Lawrence Block - Killing Castro

But it was all up to her. Because one way or the other he was going to get in her pants, whether she liked it or not, whether she was somebody’s wife or somebody’s sister or somebody’s mother, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. If it had to be rape that’s what it was going to be. It was up to her.

The underbrush got progressively thicker and Garth waded through it like a rhinoceros charging through savannah grasses. The guy called Manuel was keeping up a running stream of chatter but Garth wasn’t listening. He was busy watching the broad.

Some party, he thought. And for this they were paying him twenty grand!

The boat took Turner and Hines to a coral reef hedging a broad bay. There a man met their ship in a rowboat. Turner and Hines joined the man and he put them ashore just outside Matanzas.

Matanzas is a commercial port on the north coast of Cuba, some thirty-six miles due east of Havana. The city’s name means slaughter in Spanish. Turner knew enough Spanish to get along. Slaughter, he thought. Not murder, not assassination. Slaughter. He wondered who was going to get slaughtered.

He found out in a hurry. The man beached the rowboat and joined them on shore. He was leading them to the Bellamar Caves, a group of limestone caverns three miles outside of Matanzas. There they would spend the night.

“¡Manos arriba!” The voice was loud, sharp. Turner whirled around, flung his hands up in response to the command. There were two tall men across the road, both bearded, both uniformed. One held a pistol.

They dogtrotted across the road, eyes bright. This was it, then, Turner thought. They had entered illegally, and Castro’s men had them already.

The man with the gun was talking now, gesticulating wildly, demanding in rapid Spanish who they were and what they were doing. The Cuban who had rowed them in looked frightened. Hines was standing numb, his hands high in the air.

Turner waited. His muscles tensed. He looked at the gun. It was pointed between him and Hines now. The soldier was getting careless.

Turner sprang.

One hand closed on the soldier’s wrist, driving the gun down. His other hand clenched into a fist that connected solidly with the side of the soldier’s head. The man reeled backward, and now everybody was getting into the act. Hines and the Cuban were on the other soldier—they had him before he had a chance to get his gun from its holster. Turner was on his man, pounding his head down against the road, beating the man to death.

It was short, and very bloody. It was a fight conducted in silence, a battle from a silent movie. It ended with two bearded soldiers lying dead in the road. Turner stood up, drained, every muscle aching. He saw Hines with his nose bleeding. The Cuban had a huge welt on his forehead, another welt on one cheek.

“This is bad,” the man said in Spanish.

“They will know we have been here. They will find these men dead and they will wonder what has happened.”

“Can we get rid of the bodies?”

The Cuban thought for a moment. Suddenly he smiled. “Help me with them,” he said. “I shall take them in the rowboat. I shall take them far out, and they will be buried at sea with full naval honors.”

“Won’t they be missed?”

The Cuban shrugged. “Many soldiers desert,” he said. “Many leave the country. These will be deserters.”

Turner and Hines helped the Cuban with the bodies. They waited in the darkness while the man rowed out to sea in the small boat. It seemed to take forever before he returned, the boat empty of human cargo now.

“It is done,” he said. “Let us go. Quickly.”

He led them now to Bellamar. Guides led visitors through the limestone grottoes, but these guides went off duty at eight in the evening and did not return until seven in the morning. Hines and Turner were led through a cavern, along an underground trail. There were no lights. After a long stretch of darkness the Cuban flicked on a pocket flash and they could see where they were going.

They spent the night deep in the heart of Bellamar, far past the point where guides led turistas . There, four other men sat around a fire on which a pot of chili beans and rice was cooking slowly. Turner and Hines ate the beans and rice and drank wine from a jug. A sad-eyed Cuban strummed an out-of-tune guitar and sang songs.

The catacombs, Turner thought. A batch of crazy Christians hiding from the Romans. He took a long drink of wine and remembered the night before they had boarded the boat, the night in Miami, the rare steaks and the Canadian Club and the two hustlers. It had been good for the kid, for Hines. It had taken some of the tension out of his eyes. That was good.

And it had been good for Turner. First the steaks, prime strip sirloins fresh from the broiler. They had been burned on the outside and raw in the middle, the way steak should always be. The Canadian Club was good to wash the food down with, and the girls were there by the time the meal was done.

Two girls. One was a redhead and the other a blonde, and what the hell difference did it make if they had started life with the same shade of mouse-brown hair? They were a redhead and a blonde now. The redhead was a little taller, and the blonde’s breasts were a little larger, and they both knew as much about love-making as anyone else in the world. Maybe more.

It started out as a party, with the bottle passing from mouth to mouth, with the four of them sitting on the long couch and getting happily gassed. It finished up as an orgy, a full-blown orgy, a pretty fine way for Hines to lose his virginity. He lost it on the floor with the blonde at about the same time that Turner was enjoying the redhead on the couch.

Then they had traded off. And then they traded back, and at one point Turner watched with clinical detachment while the blonde and the redhead made love to Hines at the same time, the young novice jumping from one to the other with great agility, keeping both girls whimpering and thrashing. And, since turnabout was only fair play, then it had been his turn with both girls.

A good evening. A valuable evening, because all the liquor and all the lust made time run away, made death and murder and pursuit take a back seat to more immediate sensual excesses. And that was vital; you had to forget murder now and then or you went out of your mind.

Murder. Assassination. Killing. Slaughter. Matanzas.

The wine made sleep come in a hurry. Turner woke up around six. Hines was shaking him awake.

“We’re supposed to get out of here,” the kid was saying. “The guides come on in an hour. We have to leave before they start or we’re stuck here until tonight.”

Turner shook himself awake. He had slept in his clothes and he felt grimy. He sucked on his teeth, coughed, spat out phlegm. He found a crumpled cigarette in a shirt pocket and lit it. The smoke helped him wake up.

He yawned and stretched. Moreno, the sad-eyed guitar player of the night before, was the only Cuban who was awake. The others lay sleeping around the ashes of the campfire. They were all hunted men, Turner knew. They stayed in the caves all of the time. Moreno grinned quickly and passed the wine jug to Turner. Turner took a long swallow, offered the jug to Hines. The kid shook his head and Turner had another drink. He was awake now. It was time to get going.

“¿A donde vamos?” he asked Moreno. “Where are we going?”

“Habana.”

“¿Como?” he asked. “How? On foot?”

Moreno told them in Spanish simply to come, to follow. He led them out of the caves again. Turner decided that he could not possibly have found his way alone. He wondered how Moreno managed it. One cave looked pretty much like the next.

“The underground,” he told Hines. “They don’t kid around here. The underground lives under the ground.”