Flight from a Firing Wall Page 8

  My head was still swirling when I told them good night and backed out the LeSabre to free the driveway. I sat and watched until their tail lights disappeared before I took off for the house on S.W. Twenty-sixth Street where Luis lived with his wife, Emelina, and their two children, Gladys (thirteen) and Amalio (eleven).

  It was late, but mindful of three phone taps on Luis’ telephone in as many years I didn’t call. The July 26 Movement, Castro’s overseas arm, although driven underground by the FBI several years before, was still carrying on with branches in many cities. I had no intention of arriving at Luis’ house with a white-haired bogy on my tail.

  I dove into a maze of one-block streets in Coral Gables, turning and twisting crazily with my eyes on the mirror and my thoughts far away. It was past eleven before I crashed through on to S.W. Twenty-seventh Avenue, confident that I had thoroughly dry-cleaned myself, as Edgar Hoover puts it.

  There was only a single car in sight when I turned right on Twenty-sixth Street. It was parked under a street light in front of Luis’ house. Dr. Luis Martínez, jefe and General Coordinator of our spooky invisible empire, the AFAO, was standing beside it bidding a very cordial good night to my pest with the white hair.

  The hand-shaking over, Operator X got in his Chevy and as he drove slowly by me had the very bad taste to lean out of his window and say, “Pórtate bien, chico.”— “Be a good boy.”

  10

  Luis opened the front door for me before I could ring. He’d had time to slip into a light-blue dressing gown with a sash knotted at the waist while I was being warned to behave myself out on Twenty-sixth Street. My expression must have warned him that I had finally reached a point where I was trying not to scream.

  He said, “Before you start telling me, let’s go back to the Florida room where the air conditioner’s on and it’s cool. The family has gone to bed.”

  I followed him to the back of the house where he had set up a comfortable office. A glassed-in bookcase held medical books in English and Spanish. Bulletins of the Antoinetti Clinic, which he had helped to organize, and which was taken over by Castro late in 1961, lay on the top. A steel flat-top desk held an electric portable typewriter, some neatly stacked papers, a circular pipe rack holding four well-smoked pipes, and a tobacco jar made from a grinning human skull.

  A large map of the United States hung on the wall. It was dotted with a forest of green-headed pins marking the towns where Cubans had been resettled—nearly two thousand American communities from coast to coast which had opened their arms to more than 88,000 Cuban refugees and were helping them to live new lives. Red pins interspersed with the green showed communities where the July 26 Movement had been reported to Luis as showing activity, and passed on in turn by him to the FBI.

  A smaller map of the island of Cuba hung beside that of the USA. On it larger red pins covering the length of the island marked towns where agents of the anti-Castro underground worked steadily day and night against great odds at the discouraging task of attempting to unseat Fidel and his Communist cohorts, believing that the eventual upset would have to come from within.

  Luis softly closed the glass doors behind us and asked, “Do you want a drink?”

  “No,” I said ungraciously as I flopped down in an easy chair.

  He handed me a newspaper clipping and said, “Well, read that while I make myself one.”

  It was an AP dispatch from Santa Clara, headed FOES DEFEATED, BOASTS FIDEL: “Prime Minister Fidel Castro claimed Monday his soldiers had wiped out virtually all guerrilla bands in Cuba and were ready for a ‘stand against any direct attack from imperialism.’

  “Addressing a vast gathering on the twelfth anniversary of a barracks battle that started him on his rise to power, Castro said that the ‘counterrevolutionary bands’ once plaguing his Communist regime had been wiped out with the exception of three men still at large. He did not identify the fugitives but said his forces had killed 2,005 ‘bandits’ in hunting the guerrillas in the past few years.

  “It was Castro’s own guerrilla attack on the Batista army barracks in Santa Clara July 26, 1953, that first brought the young revolutionary into prominence. An estimated 250,000 persons gathered in Santa Clara, 200 miles east of Havana, to hear Castro speak on the anniversary. Santa Clara is near the rugged mountains where anti-Castro groups held out until late last year.

  “Conspiculously absent among the host of Cuban and visiting Communist officials was Ernesto (Che) Guevara, former industries minister who vanished from public view five months ago.

  “Castro again ridiculed the idea of allowing any opposition political parties. He said the Cuban workers don’t need ‘any antagonistic parties.’ He coupled an attack on what he called the US intervention in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam with an appeal for revolution in Latin America.”

  I disposed of the clipping face down on a table beside me where I wouldn’t have to look at the small circular picture of Premier Castro’s upraised admonishing finger, hard eyes and long nose over that circular mouth belching boasts through his beatnik beard.

  “I’m quitting, Luis.”

  He brought his highball back and installed himself behind his desk. “Quitting what?” He tested his drink and grimaced.

  “You, the hospital, and this useless work of interviewing endless exiles and trying to convince them that the only thing to do is sit on their asses, keep their mouths shut, and that everything will work out some day.”

  Luis selected a pipe from the rack, performed a catheter job on it with a pipe cleaner, and filled it with tobacco from his grinning skull. He produced a pocket lighter that after a little manipulation extruded a two-inch flame and applied it to the pipe bowl with a hand that wasn’t too steady. Once his foul briar was properly lit, he drew a bead on me with the stem.

  “So you’ve finally heard that Milagros is still alive. I expected that might happen some day. Did that information come from your father-in-law that the Kerritack brought in today?”

  “Who told you that Milagros is still alive?”

  “You did, chico. After the work we have done together for the past few years, work that you have thoroughly believed in, I figure that is the only news that could drag you away.”

  “Before we go on,” I said, “I suppose you got the news about Ernesto from that stooge who was here when I arrived. Your white-haired boy from the CIA?”

  Luis holstered the pipestem back in his mouth where it belonged and examined me with the intensity of a scientist studying a newly discovered spirochete. He coughed out a noisome cloud of smoke together with a single dirty word in Spanish, then set his pipe in an ash tray.

  “The CIA, Tony? ¡No quiera Dios! Heaven forbid! You are the very last person I expected to find looking under rugs for agents of the CIA.”

  “I’m tired and cynical and I’ve had a bad day,” I told him. “That white-haired joker who just left here followed me out to the hospital and checked on García’s name. Then I find him here practically kissing you good night—”

  “And jump to the conclusion that because I happen to know him, he’s an agent of the CIA.”

  “Why not? Haven’t we had a belly full of CIA? What with the U2 flight, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Santo Domingo, it’s getting so that exiles and the man in the street think that everyone is CIA and don’t believe anything that the US government has to say.”

  “Your brain isn’t working too well tonight. I guess you are tired,” Luis said moodily. “We wouldn’t know what was going on anywhere in the world without the help of the CIA. Harry Williams, who has been working as hard as we have to bring unity out of our division and bitterness says: ‘There is no panacea for the problem of a powerful secret organization that performs an essential function.’”

  “Name one,” I said. “I know that just ignoring them won’t make them go away.”

  “Just last week, another AP story from Cuba like the one I just showed you stated that, while there were a hundred MIG fighters in Cuba
which could carry bombs, all of the missiles and the forty Russian bombers spotted in Cuba in 1962 had been removed.”

  “I suppose that was signed by the CIA.”

  He knocked his pipe out impatiently and put it back in the rack.

  “That’s just the trouble, Tony, nothing can be signed by the CIA for it doesn’t exist any more than the AFAO which I keep so carefully under wraps so that it maintains a semblance of being fictional instead of an idea that is desperately real. Do you remember what happened to the leaders of the Cuban Revolutionary Council here in Miami while the debacle of the Bay of Pigs was going on?”

  He knew damned well I remembered, but he was determined to open a few old sores and it was easier to play along. You didn’t check out on Luis Martínez and his AFAO without some scars. I said: “They were held under an armed guard in a deserted house at the abandoned airfield of Opa-Locka. Supposedly until they could be flown to Cuba to establish their provisional government. What’s your point?”

  “My point is, chico, that those men, Miró Cardona, Tony Varona, Antonio Maceo, Manuel Ray, Justo Carrillo, and Carlos Hevia, were real men, live men, pleading for direct US intervention. You can’t put an armed guard over a group of shadows which is asking for nothing, Tony. That’s why the AFAO will function. Because I’m keeping it fictional and unreal. We’ve learned a lot of lessons from the CIA.”

  “Hunh! You claim the CIA isn’t real?”

  “Exactly. They are shadows. They are a nonfunctioning, nonexistent organization of perfect targets, designed for the sole political purpose of taking the blame when any piece of US government policy goes sour. Of course, this disembodied state also makes them the perfect cat’s paw for those impatient Cuban exiles who have gotten tired of ‘sitting on their asses and keeping their mouths shut’ as you so delicately put it.”

  “You’re neglecting your drink,” I told him. “I get the picture and it looks like me.”

  “¡Nada de eso!" He took a swallow and put the glass down. “Nothing of the sort! You’re not only tired you’re touchy. Just last week four of our most zealous countrymen were nailed in Orlando with a cache of eighteen homemade aerial bombs, firearms and airplane fuel. They claimed they were only going to put a few of Fidel’s oil refineries out of business on their own. There were a couple of Americans in the plot along with them. When the customs’ men arrested them and a US Commissioner tossed them en la cárcel, they promptly went on a hunger strike. And what was their defense?”

  I said, “Don’t bother to translate it for me like you did with Guevara’s masterpiece this afternoon. I can read the American newspapers in English as well as you. They said the CIA knew all about it, and had double-crossed them. Don’t you think there is a remote possibility that their statement might be true?”

  He finished his highball and said, “I might as well be full of whisky along with my frustration. I haven’t the faintest idea what is true and what isn’t, and neither have you. The Bay of Pigs flopped, but at least the American public knew it was officially recognized. President Kennedy’s strategy succeeded with the missiles. The same goes for that too. Officially recognized, and the public knew. But just let some hotheads foment a plan of sabotage in Tampa, or decide to toss a Molotov cocktail at the UN building, or try some impossible scheme to retake Cuba on their own and then start screaming ‘Double cross by the CIA!’ and who the devil can possibly know what’s true? All the public can get from the papers is that these are Cubans who have broken the law.”

  “Well, what are they?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Tony. Overzealous patriots who have flipped from waiting too long? Or some of Fidel’s pistoleros sent up here to start some violence that will embarrass us all?”

  “I’ll buy four-fifths of that,” I said, “but not all. Our lunatic fringe isn’t any bigger than anyone else’s. Wouldn’t it help us ignorant refugee boys to get together if, with half-a-million Commies tied to their tail, the United States would quit horsing around and make its position clear?”

  “It couldn’t be clearer.” Luis pushed his pipes to one side to get a better view of me.

  “I’ll bite,” I said. “I came here to resign, and all your talk hasn’t changed my mind, but go ahead and indoctrinate me as long as I’m here.”

  “The position of the United States toward Cuba today is one of neutrality. That’s perfectly clear.”

  “No comprendo. It isn’t clear to me. What sort of neutrality?”

  “Neutrality like in World War I and World War II with the Heil Hitler Bund parading in New York City and holding encampments to train young Nazis. Yet the Germans and all the rest of the world knew perfectly well, once the shooting started, what side the United States would be on. The Republic of Cuba came into being on May 20, 1902. The United States had helped us then, and we’re just as sure she will help us today, but to keep from blowing the world apart she has to do it in her own way. In the meantime, since neutrality is the watchword, there is nothing on earth that we can do except to accept sanctuary on her terms, obey the laws and pray.”

  “I apologize for forgetting that,” I told him. “It’s very good. In fact, it’s every bit as good as when you delivered it over television on the twentieth of last May. Okay, jefe, your white-haired buddy who started all this isn’t a member of the CIA. Then what is he, por favor?"

  “He’s a lawyer named Albert Clooney, with offices in the Ainsley Building.” Luis scowled at his desk.

  “Representing the AFAO?”

  “On occasion. Actually he’s the attorney for an outfit called the Friends of Cuba.”

  “It’s encouraging to know we have some.”

  “More than you seem to think, chico. The friends—the FOC—have a pipeline into Washington, or so I’ve been told. Clooney has interviewed a number of refugees rescued by the Coast Guard patrol, when he isn’t too busy talking long distance with the Attorney General, or having lunch with LBJ.”

  “Or following the likes of me. Why did you sic him on to me?”

  Luis’ eyes were grave. “I actually didn’t, Tony. After you told me about the Kerritack and that so-called refugee, I phoned him. He insisted that you might need some cover with the authorities if anything went wrong. When he found out at the hospital that they’d run in Ernesto García, he came rushing over here to ask me if I could get your permission to talk to García—with you present—as soon as you felt your patient was able. He seems to know a lot more about the Kerritack and Orville Harrington than you or I do.”

  “Not now,” I said shortly.

  “What do you mean?”

  I said, “You’re an orderly man who likes to keep records. Well, get that little tape recorder out of your drawer and record my resignation. It’s something you may want to refer to after I’ve disappeared from the scene.”

  I doubly liked him because he didn’t ask any questions. He put the recorder on the desk and pushed it toward me with the switch turned on. He listened in silence, his heavy brows drawn together with pain, and his mobile face unnaturally white while for fifteen minutes I poured my tortured insides out in words to a tape in a steady stream.

  When I pushed the tiny button to off, he had it all: Villaverde, one of Fidel’s “three men still at large,” dying in some hide-out for lack of medicine while his nieces bravely carried on; Harrington and the Kerritack; García coming in on the Cuban ferry and my determination to get the truth even if it took Miss Langley’s Pentothal; and lastly my firm resolve to find my wife and somehow scotch that lying appellation Reina Roja by getting her out of that Communist hell, and proving to the world at large that the only thing red about Milagros were the drops of blood that her father had caused to fall.

  After a while he pulled the tape recorder back across the desk and put it in the drawer. “So you’re going back to Cuba?”

  “You’ve heard everything I have to say.”

  “Yes. It’s on the tape, but I feel like President Kennedy must have felt when he said: ‘
It’s a hell of a way to learn things!’ You got out once, chico, but I doubt if you can do it again.”

  “Half of me got out, that’s all. If I die there this time, at least I’ll be fully dead and not running around just half dead as I’ve done up here. Have you any advice?”

  “Yes. Let Al Clooney help you milk the truth from García. I’ve seen him work. He’s better and safer than Pentothal. He’s a lawyer—”

  “With offices in the Ainsley Building. You’ve said that before. The great examiner for the Friends of Cuba. If he’s in the phone book I’ll call him in the morning.”

  “He’s in the book.”

  “Why don’t they put him in the new Federal Building where he belongs?” I demanded. “It must be a blasted nuisance each month when those pretty federal pay checks come in to have to send Albert Clooney’s over to the Ainsley Building by messenger from there.”

  My bullet holes and ulcers were all working together in high at the sorrow reflected in Luis’ face. I left before he could get a chance to tell me to “Be a good boy!” Fate may force you to cut your best friend to ribbons, but that doesn’t make it a joy.

  11

  After leaving Luis’ the night before, I had driven back to my apartment not only in the LeSabre but in a semicoma. I had stumbled into bed in what I diagnosed as “a state of utter exhaustion,” closed my eyes in blessed sleep and promptly stayed awake until dawn.

  The air conditioner was having some kind of an emotional problem and kept hissing at me. I shut it off and opened the window. An hour later my pillowcase, pajamas and sheets had developed edema and I felt as though I was trying to rest in the middle of the Rose Bowl after a week’s rain. My breathing was erratic, and I found I was choking to death from a gardenia smog. The silence began to keep me awake. I closed the window and let the air conditioner continue its hate song.