Havana

and fluted in the pale, cool early morning sunlight.

But he had no chance to settle down, for as birds of carrion whirled overhead, one in human form approached on foot, fast, bent, dark, near apoplexy.

'Hey,' he shouted, and Earl looked over to see that he had been followed from the tent by a familiar figure that he could not place in time or memory, until at last the man's sheer aggression imprinted itself, and he recognized him from his previous anger at the fancy embassy party some weeks ago.

'The fuck?' said the dark furious man. 'You just fuckin' walk out on Captain Latavistada like you're some kind of fuckin' better than him? Who the fuck are you, a prince, a nancy, a fuckin' Mr. Too Fuckin' Good for everybody?'

Earl rose quickly and it occurred to him to punch the prick bloody under the banyan tree on the parade ground, and how much pleasure would be had in the feeling of the flattened nose and the broken teeth and the spew of blood, but instead he just stared at him hard.

'Yeah, you. You fuckin' goofball, this is the shit that has to be done down here to keep it all from going blooie in our faces and Captain Latavistada is a great man who gets that while some fancy dick like you, you like to cold- cock guys in train stations and ambush 'em while they're reading the newspaper on their sofas, but you ain't got the fuckin' hubcaps for this sort of thing. You yellow piece of shit, I ought to?'

'You shut that yap, mister, and shut it hard, or I will shut it for you, and all these Cubans can watch me pound the snot out of you ounce by ounce.'

Whoever he was, he was taken aback by Earl's defiance, but the surprise instantly transmuted into rage, his face flashed the dead white of assault, and he waded in. His first blow, a wide, circular notification by wire, was easily evaded, and Earl instead snared the second one, only slightly less telegraphed, transformed its power by the primitive alchemy of judo back onto his attacker, and rammed the guy's noggin hard against the trunk of the tree.

He did it a couple more times, taking satisfaction in the gash he opened in the hairline and the spurt of blood. Then he dropped the man, hard, on the ground.

'Ow, fuck,' spat Frankie Carbine, 'you fucking?'

'You piece of shit, you get up now and in one second I will beat the side of your head in and fertilize this shithole with your brains. I am not your kidding type, so you listen now or you die in five seconds.'

The man stayed down. He put his hand to his hairline, now producing copious blood, that before swelling and turning purple-yellow like a rotted grapefruit.

'You got me with a trick.'

'Yeah, a trick called faster and tougher, you fucking human blister. I ought to pop you and drain all that pus out now, you New York grease factory.'

He dared the man to rise; the man, though still deep full of aggression, was not stupid; he stayed down, but the look in his feral eyes and his ugly knitted features suggested that the next time he saw Earl would be over the sights of a pistol.

'Earl, Earl,' Frenchy suddenly crooned, breaking though the small knot of Cubans who'd gathered to watch the amusing spectacle of a big man crushing a smaller one, a sure laugh-getter in most of the world's precincts, 'it's all right, ignore him.'

He turned to the man.

'Sport, Lansky would have you shipped back to the States in a straw basket if he knew what you'd just pulled. We are trying to stay on top of a fluid situation and get it done, and we don't need showboat New York thugs going screwball on us. You get back to Havana or I will make a phone call and you will not see Manhattan again in a dream.'

Sullenly the battered man rose, scuffed insolently at the dirt, and launched a gob that wasn't aimed east enough to strike Earl but not west enough to avoid insult. He slumped off.

'Who's that jaybird?'

'He's a mob guy. He hangs out with the secret police and reports to some big people who run the casinos in Havana. He's nobody, really. He's a worm, that's all. He's not worth beating up.'

'Son, if you call that 'beating up,' you don't know much about beating up.'

'Well, yeah. Anyhow, we have something. Something good. We have to move.'

'What is it?'

'Latavistada broke the witness. It was all in Spanish but I understood. Beautiful Eyes is making sure and dotting all the i's. But the gist of it is that someone saw Castro being led off right at the end by some kind of peasant. But a weird kind of peasant. Some tall, lanky, scrawny guy, with bristly gray hair. The description was, 'like a poet.' He looked like a poet, by which I take to mean slightly bohemian, or intellectual, what we might call a beatnik. Mean anything to you?'

Earl thought for a second.

'Yeah,' he finally said. 'It's somebody who knows what he's doing. These clowns will never find this guy, believe me. He's too good for them.'

'Is he too good for you, Earl? You'll have to hunt him down, too. You have to be better than he is.'

Chapter 41

At one point, the Russian moved into the cab with the old man who was driving, and gave directions. He seemed to sense ambush and roadblock and sudden troop appearances as if he had a radar in his brain for such things. He always knew which street to turn down, how the alleys connected, and following these methods, he got them to the outskirts of a town abuzz with police activity.

Next came the river, where he cleansed himself and felt somehow repaired, or at least improved in spirit. By then it was the middle of the day.

'Time to rest, my friend,' said the Russian.

'Where? We need shelter.'

'If we seek shelter, we alert someone who in turn mutters something to someone else and before you know it, you're before the wall, only this time, I'm standing beside you. Oh, and neither of us has any eyes. No thank you. You rest here, by the river. You keep low. Sleep if you can. We have a long journey ahead of us.'

'To where? I should be with my men.'

'Your men are dead. Your task is to survive and consecrate their sacrifice. We won't comment on the stupidity of it all, and if you win in the end, you can order the historians to portray last night as a triumph instead of a folly. If they refuse, shoot them and find new historians. Now rest.'

Speshnev thanked the truck driver, and bid him off, and when he had gone, led the young revolutionary down closer to the river. Here, he was invisible yet had a view across the water to the city, and a view down the dirt road that ran atop the crest. In the distance lay some peasant bohios, thatched-roof huts, surrounded by broken fencing, donkeys and chickens.

'You wait. Go nowhere. Shit in your pants. You don't need to tell anyone about your heroism. You wait here. I have arrangements to make.'

'You can get me there,' Castro said, gesturing to the beckoning mountains that seemed to be just yards away but were still miles off.

'To do what, live in a cave? Just wait.'

And with that, he vanished so quickly that Castro had a sense that he was magical. Could he be an angel? Castro didn't believe in God, but he believed in God's angels, paradoxical or not. Possibly this man was such an angel. Whoever he was, he was a capable fellow. He certainly knew a lot of things. He had a gift for suddenness, either in the appearance or the disappearance department.

The young man lay and tried to sleep. But he was too agitated. He kept seeing bodies shot and sloppy, arms and legs flung out, blood spattering everywhere. He kept hearing the sound of the bullets ripping into the car. He kept feeling the spray of glass whizzing at him as a bullet shattered a windshield. He kept thinking of what he could have done that he had not or what he had done that he wished he hadn't.

He turned his vision to the city across the muddy river. One could tell that El Presidente was quite upset by