Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

There were tourists milling around inside the fence, some taking pictures of the huge shade tree while others roamed around the tiny windowless building. Other people went in and out of the Museum of Havana directly behind it, and more tourists stood and read the menu and the prices posted for the restaurant inside. Most turned away shaking their heads, but a few actually went in.

Directly in front of them, shaded by an umbrella of her own and seated behind a flimsy-looking card table on a padded stool, was an ancient black woman, her rake-thin body encased in a formless, faded print dress. Her face was a mass of wrinkles and the skin was stretched like leathery parchment over her bony arms. Her feet were bare and she was smoking a narrow cigar. On the table in front of her was a cooler, a large deck of cards, a few silvery trinkets and some strange-looking leather thong necklaces with small cloth bags hanging from them.

“Who is this woman?” Holliday asked.

“Mama Oya,” said Eddie.

“Does she have a real name?”

“If she ever had one, even she has forgotten it,” replied Eddie. They approached the woman behind the card table. Holliday was surprised to see what appeared to be an old-fashioned six-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola lying on a bed of crushed ice in the cooler.

“ Hekua hey Yansa, ” said Eddie, bowing slightly.

“ Hekua hey yourself, Eddie Cabrera, the child who used to be called El Vampiro .” She spoke almost perfect English.

“ El Vampiro? ”

“It is nothing, Doc,” said Eddie.

The old woman gave a brief cackling laugh as she looked up at Holliday. Her eyes were ice blue and clear with no hint of age. They could have been the eyes of a young girl. “When he was a little boy Eddie would take off all his clothes and walk around the streets of Old Havana in the middle of the night,” said Mama Oya, grinning around her cigar. She turned back to Eddie. “You come about your brother, the white-haired one.”

“You knew this?”

“Mama Oya knows everything. Just like I know your friend is American and was once a soldier.”

“Canadian,” said Holliday.

“ No mientas a Mama Oya, gringo, ” said the old woman sharply. “You are an American, you were once a soldier and then you taught soldiers. You hated your father and love your wife still even though she has been gone for many years.”

My God, thought Holliday, literally taking a step back. The wizened creature in front of him couldn’t have known all that. Unless Eddie had somehow managed to tell her. He turned and looked at his friend, the question clear in his expression. Eddie shook his head slowly.

“I know this in the same way as I know that Eddie has crossed an ocean to search for his brother, Domingo, so he might ease his mother’s pain. I know because Mama Oya sits here and sees many things.”

“You have seen Domingo?” Eddie asked.

“I saw him driving Raul’s daughter, the one married to Espin. They came to this place more than once for their meetings in the night.”

“Who came, Mama?” Eddie asked.

“Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez Callejas, Luis Perez Rospide, Lieutenant Colonel Rojas.”

“The man who runs Tecnotex SA,” explained Eddie. “They import anything technological…computers, satellite phones-all for the top people only.” He turned to Mama Oya. “Any others, Mama?”

“Jesus Bermudez Cutino,” said the old woman.

“Director of Military Intelligence.”

“Juan Almeida Bosque.”

“He oversees all real estate transactions and builds hotels exclusively for the use of foreigners.”

“Colonel Brito.”

“CEO of Aerogaviota. It has its own fleet of helicopter based at Baracoa Air Base. The personnel are all military. It is supposed to be for tourism and rentals to foreign businessmen, but it is actually there to provide air support in case of insurrection.”

“Also there was Ramiro Valdes,” said Mama Oya darkly. “A devil, truly.”

“Minister of Informatics and Communications, also minister of the Interior-the Secret Police, also the minister of Agriculture. He is Adolf Hitler, this man. He went to a conference in Venezuela, and the joke in Havana was that he’d gone there to fix their silla electrica , their electric chair. He is a sadist and a murderer, amigo, and very dangerous.”

“Were you here on the night when Eddie’s brother disappeared?” Holliday asked.

“Buy something from Mama Oya and perhaps I’ll tell you.”

Holliday took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet, laid it on the card table and picked up a freezing-cold Coca-Cola from the cooler. He used the metal bottle opener hanging from a string threaded through a hole high on the side of the container and took a sip.

He was surprised. It tasted exactly like the five-cent bottles he’d bought as a child from Pop Mercier’s grocery store down the street from Uncle Henry’s house in Fredonia, New York. You’d drop a nickel into the slot and it would allow you to drag your drink through a maze of metal tubes until it was free, dripping water and wonderfully chilled on a hot summer’s day.

“It is the same as you remember, isn’t it, gringo?” Mama Oya said. “The Mexicans use sugar instead of corn syrup.”

“Is that so?” Holliday said, trying to be calm in the face of a tiny old woman who seemed to be able to read his mind and then some. He took another long pull on the Coke. She was right; the taste was lighter and sweeter than the heavy goop they sold in cans now. It was like stepping into the past.

“That is so, gringo.” The old woman smiled. “And yes, I was here on the night that Eddie disappeared.”

“Did he speak with you?” Eddie asked.

“Yes.”

“You were still here so late at night?”

“The Plaza des Armas is my home, gringo. I have no other. Domingo knew where I go to dream.”

“What did he tell you, Mama Oya?”

The old woman turned over the top card in her large deck and laid it out on the table. It was a tarot card, but unlike any Holliday had ever seen. It showed a dancing man, his belt hung with skulls, a machete in one hand, a severed head in the other and the face of the devil. The colors of the card were green and black, and the number 7 was printed above the image, as was the name Ogun printed in heavy, dark ink.

“ Ogun oko dara obaniche aguanile ichegun ire, ” the old woman hissed. “He told me that if Eddie came, to tell him that he had gone to the Valle del Muerte. The Valley of Death.”

Other than looking a little silly, like Mr. Spock in the old Star Trek series, having a Bluetooth screwed into your earhole had a great number of advantages for the average intelligence agent-you no longer looked like a complete idiot talking to yourself in virtually any situation or environment and you could keep in touch with anyone else on your surveillance team. William Copeland Black sat on a stool in the Insomnia Coffee Shop on Grafton Street and kept an eye on Fusilier’s Gate, the main entrance to St. Stephen’s Green. It was a gray day, threatening rain, but there were still lots of people on the pedestrian mall just outside the big picture window of the coffee shop.

Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein, Fidel’s personal physician, was in play. After an afternoon of shopping on Grafton Street, he was supposed to enter the Green through the Fusilier’s Gate on his way back to the Shelburne. So far he was almost twenty minutes late. Black wasn’t worried-yet-but he was beginning to get that familiar stiffness in the back of his neck that meant something was going wrong.

“Anything?” he said. There was a series of responding clicks in his ear. One click for no, two for yes. Where was the doctor?