Murder in Havana (9 page)

“Yeah, I’m surprised, too. They evidently brought in Italian and Mexican phone companies to improve the phone service, which used to be two tin cans connected by a string. How are you?”

“Fine. How was the flight? The hotel?”

“No problems. The room is lovely, a suite really, on a special executive floor. All the amenities. Cable TV, a safe, minibar. And obviously a telephone. Probably a wiretap. I have an ocean view.”

“I didn’t think you were supposed to enjoy opulent accommodations in a Communist country.”

“It probably doesn’t represent most of the country. What’s new back home?”

“Not a lot. I spent some time at the gallery trying to straighten out the computer problems. A total failure. I’ll have to bring someone in. Oh, guess who called?”

“Fidel? Looking for a date?”

“Jessica Mumford.”

“That’s a voice from the past. How is she?”

“She’s fine. She loves New Mexico. She’s working for a local hospital.”

Although Jessica had moved from Washington, she and Annabel kept fairly regular phone contact.

“Is she still with the guy she moved there with? He was with State. What was his name? Max something.”

“Max Pauling. She’s still with him, although he’s off on some assignment.”

“I thought he left whichever agency he was with.”

“He’s not with the government any longer. Jessica says he’s doing something with his plane in Miami.”

“That’s right. He was a pilot. Well, I’d better get unpacked. We have a briefing in an hour.” He gave her the
phone number of the hotel. “How’s Rufus?” he asked. The Great Blue Dane was part of their family.

“Depressed. He misses you.”

“Give him a kiss for me. Here’s one for you, too.”

“I’m not depressed—but I’ll take it anyway.”

Max Pauling’s arrival in Havana was neither auspicious nor ceremonial. He’d hoped to fly nonstop from Colombia to Havana, but with the plane’s cargo bringing it close to a maximum gross weight of forty-eight hundred pounds, he was forced to make a refueling stop in the Dominican Republic. Now he touched down at José Martí Airport shortly after midnight and was directed by ground control to one of many cargo buildings. There, his cargo was unloaded into a truck dispatched by Havana’s foremost hospital, Hermanos Ameijeiras.

“I need a taxi,” Pauling told a dispatcher at the facility.

“Sí, señor.”

Minutes after the dispatcher placed a call, a Russian-built Lada from Panataxi pulled up, driven by a young man wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap. Pauling told him, “Hotel Habana Riviera,
por favor
.”

The driver thanked Pauling profusely for paying in dollars instead of pesos and deposited him in front of the twenty-story hotel, a throwback to the days when Meyer Lansky and the American Mafia ran Havana. Lansky had built it as his last attempt to emulate the Las Vegas strip before being forced to flee Cuba when Castro, victorious in his revolution, announced, “We are ready not only to deport American gangsters, but to shoot them.”

Next to it was the more imposing Meliá Cohiba Hotel;
well-dressed men and women, few of them Cuban, streamed through its doors.

Pauling entered and looked in on Palacio de Salsa, a nightclub, off the lobby, before going to the desk and registering, using a MasterCard issued on a Canadian bank that had been in the packet of materials given him by Vic Gosling. Cards issued by U.S. banks were forbidden in Cuba, Gosling had said. He’d also told Pauling that if he needed cash, he could use the card to obtain up to five thousand dollars at Banco Financiero Internacional, in the Hotel Habana Libre.

The room to which he was shown was large but utilitarian; some of the furniture bore scars from years of use. It was on the fourth floor. He opened a window and looked down on the Malecón. Even at a late hour it teemed with activity, hundreds of people milling about, young couples openly necking on the seawall, street merchants hawking their wares, radios blaring infectious Cuban riffs and rhythms. The music, and the heat, drifted up to him and he suddenly felt nauseous. Pauling closed the window, turned up the room’s air-conditioning, and sprawled on the bed. The room was dark except for a small lamp on the desk. Even with the windows and drapes closed, the sounds from the Malecón reached him. The urge for a cigarette came and went, and returned.
Maybe a fabled Cuban cigar
, he thought;
I won’t inhale
.

Then, for no known reason, as though some alien spirit had invaded his body, tears came to his eyes and he felt cold and alone.

It had been years since such a feeling had overtaken him. It had happened in Budapest while on assignment for the CIA, working through an embassy cover, handling an informer from Hungary’s military bureaucracy who wanted to defect, accepting the secrets the informer brought to the safe house, feeding the man’s ego along
with good whiskey and food, flush with the excitement of clandestine meetings and shadowy relationships, the danger and intrigue a kind of nourishment for his own soul—until the informer was found dead one morning in a vacant lot near his modest home, discovered by his ten-year-old son.

It was that night, after the informer had failed to show up at the safe house—and after Pauling had learned the reason why—that this damnable wave of weakness and vulnerability had swept over him while lying in bed in his apartment in Budapest, hearing music and people laughing outside, and he had thought of Doris and his sons.

Now, he wondered, what was Jessica doing at this moment? Did she miss him?

He went to the small bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, but avoided looking at the mirror.

Music from the nightclub followed him across the lobby, through the front door of the hotel, and along the expansive Malecón. But after a half hour of walking, fatigue from the long flight caught up with him and he returned to the hotel. The cocktail lounge was still open. He sat at the bar and ordered Hatuey, a Cuban lager. A group of Canadian tourists, loudly proclaiming their presence, occupied a large corner table. An affectionate couple—they looked French to Pauling—held hands and kissed in another corner. To Pauling’s left was a heavyset man who attempted to speak in Spanish to the bartender. On the right was an extremely attractive woman, perhaps thirty, no younger, possibly a few years older. He assumed she was Cuban; certainly of Hispanic origin. Her hair was raven black, thick and luxurious, shimmering beneath the targeted light from a recessed spotlight above her. He saw her in profile; her features were fine; good genes had prevailed. She wore a blue-and-yellow silk dress and a dozen thin gold bracelets on her left wrist.
The half-finished drink on the bar in front of her was dark, a rum concoction, he assumed. He’d noticed since arriving in Havana that Cuban women, at least those in the prime of their sexual lives, tended to be lusty and voluptuous. It wasn’t so much physical assets that defined their attractiveness. It was an exuded sense that, for them, sex was to be freely and openly enjoyed, even celebrated, giving further credence to the theory that the major sexual organ is between the ears.

She’d ignored him when he sat down, never bothering to turn. Was she a prostitute? he wondered. Prostitution was rampant in Cuba, particularly with young girls, the
jineteras
, meaning literally “jockeys.” Seemingly they were everywhere; he’d been propositioned twice during his short walk on the Malecón. No; too old at thirty-plus, in too good shape. If she was a whore, she was a spectacular one. He’d been told that the major hotels—was his a major hotel?—kept out prostitutes. Maybe she worked in concert with the bartender, a hefty fellow with a healthy head of salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a loose-fitting, white guayabera, the ubiquitous dress shirt of Cuban men.

Pauling motioned for the bartender and asked for the check. He was asked whether he was a guest of the hotel.
“Sí,”
he replied.

While the bartender went to the end of the bar to fetch a hotel charge slip, the woman called out softly after him, “Chico?”

The bartender did not turn. Not his name, Pauling thought. But then it registered.
Chico
. He turned and faced her. She smiled.

“You’re—?” he started to ask.

The slightest shake of her head indicated that he was to be silent.

She stood, smiled at him again, and left the bar. Pauling signed the charge slip and followed. She’d gone to the street and was walking up Paseo. She moved slowly, allowing him to easily catch her.

“You’re Sardiña?” he asked as they walked side by side, not looking at each other.

“Yes. And you are Max. I asked for you at the hotel desk and they said you’d left. I waited for you in the bar.” Only a trace of an accent infringed on her English.

“Why did you assume I’d come into the bar?” he asked.

“I didn’t. I felt like a drink. It didn’t matter whether you came in or not. I would have called your room until I reached you.”

Pauling chuckled.

“What’s funny?”

“All this secrecy about meeting you. I didn’t know you were—a woman.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No, of course not.”

Did she sense he was lying? That she was a woman in the general sense of it was fine. That she was a woman in whom he would be placing his professional faith was another thing. He hadn’t known many female operatives in his career, and had worked with even fewer. But one experience in El Salvador had soured his view.

He’d been sent there under embassy cover to “handle” a woman from that country named Gina, who’d come over from the other side; his superiors in Langley had assured him that she could be trusted. They’d worked together to set up a sting in which she seduced a government official from El Salvador’s military establishment in a hotel room rigged with a camera. It went smoothly. The official had been compromised. The photos would go to
his wife and children unless he provided information from within his agency.

A meeting with the official was arranged for late one night in a secluded suburb of San Salvador. Pauling showed up at the scheduled time, but Gina did not. Nor did the government official. Waiting were a dozen armed militia members instead, intent on taking him captive and, he was certain, torturing him to death. His antennae, however, had been fully extended, he saw them before they saw him, and he made his escape, avoiding physical confrontation with the militiamen.

Later, during a debriefing at Langley, he learned that Gina had been the official’s lover for more than a year. Their lovemaking had been practiced, old hat. Rather than setting up the official, she’d used the situation to target Pauling. So much for Langley’s intelligence inside El Salvador. That he’d run the risk of being killed didn’t keep certain colleagues from kidding him about the episode. Somehow, he didn’t find it funny.

Gina’s pretty face came and went when he looked at Sardiña.

Cognitively, he knew that he was supposed to view the opposite sex as equal—equal opportunity and equal pay—it was expected, and he’d tried, not wanting to be out of the mainstream of thought these days, even espousing his belief in the notion of no difference between men and women, at least in the workplace.

But there
was
a difference.

Workplace?

Going undercover to spy and putting your life on the line in the bargain hardly represented a workplace.

The smell of her perfume reached his nostrils, carrying such pragmatic thoughts into the humid Havana air.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“An apartment.”

“You live in Cuba?”

“No. It belongs to a friend of mine. She’s away on business.”

“Convenient.”

“Very. I’ll be staying there for as long as it takes you to finish your assignment.”

They turned into a
solar
, a dark, narrow alley.

“The apartment’s here?” Pauling asked.

“At the end.”

He stopped walking, allowing her to get a few steps ahead. She stopped, too, and turned. “Are you all right?” she asked. Her voice was low for a woman, and well modulated.

“Yes, of course.” His defenses were up, his senses sharpened. He didn’t know this woman, yet blindly followed her into the darkness.

They reached a doorway, which she opened. A key wasn’t necessary. Pauling looked up. Silhouetted against the sky was a wrought-iron balcony; clothing hung from it. A bare bulb in the tiny foyer’s ceiling fixture gave scant light, as though receiving only some of the intended electricity. A set of stone steps led to upper floors. As the woman called Sardiña ascended the steps, Pauling took notice of the sway in her hips and the nicely turned calves and ankles below the dress hem. It was insufferably hot in the cramped staircase; her perfume dizzied him as he followed her to a steel door, which she also opened without a key. She reached for a wall switch and the room took shape; small, square, with two doors leading from it. The only window was open and a blessed breeze rippled white chintz curtains. There was a pullout couch, a tall, slender dresser, two red vinyl sling chairs, and a black rug that lay in the middle of the wood floor like a square on a
checkerboard. She went to the tiny kitchen, light from it spilling across the floor.