Fidel's Last Days Page 5

  While his younger brother assumed the role of good son, Roberto fought, he whored, he ran with street gangs in Little Havana; in his junior year, he dropped out of high school. At nineteen he was working the door at an exotic dance club, while Carolina’s father excelled in junior high school and trained in a boxing gym. When Roberto was twenty their mother died in her sleep. At twenty-one he found someone who could provide him with papers saying he had graduated from high school, kissed his younger brother good-bye, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He volunteered to go to Vietnam, where he fought and was lightly wounded in the early years of the American involvement.

  He recovered from his wounds but retired suddenly from the Marine Corps under somewhat mysterious circumstances and returned to Miami. Carolina’s father had left the city by then, and was training in New York, a light-middleweight with a hard left hook and lots of heart. Soon Roberto married—a woman from a military family, half of which had recently escaped Castro’s Cuba—and the marriage squeezed the last of the troublesome rebel out of him. After bouncing around from one menial job to the next, he borrowed some money on the strength of his Marine Corps pension, bought a small truck, some rakes and mowers, and started his own one-man landscaping business, catering mostly to those Cubans who had already made a success of themselves in America. He studied these wealthy former countrymen, sought their advice and listened to them as he had listened to his father on the Sunday rides near Camagüey. And he worked twelve hours a day, six days a week.

  Within two years he had a dozen employees, four trucks, contracts with several of the high-priced hotels in Aventura and Coral Gables. It turned out that he and his wife could not have children, a terrible blow to him; more terrible, he sometimes said, than anything he’d experienced in Havana or Nha Trang. This emptiness he filled with a kind of manic devotion to the business, which grew and grew. Twenty employees, forty-five employees, a fleet of trucks, contracts with the city’s largest bank. He invested some of the profits in a nursery near Homestead, and then the profits from that in Doral real estate, a tract of marshy land in which no one else saw any promise. Miami, meanwhile, was evolving from a quiet provincial city to a cosmopolitan capital. On his thirty-fifth birthday Roberto sold the marshy lots to a developer for three-quarters of a million dollars, promptly used that to leverage a large loan, and invested in a one-third share of an apartment complex a block from North Miami Beach.

  By the time he turned forty-five he had bought out his partners and owned the high-rise outright, along with the landscaping business and the nursery. By the time he turned fifty he owned two high-rises, and had set up all his surviving relatives and friends—including Carolina’s father, a struggling ex-boxer and part-time handyman at this point—in businesses of their own: landscaping, Laundromats, motels, restaurant franchises. She remembered him arriving at their modest home in Little Havana, a god in a guayabera and a new Jaguar, glamorous wife on his arm, cigar in one hand, such a gleam of love and need in his eyes when he saw her. She had become the child he never had, and he heaped gifts on her—dolls, bicycles, dresses, private schooling, a trip to Paris when she turned sixteen, riding lessons, tennis lessons, a car.

  Throughout these years he was building a reputation in the Cuban American community that was rivaled by no one. He found jobs for friends and the children of friends; he helped troublesome distant cousins avoid jail. He could pick up the phone and have the attention of the mayor and the governor and the state’s two senators. He found ways to move illegally large sums of money to his relatives, and his wife’s relatives, back in Cuba. He helped more than two dozen people escape—many of them military men fed up with Fidel’s lies. His politics had veered sharply rightward, but he’d maintained his compassion for the oppressed, as long as they were the Cuban oppressed. It was natural that he should become involved with people who hated Castro. Natural that he’d give large sums of money to Republican politicians. Natural that he’d form certain mysterious alliances.

  Carolina watched all this happen at closer range than most people. He confided in her, to the extent that he was able, hinted at some of the assistance he gave to the CIA, told her of a web of important contacts in the motherland—including a boyhood friend named Alejandro Davos who had risen far in the military ranks. Occasionally, he talked about anti-Castro conspiracies, assassination plots, a gleaming Havana future to match his gleaming Havana past. On the wall of his office he kept a framed list of the names of all the 124 exiles who had died in the disaster known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  For her, it all became part of his aura—the looks, the cars, the gorgeous wife, the tragic absence of children, the heroic wartime service, the money, the grandiosity; and on top of all that, the intrigue. After her father’s death from cancer at age fifty-four, Roberto had become a second father to her. He sent her to college, advising her to major in business. She had no interest in business, but she humored him, adding a minor in political science. She found she had a facility for languages and for the stage. In her senior year her uncle introduced her to Oscar Perez, who happened to work for an organization called the Central Intelligence Agency, and who happened to fall in love with her on the spot. They dated all through her senior year in college, the exotic twenty-five-year-old spy slipping into and out of her dormitory room like the promise of the future. Upon graduating, she was recruited, went to work in Langley, and married Oscar the day she turned twenty-two.

  For seven years, while her uncle persistently tried to lure her back into his business empire, she labored away in various outposts—they sent her to Spain twice, to Mexico City, to Indonesia. The marriage began to deteriorate almost immediately, and, coincidentally perhaps, she and her uncle drifted apart. He believed his gifts and love should have been properly repaid: If she wanted to be a working woman, she should have been working for him. She should have taken over his business, just as he would have taken over his father’s, and those two deep disappointments echoed back and forth inside him. Worse than that, he believed she should have stayed married to Oscar, when that marriage, for her, had become only a succession of miserable moments, the travel taking its toll, Oscar’s professional deceit creeping into their private lives, his Latino jealousy souring her career success.

  Deep down she believed that what Uncle Roberto really wanted was for her to live the life of a wealthy Cuban mother and homemaker, so that he might have his grandchildren vicariously through her, so that he could arrive at her house with boxes of gifts, let the children crawl up on his lap, kiss him, make a fuss over him. So that he could groom them, too, to fit his vision.

  And then she was approached by the organization she now worked for—the White Orchid, everyone called it, founded by men who remained miraculously anonymous. The Orchid was staffed largely by former intelligence employees, funded—according to rumor—by an invisible coalition of tremendously wealthy conservative businessmen and former political figures of both parties. When she’d left the CIA, her uncle had not even known about the existence of the Orchid—at least that’s what he told her—and he had never completely trusted her after that.

  Her life had become richer, more interesting, no longer cramped by regulations and bureaucracy, but somehow less honest. The assignments were strange, sometimes terrifying. Once, in Zagreb, she flirted with one of Europe’s largest traffickers in illegal immigrants, for an hour in a bar—that was all. What happened during that hour, what eventually happened to the awful man, she did not know; her assignment was simply to keep him occupied, and she had done that, enjoyed the dangerous thrill. Another time, she was sent to Haiti in the guise of a journalist. Everything was magically taken care of—the false passport and press credentials, a slight alteration of appearance, weeks of training. She worked there as a freelancer for only a few months, just wandering the streets and returning to her dingy office in Port-au-Prince to file stories she was sure were never read by anyone. And then word came that she was to interview the leader of a communist facti
on—in the north, near Cap-Haitien. The faction was small but growing, the man himself mustachioed and rather unimpressive, though he granted her an interview as if granting her an audience with the Pope. She spent two hours asking him questions in a steamy hut in the middle of the jungle, filed a detailed report about his location, security arrangements, and demeanor, and then learned, a week later—through the newspapers, not through her boss at the time—that he had been assassinated. For a month she felt guilty, went to confess to a priest friend of hers, and considered other lines of work.

  But soon after that, as if she had passed some test, her superiors began to show more interest in her. Obsessed with communism, she suspected, they turned her more and more in the direction of what they called The Cuban Question, and her understanding of the importance and rightness of her work returned. Hair dyed black, three bikinis in her luggage, she had traveled to the island twice with a false Italian passport, and was asked to do nothing more than swim, see the sights, note the layout of particular hotels, keep her eyes open, and make a verbal report upon her return. But if she had learned one thing about the Orchid it was that they were an extremely patient group of anonymous world-shapers, planning things for years, sometimes decades in advance. They collected bits of information from a hundred sources and then pulled one far-off string that tripped one gate, that moved one ball, that rolled along a chute, that emptied out in a pool of water, that splashed up on a wall. And that small damp stain changed the world, almost imperceptibly, but in precisely the way they wanted it changed.

  After her third visit to Havana she was moved up a rank, paid more. She began to report to a man named Oleg Rodriguez, another Cuban American, a young, dashing fellow who met her at various locations dressed in three-thousand-dollar suits and smiling a great deal. Two months ago, Oleg had finally given her some information about the Havana Project, a few details, a general sketch of the greater plan. A month ago she had been told what her actual role in the Havana Project would be, and what kind of bonus she could expect if she survived it.

  Two weeks ago she was asked to pay a visit to her uncle, deceive him slightly, mislead him, make him an offer he could not refuse. His contacts would be helpful, perhaps, but the Orchid would never risk the timing of their plan for the help of Roberto Anzar’s people. So she was going to feed him a string of misinformation, a false plot about an assassination attempt, at a different time, in a different location, by different means. And this word would travel through invisible tunnels beneath the Straits of Florida into the minds of her uncle’s people there—some of them already known to D-7, the secret arm of Castro’s Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI. It was possible that a few of these people would be arrested, a few of them would talk, and the misinformation would throw off D-7 just enough to increase the odds of the real plan’s succeeding.

  Everything was a mask upon a mask. All for a good cause. But using people in that way, using innocent Cubans—using her uncle, especially—made Carolina more than slightly uneasy. She asked herself again and again what kind of end would justify these means. Sitting in the seat of the private jet, made up to look and feel like a woman not so far from the end of her days, she took a moral inventory and felt that the balance had shifted inside her. You did not lie to people you loved and come away unscathed. And so she found herself wondering, just for a few lonely minutes, if her uncle’s plan for her life would have been, after all, the better one.

  On a whim, as the plane descended, she decided not to fasten her seat belt. She tried to see if just by a small exertion of the abdominal muscles, she could maintain her balance as the floor tilted downward. Everything went fine until, at the moment of landing, a small breeze jerked the fuselage down sharply and she had to hold onto the arms of her seat with all her strength to keep from flying up and banging her gray head on the ceiling. The jet touched down and taxied smoothly to a stop. She shuffled down the portable stairway like an old woman, holding tightly to the rail. She had always wanted to be an actress.

  Another taciturn chauffeur met her on the tarmac. The man provided her with a small travel bag on wheels, so she wouldn’t check into the hotel empty-handed. They drove out of the Richmond airport without looking at each other, and after a quarter of an hour, he pulled up in front of the Marriott and told her he would wait. No matter how long it took, he would be here when she walked out the door.

  “Mary Archibault,” she said to the young Hispanic woman at the desk. She had been sucking on the mints, and loved the old sound of her voice. She had to resist the temptation to speak in the clerk’s native tongue. When she was settled in the plain, comfortable room, she left the door slightly ajar, as she had been instructed, and lay down on the bed to wait—string of pearls bunched against her throat, pulse pounding in her temples, one doubt swirling in her heart.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Everything Volkes did in his life, he did in a casual way. In his youth, as a varsity oarsman at Princeton, he had been a student of Zen, and one of the rules of Zen was to never hurry. He never hurried. He never appeared overly concerned about anything. In thirty years of doing what he now did, he had found that this approach to life served three purposes: It calmed him, it impressed the men and women he worked with, and it was an excellent tool for deceiving those he wished to deceive.

  Now, for instance, he was meeting one of the cofounders of the organization to talk to him about a matter of the absolute highest importance—the betrayer and what to do about him. But every movement of his still lithe body indicated that he was taking a vacation day to enjoy a round of golf and a few drinks at an exclusive Ponte Vedra club. He made jokes with the pilot of his plane, small talk with the chauffeur who took him to the club. Changing clothes in the opulent locker room, with its teak lockers and plush, salmon-colored carpet, he talked golf and money with the other members he encountered. Everywhere he went he threw up these clouds of deception; it was second nature to him now.

  Roberto Anzar met him on the first tee at fifteen minutes after four—they both preferred to walk rather than to use a golf cart. On this day, for obvious reasons, they were both going without a caddy—and Anzar had the same affable attitude going. They shook hands, lit up cigars, stroked their first drives into the middle of the fairway. For five holes they went along like this, pushing their three-wheeled golf carts in front of them, pretending to imaginary observers that they were nothing more than two wealthy older men playing a hundred-dollar Nassau for the pure joy of it.

  And then, when they were walking along the manicured sixth fairway, not a soul within three hundred yards of them, Volkes turned the conversation to business: “The meeting with your niece went well?”

  “She is a brave girl, my niece.”

  “It runs in the family,” Volkes said.

  Anzar grunted.

  “She asked you what we expected her to ask?’

  “Exactly. Precisely. She offered me a position in the new Cuba.”

  “And, in return, you enthusiastically offered your services.”

  “Of course. Anything for family.”

  “She’s the right choice?”

  “Volkes, listen to me.” Anzar turned to face him and gave him the full force of his eyes. “For her to do that, for a Cuban niece to come to her uncle and make a proposition she knew to be at least partly false, and to do it in such a way that even I, who knew the whole gambit from the beginning, was almost fooled. . . . We are dealing here with an extraordinary woman.”

  “We knew that,” Volkes said, though he was not yet completely convinced. “We knew that from Haiti, from Indonesia. But the physical courage?”

  “She’s proven that elsewhere, also.”

  “This is a little different.”

  “She is the person for this job. I say that not because we are related, but in spite of the fact that we are related. Listen to me: Carolina is the closest thing I have to my own child. Putting her life at risk . . .” Anzar let the sentence trail off. He walked up to his
ball, stuck the cigar in the right corner of his mouth, selected his club, and stroked a nice approach shot that bounced crookedly into the greenside bunker.

  “Bad luck there,” Volkes said.

  He walked the few steps to his own ball and flew it onto the front part of the green.

  “Putting her life at risk,” Anzar went on, “is, for me, a thing that tears out my heart and liver in the nights.”

  Volkes nodded, allowed the Latin sentimentality to float away on the cloud of cigar smoke. Then: “We have an added complication.”

  “Oleg Rodriguez,” Anzar said immediately.

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since you knew. Since the meeting in the presidential suite. Before that I had my suspicions, but my suspicions are so widespread now that I buried them. I see that that was an error.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that they could have infiltrated us at that level?”

  Anzar shrugged, and Volkes noticed that he, too, had mastered the art of seeming nonchalance. Of course it bothered him. It infuriated him. Volkes knew that it shook his confidence in their background checks to the very core, but he would never show it. “This is what they do,” Anzar said. “This is what Castro does. Our job now is to use the information we have as wisely as we can use it. We know who he is. He doesn’t know we know who he is. Advantage us.”