Red Angel

“I am hoping you and Senorita Mendez will be working with me,” Martinez said.

“Just us? That’s it?” Devlin’s tone was pure incredulity.

“The gentleman we will see this morning may also help.”

“Who is he?”

“He is a well-known Cuban mystery writer, who, before he retired, also worked as a propagandist with our political police.”

“That’s it?” Devlin snapped. “One Cuban cop, a retired mystery writer, and a pair of tourists? And against us we’ve got the Cuban secret police?”

“You are much more than a tourist, my friend.”

Devlin shook his head emphatically. “No, I am not, my friend. Here, I am definitely just a tourist.”

“I am also hoping that Plante Firme will assist us,” Martinez said.

“The witch doctor?” Devlin stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Please, senor. The term ‘witch doctor’ would be an offense to him. He is called a palero, a priest of the Palo Monte sect, a follower of the Regla Mayombe.”

“Great,” Devlin snapped. “One Cuban cop, one retired writer, two tourists, and a goddamn palero.”

“A powerful mix, my friend. If used well, a very powerful mix.”

Devlin leaned forward, eyes hard on Martinez’s mournful face. “Well, not quite powerful enough for me, Major.” He held up a hand, stopping the words Martinez seemed about to speak. “I’ll help you,” he said. “Because I damned well want to know what happened to this woman’s body. But there’s a condition.”

“A condition?” Martinez blinked several times.

“I bring one of my people from New York to help us.”

“Who, Paul?” It was Adrianna.

“Ollie Pitts.”

“God, Paul. No. Not Ollie.”

“Who is this Ollie?” Martinez asked. He pronounced the name Oily.

“One of my detectives. The best damned street detective I have.”

Martinez turned to Adrianna. “You do not seem to like this man,” he said. “Why is that?”

“No one likes him.” Adrianna looked sharply at Devlin.

“I like him,” Devlin said. “I especially like him watching my back.”

“No one likes him except Paul,” Adrianna said.

“And why is that?”

“It’s simple.” Adrianna threw another sharp look at Devlin. “Ollie Pitts is a beast.”

Martinez sat back in his chair and nodded. “Ah, a beast,” he said. “Yes, that is definitely what we will need. A beast.”

Robert Cipriani sat in his brightly lit cell, the day’s edition of Granma propped on his lap. He glared at the newsprint, his face twisted in a sneer. He despised everything about Cuba’s daily newspaper. Even the fact that it was named after the battered ship that Fidel and eighty-six followers had used for their 1956 invasion at Alegria de Pio. It was so like these goddamned Cubans, he thought. Deifying some leaky tub, just because the fucking “Comandante” and his band of bearded greasers had once puked in its head. Naming their one fucking national newspaper after it. His jaw tightened. Christ, they had even put up a monument to the boat right behind Batista’s old Presidential Palace.

Cipriani tossed the newspaper aside. It was useless. The only financial news it carried was so laden with propaganda, all the facts became skewed. Fidel’s view of world finance. Like tits on a bull.

He pulled himself out of his leather easy chair, walked the three steps it took to cross his cell, and punched the button that would boot up the mainframe of his IBM computer. At least they had given him this-a way to communicate with the still-sane world. He moved to the cell’s one barred window while Windows 98 performed its magic. Outside, across the wide, green parade ground of the State Security compound, he could see an occasional car move past the barbed-wire-topped gate that opened onto Canuco Street. Most Cubans avoided the street. The high, wire-topped wall with its watchtowers and heavily armed guards, the mounted video cameras that tracked each car and pedestrian, made the entire two-block area inhospitable.

He snorted over the final word, then turned to take in his own “hospitable” surroundings. A ten-by-eight-foot cell, closed off by a solid iron door. A single bed, not even adequate for the weekly whore they provided. A leather reading chair. And the goddamned computer they had confiscated from his own house.

He closed his eyes and raised his hands to his face. He could feel the changes that had taken place in the five years he had been locked away. His hair was thinner now, the former widow’s peak now reaching back to the middle of his head. His face felt skeletal under his fingers, the cheeks sunken, the lines deeper across his forehead and around his eyes. He had kept his mustache, still too vain about the harelip it hid to cut it away. Christ, he was only fifty-five, but he looked ten years older, all of it coming since they had stuffed him in this cell. The bastards were killing him.

Cipriani’s eyes snapped open with the sound of the key in the lock. He watched as the door swung away and that prick Cabrera stepped into the cell.

“Hola, my friend. Have you come to free me at last.” He had forced a wide smile that Cabrera did not return.

“We have a problem.” Cabrera spoke to him in English, as he always did to protect their conversations from any eavesdropping guards. The colonel had taken care to make certain all the guards on the cellblock were not fluent in the language. It had only added to Cipriani’s miseries.

“We?” he said. “Why is it that we have problems, while only you enjoy the occasional success?”

“Spare me your philosophical observations.” Cabrera perched on the very edge of Cipriani’s bed, worried, as always, about damaging the knife-edge crease in his trousers. He was dressed in a business suit-his normal attire. Like all officers of State Security, he wore his uniform only for ceremonial occasions, or when he wanted to intimidate someone.

Cipriani returned to his leather armchair and became as attentive as possible. There was no point in irritating the man. The first two years of his incarceration had been spent in serious prisons. First, here at the State Security detention facility, the Villa Marista, but in a regular cellblock where he lived with four other men in a cell half the size of the one he now occupied. Next he went to a general prison, at Combinado del Este. There it was eight men to a cell, sleeping in tiered bunks one atop the other, the food so meager that doctors classified their level of undernourishment as moderate, severe, or critical, and it was not uncommon for prisoners to kill each other over food brought in by relatives. No, he thought, there was no point in irritating the colonel. He had saved him, brought him back to the Villa Marista, and put him in this well-appointed hellhole. And the price of redemption for his “financial crimes” was at least interesting.

It was a strange turn of fate. Robert Cipriani was a fugitive from the United States. There, he had done what other financiers do daily. He had taken money from fools. He, however, had been caught, and had fled-twenty million dollars in hand-to one of the world’s few havens from extradition. Here, the Cubans had accepted him, and his money, allowing him to live well for more than a decade. Then they had come in the night and dragged him away, convicted him of financial crimes against the government, which to this day were vague at best. All of it to one purpose. To put him where he was now, serving the interests of State Security.

But at least there was decent food, and the weekly teenage whore. There was his computer, which allowed him to work again, and over the past five years he had accumulated another five million. And that was the best game there was. Better even than anything the teenage whore could offer.

“Tell me your troubles,” Cipriani said. He studied the colonel’s dour expression. He was a tall man-six-foot- two, a full six inches taller than Cipriani-and when dejected, his tall, hard, angular body curved like a great, bony question mark. He was hatless today, and it pleased Cipriani to see his balding head glistening above his dark beard. The man was only forty, at best, and he already had less hair than the prisoner he pissed on at will. He also had a big nose that ruined any chance of being handsome. You were handsome once, Cipriani told himself. But that was before. Before they turned you into a walking skeleton.

Cabrera told him about Devlin and Adrianna Mendez. “I did not know Maria Mendez had any relatives, other