Now they moved in, all of them. This also called for speed, for guerrilla tactics, for expediency. Manuel and Fenton checked each soldier in turn, made sure the five bodies on the ground were corpses. Maria held her gun on the bearded one. Garth went to check on Taco, then came back.
“The kid’s all right,” he told Manuel. “He got it in the leg. The bleeding ain’t bad and the bone’s okay. I can lug him back and he’ll be walking tomorrow.”
Manuel nodded shortly. Now the bearded soldier was talking, pleading for his life. He did not sound frightened at all. His voice was calm, rational. There were beads of perspiration dotting his forehead but those were the only signs of worry.
“He wishes us to let him to live,” Manuel said in English. “He says he will make no trouble for us. He says not to kill him.”
The bearded man spoke again.
“He says one more death will accomplish nothing,” Manuel translated. “And so we should let him live. So he may return and kill us all.”
The bearded soldier started to protest; evidently he understood English. Manuel’s eyes hardened. He lowered his Sten gun, took a pistol from his cartridge belt. The soldier’s eyes widened and his mouth opened.
Manuel very deliberately placed the mouth of the pistol against the soldier’s forehead and spattered his brains over the trunk of the car.
They piled the six bodies into the Jeep. There was a container of spare gasoline in the trunk. Fenton unscrewed the cap, poured the gasoline over the bodies and over the Jeep. He stepped back, took out a cigarette, scratched a match. He took two long drags on the cigarette and pitched the butt underhand into the Jeep. It was safer that way, easier than tossing a match. The gasoline went up with a roar and the Jeep was transformed into a sheet of flame.
They left in a hurry. They collected weapons, ammunition. Garth shouldered Taco like a sack of dirty laundry and the rest of them followed him into the woods. Fenton brought up the rear, his heart still pounding, the excitement still a living force.
Another victory. Six men dead this time, six corpses baking in a burning Jeep. It was bloody, it was the supreme insult to a corpse, but he knew that it had been necessary.
Fenton walked and death walked with him. Death always walked with him now, a thin pain in the chest that was always close at hand. And it was strange to have death as a companion. Before, when he lived with no fear of death, no sure foreknowledge of doom, it had been enough simply to live, to exist, to go on.
Now it was different. Now he enjoyed killing, killing, killing. It was the only way to prove that he was still alive.
It was a Thursday night and Garrison was eating in the best restaurant in Havana. The restaurant was Le Vendome, on Calle Calzado, and the food was French. Garrison had baked clams, chateaubriand and a small bottle of Bordeaux Rouge. He passed up dessert and had cognac with his coffee.
When he had finished he paid his check, left a tip and walked out of the restaurant. He looked neat and summery in his cord suit. His tie was neatly knotted, his shoes polished. He walked with a sure, easy stride. Outside, he let the doorman summon a cab for him, pressed a coin into the man’s palm, settled into his seat and told the driver to drop him at the Nacional. That was his hotel, the city’s oldest and one of its best, completely air-conditioned, well serviced, with bars and a pool and a night club and a gambling casino. Tourists were still allowed to gamble in Castro’s Cuba, but Cuban nationals were prohibited from doing so. This amused Garrison.
He got out at the Nacional, tipped the driver, strode into the lobby and took an elevator to his room. Inside it, with the door locked and bolted, he made a quick check of the room. It had been searched again, he noted, amused. And once again they had failed to find either gun. The rifle was still in his mattress—he had slashed the mattress cover, wedged the gun into the ticking and sewed the mattress up again. The Beretta was still inside the television set where he had placed it. It didn’t even interfere with the operation of the TV. Not that he cared, he never bothered turning it on. All you ever got were Fidel’s speeches, and it wasn’t hard to get tired of them. He said the same thing all the time and took six hours each time to say it.
Garrison undressed, went into the bathroom and adjusted the shower spray. He showered quickly, shaved, trimmed his mustache. Then he stretched out on his bed and closed his eyes.
This was the easy way. He wondered where the others were, Fenton and Turner and Garth and Hines. Probably crouching in a dirty little room somewhere with a batch of grubby Cubans mumbling at them. And this was so much simpler. Just the direct method, quick and easy.
He’d had to get to Cuba illegally, in Di Angelo’s boat. That much was easy enough. And then there was that shrewd old Cuban on La Avenida Blanca, the one a New Orleans contact had put him wise to. You didn’t need a passport or a visa to stay in Cuba. All you needed was an identification paper and they gave you that as you got off the boat. And that little old man had given him one that couldn’t look more like the real thing. You didn’t even need the damned thing while you were in Cuba—nobody ever asked for it—but you had to have it to leave the country. And Garrison planned to leave the country the day Castro died.
His eyes opened. He grinned, looked at the ceiling, closed his eyes again. The simple way. He was an American businessman on vacation, a real estate speculator who occasionally took a taxi to look at a piece of property. He stayed in a top hotel, ate at good restaurants, tipped a shade too heavily, drank a little too much and didn’t speak a damned word of Spanish. Hardly an assassin, or a secret agent, or anything of the sort. They searched his room, of course, but this happened regularly in every Latin American country. It was a matter of form. Actually, it tended to reassure him, since they searched so clumsily that he knew they were not afraid of him. Otherwise they would take pains to be more subtle.
The simple way. He stood up, naked and hard-muscled, and walked to his window. He’d been careful to get a room with a window facing on the square. The square was La Plaza de la Republica, a small park surrounding the Palace of Justice. Parades with Fidel at their head made their way up a broad avenue to that plaza. Then Fidel would speak, orating wildly and magnificently from the steps of the palace. From his window Garrison could see those steps.
With the rifle properly mounted on the window ledge, he could place a bullet in Fidel’s open mouth.
He drew the window shade and returned to the bed. Maybe he wouldn’t even have to use the gun, he thought. Maybe one of the four idiots—Turner or Hines or Garth or Fenton, wherever the hell they all were—would save him the trouble. He was in no hurry. If one of the others killed Fidel, that was fine. He got his twenty grand just the same, with no risk and no work. If not, then he set up the gun and squeezed the trigger. The rifle would be dismantled and tucked away in the room before Fidel knew he was dead. The Beretta could stay where it was, in the television set. And he would be on the next boat to the mainland.
There was a knock on the door. He sighed, raised himself on one elbow. “Who is it?”
“Estrella. Let me in, ’arper.”
The name on his identification papers was John Harper, a simple enough name which happened to begin with the one letter Estrella couldn’t manage. He stood up, wrapped a bath towel around his middle and opened the door for her. She came inside.