Murder in Havana (4 page)

Pauling placed the last of his clothing in a suitcase and closed it. He consulted the packing checklist he always used before traveling and saw that he’d forgotten something, took it from the dresser, opened the suitcase, put it in, and closed it again. He turned; Jessica stood in the bedroom doorway.

“All set?” she asked.

She’d been helpful and upbeat the past few days despite the fact that he was due to leave, possibly for as long as a month. He appreciated her cooperation. Leaving under a cloud was something he’d experienced too many times before in his clandestine life. Not that it had ever stopped him from heading out, but an upbeat, loving launch was certainly preferable.

They’d made love the night before. She’d been playful: “I want to tire you out before you meet any of those sexy Cuban women,” she’d said. He didn’t argue, simply reveled in the silken exercise that proved satisfying to both of them.

“How long will you be in Pittsburgh?” she asked.

“Just overnight. The motel phone number is on the itinerary I gave you.”

“Nervous about meeting Doris’s new husband?”

“Of course not. She says he’s a nice guy. An accountant.”

Jessica laughed. “You won’t have anything in common,” she said.

“Aside from Doris.”

There had been many times since becoming involved with Max that Jessica had wished he had something in common with accountants, or any other men for that matter whose livelihood was derived from more “normal” sources, and who spent their working lives traveling between office and home. Their life together since leaving Washington and settling in New Mexico had come close to achieving that goal. But she knew that it was probably only a matter of time until he again sought the brand of thrills that his previous lives with the CIA and State Department had provided. Ferrying materials into Mexico had been the first step; now this assignment to Cuba.

Although she’d never met Doris, Max’s ex-wife, she felt an affinity for her. She knew what it was like to be married to a Max Pauling from her own experience of being the spouse of an undercover government agency operative. How many months would he be away this time? Two? Four? Six? Or would he come home at all, either because he’d lost his life at the hand of an enemy, or because the thought of returning to the mundane world of husband, that “normal” world, had become anathema to him?

And there were the other women. Like Max, her FBI husband was handsome and physically fit, a virile man who wore virility on his sleeve. Had there been other women in her former husband’s life, or in Max’s life? She assumed so, although she never questioned either of them. Max turned female heads on the street. She was flattered that he’d chosen her to be his woman. But how fleeting might that be? She sometimes wondered. It was a question she deliberately avoided because the answer might not be the one she wanted to hear.

Doris and Max had divorced years ago while he was still working for the CIA. He hadn’t argued against it because he knew that she was right. He was seldom home, away on assignments for extended periods, some as long as six or eight months. But his absences weren’t the biggest problem. It was when he
was
home that the friction was most intense, and it wasn’t his wife’s fault, he knew. He was never comfortable being home and playing the mundane role of husband and father after having lived on the edge in exotic places, dangerous places; him against the bad guys, defending democracy from those who would take it away from his wife and children. They didn’t teach rationalization at The Farm, the CIA’s training facility, but he didn’t need tutoring in the subject; it came naturally.

Lord knows he tried to please when he was thrust into the domestic role. He spent time with his sons, Robert and Richard, playing ball with them, taking a few weekend camping trips, attending their games and other extracurricular activities at school, all the fatherly things that good dads do. He deeply loved his sons but never really enjoyed those times. As he cheered them on at an athletic event, his thoughts would abandon the moment and be replaced by memories of escaping a Russian thug by outdriving him or outthinking him, or taking part in a native ritual in Central America where he was celebrated as a great white savior, delivering illegal weaponry from the mighty country to the north, all in the name of world peace and stopping Communism dead in its tracks. Although he felt guilty when distracted from the appealing sight of his sons at play, or the quiet beauty that had attracted him to Doris, he knew that she never understood that his was not the kind of work that proceeds from nine to five, or takes time out for the weekend.

And sometimes he thought of the women with whom
he’d come in contact during his travels. There hadn’t been many, which salved his conscience concerning Doris. Married men who traveled a lot and spent all their spare time chasing women were adulterous. Those like him, away from hearth and home for long periods, who fell into the occasional fling—sometimes for professional purposes—were to be excused, weren’t they?

Rationalization 101. He deserved an A.

Doris had raised their two sons almost single-handedly, and when she announced she was filing for divorce, Max, sadly, breathed a sigh of relief. Acting the part of husband and father when he was home was too tough. Better to sever it clean, get on with life, and play father whenever he could. But from a distance.

“I’ll miss you,” Jessica said, back in the present.

“I’ll miss you, too, sweetheart. Think of it this way. You’ll have a month to hunt down rare birds without me around to make jokes about it. Maybe you’ll run across one of those wacky roadrunners.”

“I’ll miss your jokes, too, Max. Take care, huh? I want you back in one piece.”

“Of course I’ll be back in one piece. It’s not like I’m going to war. Just some snooping into a pharmaceutical company chaired by a former senator. Piece o’ cake.”

They embraced, kissed, hugged again, and he left the apartment. An hour later he was at seven thousand feet in the Cessna, heading for Pittsburgh for an overnight stopover to visit with his ex-wife, two sons, and their new stepfather, “the accountant.” It was sure to be the most challenging part of the trip.

“Ready to go?” Ronald Goldstein asked his medical colleague Barbara Mancuso.

She pointed to the overnight bag at her feet. He grinned and glanced at his watch. If they didn’t leave soon, they’d miss their flight back to Washington.

Drs. Goldstein and Mancuso were among three hundred physicians attending the four-day annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. At the podium, the newly elected president of the organization was wrapping up the final session with words meant to inspire, but that the restless audience wasn’t particularly interested in hearing. Watches were checked; bodies slipped out of their seats as surreptitiously as possible and headed for the doors.

“This has been a remarkably successful meeting,” the president, an overweight oncologist from San Diego, said. “We are truly standing at the threshold of a new dawn in clinical research. The days ahead will be filled with dramatic successes, and disappointing failures. But one thing is certain. Cancer is no longer the mystery it once was. We know more about it, how it works, and how to combat it than ever before. Research into how to stop cancer cells in their tracks—dare I even say cure it?—has never been more promising. We can all go back and report to our patients that the breakthroughs
they read about every day are real. There is reason to hope.”

“Let’s go,” Goldstein whispered to Mancuso.

“I want to thank all of you for being here and contributing your knowledge and skills to the meeting. I also wish to thank you for placing your faith in me as your new president and …”

The closing door behind Goldstein and Mancuso silenced the speaker’s words.

Traffic on the way to the airport was snarled; they arrived at the gate only minutes before their flight was closed. They settled in adjoining seats, drew deep breaths, looked at each other, and smiled.

“Ready to go to work?” Goldstein asked.

“No,” she said, “but that doesn’t matter.”

They spent a good portion of the flight reviewing notes from the panels and sessions they’d attended by dividing up the duties and reading photocopies of the many papers that had been presented by leading researchers from around the world. The next morning they were due to brief colleagues at the National Institutes of Health on what had transpired during the four days in San Francisco.

Goldstein and Mancuso landed at Dulles Airport at one-thirty the next morning, Washington time. Later, at 9
A.M.
, they sat side by side in a small amphitheater at NIH, on the Rockville Pike in Bethesda, Maryland. A dozen men and women wearing white lab coats faced them from the audience. Their boss, who headed up the cancer research section of NIH, introduced them: “Ron and Barbara have just spent an informative four days in San Francisco at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, and, I trust, four pleasurable days in that wonderful city. I know they have interesting things to report. Barbara, Ron.”

Goldstein went first; he and Mancuso alternated. They detailed the ongoing research that, in their opinion, had the best chance of advancing the state of cancer care, and cited certain individuals whose work in the field was, in their estimation, superior—Agus in California, Treon at Dana-Farber in Boston, Weber at Houston’s M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, the team at Wayne State, Sloan-Kettering in New York—they went down the list as quickly as possible, summarizing what had been reported at the conference, adding their own personal evaluation of the work. But no matter how hard they tried to stay within the allotted time, a constant stream of questions interrupted their presentations and pushed the briefing session past the hour they’d been given.

Dr. Mancuso began the final report, “I know we’re running long and I’ll try to wrap up as quickly as possible. As many of you know, the Cuban research team presented a paper at the meeting. It’s the first time this has happened, and I’m glad tensions have sufficiently thawed between us and Cuba, at least in the medical arena, to allow their researchers and physicians to take part in such meetings.

“Their team was headed by Dr. Manuel Caldoza. He’s an impressive gentleman who was educated in Canada and Spain, and whose experiments with the use of vanadium to help create broad-spectrum, potent anticancer drugs has been ongoing for years. We’ve heard about his work, but only tangentially. The metal vanadium, as many of you know, is a soft, ductile metallic element found in several minerals, notably vanadinite and carnotite, both of which are abundant in Cuba. Dr. Caldoza and his team have developed innovative methods for purifying vanadium and are making good use of it. Of course, because Cuba is a closed society, it’s difficult to ascertain the accuracy and validity of the experimental results they reported
at the meeting. Also, I’m not blind to the fact that allowing him to present only a small portion of his work to us here in the States represents a tease on the part of Fidel Castro. Although his presentation isn’t nearly complete, it’s impressive. According to Dr. Caldoza, they’ve been testing more than two dozen drugs that utilize vanadium, and claim to have had positive results against eleven different laboratory cancer cell lines, as well as cells taken directly from patients.”

Dr. Mancuso looked out over the sparsely populated auditorium and noticed a small, balding, nondescript man wearing round rimless glasses and a green suit. He sat far apart from the doctors. Until Mancuso had begun her report on the Cuban research team, the man seemed indifferent to what she had been saying. Now he took notes, not looking up as he transcribed Mancuso’s words.

“You aren’t really taking what they say seriously, are you?” an older physician asked from the first row. He had a large, square face; his jaw enjoyed more lateral movement than normal. “Pure Communist propaganda. They claim to have invented everything from the light-bulb to baseball. Now they say they’re going to cure cancer?” He guffawed and shook his head, jaw in motion. The doctor next to him laughed.

Barbara Mancuso, M.D., held her tongue. She’d been reading everything that she could about medical research in Cuba for good reason; despite the island nation’s impoverished society, she was impressed that Cuba’s medicine and research had long been the envy of nations in the Southern Hemisphere and beyond. True, validating the results claimed by Cuba’s state-owned medical research facilities was difficult. However, Mancuso’s exploration of the caliber of medical research on Castro’s island had convinced her that the Cuban efforts were as sophisticated as those of many independent labs and hospitals
doing cancer research in the United States and other wealthier nations. She addressed the naysayer directly.

“Dr. Meadows, I understand the natural inclination to be skeptical. I was too, at first, until I made my own unofficial inquiries. The truth is—and it may be a bitter pill to swallow for the anti-Castro forces—that medicine in Cuba, and medical research in particular, especially with cancer drugs, is impressive. Sure, they’re short of medicine and physicians now because of the blockade that’s been ongoing for almost forty years, and cessation of financial support by the Soviets. But Castro stated early in his administration that finding a cure for cancer was to be a priority, and he’s committed considerable resources to that goal.”