his gun from his pocket. The searcher would stop, grunt with effort, move, stop, grunt with effort, move again, working his way up the truck bed. Something banged and scraped along the metal shelf over them. It banged and scraped again. He was probing the pile of bags with something metal. A bayonet? Something rammed down through the bags, and Cassidy pushed back against the wall of the truck. The thing withdrew and rammed down again, and Cassidy heard Dylan gasp. Someone shouted a question and the searcher called back, “
Nada.
” Nothing. The truck rocked as he clambered to the back and jumped down. Moments later it sagged to the left as Marta climbed back in the cab. She slammed the door, slammed it again to make it stay, ground the starter till the engine caught, clashed the gears and set off with a jerk.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Fine.” Was something in her voice?

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The whine of the tires on smooth pavement put him to sleep, and he woke when they turned off and slowed. The road that bumped under them was dirt and stones, and the truck rocked along, pitching and jouncing, and then stopped.

Voices.

Hands pulled the burlap sacks away. Cassidy and Dylan came blinking into the sunlight. They were in a farm clearing. The truck was parked near a small house made of scrap lumber and tin. A goat tied to a banana tree grazed at the end of its rope. Chickens pecked at the dirt of the yard. Ten men waited at the back of the truck and watched them curiously. They were young, and they were bearded, some more successfully than others. They wore mismatched fatigues. Some had boots. Others wore sandals made of tire treads. Nine of them had rifles slung on their shoulders. The tenth carried a Thompson submachine gun, a symbol of rank.

Dylan stumbled getting down from the truck, and then gasped with pain when Cassidy took her arm to right her. The sleeve of her dress was dark and sodden with blood. They cut the sleeve away to reveal a nasty gash from the probing bayonet across her upper arm. The blood had stiffened the cloth in the wound, and when they peeled it away the cut bled again. Marta wrapped it tight with a piece of cloth offered by the farmer's wife from the shadow of her doorway.

“She needs a doctor,” Cassidy said.

“She needs to get away from here,” the man with the Thompson said. “We all need to get away. We are too exposed here. The army patrols use this road.” His Spanish was hard for Cassidy to understand. It was spoken back in the throat with a lot of dropped consonants. His name was Armando, and he was the leader of this band by whatever alchemy it is that makes some men follow and some men lead. He was thin, light boned, with a sharp nose, and thinning black hair cut ragged by someone with an unsteady sense of style. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and looked like an accountant who had put aside his books to take up a gun. He was very sure of himself, a good thing in a war leader, or deadly for his followers, depending on where he led them.

“Is there a doctor where we're going?”

“There are people who know wounds.”

“Let it go, Michael. I'll be all right.”

“You have a gun,” Armando said. “You will give it to me.” He held out his hand.

“I'm going to keep it.”

“No. We do not know you.”

“You know her. She knows me.”

“We know
of
her. We do not know her. We must be careful. People come to us saying they are for the cause, but there have been betrayals. There are others who will decide who you are, but I need the gun.”

They walked for more than two hours, first through farmland, cane fields, and scrub forest that had been cut over more than once, and then, as the land rose, on narrow paths through thickening jungle. The men talked as they marched. Their rifles remained slung on their shoulders. They walked close together with no scout out on the point to run the trail in front of them.

Cassidy dropped back to walk with Armando.

“Do we have much farther to go?”

Armando looked at him suspiciously. “We will be there when we are there.”

“Does the army patrol this area?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“Maybe I should have my gun back.”

“Why do you think you need your gun?”

“You have no scouts out. No one's walking point. If we run into an army patrol, most of your men will be dead before they get their rifles off their shoulders.”

“This is what you think?”

“Yes.”

“We are past the time of needing advice from Americans. We are a people who can stand on their own feet without the help of Uncle Sam.”

“I'm sure you're right. I'd like the same chance. If we meet a patrol, I want to be able to defend myself.”

They walked in silence for a while.

“You were in the American army?”

“Yes.”

“During the war?”

“Yes.”

“And you saw fighting?”

“Yes.”

“Much?”

“As much as there was from D-Day until the end.”