Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [5]
“—will get to Cuba under my own power,” the man said. “And I’ll do as I damn please, and will play it whatever way I want. I don’t need your boats or your planes or your sympathizers or your freedom fighters. I don’t want a goddamned soul to know where I am or what I’m doing. You got that straight, Hiraldo?”
“I have it straight.”
“Fine,” Ray Garrison said. “I’m glad we understand each other. I’m going to Cuba. When your boy Castro is dead, I’ll be back. Have the money waiting for me.” He stood up, his big body uncoiling easily. For the first time he seemed to be aware of Fenton, of Turner, Hines and Garth. “You boys take it easy,” he said. “Don’t let this spic hand you a hard time. I’ll see you all in Cuba.”
And Fenton watched Ray Garrison walk out of the room.
After that it was simpler, quieter, easier. After that, Fenton could sit at ease, smoke one cigarette after the other and think his own thoughts while Hiraldo talked of trivia. He, Fenton, was supposed to go with Garth, to live in a house in Ybor City and take a plane to the Oriente hills. And from there, somehow, they were supposed to kill Castro. It seemed improbable, at best. But he would see what happened. He lit a cigarette from a butt, ground the butt under his heel. Hiraldo talked too much, as Garrison had said. Hiraldo dealt in words, not deeds, and wordy men were what Fenton was trying to escape.
So little time …
He remembered the beginning. The beginning of awareness, at any rate, if not the beginning of it all. How could you pin down beginnings?
Maybe the beginning was long ago. Maybe it all started with birth, many years ago, in Lynbrook. A nice town, Lynbrook. Quiet, peaceful and typically New England. He had been born there and he had lived there, had gone to school, then moved on to the bank. His life was a mirror of the town—quiet, peaceful and typically New England. No wife, because there had never been a woman with whom he’d fallen in love. No mistress; a bank teller in a tiny town cannot afford an affair. Just the job, a few friends, a glass of beer and a book in the evenings, a cup of coffee and the morning paper at dawn. Was that the beginning?
No, he thought. That was the foundation, perhaps. The groundwork. That prepared him, made him a man ready to wait a few more years for retirement, a man who had saved money painstakingly for those years of leisure, the good years, the lazy, self-indulging years a man like himself looked forward to.
Then it began.
It had begun with a pain—a small pain in the chest that came often enough to send him to his doctor. Maybe a heart condition, maybe he would have to start taking it easier.
But it turned out to be something worse—something frightening, inevitable and inexorable. It was a little six-letter word which translated itself into a smaller, colder five-letter word.
The six-letter word was cancer.
The five-letter word was death.
Carcinoma of the lung—lung cancer. How much time, Doctor? More than a month and less than a year. You can have an operation, you can have radium treatments, you can have X-rays. Yes, and we can apply leeches, we can let blood, we can give you hot baths and cold baths and dose you with vitamins and fill you full of antibiotics. And whatever we do, Earl Fenton, in more than a month and less than a year we will bury you. You will be dead and we will place you into a hole and fill that hole with earth.
More than a month, less than a year.
So very little time …
The very thin Cuban with the pencil-line mustache drove Turner and Hines from Tampa to Miami. It was neither a short nor a long drive. The car was a last year’s Cadillac and the thin Cuban drove it as though driver and car were component parts of a single mechanism. The Cuban did not stop once, not for gas, not for coffee, not to pass water. He stopped at last in front of a concrete-block-and-stucco house in what seemed to be a suburb of Miami. Hines wasn’t sure where they were. He had never been to Miami before, had in fact never