Cuba Libre (2008) (10 page)

Rudi shook his head. "Nothing."

"They become like wives," Palenzuela said. "In time it's hard to tell the difference. You don't know what I mean, do you?"

"I know one was enough for me," Rudi said. Palenzuela smiled, looking very tired. "Keep your life simple." "I try to."

"Do you know where I am this evening? Cfirdenas, attending a political function. I tell my wife I'll be back on the morning train and she says, "Oh, you're going to function tonight." She knows. She says, "You must function somewhere, because you don't function at home.""

Rudi wasn't sure if he should smile, so he didn't give it much. His chief smiled, appearing more tired now than he did before, yawning.

Looking at Rudi again he said, "Do you think of us as friends?"

"Not on a social level," Rudi said, "but yes, I think of you as a friend."

"Do you ever talk about me to others? I mean in regard to my personal life?"

"No, of course not."

"That was a foolish question. What else are you going to say."

"No, your personal life," Rudi said, "that's what it is. I can swear I never speak of you except with respect."

"Thank you. And I don't talk about you or your private activities," Palenzuela said, and held Rudi's gaze for several moments, Rudi making himself look back at his chief with the same serious intent, all the while trying quickly to think of something to say.

When it came to him he said, "All the correspondents in the hotel bar this evening will write about what happened. If they don't pass the story through the military censor in the morning, send it over the wire, it will go by boat to Key West and in a few days everyone in America will read about their two countrymen being held in a dungeon in the Morro."

"Unless the Guardia find contraband aboard the ship and they shoot the Americans right away," Palenzuela said. "I don't know about you, but I'm going to bed. It's been a long day."

Chapter
Eight.

"YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE presidio, the prison gallery of the famous Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro, completed in 1610 to protect the city from hostile forces, marauders, invaders.... The lamps along the wall burn coal oil. The soldiers asleep on the floor? They arrived today from a penal settlement in Africa--where you two could be going, if you aren't taken out and shot one morning at sunrise. You see, what I'm thinking," the lieutenant--who gave his name as Molina--said in English, slurring his words a little, but with only the trace of an accent, "is to remain here after the war and give tours of the Morro. There will be a war, of course, soon, and America will win. Our ships are rusting, fouled, our army can't subdue even these peasants. The Morro will become a place for American tourists to visit and I can tell them in the proper English I learned in your country what notables were here, like a guest list, and show them the wall where thousands of prisoners were lined up and shot."

Tyler and Charlie Burke, following Lieutenant Molina along this corridor that resembled a tunnel cut through stone, looked at one another. The two guards following behind gave them each a shove to keep moving. Tyler believed Lieutenant Molina was drunk.

He was saying now, "By the way, what did you do to be brought here?"

"Nothing I know of," Tyler said. "That's everyone's answer." Tyler said, "What did you do?"

And the lieutenant looked over his shoulder with raised eyebrows. "Oh, so you don't think this is a reward, uh, to serve here? I was on the staff of our legation in Washington, where I made many friends, aide to the military attach when I quite literally fucked myself out of a job. Perhaps I also drank too much of your bourbon."

He came to a cell door, a grating of steel bars, and stopped. While one of the guards unlocked the door and pulled it open, the lieutenant looked at Charlie Burke and said, "You go in here, please."

Light from the corridor showed the beginning of a row of canvas hammocks, sagging and rounded with the weight of men sleeping, in a cell that looked as wide as a road and with a vaulted ceiling, but too dark in there to tell how far it extended.

Tyler said to the lieutenant, "Wait. Can't we stay together?"

"I was told to separate you. I suppose so you won't be able to make up a story."

Tyler said, "You don't care, do you?"

"Listen," Molina said, "I could have been assigned to Africa. I can tell you the Morro is a hotel, the Inglaterra, compared to prison settlements over there. That Guardia officer who brought you, Lionel Tavalera? He wants to see you go to Ceuta, Melilla, one of those places where they send anarchists and assassins of the lowest class, men sentenced to hard labor or reclusion for life. Prisoners work in chains on a public road, beaten unmercifully by cabos, the prisoners they use as guards. Or they weld your fetters on permanently and drop you into a dungeon with a small hole in the ceiling, so that light comes to you only at midday. The food is a scrap of meat, usually infested with maggots, and some kind of pulse. The vermin eat you alive and you don't come out until they finish and you're dead." Lieutenant Molina looked at Charlie Burke then and said, "Please go in there. Here, not doing what you're told will be met with blows and imprecations."

Tyler put his hand on Charlie Burke's shoulder and Charlie Burke shook his head saying, "I'm sorry I got you into this, partner, but I don't imagine we'll be here too long." He didn't sound at all sure of it and added, "Do you?"

"Once it's in the newspapers and everybody knows about it," Tyler said, "Neely's pretty sure it'll get some action from the consulate. They'll demand a hearing right away."

The worry was in Charlie Burke's eyes, watery and shining in the lamplight.

He said, "Once they get hold of the Vamoose..."

"We don't have to go into that, Charlie."

He said, "Well..."

And that was all as one of the guards shoved him into the cell and slammed the grating closed. Molina said to him through the grille, "If you can, find a hammock not occupied."

Tyler asked, "Who's he in there with?"

"Revolutionaries," Molina said. "From their point of view, patriots."

Moving along the corridor again, their shadows accompanying them on the wall, he said, "You get food twice a day, eleven o'clock and I believe five, stew made from some kind of meat and rancho bread. It can make you sick, give you the shits, so don't eat it if you have money. Pay one of the guards to bring you food from the cantina. It's bad, but not as bad as the food they serve you. Let me see--you can buy coffee and fix your own, otherwise I don't think you get any." Tyler said, "You're not in charge here?" "I'm told what to do."

Tyler let it go. They had come to another cell and the guard with the key was pulling open the door in the steel grating.

Time to ask one more question.

"How soon will we get a hearing?"

Molina seemed to think about what he was going to say. Then: "If you're transferred to La Cabafia--you know the other prison? It's right here, so close it appears to be part of the Morro. Prisoners are usually transferred there before they go to a hearing. But then more executions take place in La Cabafia that here. They have a procession, the priest accompanying the condemned man, who usually acts quite brave while he must be frightened to death. He'll cry out, "Viva Cuba Libret." in the moment before the firing squad shoots him. The officer then uses his pistol to give the victim the tiro de gracia, a bullet in the brain. The executions take place in the foso over there, the moat; it's always dry. You see papaya trees growing there, the soil rich with the blood of martyrs to the cause."

It sounded to Tyler like something Neely Tucker had said in the hotel bar. Molina, though, expressed the idea in a melancholy tone of voice that he changed immediately, adding, "That is, if you think of those people as martyrs."

Tyler said, "And if we're kept here?"

"In the Morro? The best I can tell you," Molina said, "to give you hope..."

Tyler waited.

"Is to say, Who knows?"

Chapter
Nine.

VRGIL HEARD THE NEW ONE PUT in here during the night, heard him bumping into hammocks and heard words in Spanish among the chorus of snores-louder snores than you heard in the crew's quarters aboard the Maine, these men here being much older than fleet marines-but Virgil made no effort to have a look at the new one. What for? Virgil was new himself, put in here the night before and spent the next day discussing the possibility of America declaring war on Spain with his sixteen cellmates; most of them skinny old guys losing their teeth who'd been locked up here the past two years, some of them locked up other places before coming here, stuck in cells the whole time, not let outside even once. They were excited to have Virgil, a United States marine; he was like a messenger from heaven, as good as the Angel Gabriel come to tell them Uncle Sam was on their side now, so there was nothing to worry about. They made coffee for Virgil and served him some pretty tasty black beans and rice; and they let him hang his hammock down by the outside grating that looked out on the prison yard. The cell, with its oval ceiling, was about fifteen feet wide by forty feet deep, the grating at one end being the door to the corridor, the grating at the other end serving as a barred window. Hammocks hung from hooks in the wall and extended to posts that ran down the center of the room. The floor was flagstone and a few of the geezers preferred it to trying to climb into a goddamn hammock every night. They'd bed down on the floor with straw mats and blankets.

It was Lieutenant Molina who saw to Virgil's need for something to wear, having arrived drugged from the hospital in his drawers. Molina gave him one of his own cotton shirts and blue uniform trousers with yellow stripes down the sides. They fit snug--dons as a rule being smaller than Americans-and were shiny in the seat, but fine with Virgil. This was after the lieutenant told Virgil about his Washington duty and that he'd visited various points of interest along the Eastern seaboard. It turned out both Virgil and Lieutenant Molina had attended the dedication of Grant's Tomb. Imagine that. Virgil didn't mind not having shoes, the flagstone in here cool on his feet. He asked the lieutenant just what he was in jail for. Molina said he didn't know but would try to find out.

As soor as Virgil woke up he saw the new man by the grating that looked out at the yard. Virgil thought at first glance he was U.S. Army, the dark coat and tan-colored pants, except there was no insignia on the coat. Right then the new man turned around and walked away and Virgil noticed the light blue neckerchief and heard that ching... ching and looked down to see the man was wearing high-heeled boots and spurs with big wheels that made that chinging sound. It looked like the new man was pacing. When he came back this way Virgil said from the hammock:

"Mister, are you a cowpuncher by any chance?"

"Yes, I am," Tyler said, locating Virgil in the hammock. "Ben Tyler, from around Sweetmary, Arizona."

Now Virgil rolled out of the hammock and hit the floor in a pair of drawers, to Tyler a young guy with a full head of hair on top but none around the ears, a haircut that would last him a good while.

"I could tell," Virgil said. "You have that look of a cowpuncher."

"I had a panama hat might've thrown you off," Tyler said, "but a guard swiped it right off my head, grabbed it as he shoved me in here."

"Well, least you have your own clothes."

"I just bought 'em yesterday; they're brand-new." "What'd you do to be in here?"

"I thought it was for shooting a don, but now I don't think so. And you're " Tyler said. "I'm gonna say you're in the military from your haircut, but I can't tell which one from your drawers."

Virgil stuck out his hand. "Virgil Webster, one time from Okmulgee, Indian Territory. Most recently Private Webster, a seagoing marine off what used to be the USS Maine. God help the boys still aboard her."

"Jesus," Tyler said, shaking Virgil's hand, "you survived that terrible explosion."

"Barely," Virgil said.

Tyler squinted, studying him. "Well, what's a hero of the Maine doing in this flophouse?"

"I find out I'll let you know," Virgil said. "How about yourself? An honest-to-God cowpuncher, what I always thought I'd grow u.p to be when I was little."

"I know what you mean," Tyler said.

This was how they began talking that first day.

On the fifth day, February twenty-third, two guards brought Tyler along the corridor to the lieutenant's office, a large room with bare walls, a swept stone floor and a feeling of having been left abandoned until a desk and file cabinets were moved in. Molina looked up. He said in Spanish to the man sitting across the desk from him, "I'll leave you. Take as much time as you like."

The lieutenant got up and came this way, giving Tyler's shoulder a pat as he walked past him. He paused in the doorway and said something to the two guards. They turned and followed him out.

The man at the desk, one of those little Cuban guys with a big mustache, gestured for Tyler to come over, saying in English with the usual accent, "I like to ask you some questions."

There was something familiar about him. Tyler approached the desk and stood there, a few feet from it. "Please, sit down."