She rolled her eyes. “Caimanera. Yes, I can imagine what they were doing there, the pigs. Just about every hotel in Caimanera is a brothel. The casas even have patriotic American names, like the Roosevelt Hotel. The bastards.”
I might have wondered how she knew this, but I was rather more concerned with satisfying their curiosity than the small matter of how they satisfied their sexual desires. “It’s what Eisenhower calls the domino effect. When some guys lay one down they like to make a big show of it.” I jabbed my thumb back at the cabin door. “Look, they’re outside. They just want to check their men aren’t hiding under the bed or anything. I said they could as soon as I checked you were decent.”
“That’s going to take a lot more time than might seem reasonable.” She shrugged. “You’d better show them in anyway.”
I went back up on deck and nodded them below.
They shuffled in through the cabin door, their faces pink with embarrassment when they saw Melba still in bed, and if I hadn’t been enjoying that, I might not have noticed the NCO lay his eyes on her and then lay them on her again, only the second time wasn’t for the obvious reason, that she belonged in a picture on a bulkhead above his hammock. These two had met before. I was sure of that and so was he, and when the Amis came back to the wheelhouse, the NCO drew his officer aside and said something quietly.
When their conversation became a little more urgent, I might have got involved but for the fact that the officer unbuttoned the holster of his sidearm, which prompted me to go to the stern and sit in the fisherman’s chair. I think I even smiled at the man on the fifty-caliber, only the fisherman’s chair looked and felt too much like an electric chair for my liking, so I moved again and sat down on the icebox, which had room for two thousand pounds of ice. I was trying to appear cool. If there had been any fish or any ice in the box, I might even have climbed in beside them. Instead, I took another bite from the bottle and did my best to keep a grip on the thin line holding my nerves. But it wasn’t working. The Amis had a hook in my mouth, and I felt like jumping thirty feet into the air just to try and get it out.
When the officer came back to the stern he was carrying a Colt .45 automatic in his hand. It was cocked, too. It wasn’t pointed at me yet. It was just there to help make a point: that there was no room on the boat for negotiation.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you both to accompany me back to Guantánamo, sir,” he said politely, almost as if there wasn’t a gun in his hand at all and like a true American.
I nodded slowly. “May I ask why?”
“It will all be explained when we get to Gitmo,” he said.
“If you really think it’s necessary.”
He waved two sailors to come aboard my boat, and it was just as well he did, because both of them were between me and the machine gun when we heard a pistol shot from the forward compartment. I jumped up and then thought better of jumping any more.
“Watch him,” yelled the officer, and went below to investigate, leaving me with two Colts pointed at my belly and the fifty-caliber pointed at my earlobe. I sat down again on the fisherman’s chair, which creaked like a chain saw as I leaned all the way back and stared up at the stars. You didn’t need to be Madame Blavatsky to see that they weren’t looking good. Not for Melba. And probably not for me.
As things turned out, the stars weren’t good for the American NCO either. He staggered up on deck looking like the ace of diamonds, or perhaps the ace of hearts. In the center of his white shirt was a small red stain that grew larger the longer you looked at it. For a moment he swayed drunkenly, and then dropped heavily onto his backside. In a way he looked the way I was feeling now.
“I’m shot,” he said redundantly.
2
It was several hours later. The shot sailor had been taken to a hospital in Guantánamo, Melba was cooling her high heels in a prison cell, and I had told my story, twice. I had two headaches, and only one of them was in my skull. There were three of us in a humid office in the building of the U.S. Navy masters-at-arms. Masters-at-arms were what the U.S. Navy called the sailors who specialized in law enforcement and correctional custody. Policemen in sailor suits. The three who’d been listening to my story didn’t seem to like it any better the second time. They shifted their largish backsides on their inadequate chairs, picked tiny bits of thread and fluff from their immaculate white uniforms, and stared at their reflections in the toecaps of their shiny black shoes. It was like being interrogated by a union meeting of hospital porters.
The building was quiet except for the hum of the fluorescent lighting on the ceiling and the noise of a typewriter that was the size and color of the USS Missouri; and every time I answered a question and the Navy cop hit the keys on that thing, it was like the sound of someone—me probably—having his hair cut with a large pair of very sharp scissors.
Outside a small grilled window, the new day was coming up over the blue horizon like a trail of blood. This hardly augured well, since, not unreasonably, it was already clear that the Amis suspected me of a much closer acquaintance with Melba Marrero and her crimes—plural—than I’d admitted. Clearly, since I wasn’t an American myself, and smelled strongly of rum, they found this relatively easy.
On a light blue Formica table covered with coffee-colored cigarette burns lay a number of files and a couple of guns wearing tags on their trigger guards as if they might have been for sale. One of them was the little Beretta pocket pistol Melba had used to shoot the petty officer, third class; and the other was a Colt automatic stolen from him several months earlier and used to murder Captain Balart outside the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. Alongside the files and the pistols was my blue and gold Argentinean passport, and from time to time the Navy cop in charge of my interrogation would pick this up and leaf through the pages as if he couldn’t quite believe that anyone could go through life being the citizen of a country that wasn’t the United States. His name was Captain Mackay, and as well as his questions there was his breath to contend with. Every time he pushed his squashed, bespectacled face toward mine I was enveloped in the sour aura of his tooth decay, and after a while I started to feel like something chewed up but only half digested deep inside his Yankee bowels.
Mackay said with ill-disguised contempt, “This story of yours, that you never met her until a couple of days ago, it makes no sense. No sense at all. You say she was a chica you were involved with; that you asked her to come away on your boat for a few weeks, and that this accounts for the considerable sum of money you had with you.”
“That’s correct.”
“And yet you say you know almost nothing about her.”
“At my age, it’s best not to ask too many questions when a pretty girl agrees to come away with you.”
Mackay smiled thinly. He was about thirty, too young to find much sympathy for an older man’s interest in younger women. There was a wedding band on his fat finger, and I imagined some wholesome girl with a permanent wave and a mixing bowl under her chubby arm waiting for him back home in some Erector Set government housing on a bleak naval base.
“Shall I tell you what I think? I think you were headed for the Dominican Republic to buy guns for the rebels. The boat, the money, the girl, it all adds up.”
“Oh, I can see you like the addition, Captain. But I’m a respectable businessman. I’m quite well-off. I have a nice apartment in Havana. A job at a hotel casino. I’m hardly the type to work for the communists. And the girl? She’s just a chica.”