Killing Castro Read online

  Garrison sighed. He stood up and started to leave.

  “Hey—”

  “It’s too much,” he said.

  “How much, then?”

  “Half,” Garrison said. “Five hundred, no more.”

  Di Angelo tried to haggle but it didn’t work. “All right,” he said finally. “When do we leave?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Jesus, it takes time. It takes a hell of a time. You can’t just—”

  “It’s a ninety-mile trip and it takes a couple of hours. Cut the crap.”

  “There’s boats,” Di Angelo said desperately. “Patrol boats, ours and theirs. You can’t just dodge them.”

  “You’re going to fly over their heads?”

  For a few more minutes they sat and stared at each other. Then Di Angelo said: “All right, you’re paying for it. But not tomorrow. Tonight, at midnight. I don’t want to go in daylight. Tonight at midnight or it’s no deal.”

  “It’s a deal,” Garrison said.

  The house in Ybor City was comfortable. Matt Garth sat in front of the television set for two days. He drank beer from cans and smoked Cuban cigars. He also kept an eye on Fenton, who was some kind of a nut. Here they were, living it up big, eating good food and doing nothing much, and Fenton kept hopping around like a dog with fleas. He had a good thing going and he was too dumb to know it.

  “Look,” Garth would tell him, “cool off, have a beer, calm down. This is fine, right? We wait until they take us to that plane. Then we do what we do. You scared or something?”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Then cool it. Relax. We don’t go up against this Castro guy for a while yet. The longer we sit here, the better. There’s time.”

  “No,” Fenton would say. “There’s no time at all. There’s very little time, Mr. Garth.”

  “You could call me Matt.”

  “Matt, then.”

  “What do I call you? Earl?”

  “Whatever you like,” Fenton said.

  So Garth didn’t bother after that. He went on drinking cans of beer and smoking good Cuban cigars and thinking about Castro, the guy they were supposed to hit. It didn’t make sense to him but he wasn’t going to waste his time worrying about what made sense and what didn’t. That wasn’t the sort of thing he busted his mind over. He was an easygoing type, a guy who had more muscles than brains and knew it. He valued his brawn because plenty of guys with brains had paid him when they needed muscle to get a job done for them.

  He worked for anyone who had the money to hire him, spent his earnings as soon as they came in, and drifted from one job to another without a worry. He had done a short bit for aggravated assault once in Dannemora, a few light stretches for drunk-and-disorderly and things like that, and since then he had learned to cool it when it came to the law. Outside of that, he had a simple and lazy moral and ethical code. He looked out for Number One, played it straight as a die with whoever was picking up the tab, and generally managed to come out of things right side up.

  He had been a strike breaker, an enforcer, a bouncer, had done almost anything requiring the talents of somebody who could hit hard and swing freely. He was tougher than hell—two teeth were gone in front from a cop’s nightstick, and he had taken that same cop and put him in the hospital for a few months. That was the bit that sent him to Dannemora. But before they tried him the police worked him over, slammed him around some to avenge the cop in the hospital. He took everything they handed him. He never yelled and he never put in a gripe. He took it and they couldn’t break him.

  Now, because some Cuban nut was on speaking terms with one of the heavies who had hired him before, he was going to Cuba to get this Castro. He didn’t know who Castro was, except that he was running Cuba and somebody didn’t want him to keep on with it. He didn’t care about this. He cared about twenty grand, which meant soft living for a long time. Twenty grand could get you into a lot of big-breasted girls. You could drink a lot of premium beer, sleep in a lot of silk-sheeted beds.

  So what the hell.

  On the third day, a car came for them. The driver was a light-skinned Negro with cold eyes. He drove them out of Tampa, down the Tamiami Trail, to the airstrip. Garth noticed that Fenton seemed excited. Scared, he decided. Maybe scared the plane’ll crash. And Garth laughed.

  The plane was a twin-engine Cessna, a little puddle-jumper. The Negro told Garth and Fenton that there were supplies for them on the plane, that the pilot could tell them what they wanted to know. The Negro drove away. They got into the plane and the pilot warmed up the engines, taxied down a very small runway and took off.

  “You like flying?” he asked Fenton.

  “I don’t mind it.”

  “I can take it or not,” Garth said. “He said something about supplies. Let’s have a look, huh?”

  The supplies were guns, ammunition, some minor explosives. Garth looked them over and whistled. “We better not hit anything coming down,” he said. “Gunpowder and dynamite. We’d go up like a bomb.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Fenton told him. “The pilot seems to know what he’s doing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  The pilot knew what he was doing. He flew north of Cuba, skirting the big island and coming in over the Bahamas, then cutting south to fly over Acklins Island and move in on Oriente Province, the easternmost section of Cuba. It was hill country there, rough jungle land with dense vegetation and jagged terrain. Guerrilla fighters could disappear in that sort of country. Castro, with a force of only twelve men, had started in the Oriente hills. His twelve men had lasted, had been reinforced, until they had pushed Batista off the island and had sent him running for his life.

  But now time had played tricks. Now Castro was in Havana, growing sleek with power, and other rebel bands roamed the hills of Oriente. Small bands, hiding, fighting in desperate skirmishes.

  The plane flew over Cuba. Garth didn’t even see the landing strip until they were almost on the ground. He couldn’t understand how the pilot had managed to find it. They landed in a cleared portion of a farmer’s tiny field. The pilot had killed the engine long ago. The air was still, warm.

  Three men and a woman rushed to meet the plane as Garth and Fenton climbed down from it. The men carried drawn revolvers; the woman had a rifle across one shoulder. Two of the men went to unload the Cessna. The other, with the woman, came to Fenton and Garth.

  “You are the Americans from Señor Hiraldo?” the man asked.

  “That is correct,” Fenton said. Garth remained silent, his eyes looking at the woman. She was maybe twenty-five, maybe younger. Her hair was long and uncombed, her eyes dark brown. She wore a pair of khaki pants and a torn army field jacket. The clothing couldn’t hide the shape of her body. Her breasts were large and firm, her hips ideal for bearing children or making love. Garth stared at her and wanted her.

  “I am called Manuel,” the man said. “The others, my comrades, have no English. I have some English. I speak not well, I fear.”

  “You speak very well,” Fenton said.

  “You have much kindness. But we must hurry. There is little time for pleasantness in the hills. Soldiers are everywhere.”

  The other two men ran off, their arms filled with guns, ammunition and explosives. Manuel and the woman were behind them, Garth and Fenton close on their heels. Already the pilot was warming up the plane, anxious to get out of Cuba in a hurry.

  Garth watched the girl. He lumbered through the brush with thorns snatching at his clothing but all he could think of was the girl, the way she walked. He saw her buttocks moving within the khaki pants. He wondered if she wore underwear.

  He was going to have her.

  He knew this, knew it for a fact. The broad was hotter than hell, he thought, and he was going to get her on her back if it was the last thing he did. If she was sold on the idea, fine and dandy. If she wanted to put out, swell. That made it easier, and why take the tough way?

  But it wa
s all up to her. Because one way or the other he was going to get in her pants, whether she liked it or not, whether she was somebody’s wife or somebody’s sister or somebody’s mother, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. If it had to be rape that’s what it was going to be. It was up to her.

  The underbrush got progressively thicker and Garth waded through it like a rhinoceros charging through savannah grasses. The guy called Manuel was keeping up a running stream of chatter but Garth wasn’t listening. He was busy watching the broad.

  Some party, he thought. And for this they were paying him twenty grand!

  The boat took Turner and Hines to a coral reef hedging a broad bay. There a man met their ship in a rowboat. Turner and Hines joined the man and he put them ashore just outside Matanzas.

  Matanzas is a commercial port on the north coast of Cuba, some thirty-six miles due east of Havana. The city’s name means slaughter in Spanish. Turner knew enough Spanish to get along. Slaughter, he thought. Not murder, not assassination. Slaughter. He wondered who was going to get slaughtered.

  He found out in a hurry. The man beached the rowboat and joined them on shore. He was leading them to the Bellamar Caves, a group of limestone caverns three miles outside of Matanzas. There they would spend the night.

  “¡Manos arriba!” The voice was loud, sharp. Turner whirled around, flung his hands up in response to the command. There were two tall men across the road, both bearded, both uniformed. One held a pistol.

  They dogtrotted across the road, eyes bright. This was it, then, Turner thought. They had entered illegally, and Castro’s men had them already.

  The man with the gun was talking now, gesticulating wildly, demanding in rapid Spanish who they were and what they were doing. The Cuban who had rowed them in looked frightened. Hines was standing numb, his hands high in the air.

  Turner waited. His muscles tensed. He looked at the gun. It was pointed between him and Hines now. The soldier was getting careless.

  Turner sprang.

  One hand closed on the soldier’s wrist, driving the gun down. His other hand clenched into a fist that connected solidly with the side of the soldier’s head. The man reeled backward, and now everybody was getting into the act. Hines and the Cuban were on the other soldier—they had him before he had a chance to get his gun from its holster. Turner was on his man, pounding his head down against the road, beating the man to death.

  It was short, and very bloody. It was a fight conducted in silence, a battle from a silent movie. It ended with two bearded soldiers lying dead in the road. Turner stood up, drained, every muscle aching. He saw Hines with his nose bleeding. The Cuban had a huge welt on his forehead, another welt on one cheek.

  “This is bad,” the man said in Spanish.

  “They will know we have been here. They will find these men dead and they will wonder what has happened.”

  “Can we get rid of the bodies?”

  The Cuban thought for a moment. Suddenly he smiled. “Help me with them,” he said. “I shall take them in the rowboat. I shall take them far out, and they will be buried at sea with full naval honors.”

  “Won’t they be missed?”

  The Cuban shrugged. “Many soldiers desert,” he said. “Many leave the country. These will be deserters.”

  Turner and Hines helped the Cuban with the bodies. They waited in the darkness while the man rowed out to sea in the small boat. It seemed to take forever before he returned, the boat empty of human cargo now.

  “It is done,” he said. “Let us go. Quickly.”

  He led them now to Bellamar. Guides led visitors through the limestone grottoes, but these guides went off duty at eight in the evening and did not return until seven in the morning. Hines and Turner were led through a cavern, along an underground trail. There were no lights. After a long stretch of darkness the Cuban flicked on a pocket flash and they could see where they were going.

  They spent the night deep in the heart of Bellamar, far past the point where guides led turistas. There, four other men sat around a fire on which a pot of chili beans and rice was cooking slowly. Turner and Hines ate the beans and rice and drank wine from a jug. A sad-eyed Cuban strummed an out-of-tune guitar and sang songs.

  The catacombs, Turner thought. A batch of crazy Christians hiding from the Romans. He took a long drink of wine and remembered the night before they had boarded the boat, the night in Miami, the rare steaks and the Canadian Club and the two hustlers. It had been good for the kid, for Hines. It had taken some of the tension out of his eyes. That was good.

  And it had been good for Turner. First the steaks, prime strip sirloins fresh from the broiler. They had been burned on the outside and raw in the middle, the way steak should always be. The Canadian Club was good to wash the food down with, and the girls were there by the time the meal was done.

  Two girls. One was a redhead and the other a blonde, and what the hell difference did it make if they had started life with the same shade of mouse-brown hair? They were a redhead and a blonde now. The redhead was a little taller, and the blonde’s breasts were a little larger, and they both knew as much about love-making as anyone else in the world. Maybe more.

  It started out as a party, with the bottle passing from mouth to mouth, with the four of them sitting on the long couch and getting happily gassed. It finished up as an orgy, a full-blown orgy, a pretty fine way for Hines to lose his virginity. He lost it on the floor with the blonde at about the same time that Turner was enjoying the redhead on the couch.

  Then they had traded off. And then they traded back, and at one point Turner watched with clinical detachment while the blonde and the redhead made love to Hines at the same time, the young novice jumping from one to the other with great agility, keeping both girls whimpering and thrashing. And, since turnabout was only fair play, then it had been his turn with both girls.

  A good evening. A valuable evening, because all the liquor and all the lust made time run away, made death and murder and pursuit take a back seat to more immediate sensual excesses. And that was vital; you had to forget murder now and then or you went out of your mind.

  Murder. Assassination. Killing. Slaughter. Matanzas.

  The wine made sleep come in a hurry. Turner woke up around six. Hines was shaking him awake.

  “We’re supposed to get out of here,” the kid was saying. “The guides come on in an hour. We have to leave before they start or we’re stuck here until tonight.”

  Turner shook himself awake. He had slept in his clothes and he felt grimy. He sucked on his teeth, coughed, spat out phlegm. He found a crumpled cigarette in a shirt pocket and lit it. The smoke helped him wake up.

  He yawned and stretched. Moreno, the sad-eyed guitar player of the night before, was the only Cuban who was awake. The others lay sleeping around the ashes of the campfire. They were all hunted men, Turner knew. They stayed in the caves all of the time. Moreno grinned quickly and passed the wine jug to Turner. Turner took a long swallow, offered the jug to Hines. The kid shook his head and Turner had another drink. He was awake now. It was time to get going.

  “¿A donde vamos?” he asked Moreno. “Where are we going?”

  “Habana.”

  “¿Como?” he asked. “How? On foot?”

  Moreno told them in Spanish simply to come, to follow. He led them out of the caves again. Turner decided that he could not possibly have found his way alone. He wondered how Moreno managed it. One cave looked pretty much like the next.

  “The underground,” he told Hines. “They don’t kid around here. The underground lives under the ground.”

  They were out of the caves finally and Turner took his first look at Cuba by daylight. The sun was bright, the sky empty of clouds. The air, while warmish, was clear and fresh, especially after the stale air of the caverns. He filled his lungs with it, killed his cigarette. Moreno had a car parked nearby and Turner and Hines got into the back seat. In Spanish Moreno said that he was going to drive them into Havana.

>   “Just like that?”

  Moreno said it was simple, that no one would stop the car. He was taking them to the home of some members of the underground, he explained. These members were not known to the police. There was a room in the basement, a safe room, and Turner and Hines would live there. They would be fed, they would have beds to sleep in. And from there they could murder the Communist bastard Castro, the betrayer of revolutions, the murderer of women and children, the pig, the ladron, the hijo de la gran puta, the maricon, the hombre sin cojones—

  All of this came in a steady stream that sounded as though it had been memorized from a prepared speech. Turner didn’t bother listening to the end of it. It was more fun looking out the window.

  The highway between Matanzas and Havana had been built within the past several years and looked it. It was wide and traffic moved at a steady pace. The cars, Turner noticed, were mostly old ones. Almost all were American models, with an occasional Volkswagen and Renault tossed in. The newest one Turner spotted was a Fifty-eight Buick. The road ran parallel to the shore but a good distance away from it. There were cane fields on both sides, fields broken by an occasional gas station or roadside restaurant.

  Turner glanced at Hines. The kid was looking out the window, too. “It’s pretty,” he said.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “It’s not what I expected.”

  “What did you have in mind? Guns and barbed wire?”

  “Something like that.”

  Turner shrugged. “I don’t know politics,” he said. “They don’t interest me. But I’ve been a few places, done a few things. I used to ship out, short term cargo stuff, up and down the coast and around the gulf.”

  “I know.”

  “You meet people, sailors. That’s where I picked up Spanish. I’ve shipped with Cubans. It’s not that bad down here, Jim.”

  “You think Castro’s a bargain?”

  “I think he’s a bastard and a son-of-a-bitch. He found a little power and it went to his head. This happens. But Batista was just as big a bastard. The average Joe didn’t eat steak and still doesn’t. A few years ago he had to be satisfied with beans and rice and was happy to get that. One revolution later and he’s still eating the same crap. They’ve got wholesale executions and no democracy and it’s easy to find a lot of reasons to put Castro down. But you get back to the average Joe and he doesn’t care about these reasons. He’s more interested in eating better and being pushed around less. And all the things he finds wrong he can sit back and blame the Yankees for them, because that’s what Loudmouth Castro tells him, over and over again, ad nauseam. He figures Castro and the people around him are Communists but he also figures he’s got nothing to lose. So don’t look around for barbed wire. They don’t need it yet. The average Joe is still on Castro’s side or, at least, not definitely against him.”