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AND WHEN I WASN’T LOOKING at the two bodies lying by the side of the road I was watching the police van parked a few meters away, and the several, frightened-looking occupants of its brightly lit interior. Their faces were bruised and bloodied and full of fear. It was like staring into a tank full of lobsters. You had the impression that at any moment one of them might be taken out and killed, like the two on the grass shoulder. Then the officer checked my identity card and asked me several questions in a nasal, cartoonish voice that might have made me smile had the situation seemed less lethal. A few minutes later, I was free to proceed with my journey back to Vedado.
I drove on for about half a kilometer and then stopped at a little pink stone café by the roadside, where I asked the owner if I might use the telephone, thinking to call Finca Vigía and warn Noreen-and, in particular, Alfredo López-about the roadblock. It wasn’t that I liked the lawyer so much. I never yet met a lawyer I didn’t want to slap. But I didn’t think he deserved a bullet in the back of the head-which, almost certainly, was what would happen to him if the militia found him in possession of those pamphlets and a pistol. Nobody deserved that kind of ignominious fate. Not even the NKVD.
The café owner was bald and clean-shaven, with thick lips and a broken nose. The man told me the phone had been out of order for days and blamed it on pequeños rebeldes who liked to demonstrate their devotion to the revolution by shooting their catapultas at the ceramic conductors on the telephone poles. If I wanted to warn López, it wasn’t going to be by telephone.
Experience told me that the militia seldom allowed anyone to drive back through a roadblock. They would assume, rightly, that I intended to warn someone. I would have to find another route back to Finca Vigía-one that took me through the little side streets and avenues of San Francisco de Paula. But it was not an area I knew well, especially in the dark.
“Do you know Finca Vigía-the American writer’s house?” I asked the café owner.
“Of course. Everyone knows the house of Ernesto Hemingway.”
“How would a man get there who didn’t want to drive down the main road, south to Cotorro?” I held up a five-peso note to help him think.
The café owner gri
I nodded.
“Keep your money, señor. I would not take money from a man who merely wished to avoid our beloved militia.” He led me out of the café.
“Such a man as yourself would drive north, past the gas station in Diezmero, and turn left onto Varona. Then go across the river in Mantilla. At the junction he would go south, on Managua, and follow the road until he came upon the main highway going west toward Santa María del Rosario. At which point you would cross the main road north again and find Finca Vigía from there.”
This series of directions was accompanied by much pointing, and like almost everything in Cuba, we had soon attracted a small crowd of café patrons, small boys, and stray dogs.
“It will take you fifteen minutes, perhaps,” said the man. “Assuming you don’t end up in the Río Hondo or shot by the militia.”
A couple of minutes later I was bouncing through the poorly lit, leafy backstreets of Mantilla and El Calvario like the crew of a stricken Dornier and wearily regretting the consumption of too much bourbon and red wine and probably a brandy or two. I steered the Chevrolet west, south, and then east again. Off the two-lane blacktop the roads weren’t much more than dirt tracks, and the Chevy’s rear end held its line with less grip than a recently sharpened ice skate. U
“This is what you get for trying to do someone a favor,” I told myself, irritably.
I saw that the car was undamaged and that the front left tire seemed to have broken through several planks of wood that were buried in the ground.
I sat up straight and carefully reversed back onto the road. Then I got out to take another, closer look at what was buried. But because it was dark I couldn’t see very clearly, even in the car headlights, and I had to fetch a flashlight from the trunk to shine through the broken planks. Lifting one of the boards, I shone the flashlight through the hole and peered inside what appeared to be a buried crate. The size was difficult to determine, but inside the crate were several smaller wooden boxes. Stenciled on the lid of one of these boxes was MARK 2 FHGS; and on another was BROWNING M19.
I had stumbled onto a hidden weapons cache.
Immediately I switched off the flashlight and then the headlights of the car, and looked around in case anyone had seen me. The te
After a while I lifted one of the broken planks and used it like a snowplow to move some dirt back on top of the weapons cache- enough to conceal it. Then I quickly marked the site with three stones I took from the other side of the road. All this took less than five minutes. It wasn’t a place I wanted to linger. Not with militia in the area. They were hardly likely to accept my explanation for how it was I came to be burying a weapons cache at midnight on a lonely road in El Calvario, no more than the people who had buried it there would have believed that I wasn’t going to inform the police. I had to get away from there as quickly as possible. So I jumped back in my car and drove off.
I arrived back at Finca Vigía just as Alfredo López was getting back into the white Oldsmobile to drive himself home. I reversed up next to him. Then I wound down my window. López did the same.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“It could be. If you were a man with a thirty-eight and a briefcase full of rebel pamphlets.”
“You know I am.”
“López, my friend, you might care to think about getting out of the pamphleteering business for a while. There’s a militia roadblock on the main road north, just next to the gas station in Diezmero.”
“Thanks for the warning. I guess I’ll have to find another route home.”
I shook my head. “I drove back here through Mantilla and El Calvario. There was another truckload of them getting ready to deploy down there, as well.” I said nothing about the weapons cache I’d found. I thought it was best that I forget all about that. For now.
“It would seem that they’re looking to catch some fish tonight,” he observed.
“The keep net was full, it’s true,” I said. “But it looked to me as if they were pla
“These were individual tragedies, I suppose,” he said. “Of course, a couple of deaths are hardly comparable with the rule of genuine tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.”
“Think what you like. I didn’t come here to make a convert. Just to save your stupid neck.”
“Yes, of course, I’m sorry.” López pursed his lips for a moment and then bit one of them hard enough to hurt. “They don’t usually bother coming as far south of Havana as this.”