Clive Cussler - The Eye of Heaven

“It’s certainly imposing,” Remi said, gazing up at the fort’s towering stone walls. “How do we get to it?”

“There’s a tunnel that runs under the harbor for automobile traffic.”

“So we’re not going to have to swim the channel?”

“Not tonight.”

“You want to go over there right now?”

“We can tour it tomorrow. Tonight we’re sightseeing. Taking in the city’s sights and sounds.”

A group of young women passed them on the malecón , their perfume lingering on the light wind. Remi and Sam followed them, having no special destination in mind. They walked east along the waterfront and then turned up a small street into the historic section of old Havana, a lively area where locals and tourists wandered along the sidewalks. Bricks poked through battered building façades like skeletal bones, the mortar long ago eroded away, lending them an aura of seedy disrepair.

They rounded a corner and nearly collided with a wizened man sporting a panama hat, his skin as dark as a well-worn saddle, puffing on a cigar almost as big as his arm. He smiled, a flash of pink gums, his teeth long ago sacrificed to age and circumstance, and muttered a sandpaper “Perdón” before continuing on his way, trailing a cloud of pungent smoke behind him.

“Are you sure about this, Sam?” Remi asked in a whisper.

“Absolutely. All the guidebooks say this section of town is as safe as the womb.”

As if to underscore the point, two soldiers with machine guns approached, their eyes watchful, studying the surroundings with the vigilance of a patrol in a war zone.

“There, does that make you feel any better?” Sam asked.

“It might if they were over sixteen.”

“Everyone’s a critic.”

They stepped around a pool of stagnant water gathered in a low spot among the ancient cobblestones.

Remi pointed to a small yellow sign fifty yards to their left. “Look. There’s one of Hemingway’s haunts. La Bodeguita del Medio.”

“I regard that as an omen. It’s the universe commanding us to stop.”

“According to Papa, this is the best mojito in Havana.”

“That’s good enough for me. Lead the way,” Sam said.

The bar was crowded and smaller than expected. Its walls were covered with autographs of the notorious, the famous, and the forgotten. Obligatory photographs of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro glared at them from dingy frames. A stool freed up and Sam elbowed through the tourists and held it for Remi, who took the seat gratefully and caught the bartender’s eye.

“Dos mojitos, por favor,” she said, holding up two fingers.

The man nodded and moved to make the drinks, crushing the mint leaves with focused concentration before pouring a liberal slug of rum into a stainless steel shaker. He added lime juice, sugarcane syrup, and soda and then shook the concoction with sincere intensity, making a production out of the cocktail preparation while several cameras clicked behind Remi’s head.

The drinks arrived on the scarred wooden bar, each with a sprig of mint atop it. Sam held his sweating glass up in a toast that was met by Remi.

One mojito led to another and soon they were chatting with a Canadian group bound for Varadero the next day — a beach resort seventy-five miles east of Havana famous for its hospitality and its sun-drenched shores. As the crowd got louder, Sam glanced at his watch and gestured to the bartender for the tab.

Outside, the darkened street seemed more ominous than when they’d arrived at dusk. They hurried along with other tourists, making their way from the waterfront toward the city center. When they arrived at a large hotel, Remi approached one of the loitering taxi drivers and asked him how far the restaurant was. The old man looked her up and down without expression.

“San Cristobal Paladar? Too far to walk. Maybe ten minutes, maybe less, by car. You want me to take you there?”

Sam nodded and they got in.

The restaurant was in a colonial home in the middle of town and the food was divine — an unexpected treat. When dinner was over, the owner called a taxi for them and waited by the front door for the vehicle to arrive, chatting with Remi about the ups and downs of operating a business in a Communist country.

Back at the hotel, Sam convinced her to have a nightcap in the lobby bar. They savored snifters of aged Havana Club Gran Reserva fifteen-year Añejo rum as a tuxedoed musician stroked the keys of a grand piano in the atrium.

“Well, so far, I have to say this hasn’t been terrible,” Remi conceded.

“Good food, good drink, and good company. Always a winner in my book.”

“I just hope we don’t have hangovers tomorrow from all the rum.”

“It’s common knowledge that when you drink it in the islands, you never get a hangover.”

“Interesting. I hadn’t heard that. Sounds like another Sam Fargo invention.”

For a few short hours in their usually hectic lives, the world was perfect, the mood tranquil, the music hypnotic, the trade winds blowing outside, as they had for centuries and would for countless more.

The next morning Dr. Lagarde was waiting for them in the hotel atrium lobby. A short, paunchy man in his sixties, with a dense gray beard and round spectacles, he wore a white tropical-weight linen suit and a pale blue button-down shirt, a seemingly mandatory panama hat perched on his head.

“I’m honored to meet you,” Lagarde said, shaking first Remi’s hand and then Sam’s.

“Thanks for taking the time out to play tour guide,” Sam said.

“Please, you’re on my island. It’s the least I can do for guests.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Remi said.

“ Bueno. So what would you like to see first? There is much of interest here, depending upon your tastes.”

“We’re really here to study Morro Castle, Doctor.”

“Please, call me Raphael.”

“And we’re Sam and Remi. Can you tell us about the castle?”

“Of course. It’s a national treasure. Everyone in Havana knows its history and most have been there a hundred times. In the old days, it was free — for the people.” Raphael sighed and shook his head. “Like so much, that, too, has changed and we must now pay to see our own history.”

“Can we go there and have you show us around?”

“Absolutely. My car is parked around the corner. Although we may want to take a taxi because parking there will be a problem.”

Remi nodded. “Whatever you think is best.”

Seven minutes later, the cab dropped them off at the base of the hill. The fort loomed above them, the ugly black snouts of cannons jutting over the walls, pointed at the channel that any invaders would have to pass through. Raphael led them through the gates, where Sam dutifully paid their entry fee.

Like so much of Havana, the fort’s walls were crumbling, their surfaces marred by centuries of storms and blistering sun.

Dr. Lagarde removed his hat and fanned himself with it for a moment. “The fort was designed by an Italian engineer, Juan Bautista Antonelli, who was rather well known at the time. His design was approved by the Spanish and construction started in 1589. Up until then, the hill only had a few cannons, and a stone hut for the guards, which was inadequate to protect the town as it grew from a small village to the main Spanish trading hub for the New World. There were constant threats by pirates, and after building the first lighthouse, the governor appealed to the Crown to build a proper fortification. It took forty years to build the fort, which was armed with sixty-four cannons.”

“But the British took it at some point, didn’t they?” Sam asked.

“Indeed they did. In 1762. They held Havana for a year and it was returned to Spain as part of an end to the Seven Years’ War. Immediately after that, construction began on La Cabaña, which is the larger fort you can see just past the point. That took ten years to build, and, together with Morro Castle, it made Havana impervious to attack.”