Murder in Havana Read online

  “Were you successful?”

  “More than he was. I’m alive. I need help with this.” He pulled the photocopies of the pages he’d discovered in Grünewald’s office from his jacket and handed them to her.

  “What’s this?” she asked, squinting at them in the bar’s dim lighting.

  “That’s what I want to find out. They’re copies of pages I found in a file in his office. It was labeled BTK Industries. They might say something that implicates McCullough in using Strauss-Lochner as a front. I don’t speak or read German. Do you?”

  “A little, not very much. I can ask Mehta.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A friend. She works at the German embassy here.”

  “Can you trust her? For all I know, the whole damn German government is involved in this.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “The hell it is. Grabbing this so-called breakthrough Cuban research wouldn’t hurt anybody, including the government.”

  “I can trust her.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. I don’t have much choice. How fast can you get it translated?”

  “Today, if I can make contact with her. I haven’t seen her in a while. I hope she isn’t on holiday back home.”

  “Do what you can.”

  Pauling shook off the bartender’s offer to refill his drink. He said to Celia, “Gosling didn’t tell you why he wanted you off this assignment?”

  “No.”

  “Dance with me,” he said abruptly.

  “Dance with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Pauling left the bar and went to the piano where the musician was lighting a cigarette between tunes. “Do you know ‘As Time Goes By’?” Max asked.

  “I know it.”

  “Good.” Pauling placed an American dollar bill on the upright. “Play it for me, nice and slow.”

  He returned to where Celia sat, took her hand, and pulled her off the stool.

  “I don’t want to dance,” she said as he pulled her close and started to lead.

  “Sure you do. Like this song?”

  She’d been rigid in his arms. Now she relaxed, her sudden suppleness allowing her body to conform to his. They moved together slowly, the only people on the dance floor, saying nothing until Pauling sang a line of lyrics into her ear.

  “Woman needs man and man must have his mate, that no one can deny.”

  “You dance better than you sing,” she said, mirth in her voice.

  “I don’t do either well, and you know it. The world will always welcome lovers, as time goes by.”

  He’d maneuvered them to the piano as the song ended. Max pulled another dollar from his pocket and tossed it on the piano. “Play it again, Sam,” he said in what passed for a Bogart impression.

  “How do you know his name?” Celia asked as they began dancing again.

  “I don’t. It’s a line from an old movie. Casablanca. You never saw it?”

  “I saw it. I don’t memorize lines from movies.”

  He pulled her as close as possible and exaggerated his movements as the pianist neared the end of his second version of the Herman Hupfeld classic.

  “We seem to have developed hard feelings between us,” she said, stepping away from him. He followed her to the bar where she drew the remains of her drink through the tiny straw and checked her hair in the mirror behind the bar.

  “I must go,” she said.

  “The night’s young,” he said. “This is Havana, remember?”

  “I’ll call you at the hotel. Noon?”

  “Sure. I’ll be there. Celia, I—”

  He didn’t want to see her go, but she did—with purpose.

  He lingered at the bar for a few minutes. The piano player came to him and asked if he had any more requests.

  “No, thanks. You play good.”

  “Gracias. She’s a beautiful woman.”

  “Oh, her? Yeah, she’s okay, I guess. Thanks again.”

  Had he been truthful, Pauling would have admitted to the pianist that at that moment—at that late hour—Celia Sardiña was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  The Cuban section had been established at the Central Intelligence Agency shortly before Castro’s Revolution succeeded in 1959. The Eisenhower administration had been pumping in arms and money to prop up Batista while Castro and his ragtag army continued its assaults on government bases and arms depots. At the same time, perhaps with Eisenhower’s knowledge and approval, maybe not—the general-turned-president never acknowledged it—the CIA was channeling illegal funds into Castro’s coffers. Covering all bets? The proverbial left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing? Different agendas within the U.S. government?

  No matter. For more than four decades, Cuba and its enigmatic, charismatic dictator had commanded the attention of a considerable number of people at the CIA’s headquarters in laconic Langley, Virginia, and plenty of intelligence dollars. He’d outlasted nine U.S. presidents and was the world’s longest-ruling political leader. And on this day, interest at Langley in the Communist island ninety miles off the coast of Florida was ratcheting up.

  Joe Pitura had been with the section for twenty-four years, its chief of operations the past eleven. He’d joined the agency after three highly decorated tours in Vietnam where he was known as a specialist in organizing Vietnam’s Montagnards into effective guerrilla groups. He was known throughout the agency as a no-nonsense, straight-shooting, hard-nosed hawk who’d been advocating a full-scale armed invasion of Cuba ever since arriving at Langley. But because that option had been scotched by a succession of presidents, he contented himself with conjuring covert activities against Castro. It was a favorite exercise; he’d spend hours at a time with trusted aides coming up with ways to strike at Castro, most of them outlandish and totally unworkable, some potentially doable, an occasional idea causing Pitura’s broad, creased face to light up, and sending him up the chain of command in the hope of seeing it put into action.

  During his Vietnam days, he’d been an imposing physical specimen, barrel-chested, with powerful arms. But rheumatoid arthritis had wracked his body. His fingers were gnarled, his wrists misshapen. His feet had broken down under his weight; despite orthopedic shoes, he walked with a painful waddle. During meetings, he would occasionally yelp when a sharp pain stabbed a joint. His people were used to it and ignored it, which is what he preferred.

  “I’ve got nothing against Fidel Castro,” he was fond of saying. “But I wish I did—cold steel against that murdering bastard’s neck.”

  On most days, Pitura went about his duties with a sense of impotence verging on boredom. Watching successive administrations fumble in their relations with Castro and Cuba was perpetually frustrating. He considered the embargo to be a weak substitute for direct military intervention. In his judgment, the Helms-Burton Act and Torricelli Cuban Democracy Act represented only political showboating.

  On this morning, however, Pitura appeared to colleagues like a man with a purpose.

  He’d been in his office all night, catching only a couple of twenty-minute catnaps in his chair. Most of his staff had spent the night there, too, poring over reports arriving with regularity over secure lines of communication from operatives in Havana, and from Cuban-Americans in Miami who served as conduits between Pitura’s Cuban section and friends and family in Havana. At seven, he gathered in his office those of his staff with need-to-know security clearance.

  “Okay, let’s go over those reports again, in order,” he said, blowing his nose in his trademark red-and-white railroad handkerchief. The lights were dimmed.

  “First, there are these reports on Fidel’s birthday celebration,” a staffer said, using an overhead projector to display transcripts on a collapsible movie screen.

  “If I had my way,” Pitura said, “he wouldn’t be celebrating another birthday. Any surprises?”

  Another transcript appeared on the screen. “None that we can see, Joe. The usual excuse for Cast
ro to give a four- or five-hour speech, although he has been keeping them a little shorter lately. Heads of state have been arriving. McCullough and his group are invited guests, VIP status. The word is out, as usual, that everybody in Havana is expected to show up and shout their praises for El Jefe Máximo.”

  Pitura snickered. “If you don’t shout loud enough, you get shot. Is everything in place on our end?”

  The answer was affirmative and unanimous.

  “Okay, let’s get to the meat,” Pitura said, turning to his senior staff analyst. “You haven’t actually heard the tape. Correct?”

  “Correct. They rushed through a verbal report on it, came up with a fast synopsis.”

  “Let me see it again.”

  A different sheet of paper was slid into the overhead projector. It was typewritten, short sentences separated by dashes or dots.

  “Can you believe this?” Pitura said, more to himself than to the others. He’d said it a half-dozen times since first being handed it during the night. “Price McCullough going into partnership with the devil. What a world.”

  “I never did like McCullough,” someone said.

  “Our esteemed president does,” said Pitura. “Turn up the lights.” He sat back and rubbed bloodshot eyes. “Christ, McCullough is helping fund Fidel’s retirement package.”

  “Not the only benefactor,” the senior analyst said. “Fidel’s cutting deals with all sorts of foreign businesses, selling off a piece of Cuba here, a piece there.”

  “For the good of his people, of course,” Pitura growled.

  “The question is whether the president knows about the deal.”

  “Of course he does,” Pitura said. “Clinton shook hands with Castro. Walden wants to climb in bed with him, bring Cuba back into the fold, have plenty of Cuban cigars in the humidor. I had a phone briefing a half hour ago from Zach Rasmussen. Tom Hoctor’s been keeping him up-to-date on what Max Pauling is doing in Havana.”

  “And?”

  “He got himself arrested.”

  “Arrested?”

  “Yeah. I’ll get back to that. This report on the meeting between McCullough and Castro raises an interesting question.”

  They waited for him to continue.

  “Rasmussen wants us to hold off until we see what Pauling comes up with for Vic Gosling and his client. I suppose I can’t really argue with his position. The way he sees it, if Pauling comes out of Cuba with proof that McCullough’s company is cutting a deal with Castro, we could leak that to whip up sentiment against Fidel in Cuba, and with the Miami crowd. Not that our foaming-at-the-mouth Cuban-American friends need more prompting. If Castro seems like a traitor about to skip with three-quarters of his country’s resources, it would help us foment a strong uprising against him by his own people. Gosling agreed to give us everything Pauling comes up with. He’s as much a whore as McCullough. But Pauling’s job is to link McCullough’s company to the German outfit, prove it’s using the Germans as a front to get around the embargo. All that accomplishes for us is to paint the esteemed former senator as a lawbreaker, and I guarantee you McCullough and his pal in the White House will spin the hell out of that.” Pitura laughed. “Want to hear something funny?” he asked.

  “Castro’s been photographed with choirboys?”

  “I should only hope.”

  “Pauling was arrested for being with choirboys?”

  “No—for murder. The German Strauss-Lochner rep in Havana got himself killed, and the Cuban cops questioned Pauling about it. Seems they enjoyed a night on the town together just before he got it.”

  “Pauling’s off the hook?”

  “Yeah. Bobby Jo in Havana at Special Interests reported it.”

  “Maybe Pauling will get out of Cuba fast,” it was suggested.

  “Chances are he’ll keep looking for what Gosling wants. As a spook, Pauling was never easily spooked.”

  Pitura stood and looked out of a window at the parklike setting surrounding the building in which assassinations were planned and occasionally carried out successfully. Things were coming to a head; he had decisions to make, and had to make them fast. Plans had been in the works for months leading up to Castro’s annual birthday bash. Everyone had been put on alert—Cuban exile groups in Miami, paramilitary training camps in Florida and Mexico, Cuban operatives inside Havana. The McCullough meeting with Castro hadn’t been anticipated, nor had Max Pauling’s assignment to Cuba. But those unexpected twists were manageable. Pitura’s feet might be a wreck, but he could still think on them.

  He was glad Tom Hoctor had ordered Gosling to sever Celia Sardiña’s relationship with Pauling. What was she thinking of when she agreed to become involved? He’d sent her to Havana too early, he knew, giving her too much time on her hands. Operatives like her needed to be kept busy, occupied, like little kids with too much idle time. That was always the trouble with using independents for sensitive assignments, especially the hotheaded Cubans. They tended to go off on their own unless the leash was short and maintained by a firm grip. But sometimes you needed them, like now.

  He turned and faced his staff.

  “All set?” he asked, taking in each person at the table. Nods all around.

  “No hitches?”

  “None, Joe.”

  “Then it’s a go,” he said, and left the room.

  After Celia had left the hotel, Pauling lingered at the twenty-fifth-floor bar before going downstairs and out to the street. The Vedado section of Havana had a different feel from bustling, decrepit central Havana. The boulevards were wide and lined with royal palms. There were many hotels patterned after those in Miami Beach; the majestic Hotel Nacional looked down from its perch above the Malecón as though to proclaim its superiority over lesser ones below.

  Pauling looked across the street to the Coppelia Ice Cream Park that Celia had mentioned. Prior to the Revolution, this trendy part of the city had been the scene of numerous ice cream parlors catering to Havana’s well-heeled citizens. Blacks and poor mestizo Cubans weren’t welcome. But in 1966, Castro ordered the sprawling, lush park be built to include the ultimate democratic ice cream parlor, the world’s biggest, serving dozens of flavors to as many as forty thousand customers a day. The park had been closed for repairs for two years in the late ’90s; cynical Cubans believed the true reason was that the government could no longer import the necessary ingredients for the ice cream. But it had reopened six months prior to Pauling’s arrival and was busy despite the early morning hour.

  As he crossed the street, he noticed a PNR car with two men inside parked just beyond the park’s entrance. He was tempted to wave but stifled the urge. He entered the park and went to its center where the ice cream parlor, which looked like a giant flying saucer, was located. Regardless of the hour, and what had happened to him during the night—or because of it—he was wide awake, charged, wired, and throbbing with nervous energy. He found a vacant bench beneath a tree, sat, and tried to put a finger on what to do next. He was certain of one thing. Get out of Cuba as quickly as possible, ideally with the information he’d been sent to collect. With any luck, Nico would come up with some credible documentation of BTK’s deal with Strauss-Lochner Resources before the end of the day. Also, the papers taken from Grünewald’s office, once translated, might provide additional proof.

  A pretty young Cuban woman dressed in a red tartan miniskirt approached and asked if he wished to order ice cream. “Only vanilla,” she said apologetically. Pauling shook his head and she walked away.

  Another young woman, a teenager, came up to him and offered a paper flute of peanuts coated in sugar from a makeshift cardboard rack she carried. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Sí.”

  He munched on the peanuts as he left the park and walked in the direction of his hotel, mind still racing. He was acutely aware of his surroundings, a natural instinct for Pauling, made more so as he thought of the young blond German he was convinced had killed Kurt Grünewald. He hadn’t known Grünewald well, had no connec
tion to him aside from being aware that he worked for Strauss-Lochner, and having spent an evening with him. Still, the man’s murder was more upsetting than he’d realized. He’d liked the fat German; felt sorry for him was more like it. A plain guy in a difficult situation, going for the pension, he’d said at dinner, a family back in Heidelberg waiting for him to come home and putter in his garden and pinch his grandchildren’s cheeks. Anger rose as he thought about Grünewald and the end he’d suffered. The German was right in labeling the blond aide foisted on him “Vice President of Stupidity.” Maybe his mistake was in not adding “VP of Bloody Wetwork” to his titles.

  As he approached Hotel Habana Riviera, Pauling realized that Blondie had now become a cause with him. It was a personal weakness, he knew, one he’d suffered before. Once, in Vienna, he’d been part of a team that had identified the source of leaks from the U.S. embassy that had gotten a CIA colleague killed. Pauling’s mission had been successful. The informer, an Austrian civilian employee of the embassy, had been fingered, his fate placed in the hands of others. But rather than leave when scheduled, Pauling had stayed in the city and physically attacked the source of the leaks one night in a secluded park. He’d been called on the carpet by Hoctor for that breach of orders. He couldn’t justify to his superior why he’d done it—except that he had to. The slain agent had been Pauling’s friend.

  “You jeopardized the mission,” Hoctor had said when they met at Langley. “Your stupid attack might have served as a tip that we were on to him.”

  “Nonsense,” Pauling had replied. “As far as the creep knew, he was mugged by an Austrian. That’s why I cleaned out his wallet before I left.” He held up his hand against what Hoctor was about to say next. “No, Tom, I didn’t pocket the money. It went down a sewer, where he should have gone.”

  Pauling didn’t bother trying to provide Hoctor further justification for his actions. The truth was, the agency might have let the informer walk, might have even paid him off to get lost somewhere in South America. He’d witnessed that resolution before.