Hostage in Havana - Noel Hynd

“And what would that be?” she asked.

“Are you going to the cemetery tomorrow? You still haven’t answered.”

She watched the thin curtains flutter against the breeze and looked at the shadows that the moonlight threw into the room. The room was deeply quiet, except for the rumble of the surf on the beach.

Tomorrow. The cemetery.

The notion raced through her head that, in spite of everything, this location was comfortable and the people around her were good – even Paul, in his rough and strangely ironic way, even though he alternately irritated her and amused her. Then, of course, there was the danger and the fascination with everything that was going on, an equation that added a shot of adrenaline to everything. She almost disliked herself by getting so turned on by the excitement, the risks, and the challenges.

She turned back toward him. She spoke to his silhouette against the feeble light from the hallway. “I’ll go,” she said. “I don’t like what we’re going to do. But I’ll go.”

“Excellent,” he said.

He rolled over, away from her. She rolled over away from him.

A few minutes later, she was at the edge of sleep when her cell phone came sharply alive. It jolted her. She sprang from the bed and went to her clothes. She stood in the reflected moonlight from outside, snapped the phone open, and answered. “Hello?”

Paul lifted himself up on one elbow and watched. For a moment it bothered her that she was so well on view to him, shorts and T-shirt in a moonlit bedroom. Then it stopped bothering her, and her mind bounced back to business.

“Hello,” an emotionless voice said. “You know who I am, yes?”

“I know who you are,” she said quietly. “Then who are you?” he asked. “Tell me who.” “I’m Anna.” “Anna who?”

“Anna Marie Tavares,” she said. “You know why I’m calling?” “I know,” Alex said.

There was a painfully long silence. Then, “Hotel Plaza Habana. Tomorrow, 3:00 p.m.,” the voice said. “Remember … 3:00 p.m.,” he repeated. “The lobby. Can you do that?” “I can do that,” Alex answered.

Then the line clicked dead. Alex folded the phone away, heaved a sigh of exhaustion, and turned back toward the bed. Paul was still sitting up, smiling slightly. With courtesy, he lifted the sheet and blanket on her side to welcome her back into bed, as a husband might.

“Violette,” she said. “He’s ready to play ball.”

FIFTY-SIX

The next morning Paul took the Toyota Jeep again. He and Alex drove back to Havana. By early afternoon, Paul had parked in the garage of a man whom he said was a family friend. Then they found their way to the Hotel Plaza Habana, on foot. It was about a fifteen minute walk. Alex tried to memorize the route but wasn’t able.

The Plaza Habana was one of the oldest hotels in the city, built in 1909. Unlike much of the rest of Havana, it was charming and beautifully restored. It stood proudly on Calle Agramonte in Old Havana, where Agramonte intersected with Zuluete, not far from the Ambos Mundos where she had rendezvoused with Paul the day before.

Alex entered the hotel with Paul fifty feet behind her. The lobby was vibrant with sunlight, tourists, and bright mosaics. A floor of off-white tile gleamed. There was a surprisingly festive air, supported by groups of laughing Italian travelers. An upbeat salsa melody pulsed from the sound system.

Alex, nervous, scanned the lobby and proceeded directly to the first-floor bar. She carried her small tote that she had bought on her first day in Cuba. Her gun was in it, beneath her traveling clothes.

The bar was bright like the lobby. It jutted out from the main hotel building, a separate one-story annex with a high ceiling. There were tables for four, topped with white Formica and light wood. A skylight lit the room and a fountain bubbled unobtrusively at the center. More music was piped in from somewhere, but a different track than in the lobby.

Alex picked a table where she could watch both doors. Paul, following her a minute later, disappeared to a table in the corner.

A waiter found Alex, and she ordered a Coca-Cola. She waited. From the corner of her eye, she watched Guarneri order a drink and start a small cigar. From a nearby table, he picked up a newspaper. Trabajadores. The Cuban workers’ newspaper. Well, that would raise Paul’s consciousness a little, Alex mused.

She scanned the bar again. Like the lobby, it was filled with tourists, mostly Europeans, and some wealthy South Americans. A group of eight young backpackers had pushed two tables together, four girls, four boys, college kids probably, their backpacks bedecked with Canadian flag appliques. They sat around bottles of Cuban beer, in no hurry to go anywhere. There were no cops that Alex could spot, nor anyone she could ID as Cuban security. For that, she was thankful.

According to the legends that Paul had told her about on their drive that morning, Babe Ruth had once made the hotel’s Suite 216 his personal den of iniquity during his barnstorming tours through Cuba in the 1920s and ‘30s. Also, several of the top dancers from the clubs in the 1950s had had suites there, and more than a few American GIs spent debauched R amp;R weeks there during World War II. Albert Einstein once attended a banquet there. Somehow, the Plaza had navigated both the Batista and Castro eras with comparative ease. Somewhere, Alex concluded, someone knew whom to pay.

Her soda arrived.

A quarter hour passed. Alex’s anxiety level spiked. The afternoon heat continued to build outside and started to overpower the air conditioning. Alex looked up and her heart jumped. She spotted a figure at the entrance to the bar. Roland Violette. She recognized him instantly from the surveillance photos she had seen in Langley.

He looked much older in person. In his khaki pants and rumpled shirt, he looked thin, almost frail, and stooped. He would have been about six feet as a younger man. He moved with difficulty, as if he had arthritis in his hips. His hair was thin and flecked with white, and his dark glasses wrapped around his narrow mocha face. He carried a cardboard box, about the size of a double ream of copy paper.

He was jittery and moved cautiously, as if at any time he might spot a gun aimed at him. He carried a pack of cigarettes in his right hand – Winstons – which seemed to be his security system, keeping him calm. Alex watched for several seconds and didn’t miss the irony of the cigarettes. She had seen it before. Even those who vilified America most often clung passionately to American products and culture. Ho Chi Minh smoked Kools. Castro loved baseball. Khrushchev had loved Fred Astaire movies. Kim Jung Il loves Elvis. Go figure, she mused.

Violette spotted Alex almost as quickly. His gaze settled on her. She gave him a subtle nod and a smile. She held him in her gaze, eye contact all the way, almost like radar to bring him to her table. He stopped and scanned the room. He didn’t seem to sense that Paul was an accomplice, though he took a long look at him. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

Violette came to Alex’s table and sat down.

“Anna from America,” he said in English. “Anna. Anna. Anna. Anna and the King of Siam. Anna from America come to take me home? Right?”

“Good guess. Right,” she said.

“Wasn’t much of a guess,” he said. “I used to be a spook. But you knew. You knew that.”

“I did,” she said. “That’s why I’m here, right?”

“Guess it is,” he said. “Guess it is.”

Her instinct was to extend a hand. In a flash everything Roland Violette had done went through her mind – the slaughtered agents behind the Iron Curtain in the final days of the cold war, the flight from Spain, the profligacy with his amoral Costa Rican missus – and she withheld her hand. Then another part of her was in rebellion against her moral instincts. She reminded herself that she was on assignment and not supposed to pass judgment. So she offered her hand.

He assessed her up and down. He gave her a dead-fish handshake and moved his left hand toward his left pocket. Her eyes shot down and spotted the contours of a small pistol. Her nerves simmered. He withdrew his hand. She pulled her own bag closer, just in case.

“I’m surprised they sent a woman,” he said.

“They?” she asked.

“The CIA people,” he said. “The Careless Intelligence Analysts. We all know who we’re talking about. So don’t flirt. Don’t flirt. Never used to do that, never used to do that. Send women, I mean. If I’d known women who looked like you I might never have left.”

“What’s done is done,” she said.

“Yes. It is. It is done.”

She wondered if he was acting or if his screws really were as loose as they seemed. “You had a wife for many years,” Alex said.

“Yes,” he said. “So I did.”

“I heard she passed away. I’m sorry.”

“I am too,” he said. “She’s in heaven. Waiting for me.”

Alex wasn’t sure if it were another place where his wife was, one even hotter than Cuba in the summer.

Violette stared at her. “Do they ever ask you to be a hooker?” he asked.

“What?”

He repeated. “You know. For spy stuff. Honey traps and all. Be a whore for Uncle Sam.”

“I once posed as one, but I never became one. In Cairo last year,” she answered.

“Nice,” he said.

“Does that excite you?”

“Not today. I’m too sick.”

Violette rubbed his face, then his chin. He had more nervous ticks and twitches than there were peanuts in a bag. A nervous eye flickered. A tick at the left side of the lips wouldn’t quit. Two fingers on his right hand wouldn’t stay still, and the other hand still was playing hide and seek with the pistol. She wondered if he had some neurological damage somewhere. Drugs, maybe, or a thrashing he had sustained somewhere. Or were his nerves just badly shot? The guy was one unhinged piece of work, Alex decided quickly. No act was this good. That made him even more dangerous. He might not respond to logic in a pinch, and that was exactly how she was supposed to make her pitch to him – with logic.

Violette sighed, long and loud. “So about time and all. You’re going to get me out of here, right?” he said.

“That’s my assignment. Assuming you want to leave.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Roger. I do,” he said. “I want to go.”

The waiter reappeared. Violette ordered a Pepsi with ice in a separate glass. Embargo or not, the waiter nodded and disappeared.

“That’s good, that’s good,” he said. “Getting out of Cuba. Been here too long, you know. Time to go home.”

“You’re lucky they’ll take you back,” she said.

He shrugged. “Jail time,” he said. “Going to have to pay some dues. I have prostate cancer, you know. I’m sick.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Got a prostate the size of a grapefruit,” he said. “That’s part of the deal. Well, you know what the deal is,” he said. “I come back, do some prison time, get an operation in federal slammer. Maybe I die there. Who knows? It’s all part of the package. If I die in America, they bury me in America. If I survive jail, I live my last years in America. Win-win. Get it?”

She nodded. So that was the angle. The waiter returned with two glasses, one empty and one filled with ice and a bottle of Pepsi, or at least something the color of cola in a Pepsi bottle. The waiter started to pour. Violette shooed him away, indicating he would administer to his own beverage.

“Just asking,” she said, “how do you know the CIA is going to keep any deal they make with you?”

“Why? You think they won’t?” he asked sharply.

“No. Just wondering. Seems they might still be plenty mad at you.”

“I’m sure they are,” he said. “Because I beat them at their own dirty games. I have a lawyer in New York,” said Violette. “A smart little Hebrew with a big nose and a shiny bald head. He negotiated a deal for me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s all money, you know. Who you can buy, what you can buy. That’s the only thing that counts, money, money, money. Capitalist system. Just business. Screw everyone before they screw you. Nothing personal.”

She couldn’t help herself. “Is that why you sold out to so many other people?” she asked. “Just business?” She had expected that he might at least be troubled by the morality of what he had done, even two and a half decades ago, then realized she had been naive to entertain such a thought. If Violette was troubled, he didn’t show it. Instead, he held up the glass with the ice in it, examining the cubes carefully in the light from the ceiling window.

“Never know what’s in the ice in Havana,” he said. “I’ve found ticks as big as my toenail and toenails as big as ticks. Sometimes glass … sometimes I find glass. And fleas. Lots of fleas. World wouldn’t starve if everyone ate fleas.” Then he turned to her. “What?” he asked.

“Just business?” she repeated. “The money you took from the Soviets to give up spies? It was just business?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“But it happened. People got killed.”

“So what? They would have sold me out just as easily,” he said. “They were selling out people themselves. They were Russians, the people I sold out, mostly Russians, and they were squealing on their own people. Dog-eat-dog. Bow wow wow. I needed money.”

“If your Communist system works better,” she asked, “why are you coming back?”

He laughed. “System here doesn’t work,” he said. “System here stinks. Castro sold out his own revolution. I’ve had a snootful for twenty-six years. I can tell you all about it.”

He poured his soft drink and spent several seconds examining the bubbles, as if to find a deeper truth in them. “Everyone thinks I’m some sort of latter-day Leninist,” he said. “Not true. You know what? I love America. I just wish America would be true to America.” He drank half the glass. “American soil, American soil. See, that’s the thing. I want to live my final years on American soil and be buried in American earth. That’s where I came from, so that’s where I go back to. That’s my only wish.”

“So I hear.”

He eyed her. “Why should it bother you?” he said. “What were you, five years old when it all happened? A gleam in your horny father’s eye? How old are you, twenty?”

“Thirty,” she said.

“Thirty,” he scoffed. “You’re less than half my age, less than half. Thirty is the new fifteen. When are you getting me out of here?” he asked. “I want to leave.” His eyes shot to the door and back.

“If the connections can be arranged, we leave in forty-eight hours,” she said. “You ready to travel?”

“I’m ready to travel. Been ready for two years, if you want to know. It’s your own Justice Department people who’ve been dragging their feet.”

“What about the twenty-six years before that?” she couldn’t help asking.