For the first time in his life Ocho wondered if God cared.
He was still thinking along these lines when the boat buried its bow in the first big swell at the harbor entrance. Spray came flying back clear to the wheelhouse. People shrieked, some laughed, all tried to find some bit of shelter.
People were moving, holding up clothing or pieces of cardboard when the next cloud of spray came flying back.
The boat rose somewhat as she met each swell, but she was too heavily loaded.
“We’re not even out of the harbor,” muttered the man beside Ocho. His voice sounded infinitely weary.
Dora hugged Ocho, clung to him as she stared into the night.
She barely came to his armpit. He braced himself against the wall of the wheelhouse, held her close.
The boat labored into the swells, flinging heavy sheets of spray back over the people huddled on the deck.
The door to the wheelhouse opened. A bare head came out, shouted at Diego Coca: “The boat is overloaded, man! It is too dangerous to go on. We must turn back.”
Diego pulled a pistol from his pocket and placed the muzzle against the man’s forehead. He pushed the man back through the door, followed him into the tiny shack and pulled the door shut behind him.
The man next to Ocho said, “We may make it … if the sea gets no rougher. I was a fisherman once, I know of these things.”
The man was in his late sixties perhaps, with a deeply lined face and hair bleached by the sun. Ocho had studied his face in the twilight, before the light completely disappeared. Now the fisherman was merely a shape in the darkness, a remembered face.
“Your father is crazy,” Ocho told Dora, speaking in her ear over the noise of the wind and sea. She said nothing, merely held him tighter.
It was then he realized she was as frightened as he.
Angel del Mar smashed its way northward under a clear, starry sky. The wind seemed steady from the west at twelve or fifteen knots. Already drenched by spray, with no place to shelter themselves, the people on deck huddled where they were. From his position near the wheelhouse Ocho could just see the people between the showers of spray, dark shapes crowding the deck in the faint moonlight, for there were no other lights so that the boat might go unnoticed by Cuban naval patrols.
“When we get to the Gulf Stream,” the fisherman beside Ocho shouted in his ear above the noise of the wind and laboring diesel engine, “ … swells … open the seams … founder in this sea.”
In addition to heaving and pitching, the boat was also rolling heavily since there was so much weight on deck. The roll to starboard seemed most pronounced when the boat crested a swell, when it was naked to the wind.
Ocho Sedano buried his face in Dora’s hair and held her tightly as the boat plunged and reared, turned his body to shield her somewhat from the clouds of spray that swept over them.
He could hear people retching; the vomit smell was swept away on the wind and he caught none of it.
On the boat went into the darkness, bucking and writhing as it fought the sea.
Late in the evening William Henry Chance met his associate at the mahogany bar in El Floridita, one of the flashiest old nightclubs in Old Havana. This monstrosity was the dazzling heart of prerevolutionary Havana in the bad old days; black-and-white photos of Ernest Hemingway, Cary Grant, and Ava Gardner still adorned the walls. The place was full of Americans who had traveled here in defiance of their government’s ban on travel to Cuba. As bands belted out salsa and rhumba, the Americans drank, ate, and scrutinized voluptuous prostitutes clad in tight dresses and high heels.
Chance’s associate was Tommy Carmellini, a Stanford law school graduate in his late twenties. The baggy sportscoat and pleated trousers did nothing to show off Carmellini’s wide shoulders and washboard stomach. Still, a thoughtful observer would conclude he was remarkably fit for a man who spent twelve hours a day at a desk.
“Looks like the Cubans have come full circle,” Chance said when Carmellini joined him at the bar. He had to speak up to be heard above the music coming through the open windows.
“Goes around and comes around,” Tommy Carmellini agreed. “I wonder just how many different social diseases are circulating in this building tonight.”
When they were outside on the sidewalk strolling along, William Henry Chance pulled a cigar from the pocket of his sports jacket, which was folded over his left arm. He bit off the end of the thing, then cupped his hands against the breeze and lit it with a paper match. The wind blew out the first two matches, but he got the cigar going with the third one. After a couple puffs, he sighed.
“Smells delicious,” Carmellini said.
“Cuban cigars are the real deal. Gonna be the new ‘in’ thing. You should try one.”
“Naw. I just might like cigars. I’ve made it this far without smoking, I’m going to try to go all the way.”
They paused outside a nightclub and listened to the music pouring out. “That’s a good band.”
“If you close your eyes, this sorta feels like Miami Beach.”
“Miami del Sud.”
They walked on. “So what do you hear?”
“The pacifiers are working. All three of them. This afternoon Vargas talked to his subordinates about this and that, the minister of finance had phone sex with a girlfriend, and Castro’s top aide talked to the doctors for an hour.”
“How is the old goat doing?”
“Not good, the man said. The doctors talked about how much narcotics to administer to ensure he didn’t suffer.”
“Any guesses when?”
“No.”
“The Cuban exile, El Gato, where does he fit in?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“He’s in the casino now with three Russian gangsters, people he knows apparently, playing for high stakes.”
“El Gato is supposed to be an influential and powerful enemy of the Castro regime,” Chance muttered. “Sure does make you wonder.”
“Yeah,” said Carmellini. He and Chance both knew that the FBI had an agent and three informers in El Gato’s chemical supply business looking for evidence that it was the source of supply for some of the makings of Fidel Castro’s biological warfare program. So far, nothing. Then El Gato unexpectedly swanned off to Havana. Chance and Carmellini were coming anyway, but now they had a new item added to their agenda.
And Castro was dying.
“I’d like to know what the Cat is going to tell all his exile friends when he gets back to Florida,” Tommy Carmellini said. “Maybe if he winds up in the right offices we’ll find out, eh?”
That reference to the executive pacifiers made Chance grin. He puffed the cigar a few times while holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger.
“You don’t really know much about smoking cigars, do you?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yes, sir.”
Chance put the cigar between his teeth at a jaunty angle and puffed fearlessly three or four times. Then he took the thing from his mouth and held it so he could see it. “Wish I could get the hang of it,” he said. “Cuba seemed like a good place to learn about cigars.”
He tossed the stogie into a gutter on the street.
“Makes me a little light-headed.” Chance grinned sheepishly and wiped a sheen of perspiration from his brow.
He stood listening to the sounds of the crowd and the snatches of music floating from the bars and casinos, thinking about biological weapons.
Angel del Mar was only a half hour past the mouth of the harbor when the fisherman beside Ocho Sedano pulled at his arm to attract his attention. Then he shouted, “We will reach the Gulf Stream soon. The swells will be larger. We are too deeply loaded. We must get rid of what weight we can.”
The boat was corkscrewing viciously. Ocho nodded, passed Dora to the fisherman, pulled open the wheelhouse door and carefully stepped inside.