Noel Hynd - Hostage in Havana

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.”