Flight from a Firing Wall Read online

  Flight from a Firing Wall

  Baynard Kendrick

  Foreword

  Probably the most invidious statement an author can make about a work of fiction is that only the names of the characters are disguised, and that otherwise the book is a composite picture of actual happenings in authentic settings. That, however, is a chance I feel I must take with Flight from a Firing Wall since most of this story is true.

  This book was begun in March 1960 at the time President Eisenhower had authorized the CIA to organize, train and equip Cuban refugees as a guerrilla force to overthrow Castro. Because of daily changing events, I abandoned the project until 1961, when I resumed it at the suggestion of Antonio A. Micocci, Staff Adviser, Cuban Refugee Program, Welfare Administration, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Even then the Cuban Policy was in such a state of flux that after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, and three rewrites, the book had to be shelved once more until there seemed to be some likelihood of getting proper perspective and continuity.

  Meanwhile, the author has had unremitting advice and assistance from the following in Miami, Florida: Cuban Refugee Emergency Center, National Catholic Welfare Conference, International Rescue Committee, Church World Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, United States Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Information Agency and the Veterans’ Administration.

  Officials of the FBI, the CIA, the Bureau of Narcotics, the Secret Service and the Miami Police, as well as other Federal watchdog groups, (called locally “tamale squads”) have supplied a wealth of hard-to-obtain information.

  Particular mention must be made of Mr. George Volsky, of the U.S. Information Agency, who, out of his own experience, supplied the details of life in Castro’s Cuba as it is today and the horrors of imprisonment in La Cabana. The author is also deeply indebted to Mr. John M. Peoples, Jr., of the Bertram Yacht Sales, Inc., for furnishing and checking the specifications of the 31’ Bertram Tantivy.

  Scenes in Cuba are from the author’s pleasant memories of many trips there dating back to 1954. As to Miami—quoting William Tucker, in the National Observer of March 21, 1966: “Miami, the Casablanca for the Caribbean? The city’s population of almost 1,000,000 people would never suspect it. No Sidney Greenstreets go waddling into the cafés; no sinister Peter Lorres peek from behind the palms. But Miami in the last six years has become a major center for international intrigue with a heavy Latin American flavor.

  “The Government is keenly aware of the plotting that goes on here. It has bolstered the local detachments from seven agencies—the FBI, State Department, Border Patrol, Customs Bureau, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and CIA—to deal with the situation.

  “… While the city and its tourists sleep, the plotting goes on as red-eyed Government agents try to keep it under control.”

  —BAYNARD KENDRICK

  Leesburg, Florida

  April 1966

  BOOK I

  MIAMI

  1

  It was one of those Miami melters in July that the local Chamber of Commerce soft-sells by calling “midsummer tourist weather.” The weather bureau, heavily subsidized by the local press, would be careful to report the temperature between 78° F. and the mid-eighties, but the reports from my sweltering body were different. I knew that if I ever got up nerve enough to take a look at the clinical thermometer clipped like a fountain pen in the inside pocket of my linen jacket I would find that my left breast was running a fever of 104°.

  When I swung my 1961 LeSabre into the parking lot next to the bus station on N.E. First Street and climbed out away from the air conditioner, it was like standing on the launching pad during the blast-off of a Titan rocket.

  An attendant came up just before I had melted down into a grease ball and asked me if I was going to be long. It was a fair question, but one that for the moment I couldn’t answer since I didn’t know. To play it safe I admitted to an hour, or maybe two, and told him I was going to have lunch at the Columbus Hotel. He tore a ticket into two pieces, gave me half, and stuck the remainder under the windshield wiper, a device that is used by all parking lots throughout the country to easily identify the remains of any car.

  He got in, slammed the door, and took off backwards at an easy ninety with the tires screaming almost as loudly as I wanted to. Somehow, he managed to slot it between a DeVille and an Electra and still leave all the paint intact except for a few unimportant excisions made when he opened the door.

  I stood there partially paralyzed at such surgical skill, and wishing for the old days when Buicks were Buicks, Cadillacs “Caddys,” Chevrolets “Chevys,” Chryslers Chryslers, and Fords just Fords. It made for such simplicity when one had to file an insurance claim. Today you can’t tell back from front nor one from another, and the middles are hidden back of those fancy names picked off some Pullman car.

  So close in back of me that I jumped for my life, somebody blew a horn. It woke me rudely from my dream of becoming President of General Motors. I whirled around to find the grille of one of those red foreign two-seaters not an inch from the point of my spine. It wasn’t very large, but it represented plenty of lire in anybody’s money.

  When I finally got my sight back from the sunlight on chrome, I could see that back of the pint-size windshield there was a pair of those wrap-around black goggles. If the car had a top, it was down. I stepped up closer and discovered that the goggles were perched on a small straight nose, with a pair of carmine lips underneath.

  “¡Lo siento mucho! I am very sorry!” The lips apologized in both Spanish and English which is the safe thing to do in Miami today, since there are more Cubans in Miami—including me, Dr. Antonio Carrillo—than there used to be in Camagüey.

  “No ha sido nada. Think nothing of it, in any language,” I said beaming with my best bedside gallantry. “What’s one humble life like mine when a thousand people are killed by automobiles in this country every holiday?”

  Two slim brown hands with polished red nails came up and unwound a gossamer pink scarf that had been hiding a head of wavy hair. She shook the scarf loose and the hair fell into place at the back of her neck, as fine as spun silk and blacker than the goggles. She opened a tiny door, performed a fast contortion feat, and produced a long pair of shapely legs to stand up on. They must have been hers, since she had brought them with her, but I couldn’t see where she had put them away in that car.

  Her shapeliness was evident, at least from the waist clear down, for she was wearing a pair of those pink acrobat tights, pre-Minsky, which the present-day shops along Lincoln Road in Miami Beach advertise as “stretchers.” They fit with all the loose freedom of a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and it must take a pound of K-Y lubricating jelly to get them on. Seems she’d forgotten her socks, for slender toes with polished nails peeped out from a pair of gold-strapped sandals. The upper deck was chastely covered with a sleeveless jacket of gold lamé.

  I must have been staring rudely when Hot Rod Harry, the sweaty car smasher, bustled up and put her through the time routine.

  “How long will you be, miss?”

  “Probably a couple of hours or more.” She flashed him a smile that should have started more sweat glands working if he hadn’t already been dehydrated. It failed to excite him any more than I had. Cubans or Americans, he’d probably been smiled at or cussed out by them all. She turned from him and aimed the black goggles full on me. “I’m having lunch with Dr. Carrillo here.”

  Hot Rod gave me a dirty look, like I’d purposely kept something from him. He vaulted handily into her wee one and shot it off backwards to be stored in the trunk of another car.

  I lapsed into Spanish and
produced some inanity about not remembering where we had met before. She said, sticking to her English, which was perfectly good, “We haven’t, except for a short conversation over the telephone. I’m Liliana Medina.. Do you mind if we go somewhere where it is quiet and a little cooler?”

  I said I didn’t mind, and decided to look at my watch to recover my aplomb. I felt much more at ease when I found it was ten minutes to one. She tucked a hand under my arm and, chummy as a pair of lovebirds, we walked the short distance to the hotel entrance. I had to admire the possessive way she had latched on to me, even though I had never laid eyes on her before.

  Our conversation was limited to an extreme.

  Two hours before, about eleven o’clock, someone had called me at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Coral Gables, where I had been employed as a resident internist for the past two years. (Let me make it clear that an “internist” is a specialist in internal medicine and not an “intern” as so many delight in calling me!) It was a woman, who had said I didn’t know her, but who had been frank enough to admit that she was Señorita Liliana Medina, as if that meant anything to me.

  She asked if I could meet her about one o’clock at the entrance to the Columbus Hotel. Why? Well, most important! When I started a bit of natural spade work, instead of wasting time with explanations at the other end of the telephone a record had started to play.

  It was just the last few lines from María la O, sung by that wonderful singer Dolores Perez. It worked on me like a shot of adrenalin. María la O, a lyrical farce in two acts by Gustavo Sanchez Galarraga, with music by Ernesto Lecuona, was presented first in the Teatro Pairet de La Habana (Theater of Havana) by Lecuona’s own company.

  The operetta takes place in Havana in the year 1800, and concerns the sad love affair of a beautiful mulatto whose name, María la O, gives title to the play. It has become as familiar to generations of Cubans as Franz Lehár’s Merry Widow has to citizens of the USA.

  It was not the operetta itself which hooked me, so much as the scene which my unidentified señorita had picked as the winner of the hit parade of the play. That scene, from the year 1800, takes place in the Alameda de Paula, a promenade noted for its beauty besides the wharves of Havana. The ruins of Paul’s ancient church, still by the wharves, are all that remains to remind one of it today.

  My own memories of that ancient Iglesia de Paula were slightly more recent than 1800. In fact, they dated back only to the late summer of 1960, when as an active worker in the anti-Castro underground I was warned by my ex-professor at the University of Havana, Dr. Jorge Villaverde, that my wife, Milagros García de Carrillo, and I would live a happier and longer life in the city of Miami.

  Together, we might have, except that we had never had a chance to try. Instead, after five lonely work-filled years, I was still vainly trying to ease the aching pain in my heart, and to blot from my mind those poignant memories of the short two years of happiness that I had known in Cuba with Milagros. She was one of those rare Cuban women of Andalusian descent, with the fairest of skin and shining red hair. We had grown up together, and our love along with us, following us through adolescence and emerging full bloom when she worked for my father’s advertising agency, Hatuey Publicidad S.A.

  We were married in June 1958, in the church at Matanzas which houses the wonder-working statue of Our Lady of Montserrate and both of us were sure that the miracle She performed that day would last forever. We honeymooned on my cruiser, named for my mother Margaret-A, fishing, lazing and loving in the sun, and exploring the tiny islets in the shallow bays. Only one small shadow marred the sheer perfection of it all. Milagros had married me without her father’s blessing, but we were far too much in love to let the anger of Ernesto García intrude on our consummate happiness. Or could it have been that we were just too dumb?

  Ernesto had been a coronel under Batista, with a company of the most vicious secret police that ever spread terror throughout Havana ready to shoot or torture any suspected insurgent on whom Batista might frown. While he had grown slightly splay-footed from trying to work both sides of the street while walking down the middle, no one had ever exceeded his sprightly footwork in reaching the proper sidewalk where the banks were about to open again. My father always claimed to the day he died that with amigos like Ernesto you needed no enemigos to help you on your way.

  If he had ever loved anything outside of himself, pesos, politics and power, it was probably Milagros, whose mother had died happily giving birth to their only child while Papa was away, busy with his bullwhip and Beretta getting an honest election for Col. Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar, and giving a brand new life to torn Cuba in 1940. My earnest suegro or father-in-law to be was only a shavetail—a teniente— then; but on our tight little island it is hard to keep a bad man down. When his daughter and I had tried to get away from his loving care in 1960, he had reached the rank of comandante in Fidel’s Rebel Army, the equivalent of a general in the US Army, and had become as Red as the nose on Rudolph the reindeer.

  It was not quite dusk when Milagros, enveloped in the flowing black habit of a nun, and I, disguised as a priest and armed with an artistically forged passport, plus a .45 automatic, both under my cassock, got safely past the first checkpoint. We were about to board a freighter bound for parts unknown at the docks near the Antigua Iglesia de Paula, when a jeep closely followed by a truckload of soldiers came steaming down San Pedro. It became quite apparent that someone had blown the whistle on my wife and me.

  Milagros’ eyes were sharper than mine. She must have seen a rifle raised, for she quickly stepped in front of me. I still remember the red of her hair as her cowl was pushed back, and the deeper red of the blood spreading slowly against the starched white collar that covered her shoulders. I must have gone a little crazy for the automatic started jumping in my hand and three of Fidel’s musclemen who were closing in went down. Either luck was with me, or unseen friends were helping me. However it happened, I came to on a forty-foot pleasure cruiser headed for Key West with two metralleta bullets from those crummy short Czech machine guns in me. I stayed conscious just long enough to speak to a man in the opposite bunk and discover that he was very dead. In five years’ time I had heard nothing from Milagros, nor about her, yet so strong is that eternal hope that deep inside I refused to believe that God could be so cruel as to take both my wife and my country from me. Anyhow the US Coast Guard has those bullets, but the holes which keep my memory fresh are still very much in me.

  This sieve-work in my anatomy had allowed a lot of loving kindness to leak from what had formerly been a trusting young M.D. Scnorita Medina was going to have to come through with a few more hard facts before she could milk a lunch from the likes of me.

  With the idea that a little heat treatment might help her to let down another few inches of that silky hair, I stopped outside of the entrance before going into the air-conditioned hotel. Holding both of her arms, I turned her around to face me and tried to read something from looking deep into her eyes. Searching for an expression through those ebony goggles was like trying to read through the deuce of spades.

  I said, “Lookit, señorita, chiquita, honey-chile, sweetie-pie, is Liliana Medina really your name?”

  She shook herself free from the squeeze I had purposely put on her slender arms. “I told you that over the telephone.”

  “Period,” I said, “con música de Ernesto Lecuona.”

  “If you weren’t interested why did you come?”

  “I’ve always been interested in meeting strange women who call me up on the telephone. Particularly Cuban women who like the music of María la O.” I turned my wolf glare on full. “It happens to me every day. At the first sound of those lines: ‘… that which stirs within me is his son, señor …’ I’m rarin’ to go!”

  “But this one you don’t trust very much?” Her lips moved upward in half a smile. “Isn’t that so?”

  “Most of them don’t trail me in from Coral Gables following the caduceus on
the back of my car.”

  She said, “It is different, no? Usually the man is trailing me. It was my sister who asked me to do this. She called me this morning from her husband’s yacht, the Kerritack. They have been off the keys on a fishing trip, and expect to dock at the city yacht basin between three and four. She told me where to reach you at the hospital and described you very accurately.”

  “It is indeed most flattering! But why me?”

  “They have a very sick man on board. It is he who hoped you might be persuaded to meet him. Will you?”

  “I might.” I lit a cigarette for thinking time. “What is his name?”

  “She doesn’t know, or didn’t say. Does it matter since he is ill?”

  “No importa. Did your sister also ask you to follow me?”

  “Yes. I picked you up when you came out of the hospital and watched you get into your car, then trailed you to the parking lot. The doctor’s emblema—how do you say?”

  “Caduceus.”

  “Caduceus, sí, it made it very easy. Soledad, my sister, wanted me to make quite sure that you didn’t stop anywhere on your way into town.”

  “Anywhere like what?” I asked her sharply.

  “Any official office.” Her red-nailed fingers plucked briefly at her jacket. “Like the police, immigration, the Coast Guard—anywhere in the Federal Building. You see, the man they are bringing in, who is so very ill, is a Cuban refugee.”

  “Oh? And he’s the one who doesn’t want to meet any of these nasty American officials?”

  She nodded.

  “And with all the doctors in Miami, he picked on me?”

  “I’ve told you everything I know,” she said stiffly. “Don’t you believe me?”

  I believed her enough to know that I was hooked. “You win, Liliana,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs and eat on the roof where we can watch all the pretty hospital ships come in. The lunch is on me.”