Lassiter 03 - False Dawn (37 page)

Soto looked away, pretending to admire an old church. “I have said too much. Do not fear. I am a good soldier.”

I knew that. I just didn’t know in whose army.

W
e were on Agramonte Street nearing the Maximo Gomez monument when the driver stopped and pointed to his left. Severo Soto nodded, rolled down his window, and spat in the direction of a baroque palace of arches and columns. “The
antiguo palacio Presidencial
, decorated by Tiffany, occupied by the pig Batista. How unfortunate he did not die there rather than in his bed in Spain. Now, it’s the
Museo de la Revolucion
.”

The driver headed out of Old Havana on the Malecon just as the sun was setting. Behind us, the city was bathed in a pink glow, softening the focus, concealing the decay. We were on Fifth Avenue, the broad tree-lined boulevard of foreign embassies, when Severo Soto spoke to the driver in Spanish, and we took a sharp left turn in front of the Presidente Hotel.

The setting sun was at our back. My sense of direction told me we were headed away from the ocean. “The marina is to the west,” I said, “and we’re headed east.”

“There is something I want to see before we do our business,” Soto replied.

I had left Foley sitting at his table at the Tropicana roughly twenty hours earlier. Soto spent the day at the U.S. Interests Section, fiddling with a satellite up-link telephone, speaking in coded English to his superiors at Langley. He conveyed my messages and gave me theirs as we worked on details of the agreement. I already had prepared the first draft of the paperwork. An assistant attorney general made some revisions, then I made some more. Soto sent and received the documents by fax. Later we would meet with Foley, review the papers, dot the
i’s
and cross the
t’s
. Just another day of lawyering, but somehow it didn’t feel the same as settling a slip-and-fall at the Porky Pig market.

Had Foley
really
said ten million?

The taxi pulled into a large square dominated by a huge obelisk. “The Plaza de la Revolucion,” Soto told me. “Formerly, Plaza Ci’vica.”

“Folks do a lot of name changing around here,” I said. “Maybe after Castro’s gone, they’ll change it all back. Like Leningrad to St. Petersburg. How about a Parque Soto in Old Havana?”

“I never had such ambitions. It is enough for me to be a lieutenant in the eternal war for justice. “

He stared at the monument, and something nagged at the back of my mind. What was it?

Present tense.

It is enough for me …

Soto
was
still a soldier. “What war?” I asked.

“Do you know nothing of history, the struggle against neocolonialism, fascism, and racism?”

“That sounds like Castro’s rhetoric.”

“Rhetoric? Is that what you call it?”

“What now, are you going to defend the guy who put you in prison and threw away the key?”

“I don’t condone his Stalinist repression of dissent, but I have never disagreed with his philosophy or principles. Have you ever listened to even one of his speeches to the Movement of Nonaligned Nations?”

“No, I seldom have six hours to kill.”

“His are the words of a giant who has prevailed against the concerted efforts of eight American presidents to overthrow him. Fidel has been shaped by Cuba’s tragic past, four hundred years of domination by the Spanish, fifty years by the Yankees.”

“And now thirty years of glorious independence.”

He looked toward a statue of the Cuban poet Jose Marti at the base of the spire. “You are being sarcastic, are you not?”

“Yeah, in case you haven’t heard, Marxism is dead, but here you are, the number-one fan of the All-Pro commie dictator.”

“I told you I can see Fidel’s faults, but—”

“But he’s the lesser of two evils, right?”

“
Sí
, compared to the imperialists—both American and Russian—Fidel is a
santo
, a saint. He believes in Cuba for Cubans, an independent country free of control by outsiders.”

“I don’t believe this. All this time, I thought you wanted to overthrow Castro.”

“My philosophy has been consistent for thirty-five years. Am I not entitled to my beliefs, my freedom of expression you Yankees always speak about?”

But where does philosophy end and action begin, I wondered.

Soto motioned for the driver to get moving. “We were the children of the centenary, Fidel Castro Ruz and I. In 1953—the one hundredth birthday of Jose Marti—we attacked the Moncada fortress in Santiago de Cuba. You should have seen Fidel then. Rugged, clear-eyed, full of purpose. Did you know he was a lawyer?”

Just like Gorby and little old me. I wondered if the clear-eyed bearded one ever defended a condom-in-the-salad case.

“The attack failed,” Soto said, “and we were both arrested. At the trial, Fidel gave a brilliant speech. He told the world, ‘History will absolve me.’” Soto pulled a Partagas from his guayabera pocket. He rolled the cigar under his nose but made no move to light it. “We were both imprisoned on Isla de Pinos, then exiled to Mexico. But we never gave up. We planned for a Cuba where every child could read and write and have doctors and nurses provided by the state, where we would get fair prices for the sugar and fair wages for the workers. We would burn the casinos and send the whore-mongering Yankees home. Eventually we sailed from Tuxpan on the
Granma
with eighty-two men. Eighty-two men to fight a war! Do you know what Castro said as the lines were cast off and we headed toward what I believed was certain death?”

“‘Who brought the Dramamine’?”

Soto’s eyes were thirty-five years and hundreds of miles away. “‘If I set off, I arrive; if I arrive, I enter; if I enter, I win.’”

“And he won.”

“
We
won! Not that it was easy. Camping in the Sierra Maestra mountains, recruiting villagers for the rebel army. Fighting and running and fighting again until Batista fled like the coward he was, and eight days later, we rode triumphantly into Havana.”

“And one dictatorship was replaced with another.”

He shot me a look. “But the children
can
read, and there
are
doctors for all.”

“And Mussolini made the trains run on time.”

“Perhaps we should not speak of politics,” Severo Soto said, striking a match to his cigar, then puffing at it until an orange spark glowed at the tip. He exhaled a wisp of smoke toward the monument, and without turning to me said, “It is beautiful to behold, is it not?”

“What, the statue?”

“The art. You saw it, all gathered together.”

I thought of the warehouse, the paintings and sculptures, the coins and jewels, the intricate eggs and ancient artifacts, the treasures of long-dead nobles and czars. I thought of the golden bunny in Crespo’s clenched fist. “Yes, I have seen it all.”

Soto’s eyes glistened. “It is beautiful, is it not?”

“It’s the stuff dreams are made of,” I said.

S
urrounded by Canadian yachts and luxury craft from South America, the rusty Polish freighter creaked against its lines and rested low in the water, its paint faded, an unlikely bearer of a priceless treasure. Maybe that was the idea. The
Polonez
was moored at Hemingway Marina, which sits on the shoreline of the Great Blue River, as Ernest Hemingway called the Gulf of Mexico. According to a sign near an outdoor restaurant, the writer started a marlin fishing tournament here in 1950.

Soto and I followed Foley down a ladder. The freighter smelled of diesel fuel and stale air. Foley turned the wheel on a watertight hatch. We stepped over a metal rise and into the hold. Ten metal containers the size of trailer-trucks lined the bulkhead, five on each side. We sat at a wooden table bolted to the deck. A crewman brought us a pot of
café Cubano
, then left, sealing the door behind him.

“Hey, Soto, you’ll be a big hero back at the Farm,” Foley said. “You’ll get a gold watch.”

Severo Soto’s dark eyes flared. “You are a man without principles. You are a servant to expediency.”

“Wrong, my friend. In the end, I’m loyal to my country, as you are to yours. I just gauge the way the wind is blowing and try to make a buck out of it.” Turning to me, Foley said, “Or two hundred million bucks, eh, Lassiter?”

“I’m going to drink my coffee and let you boys play your macho spy games,” I said. “When you’re done wagging your dicks, let me know, and we’ll talk about the logistics for getting this old tug into the Gulf Stream.”

Soto looked toward the steel containers. “Perhaps it is not too late for the wind to shift. What makes you think Fidel will let you take the art now that it is here?”

Foley laughed like a man holding four aces. “What’s he going to do with the stuff, sell it at Sotheby’s? Become an international fence? He can’t take the heat. He’d lose the moral high ground. The few friends he has left would scorn him. The Russians would write him off if they haven’t already. The Chinese would stop sending bicycles, then where would he be, buying roller skates from the North Koreans for his great revolution?”

“And what if we just took the ship away from you?” Soto asked, his voice even and soft.

We?
At first I thought that included me. Then I realized
we
referred to his old
muchacho
Fidel.

“Why would you do that?” Foley asked. “The Company’s making a deal for pocket change. The Russians get their art, and everybody goes home happy.”

“I will not be happy,” Soto said, his voice still betraying no emotion, “and I will not be home.”

Foley smiled. The look was familiar. Did it come just before or after he broke Kharchenko’s finger? “Hey, Lassiter, you said we had a deal. Now this old geezer’s changing the terms, holding me up for a piece of the action.”

“I don’t think that’s what he’s doing. Foley, I think you’ve got a problem here.”

“Problem? I been dealing with problems since ‘Nam. Look, Soto, you’re screwing around with the wrong guy. I don’t care how many people you bayoneted back in ’58. You give me any shit, you’ll be shark bait in the Florida Straits.’’

Soto shrugged his shoulders. “It is not so terrible to die for a cause that is just.” He sipped at the sweet, syrupy coffee, calmly showing Foley that he had no fear. “The riches you have stolen can be used for the people. If you do not agree to cooperate, I will use all of my power to obtain the principled result.”

“What power? Soto, you’re two cans short of a six-pack.”

“We are at the crossroads in history,” Soto said, barely above a whisper. “Eastern Europe has fallen. The Soviet Union no longer exists. It is now or never for the Cuban people.”

Foley slapped the table with his hand. The sound echoed off the metal bulkheads. “You senile old bastard! So that’s what you’re talking about. Giving the merchandise to Alpha 66 or whatever you guys call yourselves these days. A bunch of potbellied old farts in fatigues, tromping around the Everglades, shooting tin cans with 22s, pretending they got Fidel in their sights.” He looked at me, shaking his head with disgust. “Is that it, Lassiter? He’s gonna fund an army of Calle Ocho shopkeepers?”

Below us, I heard the pumps working, and somewhere on the dock, a whistle shrilled. A crane groaned from the top deck, as provisions were loaded. I looked at Severo Soto, his eyes dispassionate, his face placid. Another war to fight, or was it the same one? I thought of his ceaseless condemnation of the Americans and the Russians, the glorious memories of the revolution, his friendship, even adoration of Castro. He was a man of contradictions and conflicts, but in the end, his loyalty never wavered. Soto was a Cuban patriot, and regardless of their differences about the means to achieving a
Cuba Libre
, so was Fidel.

“Foley, you’ve got it wrong,” I said. “Señor Soto’s not talking about the counterrevolution. His war is the ongoing struggle of the socialist people of Cuba. He wants arms and food and consumer goods. He wants to protect communism, not destroy it.
Socialismo o muerte
.” Foley looked as if he didn’t understand, so I spelled it out for him. “Come smell the
café Cubano
, Foley. The art, the money—it’s all for Fidel.”

F
or long moments, no one spoke. Above us, the crane continued to groan. A metal cable whined. Something thumped against the upper deck. There were the hydraulic
whooshes
and mechanical
clunks
, and the soft, padded noises that come from deep inside ships. Foley’s pale eyes studied Severo’s implacable face. Minutes passed. Somewhere above us, I heard water dripping against metal, a
ping-ping
that seemed to pace itself with my breaths.

“So the great anticommunist turns out to be a
fidelista
,” Foley said finally. “A double agent, sucked in by the cult of personality. The last of a dying breed, aren’t you, fella?” He sneered in disgust, stood, paced around the wooden table, then sat down again. He looked like a man who didn’t know how to express his anger and frustration. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Look what Castro did to you.”

“I still have one arm,” Soto said.

“Look what he did to your country, aligning it with the Soviets.”

“Unfortunately, your government gave him no choice.”

“Look what he did to his buddies in the army, General Ochoa and General de la Guardia.”

“They betrayed him,” Soto said.

“And you? What will you do, give him the ability to stay in power a couple more years, postpone the inevitable. He’s a dinosaur, a snake, a bearded grandmother.”

Soto never raised his voice. “Fidel will survive with or without the Russians. Hard currency now will give him time to pursue what we planned in the mountains in ’56.”

“Christ, listen to him!” Foley exploded. “Lassiter, help me out here. Earn your fee.”

“Señor Soto,” I said, “you are a man of high ideals. Becoming an international criminal will not advance your cause.”

Soto shook his head sadly. “The international criminals are the Western nations. For hundreds of years, they have exploited the peoples of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They stole the gold and silver, plundered the sugar, coffee, cacao, tea, and cotton. They have endless thirst for the raw materials of the third world. Your own government commits heinous acts of international terrorism in pursuit of oil. But no force on earth can shackle human dignity and freedom forever. Jose Marti said that ‘rights are taken, not asked for; they are wrested, not begged for.’”