Night Work (34 page)

“I've heard of him,” Drago said.
Say nothing till you know which way the wind blows. You don't make any money disagreeing with the tipper.

“The son of a bitch has stolen my country.” This from a man who owned a house in Miami and paid a thousand dollars a month rent in New York on the nine-hundred-dollar salary of a Cuban Army Lieutenant General, a salary he had not drawn in the three months since the revolution. “He is going to turn it over to the Communists. He is going to turn paradise into a shithole.”

“I hate the Communists, General. When I see what they've done to my beautiful country … I don't know. I wish I could go back there with a gun.”

“A gun, yes. It is the only argument they comprehend. You're a good man, Drago. You understand these things.” Garza y Mendoza took a dollar bill from his pocket and pressed it on the doorman.

“No, General, you don't have to do that,” in perfect imitation of sincerity as his hand closed over the bill.

“I do it because I want to. I do it to show my appreciation. Come on, Mitzi.”

Drago watched as they walked to the corner, the big man and the tiny, fluffy dog.
What the hell's a man doing with a little faggot dog like that?

*   *   *

General Garza y Mendoza walked Mitzi in Riverside Park in the glory of a spring morning. The trees were budding. Flowers had begun to sprout in the beds. The sun was warm. The tall apartment buildings looked as permanent as mountains. It was a day to feel hopeful, strong, full of life, but the thought of Castro in Central Park turned it all dark. Who was it who said that God is on the side of big battalions? They had had the battalions, and Castro had nobody. What had SIM reported? Eighty-two men had landed with Castro. Many of them had been killed or captured in the first twenty-four hours. Only twelve had gotten away to the mountains. Twelve men. How could twelve men defeat an army? It was against the natural order of things. He threw away the stub of his cigar and sighed. How could such a thing happen?

Mitzi tugged at her leash. “Yes, I'm coming, Mitzi. I'm coming. We'll go home and have something to eat.” He turned south toward 73rd Street.

A car pulled to the curb on Riverside Drive. A man got out of the passenger seat and went into the park and turned down the path behind Garza y Mendoza. He was a tall, powerfully built man. He wore rubber-soled shoes, khaki pants, a white wash-and-wear shirt, and a windbreaker. His hair was as pale as ice. He walked just fast enough to close the distance without appearing to hurry.

Mitzi stopped to sniff at the base of a streetlamp. General Garza y Mendoza felt a presence and turned to find a tall man with pale eyes a few feet away.

“Do you have a match?” He held a cigarette between two gnarled and twisted fingers that looked like they had been badly broken and never properly set. His accent was similar to Drago's, from somewhere east of Europe, somewhere cold.

Mitzi strained at her leash and began to yap at the man. She bared her teeth and scrabbled at the pavement in her fury to get at him. Garza y Mendoza looked down at her in surprise and never felt the blow that dropped him into darkness.

*   *   *

Drago Peck handed Mrs. Rothman into the taxi as if she were a delicate and valuable package. He palmed the quarter she gave him, closed the door, tapped on the roof of the cab to let the driver know, and turned away, flipping the coin in the air as Mitzi came around the corner of the building trailing her leash. She ran past him to the door and stood there barking for entrance. He looked around for the general, but he was not in sight. She must have pulled loose from him. He would be hurrying up the block from Riverside Park, frantic that Mitzi would dash out into traffic. So, Drago would save her from the crushing wheels of a truck and return her unhurt to her master. Surely worth a dollar or two. When he stooped to pick up the trailing end of the leash, he saw that the white fur on her shoulder was matted with blood.

*   *   *

Cassidy and Orso pushed through the crowd of onlookers held back from Riverside Park by police barriers and uniformed cops. Why did violent death attract people? Did the butchery of others make them feel more alive, or were they just drawn there for a possible glimpse of the mystery?

They walked toward the group of cops and coroner's crew clustered at the far side of the grass in the shadow of the West Side Highway. FBI Agents Susdorf and Cherry kept a Federal distance from the other cops.

General Garza y Mendoza lay on his back in a patch of green spring grass near the river behind a pile of sand and gravel to be used for resurfacing the park's paths. His face was battered, and the one hand Cassidy could see was ripped and broken, and he could smell burned flesh. “Who found him?” Cassidy asked.

“A couple of kids playing. One of them chased their ball over here and saw him.” The beat cop's name was Wangold. He was a short, dark man with a severe widow's peak and arched eyebrows that gave him a permanent look of surprise. He held a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, dragged on it luxuriously, and looked down at the dead man. This wasn't the first body he had seen in the park.

“Where's Skinner?” Cassidy asked. A coroner's office assistant flicked his cigarette away and pushed away from the coroner's van. His name was Brackett or Hackett, Cassidy could never remember.

“He's out on another call.”

“Cause of death here?”

Brackett or Hackett crouched by the dead man and pulled back his shirt collar. There were livid marks on the dead man's throat. “Strangulation. Whoever did it had a hell of a grip. Take a look here. Only three fingers of this hand got a real grip. A couple of marks here, but the other two didn't really dig in.”

“Okay, thanks.” Orso trailed him to where Susdorf and Cherry stood. “What've we got?”

Susdorf flipped him a black leather wallet. The surface was covered with fingerprint powder, and he could see where the lifts had been made. He went through the wallet while Susdorf talked. “General Alfonso Garza y Mendoza. One of Batista's boys. He's on our list, so when they got an ID, we got a call. We called you.”

“Why's he on your list?”

“Number two in Batista's secret service. SIM, you know it?”

“Yes.”

“We like to keep our eye on guys like that. The Director says that sometimes they forget they're in our country, not theirs. They kill this guy, kill that guy, bring their war into our towns. We watch who they meet. If it looks like they're getting too excited, someone goes and says something to them.”

“Not a robbery,” Cassidy said. The wallet was thick with money. “Castro's people?”

“Maybe. Maybe retaliation for the four killed over at that restaurant in Williamsburg last week. The wallet was lying open on his chest. The cop didn't have to touch it to get the ID.”

“Someone wanted someone to know he was dead,” Cassidy said.

“A lot of that going around,” Orso said. “He must have screamed when they were working him. Nobody heard him?”

“Yeah, they heard him,” Cherry said. “Some guys fixing potholes up the next block said they thought it was kids playing. Kids, Jesus.” He shook his head at the stupidity of citizens.

Cassidy put the wallet in an evidence envelope and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “His apartment's around the corner.”

*   *   *

Orso stayed downstairs to talk to the doorman. Cassidy and the two FBI agents went up to the fifteenth floor and opened the door with the dead man's keys. They walked through the apartment, getting a feel for the place and the people who lived there. They would do a proper search later. The rooms were crammed with gilded, overstuffed furniture. A big radio-phonograph in a blond wood case dominated one corner of the living room. There were silver-framed photographs on every flat surface. Many showed General Garza y Mendoza with a plump big-haired woman and three plump daughters on beaches, at the racetrack in Havana, on the deck of a ship, at a swimming pool, on horseback in a cane field above men stooped to cut cane. There were photographs of the general with other uniformed officers, with Batista on maneuvers in the country, seated with their wives in a nightclub smiling widely at the photographer, shaking hands at what looked like an awards ceremony, at a formal dinner, a long table with a white tablecloth freighted with dishes and bottles, the men leaning forward or backward to make sure they got in the photograph. Meyer Lansky, a small, gray figure among the glittering uniforms, was at the end of the table near Batista. Colonel Diego Fuentes was in a number of the pictures, never in the front, always at someone's shoulder, often angled away from the camera, a man more comfortable in the shadows. In one photo Sergeant Lopato was standing back against the wall. The camera had snapped just as a waiter passed him with an empty tray, leaving the illusion that Lopato's head was on the tray, like John the Baptist's.

The master bedroom was up a narrow flight of stairs. The big bed was canopied in white and pink and covered with matching throw pillows. There was a thick white rug on the floor, a pink-cushioned wicker bed for a dog, and a series of large gold-framed oils on the walls showing country and sea views of Cuba, the sun too bright, the colors too rich to be real. Decoration by the absent Mrs. Garza y Mendoza, Cassidy guessed. And where was she? Well, that would be someone else's problem.

Downstairs again Cassidy found Susdorf going through the desk in the living room while Cherry took the tops off bottles on the bar and sniffed the contents. Cassidy followed the hall to a bedroom at the back, a guest room, he supposed, since there were none of the frills and frou frou of the other bedrooms, the ones he assumed were for the general's daughters. It was spare and orderly. The bed was made with military tautness. Three pairs of shoes were lined up next to the closet. When he opened the closet door he found three suits, three sports jackets, six pairs of trousers, a pair of highly polished black boots, and the uniform of a colonel in SIM. A .45 automatic in a polished leather holster hung in a gun belt from a hook next to the uniform. He opened the desk drawers but they contained nothing but a colorful brochure with the Hotel Nacional in Havana on the cover. He recognized it as a duplicate of the one his brother-in-law, Mark, had showed him—Paradise One, a Sanborn-Buckman Company. He tossed it back in the drawer. The general was an investor or maybe one of the men who greased Sanborn's wheels.

The elevator doors clashed. A key grated in the lock. The door opened, and Colonel Diego Fuentes walked into the apartment. If he was surprised to see Cassidy walking toward him he covered it well. Fuentes wore a well-cut black suit, a pale yellow shirt, and a paisley tie aswirl with red and yellow. He took off his dark Panama hat, put it on the table in the hall, and looked in the mirror above the table while he smoothed his hair with a comb from his pocket.

“Detective Cassidy, how nice to see you again.” As cool as a blade.

“Colonel Fuentes.” Neither man felt the need to shake hands.

“I understand from the doorman that something has happened to General Garza y Mendoza.”

“He's dead.”

“Ahh. How?”

“Someone strangled him.”

“I see.” What he saw did not seem to disturb him much. “And do you know who did it?”

“No. Do you?”

“The Communists, of course. The general was an enemy of communism. He understood the dangers it presents to people who love freedom. And they are ruthless with people who oppose them.”

“They tortured him. What do you think they wanted to know?”

“I have no idea. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps they just wanted to hear him scream. They're animals. They have no humanity.” He stopped in the open arch to the living room and looked in at Susdorf and Cherry.

“Special Agent in Charge Susdorf and Special Agent Cherry. FBI. This is Colonel Diego Fuentes. He worked for Batista's secret police. He's a friend of the general,” Cassidy said. Susdorf looked up from the letter he was reading. Cherry put the cork back in a bottle and turned away from the bar, satisfied that the bottles held nothing of national importance.

“Continue, gentlemen,” Fuentes said. “I'm sure the general would want to hold nothing back from the FBI.” He took out a leather case, selected a cigar, lit it, and blew smoke at the ceiling, all the while watching Cassidy with cool amusement.

“Where are the rest of the family, his wife and daughters?”

“Out of the country at the moment. They are visiting General and Mrs. Batista in the Dominican Republic, old friends. Your government did not allow the Batistas into the United States, even though they own a house in Fort Lauderdale. It is a disgusting way to treat a man who has been your friend and ally for years. You Americans are so shortsighted. Everything you do is because of the next election. Every decision your government makes is because of the moment now, with no thought to tomorrow. Only what works today. You have no long-term vision. General Batista's usefulness is over, so you throw him away so as not to offend Castro. A year from now, you will understand who Castro is. Do you think his nationalization of the telephone company is the end? It's the beginning. And when you finally see that, then you'll start looking for some way to replace him. You'll look for allies, but you won't find them, because you betray your allies so quickly. It is no wonder you are becoming hated by so many people around the world.” The elevator stopped on the fifteenth floor and Orso came into the apartment. He nodded toward Fuentes and raised his eyebrows in question.

“Colonel Fuentes, my partner, Detective Orso.” Orso recognized the name. Fuentes turned and the two men checked each other for a moment. “We've received a report that someone's going to try to take Castro out while he's here in New York,” Cassidy said.

“Good. Let us hope it's true.”