Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

She took off her dark glasses and looked at me seriously with those silvery eyes. “Leo, I think maybe you saved my life,” were her first words. “I don’t know who was watching me or what their motivation was. But since you found me, I’m assuming you’ve figured it out.”

“I can answer that,” I said. “The FBI was watching you , and The Company was watching them . But lucky for you, I was watching them both.”

“And were you able to figure out from my cryptic notes and links why Hemingway was so hunted and haunted?” she said. “Why they wanted to blot out his memory altogether, before he remembered too much?”

“Yep,” I assured her. “He was Mr. antifascist, and he’d figured out what was going to happen, at any moment, in Cuba. Just as you figured out how it’s connected with what is about to happen right now, just next door.”

She looked at me for a moment, then she grinned a wide grin. I was so happy to see her smile like that.

“So were you able to do it—what I suggested?” she asked.

“The Company seems to think it’s a real peachy idea,” I assured her. “You’ll get the first fellowship grant. So you’d better get it written from those notes pretty fast. After all, the trials are going to begin next week.”

“I don’t have equipment to type it on,” she said. “The asshole took my computer.”

“There’s a new invention called pencil and paper,” I told her. “If you play your cards right, I think I can get you some. From what I can tell of your prior efforts, it seems safer than surfing the web. Why not try it? After all, my dear sister, as Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember their own past are condemned to repeat it.’”

When she agreed, I added:

“But tit for tat, my dear Paloma. I just want a couple of answers by way of payment. A symbolic translation: If, as you say, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea at the height of the Cold War, and if it really was an allegory about Cuba—then who was Santiago, the old man who was named for a saint? What does the marlin, the giant fish that got eaten by sharks, represent? And who were the sharks?”

“You’ll have to figure it out when you read my report,” she told me, still smiling.

And I did.

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world—or at least as much as I have seen.

1899was a very big year:

• The Spanish-American War has just ended: The U.S., having helped Cuba attain independence from Spain with the rallying cry “Cuba Libre,” now occupies Cuba.

• The United Fruit Company is incorporated, merging with several other importers; it now controls 75% of banana imports to the U.S.

• The first dictator to take over Guatemala with a gun, Manuel Estrada Cabrera seizes control of that country.

• Ernest Hemingway is born in Illinois.

1901:Guatemala hires United Fruit to manage its postal service.

1903:Guatemala grants United Fruit a ninety-nine-year concession to build and maintain a railroad, with land in exchange; U.S. intervenes in Panama; U.S. intervenes in Honduras; U.S. intervenes in Dominican Republic.

1904:Author O. Henry coins the term “Banana Republic” for countries with one main product like bananas, ruled by a small rich military-elite of landowners at the tip and a vast impoverished populace crushed beneath like an iceberg.

1912:U.S. intervenes in Cuba, Panama, Honduras. United Fruit now gets land concessions in Honduras to build another railroad; the poor are pressed into service as banana workers, the cash crop.

1914–19 WWI

1917–1933:U.S. Army invades and occupies Cuba until 1933.

1928:“Banana Massacre” in Columbia: United Fruit workers pressed into service now strike and are killed by government militia.

1936–39:Spanish Civil War against elected government (loyalists) and General Franco (fascists); Hemingway sides with the former, but the latter prevail.

1937:Hemingway speaks against fascism at Carnegie Hall (1937) while his Spanish friend in Paris, Pablo Picasso, paints Guernica to protest the fascist bombing destruction of the small Basque city (1937); both men are labeled by Western governments as possible communists for their antifascist stance.

1941–45 WWII:German submarines in the Caribbean reduce United Fruit banana exports; Hemingway and his “Crook Factory” of ex-Loyalist Spaniards hunt German subs off the coast of Cuba; “Chiquita Banana” icon styled after Carmen Miranda, invented to use after war.

1942:J. Edgar Hoover has the FBI open a file on Hemingway as possible communist; file remains active until Hemingway’s death in 1961.

1945:Chiquita Banana jingle copyrighted; bananas promoted as the healthiest and most useful food as breakfast for babies, women.

1947:Guatemala begins support of labor laws to protect peasant workers against foreign multinational firms.

1951:Jacobo Arbenz elected Guatemala president, begins agrarian reform; Hemingway writes The Old Man and the Sea in Cuba, about a fisherman from Canary Islands, Spain, living in Cuba, who captures a huge marlin, fights it for days, calls it “brother,” defeats it, and ties it to his boat, and it is eaten by sharks before he returns to port. The old man dies.

1952:Guatemala Decree 900 passed, a reform act to redistribute unused land that had been given in ninety-nine-year leases to foreign companies like United Fruit; young Argentine med student Ernesto “Che” Guevara assists in reform moves; The Old Man and the Sea published to universal success and acclaim.

1953:Guatemala president redistributes 210,000 acres of United Fruit’s unused land to peasants for cultivation; pays United Fruit their own appraisal value (low for tax-free purposes) for land; John Foster Dulles (U.S. Secretary of State) and brother Allen Dulles (director of CIA)—both shareholders of United Fruit—back a successful coup against Guatemala; Eisenhower instantly recognizes new military government; Che Guevara, appalled, vows to retaliate; The Old Man and the Sea wins Pulitzer, Hemingway’s first major award.

1954:Banana workers strike across Honduras, U.S. investigates United Fruit’s monopoly; Che joins Raul and Fidel Castro to launch revolution against U.S.-backed Cuban government; from Cuba, Hemingway opposes U.S. Senate hearings on un-American activities, says the only thing to stop senator Joseph McCarthy is “a .577 Solid” (Elephant bullet); Hemingway in two successive plane crashes in Africa, wins Nobel prize in literature, returns to Cuba.

1958:Fidel Castro takes power in Cuba, U.S.-backed president Batista leaves; Castro seizes United Fruit properties, says “Cuba is no Guatemala.”

1960:Banana workers strike in Panama; Hemingway leaves Cuba for Ketchum, Idaho (July); John Kennedy elected U.S. president (November); Hemingway sent to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, undergoes two months of electroconvulsive shock therapy (December–January), while still privately being investigated closely by the FBI. Guatemala begins civil war between (U.S.-backed) military governments and (Cuba-backed) peasant-guerrilla fighters; the war will drag on for thirty-six years.

1961:John Kennedy inaugurated (January); CIA Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (April); Hemingway receives two more months of shock therapy (April–June); FBI follow Hemingway inside the hospital for observation and tap his phone; Hemingway commits suicide (July)