Murder in Havana Read online

  The minister spoke: “That may be true,” he said, “but you have many former colleagues in Congress who not only resist increased trade with us, they would like to choke us into submission.”

  “That’s unlikely to happen to you,” the ad executive said. She added, “You engage in extensive trade with many nations, European, Asian, Canada.”

  The minister nodded. “Our economy is on its way to health once again, thanks to our trading partners.”

  “But the United States could be your most important partner,” McCullough said.

  “The United States has far more to gain from us than we have to gain from you.”

  “Perhaps if there were an improvement in your human rights record, Mr. Minister,” said McCullough, “your enemies in Congress would begin to soften.”

  Mac checked for an angry reaction from the Cuban. If McCullough’s comment had angered him, he didn’t show it. He said in a level voice, “There is no room for bending on our part, Senator. We are at war with you and the brutal capitalistic society you represent. As our prime minister has said, ‘My sling is the sling of David.’ ”

  Smith winced and wondered whether their trip to Cuba was about to be cut short. He was surprised when the minister added, “These questions, and so many others, have been debated for decades, and will continue to be, I am certain. In the meantime, let us not allow them to interfere with the pleasure of your visit to Cuba. We will continue to discuss trade issues even though there will be little fruit born of our conversations. I am pleased to tell you that Prime Minister Castro himself wishes to join in our discussions, and will do so at a later time.” Now he became almost gleeful. “I am pleased to issue each of you a personal invitation to his seventy-fifth birthday party in a few days. To be asked to celebrate with him and the Cuban people is an honor not casually bestowed upon visitors.”

  After touring the Martí monument, they were driven back to the hotel where they gathered in small groups at the bar.

  “I really admired the way you laid the cards on the table, Price, about human rights,” McCullough was told.

  “I thought we might as well get it out in the open right up front,” the affable former senator said, downing a Bacardi cocktail.

  “I was afraid he’d take offense,” someone else said.

  “I didn’t care if he did. The truth is—and they know it—as long as they ignore basic human rights, Congress will keep the screws on tight.”

  “Despite President Walden.”

  “Yes, despite the president. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, there’s someone I must see.”

  Smith watched as McCullough left the bar. He turned to the president of a regional airline whom he’d befriended during the trip and said, “The minister was right. This is all very pleasant, but there’s really nothing that can be accomplished unless Congress eases up on the embargo.”

  “We might accomplish something, Mac,” he said. “The more times Castro gets the message about human rights, the more likely he’ll come to understand it.”

  “And change? Won’t happen.”

  “I’ve heard he has three hundred million dollars stashed in Spain for when he bows out,” the airline president said. “Maybe he’ll decide it’s time to give it up and live out the rest of his life in luxury, learning to dance the flamenco and play the guitar.”

  The figure cited by the airline president jibed with what President Walden had confided in Smith during their weekend together at Camp David. Obviously, Spanish banks didn’t have the secrecy standards of the Swiss.

  Smith laughed. “I don’t think Mr. Castro is close to packing it in,” he said. “Castro said about giving up his revolution, I’m paraphrasing, ‘If I’m told I’m the only one left who believes in my revolution, I’ll continue to fight.’ I think he means it.”

  “He’s a madman.”

  “A committed one. Have to run. I want to check in with my wife.”

  “Annie, it’s Mac.”

  “Hello, stranger. How’s everything going?”

  “Fine. We had a meeting with some of Castro’s ministers. Interesting. Price McCullough brought up the human rights question. The minister didn’t bat an eye, or acknowledge it. Castro says he intends to personally take part in our meetings, and, oh yes, we’ve been invited to his birthday party.”

  “You devil,” she said. “I’d love to meet him.”

  “I’ll invite him to the apartment for one of your chicken pot pies.” He stopped. “You know, I had a funny feeling at the meeting, something I don’t think the others felt.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I had the feeling that Price’s little speech about human rights was scripted. As though he said it on cue.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was as if the Cubans expected it, and Price knew it wouldn’t mean anything to them.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t—mean anything to them. They must be used to hearing it by now.”

  “You’re right, of course, and I’m probably off base.”

  “Any Cuban señoritas giving you the eye, Smith?”

  “Hundreds. I’ve had to hire a bodyguard to fend them off.”

  “Have him send me the bill. I’ll be happy to pay it.”

  She filled Mac in on the happenings at home, at the gallery, and in a variety of charitable organizations with which she was actively involved. She chaired the city’s humane society, raised money for the Washington Opera and for Ford’s Theatre, and devoted a half day a week to a battered women’s shelter. He loved her industry as well as her natural physical beauty.

  “I’ll call again,” he said. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too, Mac. Take care.”

  Pauling didn’t sleep late.

  A series of blackouts during the night had rendered the air-conditioning unit useless. He got out of his soggy bed at six, exercised—stretches, sit-ups, followed by push-ups—despite the heat and humidity, showered, dressed, and walked into the hotel dining room at seven-fifteen. Before coming down he’d gone through the Havana telephone directory in search of a listing. Favorite sayings by Fidel Castro were printed at the bottom of many of the directory’s pages, in case you forgot who was in charge.

  He found Strauss-Lochner listed at an address in the Miramar section of Havana, and wrote the street number and phone exchange on a slip of paper, which he put in one of the many pockets in his photojournalist’s vest. The buffet was more bountiful at this earlier hour. He filled his plate and carried it to a table in a far corner from which he had an unrestricted view of the door.

  His shadow of the previous day was very much on his mind as he ate. The man probably posed no danger, at least for the moment, but Pauling knew that when someone was following you, for whatever reason, that could change. If the man were Cuban, Pauling wouldn’t have been concerned. Just a case of Communist paranoia. But this wasn’t some PNR—Policía Nacional Revolucionaria—cop assigned to keep tabs on a foreigner. This guy was a Caucasian who looked German or Scandinavian.

  He formulated a plan of action while at the table. He wasn’t interested in a confrontation with Blondie, but he did want to know why he was being followed, and more important, who was interested enough in him to order it.

  Pauling didn’t have to continue contemplating the man because he walked through the door to the restaurant, looked in Pauling’s direction, then chose a table at the opposite end of the room. He placed a newspaper on the table and went to the buffet table where he chose nothing but fruit, a mound of it.

  Interesting, Pauling thought. The guy knows I’ve spotted him, yet he strolls in here where I can see him and has breakfast. He’s either inept or he has a purpose in being visible.

  Pauling signed the check and wrote his room number on it. His intention was to take a stroll and see what happened next. But his tail beat him to it. He laid down money on the table and left the restaurant. Pauling waited a beat before doing the same. He surveyed the lobby; no sign of him. He stepped o
ut onto the sidewalk and looked left and right. The blond man in the black suit was nowhere to be found.

  Pauling walked up the street, pausing occasionally to pretend to look into a store window but using the moment to look behind. Nothing. He stopped at a busy intersection to consult the small map of Havana that he carried, pinpointed the location of Strauss-Lochner, decided it was too far to walk, and hailed a taxi, a ’50s DeSoto.

  Back at the hotel, Erich Weinert, concealed in an alcove behind the registration desk, handed the Cuban clerk ten dollars in American money. “Muchas gracias, señor,” the small, older man said repeatedly as he handed over the key to Pauling’s room.

  Pauling didn’t have any purpose in seeking Strauss-Lochner’s Havana offices, except to go to the source. You never could tell. That the German company had a listed address and phone number in Havana wasn’t surprising. Foreign companies doing business in Cuba were there legally—everyone except American companies. He could have whiled away the morning playing tourist again until noon, when Celia was to call. But that represented the sort of inaction that set him on edge. He’d done enough sight-seeing the previous day. Also, he wasn’t anxious to extend his stay in Cuba any longer than necessary. He’d been told that he was to return to Colombia in a week to pick up more medical supplies to give credence to his alleged reason for being in Cuba. With any luck, he’d come up with the proof Gosling was looking for—evidence that Price McCullough’s American company, BTK Industries, was using Strauss-Lochner as a front—and do it before the week was up.

  There was something unsettling about Cuba.

  On the one hand, there was a pulsating spirit of life among the people on the streets that had been absent in the old Soviet Union during his assignments there. Commuters, after waving down flatbed trucks to hitch a ride, shouted greetings to fair-skinned tourists as they passed. Old men leaning with their ancient bicycles against walls did the same. Children no older than ten sold shaved ice cones streaked with fruit syrup; other women only slightly older offered sweets of a different sort. Salsa bands performed on street corners for coins tossed into a straw hat on the ground. The women were openly flirtatious, and the Cuban men were as overtly sensuous to the women. Horse-drawn carriages plied the streets of the city, and bicycles were everywhere, a million of them imported from China: “Expanding the use of the bicycle is an indicator of cultural advancement,” Castro had said after ordering his people to start pedaling to ease the perpetual fuel shortage.

  No doubt about it, a fun-loving group.

  But there was another side of Cuba and its forty-year experiment with Castro and his brand of Communism. Uniformed PNRs were everywhere, watching, frowning, their eyes locking on every passerby. And there were those thousands of the CDRs Celia had spoken of, neighbors spying on neighbors and reporting to authorities what they considered inappropriate words and deeds. Castro’s face was ubiquitous, his picture on lampposts and on the sides of buildings. Signs proclaiming SOCIALISMO O MUERTE—Socialism or Death—hung side by side with the Big Beard’s likeness glaring from billboards across the city. On the opposite side of the street from the U.S. Interests Section, on Calle L, was Havana’s most photographed site, a huge, colorful billboard showing a crazed Uncle Sam glowering menacingly at a Cuban soldier, who is shouting, “Señores imperialistas: No les tenemos absolutamente ningún miedo!” “Mister imperialists: You don’t scare us at all!”

  Not exactly all fun and games, Pauling thought. Good people, bad government. What else was new?

  His driver took him to Miramar via the Malecón, which led into a tunnel beneath the Almendares River. When they emerged on the Miramar side, they were on Quinta Avenida, Cuba’s Fifth Avenue, a wide boulevard lined with fig trees, the center of Cuba’s economic life.

  Strauss-Lochner’s Cuban offices were located in a four-story building on Quinta Avenida. The building, once a mansion for the rich during pre-Revolution days, was in need of a face-lift, like most of Havana’s buildings. Its architecture reflected the late-eighteenth-century baroque style that had arrived in Cuba, its more sophisticated design melding with what had gone before, the mudéjar school of architecture that fused Spanish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Attempts to cover crumbling exteriors only exacerbated the deterioration. A curved, colored-glass panel above the door, in greens and blues, was the only hint of the grandeur that once existed before terminal neglect had set in.

  He walked up and down the busy boulevard to gain bearings. Miramar was certainly different from downtown Havana, he thought. It had become the commercial center for foreign companies that had chosen to defy the U.S. ban and invest in Cuba. There were neon signs atop some of the buildings—Benetton, Castrol, Bayer, and Philips. Pauling passed other former mansions now housing embassies. The imposing former Soviet embassy, now virtually deserted, towered over everything.

  There were no signs on the front of the building in which Strauss-Lochner was situated. Pauling opened the door and stepped into a dusty foyer with cracked white and yellow tiles on the floor. A photograph of Castro was the only wall decoration. Pauling leaned close to a building directory, the glass almost opaque with grime, and read the names. Strauss was on the third floor.

  Pauling slowly climbed the stairs. As he reached the second-floor landing he was face-to-face with an old woman holding a broom and wearing a floor-length gray housecoat.

  “Buenos días,” he said.

  She returned his greeting with a toothless smile.

  A CDR?

  She watched him placidly as he continued up to the third floor. There were two offices there; the door to one of them was open. He looked into the reception area and saw a sign above a desk: STRAUSS-LOCHNER RESOURCES. He went to the door and surveyed the small space. Empty. He considered entering. As he pondered that, a stout man suddenly appeared from an inner office. He wore a white shirt, red tie, and red suspenders. Pauling’s presence startled him. “May I help you?” he asked. The accent was guttural.

  “No, thank you. I must be in the wrong building.”

  “It happens. So confusing, Havana. Who are you looking for?”

  “An export firm. They gave me this number on San Rafael but were obviously wrong. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No bother.” To Pauling’s surprise, the man extended his hand and said, “I am Grünewald. Kurt Grünewald.”

  “Oh. A pleasure meeting you, Mr. Grünewald.”

  “American?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s always good to see someone who isn’t Cuban. You do business in Havana?”

  “No. I’m—ah, visiting a friend. How long have you been in Havana?”

  “Two years.” He wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

  “Like it?”

  Grünewald shrugged and grimaced. “The food is not to my liking. I have a sensitive stomach, ya? The heat, too, is difficult. But we do what we must.”

  “That’s the spirit. What sort of company is Strauss-Lochner?”

  “Pharmaceuticals,” he said proudly. “Research into many diseases. Cancer mostly these days. Here.” He handed Pauling his business card on which both his office number and home number were listed.

  “Thanks,” Pauling said. “It was nice meeting you. Name’s Pauling. Max Pauling. Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”

  “Ya, I hope so. I enjoy talking to Americans. Maybe a drink some night, dinner, a show? Have you seen the show at the Tropicana?” His round face broke into a satisfied grin. “A wonderful show, but so expensive. The best seats are fifty dollars American. The women—” He touched his fingertips to his head. “Beautiful women.”

  “Sounds great,” Pauling said.

  “Ya. Well, if you want, we could go together. I have been many times. There is so little to do here in Cuba at night, ya?”

  “Maybe so,” Pauling said. They shook hands again and Pauling left.

  The cleaning lady was on the second-floor landing as he descended the stairs. He reached the street. It had b
een overcast when he left the hotel that morning, but the sun had broken through. It was like a steam bath, making breathing difficult, his eyes feeling as if they were being parboiled.

  It was ten o’clock, two hours until Celia’s call. He returned to the hotel and asked the desk clerk whether he had any messages.

  “No, señor, no messages.”

  Pauling took a look around the lobby in search of his blond shadow, and checked the restaurant. No sign of him. He rode the elevator to the fourth floor and approached his door. It was closed. Nothing unusual—except for the heavy smell of cheap cologne hanging in the air outside his door. Something was wrong. He’d learned over the years to trust his instincts even though they often were unfounded. But when they were right—

  He stood outside the door and pressed his ear to it. The AC was working, the only sound coming from inside.

  He looked back up the hallway. He had it to himself.

  He pulled the Austrian Glock nine-millimeter semiautomatic from the largest pocket in his vest, placed his other hand on the doorknob, and carefully, slowly opened the door, the weapon held pointing up, next to his ear. His eyes swept the room. No sign of a person. But he saw the open drawers in the dresser, and clothes on the floor.

  He checked every corner of the room, the bathroom, behind the shower curtain, the closet, under the bed. Feeling secure, he closed and locked the door and sat on the bed.

  Because he traveled light, there had been very little in the drawers or the closet. There had been no need for Blondie to have tossed things on the floor. He’d done it so that Pauling would know he’d been there. A warning. A message that his presence in Havana had not gone unnoticed.

  He picked up the few items of clothing from the floor and returned them to the dresser. He opened the drapes and stood in front of the air-conditioning unit, reveling in the cold air that bathed his face. Four floors below, Havana was on the move.