Topaz

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Dr. Kaplan doesn’t think it is.”

  “He doesn’t run an intelligence establishment.”

  In his business few details were shared with his wife. Nicole usually knew better than to ask.

  “You’re going to Cuba, aren’t you?”

  André grunted a little laugh and pinched her cheek.

  “Well?”

  “You’ve a good nose for intelligence.”

  “Your health is not the only thing that disturbs me. The hostility against you at the Embassy is becoming quite apparent. I hear things and sense things that upset me. They say the Americans are just using you.”

  “Indeed they are. However, I’ve always been perfectly willing to be used in the interest of France.”

  “You and your twisting words. Lord, how I envy those people who live and breathe around us and who know a day of peace. Do you realize, André, since I’ve known you you’ve never really spent a day that you weren’t in battle? For twenty years, day in and day out, this war you’re in never stops. You bring it home with you, into the dining room, into the bedroom. As often as not I’m made to feel I’m looking at a detached stranger.”

  “Well, darling, better luck in your next life. Maybe you’ll find a Tucker Brown IV.”

  “Why does it always have to be you who does it? What about the others? Why are you the one always in the middle?”

  “President Truman had a little sign on his desk. I’ve always admired its philosophy. It read: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. I’ve envied certain people, too, the great majority of my colleagues whose sole mission in life is to attain the goal of mediocrity. They sail into a safe harbor, button up and conveniently and quietly sort their paper clips, avoiding responsibility and decisions. I can’t explain, Nicole, why I was singled out and am unable to avoid conflict, but I can’t run or plug my ears or close my eyes or turn my back. I often envy those who can.”

  She looked at him blankly, not drinking in his words, but only feeling their thud as another of his well-phrased rejections.

  “I’m going up to see Michele,” she said tersely. “I’m thinking of going off with her on a trip.”

  “Where? When?”

  “I don’t know. France, to your father’s. Switzerland, Outer Mongolia. Some place where I don’t have to be a daily witness to your demise.”

  Coming home these days, he thought, is not my idea of heaven, but I never thought of a home without Nicole. If I don’t know how to quit and if you love me, then, God, woman, accept it for what it is and try to make things a little easier.

  “For whatever it means,” André said, “I still love you dearly and I don’t want to go through life without you.”

  Nicole took her hand out of his, folded her napkin, and stood. “Give Juanita de Córdoba my regards,” she said.

  André watched her leave the room, stinging from the slur. Damn it! Juanita de Córdoba had no place in this conversation! It was the unpredictable quiltwork of a woman’s mind, the determined illogic of ending up with a stab.

  Or was it so illogical? André ticked the ash from his cigar and spun his cognac around slowly. Wasn’t this the real heart of the matter and wasn’t Nicole’s intuition perfect?

  Lord knows he had tried to keep the affair with

  Juanita from his wife and Lord knows he was a fool to think he could. He had intended to live with Nicole forever and let things go on as they were. Yes, even to love Nicole in that certain way that two decades of marriage dictated.

  But his real love, though denied and buried, belonged to Juanita de Córdoba. How many days and weeks and months had he gone on without daring to think about her, shutting this longing for her out of his life?

  But the thrill and the hunger for Juanita never failed to renew itself.

  In this moment of honest appraisal, Nicole understood perfectly.

  André had tossed around his decision of whether or not to go to Cuba for the Americans. In the end the scale tipped in favor of the trip because Juanita would be there. And even though he denied it to himself and justified it otherwise, this was the truth.

  His lips touched the cognac snifter .... “Juanita ... yes ... I am afraid I love you very much ... I am sorry for that ... for both of us....”

  He drew himself from the table and made his way slowly to the head of the steps. A ray of light from Nicole’s room fell over the hallway and down the stairwell. He stood motionless, waiting until her door closed at last.

  “Nicole,” he whispered to himself, “please, please understand. Juanita is an unreachable dream ... an illusion ... but I must be allowed to dream. It means nothing between you and me. You are my wife and I love you ... in a different way....”

  André found himself standing before Nicole’s door knowing it was not locked. Somehow he could not bring himself to open it and go to her with his thoughts flooded with Juanita de Córdoba and the coming nights with her.

  Nicole lay in her bed tensely, listening for his every movement, praying the door would open. Praying to see his shadow move to her, stand over her, sit by the edge of the bed. She wanted the touch of his hand stroking her head, for him to draw back the sheets and come beside her.

  Much of it tonight would be a lie, she thought, but God, I want him.

  And she fell into despair as the sound came of his door shutting and wet tears formed on her pillow.

  It turned midnight. André continued to toss in the dark, unable to sleep. The phone rang. He switched on the lamp and lifted the receiver. “Devereaux.”

  “Hello, Daddy.”

  “Michele. How are you, darling?”

  “I’m fine. I understood you were going away. I just wanted to say good-bye.”

  Her voice sounded strange and shaky.

  “I mean,” she continued, “we’ve been missing each other and really haven’t had a chance to sit and talk for months.”

  “Yes, come to think of it, it has been quite a time. Well, you know how my work goes.”

  “Of course, I realize. I’m not complaining.”

  “Come now. What’s really bothering you? The quarrel with Tucker?”

  “We’re through and I couldn’t care less. I just missed you tonight and wanted to talk to you ... and to say ... I love you very very much.”

  “Thanks, Michele. Maybe we’ll be able to get away later.” But these were meaningless words, for he’d promise and disappoint her again as he had done before. How many disappointments did the rules allow him?

  He fell back on his pillow with the light on, then went to Nicole’s door and opened it softly and made to the edge of her bed and felt for her hand in the darkness. She was awake, but there was little warmth in her response.

  That crazy recurring thought came to him that it would serve him right if some other man took her. He could envision the details of her love-making, her enjoying it madly. For that instant, he did not object to the sensation that swept through him. He wanted it to hurt and he wanted to be punished for Juanita de Córdoba and all the others.

  He returned to his room.

  André Devereaux and Brigitte Camus made for the National gate as the Miami flight was announced. He mumbled instructions she knew by heart.

  She waited until he was in the plane and out of sight before she cried.

  For twelve years André had come and gone, and Nicole had always taken him to the gate to see him off. André had looked for her in vain, and when the flight was announced Brigitte saw a desperation seize him. Oh, damn you, Nicole Devereaux! Don’t you know he must do what he must do?

  “Cocktail, sir?”

  “Bourbon, please.”

  He watched land’s end below. The layover in Miami would be a short one until the KLM flight to Havana. It was painful to go there these days. Havana had turned old overnight, like a beautiful woman who had undergone major surgery at the hands of a butcher.

  At least, Juanita de Córdoba would be waiting.

  Beautiful Juanita ... r />
  13

  FROM THE EARLIEST MEMORY she had been known as La Palomita, “The Little Dove.”

  Her name was Juanita Ávila de Córdoba. Her grandfather was Manuel Ávila, foremost among the lieutenants of the national liberator, Marti. During the ten-year war that freed Cuba from Spain, Manuel Ávila was to immortalize himself among his people as “The Poet of the Revolution.”

  Juanita Ávila de Córdoba’s father, Jorge Ávila, had become Cuba’s greatest composer and a guitarist of world renown. It was his composition, a lullaby to her, “Don’t Weep, Little Dove,” that was to give her the identity that would remain all of her days.

  When Héctor de Córdoba, scion of a great family of landed gentry, took the Little Dove in marriage, it was an event long remembered in Cuba as one akin to a royal wedding. The couple were of the aristocracy, by both fortune and achievement.

  Héctor de Córdoba preferred the electricity of life in Havana and the international sparring grounds of diplomacy and the world’s sporting places to the bondage of the family holding near Santiago.

  In the mold of a staunch independent thinker and somewhat of a black sheep, Héctor’s interest in family affairs remained nominal, Actually, he was in constant battle with his family, deploring the exploitation of the peasants and the other social injustices upon which the family had been able to build and hold an empire.

  The pull and tug of Cuban politics had always been a deadly game. Héctor de Córdoba, a liberal in days of reaction, achieved a stature so great that he rose above that small army of bickerers and became one of Cuba’s foremost diplomats, mainly as a roving ambassador and negotiator. His value was great enough to pass him through seasons of disfavor with Batista, although, over a period, his relations with the dictator turned to ice.

  He rejected a Batista attempt to bury him in a remote, obscure diplomatic post and chose to practice law and live in de facto political exile in Marianao, a suburb a few miles west of Havana in the hills overlooking the sea.

  When Castro swept from the Sierra Maestra Mountains into Havana, it was Héctor de Córdoba who embraced him beneath the monument to Martí. It could now be known that Héctor had been one of Castro’s manipulators and backers in the capital who hastened the collapse of Batista.

  A month after the liberation of Havana, Héctor de Córdoba was killed in a tragic airplane crash en route to his first diplomatic mission under Castro.

  Raul and Fidel and Che Guevara and Rico Parra all wept openly as the Little Dove was handed the flag of Cuba that adorned her husband’s coffin. In shaken voice, Fidel Castro named Héctor de Córdoba a martyr of the Revolution.

  Juanita then retreated with her two sons into mourning in the pink marble villa in Marianao.

  In the days that followed Castro’s victory, great estates were broken up ruthlessly, with the former owners receiving a pittance of their true value.

  Fidel Castro personally interceded in behalf of Juanita and arranged a large and admirable settlement on the de Córdoba holdings. The Little Dove of Cuba was that kind of aristocrat who could transfer from one regime to another and become an aristocrat of the Revolution.

  When the time for weeping was done, Juanita emerged from her villa and continued the good works that had been part of her training and heritage from childhood. She walked among the impoverished and battled for the orphan.

  She was swept into the swirl of state functions.

  She was a woman who made a man feel good. To pour his liquor, to light his cigar. To dance with him till dawn.

  She campaigned for greater sanitation in the villages.

  The disenchantment with Fidel and his Revolution set in almost at once.

  Lifelong friends were rounded up in a terror that soon filled the dungeons of Morro Castle and the moats of La Cabaña.

  And many ended up in the Green House of G-2 on Avenida Quinta, to be doled the cruel mercy of Castro’s chief inquisitor, Muñoz.

  Juanita de Córdoba’s reaction to the rape of Cuba and the murder of her friends filled her with unbounded hate of Castro. And she set out to do something about it.

  Many years before his death, Héctor de Córdoba had attended a conference in Washington as an adviser on the sugar quota.

  André Devereaux had also attended in behalf of France, both because he was knowledgeable in matters of the sugar quota, and because it was a good place to obtain intelligence information.

  In the course of their daily contact, a friendship was struck up between Devereaux and Héctor de Córdoba, and also between their wives.

  In his subsequent visits to Cuba, André continued his friendship with the de Córdobas and never failed to visit them at Marianao. Through his sources in Havana, André learned that Héctor was secretly working for the Castro band, which was then still in the Camaguey Mountains.

  “I must warn you, Héctor,” André told him over sunset drinks on the veranda, “that you will be disillusioned with this Castro. I know you detest the present regime, but those boys up in the mountains smell like Communists.”

  “André ... ugh! ... what will I do with you? You smell Communists behind every tree, under every leaf. It is a mania with you. I have known Raul and Fidel since we were children together in Santiago. Fidel is radical, yes. But a Communist, never. And, my friend, after this bastard Batista is thrown out, Cuba needs radical thinking.”

  “So the Castro brothers are pure Cuban. How about that South American devil, Che? And what about Rico Parra? Parra is straight out of the Soviet system.”

  “Yes, André, and how about the Americans? The damn Yankees do business with the Peróns, Trujillos, Batistas and Jiménezes, but let anything smack of desperately needed reform and you denounce it as Communist.”

  Juanita listened to it all quietly, attending to the level of their glasses and saying little.

  “Mark it down, Héctor. Fidel Castro will become a menace. Even the Americans refuse to listen to me now, but they’ll learn.”

  “Nonsense. The Cuban people will never choose Communism.”

  “They won’t have to. The choice will be made for them.”

  Héctor died before the prophecy was fulfilled. Juanita had marked the Frenchman’s words.

  On André’s first visit after Héctor’s death, he went to the villa to pay his condolences. The Little Dove had already begun having her misgivings on the Revolution.

  Old friends were gone. Of those who were left, one had to be suspicious. André was one of the few with whom she could share her feelings of sorrow and disgust over what was happening in Cuba.

  Each visit thereafter, Juanita’s feelings against Castro had grown darker and darker.

  André sensed an opening upon which to build an important contact. She was a woman of prominence, above suspicion, and highly placed in the inner circles. He held back at first. Then, as the American intelligence organization in Cuba was broken, he proceeded to feel her out with caution, for as the Cuban government drifted toward the Soviet Union, new sources of information would be desperately needed.

  André became a frequent visitor. At first he was looked upon from the outside as a good friend, and later rumor had it that there was a romance.

  What André was romancing was the careful buildup of an espionage ring, and its heart was Juanita de Córdoba, the Little Dove.

  He trained her expertly and sent her out on a mission. Since she was free to travel throughout Cuba at will, Juanita’s appearances were considered good for the image of the Revolution. In trips around that country she recontacted some of those friends who had escaped the Castro terror and banded together a small, select group of patriots placed in every part of the Island.

  André guided her in establishing communications through dead-letter drops in hidden places around the country.

  When a message came back to Juanita de Córdoba, she would then pass it on to the French Ambassador, Alain Adam. Usually the messages were passed at cocktail parties or formal dinners and, at times, in broad daylig
ht at public rallies right under the very beards of Fidel and Che and Raul and Rico.

  André Devereaux had an excellent eye on Cuba, indeed.

  14

  MICHAEL NORDSTROM LINED UP the shot, drew the billiard stick back and tapped the cue ball. It slid off the six ball with a trace of side English. The six ball dangled, then dropped reluctantly into an end pocket.

  “Eight ball in the side pocket.” Mike chalked, made his shot, straightened up and beamed at his son, Jim. “Your old man didn’t get a reputation as a good pool hustler for nothing. Earned all my spending money at Stanford doing this.”

  Jim was glad his dad finally won for his dad was down three games. Mike tousled his son’s hair, replaced the stick in the rack, rolled down his sleeves, and walked up from the recreation room to the kitchen.

  Liz had come in from her sunbath. She still looked great in a bikini. He watched her as she flitted about the kitchen setting a light under the pot of stew. As she passed, Mike grabbed her, reached under her robe and rubbed her warm flesh. Liz stopped long enough to lean back against him and purr.

  “Hon, I’d like to take in the movie tonight with the Bowmans.”

  “What’s playing?”

  “Lolita with that deliciously decadent James Mason.”

  “Sure.”

  Liz put a tall iced tea before him as he thumbed through the Sunday papers, stopping at “Peanuts.” He laughed and commented that Snoopy fractured him.

  “The stationwagon is on the blink again,” Liz said.

  “Well, get it fixed.”

  “It spends half the time in the garage. Hon, do you think we’ll be able to trade it in by the end of the year?”

  “Huh?”

  “I said I’d like to trade it in.”

  “Well, maybe. This Koufax is something. Struck out ten again last night.”

  Liz tasted the stew testily, adding a pinch of onion salt and replacing the lid. Mike was in earnest in the sports page.

  “Put the paper down, hon.”

  “Liz, don’t talk about the car now.”

  “How are things with the Devereaux?”

  “So-so.”