The girl gave one last convulsive sniff and stopped howling.
She took Nicholas's hand and trotted beside him as he led her up the beach.
'I will take you back to your manuna,' Nicholas was telling her, and then he looked up and saw his father. He stopped abruptly and stared at him.
Ramsey saw the flare of terror in his eyes that was instantly hidden. Then Nicholas lifted his chin in a defiant gesture, and his expression went dead.
Ramsey liked what he saw. It was good that the boy felt fear, for fear was the basis of respect and obedience. It was good also that he could control and hide that fear. 'Me ability to conceal fear was one of the qualities of leadership. Already he showed a strength and resolve far beyond his tender years.
He is my son, Ramsey thought, and raised one hand in a gesture of command.
'Come here, boy,' he said.
The little girl shrank away from him. Then she released Nicholas's hand and fled up the beach, bawling once again, but ihis time for her mother. Ramsey did not even glance in her direction. He often had that effect on children.
Nicholas steeled himself visibly and then came to his father's bidding.
'Good day, Padre.' He held out his hand solemnly.
'Good day, Nicholas.' Ramsey took the proffered hand. He had schooled the child to shake hands like a man, but Adra had taught him the term of address. 'Padre.' He should- not have allowed it, but was pleased that in the end he had done so. It gave him another little twinge of sentimentality to be addressed as Father, but that was an indulgence he could afford.
There were few enough that he allowed himself.
'Sit here.' Ramon indicated the wall beside him, and Nicholas scrambled up and sat with his little legs dangling.
They were silent for a while. Ramsey did not approve of childish chatter.
When he asked finally, 'What have you been doing?' Nicholas considered the question gravely.
'I have been to school every day.' 'What do they teach you at school?' 'We learn the drills and the songs of the revolution.' Nicholas thought about it a little longer. 'And we paint.' They were silent again until Nicholas added helpfully: 'In the afternoons we swim and play soccer, and in the evenings I help Adra with the housework. Then we watch the TV together.'
He was three years old, Ramsey reminded himself. A Western child who was asked the same question might have replied 'Nothing' or 'Just stuff.
Nicholas had spoken like a man, a little old man.
'I have brought you a present,' Ramsey told him.
'Thank you, Padre.' 'Don't you want to know what it is?' 'You will show it to me,' Nicholas pointed out. 'And then I will know what it is.' It was a plastic model of an AK assault-rifle. Although it was a miniature, it was perfect in detail with a removable magazine that was loaded with metallic painted bullets. Ramsey had bought it at a toyshop on his last visit to London.
Nicholas's eyes shone as he raised it to his shoulder and aimed it down towards the beach. Apart from the first flash of fear, it was the only real emotion he had displayed since Ramsey's arrival. When he pulled the trigger the toy rifle made a satisfying warlike clatter.
'It is very beautiful,' Nicholas said. 'Thank you, Padre.' 'It is a good toy for a brave son of the revolution,' Ramsey told him.
'Am I a brave son of the revolution?' 'One day you will be,' Ramsey told him.
'Comrade Colonel, it is time for the child's bath,' Adra intervened diffidently.
She took Nicholas and led him from the veranda into the cottage. Ramsey put aside the temptation to follow them. It was unseemly for him to participate in such a bourgeois domestic ritual. Instead he went to the small table at the end of the veranda where Adra had set out a jug of lime-juice and a bottle of Havana Club rum, indisputably the finest rum in the world.
Ramsey mixed himself a mojito and then selected a cigar from the box on the table. He smoked only when he was at home in Cuba and then only the premium cigars of Miguel Fernandez Roig, and Adra knew this. Like the Havana Club, they were the finest in the world. He took the tall sugared glass and the cigar back to his seat and watched the sunset turn the waters of the bay to bloodied gold.
From the bathroom, he heard the splashing and the happy cries of his son, and Adra's soft replies.
Ramsey was a warrior and a wanderer on the face of the earth. This was the closest he would ever come to a home of his own; perhaps the child had made it so for him.
Adra served a meal of chicken and Maros y Cristianos, or 'Moors and Christians', a mixture of black beans and white rice. Through the DGA, Ramsey had arranged a preferential ration-book for the little household. He wanted the boy to grow up strong and well nourished.
'Soon you are going on a journey with me,' he told Nicholas as they ate.
'Across the sea. Would you like that, Nicholas?' 'Will Adra come with us?' The question irritated Ramsey. He did not recognize his annoyance as jealousy. He answered shortly: 'Si.' 'Then, I will like that,' Nicholas nodded. 'Where win we go?' 'To Spain,' Ramsey told him. 'To the land of your ancestors and the land of your birth.' After dinner Nicholas was allowed to watch the television for one hour.
When his eyelids drooped, Adra took him to his bedroom.
When she returned to the small, starkly furnished living-room she asked Ramsey: 'Do you want me tonight?' Ramsey nodded. She was over forty years of age. However, her belly was flat, and her thighs were firm and powerful. She had never given birth, and she had extraordinary muscular control. At his request she often excited him with a little trick. He would hold one end of a lead pencil while she snapped it in half with a spasmodic constriction of her vaginal sphincter.
She was an adept, one of the most natural and intuitive lovers he had ever known - furthermore she was terrified of him, which enhanced both her pleasure and his.
In the dawn Ramsey swam down to the head of the bay and then made the hard two-mile return against the tide, ploughing in a crawl through the choppy water.
When he came up from the beach, Nicholas was ready for school and there was an army jeep and driver waiting at the back door of the cottage. Ramsey was dressed in plain brown paratrooper fatigues and soft cap. This was revolutionary uniform, so different from the flamboyant Russian braid and scarlet piping and tiers of medal ribbons. Nicholas sat proudly beside him in the jeep for the short ride until they dropped him off at the nursery school near the main gate.
The drive up to Havana took a little over two hours, for the sugar harvest was in progress. The sky over the hills was smudged with smoke from the cane fires, and the road was congested with behemoth trucks piled high with cargoes of cut cane enroute to the mills.
When they reached the city, the driver dropped Ramsey at the far end of the vast Plaza de la Revolucien, with its 350400t obelisk to the memory of Josd Marti, hero of the people, who founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party way back in 1892.
The square was the scene of many of the moving rallies of the party, where a million and more of the Cuban people gathered to listen to Fidel Castro's speeches. The president's office was in the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, of which El Jefe was the first secretary.
The office in which he welcomed Ramsey was as austere as the revolutionary principle dictated. Under the revolving ceiling-fan, the massive desk was piled with working documents and reports. However, the white walls were bare of all ornament, except for the portrait of Lenim on the wall behind his desk. Fidel Castro came to embrace Ramsey.
'Mi Zorro Dorado,' he chuckled with pleasure. 'My Golden Fox. It is good to see you. You have been away too long, old comrade. Much too long.' 'It is good to be back, El Jefe.' Ramsey truly meant it. Here was one man he respected and loved above all others. He was always startled by the size of the man he called the Leader. Castro towered over him, and smothered Ramsey in his embrace.. Then he held him at arm's length and studied his face.
'You look tired, comrade. You have been working hard.' 'With excellent results,' Ramsey assured him.
'Come, sit down by the window,' Castro invited him. 'Tell me about it.' He selected two Roig cigars from the box on the corner of his desk and gave one to Ramsey. He held the burning taper for him; then lit his own before he settled into the straight-backed chair and leant forward with the cigar stuck out of the corner of his mouth, puffing smoke around it.
'So tell me what is the news from Moscow. You saw Yudenich?
'I saw him, El jefe, and the meeting went well.
Ramsey launched into his report. It was typical of them that there was no small-talk, no preamble to serious discussions. Neither of them had to manoeuvre for position or advantage. Ramsey could speak with total honesty, without worrying about giving offence or trying to improve his own position.
His position was unassailable. They were brothers of the blood and of the soul.
Of course, Castro could be changeable. His affections could shift. It had been that way with Che Guevara, another of the eighty-two heroes who came ashore from Granma. Che had fallen from grace
