Lawrence Block - Killing Castro

“Well, I don’t get it.”

Turner shrugged. “There’s not a hell of a lot to get. I took this job to beat a stateside murder rap. I was going to run for Brazil. Well, why Brazil? I’m in Cuba. I can stay here.”

“Stay here?”

“Get work, find a place to live. I don’t know. I like it here, Jim. And I’m here already. Why commit another murder so I can start running all over again?”

“Jesus Christ. What would you do here, for God’s sake?”

“Anything. There’s a lot of new construction going up—and I’ve swung construction work before. I know how to handle heavy equipment and they’re short of that kind of labor.”

“So you’ll throw away twenty grand to work a steam shovel? That doesn’t sound like you, Turner.”

“Maybe not. Or maybe it does, I don’t know. And there’s a guy I got friendly with, a grifter type. He wants me to throw in with him. He works some semi-legitimate cons and he makes a living. And it sounds a hell of a lot better to me than tossing bombs around like an imitation anarchist. Castro’s not my enemy. He may be bad, but it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference to me. All I want is a nice quiet place to live, food to eat, liquor to drink and a woman when I need one. I can get all those no matter who’s in charge here.”

“So you’re quitting.”

“Maybe.”

Hines went over to his bunk, sat down. He was sweating. First the truth about Joe and now Turner doing a fadeout, gumming up the works by quitting cold on him. It was all falling apart at the seams—his whole little world.

He didn’t know how to tie it together again.

“Jesus,” he said. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“That’s up to you.”

“I can’t go ahead and throw the bomb—”

“Sure you can. I’ll put it together for you. It only takes one person to heave it. If we both go, it only makes it easier for them to spot us.”

“But—”

“You can even take my share of the dough. That makes it forty thou instead of twenty.”

“I don’t care about the money!”

“Hey,” Turner said. “Calm down, kid.”

“You don’t know, damn you. You don’t understand a goddamn thing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About everything. Joe was my brother, damn it, and Castro killed him. So I have to kill Castro. Can’t you get that into your fat head?”

“So kill him! I don’t care—”

“ Goddamn it! You know what I found out, Turner? Castro had a right to kill Joe. Joe was a turncoat, he got power happy and tried a coup of his own. Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m over here getting some kind of cockeyed revenge for my hero of a brother who had it coming all along! Isn’t that one for the goddamned books? Here I am living in a cruddy cellar and scheming like some kind of comic-strip character and it’s all for revenge. And Joe doesn’t deserve being avenged in the first place. How do you like that, Turner? And what the hell am I supposed to do now?”

He sat there, glaring. He was waiting for Turner to say something but the older man was silent, watching him with cool eyes. He felt like a nut now, like some kind of an idiot. He’d been shouting at the top of his lungs like a kid with a tantrum.

“Jim—”

“I’m sorry, Turner. I lost control.”

“Forget it. Jim, get the hell out of here. I didn’t know about Joe. How did you find out?”

“From the Luchar broad.”

“Are you sure she was telling it straight?”

“Yeah. I’ve checked around and… oh, hell, she wouldn’t have any reason to lie to me. If she was going to lie she’d do it the other way, Turner. She’d want me to stay revenge-happy so I wouldn’t blow the assassination. She wasn’t lying. It’s straight. Joe must have gone a little nutty or something. He probably lost his edge the same way Castro did. Power does that to a person. It happens all through history. But it takes a little of the steam out of… out of me , damn it. It’s like shooting the governor because your brother went to the chair for a murder he committed. It makes it silly.”

“Yeah.”

“Turner? What do I do now?”

“What I told you. Get the hell out.”

“Out of Cuba?”

“Uh-huh. Get the first boat back to the States and stay there. You’re not a criminal, kid. You’re young, you can go back to school and start fresh. You’ve got a story to save up and tell your own kids someday. In the meantime you can live instead of dying. Because if you stay in Havana they’re going to kill you, Jim. This game was a last chance for me. I figured there might be a nice easy way to bump Castro and stay alive. But there isn’t, and I can stay alive without it.”

“But—”

“And so can you. Look, you don’t care about the money. Remember? And the revenge seems kind of pointless now. So throw your hand in.”

“I don’t know.”

Turner took out a cigarette, lit it. He took a deep drag, let the smoke out in a thin stream. The air in the cellar was dense and the smoke stayed in a long, snakelike column as it rose slowly to the ceiling.

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m staying right here until Saturday. There are three other guys in on this, don’t forget. God knows where they are, but they’re supposed to be somewhere around here in Cuba. Ray Garrison, Matt Garth, Earl Fenton. You remember them?”

“I remember.”

“Yeah. Well, there’s no law saying we have to be the ones to hit Castro. They might get him first. If that happens, we have our twenty grand apiece without any risk. So I’m sticking around to see if maybe that’ll happen. It would be nice.”

Hines didn’t say anything.

“Saturday night,” Turner went on, “I clear out. Don’t ask where I’m going because I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I’ll hole up somewhere for the time being so that Lady Luchar and her hired hands can’t decide they don’t like me any more. Then I’ll apply for Cuban citizenship. I’ll go straight to the government and tell them I’m wanted for murder in the States and I like the climate better in Cuba. I’ll have a work permit the same day and a set of citizenship papers within the week. And I’ll be set.”

“And what should I do, Turner?”

“Stick around until Saturday. You don’t want to miss out on twenty grand, do you?”

“I told you—”

“That you don’t care about the money. I got that. But you wouldn’t throw it away if someone dropped it in your lap, would you?”

“No,” Hines admitted.

“Fine. So you hang around until Saturday. Then you grab a boat or a plane, go to the Swiss consulate and tell them you’re an American refugee, something like that. They’ll get you back to Miami and you can go it alone from there.”

“That’s the sensible way, huh?”

“Sure.”

Hines nodded to himself. There was always a sensible way, and there was another way that seemed more honest. He decided it was a hell of a shame that the honest way was never the sensible way.

“Will you put those bombs together? And explain to me how they work?”

“Why—”

“Saturday night,” Hines went on desperately, doggedly. “Saturday night you’ll show me how the bombs work. Sunday you can disappear. I don’t care. Because Sunday I’m going to blow the hell out of Castro.”

“Didn’t you hear a thing I said? Don’t you remember what you said, goddamn it?”

“I remember.”

“Then—”

“I don’t even want to talk about it. I know—I’ll be getting killed, maybe, and all for a brother who had it coming. But I don’t want to think about it, it only makes my head ache. I can’t take it any more. I don’t know what’s right or wrong, Turner. I can’t tell the heroes from the villains. It’s not black and white like a morality play. It’s all kinds of shades of gray.”