occasional shabby hut to be seen. The rain had slowed to a heavy mist. “We’re gonna have to gas this buggy up pretty soon,” Wilson announced. “See if there’s a gas requisition pad in the tray there.”
“What does it look like?”
“A blue pad. Squarish in shape.”
I found a blue pad and a white one. “The blue one,” Wilson repeated. “The white one’s for a private car. Castro likes to know who’s doin’ the drivin’ in this country, so all gas has to be signed for. Civilians pay, but the military runs a tab.”
The gas stop was made without incident. If Cuban civilians have any curiosity about military activities, they keep it to themselves. There was a pillbox checkpoint between Holguin and Camaguey, but it was unmanned. “They must’ve pulled the boys into the interior to help out with flood relief,” Wilson deduced. “Never saw this road with so little traffic on it.”
In the late afternoon he pulled the Dodge onto a side road. A hundred yards along it he bounced us across a field into a grove of trees. “Sack time,” he said. “We’re ahead of schedule.”
He turned off the radio, and for two hours there was uneasy silence in our steel domicile. A freshening breeze whistled through rusted-out holes in the ambulance shell. From my observation, Wilson was the only one of us who slept.
He woke just when I was beginning to wonder when Erikson was going to wake him. He turned on the radio, listened for five minutes, then maneuvered the ambulance back onto the highway. “Home stretch now,” was his only comment. It wasn’t raining, but there was cloud cover enough to bring an early twilight.
Three more hours brought us to the outskirts of Havana. It was full dark. Only an occasional streetlight relieved the blackness. Wilson drove confidently. “I made a lot of dough smugglin’ into this town,” he told us. “We’re comin’ in on the airport road. The water on the left is the Almendares River.”
The cleated tires of the ambulance whined on the city streets. The storefronts were dark. The ambulance made a gradual left-hand turn onto a two-lane street. “Carlos Manuel de Cespe Avenue,” Wilson volunteered. “We’re gettin’ close.”
Erikson and I stacked the gear at the rear doors. We made a sweeping left-hand turn. “Zapata Avenue,” Wilson said like a tour guide. “Soon as we cross Paseo in the Vedado section — an’ here it is — we turn right”—the ambulance wheeled into a dimly lit street with houses closing in on both sides and pulled into the curb—“an’ abandon ship. From here we walk.”
“How far?” Slater demanded.
“Four blocks. Don’t leave nothin’ because we won’t be comin’ back to this limousine.” He climbed out and ran around to the back to open the doors. “Load up an’ let’s go,” he urged.
We set out along sidewalks littered with trash. Our boots echoed loudly in the empty, silent streets. “Where is everybody?” Slater asked uneasily.
“Curfew. You better have business to be on the street at night. Patrols pick pedestrians up on suspicion. If we get stopped, I’ll have to do my best talkin’ of the trip.” At each intersection he moved ahead of the group and checked left and right on the cross street. “Second doorway, next block,” he said at last. “If there’s anyone in sight, walk past an’ make another pass at it comin’ back.”
We hadn’t passed a parked car in the four blocks, nor had I seen one driving by. The quiet was a brooding quiet. Ahead of me, the group disappeared one by one from the cracked sidewalk into a narrow doorway. When I followed, we were crowded into a small hallway that smelled of chili and garlic. Peeling paint hung in tatters from the walls. Wilson palavered with a fat woman whose beady eyes took in the appearance of our group. He turned away from her in my direction. “Money,” he said.
I pulled out my khaki tunic, wrinkle-dried from the hours of rain. I unzipped the pouch in my money belt, took out a handful of fifty-dollar bills, which I handed to Wilson, and zipped up again. He separated six of the bills and gave them to the woman. Her greedy little eyes were not upon the money in her hand but upon the remainder, which disappeared into Wilson’s mud-stained khakis.
She buried the bills somewhere in the front of her dress, then led the way through a long corridor along which the odor of garlic-flavored chili first waxed and then waned. She tapped in a quick rhythm upon a door with a see- through window with wire mesh imbedded in heavy glass. Wilson entered first when the door opened.
Erikson tapped the door with a questioning finger as he moved through it ahead of me. “Steel-plated,” he whispered. “Both sides.” I was looking at the two men standing just inside the door to whom Wilson was passing out more fifty-dollar bills. Both had swarthy, piratical-looking faces. One even had a Pancho Villa mustache. The man nearest the door threw over a lever that forced massive bolt-arms into matching sockets at top and bottom of the door.
The mustached man was looking at the loads we were carrying. He said something to Wilson and pointed to Erikson’s backpack radio in its concealing haversack. More fifty-dollar bills changed hands, and the man shrugged and turned away.
Slater was staring around the room. Its decor was in such contrast to the scurfy hallway through which we had passed as to seem almost incredible. It was a large reception room. The floor was thickly carpeted and gilt- framed mirrors decorated the walls. The furniture was heavy, old-fashioned-looking, and its upholstery ran to velvet and plush. There was an indefinable odor in the air, sweetish but not perfumy. It had almost a medicinal base.
“What the hell kind of joint is this?” Slater asked.
“A whorehouse,” Wilson answered.
“A whore — you’re kiddin'!”
“No, I’m not. This has been my layover half a dozen times after smuggling runs. It’s the safest place in Havana. Whorehouses are illegal since Castro, but you know how that is. So these people are undercover an’ can’t lead anyone to us without leadin’ him to themselves.”
“Where are the women?”
“Upstairs. You’ll see them.”
From Erikson’s silence I gathered that the news concerning the life-style of our hideout was no news to him. The man who had levered the reinforcing bars across the door beckoned to Wilson. We followed him through another large room with murals and tapestries on the walls. A grand piano with a single sheet of music on the rack stood in a corner. Both piano and music looked as though they hadn’t been touched since 1870.
Beyond the second room we came to a carpeted stairway. A curve in the stairs led us back toward the front of the house. At the top was another steel-reinforced, barred door. “Hi, Ramirez!” Wilson said eagerly to the thick- shouldered, pockmarked man who opened the door. “Is Melia still here?”
Slater was staring down a long hallway with cubicles on either side. There were no doors on the cubicles. At each doorway stood a girl in a transparent short shirt beneath which was just girl. The coloration ranged from
“Hi, girls,” Wilson said expansively, smiling and waving. Several of the girls waved back.
The pockmarked Ramirez shepherded us past the array of skin tones to a good-sized room at the front of the house. I noticed that several of the girls retreated from their doorways at Ramirez’ approach, and from the expressions on their faces the feeling they had for him was not adoration.
The room to which he led us had drawn curtains. Six bunks were scattered about, and the remainder of the furniture was similarly spartan. Erikson stepped to a curtained window and drew it back slightly. Over his shoulder I could see the street on which we had approached the house. There was an overhang at our level so that the sidewalk and even the doorway through which we had entered could be seen.
Slater kept looking back at the hallway through which we had passed. “What about all those rooms with no doors?” he asked Wilson. “Doesn’t a guy get any privacy for his money?”
“What’s private about what goes on in the rooms?” Wilson returned. “The no-doors policy is to keep the girls from holdin’ out on the house if there’s any tips.”
Ramirez said something to Wilson and left us. “He said we have the run of this floor,” Wilson explained.
“You mean—?” Slater cocked an eyebrow toward the hallway.
“Correct,” Wilson said with a grin. “Take your pick by size, shape, color, or spark plug gap.”
“Listen, you two hot sparks,” Erikson interjected. “Tomorrow we have work to do and sleep tonight would be helpful.”
“Helpful but not crucial,” Wilson said. Slater laughed. They started to leave the room together.
“Before you leave, let’s all get out of these uniforms and have them laundered, Wilson,” Erikson said, bowing
