“I could just see the place from my apartment. And it made me so goddamned nervous, I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
“It made you think how you owed your freedom to Roger Harris,” McGarvey suggested. He couldn’t keep the sarcastic edge from his voice.
Basulto didn’t bother to reply. He glanced at Day, who seemed indifferent.
“Let’s just get on with it,” Trotter said impatiently. “You told us you could see the Ateneo Espanol from your apartment.”
“There was a lot of activity going on,” the Cuban said. “People coming and going, you know. At night they would hold meetings on the second floor. The windows were open, and if you walked past you could hear them arguing like crazy people about the future of Latin America, about the people’s revolution that would someday come to the U.S. But I didn’t believe any of it.”
McGarvey raised an eyebrow.
“It was all bullshit,” Basulto argued. “It was a cover. The real work was going on somewhere else within the building.”
“White noise,” Trotter mumbled.
There was no big deal about Basulto’s presence in Mexico City at the time. Strangers were coming and going all the time. One more was hardly noticeable. There was the café a block away where his contact worked, but after the first week he only went there to pass on his reports, figuring he’d probably be in the city for a long time and he was going to have to conserve his money. Of all the statements Basulto had made so far, that to McGarvey was the wildest.
He went fishing then, he said. Looking for a hook that might lead him to bigger things, just as he had been taught in Miami.
Basulto had taken a couple of dry runs past the building, which looked more like an ordinary cultural club than a hotbed of revolutionaries. Such places were very popular at the time. But in Miami, Harris had taught him that repetitious activity would almost certainly be noticed. Besides, he had been given the warning that whatever was happening down here was damned important, not only to Harris but to them all.
He purchased a set of powerful binoculars, which he taped to the top of an ordinary photographer’s tripod, and set up the rig in the window of his living room so that he could see the front entrance to the Ateneo Espanol.
“I ate my meals and slept by that window,” Basulto said with a touch of pride in his voice. “I’ll tell you, I even dreamed by that window. Thought about everything right there. It was my salvation up there as I watched the world go by. Looking … always looking. Two o’clock in the morning a dozen people might show up, see. The lights would go on upstairs and the meeting would begin.”
“What were you looking for?” McGarvey asked. “Harris must have given you some idea. You were watching for someone specific? Back in Miami he told you that he had saved your ass, and now it was your turn to save his.”
A wild look came into Basulto’s dark eyes. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He sat forward fast. “If he had been more honest with me, I could have saved his life!” he cried.
“Roger Harris was murdered?” McGarvey snapped.
Trotter nodded glumly. “But he’s getting ahead of himself,” he said.
“We’re chasing a murder mystery, John?”
Trotter waved it off. “Nothing like that, Kirk, believe me. Just hear what this little bastard has to say.”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Basulto said defensively. “Goddamnit. He just sent me down there to watch and to report back to him.”
“Every Wednesday at noon you were to give your report, in cipher to the waiter at the café?” McGarvey asked. “That was the drill?”
“Yes.”
“He gave you the pad?”
Basulto shook his head. “We used a book, a novela: For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was funny because the guy was very big in Cuba.”
McGarvey digested this for a moment. There were so many loose ends. Why did he bother? Why him, the thought hammered insistently in his head.
“That was for routine reporting. The San Antonio number was for emergencies.”
Basulto nodded, but then realizing where McGarvey was leading him, froze.
“Emergencies,” McGarvey said sharply. “He must have told you back in Miami what constituted an emergency.”
Again Basulto looked elsewhere for some assistance, some moral support. He was obviously a man on the edge of a very dangerous precipice; he was looking for help. But Day was suddenly quite aloof from the proceedings.
“We told you that we would give you protection,” Trotter said.
“I don’t know him!” Basulto cried, barely glancing toward McGarvey.
“I do.”
Basulto looked away for a long moment, then he lit another cigar with shaking hands, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke out through his nostrils. He seemed to be calming himself; McGarvey had the impression that it might be an act.
“He told me I would know an emergency when I saw one.”
“Get on with it,” Trotter prompted.
“Nothing much happened in the first few weeks,” Basulto picked it up again. “I watched the people come, I watched the people go. Really rough characters. But from where I was sitting they could have been anyone, you know. Mexicans, Cubans, Guatemalans … but all Latinos, all of them third-rate revolutionaries who preferred to stay behind and talk while Uncle Fidel went home and won the war.”
After a while, Basulto said, he fell into a routine of catching catnaps during the daylight hours when there didn’t seem to be as much activity. Around seven or eight in the evening, things usually stepped up at the Ateneo Español. Most of them came in by foot, a few of them had motorcycles, and very few came by car. It got to the point where he began to identify some of them. The midget, the fat man, the greaser who always wore dirty white shirts (he looked Panamanian), the two women who came hand-in-hand. They were an odd lot, and he began to make up stories for each of them. The midget was with the Peruvian circus. The fat one was a pimp. The girls, of course, were dykes, and the one he swore was Panamanian was a mad bomber who killed children.
One night in the fourth week, very late — probably around two or three in the morning — a large American car pulled up and parked just across the street from Basulto’s apartment building. He had not been looking through the binoculars because no one had come to the Ateneo for the last hour, though there was quite a crowd over there that evening. It was very hot, and all the windows were open. He remembered hearing a lot of shouting and laughing and even a radio playing loud music. It was all background noise. All cover.
Two men got out of the car. (Basulto recalled thinking it was a Chevrolet or a Buick — long, with a lot of chrome and very big, flashy bumpers.) One of the men was short, on the husky side, with thick, dark hair. The other was tall, good-looking and very well dressed. Obviously an American. He stood out a mile. Together they walked down the street and entered the Ateneo, Basulto watching them all the way, now through the glasses.
“It was a change. It was something different. And it scared hell out of me. Here was an American and another man coming to the headquarters for Communist revolutionaries for all of Latin America. Something very big was going on.”
“Did you know either of them?” McGarvey asked.
Basulto shook his head. “I watched the place all night, but it wasn’t until morning — just about dawn — when they came out, walked back up the street, got in their car, and left.”