Night Work (4 page)

It had been a prison for two hundred years. How much blood had soaked into its stones? How much more to come?

Cassidy saw Echevarria stiffen as they approached the gates. Nothing good waited for him here. All that he had fought for, connived for, killed for was going to turn to ash behind these walls.

Fuentes signed the papers at a scarred wooden desk in an office deep underground at the end of a cold stone cellblock built into the fortress walls. The two electric lights were dim yellow and did not penetrate the shadows in the corners. The air smelled of earth and damp. It was a place that would suck hope from a strong man. Cassidy countersigned and stowed the papers in his jacket pocket. He unlocked the handcuffs. Echevarria rubbed at the red circle on his wrist. He was diminished now, driven inward, hopeless. Cassidy had seen it before with prisoners when they felt the walls close around them, heard the key turn in the lock.

“Is he my prisoner now?” Fuentes asked.

“Yes.”

“
Paredón!
”

The Sergeant slammed Echevarria back against the wall. Echevarria's eyes went wide. Fuentes drew his pistol, stepped forward until the barrel nearly touched him. Echevarria put his hands up as if he could ward off what was coming. Fuentes shot him twice in the face. He sagged down, boneless and broken, and left a smear of blood against the wall. His shattered head leaked a thick, dark pool onto the stones of the floor. The room stunk of cordite. Cassidy's ears rang from the pistol blasts. Echevarria's last look, a plea, a horror, would be with him for a long time. He did not like the man, but the brutal suddenness of his death shook him. There one moment, then gone.

Fuentes touched the dead man with the toe of his boot. He looked up as if mildly curious about Cassidy's reaction. The gun dangled, but it was still in his hand. Cassidy looked back at him.
Give him nothing. Show him nothing
. There was nothing to say, nothing to do. That moment at the airport when he had stopped Fuentes from hitting Echevarria had led directly to this. It was a demonstration for Cassidy's benefit that Fuentes held the power here. Did Cassidy have a greater responsibility for Echevarria's death than he should have had? Yes. Was there anything he could do about it? No. Not right now. Maybe the time would come. In the war he had seen how casually men destroyed each other without thought or compunction. Shouldn't that have scrubbed the capacity for surprise out of him? Yet it still shocked him when it happened.

“Sergeant Lopato will have someone drive you into the city. Wherever you want to go.” Fuentes put the pistol on the desk and lit a cigar. He gestured toward the body on the floor. “This was justice.”

“A funny kind of justice.”

“He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. Would it have been better to lock him in prison for a year, to let him think about it every day? One more day gone. One more. Closer and closer it comes. This was a kindness. I hope someone will be so kind to me if my day comes.”

“I hope so too.”

Fuentes drew on the cigar and let the smoke filter out of his mouth. He smiled. “Good-bye, Detective Cassidy.”

Cassidy followed the broad back of Sergeant Lopato along the corridor. Dim light came from caged bulbs widely spaced in the vaulted ceiling. The stones seemed to press in and down, but the tropical heat did not penetrate. The doors to the cells were thick wood, banded with black iron. Small, barred observation windows pierced them. Hands clenched some of the bars, white fingers on the black bars, but the interiors of the cells were dark and he could not see the faces of the prisoners.

A door clashed open somewhere ahead of them, and a file of prisoners came into the corridor behind a warder who swung a three-foot billy club from a leather loop on his wrist. The prisoners shuffled, heads down, the walk of the defeated, resigned to their lot, beyond hope. Their sandals scuffed on the worn stone floor. They wore light cotton pants and cotton shirts once red, now faded to rose from years of use. They shuffled along without raising their heads, and suddenly he was haunted by the dream he had had the night he had spent in Miami, the dim tunnel, the shuffling, rose-colored, featureless figures.

The last one in line was slighter than the others. As they passed, Cassidy noticed that the prisoner's close-cropped hair was copper red. She raised her face and looked at him without recognition, her face as he had known it, as it had lived in his dreams and memory, but older now, drawn and tired, scared.

Dylan McCue, spy, lost love, dead these past four years. Or so he had thought.

*   *   *

Cassidy followed Sergeant Lopato up narrow stone stairs, along another dank stone corridor, and up broad stone stairs, worn down by centuries of shuffling prisoners, and into the sunlight. He saw none of it. He saw only Dylan's face, worn, blank-eyed, beautiful.
Was it Dylan? How could that be possible? Why was she here? How did she get here? Was it Dylan? Was it? Yes, it was.

The sunlight and heat after the dim coolness of the cell block woke him to where he was. He stopped and looked around. The wide parade ground of the fortress; worn paving stones with grass growing in the cracks; the massive wall rising twenty feet to the broad parapets; prisoners cutting grass, herded in groups by warders carrying batons, overseen by men on the walls cradling rifles. The prisoners wore loose shirts and pants made of unbleached cotton the color of dust. Why had she been wearing a red shirt? Segregation in prison was not usually a good thing. It often meant you were a danger to people, or people were a danger to you. Was that it? What the hell was she doing here?

Lopato stopped when he stopped and watched him without expression.

“Do you speak English?”

No change of expression. He looked like a man who could not be provoked by the blow of an axe.

“
Habla Ing—”
He was stopped by Lopato's abrupt nod. “The prisoners we saw with the red shirts. Why the red shirts?”

Lopato looked at him with obsidian eyes, calculating whether the question was worth an answer. “Politicals.
Communistas
. Very bad ones.” His voice was surprisingly high and reedy coming from that massive head. “
Condenados.
”

Condemned.

Cassidy spoke Spanish, but now it seemed important to keep that information to himself. There had been a Spanish housekeeper in the brownstone on Sixty-sixth Street for five years who was paid extra to speak to the children only in her language, and he had spent two summers working on a ranch in Mexico. His father felt he needed to learn the discipline of hard, physical labor.

“What will happen to them?”

“
Paredón!
” He smiled and pointed a finger like a gun and pulled the trigger. “
Paredón.
”

“When?”

“
Yo que se.”
Lopato shrugged as if it was of no importance. “Tomorrow. The next day. Next week. ¿
Quien sabe
?” Who knows? What did it matter? Condemned was condemned.

 

2

The car was a four-year-old Buick painted gray, the color of most SIM cars. The driver was a young corporal with severely cropped hair and a rigid posture. He drove with his hands at ten and two and had a delicate touch on the brake and accelerator that produced a smooth ride. Cassidy sat wedged in a corner of the backseat, ignorant of the scene that passed the windows, deeply tangled in the last time he had seen Dylan nearly five years ago. They had been on a Russian ship steaming out of New York Harbor. Cassidy's father, Tom, caught up in the McCarthy witch hunts, was being deported, returned to Russia, a country he had fled as a teenager. Cassidy had boarded the ship at its New York pier to try to get his father off before the ship sailed. He had failed. Dylan, Cassidy's lover, a KGB agent, held them with a gun until her superior, a man named Apfel, came into the cabin to decide their fate. Then she had changed her mind. She killed Apfel. Her story would be that Cassidy and his father overpowered them and shot Apfel. To make it work, Cassidy had hit her, hit her hard, split her mouth, hit her again and knocked her down, and then he and his father had jumped into the harbor and had been fished from the water by a pilot launch, and the ship, with Dylan on it, had steamed away. For years he had feared she was dead, that the story had not held up, that she had paid the price the KGB extracted for failure or betrayal. Now the Cubans were going to do what the Russians had failed to do.

Suddenly the car was as confining as a cage.

Cassidy told the driver to stop. He would walk the rest of the way to the Hotel Nacional, and the man could leave his suitcase at the desk. The driver protested. He had been ordered by Sergeant Lopato to take Cassidy to the hotel. Nothing had been said about dropping him in town. Lopato was not a man to disobey. It would be better if he delivered Cassidy where he had been told to deliver him.

When the Jeep stopped at a red light, Cassidy got out and walked away, leaving the driver no choice.

He walked along Calle 23, La Rampa, through Vedado, the high-rent district west of Old Havana. The shop windows displayed clothes and jewelry you could buy in New York made, more attractive by the absence of tax for visitors. The street was crowded, and the language he heard most was not Spanish, but English. Havana was an occupied city, occupied by American tourists dressed in colors never found in nature. The cafés and bars were filled with afternoon drinkers having loud fun. It was an expanded version of the party on the flight over. Here none of the normal rules applied, and when you went home, anything that might smudge your conscience was forgotten, wiped clean by the ninety-mile flight across the water.

Two young women in bright cotton dresses sat together at a café table at the edge of the sidewalk, nursing tall scarlet drinks with fruit in them. Cornflower hair and blue eyes, teachers from the Midwest, or maybe that was just his fantasy. They looked at Cassidy and smiled an invitation. Was he going to be part of their adventure? He smiled back and shook his head. They shrugged, oh, well, and looked to see who might be coming next.

Havana. A man could have a good time down here, as long as he didn't think too much about the uniformed men with submachine guns on the corners.

No matter what the local newspapers and radio said about successful military operations in the Sierra Maestra, no matter how many speeches Batista gave about the imminent defeat of the “small band of Communists” in the hills, the uniformed men with submachine guns were not there to protect the merchandise in the windows along La Rampa, not there to politely explain to the furniture maker from Des Moines how to get to the Tropicana so he could unburden himself of his money at the roulette wheel, not there to suggest to the boys from Delta Kappa Epsilon where they might find the finest whores, nor to guide the advertising executives from New York to the club where women performed athletically with a large man and a small donkey. They were there because of Fidel Castro and his rebellion. Castro's death had been announced by Batista, but he had been resurrected by Herbert Matthews of the
New York Times
, who found him very much alive in the mountains and took photographs to prove it
.
Very embarrassing for Batista. So, more soldiers on the streets, more late-night raids, fists pounding on doors, frightened men and women bundled into cars and taken to La Cabaña to discuss what they knew about the misguided rebels who were threatening everyone's prosperity. More bodies leaking blood in the early-morning gutters, more corpses bumping with the tide against the seawall in the harbor.

The big lobby of the Nacional was hushed and cool, the light golden and comforting under the massive beams of the ceiling. The thick walls shut out the city and the heat. The desk clerk was deferent and eager. Cassidy's bag had arrived. It had been taken to a room overlooking the sea. Would that be all right? Perhaps he preferred the other side. Some were disturbed by the sound of the waves on the Malecón.

No, he preferred the ocean side.

Wonderful, anything he wanted. Any friend of Colonel Fuentes. But behind the smile and the eagerness was wariness. Who are you, friend of Colonel Fuentes? How much trouble do you bring? It was an indication of the colonel's reputation and power.

The elevator was already full when Cassidy entered. American tourists in bright resort clothes, three elegant silver-haired women conversing in Spanish, and two men who got off on Cassidy's floor, men who sparked Cassidy's cop radar. They both wore cheap tropical-weight suits, rayon shirts, and wide, hand-painted ties. They had the hard-eyed, lumpy faces of men who had been hit more than once and would probably get hit again. They weren't tourists. Cassidy had seen men like this in holding tanks or waiting for the desk sergeant to fill out the booking slips. What were they doing here? He knew that one of the Hotel Nacional's owners was the gangster Meyer Lansky. No surprise that some of his thugs would have rooms here. The hell with it. It was none of his business. He wasn't on the job here. They stopped at a door down the corridor from his.

Cassidy's bag was in his room. There was a bucket of ice and a bottle of Bacardi rum and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label on a tray near the closet, anything for a friend of Colonel Fuentes. He poured rum over ice and stood looking out the open window. The air was warm and soft and smelled of tropical flowers, burning charcoal, salt, and diesel. The ocean crashed white on the breakwater of the Malecón. There was something familiar about the broad boulevard, the massive blocks of stone, and the spray that rose above them, something he should remember, but he could not get ahold of it.

The sun was setting, and the western sky was a riot of orange and purple. He could see over the city and harbor to La Cabaña on the hill. The last rays of the sun turned the stone walls red.

Red. Condemned.

When? What had Lopato said? Tomorrow, the next day, who knows.