Fidel's Last Days Read online

  Carlos nodded gravely, and waited.

  “Your name was mentioned,” Olochon said.

  Carlos shrugged. “I am a public figure.”

  “Of course. I meant nothing by it, I just hoped that perhaps there might be something, two small dots you could connect. Something you’ve heard. Something strange or even very slightly out of the ordinary that you’ve noticed.”

  Carlos pinched the muscles of his forehead and pretended to give the question some thought. “It’s possible. I’ll observe more closely. But nothing leaps to mind.”

  “Fine, then. Thank you. I’ll see you at the cabinet meeting at eleven. No doubt you’re expected at your office now.”

  Carlos looked at his watch and feigned mild surprise at the lateness of the hour.

  “However,” Olochon said after a momentary silence. “I was wondering if there is one thing you might do for me before you go. It’s something you might enjoy, as I once enjoyed such things. This rat, you see. Well, there is nothing more to be gotten from him. I thought you might enjoy watching his, well, his departure.”

  Carlos felt breakfast rise into his throat. There was a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. He was sure Olochon noticed.

  “Nothing too gruesome,” the Dentist continued. “The gruesome is behind us now. Something quick, a quick end. He’s semi-delirious, you see. I thought, I don’t know what I thought. I thought that perhaps just the sight of you—a man with a history like your own, a history of selfless service to the Revolution—might squeeze one last drop of contrition out of him. I do this at times. I try to throw the rats off guard, to unnerve them. It is, some people say, my specialty.”

  As if pulling out their teeth one by one with a plumber’s wrench isn’t unnerving enough, specialty enough, Carlos wanted to say, but he held his eyes on the Dentist and waited. When the silence became unbearable, he said, “After all these years of trying to heal, I’m afraid I don’t have the taste for presiding over an execution.”

  “A dangerous indulgence, my good friend. A softening that can be fatal. If the enemy came to our shores would you kill?”

  “Of course. Naturally.”

  “You don’t believe it’s sinful, that you’ll be punished afterward?”

  “If there’s sin, Felix, it’s what existed before the Revolution.”

  “But this rat is an enemy, and he is on our shores, and you’ll refuse even to watch as he meets his punishment?”

  “I don’t see the point in it.”

  “Squeamishness, is that it? Moral objection?”

  “Hardly. Simply not my work.”

  “Well as a favor to an old friend, then?”

  Carlos felt as if he’d been holding a hand of five cards, refusals, all of them, and Olochon had cleverly made him play out the suit. “Fine,” he said, and as he pronounced the word he realized that from the moment he had first spoken openly to General Rincon of his disappointment with Fidel Castro and the way the Revolution had turned out, from that moment eighteen months ago there had been a sort of dim, unbearable tone in the depths of him, a premonition, something he knew would happen, something he knew he would have to witness, or do. Now it was as if a curtain had just been moved aside, here in this office, and the tone was clearly audible.

  Olochon smiled. He went to the wall, snapped off the radio, and took a long and perfectly clean white coat from a hook there. “Put this on,” he said happily. He had started to hum the tune again, and this time Carlos recognized it. It was a song one heard sung by the children of the ghetto when the rains ended: “Viene calor.” The heat comes. “It will protect your fine Spanish suit and fine white shirt. Let us go.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Carolina’s departure from government service—the very thing that had caused the trouble between her and her beloved uncle Roberto—had resulted in a quadrupling of her pay. And so, for her visits to Miami, and for investment purposes, she had purchased a two-bedroom apartment in a gated community in Doral, at the city’s western edge. She kept an entire second wardrobe there, and duplicates of almost everything she owned—makeup, computer, a complete kitchen. Once or twice since her divorce she’d had men over, and a few times a year she entertained old friends there, but for the most part it was her solitary retreat, the place she went to get away from the life she lived.

  After leaving Brickell Key, she drove a short way to regain her composure, then pulled over, put the convertible roof down, and rejoined the highway traffic. The life she lived. The life she lived was a lonely life of constant small and not so small deceptions in the name of a great cause. It had become a life of almost continuous wariness. Not fear. She was rarely afraid. But everything in her working life had a shadow over it now, false fronts, a dimension not visible to the eye of the ordinary world. The ability to live in that other dimension had made her as successful as she was; it had also altered her personal life to the point where she had almost given up on her dream of finding another man, of having a good marriage and a house full of children. Almost.

  More than anything at that moment she wanted to take the exit onto State Highway 112, head for Doral, and curl up there in front of the TV. The hour with Uncle Roberto had washed the solid earth out from beneath her feet, as she’d known it would. Something had begun to move inside her when she’d made the decision to leave the federal government and climb into this privatized, secret world. Today, at the Mandarin, that something had shifted into a new gear. She had the feeling, now, that it would not be stopped.

  She had been keeping an eye on another SUV—all white this time—that kept appearing in her mirror then fading out of view. She pressed north on the highway, two miles above the speed limit. She was thinking about her uncle, glancing in the mirror every few seconds as if he himself might have charged someone with the duty of keeping a careful eye on her.

  She took the exit at Boca Raton and moved slowly and impatiently in the traffic behind the beach. At Conch Street she turned—slowly, innocently, not like a woman trying to lose a tail—and then turned again into another basement parking garage, no attendant here. She waited, watched a white Ford Explorer pull in a minute or so behind her and park far off in the shadows. Why would she be trailed at this early stage, and by whom? Pro-Castro traitors?D-7 agents? Her uncle’s people? Employees of the Orchid checking up on her?

  She walked to the opposite corner of the garage and took an elevator to the eleventh floor, got off, then walked up the stairs to the fifteenth. No one followed her that far, she was quite sure. If, in fact, the driver of the Explorer was tailing her, he would probably decide to stay down in the garage, waiting for her to get back into her car . . . and it would be a very long wait indeed.

  At the end of the hallway there was a window that looked out over Florida’s Atlantic coast. She rapped twice on the last door and it was opened for her by a tall, thin man in his early fifties. She had never worked with him before. Spectacles, curly salt-and-pepper hair, eyes that might have been Cuban.

  “Evan,” he said, holding out a hand for a delicate shake. Last names were rarely used in the Orchid. “Ready to grow old?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  He gave her a pale green hospital gown, and she went into the bedroom, took off everything but her underwear, and draped the gown over her body. In the kitchen, the man motioned her to the sink, where he had set up shop, and he began by washing her hair, then bleaching the color out of it, then making it into a horrible mass of gray curls. He colored her eyebrows a matching gray. He worked the makeup into her face so thickly that it wrinkled naturally around her eyes and mouth when she smiled or spoke. Crooked blue veins appeared magically on her hands and temples. Real gold marble-sized earrings. A real pearl necklace. The man was a genius, an artist. He worked and worked, even placing tiny short hairs above her lip.

  “Hollywood more fun or this more fun?” she asked him when they’d been at it for almost two hours.

  “How did you know I came from Hollywood?”
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  “Lucky guess.”

  “It was more fun there.”

  “And you’re not there because?”

  “Because I like money.”

  “And the Orchid pays you more than the studios paid you?”

  “Three times as much. I was just starting out on my own when they first approached me, and I was worried about that—no security, you know. The man I’d apprenticed for had once taught at Langley, disguises and so on. He gave them my name. I won’t get fired here, won’t go bankrupt. I’ll retire at sixty-two with a nice fat severance package.”

  “And you will have performed a real service for the world.”

  “That, too. I have a condo on Eleuthera. A life planned out for myself there.”

  “With the wife and kids?”

  “No wife. No kids.”

  “You’re gay, then.”

  “No longer practicing,” he said. “My sex drive died a couple of years ago. And may it rest in peace.”

  “There are pills now.”

  “I know. But I had enough sex in my life, and enough trouble from sex, and I just decided that if my body was telling me it was time to retire from all that, then I wasn’t going to fight it. Plus, this kind of work is hard on relationships, don’t you think?”

  She sighed. Hard wasn’t the word. His story was not so different from her own: a solitary life, compensated for by a fat paycheck and the promise of saving the world. Though it hadn’t yet quite driven her to think about giving up sex. “What about loneliness? You won’t know anybody there.”

  “I’ll make friends. I might start a little disguise shop there, a party shop. I might cut hair, you know, just part-time.”

  “You do it well,” she said, and he nodded his thin rectangular head, turned her around and handed her a mirror to show her his work.

  She gasped.

  “You in four decades,” he said.

  “A horror.”

  “You’re quite an attractive seventy-year-old. You’ll be the belle of the retirement community in forty years.”

  “I’ll be seventy-five in forty years, not seventy. Thank you, though.”

  “You are absolutely gorgeous, you know,” he said. “The real you, I mean. If the opinion of an old queer matters at all.”

  “I never know how to respond when people say that.”

  “I have a picture of you in my mind, your whole life—a husband as handsome as a magazine model. Three stunning kids.”

  “No kids,” she said. “One ex-husband, that’s all. I don’t know about the model part, but he was nice-looking enough last time I saw him.”

  “What happened?”

  Carolina did not want to go there. Her seventy-year-old face in the mirror was a glimpse into a lonely future. “I’m still figuring that out,” she said, and Evan got the message, smiled sadly, and turned back to business.

  “Your new clothes are hanging in the closet in the room where you changed. There’s a handbag for your gun and things. I’ve sewn something into the dress at the top of your back to make it look as though you have a little hump there, and you’ll be wearing special stockings that make your legs look . . . well, like the legs of a seventy-year-old. There’s a cane, too. I’ll give you a couple of walking lessons, just in case.”

  “I guess this means I don’t get to drive the convertible to the airport.”

  “No way.”

  “Claro,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ve been instructed to tell you that your flight is at 6:15 P.M. Someone will meet you out front here and take you right onto the tarmac. Go out the front door and straight across the street to the pearl blue Camry. Someone else will meet you at the plane on the other end. The details are in the pocket of your dress, on a folded yellow sheet of paper in the wallet, in the small purse. You can take your own purse with you onto the plane but leave it there. Destroy the paper when you’ve read it. You’ll have an ID in your wallet and you are to check into the hotel under that name. The person you will be meeting will contact you, so all you have to do is go up to the room and wait. There are mints in the purse in a blue tin. Take two of them a few minutes before you arrive at the hotel. They’ll change your voice just enough to make everything believable, but talk as little as you can before the meeting.”

  “All set,” Carolina said. “I can’t wait to see the clothes. Who is the meeting with, do you know? Who and where?”

  “I’m not in that loop,” Evan said. “I’m a disguise master, that’s all. No ambitions beyond that. They give me little bits of information to pass on, and I pass them on. Everything works better that way.”

  “Ever feel like they’re testing you? Grooming you for something bigger?”

  “Always to the first part. Never to the second.” He patted Carolina on the shoulder and she went into the other room to change.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Carolina had been in disguise many times. Not only physical disguise, of the kind she wore now, but a kind of moral or psychological disguise as well. Once, still working for the CIA, she had posed as a prostitute in West Berlin. The other agents had been delayed, and she’d almost ended up actually having sex with a vicious former Stasi member, now serving a life sentence in a Frankfurt prison. Another time, in Mexico City, at the other end of the moral spectrum, she’d turned herself into a nun for the purposes of observing a man suspected of helping to arrange the bombing of Pan Am 103. She spoke five languages almost without accent. She could shift gears from the speech and body language proper to an elegant restaurant like the Mandarin to the speech and body language proper to a bodega in East Harlem. She could put five pistol rounds into the chest of a body-target from 60 yards. At five foot five and 121 pounds, she could incapacitate a man twice her weight with one kick. Other professional women she knew had trained for fifteen years to learn the tax code inside out, to be able to negotiate a corporate merger or convict a drug dealer in a court of law. She’d spent those years—with two different employers—learning how to change her identity, how to master deceit, conquer fear, kill or outwit some of the most heinous criminals on earth. She liked it.

  The driver did not speak to her, which was just as well, though Evan had, as he’d promised, provided her with the tin of mints that altered her voice. From Boca Raton, they drove south again, hurtling down 95 and turning west into the mile-long ribbon of traffic that always seemed to wrap itself around Miami International Airport. She carried nothing but her own purse and the smaller one Evan had given her. The cane, she’d decided, had been overkill and she’d left it in the apartment. During the short walk across the tarmac to the private jet she sweated lightly beneath the makeup. Once the jet was airborne—she was the only passenger—she opened the new purse, took out the wallet, removed the folded-up piece of paper, and looked at the instructions.

  MARRIOT COURTYARD MOTEL, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.

  Register under the name Mary Archibault—A room will have been reserved. Go into the room, leave the door slightly ajar, and wait.

  She read the note three times, then used the shredder at the rear of the plane and flushed the pieces in the toilet for good measure. The flight lasted an hour and forty-five minutes, and during that time, sipping a Bombay and tonic from the wood-paneled bar and looking out over the brown, buckled earth of the western Carolinas, she found herself thinking again about her uncle, the famous Anzar, or, as he was known in émigré circles, the Grand One.

  Uncle Roberto had grown up in one of the wealthiest families in Havana. His parents had started their married life as owners of sugar and tobacco plantations, and then parlayed money from international sales into a vast real-estate empire that included everything from casinos, downtown apartment buildings, and beachfront villas to thousands of hectares of coffee-growing land in the hills around Santiago. By the time he turned seventeen, in late 1958, Roberto—handsome, confident, poised beyond his years—was already being groomed to take over the family
business. He was running a twenty-unit apartment house with only a gentle-handed overseeing by another uncle; he was sitting in as observer/apprentice on meetings of his father’s board; on weekends he rode horses with his father in the rolling hot countryside outside of Camagüey and listened to impromptu seminars on the art of attracting and maintaining influential friends (although they despised him, Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s president, had for many years used one of their opulent beachfront villas free of charge).

  But—and she’d heard this from family members and nonrelated Cuban émigrés alike—there had always been something different about Roberto Anzar. As a teenager he’d spent time with friends in the poorer sections of Havana. For a while he even had a romantic involvement with a twenty-year-old black woman who lived with her mother in what could only be called a shack. His father had put a stop to that, but Roberto’s curiosity about and compassion for the poor persisted. His parents believed it to be a passing fancy, mere adolescent idealism. Four or five times a week Roberto could be found at morning mass in the Cathedral, and actually seemed to want to apply the words of Christ to his own situation, to the world around him.

  Two days before Batista fled the country for the Dominican Republic, carrying $600 million in his people’s money and riding in a plane supplied by the U.S. government, Roberto’s father, two older brothers, and two close family friends were assassinated in front of one of their casinos and before Roberto’s eyes, their limousine blown to pieces by some kind of homemade bomb. Four days later, two days after the government fell, when it was already becoming clear how Castro would greet the rest of the Anzar family, Roberto was shipped north—no relatives to meet him in Miami, no family friends, just a representative from the local church. His mother and surviving brother—Carolina’s father—stayed behind. For a year and a half Roberto lived in a tiny room in a rectory, awaiting news of his mother, listening to the reports from what was now Castro’s Cuba. When his mother and brother at last arrived, she was dirt poor, and she and her two sons rented half of a four-room house on Southwest 26th Avenue. She found the boy changed. Perhaps it was the trauma of seeing his father’s body blown into wet bone and crimson shreds of tissue, or perhaps something had happened in the rectory during his stay there, but Roberto had lost his faith, lost his interest in helping the poor. Now he was the poor.