“I could do it, man. It’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
“A grand.”
Garrison sighed. He stood up and started to leave.
“Hey—”
“It’s too much,” he said.
“How much, then?”
“Half,” Garrison said. “Five hundred, no more.”
Di Angelo tried to haggle but it didn’t work. “All right,” he said finally. “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Jesus, it takes time. It takes a hell of a time. You can’t just—”
“It’s a ninety-mile trip and it takes a couple of hours. Cut the crap.”
“There’s boats,” Di Angelo said desperately. “Patrol boats, ours and theirs. You can’t just dodge them.”
“You’re going to fly over their heads?”
For a few more minutes they sat and stared at each other. Then Di Angelo said: “All right, you’re paying for it. But not tomorrow. Tonight, at midnight. I don’t want to go in daylight. Tonight at midnight or it’s no deal.”
“It’s a deal,” Garrison said.
The house in Ybor City was comfortable. Matt Garth sat in front of the television set for two days. He drank beer from cans and smoked Cuban cigars. He also kept an eye on Fenton, who was some kind of a nut. Here they were, living it up big, eating good food and doing nothing much, and Fenton kept hopping around like a dog with fleas. He had a good thing going and he was too dumb to know it.
“Look,” Garth would tell him, “cool off, have a beer, calm down. This is fine, right? We wait until they take us to that plane. Then we do what we do. You scared or something?”
“I’m not scared.”
“Then cool it. Relax. We don’t go up against this Castro guy for a while yet. The longer we sit here, the better. There’s time.”
“No,” Fenton would say. “There’s no time at all. There’s very little time, Mr. Garth.”
“You could call me Matt.”
“Matt, then.”
“What do I call you? Earl?”
“Whatever you like,” Fenton said.
So Garth didn’t bother after that. He went on drinking cans of beer and smoking good Cuban cigars and thinking about Castro, the guy they were supposed to hit. It didn’t make sense to him but he wasn’t going to waste his time worrying about what made sense and what didn’t. That wasn’t the sort of thing he busted his mind over. He was an easygoing type, a guy who had more muscles than brains and knew it. He valued his brawn because plenty of guys with brains had paid him when they needed muscle to get a job done for them.
He worked for anyone who had the money to hire him, spent his earnings as soon as they came in, and drifted from one job to another without a worry. He had done a short bit for aggravated assault once in Dannemora, a few light stretches for drunk-and-disorderly and things like that, and since then he had learned to cool it when it came to the law. Outside of that, he had a simple and lazy moral and ethical code. He looked out for Number One, played it straight as a die with whoever was picking up the tab, and generally managed to come out of things right side up.
He had been a strike breaker, an enforcer, a bouncer, had done almost anything requiring the talents of somebody who could hit hard and swing freely. He was tougher than hell—two teeth were gone in front from a cop’s nightstick, and he had taken that same cop and put him in the hospital for a few months. That was the bit that sent him to Dannemora. But before they tried him the police worked him over, slammed him around some to avenge the cop in the hospital. He took everything they handed him. He never yelled and he never put in a gripe. He took it and they couldn’t break him.
Now, because some Cuban nut was on speaking terms with one of the heavies who had hired him before, he was going to Cuba to get this Castro. He didn’t know who Castro was, except that he was running Cuba and somebody didn’t want him to keep on with it. He didn’t care about this. He cared about twenty grand, which meant soft living for a long time. Twenty grand could get you into a lot of big-breasted girls. You could drink a lot of premium beer, sleep in a lot of silk-sheeted beds.
So what the hell.
On the third day, a car came for them. The driver was a light-skinned Negro with cold eyes. He drove them out of Tampa, down the Tamiami Trail, to the airstrip. Garth noticed that Fenton seemed excited. Scared, he decided. Maybe scared the plane’ll crash. And Garth laughed.
The plane was a twin-engine Cessna, a little puddle-jumper. The Negro told Garth and Fenton that there were supplies for them on the plane, that the pilot could tell them what they wanted to know. The Negro drove away. They got into the plane and the pilot warmed up the engines, taxied down a very small runway and took off.
“You like flying?” he asked Fenton.
“I don’t mind it.”
“I can take it or not,” Garth said. “He said something about supplies. Let’s have a look, huh?”
The supplies were guns, ammunition, some minor explosives. Garth looked them over and whistled. “We better not hit anything coming down,” he said. “Gunpowder and dynamite. We’d go up like a bomb.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Fenton told him. “The pilot seems to know what he’s doing.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
The pilot knew what he was doing. He flew north of Cuba, skirting the big island and coming in over the Bahamas, then cutting south to fly over Acklins Island and move in on Oriente Province, the easternmost section of Cuba. It was hill country there, rough jungle land with dense vegetation and jagged terrain. Guerrilla fighters could disappear in that sort of country. Castro, with a force of only twelve men, had started in the Oriente hills. His twelve men had lasted, had been reinforced, until they had pushed Batista off the island and had sent him running for his life.
But now time had played tricks. Now Castro was in Havana, growing sleek with power, and other rebel bands roamed the hills of Oriente. Small bands, hiding, fighting in desperate skirmishes.
The plane flew over Cuba. Garth didn’t even see the landing strip until they were almost on the ground. He couldn’t understand how the pilot had managed to find it. They landed in a cleared portion of a farmer’s tiny field. The pilot had killed the engine long ago. The air was still, warm.
Three men and a woman rushed to meet the plane as Garth and Fenton climbed down from it. The men carried drawn revolvers; the woman had a rifle across one shoulder. Two of the men went to unload the Cessna. The other, with the woman, came to Fenton and Garth.
“You are the Americans from Señor Hiraldo?” the man asked.
“That is correct,” Fenton said. Garth remained silent, his eyes looking at the woman. She was maybe twenty-five, maybe younger. Her hair was long and uncombed, her eyes dark brown. She wore a pair of khaki pants and a torn army field jacket. The clothing couldn’t hide the shape of her body. Her breasts were large and firm, her hips ideal for bearing children or making love. Garth stared at her and wanted her.
“I am called Manuel,” the man said. “The others, my comrades, have no English. I have some English. I speak not well, I fear.”
“You speak very well,” Fenton said.
“You have much kindness. But we must hurry. There is little time for pleasantness in the hills. Soldiers are everywhere.”
The other two men ran off, their arms filled with guns, ammunition and explosives. Manuel and the woman were behind them, Garth and Fenton close on their heels. Already the pilot was warming up the plane, anxious to get out of Cuba in a hurry.
Garth watched the girl. He lumbered through the brush with thorns snatching at his clothing but all he could think of was the girl, the way she walked. He saw her buttocks moving within the khaki pants. He wondered if she wore underwear.