“You don’t get it,” Bayo spat when he could talk again. “This is bigger than a two-bit thug like you. Russians won’t back down. They got nothing to lose.”
Melchior pulled his knife from its sheath.
“I don’t got any safety pins on me, so I’m gonna have to slice your eyelid off so you can’t blink. I imagine that’ll hurt a fair bit, but it’s gonna feel like heaven compared to the sensation of having your eyeball melted down like tallow. That’s candle wax made from animal fat for an ignoramus like you. Like the kind the Nazis made from the Jews. You want your sister to see you looking like that, Eddie?” He dropped to one knee. “You want Maria to see her big brother looking like a burned-out kike blubber candle?” Melchior sucked at the cigar, getting it brighter and brighter. “How old is she now? Maria. Eleven? Twelve?”
“Not even you—”
“Yes, Eddie, I would. If it would get me off this shit-fuck island, I would gladly lay Fidel Castro on the altar of the Catedral de San Cristobal de la Habana in front of a full congregation and stick a communion wafer on the head of my dick and shove it between what I assume, based on his beard, are a couple of incredibly hairy ass cheeks. And I wouldn’t even
He brought the cigar an inch away from Bayo’s left eye.
“Talk to me, Eddie. Save us both the trouble.”
Bayo had cojones, you had to give him that. Melchior was pretty sure it was the threat to his sister that broke him, not the pain. He whispered the name of a village about seven clicks away, close to the border of Las Villas.
“The big plantation south of town got burned out during the fighting in ’58. Meeting’s in the old mill.”
Melchior jammed the cigar in his mouth and jerked Bayo to his knees. The seared skin of Bayo’s chest split like wet paper when Melchior pulled him up, and a mixture of blood and pus spilled from the seam and ran down his stomach. But all Bayo did was bite his lip and close his eyes.
“You’re a good man, Eddie. You can rest easy with the knowledge that your sister will never know what you did for her. Unless of course I go to the meet and no one shows.”
Bayo didn’t say anything, and Melchior exchanged his knife for his pistol, brought the gun to the back of Bayo’s head. A shot to the back of the head sent a message. If you were going to execute someone, you might as well make it count. Still, the gun in his hand felt ponderously large and heavy, and Bayo’s head seemed suddenly very small, as if, if Melchior’s hand didn’t stop shaking, he might miss. He brought the gun so close to Bayo’s head that it tapped against his hair like a typewriter key worried by a twitching finger.
“They’ll kill you, too,” Bayo said, a desperate whine in his voice.
Melchior laid his thumb on the hammer to still it. “I’ll take my chances.”
“Not the Russians. The Comp—”
Bayo jerked to the left—even managed to get a foot on the floor before Melchior squeezed the trigger. Clumps of brain splattered across the room, along with his right ear and half his face. He remained upright for a second or two, wobbling like a metronome, then fell forward. His cracked skull shattered when it hit the floor, and his head flattened out like a half-inflated basketball.
As the reverberations of the shot faded from the room, it occurred to Melchior that he should have cut Bayo’s throat with his knife. He only had five bullets left in his gun. Four now. If Bayo hadn’t lunged, he would’ve remembered that before he pulled the trigger.
“Damn it, Eddie. You went and ruined it.”
Well, that was Cuba for you. It could take the fun out of just about anything.
Cambridge, MA
October 26, 1963
Fifteen hundred miles north as the crow flies (no airplane had made the journey since the embargo had started in February) Nazanin Haverman walked into a dingy bar in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Morganthau had selected the King’s Head because it was far enough from Harvard Yard that the usual rabble didn’t frequent the place, yet still well known among “a certain set,” as he called it. Naz hadn’t asked who the members of that set were, but somehow she suspected they were responsible for the smug graffito scribbled on a months-old mimeograph advertising Martin Luther King’s March on Washington:
There was a mirror in the vestibule, and Naz looked in the glass with the disinterested gaze of a woman who’s long since learned to inspect her war paint without reckoning the face beneath. She took her gloves off, easing the right one over the big ruby on her third finger, which she rubbed, less for good luck than to remind herself that she still had it—that she could still sell it if things got really bad. Then, keeping her gait as steady as she could—she’d primed herself with one or two gin and tonics before she left home—she headed down the narrow corridor toward the bar.
It hit her as she paused in the jaundiced light over the inner door. The cigarette smoke and the stale odor of spilled drinks and the urgent murmur of voices, the sidelong glances and equally circumspect feelings that accompanied them. A miasma of frustrated, sexually charged emotions swirled around her as palpably as the bolts of smoke, and against its press all she could do was fasten her eyes on the bar and forge ahead. Fifteen steps, she told herself, that’s all she had to take. Then she could center herself around a tall, cold glass of gin.
Her form-fitting pearl gray suit directed the men’s eyes to her hips, her waist, her breasts, the single open button of decolletage in her white silk blouse. But it was her face that held them. Her mouth, its fullness made even more striking by deep red lipstick that picked up the color of the ruby on her right hand, her eyes, as dark and shiny as polished stone, but slightly blurred, too—anthracite rather than obsidian. And of course her hair, a mass of inky black waves that sucked up what little light there was and radiated it back in oil-slick rainbows. A hundred times she’d had it straightened with the fumy chemicals Boston’s blanched housewives used to relax their hair, a hundred times it had sprung back to curl, and so, in lieu of the elaborately sculpted coifs that helmeted the rangy blondes and brunettes in the room, Naz’s hair was piled against her skull in a thick mass that framed her face in a dark
