Harlot's Ghost

  When I asked why Balletti made the mistake of phoning him, Maheu shrugged. “I can offer no explanation other than that he lost his head.”

  This is Maheu’s official explanation. There can be, of course, another track. For some time, Maheu resisted my questions. I had, finally, to suggest that I was following leads you had suggested. “You are asking,” Maheu said at last, “were we set up by Giancana?”

  “The question does exist,” I told him.

  “We are now in the realm of uninformed hypothesis,” said Maheu.

  “Let us speculate.”

  “It is possible,” he said, “but what would be Sam’s motive?”

  What was tacitly agreed upon is that our project with “the boys” has to be placed on hold. As Maheu avowed, it is in the Agency’s interest that nothing happen to Castro right now. Since the FBI is well aware of Giancana’s interest in assassinating the Cuban leader, they might connect that to the Vegas hotel room and Maheu. No new ventures, therefore.

  I confess that I enjoyed talking to Maheu. At the end, almost incidentally, he said in passing, “Do tell Mr. Halifax that I, too, have people who are angry at me.” Again he raised one eyebrow. It must be Hughes or Nixon of whom he speaks. That is why I do not think there is any likelihood that we were set up by Maheu himself. Hughes, by all accounts, is very much a Nixon man.

  Yours in time for the pouch,

  Robert Charles

  30

  ON NOVEMBER 2, A CABLE ARRIVED FROM CAL ON ZENITH/OPEN. IT read: THANK YOU FOR A GOOD CLEAR ASSESSMENT.

  That was the last communication from my father for a period, and it was just as well. My work for Hunt was increasing by the day. Rumors had swept Miami that there would be an invasion of Cuba in advance of the election on November 8, and a fever undulated in from Havana. The traffic in agents had never been higher. In a memo sent to my father at Quarters Eye, Howard wrote, “Zenith is bogged down with a small army of amateur spies who assume that espionage needs no more for technique than a little nepotism they can call on in Cuba. Of course, once we dispatch them back to the homeland, they seem to contact no one but friends and relatives. It should not take a classical education to realize that not every friend is, in troubled times, a true friend. Nor does the history of el Mar Caribe allow one to forget that Latin families in these tropical climes do manifest loyalty and treachery in equally balanced Shakespearean proportions.”

  Hunt was pleased enough with this memo to show it to me. I gave him literary praise without too much of an undue tug on my taste. After all, he was right. We were losing a lot of our young spies. Local networks in provincial Cuban towns were being rolled up every week and the agents who were successful in reporting to us were in conformity with Hunt’s oft-repeated axiom that a spy, left to himself, will tell you what he believes you want to hear. I was obliged to put a grade of credibility on reports going up to Quarters Eye; 10 and 20 percent became the marks I issued most often. I was dealing with such statements as “Camaguey is ready to revolt,” “Havana is seething,” “Guantánamo Bay has become a shrine for Cubans,” “Castro is in deep depression,” “the militia is ready to revolt.” Little of it was specific; nearly all was operatic.

  I had to deal, however, with a couple of gung-ho paramilitaries at Quarters Eye, unknown to me except as VIKING and CUTTER. They were always dissatisfied with my evaluations. “How do you know you’re not crimping the intake?” they would ask by phone. I could only assure them that at Zenith we were panning tons of sludge, and anything that looked remotely like gold went north.

  While Howard never encountered a day without trouble among the Frente, his difficulties were intensifying. Manuel Artime was now training with the Brigade, and that sent a signal. Artime was a devout Catholic and perhaps the most conservative of the five leaders. The rumor at Zenith was that the Agency planned to make him the next President of Cuba. In reaction, the older leaders of the Frente were demanding to be sent to TRAX as well. Meanwhile, Toto Barbaro kept screaming, “Just give us twenty million dollars. Repayable after victory. We will get our own boats to Havana.”

  “How,” asked Howard, “do you plan to get those boats past our Coast Guard? Be patient,” he would add, “trust the clout of my backers. Former Ambassador to Cuba William Pawley and other wealthy businessmen like Howard Hughes and H. G. Hunt are very close to the next President of the United States.”

  “What if Nixon does not win?” one of the Frente members might ask. “I can only hope that our situation will remain the same under Kennedy,” Howard would reply.

  A few days before the election, Barbaro asked me out for a drink. “You must tell your father,” he said, “that the entire Frente leadership, all five of us, are endangered.”

  “By whom?”

  Barbaro would never answer a serious question too quickly for fear one might not appreciate the cost to him of an honest response. “There is good reason,” he said after sipping on his añejo, “to be afraid of Mario García Kohly.”

  “You have spoken of him before.”

  “In Kohly you can find a Cuban millionaire who is truly of the extreme right wing. He even thinks that Artime is a soldier of Satan. As soon as the Frente lands in Cuba and declares itself the provisional government, Kohly is ready to assassinate each and every one of us five leaders. He has independent funds, and he will use Rolando Masferrer’s men from No Name Key.”

  “This is nonsense,” I said. “Your safety will be defended by the Brigade.”

  “The Brigade.” He made a face. “Members of Kohly’s army have infiltrated the Brigade. I tell you, we leaders will be executed a few days after the landing. You cannot conceive of the danger. For many years, Kohly’s father was Cuban Ambassador to Spain. Kohly is a follower of General Franco. Now we have heard that Nixon will give support to Kohly.” He laid a hand on my arm. “You will tell your father?” he asked.

  I nodded. I knew I would not. The story was too wild. I gave it a grade of 20 percent. I knew, however, that I would speak to Hunt about it.

  Hunt was furious. “A rumor like this can demoralize the Frente. You had better talk to Bernie Barker. He knows Faustino Barbaro inside out. He’ll tell you that if Barbaro is afraid of being assassinated, it is because he damn well ought to be.”

  “Can I talk to Barker?” I asked. “I want to get to the bottom of Barbaro’s story.”

  “I would just as soon,” said Howard, “dig out a latrine.”

  It was agreed that on election night Hunt, Barker, and I would watch the returns together. A divorcée who lived next door to Howard on Poinciana Avenue in Coconut Grove was going to have a party.

  “Can you bring a girl?” asked Howard. He poked me with a finger. “Or don’t you know any?”

  “Oh, yes,” I told him, “I have a girlfriend.”

  “Well, good for you,” said Howard.

  “Ed, do me a favor,” I answered. “My girl is kind of friendly with the Kennedy family. I would appreciate it if you didn’t noise your opinion of Jack too loudly.”

  “Well,” said Howard, “that is a piece of news. I promise, under the circumstances, Roberto, to muffle my more strident feelings.”

  31

  ACTUALLY, I WAS GLAD TO TAKE MODENE TO A PARTY. SHE HAD NO REAL friends in Miami; I had none; we often met late at night when her return plane was an evening flight, and we certainly made love too often. Sometimes, on mornings after we had smoked marijuana, we looked at each other with the flat, eternal distaste of lovers who have become roommates.

  We tried to go out to dance. I suffered again. Sometimes, after asking my permission, she would accept an invitation from a stranger, go forth to the floor, and leave me hoping that her partner was without skill. Once we double-dated at Joe’s Stone Crabs with another airline stewardess and her boyfriend, a pilot who had a mind like a meticulously plowed field: “What kind of job do you do, Tom?” “Electronics.” “That’s great.” My warning bell went off. I might have to talk about the instrument panel on his
plane. “Electronics are great,” I told him, “but kind of boring. I’m really more interested in the election.”

  So, Modene and I stayed at home. That is to say, I signed us out to La Nevisca, and we had congress in the master bed. I tried to exorcise John Fitzgerald Kennedy out of her flesh and must have driven him into her mind. It came over me on election night that Modene’s composure was not to be taken for granted this evening.

  Nor mine. I hardly knew whether I wanted Kennedy to win. She might look upon me then as his understudy. And if he lost, well, I could remember talk of desert islands large enough for two. This election was going to bring me no romantic gain.

  All the same, if Jack won, then I, by the intermediary of her body, would still have touched immortality. The ferocity of this squalid satisfaction was white as a blowtorch in my compromised heart. On to the party!

  Our hostess, named Regina Nelson, proved no advertisement for divorce. Once blond, now a redhead, she had grown wrinkled from old marital bitterness and daily exposure to the sun.

  “I knew a Charles family once in South Carolina,” said Regina. “Any relation to you, Bobby?”

  “Sorry. No family in South Carolina.”

  “Your girlfriend calls you Tom. But sometimes she says Harry.”

  “Robert Thomas Harry Charles,” I said.

  “Your girlfriend is gorgeous.”

  “Thank you, Regina.”

  “If she’s ever too beautiful for you, give me a ring.”

  I hated her house. It had the kind of pastel furniture, cream colored rugs, and bamboo wallpaper that would never need a bookcase. There were mirrors in ornate gold frames but no pictures were hanging. The standing lamps stood as tall as the guards at Buckingham Palace, and the bar took up one end wall. A dark silver-dusted mirror gave backing to the bottles on the shelves. We were in Coconut Grove, and the land where the house now sat had once been a swamp.

  “Is Ed your boss?” Regina asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know, when he first moved in next door I thought he was a homo.”

  “Ed doesn’t look like one,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised,” said Regina, “what comes out in the wash.”

  “Does he act queer?”

  “Well, he’s very fussy about the way he keeps his house. He is always coming over to borrow furniture polish or detergent, but maybe that’s because he wants to get to know me better.”

  I realized that I not only desired to get drunk tonight, but would succeed. Beyond Regina, past an arched doorway, was the television den, a buff-colored leather pit. Modene sat alone by the TV, bourbon in hand, and studied the tube.

  Regina said, “Cubans keep visiting Ed’s house. At night. I have heard that Cubans are AC/DC.”

  “It’s more like they exhibit deep feeling for each other,” I told her.

  “Poor Ed. I can tell by looking at him. I just might start to take care of that poor lost soul.”

  No response needed. “I don’t mind inviting Ed to my party,” she said, “or him inviting people like you and your girl to drink my booze, hell and hello, everybody’s here to do that, aren’t they? ‘Just spend the green, Reggie-girl,’ I tell myself, but I don’t know half my guests. People’s tongues look kind of long when they’re lapping up your liquor and you don’t even know them.”

  “I’m going to fill my glass,” I said.

  I didn’t know anyone at the party either. There must have been fifty people in her living room, and they looked like realtors to me, and lifeguards, and beach girls, and insurance salesmen, and divorcées—I realized suddenly that I had been living in Florida for months and knew no one in the state who was independent of the Agency. A retired businessman, a golfer with a sixteen handicap, now began to talk to me about his putting game, and as I drank I measured in my mind the length of the Hubbard tongue dipping into Regina’s booze.

  Modene was still by herself. The arched bow of her back and shoulders formed a guardrail around the TV set.

  “How is it going?” I asked.

  “It looks like he still is winning, but it’s not as sure anymore,” she said.

  A still photograph of Jackie Kennedy appeared on the screen. “The candidate’s wife,” said the TV set, “is expecting a baby. If elected, President and Mrs. Kennedy will have the first baby born in the White House.” The still photograph gave way to a picture of Kennedy Headquarters in New York.

  “Is he doing well in the Midwest?” I asked.

  “Shush,” said Modene.

  I felt a blast of rage worthy of my father. She had not even turned to look at me.

  In a corner of the living room standing together were Hunt, Hunt’s assistant, Bernard Barker, and Manuel Artime. I did not wish to visit with them, yet I did not want to talk to anyone else.

  “We were speaking,” said Hunt as I came up, “of a well-substantiated rumor that the Soviets are going to give Castro some MIGs. Delivery date next summer.”

  “In that case,” I said, “we have to get to Havana first.”

  The two Cubans nodded profoundly.

  The gabble of the party was not unlike a jungle canopy beneath whose shelter we could speak. That gave its own pleasure. It felt better to talk shop here than in the cafeteria at Zenith.

  “Will Castro be able to find enough Cuban pilots to make those jet fighters operational?” asked Artime. “He has not much of an Air Force.”

  “Right now,” said Hunt, “Cuban pilots in Czechoslovakia are receiving advanced training on those same MIGs.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Barker.

  Hunt turned to me. “How is the election going? Kennedy still ahead?”

  “Nixon seems to be catching up.”

  “I hope so,” said Hunt. “If Kennedy wins, it will be hard to identify the enemy.”

  “Don Eduardo,” said Artime, “certainly you are not suggesting that any American president would desert us? Why, Kennedy even said to Nixon in their debate that the Eisenhower administration had not done enough about Cuba.”

  “Yes,” said Hunt, “I saw that exercise in gall. Think of what it must have cost Nixon. There at the podium, right on live television, Dick Nixon, the Action Officer for Cuba, has to bite his tongue all the while that Kennedy is pretending to be the man who is going to do something.”

  “All the same,” said Artime, “Castro should have been dead by now.”

  “I thought he might be,” said Hunt.

  “I could kill Castro myself,” said Artime. “I could kill him with a bullet, a knife, a club, a few grains of powder in a glass.” His voice grated on me. Artime was singularly handsome, a well-built man with broad shoulders and a fine mustache, but his voice rasped on my ears. It was the voice of a man who had pushed himself to every limit, and now would push more. Fuertes had not been charitable about Artime. “I do not like him,” Chevi had said. “He arouses his audiences by reading bad sentimental verse of his own composition. He sets his people amok with emotion. He looks like a prizefighter, yet he is fraudulent.”

  “That is a strong word.”

  “He was frail as a boy. I have heard that when he was a young adolescent, all the other students would pat him on the ass. In some manner, he grew out of that.”

  “I would say he transcended it,” I told Fuertes.

  “Yes, but there was a price. His voice tells you what such transcendence must have cost.”

  “Castro will not live,” Artime said now. “If he is alive this month, he will be dead next. And if he is not dead next month, then next year. Such evil will not survive.”

  “I drink to that,” said Barker.

  We sipped our drinks.

  At the other end of the living room, a carpet had been rolled back, and a few people were trying out a new kind of dance. I could hear the words on the record: “Let’s do the Twist.” I found it bizarre. One young vacuous blonde with a beautiful sun-ripened body kept insisting in a loud voice that they play the song again. I hated all of it.
I thought it was strange in the extreme that the dancers did not hold each other but stood apart and rotated their hips like people alone in a room leering into a mirror. Maybe I was more drunk than I recognized, but I felt as if I were defending a country I no longer understood.

  “Look at the wiggle on that blonde,” said Hunt with a sad, lopsided, half-superior sneer.

  “Yes,” I said, “you can whistle while she works.” I did not like myself particularly for this remark, but Barker laughed so vigorously that I wondered if I had thrown it out for him. He was a small blockhouse of a man, sturdy, square in build, turning bald, and his lips were humorless. He had been a cop in Batista’s security forces. “Don Eduardo,” I said, “believes you can tell me some interesting things about Toto Barbaro.”

  “He is a piece of shit,” said Barker.

  “What kind of mierda?” I asked.

  That produced another laugh. When it concluded, Barker said, “He works for a gangster in Tampa.”

  “Can the gangster be Santos Trafficante?”

  “You are the one who said that, not I,” said Barker, and gave a sign to Hunt that he was ready to leave.

  “You and Bernie,” said Hunt equably, “will have other opportunities to talk.” Artime also left, and Hunt and I went to the bar for another drink. “Your girl strikes me as most attractive,” said Hunt, “albeit somewhat shy.”

  “No,” I told him, “she’s really a frightful snob. She wants nothing to do with any of these people.”

  “Yes,” said Hunt, “it’s not my idea of a party, either.”

  “What’s the real story on Barbaro?”

  “I’ll fill you in on what I know if Bernie Barker remains no more forthcoming.”

  Modene turned off the television set and came toward us. “Let’s leave,” she said. “They can’t tell any longer who’s ahead, and it’s going to take hours to learn.”

  I could sense a turn in Hunt’s mood. “On that premise,” he said, “I think I’ll stay and have another drink for Richard Nixon.”