“Becker is here because his network is being rounded up in Brazil,” said Delgado. “The Hauptsturmführer isn’t sure about heading back into that shit storm. He’s opened negotiations with some… ah… local representatives about either turning state’s evidence or working both sides of the street.”
“Why are you telling me?” I said.
Delgado rubbed his lower lip. Sweat ran down his cheeks and dripped from his chin. It was very hot in the little room. “I’m telling you, Lucas, because we don’t want you bumping into Herr Becker in some bodega and blowing his head off or turning him over to the local constabulary until we complete our negotiations.”
“We?” I said.
“Me,” said Delgado.
“All right,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Not from me.”
I went to the door, never quite turning my back on him.
“Lucas?” His left hand had gone beneath the table edge again. Standing half in the sunlight as I was, I had trouble seeing him well in the dim interior. “Sorry about the kid,” he said.
I put my hand behind me as if to scratch an itch. “Do you know who did it?” I said.
“Of course not,” said Delgado. “I just heard about the burial and put two and two together. You should tell your writer pal not to use kids in his spy games.”
“You don’t have any idea who killed Santiago?” I said, watching his eyes.
Delgado’s lips curled in his simulacrum of a smile. “Was his name Santiago?”
THE FINCA GROUNDS SEEMED EMPTY when I got back. Then I remembered that the servants were off that evening and that Winston Guest and Patchi Ibarlucia had planned to take the boys to El Pacífico for dinner.
I knocked, received no answer, and walked into the main house.
Hemingway was sitting where I had left him, in his ugly floral chair in the center of the room with the drinks tray to his left, but now all of the cats were gone. Instead of Boissy D’Anglas on his lap, he had the Mannlicher .256 from the boat between his legs and the muzzle just under his chin. The butt of the rifle rested on the rough weave of the carpet. His feet were bare and his big toe was inside the trigger guard, just resting on the trigger.
“You’re just in time, Joe,” said Hemingway. “I’ve been waiting for you. I want to show you something important.”
21
I STOOD FIFTEEN FEET from Hemingway and watched him prop the muzzle of the Mannlicher under his chin. I did not know if the weapon was loaded. I did not like it that the writer had called me “Joe.” In private, he never called me by my first name.
“Estamos copados,” said Hemingway. “And this is what we do when we’re surrounded, Joe.” He put both hands on the barrel and leaned it forward, his bare toe moving tighter on the curve of the trigger. Hemingway was wearing only a stained blue shirt and dirty khaki shorts.
I said nothing.
“In the mouth, Joe,” he said. “The palate is the softest part of the head.” He moved the muzzle to within inches of his open mouth and pressed the trigger down with his big toe. The hammer dry-clicked. Hemingway raised his head and smiled. I recognized it as some sort of a challenge.
“That’s fucking stupid,” I said.
Hemingway moved very carefully as he propped the rifle against the arm of his chair and got to his feet. He might have been very drunk, but he was balancing easily on the balls of his feet as he flexed his fingers. “What did you say, Joe?”
“That was fucking stupid,” I said. “And even if it wasn’t, putting the barrel of a firearm in your mouth is something only a maricón would do.”
“Would you like to repeat that, Joe?” said Hemingway, enunciating carefully.
“You heard me,” I said.
Hemingway nodded, walked to the back door, and beckoned me outside. I followed.
Standing by the pool, he took off his dirty shirt and folded it carefully on the back of a metal chair. “You will want to remove your shirt,” Hemingway said in Spanish. “I plan to spill very much of your blood on it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Fuck what you want,” said Hemingway. “And fuck you.” In Spanish, with a thick Cuban accent, he added, “I shit on your whoring mother.”
“I don’t want to do this,” I said again.
Hemingway shook his head as if clearing it, stepped forward quickly, and launched a left jab at my face. I ducked it, raised my fists, and began circling to my right, working from the assumption that vision in his left eye was worse than in his right. Hemingway jabbed again. I deflected it.
His opening jabs were—much like the Cuban insult—mere provocations. I realized at once that, like me, he was a counterpuncher. The beginning of a bout between counterpunchers can be deadly dull.
I smiled at him. “Piropos, señor?” I said mincingly. Then, flatly, “Pendejo. Puta. Maricón. Bujarón.”
Hemingway came at me then. In the two seconds before the real fight began, I realized that I could kill him easily but had no idea if I could beat him in a fistfight.
He aimed a solid left jab at my mouth. I blocked it and he swung a hard right hook around to my belly. I danced back, but his huge fist still caught me solidly in the ribs, knocking much of the wind out of me. Hemingway followed with another left and a right hook over my guard that should have broken my cheekbone but careened off the top of my skull instead.
Hemingway had a very heavy punch. That’s an advantage, of course, but one that can work against amateur fighters who get too used to depending on a knockout or knockdown in the first minute of a fight. They forget that they sometimes have to go the distance.
Hemingway moved in close, grabbed my shirt with his left hand, and chopped a right hook down at me again. I took the blow on my shoulder, crouched low, and hooked him three times in the belly.
The air went out of him with a soft whoof and he closed on me, pulling me tight, using me to prop himself up while he caught his breath, but trying to do damage at the same time. His belly had been soft, but he had been ready for the blows and was not about to go down. He grabbed at my hair, but it was too short to give him much grip. He drove me back toward the wall of the finca, using his bulk and greater weight to move us across the patio. I buried my chin in his shoulder and pressed hard against him, not giving him a shot at anything except my back. His kidney punches still hurt like hell. Backpedaling, realizing that once he got me against that rough wall he could use his weight to do real damage, I butted him in the chin and pushed him away when his head snapped back.
Hemingway shook sweat out of his eyes and spat blood. I slapped him hard across the face with a fast backhand, heard him growl, and caught him with a good right hook as he charged in.
He did not go down. I was out of fighting shape, but not that out of shape. That hook—even though it had caught him on the side of the head instead of the jaw—had taken care of bigger men in the past. Hitting Hemingway’s skull had been like punching an anvil.
He moved in again and grabbed my arms, his thumbs moving fast and tight, squeezing hard on the insides of my elbows between the upper muscles and my forearms, trying to damage the tendons at the bases of my biceps. I raised my knee, but he swiveled fast enough to take the blow on his hip instead of his testicles. I kicked again, he released my arms, and I caught him twice on the right ear with my left as he moved back. His ear began swelling immediately, but I realized that his thumbs had done some damage—my left arm was almost numb and my right forearm tingled as if it had fallen asleep. This son of a bitch had learned his tricks well as a kid in Chicago.
Hemingway was panting heavily now as we circled again, moving toward the pool. He backed into a metal chair and kicked it out of his way. As he was doing that, I moved in with a combination, but he blocked both blows and caught me above the left eye as I backed out. I shook the blood out of my eye. The brow was swelling quickly, but not low enough to blind me before the bout was over.
Hemingway came
in again, breathing hard. I could smell the gin on his breath and in his sweat.
His right fist came in low and hard and would have smashed my balls into pulp if I had not levitated back and up. I took the blow on my inner thigh and felt my right leg go numb even as Hemingway’s left fist clubbed down against my right temple hard enough to send me spinning.
For several seconds I could not see anything except red spots or hear anything except the roar and rush of the blood waterfall in my skull. But I stayed on my feet, completed my spin, and unleashed a right uppercut to where I expected the bigger man to be moving in.
I was off by inches, but my fist still went through his guard and caught him square on his bare chest. Through the waterfall noise, the blow sounded like a sledgehammer in a slaughterhouse.
I backpedaled and covered up, waiting for his continued attack, kicking the overturned patio chair away again, shaking my head to clear my vision, and hoping that I was not going to back into the swimming pool. No attack came for several seconds, and I had time to shake away the worst of the roaring and get some of my vision back.
Hemingway was leaning forward, vomiting onto the patio stones. His right ear was obscenely swollen—looking like a bunch of red grapes—there was blood and vomit in his beard, and his left eye was almost closed from a blow I did not remember landing. I dropped my guard halfway and staggered a few steps closer, opening my mouth to say something about a truce.
Still retching, Hemingway threw a roundhouse right that would have taken my head off if I hadn’t ducked under it. I stayed down, duck-stepped closer, and hit him twice in the belly.
The writer staggered closer, grabbed my shirt as if for support, pulled me upright, came up quickly, and butted me in the chin.
I felt a side tooth splinter as my head snapped back. I tried to backpedal, but Hemingway was hanging on again with his left hand, punching me hard in the ribs with his right. His big teeth were snapping as he tried to bite my ear, my throat. I heard my battered shirt rip down the front as I pulled away and caught him on the cheekbone with two short, hard, straight lefts. His guard went down, and I came around with a perfect hook to his solar plexus, remembering at the last instant to hold back just enough so as not to kill him.
He doubled over and reeled away, but still did not go down. A second later, gasping and staggering backward, he tripped over the metal chair and fell heavily onto the paving stones.
I stepped forward, wiped more blood out of my left eye, and waited.
Hemingway got slowly to his knees, then to one knee, and then to his feet. His right ear was swollen and bleeding. The flesh around his right cheekbone was purple. His left eye was closed now from swelling, his mouth and short beard were covered with blood, and his chest hair was matted with blood and vomit. Hemingway grinned at me with bloody teeth and staggered forward, his arms rising again, his swollen fists closing.
I grabbed his arms, pulled him into a clinch, and buried my chin in his shoulder again so he could not butt me or push me away. “Tie,” I gasped.
“Fuck… that,” gasped the writer, and dug a weak left into my ribs.
I pushed him away, swung a hard right at his bloody chin, missed, and went to one knee.
Hemingway brought his fist down against the side of my head hard enough to make sparks leap in my vision, and then he sat down on the patio stone next to me.
“You… take… back that… maricón?” gasped Hemingway.
“No,” I said. I felt around between my swollen lip and gums until I found the splinter of broken tooth. I snapped it free and spit it out. “Fuck you,” I said. “And the maricón horse you rode in on.”
Hemingway laughed, stopped laughing, held his ribs, spat blood, and chuckled more carefully. “Muy buena pelea,” he said.
I started to shake my head but stopped quickly when the patio began to tilt and spin. “No… such thing… as a good fight,” I said between gasps for air. “Fucking waste of… time… energy.” I rubbed my mouth again. “Teeth.”
I looked at my hands. The knuckles were swollen and scraped. It felt as if someone had run over them with a small car.
Hemingway rolled to his knees and moved toward me. I got to my knees to meet him, my arms coming up so slowly it felt as if there were lead weights on my wrists. This son of a bitch is forty-three fucking years old, I thought. What did he fight like when he was my age?
Hemingway’s arms came around me clumsily. I waited for the blows and butts, then realized that he was patting my back with his swollen hands. He was saying something, but I had trouble hearing him through the renewed waterfall in my skull.
“… inside, Joe. Marty had a steak in the freezer,” he said. “Good bottle of Tavel on ice.”
“You’re hungry?” I said as we helped each other to our feet, each leaning against the other for support. There were drops of blood spattered over most of the stones by the pool, and the evening wind was blowing long, blue streamers of what I realized had been my shirt.
“Yeah, I’m hungry,” said Hemingway, steering me toward the door. “Why not? My stomach’s empty.”
THAT NIGHT, Maria was even more solicitous than she had been the night before. “Poor, poor, José,” she murmured, putting cool, wet towels on my face, hands, and ribs to slow the swelling. “I have seen this before with my brothers. Did the other man suffer?”
“Terribly,” I said, wincing slightly as the cool towel touched my battered ribs. I was lying on my back and wearing nothing but my undershorts. Maria wore only her thin cotton shift. The lantern was turned low.
“Is there any part of you that does not hurt, my José?” she whispered.
“Just one part,” I said.
“Show me,” whispered Maria.
I showed her without pointing.
“Are you sure it does not hurt?” she whispered. “It looks all red and inflamed.”
“Shut up,” I said, and drew her down onto me. Gently.
“We will not kiss on the lips in honor of your poor mouth,” she whispered. “But I can kiss elsewhere, yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We must make the swelling go away, no?”
“Shut up,” I said.
Toward morning, we slept.
THE BOYS WERE gone the next day, out on the Pilar fishing with Guest, Ibarlucia, and Sinsky. Hemingway and I shuffled around the finca like two eighty-year-olds who had been in a train wreck. We decided that we needed nourishment, and agreed that the nourishment had to be liquid in nature.
After he opened the second gin bottle, we locked the doors and got down to business. The dining room table was soon covered with nautical charts. Chart Number 2682 was the one we wanted. According to a legend on the chart, these coastal waters had been charted in 1930 and 1931 by the U.S.S. Nokomis.
“Longitude seventy-six degrees, forty-eight minutes, thirty seconds,” he said, checking the decoded transmission and looking back at the chart. “Latitude twenty-one degrees twenty-five minutes.” He stabbed a swollen finger down on the chart. “It’s Punta Roma,” confirming what we’d first seen on the Pilar’s chart.
I studied the charts again. Point Roma was far down the north coast of Cuba, not too distant from where we had explored the tourist caves. It was beyond the scattering of large keys—Sabinal, Guajaba, Romano—where the Southern Cross had been carrying out its sea trials and where the Pilar had spent so many fruitless days, and southeast of the large Bahía de Nuevitas.
“It’s a good place for a landing,” said Hemingway. “This is mostly empty coast along here. There’s not much of anything between Nuevitas and Puerto Padre. Manatí Bay has a tricky channel that runs five and six fathoms, but much of it has silted up since the Manatí Sugar Mill closed on the southwest part of the bay, and there are only a few shacks in that entire area. Nothing on the coast here.” He ran his finger in a circle at the entrance to Bahía Manatí. “You see why a sub would like this approach, Lucas.”
I checked the fathom markings. The area just off
the beach ran six to eight fathoms, but fifty yards out, the shelf dropped off to a hundred and ninety-five, then two hundred and twenty-five fathoms. A U-boat could easily pull within two hundred yards of Point Roma and Point Jesus at the narrow entrance to the bay without fear of finding a sandbar or reef.
“They can see the old Manatí stack from the entrance to the bay,” said Hemingway. “They can use that as a reference point through the periscope by daylight, then launch small boats toward those coordinates after dark.”
I nodded and touched a Y of rail lines halfway along the bay line between the sugar mill and the entrance to the bay. “These go to the cane fields?”
“They did,” said Hemingway. “The short line hauled the cane into the pressing sheds and the old docks there. All abandoned now.”
“And Doce Apostoles?” I said, pointing to a cluster of dots across the inlet from the abandoned rail lines.
“The Twelve Apostles are large rock formations,” said Hemingway. “There used to be workers’ shacks at the base of them, but they’re overgrown as well.” He ran his hand northwest up the coast a short distance. “You see here, right behind Point Roma and the abandoned lighthouse there, Enseñada Herradura.”
I nodded. The inlet was broad and shallow, three-quarters of a fathom, according to the chart. “You don’t think they’ll come in there, do you?” I said.
“No,” said Hemingway. “No need. I think they’ll come ashore by raft right at the old light on Point Roma. No rocks or cliffs there, and it’s free of mangroves and other crap. But we could take a small boat into Enseñada Herradura and hide it there in the mangroves.”
“Small boat,” I said. “The Tin Kid?”
Hemingway shook his head. “I want to keep the dinghy with Pilar. We don’t want to bring the Pilar into water that shallow, especially if the wind is from the east, and I don’t think we could conceal her anyway. We’ll have to get something else.”