Night Work (6 page)

“Ahh, like that, huh?” A man who liked women and understood what that could do to you.

“Yes.”

“Why do you need me? You're a cop. They'll let you in, won't they?”

“If I go in with you, they'll be looking at you. No one will pay attention to me.”

“Once you're in, what do you do?”

“I don't know.”

“This is a hell of a plan.”

“I'm not strong on plans. I'm more likely to bang around and see what happens.”

“Uh-huh, just grab and hold on tight.” It seemed to intrigue him. Maybe being a senator wasn't exciting enough.

Cassidy said nothing. The idea sounded ridiculous to him. What did it sound like to the senator?

“So I go to the authorities and tell them about my abiding interest in prison administration, or history, or something. I form a group. We go in. You do what you do, and then we get caught. That's not really going to be a help to my political career.”

“No.”

“Last night was last night. That's over. I owe you, but this? Why should I do it?”

“No reason at all.”

“I suppose it has to happen fast.”

“She's on short time.”

Cassidy lit a cigarette and smoked while the senator thought about it.

“A goddamn stupid thing to be doing.”

“Yes.”

“We could try for this afternoon. I'll get some people together. I'll have to make some calls, find out who can give us permission.”

“Thank you, Senator.”

He grinned. “If we get caught, my father's going to kill me.”

Cassidy went shopping on La Rampa. He bought a cheap briefcase and stored his purchases in it and went back to the hotel and lay on the bed and wondered if he would be alive at the end of the day. It was a thought that had come often in the war. If you examined it from all sides it would paralyze you. Better to stuff it back in the box and go on. What else was there to do?

They left the cars in the shade of the high wall inside the gate and followed their guide, a slim, clerkish lieutenant with a wisp of a mustache and an impeccable khaki uniform, across the heat of the parade ground, the cut stones smooth and warm underfoot. The office of the Commandant was cool. The ceilings were high, the windows deeply recessed in the thick walls that displayed old photographs in frames of stern officers in elaborate uniforms, swords at their sides, artillery squads firing small field guns, soldiers on parade shouldering rifles from fifty years ago. The Commandant, General Castillo, was a happy round man, with a round head like a soccer ball painted with oiled black hair parted in the middle as if with a razor, a round belly, round wire-rimmed glasses. He was delighted by an excuse to show off his command. He greeted them with small cups of strong dark coffee and thimbles of brandy served by mess men in white uniforms, and gathered them around a large map of the fortress so he could explain its construction and history. Jack and his friend George, a senator from Florida, three aides, serious young men in seersucker suits with close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed glasses, all poured from the same mold. And two secretaries. Claire with Jack, tall, athletic, blond, with the high cheekbones of a model and long red fingernails that had never seen a typewriter. Alice with George, the pneumatic brunette from the plane from Miami, who swatted Cassidy on the shoulder in the lobby of the Nacional while they waited for the cars and said, “Ooh, I remember you. The kidder from the plane. What happened to the guy?”

“I ate him.”

She laughed and swatted him again and leaned a heavy breast against his arm for a moment. Perfume, musk, and body heat.

General Castillo carried a riding crop and used it to proudly point out the interesting features of his fortress. His English was accented, clear and colloquial. “Started in 1763 and finished eleven years later under the reign of King Carlos III. The fort occupies nearly twenty-five acres and it could have housed six thousand men in time of war. However, the fort was never involved in a battle. Do you know why? Strength. It was clearly such a powerful fortress that no one ever had the courage to test it. To guarantee peace, you must have great strength. It is weakness that invites attack. There is a lesson here that America knows well. It is America's strength that keeps the Communists quiet. Without that, they would be on our beaches and at our throats.” He slapped the map with the riding crop. “Now, we are here. Here are the barracks. Here are the stables, though we do not keep horses anymore. Here is the magazine where we still keep explosives and ammunition.” He turned to his audience and threw his arms wide. “Welcome to Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña. Now, let us go out, and we will walk, and you will ask me questions.”

Sun-warmed stone. Well-clipped lawn around a sundial. Young soldiers, their uniform shirts off, suspenders over bare torsos, playing soccer on a strip of grass near freshly painted barracks. Squads doing close-ordered drills under the bark and lash of sergeants. Flower borders along the paths. No sign of prison, of condemned prisoners in rose-colored shirts. General Castillo was not going to spoil his visitors' day by showing them that. He led them west, away from the area Cassidy had seen the day before when he had delivered Echevarria to the mercy of Colonel Fuentes. The sun was hot on his back, and his hand sweated on the plastic handle of the briefcase.

He followed the tour for a look in the magazine to see the stacks of brass howitzer shells, crates of hand grenades, old wooden shelves packed with new cardboard boxes of small arms rounds. “Please, Señorita, it is best not to smoke in here. Boom!” A few minutes in the armory to admire the water-cooled .50 caliber machine guns on their tripods, the racks of M-1 rifles and Thompson submachine guns left over from World War II and supplied by the government across the straits for little more than their cost, an act of friendship. A trip to the battlements to inspect the black iron cannons that pointed out through the embrasures and had waited for a hundred years to take on any brig or frigate that might sail in to test the harbor's defenses. At the next corner, Cassidy hung back until the others disappeared, and then walked away.

He went back to where they had left the cars and stopped there for a moment to try to reconstruct where Fuentes's Jeep had taken them the day before. That road, or the one that went to the right? Why hadn't he paid more attention to where they had gone the day before? All right, that way, if not, then think again.

He walked quickly, not so fast that someone would remark on his pace, but with purpose, a man with a briefcase and a place he had to be, perhaps a bit late, or maybe he just wanted to be on time. Nothing remarkable in that. No reason to pay attention.

Two lieutenants in SIM uniforms stood talking and smoking outside an office door. They watched him cross the plaza. One said something and pointed toward Cassidy. Would they call him over and ask him what his business was? It's the prerogative of power to stop someone and demand an accounting. What's the point of having the power if you don't demonstrate it? The other one said something, flicked his cigarette away, and turned back into the building. The first one watched him for a while. Was he worth the trouble? No. He followed his friend inside and Cassidy walked on.

The road slanted down between gray walls. At the bottom three narrow roads, little more than alleys, branched from a small square. Which one? He had some vague memory that the Jeep had followed the one on the left. A hundred yards along he discovered he was wrong. The road made an abrupt right angle that no Jeep could have navigated. He went back and tried the one on the right.

The walls rose high above him, and the stone roadbed was in deep shadow. He was a hundred yards along when he heard gunfire. He stopped to listen. It had not been the individual shots of men on a firing range, but a ragged volley of half a dozen rifles. Moments later he heard three spaced shots. Snap. Snap. Snap. Coups de grâce. First the firing squad, and then three pistol shots to make sure. His heart jumped.

The narrow street widened out into a plaza. On the left he recognized a building, a long two-story block of cut stone with deep-set barred windows and a red tile roof. The wooden double doors were banded with black iron. The cellblocks were in its basement. Gunfire rattled from somewhere past the end of the building. It was followed by two spaced single shots.

Four civilian workmen in cotton jumpsuits came around the corner. They carried a ladder, paint buckets, and long-handled brushes, and they walked fast with their heads down. They knew Cassidy was there, but they refused to look at him, and they hurried into the narrow road, eager to get away from whatever was happening past the end of the plaza.

Cassidy touched his gun at the back of his belt under his jacket. What the hell was he going to do with it? Six shots against a firing squad with rifles. If it came to that he might do better to shoot himself.

Beyond the building the wide pavement ran through a low wall to broad steps. The steps descended into a wide, dry moat that was backed by the exterior walls of the fortress that rose thirty feet from its floor. This was part of the old defense architecture. If you breached the outer wall you were faced with the deep, wide moat. If you made it up from the moat you faced the thick walls of the cellblock. If you made it past its defenders you were channeled into the narrow high-walled street where no more than five or six men could walk abreast. If you made it down the street, maybe you deserved to have the fortress.

Voices came from the moat, but Cassidy could not make out what they said, only that some of it had the weight of command. He moved to where he could see. Uniformed soldiers carried the bodies of two men in rose-colored shirts from the wall where they had been shot to a truck. The tailgate was down. They heaved the bodies like sacks up into the truck bed to lie with the three who were already there. The soldiers of the firing squad leaned on their rifles and smoked cigarettes and talked. Colonel Fuentes and Sergeant Lopato stood together in the shade of the wall. The facing stones of the wall were bullet shattered and pocked from years of executions. New blood darkly oiled the pavers at the foot of the wall. One of the soldiers came back from the truck and sluiced a bucket of sand onto the blood pool, and flies rose in a cloud.

Fuentes handed Lopato a piece of paper, and Lopato crossed the moat and disappeared from view. The colonel took a leather case from his pocket and selected a thin cigar. He rolled it in his fingers, bit off the end, lit it, and blew a plume of smoke into the still, warm air, a man taking a break from a tedious job. He started to turn, and Cassidy stepped back. Fuentes was one of those dangerous men with antennae others did not have. He heard what he should not hear, sensed the unseen threat in a vague shift in the air.

Cassidy waited until he heard voices and then moved to where he could see. Below him Lopato and a guard escort led three men out into the sun. They were all dressed in the faded red shirts of the condemned, and two of them appeared to have already passed out of the world. They stood slumped, heads down, slack and dull, as if uninvolved in what was happening. The third man was slim and straight and charged with energy. He shook off the hands of the soldiers who escorted them and marched to the wall. He inspected it for a minute as if reading the history of men who had died here in the scars and gouges. Then he turned and scuffed the ground with the side of one shoe to clear it of pebbles and broken stone so that he had a solid, level place to stand. He waved as if to say, come on, come on. What are you waiting for? Here I am. The soldiers pushed the other two forward. They went as long as there was a hand on them and stopped when the hand came off. They turned when their escorts pulled them around by their shoulders. They did not raise their heads, and they paid no attention when the man in the middle spoke to them, offered them comfort and courage. At Fuentes's command, the firing squad shouldered their rifles and aimed. The brave one raised a fist and shouted
“Viva la revolución!”
The volley cut him off, and the three men were driven back against the wall. They crumpled onto each other and lay entangled and unmoving. The firing squad grounded their rifles. Colonel Fuentes, still smoking his cigar, took his pistol from its polished holster, walked to the bodies, and shot each one in the head. Sergeant Lopato called a command, and men stepped forward to carry the bodies to the truck.

These were the men from the dream of Dylan surrounded by featureless rose-colored figures falling at the sound of gunfire.

There was a corporal on duty at a counter just inside the big entry door. He looked up when Cassidy came in, but before he could speak, Cassidy flashed his badge and held up the briefcase and said, “
Documentos importantes para Coronel Fuentes,
” and rushed on by as if the fate of the nation depended on rapid delivery of those papers. He braced for the command to stop, but it did not come. He went down the worn stairs to the coolness of the lower level and stopped by the wooden door that led into the cellblock. He put his head against the wood but heard nothing but the thump of his own heart and the pulse of blood in his ears. He pushed the big iron handle down and eased the door open. There was no one on the other side.

He opened the door wide and stepped through.

“
Oyé
.” A guard he had not seen rose from a small desk in an alcove next to the door. “¿
Quién es usted
?
¿Qué
quieres?”

“Estoy buscando Coronel Fuentes.”
But Cassidy could see that the man did not really believe that he was looking for Colonel Fuentes. The guard put his hand on his gun. Cassidy stepped in and slammed the briefcase against the man's head. He bounced against the alcove wall and stumbled forward, and Cassidy hit him twice in the face and once in the throat with his fist. The guard sprawled across the desk, gagging for air. Cassidy jerked the big .45 automatic out of the man's holster and hit him hard on the side of the head, and he slid to the floor. Cassidy dragged him around and crammed him into the kneehole of the desk, and then stood and listened for sounds of alarm. He heard nothing.