She turned. She recalled from memory the address of the Hotel Ambos Mundos. Trying to look as much like a tourist as possible, she consulted her map and began the short walk through Old Havana. Her path led her through a warren of narrow cobblestone avenues lined with baroque buildings that had changed little since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The street life was vibrant, the surroundings impressive.
Then, eventually, she stood across the street from the hotel. A pink facade fronted a rambling old building. Ambos Mundos: both worlds, appropriately named. Alex walked toward it and entered.
The lobby was a scramble of architectures, faded yellow with appealing dark woodwork. A rickety old Otis elevator cranked and creaked at the far end. Once again, Alex felt as if she had stepped into a time warp.
The lobby was cooler than the outdoors. She looked each way and saw what had to be the piano bar to her left. Purposefully, she walked toward it. It was only moderately busy. Several large plants softened the look of the room. Large chairs were scattered around, comfortable big old leather and wicker chairs. A pair of ceiling fans turned slowly. The carpet was reddish and threadbare, and a piano player softly weaved a muted samba into the air.
As she entered, several men, seated alone at the bar, turned their eyes toward her. She scanned them quickly. No Paul Guarneri.
Who were the men? Tourists? Undercover police keeping an eye on the place? There were a couple of dozen people in the room and she tried to take them all in.
She had hoped to see Paul there. She masked her disappointment. Please, God, next time, let him be there, alive and well. Please. She sent prayers off into the void. No answer, no acknowledgement. If only it could be that simple.
Well, wrong time, she reminded herself. Not wrong time for prayer but wrong time for Paul. She turned and left the hotel.
Then, working from memory and with only one glance at the map, she found her way down a maze of side streets to the old Iglesia de San Lazaro, a faded edifice in blue stucco. It was her primary drop site, but she wasn’t sure what she would find. The front door was ajar. There was a lovely pair of antique stained-glass windows on each side of the front portal, but one had been cracked. A plywood board protected it.
She entered and, in keeping with her plan, slid into the back row on the left side. She reflected for a few moments, as if in prayer, and stared at the ornate rococo cross above the altar. She took stock. No one else present. God, she mused, had provided her the perfect time and opportunity for her visit.
She looked around. Any spies? Any observers whom she hadn’t seen at first glance? Her nerves were suddenly on edge again. Who needed post-traumatic stress when she could have her traumatic stress while the events were taking place?
Her thin cotton dress stuck to her skin. She felt sweat pouring from her. Inside, it felt like a dozen hummingbirds were zipping around her stomach.
Then, convinced that no one was looking, she kneeled forward to pray. She closed her eyes and slid her right hand under the pew in front and groped along for several feet in each direction. She prayed it would be there.
Finally her fingertips hit something – pieces of heavy plastic tape, such as Maurice Fajardie back in Langley had suggested. She followed these along until she found metal, a little square of it. Her heart surged. She could tell before she even retrieved it: a cell phone, complete with a power cord for recharging. She pulled it out of the tape and held it in her hand. She turned it on.
It powered up. She checked it for messages. There were none. She examined it to see if it had been tinkered with in any way. She found nothing that alarmed her. As a precaution, she shut it down, removed the battery and the SIM card, then reassembled it. Then she slid it into her tote. She made sure it was turned off to minimize the chances that it could serve as a GPS for an enemy.
Then she heard a loud bang behind her. In an instant her hand, still in her tote bag, jumped from the cell phone to her gun, and she was convinced she had waltzed into a trap. Her wet palm closed upon the weapon and clutched it.
She turned. A priest. He was a small elfin figure, much like the little men in black cassocks she had seen in remote Italian towns when she was a college student. Her eyes swept the space. No one else. She was safe, or so it looked. She looked back at the priest. His hands were clear and clean. Not a fake priest who was actually a gunman or a cop, she deduced. She released her own gun.
The priest crossed himself, then reacted in surprise to see a pretty young woman sitting in a rear pew. He nodded to her, smiled, and mumbled a blessing in Spanish.
Alex returned the greeting. Then he walked down the center aisle and went about his business of tending to something behind the altar. She watched him all the way, making sure he was okay. Then she bowed to the cross and quickly exited the church.
She returned to the small square near the Hotel Ambos Mundos, where she caught her breath and let her heart settle. She searched her soul. With all that money sitting in a bank account in her favor in New York, did she really need this? Is this truly what she was supposed to do with her life?
Alex sat down at a table at a cafe on the square. A waiter – handsome with an easy smile – approached her. He spoke in Spanish and she answered easily.
“I’m hot and very thirsty,” she said. “What would be good?”
His smile widened. “Orange juice, just squeezed,” he said. “Or lemonade.”
“From a bottle or fresh?” she asked.
“Both are bottled,” he answered.
“Lemonade would be excellent,” she said.
He nodded and disappeared. She turned her attention to the plaza. She watched the city live and breathe. She was relieved that no one paid her any special attention. She was used to catching the eyes of men, and she was used to being able to ignore it. The linen dress she wore was reasonably demure. The hem was at her knee. She felt highly vulnerable.
She finished the lemonade and was hungry again. She ordered a small plate of shredded pork with rice and beans. She noticed from people at other tables that Coca-Cola had slipped past the embargo. So she ordered one. Then a second, both with ice. A slight breeze kicked up. She felt better and began, for the first time, to relax.
For a moment, she scanned the city street. There was not a brand, nor a neon sign, nor an advertisement of any sort. Rather, there was just a view of time slowly drifting from the far past into the present, with no particular hurry. The square was baked in Caribbean sunshine. Cuban socialism had created a strange mid-twentieth-century aesthetic, a city freed from agitation, caught in a strange state of decay and quietude.
She saw vast spaces, away from the assault of every form of commercial message and, for that matter, far from Twitter and email as well. The global mall was nowhere to be seen in this city, and, in a way, she cherished it. It was so different from New York. Even when she took a taxi in New York, a television would come on with its infomercials. Here she could watch the square, watch the modest traffic, watch the sunlight on the walls of the old city, watch lovers passing, watch businessmen expounding, watch cab drivers negotiating, watch children smiling. Here was the idle sensuality of the pre-Blackberry age.
Beyond street-level doors were courtyards, some shabby, some fine. Her eyes, rising one flight up, saw that Havana had also preserved its antique wrought-iron balconies and its old baroque Castilian flourishes. Even if the city was crumbling, even if it could be interpreted as a monument to the failure of communism, it had its charm.