Night Work (7 page)

Down the block eight cell doors stood open. Eight empty cells, eight dead men. He tried to remember which door led to Dylan's cell. Where had he been when the prisoners came in the day before? She passed him without seeing him when he was about here. And then he had turned and watched as the prisoners took up positions, in front of their cell doors. Which was hers?
Think. Which one? That one or that one
. The twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth from the end. Somewhere in there. There was no movement behind the small windows in the cell doors, no hands grasping the bars, nothing that would draw the attention of Lopato and his men. Maybe they'll go by me. Maybe they'll forget.

A door banged open at the end of the cellblock and light flooded in and Sergeant Lopato and two soldiers entered. They stopped just inside the door, blind in the dimness of the cellblock after the sunlight. Cassidy stepped into the guard's alcove and thumbed the safety off the .45. He should have checked to see if there was a round in the chamber. Too late now. The sound of the slide would draw them. Lopato opened the next three cell doors. Two men stepped out without urging, but the soldiers had to go in and get the third. They pulled him out of the cell. He made no protest, did not struggle, but his legs did not work, and they had to drag him through the sunlit doorway while Lopato herded the other two.

When the door closed, Cassidy searched the desk in the guard alcove and found a ring of keys in the top drawer. How much time did he have before Lopato was back? They take the men outside. They put them against the wall. The squad is brought into place. Fire. Maybe two minutes after the gunshots, six or seven minutes in all. He went down to the three cells he thought might be hers and called out, “Dylan. Dylan, where are you? Dylan.” Fingers gripped the bars of the cell where he stood, but they were a man's hands. “¿
La mujer, adonde esta?”

“
Allí, en ese lado.”
A gesture with his head.

Cassidy stepped to the next cell. “Dylan. Dylan, are you in there?” No answer. He ran through the keys with clumsy fingers until he found the right one and opened the door. A dim caged bulb in the ceiling showed him the cell, eight feet by twelve feet, the pallet on the floor, the toilet bucket, and Dylan standing with her back against the wall, braced, wide eyed, hands curled like claws.

“It is you.” Her voice sounded rusty. “When I saw you in the corridor yesterday, was it yesterday? I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I was finally going mad. But it was you.”

“Yes.”

“How? Why? It can't be.” She stepped forward and touched him to make sure he was real.

“I'll tell you afterward. We don't have time.” He opened the briefcase and took out the clothes he had bought that morning on La Rampa, a dress, underwear, the clothes of a tourist, a silk scarf to cover her distinctive hair, and rubber-soled shoes in case they had to run. “Put these on.”

She looked at him for a moment as if trying to grasp what he had said, and then pulled off the rose-colored shirt and cotton pants and began to dress.

God, she was thin, and there were bruises on her arms and back where someone had beaten her.

He stepped to the door in time to hear the ragged volley of the firing squad. A couple of minutes until Lopato came in for the next group. “Hurry.”

She came out of the cell tying the scarf over her hair and took the keys out of the lock and stepped to the next cell and began to search for the key that would unlock it. “What are you doing? We have to go.”

“I can't leave them in here.”

“Dylan, we have to go now. They'll be in here in a minute.”

“I can't.” She had the door open and was working on the next. She got lucky and opened it with the second key. Now there were two men with rose shirts in the corridor, and she handed each of them some of the keys and told them to get to work. Cassidy took three keys and moved up the line looking for the doors they fit. Soon there were twenty men in the corridor, and their voices rose as they talked about what to do. One of them moved to the door to the killing ground and slid a bolt across to lock it.

“They're not going to make it.”

“They'll try, and if they don't, well, it's better than sitting in a cell waiting for them to come take you. Do you have a gun?”

Cassidy handed her the .45 he had taken from the guard. She passed it to the man from the cell next to hers. They hugged, and as she pulled away, she said, “
Suerte, hombre.
” He smiled like a man who knew that all his luck was behind him. Someone tried the door from the killing ground, and the man turned and fired a bullet through it. Someone outside yelped with pain.

Cassidy hurried Dylan up the stairs and out into the plaza. Gunfire sounded from below the wall. The soldiers there would be firing back through the door. He led Dylan to the narrow street, and as they turned the corner he looked back in time to see four soldiers and Sergeant Lopato come up the stairs from the killing ground. A shot came from the front door of the prison building. One of the soldiers spun and went down, and the others threw themselves flat and began to return fire. The men in the prison block were not going to get out, but they would buy Cassidy and Dylan time. How long before the general alarm was raised? How long before they blocked the gates?

The two drivers were standing in the shade by the cars smoking and talking. Cassidy led Dylan to the one closer to the gate. The driver flicked his cigarette away and walked over.

“We have to go now,” Cassidy said.

The driver looked around. “And the others?”

“They'll be a while. You can come back for them.”

“Are you sure?” Did he hear the distant snap of rifles?

“I'm sure.” Cassidy put his arm around Dylan's waist, and she leaned in and kissed the side of his neck and rested her head on his shoulder. “I'm sure.”

The driver nodded and smiled. “Ahh, yes. Of course. Of course.” He understood the urgency of love in the afternoon. He opened the back door and ushered them in with a flourish, got in behind the wheel, revved the engine to show his appreciation of the need for haste, circled the plaza fast enough to make the tires squeal, and drove out through the gate.

Dylan put her head against his chest. He could feel her body shake. He felt her tears through the cloth of his shirt.

 

3

Cassidy asked the driver to take them to the Nacional, but Dylan had him pull over on La Rampa, and they got out and watched him drive on. “They'll know you were at the hotel. They'll go there first.” She led him around a corner and hailed another taxi and asked the driver to take them to the old town and to drop them at the Cathedral plaza where they walked through the beggars displaying their wounds and deformities. She warded off the vendors who took her for a tourist with a smile and a shake of the head. They turned down an alley where the old stucco buildings leaned toward each other and laundry in all colors hung from the wrought-iron balconies and got on a bus and rode ten blocks with the people headed home from work. At a corner where the bus turned, two gray police cars nosed together into the curb. Four young men, college age, stood facing a white wall, their hands high, their legs spread, as the cops patted them down. The people on that side of the bus turned away from the windows. Cassidy and Dylan got out at the next stop and he followed her down narrow streets that smelled of grilling meats, flowers, the sea, and open drains. Music played from radios near open windows, drums and guitars, brass and maracas, a heavy tropical beat. She walked with purpose, and he followed without comment. He was in her world now, the covert, the clandestine, and she would lead them where they had to go.

She stopped at a wide arched gateway on a narrow street near the port and reached in through the slats and fiddled with something until she got it right and half the gate swung open and he followed her into a courtyard. It was paved with worn cobblestones and surrounded on three sides by a two-story building and on the fourth by a high wall and the gate they had entered. The building was old, the stucco discolored and broken in places. The ground floor under the two wings had been built as stables, but now they were crowded with cars in various states of repair. Pieces of car bodies, fenders, doors, bumpers were piled in corners of the yard.

Someone beat on metal with a hammer in one of the stalls.

*   *   *

“Your descriptions have been on the radio. Very accurate because, of course, your hair is easy. We should do something about that. And him too. Very accurate. Hair, height, weight, everything. Someone was paying attention. Who is he?”

“An old friend.”

He waited for more but Dylan gave him nothing.

“We must do something about your hair, Selena. I'll ask Veronica. She works at a hair place for women.”

Selena, the cover name she was using.

The man's name was Tomas. He was broad and thick and bowlegged, and his dark face was cheerful until you got to his eyes. His English was good, learned, he explained, during six years he worked as a mechanic for a Ford dealer in Fort Lauderdale. He carried a shotgun up from the garage and put it behind the door where it would be easy to reach. His hands were ingrained with oil and dirt even after scrubbing in the stone sink in the kitchen on the second floor. There was no sign of a woman here. The sink was stacked with dirty dishes. The towel he used to dry his hands was gray. The windows were opaque with years of stove smoke. One of the counters was littered with bits stripped from cars, radio tubes and knobs, a gearshift, unidentifiable pieces of metal, a wind wing in its frame. The wood table where they sat was scarred on the edges from where people had rested cigarettes.

Tomas lit a Chesterfield and blew smoke at Cassidy. “You're sure of him?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “Okay, then. On your head if it goes wrong.” He took a long barreled .38 revolver from his waistband and put it under a cloth at his elbow and got up and found an unlabeled bottle in a cabinet above the old kerosene range and poured rum into mismatched tumblers. He served them bread and plates of olives and hard cheese and small grilled fish. Dylan ate as if she had not seen food in days. Tomas ate the fish with his fingers, crunching heads and all and washing them down with rum.

“Two more got out, they say. But no names yet. If they're ours, we'll soon know.”

“And the rest?” Cassidy asked.

Tomas shrugged. Dead or recaptured. What else was there? The phone rang and Tomas answered it. “¿
Si?
” He listened for a while and then hung up and came back to the table. “Big search. SIM, soldiers, police. It's too dangerous to move you now. So tonight we hide you here. Tomorrow we get you out of Havana.”

He led them back downstairs to one of the garages where a 1952 Chevrolet Bel Air waited with its hood open. A blanket lay across the driver's side fender to protect the paint from tools. The valve cover, carburetor, air cleaner, and other pieces Cassidy could not identify were on a workbench against the wall. “Valve job,” Tomas explained. Cassidy helped him roll the car back to the door. The floor underneath it was caked with oil and grease. Tomas scrubbed some of it away and then screwed a handle into the hole he had cleared, and pulled. A section of the floor tilted up on counterweighted hinges. There was a ladder leading down into a pit. “Wait,” Tomas said. He went down into the pit and opened a low door at one end and ducked in. A moment later a light came on in the room beyond the door and he reappeared and climbed back out. “A good place. They will never find you here. You'll be safe.”

Or trapped in a hole, Cassidy thought.

“I'll bring you food and something to drink. I'll push the car back over, but even so there is just enough room to open the trapdoor and crawl out. Just in case.” In case something happens to me, he meant, a man who lived with that daily reality, the midnight knock on the door, the car with darkened windows, the room where men waited with questions.

They went down the short ladder into the pit and then into the room at the end, and the trapdoor thunked down as Cassidy lit a cigarette and took in the hideout room. It was not much bigger than the cell Dylan had left. A mattress took up half the floor. There was bucket in the corner, a wooden stool and small wood table on which Tomas had put a plate of ham, some cheese, half a loaf of bread, a bottle of water, a bottle of rum, two glasses, and a knife. A bare bulb glared from overhead.

She studied him carefully in the silence of the room, and then smiled. “You haven't changed, Michael. You look the same.”

“So do you.”

“Liar.”

Her face was thinner, and there was a shadow of something that had not been there before, sadness, or pain. Her eyes did the same shift from blue to green, depending on the light, green now, and fathomless, eyes to drown in. There was a thin white scar at the corner of her mouth. He touched it with his finger and she did not flinch. “Did I do that?”

“Yes.” She touched it with the tip of her tongue. “Every time I looked in the mirror I thought of you. Where were you? What were you doing? Were you even alive?” She took his cigarette from his mouth and took a drag and gave it back to him, an intimacy from when they were together in New York four years ago. “Did you think of me?”

“Yes.”

“A lot?”

“Yes. A lot.”

“Do you believe in Fate, Michael?”

“Not much.”

“They were going to kill me today, and then you came and got me. It has to mean something.”

“What?”

“I don't know. Something.” She accepted the glass of rum he offered and lit a cigarette off the burning coal of his. “I always thought I would see you again before I died, but lately I began to lose faith that it could happen. I know that at the end of it in New York you believed I came to you because my superiors ordered it, because they needed to know if you had the photographs. It was like that in the beginning. But by the end, I loved you for me, for you, and this morning all I wanted was to see you one more time before they took me to the wall.”