and slender and pink below, caramel atop, their?
He was jerked awake by a noise.
'What was that?' said Corporal De Guama, making coffee.
'It sounded like a shot,' said Private Morales.
All three men wore the green-brown uniforms of the Cuban national police, though without ties and much in need of cleaning and pressing. They were normally stationed at Sevilla, just a few miles inland, but with all this madness of the insurrection at Moncada, they had been sent out to set up an outpost on the outskirts of Siboney, the beach town. When they got to the beach town, though, the lieutenant decided it was unlikely the fleeing man would come this way, where it was so populated. So he had moved west down the beach by jeep and been unable to locate quite the perfect place until, well beyond Siboney, they came upon an old planter's shack, where they'd been for a day, out of radio contact or telephone contact, but ready to defend Cuba and the president with their lives, meanwhile catching up on much-needed sleep. Sarria would never rise above lieutenant-high enough for a negro-and the other two were men whose ambitions had been ground into indifference by the rigors of avoiding duty. All three men were armed, but two of the three revolvers carried between them were empty. Only the lieutenant's held ammunition, though as it had held that same ammunition since 1934, he wasn't entirely certain that it would fire.
'Well,' said the lieutenant, 'I suppose we'd better go do something.'
'I suppose,' said De Gauma, sadly. It seemed that something always interrupted his coffee. 'May I finish my coffee first?'
'He always wants the coffee,' said the corporal. 'He lives for the coffee.'
'Well, De Gauma, actually, no, I'd prefer if you just went along this time. Would that be all right?'
Sarria wasn't being sarcastic. He wore the mantle of command somewhat unsurely. He genuinely wished to know if it was all right with the private.
'No, no, it's fine,' De Guama said.
The three men rose. Morales could not find his cap, and De Gauma had taken his boots off.
'I'll have to stay in the sand, where it's soft.'
'Yes, yes, that's fine,' said Sarria.
They stepped out and saw only what they had seen for two days: the blinding brightness of the beach, the blinding blue of the bay, the blinding though lighter blue of the sky, and the dark green of the forest here where the Sierra Maestra plunged so precipitously into the water. The sun was hot, the wind was still. Prickly sweat came at their hairlines immediately and began to run down their cheeks. The air had been superheated by the sun and to breathe was not pleasant. It was July, after all.
'I think it came from there.'
'Is this dangerous? A man with a gun? Maybe I'd better run back to town and call for reinforcements.' De Guama was not the bravest of policemen.
'It's just a hunter,' said the private, Morales. 'He's cornered a boar, he's finished him, that's all.'
'The boar don't usually come down this far,' said Lieutenant Sarria. 'They like it up the mountains, where it's cooler.'
The three walked along the beach for a while, but could see nothing of consequence. Birds, flowers, the sand, the floating gulls, a trawler of some sort fishing close in.
'I've never seen them come in that far,' said Morales.
'Maybe they were the ones who fired?'
'A gun on that old tub? I doubt it. It certainly is low in the water, though. Maybe it's taking sea.'
'We should inquire.'
They walked ahead and though they would later argue about it, it actually was Morales and not De Gauma who saw a flash of movement off to the right, in the trees, and alerted the others.
Speshnev had squirmed into the trees and gone to dead, still calm. He waited and waited. No soldiers appeared. None at all.
He tried to reconstruct the last several seconds in his brain. He and the boy, kneeling in the water, letting it soak, drinking slowly, not glugging like fools. The boat a few hundred yards away. No soldiers yet at the crest. No noise, no sense of approaching men, no nothing.
He soaks his handkerchief, hands it across and at that moment feels the whisper of hot air as a bullet roars by. Simultaneously, his handkerchief is torn from his hand to flutter across the pond, and at the same second the surface of the pond explodes in a bright plume of water.
The size of the blast, the noise of the shot, the force by which the handkerchief was ripped from his grip all indicated a heavy-caliber military bullet. Yet why had the bullet not struck head, his or the boy's? He realized the handkerchief was shot from his hand on purpose, for a shooter gifted enough to put his round into it could have just as easily shot either through the eye or the ear.
But that mystery was quickly enough forgotten. What had to be done now was more exact and specific. Find the boy. Get the boy to the boat. Yet how could he do so with a marksman about, possibly hunting him, possibly playing tricks on him. And why would a marksman play a trick on him?
And then of course he knew. It could only be one man. And the message was: you must fail. Fail and live, attempt to succeed and you die. I will have to kill you. But this time, I only make you fail.
Well, he thought, you are a clever man, a brave man, but I have a duty to do as well, and if I have a chance, then I will kill you, too.
He realized with perfect clarity the man wouldn't shoot him. He just wouldn't, he knew, at least not to kill him. He would watch from his perfect hide and if Speshnev seemed about to do it, then he would shoot.
Speshnev realized that?
But then movement caught his eye. Through the screen of trees, he saw three policemen. Where the hell had they come from? From the sloppiness of their clothes and the indifference of their postures, he determined that they were not the army troops being driven forward by Captain Latavistada. In fact, they moved so tentatively upon the beach it was as if they'd prefer to be anywhere else. The sound of the shot could not have delighted them.
Yet here was the comical part. The manhunt was run by the best of Cuban intelligence with advice from the CIA, and it had failed completely. These three idiots had succeeded.
For he now saw that they approached a clump of rags hunched trembling behind a knot of trees, and that clump of rags could only be Fidel Castro.
'Is it a man?' De Guama asked.
'I think it is. A bum. He is sleeping.'
' You!' cried the lieutenant. ' You! Wake up!'
The figure, indeed a man and not a clump of rags behind a glade of palms, stirred. Eventually a raggedy mop of hair came up, a pair of wet brown eyes, a broad axe of a nose, a pinched mouth, a whole face.
'It is him!' said De Guama. 'Good Christ, it is Fidel!'
The young man assembled himself slowly, then got up, his hands raised.
'I thought you would be a negro,' said Lieutenant Sarria. 'I thought only a negro would have the strength to fight the president.'
'I am fighting for the negroes as well as all other Cubans,' said Fidel. 'I fight for you all.'
A whistle sounded far off.
All four of them looked up the hill. There, at its crest-line, troops were assembling, an officer was shouting orders smartly, dogs were barking, and then the unit started to move.
'They will kill me,' said Castro. 'Please don't give me to them. The man in charge, he has cut the eyes out of many of my friends. He will cut my eyes out and then shoot me.'
'Yes,' said Lieutenant Sarria, 'Ojos Bellos, of SIM. I know his reputation. De Guama, Morales, you run back and bring the jeep. We will transport this bad boy into Siboney.'
The two turned and ran off.
'You may as well sit down,' said Sarria. 'It'll be a few minutes yet.'
'Thank you,' said Fidel.
The two sat. Sarria held his pistol in his hand, but did not point with it or gesture with it dramatically. Frankly, it scared him a little.
'You won't try anything, young man? I'd hate to have to shoot you. In twenty-seven years as a policeman, I
