Possibly it had nothing to do with him but he was troubled. He made a U turn in the potholed street and drove away watching the mirror. His alarm increased tenfold when the man turned and went inside the house whose doorway had framed him. If the man was going to a phone...
Driving into Hato Rey he was remembering his introduction to the heroic arts: the Sierra Maestra, 1958, nothing more than a skirmish really — the rebels under Ché Guevara had ambushed the trucks and Cielo had dived out into the ditch along with the other soldiers. The rebels had used mortars and Brownings and grenades; the noise of battle had confounded and infuriated Cielo. Finally — to stop the noise — he had performed heroically. Madly. Afterward six rebels were dead and Batista himself pinned the medal on Cielo. It was all so comical. He’d had no thought of earning medals; he’d only wanted to stop the noise.
But after that he was a hero and they promoted him and he was looked to as a leader and he was too young to know better than to play along with it. The attention was too flattering to be rebuffed.
An accidental moment of madness, but it had changed and colored everything in his life since then. He had never confided this to anyone but Soledad; no one but Soledad would understand. Not even his own brother.
Still troubled by the man in the doorway, he pulled around behind an open-front cantina and parked the Volkswagen in the dust where it was hidden from the street. He went to the public kiosk and Luz answered the old man’s phone. He exchanged counterproposals with Luz and then cradled the phone and walked away — walking up the alley past the Volkswagen and on past the back doors of several seedy shops. At the corner of Avenida Hostos he turned north and walked at a steady pace, using the side mirrors of parked vans to examine his backtrail. No one was following him; he was positive of that after ten minutes. At the corner of the Calle Eleanor Roosevelt he waited in the shade until a bus came by. He rode it across the causeway into San Juan and dropped off at the edge of Santurce. He went around the block twice on foot, picked up no tail, and was waiting by the curb when the Pinto drew up. Cielo got in and the car started moving before he’d pulled the door shut. Luz, at the wheel, said, “Señor Draga is anxious to know what this is about.”
“Maybe nothing — maybe it means nothing.”
“But if it does. What would they be?”
“Police. CIA. Castro’s men. Who can say?”
“But they were not watching your house?”
“No, I’d left the car away from my house and that was where I saw the man. Near the car.”
“Where were you yesterday that someone might have noticed you and taken down the license number of the Volkswagen?”
“The old man knows where I was. I reported to him last night by phone.”
Luz’s voice had the quality of a rusty hinge in motion. “You’ll have to stay out of sight for a while. Don’t go back to your home.”
“I know that, you don’t have to tell me.”
“And don’t telephone the house again.”
“He gets upset if I don’t report to him.”
“We’ll have to find a way to do it without telephones. El viejo no longer trusts their security.”
Luz drove east toward the airport. Cielo had never quite comprehended Luz’s exact place in the Draga scheme of things; Luz apparently was something between bodyguard and secretary, with a bit of valet thrown in, but the old man had secretaries and bodyguards and a valet besides Luz. There wasn’t much likelihood that Luz was of any importance in the management of the Draga businesses — Luz wasn’t a businessman, he was too coarse, he was nearly a thug. He was a Cuban mountain peasant whose parents had worked for the Draga interests in some capacity.
Luz was low-profile; he usually didn’t appear in public at Draga’s side and most of the world didn’t associate him with Draga, which gave him a certain freedom of movement; Cielo suspected that Luz perhaps acted as a sort of bagman in Draga’s dealings with officials and police and the Jews and Italians from Florida with whom the old man did certain kinds of business. It was old man Draga who in 1963 had acted as intermediary between the Free Cuba movements and the Santos Trega group of Sicilians; the Sicilians had made six separate attempts on Castro’s life. Santos Trega himself was Cuban, a former criminal boss in Havana, imprisoned in ‘61–‘62 by Castro, then deported — after a substantial sub-rosa payment to Castro — to Miami and New Orleans. Jack Ruby, who had shot Lee Oswald in Dallas, had been one of Trega’s associates; Cielo had heard rumors that Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli were part of it as well. In subsequent years old man Draga had withdrawn from most of his contacts with Trega and Lansky, mostly because he disapproved pragmatically of their ethics but also because he came to regard them as bunglers.
It was taken for granted by Draga and those around him that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had been formulated in Havana and dictated by Castro because Castro knew that the CIA had employed the Mafia to try to assassinate Castro: The killing of the President had been a retaliatory hit. Cielo had believed in these conspiratorial complexities for a long time but just recently he had begun to question them; he no longer knew what to believe — he no longer was sure he cared.
Along the service road beside the airport Luz slowed the Pinto. Its air conditioner blew a chill draft against Cielo’s throat and he reached out to change the direction of the vent ribs. By the side of the road a small station wagon was parked, a man in the front seat; its sun visors were lowered to indicate all clear. Luz drew past the station wagon and touched the brake pedal — three taps, to signal the station wagon — and drove on toward the big hangars that butted up against the chain fence. Cielo glanced back and saw that the station wagon was following. He hadn’t recognized its driver.
He began to think about the niceties of his situation: Was this an execution ride? But he knew better; he was relaxed when Luz stopped the car behind one of the hangars. “Is there anything you want me to relay to the old man?”
“No. Tell him I’ll be in touch.” Cielo pushed the door open and got out.
The station wagon drew up and its driver left the door open when he walked forward. The driver nodded civilly enough and went past him. Cielo recognized him now — he’d seen the man around Draga’s place a few times walking the dogs on leashes. He’d never seen the man out of uniform before; that was what had thrown him.
The dog handler got into the Pinto, the seat Cielo had just vacated; the Pinto drove away.
It was so hot there didn’t seem to be any air. Cielo went squinting to the station wagon and, shut himself in, grateful for the air conditioning.
He had a look around the car’s interior and opened the glove compartment to see if anything had been left for him — an envelope or whatever. There was nothing, only a flashlight and the car’s registration papers made out to somebody named Juan D. Ruiz at an address in Ponce — he was sure it was phony although it looked good enough to his untrained eye; Cielo had no talent for forgery.
He put it in drive and pointed it out toward the highway, thinking now of the old man up there possibly sitting over iced tea on his veranda overlooking the Cerromar golf course and all the tourists getting their exercise in electric carts: The old man sitting on his wealth and still deluding himself into the belief that he was the power behind the operation that would liberate Cuba.
The farm was deserted except for one man whom Julio had left on guard: Stefano — small, ruddy, quick, with an incipient potbelly and under his mustache a set of buck teeth like a steam engine’s cowcatcher. Stefano had a disconcerting wart at the corner of his lower lip. Stefano greeted him with a casual remark and an easy smile, and it struck Cielo suddenly how old Stefano looked — how old they all were getting.