know who you are. They'd like to bask in your glamour. It would be like John Wayne or Joe DiMaggio coming over and sitting with them. You'd find it pretty amusing, I think. Most of them are worthless.'
'Once they saw what a down-home buckra I was, they'd go back to yakking about the stock market. I really ought to head upstairs. I don't think there's a chance in hell of a thing happening here, because nothing on this island happens on time, but I ought to be ready just in case.'
'So mysterious. But that's what I'd expect from the manhunter.'
'You are well informed, I have to say.'
'Down here, everybody talks, everybody gossips. You can't keep a secret. All right, Sergeant Swagger, mystery man of the Caribbean, I'll go away and let you do your duty, as all marines must. You still have my card, right?'
'Yes I do, Mrs. Augustine.'
'Please call me Jean. Everybody does. I'm just Jean, the famous Jean of the Havana smart set.'
'Jean, then.'
'So if you need help and these young kids you're working for, even though you detest them, can't do a thing for you, you call me.'
'Sure.'
'And thanks for being such a good guy that night with that big jerk. You were terrific. Guys like you, always married, always decent. Always. Just my luck.'
She gave him a kiss on the cheek, squeezed his arm and slipped away through the crowd.
He finished the rumless-and-Coke, threw down too much money on the bar, and found a quiet way out.
He showered but could not sleep. He lay in the darkness, waiting for it to come but it didn't. He tossed, turned, tried to quell his mind. The smell of the woman was still in his mind, and possibly what she represented: a whole world of unimagined possibility. And this business too, with its promise of the fancy job in Washington, some idea of a big house, a fine school for the boy, a sense of becoming something so far beyond what he was supposed to become it disturbed him.
Somewhere in there he actually drifted off. But it was a shallow, restless sleep, broken by dreams. In one of these he was back in the water off Tarawa, that moment of the war's darkest horror, where the Higgins boats had gotten caught on the reef and they had a whole thousand-yard walk in neck-deep water under heavy Jap fire. The tracers were white-blue, like snakes or whips that lashed or struck across the water, and it was so deep and heavy you could hardly move and there were times when the island ahead disappeared behind swells and the ships behind disappeared too, and there you were, one man, neck-deep in water, defenseless-alone, it seemed, on the face of a watery planet.
Gunfire.
Then he realized the gunfire wasn't in his brain.
He snapped awake and listened as the shots rang through the night.
He got up, raced to the westward-facing window and opened the curtain, pushed the shutters open wide.
Facing the square, he saw nothing but the flicker of gas lamps in the park, but he knew the gunfire came from behind, to the east.
Frenchy called three minutes later.
'It's happening. The idiot attacked the Moncada Barracks. There's a gunfight going on there now. We can get him. How soon can you be set?'
'I'm ready now,' said Earl. He hung up the phone, picked up the rifle case and headed downstairs.
Chapter 39
The mulatto Cartaya stood before them all and once again sang his song, a catchy tune that bore an embarrassing similarity to a famous English seaside rhythm.
On and on it went, through several more verses, and by the end, most of the men were weeping. They felt it so profoundly. It stirred them, deep in their Cuban souls.
They were not radical students or intellectuals, members of any elite or vanguard. They were just men. Most were factory workers, agricultural workers, shop assistants. There was a watchmaker, a teacher, a taxi-driver, a doctor, a dentist, a bookshop assistant, a chimney sweep, three carpenters, a butcher, an oyster seller and a nurse.
They came not because of him, but because of it. It was Cuba. They felt it. He was only the instrument of will. He made it happen by conceptualizing it, by focusing on plans much discussed but always lacking behind them the necessary force, and by supplying that force. What he stood for, they didn't know; what his programs were, they didn't care. He may not have stood for anything. He was just the one who had appointed himself the leader, and by reputation he gathered them. They didn't even know him, they didn't care about him; he was just the man who'd made it happen over the past month.
Having talked this over a thousand nights in coffeehouses and over chessboards and cigars and after rallies, he knew who to call. He had begun to make phone calls-thank you, Mr. President, for the wonderful Cuban phone system, the best in the Caribbean-from the town of Artemisa, ten miles east of Santiago, on the plain that separated the mountains from the seas, as was this farmhouse where they were now meeting. He made phone calls to men he knew and trusted, who in turn made phone calls to men they knew and trusted, who then…and so forth and so on, and now there were eighty or so of them, gathered here in their shabby khaki uniforms, with their shabby weapons, a few American M1s or carbines, a Winchester.44 lever rifle, but mostly.22 hunting rifles or old
