Night Work (10 page)

They finished the cigarette in silence.

That night she turned to him on the mat and put an arm around him, and he turned to her, and they pressed together, no words spoken. She cupped the back of his neck with one hand and tugged. He kissed her and felt her mouth open under his and she pressed her body against him. He pulled her shirt up and slid his hands into the warmth of her back and down over the swell of her ass. They undressed each other as they kissed, awkward and fumbling as if they had forgotten how buttons worked, and kicked away the last of the cloth and found each other, went into each other as if they had never been away, as if time had not passed.

*   *   *

“They're going out,” Cassidy said. It was the blue of early morning before sunrise. Dylan got up from the mattress and came to crouch beside him and look out through a crack in the boards. The patrol was forming up in the center of the clearing. Most of them were carrying packs. “It looks like they'll be out for a while.”

Armando, the clerk who had picked up a gun, led the patrol to the trailhead and down into the jungle. Nine people were left in the camp, Gonzales, Pilar, three men, and Conchi in the clearing and a fourth man on watch at the back of the house. Pilar and Gonzales sat together on a log near the remnants of a cook fire and talked.

When Conchi came in half an hour later, she was quiet and somber. She checked the wound without speaking. She put a small bottle of rum and a few cigarettes on the table, an offering, a comfort, and left without meeting their eyes.

“They've made a decision,” Dylan said.

“Yes.”

Her face clenched, and her eyes veiled as she absorbed what this meant. If you did this work, it was always there that it could end like this, but it was a thought kept tucked in a dark corner. Now it was out in the light. She looked at Cassidy, and he wondered how his face looked. Did it show anger or resignation?

They stood when they heard the scrape of the key in the lock. They had been sitting with their backs against the wall, touching at shoulders, hips, and thighs, sharing the cigarettes and rum Conchi had left, speaking of little, quiet talk—do you remember this day in New York when we went there, did that, the Italian restaurant on Hudson Street, the way the rain looked on the river from the apartment windows, Carlos Ribera destroying the sculpture that wasn't quite right?

Now they did what they had talked about. Cassidy stood against the wall next to the door. He had broken a leg off the table to use as a club. Dylan waited with her hand just above the door handle. Why go easy?

The door handle moved. Dylan grabbed it and jerked the door open hoping to pull whoever it was into the room under Cassidy's club. A hostage, leverage, someone to bargain with. A forlorn hope.

The doorway was vacant. Pilar and Gonzales stood back out of reach. A Thompson submachine gun was small in his hands.

“Please,” Pilar said. “There has been a decision.” She stopped as if she had lost track of what she had prepared to say, or maybe she understood it was not necessary. “We will give you time to make your peace.”

Cassidy looked at Dylan. She shook her head.

“Now,” he said, and let the table leg drop. Pilar nodded without expression and stepped back to let them leave the room.

He took Dylan's hand. Maybe there would be a chance when they went outside.

Gonzales opened the front door of the house and led them out. The morning sun slanted into the clearing. Cassidy could smell the smoke from the cook fires and the rich green smell of the jungle. Birds called, and there was a whisper of wind in the trees. Conchi and the two remaining rebels stood near a fire watching them. A coffeepot was wedged on stones above the coals. Cassidy had a sudden ache for the taste of coffee.

Pilar gestured, and they followed Gonzales down the steps and off the porch. Dylan's hand was tight in his. The steps creaked as they went down them. He could feel the pebbles in the dirt under his feet. A beautiful day. Life all around.

He saw movement at the trailhead. The patrol coming back?

No.

He yanked Dylan's hand, dragging her to the ground.

The first shot hit Gonzales in the chest and spun him, and the second and third hit him in the side, and he was dead as he fell. He was the farthest from the trailhead where the soldiers first appeared, but maybe they had targeted him because he carried the submachine gun and they worried about it. Pilar froze on the top step, and they killed her there. Bullets ripped overhead and kicked up dirt as Cassidy and Dylan scrambled under the porch. More slammed into the wood above them as they wormed back under the house. The man on guard at the back of the house ran toward the front. They could see his legs as he turned the corner. He stopped abruptly, crumpled, and lay in the dirt with his rifle a few feet from his outstretched hand. Cassidy looked out into the clearing. Conchi was facedown in the fire and one of the rebels lay across her legs. The other managed to fire a couple of shots that checked the rush of soldiers. Then he was cut down.

Cassidy and Dylan belly crawled under the house through the cobwebs and dirt. Shots banged into the walls above them. They crawled out the other side and ran across the ten yards of clearing with the house between them and the soldiers and plunged into the jungle. They kept going until they were well away from the house and then went to ground.

*   *   *

The afternoon sun filtered through the trees, throwing light and shadows on the bodies sprawled in the mud of the trail. They had been dead for a long time, probably since within the hour of when they had left the camp that morning, and the birds and insects and small animals had already begun the work of cleanup. The ambushers had stripped them of weapons and had turned their pockets out, maybe searching for the intelligence prizes of identification or indiscreet diaries, notes of plans, but also because looting is the privilege of the victors. The ambush site was easy to read. The army had been in cover on the high side of the trail with a clear field of fire. They had put blocking positions at either end of the trail section to prevent flight. The thing must have been over in seconds, the sudden blast of shots, the confusion and screaming. Then they came down and finished off the wounded one by one with a bullet to the head. Armando lay on his back in the middle of the trail, his arms crossed on his chest. A bullet had smashed one lens of his glasses.

“Nobody on point. All bunched up together again. Walking down the trail like a Sunday-afternoon stroll. What did I tell them? Why didn't they listen?” Why did their carelessness make him angry? They were people he had known only a little, people who had looked at him with suspicion. Why should it matter to him that they had thrown away all that they were and all they ever would be?

There was no way to bury the dead, nothing to be done. They set off down the trail. An hour later they ran into a patrol of bearded men in mismatched fatigues. The leader embraced Dylan and said, “Selena, we heard you were in the mountains. We came to find you.”

 

4

Carlos Ribera's house was in Vedado, a suburb of Havana developed for the rich in the mid-1800s. The house looked out to the sea and was cooled by ocean breezes, God's benefit to those who could afford the real estate, as Ribera sometimes remarked, invoking a deity he dismissed as irrelevant to the anarchist he professed to be. Entry from the crushed shell drive was through massive, iron-strapped wooden doors into an airy, two-story front hall with a wide marble staircase that curved up to the floor above. The hall led to a big interior courtyard paved with Italian tiles where a bronze dolphin balanced on its tail and spewed water from its mouth into a round pool where lilies floated. There were plants in clay pots, flowers of every color, and three palm trees whose green crowns overgrew the red tiled roof. And there were Ribera's sculptures. Some were abstract tangles of metal and wood, some stone heads, roughly chiseled, the features beginning to appear as if forcing their way out to the surface of the stone. And there was one startlingly realistic bronze nude of a woman.

Ribera had been Dylan's employer in New York five years ago, and Cassidy had met him then. She had welded his metal sculptures with a skill learned as a child while working in a Russian tank factory during World War II. Ribera, a Cuban, was a self-declared Marxist-anarchist, and a self-declared genius artist. He had worldwide reputation as a painter and sculptor. It was harder to tell about his politics. He took positions to provoke and to annoy, to tip people off balance about who he was and what he truly thought. He had told Cassidy in New York that he was not a Communist, that the dictatorship of the proletariat was just another dictatorship, but he had provided cover for Dylan and the KGB officer who ran her cell. Two days ago, when they had come down out of the mountains, Dylan had led Cassidy to Ribera's house. “We'll be safe there,” she explained, but she did not explain the KGB's relationship to Ribera.

*   *   *

“My great-grandfather Oscar Mena built the house in the 1850s,” Ribera said. The evening was a time for iced rum drinks in the courtyard, Dylan in a light silk dress she had found in the closet in their room, and Cassidy in linen trousers and a cotton shirt, softer than any he had ever worn, which, by some magic, fit him perfectly. “It was a time when the people with money were moving to Vedado. The streets in what we now call Old Havana were becoming too crowded, too egalitarian. What was the point of having money if you were to be jostled by the great unwashed every time you left your house?” Ribera raised a hand, and a serving man in black trousers and a white shirt brought a new silver pitcher rattling with ice and beaded with moisture, and took away the one from the table in front of them. “Oscar had made a great deal of money. He was in the sugar trade when the economics of slavery made that very lucrative indeed. Nothing better for the profit margin than owning the labor.” He smiled to indicate his irony.

A serving woman brought a plate of grilled shrimp and lime and left it on the table without a word.

“Great-grandfather Oscar was something of a revolutionary himself, though not, my dear,” a nod to Dylan, “one that you would have approved of. Spain was going to enforce its laws against slavery, and Oscar and his planter friends who depended on slaves thought it might be a good idea to annex Cuba to the Confederate States to prolong their way of life. He was encouraged by the woman who held his heart in her hands in those days, an American widow from New Orleans.”

“What happened?' Dylan asked. She ate a shrimp and threw the tail over her shoulder where it was pounced on by one of the house cats. It was a habit she had picked up from her host.

“There was an uprising. They took an armory in one of the towns south of the city with the full expectation that the general sent to attack them was on their side. It was a miscalculation. They had offered him a title if they won, Duke of Havana, or something. The other side offered cold cash. He turned out to be more a pragmatist than a romantic.”

“And Great-grandfather Oscar?” Cassidy asked. “
Paredón
?”

“No, no. He was much too grand, related to too many people, and much too rich to shoot. He paid a large fine, which expunged his transgressions, and they asked him not to do it again. He died upstairs in his bed at the age of ninety-three.” He stood. “Let's go eat. Livia has done something fantastic to a small tuna. You have never tasted anything like it.”

Carlos Ribera was a big man, thick through the shoulders and chest, with a big, square head, heavy chin, bold nose, and a tangle of gray and black curls. His powerful hands were scarred from work with metal and sharp tools. He dressed in guayabera shirts and linen trousers and leather sandals with perfect confidence that his informality would be acceptable wherever he went. His house was overrun by servants. In the days they had been there Cassidy had tried to figure out how many, but he discovered new ones daily. Dylan, champion of the proletariat, was uncomfortable with that, but Ribera laughed off her protest. “I give them employment, shelter, medical benefits, education, things they cannot otherwise have until after the revolution. Do you want me to throw them into the street to protect your democratic sensibilities?” He laughed at that absurd notion and poured her more wine. He was a man who worked to evade classification.

Ribera had fought in Spain against Franco's Fascists, and when Cassidy asked him about it, he dismissed it with a few words and a wave of his hand as if to say all wars are the same in their details. “It taught me that you can be on the side of right and still be beaten, that force can defeat ideals, that courage is not always rewarded, bitter truths that I wish I had not learned.”

Their room on the second floor was vast. It had a high ceiling and eight-foot windows that looked out toward the sea and let in the cooling breeze. The floor was dark tile, and there was a gigantic four-poster bed with mosquito netting. A grouping of chairs and a sofa waited in front of a tiled fireplace. The closets held clothes that fit. The bathtub was big enough for both of them, and the towels were large and soft. They made love in the big bed and slept tangled together, and when they woke there was always a tray outside their door with a silver thermos of coffee, because, Ribera said, it was uncivilized to have to come to breakfast and talk without at least a cup of strong coffee to start the engine.

Cassidy carried coffee back to the bed. Dylan stretched till her muscles cracked, pushed herself up against the pillows, and took the cup. “God, I could get used to this.”

“What are the poor people doing today?”

“Hey.” Mild outrage. She took a sip. “Even the coffee tastes better here.”

“Careful, your proletariat sensibilities are slipping.”

“Don't tell. I consider this a loop out of my real life. I'll be back to the other soon enough.”

It was the same for him—his life in New York was a distant insubstantial dream. His vacation lasted until January third. Then what would happen? Best not think about it.