“A turtle boat?” I said. “Borrow a skiff?”
The writer scratched his chin stubble and then winced. “I can get something faster that can get us in and out of a rain puddle. Tom Shevlin’s rich and has a beautiful, old twenty-two-foot speedboat tied up at Cojímar. He owes me a favor and gave me permission to use the boat if I wanted. I think he named it Lorraine, after his wife. Shevlin can’t use it because of the gas shortage.”
“Fast?” I said.
“Sure,” said Hemingway. “A hundred and twenty-five horsepower engine—almost twice as powerful as the Pilar’s, with less than half the weight to push. Shallow draft. Extra-long-range fuel tanks.”
“Sounds like it ran booze north during Prohibition,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Hemingway. He pointed to the map again. “Look at how nice this will be for them. This coming Thursday, the sub checks out the area in the daylight, then comes right up to the entrance to Bahía Manatí after dark. What time did the transmission say?”
“Eleven P.M.,” I said.
The writer nodded. “There’s a crescent moon, but it rises after midnight on the thirteenth. They come ashore at Point Roma and follow the old cane roads and railways to the abandoned sugar mill on the southwest bend of the bay. From there, they just walk out the old spur line that ran from the mill to the town of Manatí, twelve miles farther inland. Someone picks them up in Manatí and from there it’s a simple drive down the highway through Rincón and Sao Guásima to the Central Highway, then turn right to Havana and the U.S. air base at Camagüey, or left to Guantánamo.” He looked at me. “Twenty-three-hundred hours on Thursday the thirteenth if we’re going to greet them. When do you think we should get there, Lucas? Before sunset on the thirteenth?”
I thought of Simón Bolívar Street in Veracruz. Someone had been waiting there. I knew that someone would be waiting for us here.
“Way before sunset on the thirteenth,” I said. “Before noon.”
“You have to be fucking kidding.”
“I have to be fucking serious,” I said.
Hemingway sighed and rubbed his short beard. He winced again and looked at his swollen fingers. “All right. Leave on the day after tomorrow. How do we do this? Should the kids and the Pilar stay here?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Let’s all make a show of leaving early Wednesday morning. The kids, your usual crew, me, everybody. Drop me somewhere along the coast and I’ll head back to Cojímar to get Shevlin’s speedboat and I’ll meet you at the base on Cayo Confites Wednesday night. We’ll go ahead to Bahía Manatí the same night.”
“Gregorio, Patchi, Wolfer, and the others won’t like being left behind,” said Hemingway.
I looked at him.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s just too bad.” He ran his hand through his hair. “There’s a lot to do between now and then. We’ll have to bring the sombreros científicos and a couple of the niños from Pilar when we go in.”
I knew that he was not talking about his children. Hemingway had ordered Fuentes to make special leather cases with oil-soaked, sheepswool linings for the Thompson submachine guns. When the crew of the Pilar was at action stations, the cases hung by straps from the railing around the flying bridge and elsewhere. Ibarlucia had commented that the swinging gun cases looked like rocking cradles, thus the automatic weapons were nicknamed “little children.” It was at times like this when Hemingway was at his cutest that I had the urge to hit him again.
I looked at my swollen hands and shelved that idea.
The writer rolled up the chart. “So you and I are there hiding in the weeds or the mangrove roots or the rocks or whatever, the German agents show up at twenty-three hundred hours on the thirteenth… and then what?”
“That’s what we’re going to see at twenty-three hundred hours on the thirteenth,” I said.
Hemingway gave me a disgusted look. I took it as my cue to leave, and went back to the guest house to do some Crook Factory business.
MY MAJOR CONCERN WAS the second coded transmission that I had intercepted. I had told Hemingway the truth when I said that it was in a different code that I could not decipher, but I had not explained the details.
The transmission had been in groups of five letters, exactly like the book code—q-f-i-e-n / w-w-w-s-y / d-y-r-q-q / t-e-o-i-o / w-q-e-w-x and so forth. The problem was that it was not the book code. There was no page number given. There were no key words or first sentences.
Since I had encountered both Abwehr and SD AMT VI transmissions before, my guess was that this was the latter. The Nazi intelligence agency—as opposed to the German army intelligence—liked number-based ciphers for fast and secure transmissions. Such a code would be based upon a string of numbers, perhaps six or seven digits long, chosen at random by the agent transmitting. He would give that string to the person or persons receiving his transmission. The numbers would tell the receiving station how many letters up or down in the alphabet to count to find the actual letters.
For instance, if the randomly chosen number had been 632914, the first letter in the transmission—q—would actually be six letters up or back in the alphabet—w or k. The second letter transmitted—f—would be three letters up or down—i or c—and so forth.
A decent cryptology department could break such a code, given enough time and computers. “Computers” were people—usually women—who worked in the number-crunching department of decrypt groups, plugging in various possible numbers, studying the thousands or tens of thousands or millions of combinations, looking for repetitions, letter frequency probabilities, and so forth. But with dummy inserts, false transmission groups, and other simple transmission devices, decrypting even such a simple code was a months-long, infinitely laborious task. And I had never been good at arithmetic.
What bothered me about this code was that I had become almost certain that we were meant to decipher the previous book code transmission. The whole operation had been too easy—discovering Kohler’s codebook, finding the two reference books on the Southern Cross, the later transmissions being in the same code. Someone wanted us to know about the rendezvous at Point Roma. But that same someone did not want us to read the ancillary transmission.
This bothered me. I did not believe in intuition or any paranormal powers—not even the “sixth sense” that intelligence agents were supposed to develop with time—but all of my training and experience was warning me on a subconscious basis that this number-encrypted code was bad news.
Given my suspicions about Delgado, I could not give the intercept to him and ask him to send it to SIS/FBI labs for decryption. It did not seem feasible that I could saunter into the FBI’s Havana field office, explain my mission to Special Agent in Charge Leddy, and expect any help without bringing down J. Edgar Hoover’s wrath for going out of channels and blowing my cover. Besides, it could literally take months to break even a simple numerical code, and we did not have that kind of time.
I had been considering a crude but effective shortcut to the decryption problem when Agents 03 and 11 arrived at the guest house.
Agent 11 was the aged bellman at the Ambos Mundos Hotel. Agent 03 was “Black Priest,” Hemingway’s friend Father Don Andrés. I was used to seeing the priest at Hemingway’s Sunday-afternoon parties, where Don Andrés usually wore a bright red sport shirt. But today he was in his black outfit with a Roman collar. He looked older this way and much more solemn.
“We have come to tell Don Ernesto that the rich man from the boat, Señor Shell, is leaving in one hour,” said Father Don Andrés. The bellman nodded vigorously.
“You are sure of this?” I said in Spanish, looking at both men for confirmation.
The bellman said, “Yes, Señor Lucas. Señor Alvarez at the desk confirmed Señor Shell’s airplane reservations for three o’clock. Señor Shell has asked for a car to be brought around at one-thirty for a ride to the airport.”
I nodded. Teddy Shell—Theodor Shlegel—had been staying ashore for most of the
time the past month, moving from hotel to hotel. He had not met with Lieutenant Maldonado for more than two weeks, and he stayed aboard the Southern Cross only during the yacht’s occasional forays down the coast.
“What is his destination?” I asked.
“Rio de Janeiro,” said the Black Priest. Hemingway had explained this nickname recently. It had not been one of the writer’s creations but had come about after the Church had assigned Father Don Andrés to a parish in the worst and poorest section of Havana as a punishment for his previous behavior, including his years as a machine gunner in the Spanish Civil War. Most of Father Don Andrés’s parishioners were from the lowest levels of Cuban society—Negroes, in other words—and so the nickname Black Priest.
“You’re sure of this?” I said. I knew that the only three P.M. flight out of José Martí Airport was to Rio.
The bellman looked offended. “Yes, Señor Lucas. I saw the ticket myself.”
“Round-trip or one way?” I asked.
“One way, señor,” said the bellman.
“We think he’s flying the coop,” said Father Don Andrés. “Don Ernesto should know.”
“I agree,” I said. “I will tell him. Thank you for your diligence, gentlemen.”
“It is important?” said the bellman, grinning through missing teeth.
“It may be important, yes,” I said.
The priest looked uneasy. “Should we not report to Ernesto in person?”
“I will tell him, Father,” I said. “I promise you this. Right now, the writer is resting. He has a bad headache this morning.”
The priest and the bellman exchanged knowing glances. “Should we follow Señor Teddy Shell to the airport?” asked Father Don Andrés.
I shook my head. “This will be taken care of. Thank you again for your professionalism.”
When they were gone, I walked past the swimming pool, around the dilapidated tennis court, to the small garage. Juan, the chauffeur, was washing the Lincoln in front of the garage and looked at me suspiciously as I approached. Juan frequently acted as if he was constipated and out of sorts, and I do not believe he liked me much.
“May I help you, Señor Lucas?” The words were correct, but his tone was slightly insolent and challenging. The staff at the finca was never quite sure how to treat me; I was something slightly higher than hired help but definitely lower than an honored guest. Also, it had been decided that I was the one responsible for bringing a whore into the finca household family. The servants seemed to like Maria, but I suspected that they held it against me that I had lowered the tone of the place.
“Just looking for something,” I said, walking into the dimness of the little shed. The garage had the reassuring smell of garages everywhere.
Juan put down his sponge and stood at the open door. “Señor Hemingway does not wish for anyone but him and myself to touch his tools, Señor Lucas.”
“Yes,” I said, opening the metal toolbox and rooting through the contents.
“Señor Hemingway is very strict about this provision, Señor Lucas.”
“Of course,” I said. I chose a roll of gray duct tape and a large, flat-headed screwdriver about eight inches long. I closed the toolbox and looked around the wooden countertop. There were cans of paint, dusty two-by-fours, coffee cans of nails… ah, yes. I lifted the small can of axle grease and checked under the lid. About a third of the can left. That would do. I picked up a ten-inch length of lead pipe and put that in my back pocket.
“Señor Hemingway is extremely strict about no one except myself and himself being allowed to touch…” the chauffeur was going on, forgetting his syntax in his growing agitation.
“Juan,” I said sharply.
The little man blinked. “Yes, señor?”
“Do you have a uniform coat and cap to wear when you drive Señor Hemingway or his guests for formal occasions?”
Juan squinted at me again. “Yes, señor… but he rarely asks me to…”
“Go get them,” I said, just sharply enough to brook no argument but not so sternly as to offend the man.
Juan blinked and looked at the wet Lincoln. It was washed but not yet toweled off. “But, Señor Lucas, I must—”
“Get the uniform and cap,” I said with finality. “Now, please.”
Juan nodded and jogged away. His home was down the hill in the tin-roofed cluster of shacks that was the village of San Francisco de Paula.
A few minutes later he was back with both articles. The cap and jacket smelled of mothballs. As I had expected, the jacket was too small for me, but the cap fit. I took the cap and said, “Have the car dried and waxed and ready in twenty minutes.”
“Yes, Señor Lucas.”
I walked up to Grade A. The cottage was empty. Maria was helping clean at the finca. I took the .357 Magnum out of its hiding place, checked the chambers, and slid the large handgun into my belt. Then I went to the clothesline where my dark jacket was hung—it had been freshly ironed by Maria—and pulled it on. The dark pants, jacket, and cap looked more or less like a uniform.
The car was gleaming when I returned to it with the keys. I had picked up a bottle of whiskey in the house and was carrying it in a brown paper bag along with the screwdriver, pipe, roll of tape, and can of grease. Juan stood next to the vehicle and looked wistfully at his cap.
“Señor Hemingway is sleeping,” I said. “Do not wake him, but when he wakes, tell him that I borrowed the automobile for a short time.”
“Yes, Señor Lucas. But…”
I drove down the driveway and out the gate.
I DID NOT LOOK MUCH like a chauffeur: my face and hands were swollen and bruised, and although my complexion had darkened even further from months of exposure to the sun, I did not look especially Cuban. Still, I trusted Schlegel not to pay attention to a mere driver or remember me from our dinner together at the finca. Schlegel was the type who never looked closely at the hired help.
I drove through the squalor of San Francisco de Paula, under the gigantic Spanish laurel that arched over the entire roadway, and down the hill on the stone of the old Central Highway. I drove past the café called El Brillante, with its crude wall painting of a huge, sparkling diamond, and then down the long grade toward the outskirts of Havana.
Memories of the previous day’s fight with the writer bothered me more than my aching knuckles or swollen lip. A fistfight was life’s best example of pure, unadulterated idiocy. I had provoked Hemingway into fighting because I had recognized the look on his face when I walked into the living room to find him staring into the muzzle of the Mannlicher. I had seen the same look on the face of ex-NKVD chief Walter Krivitsky a year and a half earlier in a room in the Bellevue Hotel in Washington, D.C.
“Estamos copados,” Hemingway liked to say. “We’re surrounded.” I think he liked the sound of it in Spanish. That had been my message to Walter Krivitsky on the evening of February 9, 1941, as I sat with him in his room in the Bellevue Hotel. The little man was tough and clever, and had been on the run for four years, escaping or outwitting his own Russian intelligence service, GPU assassins, both European and American Abwehr networks, Office of Naval Intelligence agents, and FBI interrogators. But toughness and cleverness can carry one only so far when your enemies are relentless.
Krivitsky’s eyes had shown weariness, and Hemingway’s eyes had reflected that same sense of siege. Estamos copados.
At the end, Krivitsky had turned to me for help. “I’m not here to help you,” I said. “I’m here to make sure that the Germans don’t get you and interrogate you before they kill you.”
“But surely the FBI will—”
“You’ve told the FBI everything you know,” I said to the former Russian agent. “Everything you know about the Soviets and the Germans. The FBI doesn’t need you. No one needs you.”
Krivitsky had looked at the stained wall of his hotel room and laughed softly. “I borrowed a gun, you know. In Virginia. But I threw it out the window of the train.”
I had taken the .38 from my shoulder holster and handed it to the shaggy-browed little man.
Krivitsky had checked to make sure it was loaded and then held the pistol loosely in his right hand, the muzzle pointed in my general direction. “I could kill you, Special Agent Lucas.”
“Sure,” I said. “But Hans Wesemann and the others will still be out there. They’ll be waiting when you try to leave in the morning.”
Krivitsky had nodded and taken a long drink from the vodka bottle on the nightstand. Hans Wesemann was part of a Todt Team—a death team whose only mission was the assassination of one man, Walter Krivitsky. Krivitsky knew that once a Todt Team was assigned to a target, that target rarely survived.
We continued to talk into the night. The subject was hopelessness. Estamos copados.
In the end, Krivitsky had used the .38 on himself, of course, holding it to his right temple rather than putting it in his mouth. Hemingway was right about the palate being softer and a more certain spot to place the slug—more than a few would-be suicides had ended up drooling vegetables after bullets bounced off their skulls and removed only part of their brains, not all of them. But the .38 bullet had been very successful in ending Walter Krivitsky’s paranoia.
That morning, before we had consulted the nautical charts, Hemingway had shown me a manuscript he had just finished. I glanced at it. It was the introduction to the Men at War anthology. The piece ran to more than ten thousand words, almost fifty typewritten pages. I was surprised at how bad Hemingway’s spelling was—he rarely dropped the e before adding the ing, for instance, and made other simple mistakes that would have gotten me fired if I had submitted an FBI field report like that—and I was surprised to see all of the handwritten insertions, substitutions, and corrections.
“Read it,” Hemingway had ordered.
I read the piece, in which Hemingway argued that the anthology could render a patriotic service by acquainting American youth with the true nature of war throughout human history. He talked about how he reread the same piece—Frederick Manning’s The Middle Part of Fortune; or, Her Privates We—every July on the anniversary of his wounding at Fossalta di Piave. It’s “the finest and noblest book of men of war,” he wrote, and his purpose for reading it was always the same—to remind himself of how things had really been so that he would never lie to himself. That was the purpose of this anthology, he wrote, to show what war was really like rather than how it was supposed to be.