“That’s very diplomatic.”
“Not really. I like it.”
“It’s not Cuban,” she said drily and went clipping into the kitchenette, speedy and practical and sure of herself.
He liked her. He thought perhaps he loved her but he had thought that a few times before and his ex had crashed into an overpass abutment at eighty miles an hour with a blood-alcohol content later measured at near comatose levels; now he was wary because he felt he’d driven her to it. In any case he wasn’t sure what women saw in him. He’d always been just a little overweight; he had the square face of a vacuum-cleaner salesman; and the Anders hair, a product of Danish genes, was pale and thin — it flowed in the air like seaweed, he thought. He had confidence in one thing: He did his work well. That was a reason to feel close to Rosalia. She understood the work. But then it didn’t make sense looking for reasons for such things.
She said, “What’s on for tomorrow?”
“I’d better get down to Mexico.”
“Oh.”
He said, “Your Spanish is better than mine.”
“Anybody’s is. Yours is atrocious.” Her eyes wandered away.
“Look,” he said, “how would you like to fly down to Mexico with me?”
Her smile was as good as a kiss.
Chapter 4
A fish jumped through the surface of the river: broached, shook foam, dived. Cielo watched for a while but it didn’t leap again. He listened to the birds and then finally went back along the riverbank reluctantly; it was time to put things in motion.
There were clouds; steam in the air; soon there’d be rain. It was what he had waited for — a safe time to move the hostages out. Later if someone tried to backtrack them with dogs or infrared the rain would protect them by washing away clues between the camp and the dock. The whole thing, he thought, was a quixotic farce; but one might as well maintain security. He slapped at a mosquito.
Cielo wasn’t the name he’d been born with; the nom de guerre had been chosen mainly for its meaninglessness. Cielo: sky. Only two of the nine men in his band knew his real name, not that it mattered; Rodriguez was not so astonishing a surname.
No one was in sight; that was in obeisance to the discipline of the camp — there was no knowing what sort of high-altitude equipment might be in search of them; the rule was to stay under cover at all times. Cielo entered the camp from tree to tree until he reached the covered walkway.
The camp had been built long ago by a Dutch oil company as quarters for its men during an exploration for petroleum in the river delta. When they found no oil they’d floated their rigs away to try again farther down the coast; they’d left the camp behind, as they usually did — it was cheaper to prefabricate a new one than to dismantle the old one and haul it away.
Cielo had left it all untouched; when he was gone he wanted to leave behind no sign of his presence. Nothing had been disturbed; machetes were forbidden — not even twigs were allowed to be broken.
He found Vargas and the big Draga boy in the money hut standing well away from the cage and looking expectantly toward him; he had interrupted their colloquy, startled them, and there was no way for Cielo to know whether they had been discussing the weather, the subject of sex, or the possibility of stealing the ten million dollars from Cielo.
He said, “It’ll rain soon.”
Vargas had a terrifying smile; it went with his size. It was said Vargas had broken a man’s back with his hands but Cielo knew the story to be false. Vargas was as gentle as he was massive; a man that big rarely needed to lose his temper. Cielo had known him twenty years. That was part of the trouble, he thought: We’re too old to believe in this nonsense. It takes children.
No, the money wouldn’t tempt Vargas; and as for the Draga boy, the idea might amuse him but in the end he would not steal because he did not need to steal. Emil Draga was the heir to his grandfather’s fortune, which would be enough to discourage him from taking suicidal risks. The lad wasn’t in this for money. He was in it, in an atavistic sense, for the adventure — he was a clever youth, big and muscular, ugly, stuffed with Draga legends of machismo and arrogance and financial bucaneering: Through determined rapacity the Dragas had acquired empires of cane and rum. Left to himself the hard and ruthless young Emil probably would become a corporate-takeover pirate, a Wall Street raider; if and when the old man died, Emil probably would move instantly to New York. Cielo had no illusions that The Movement could survive old Draga.
For the moment Emil would stay at Cielo’s right hand until the old man ordered him elsewhere or he saw an opportunity to flex his brutal muscles again.
In the cage with the money the squirrel and the parakeet showed no signs of illness. It had been long enough. Cielo said, “You can pack up the money and give their freedom back to the bird and the squirrel.”
Vargas showed his chilling smile. “It’s our day for being magnanimous. Today we give freedom back to everybody.”
“Don’t forget your hoods.” Cielo went toward the door wondering if he’d neglected anything. The parakeet and the squirrel had been caged forty-eight hours with the ransom money because Cielo had heard once about a rigged payment of money that had been radioactively treated so as to infect anyone who handled it. During the past days they also had studied the money under infrared and ultraviolet lights to make sure it hadn’t been dyed; they had sifted laboriously through the $50 and $100 notes looking for evidences of serial-number sequences or counterfeiting; they had subjected the money to every test they could think of. So far as Cielo could determine, it was clean. No doubt there’d been giveaway devices attached to the canister in which the money had been dropped from the helicopter, but they hadn’t even bothered to search it for transmitters. They’d left it where it had fallen until fourteen hours after the drop, when they’d moved it under cover of rain and transferred the money into the canvas sacks and gone out the way they’d come in — by canoe part of the way, outboard motorboat the rest.
He always preferred boats when it was possible. He was an island man, that was part of it, but also there was the fact that a boat left no footprints.
He said, “We’ll go in half an hour,” and left the hut.
He pushed the camouflage net aside and went aboard the ketch, stooping to clear his head when he went below. He cranked up the receiver and put on the headphones and consulted the dashboard chronograph; Julio was due to broadcast in three minutes. He waited with relaxed patience. He had learned patience long ago and practiced it all his life. In Sierra Maestra of the Cuban civil war, on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs waiting for the air cover that didn’t come, in Castro’s prison, in all the slow years since his escape from Cuba in 1964 — the nondescript demeaning jobs, the secrecy, the undercover work for old Draga. The slow acquisition and equally slow disintegration of the hard tight determined cell of Free Cubans. After the Bay of Pigs and the softening of U.S. relations with the Castro regime old Draga had lost any trust he might have had in the American government; he had gone it alone, trusting no one outside his own household and Cielo’s tight little band. They had practiced a conscious and businesslike paranoia — Cielo’s, alone among the movements, had successfully avoided infiltration by agents of Washington and Langley. Draga kept them isolated from all the other exile armies; Cielo had admitted to membership no new recruits — the commando was manned entirely by those with whom he had done time in the dripping Havana cells.
Until now. Emil Draga; he couldn’t be certain of Emil. The hothead had already exploded once. It was, he felt, another sign of the rot that had infected the group surreptitiously for years.