the tall windows to the nearly deserted promenade. Once the boulevard of Cuba’s rich, the Malecon had begun to deteriorate after just three years of Communist egalitarianism. Not even Communism could dull the glow of the sun, however, and beyond the potholed, pockmarked concrete was the brilliant blue vista of the Florida Straits. Melchior squinted as if he might actually spy Key West, ninety miles more or less due north, and when he returned his attention to the baroque desk that sat in front of the glass, all he could see were shadows and shapes. An expanse of pink-flecked marble the size of a DeSoto, a tall man seated behind it in some kind of creaking industrial office chair, his broad shoulders and smallish head nothing more than a featureless silhouette until Melchior’s sun-blinded eyes readjusted to the light.
Unlike his older brother, Raul Castro did not affect military fatigues, but wore a plain gray business suit. The jacket fit his tall frame poorly, pulling across the shoulders and riding up in the sleeves, and the narrow black tie had been crookedly knotted, so that it ran aslant the buttons of his shirt instead of covering them. All in all, he gave the impression of a man who would rather be shirtless, wielding a machete in the cane fields perhaps or a machine gun in the mountains. Though he was over thirty, he still had a baby face, but the eyes above his round cheeks were small and hard, and he regarded the shabbily dressed skeleton who walked into his office skeptically, as though he could not believe this was the agent of the all-powerful Central Intelligence Agency he had summoned. It was as if he was contemplating, not whether the visitor should live or die, but rather if it was even worth the effort to give the order.
After an interminable moment, he lifted one hand and pointed to the chair. Melchior sank into the seat, trying not sigh. The rickety hinges creaked beneath his wasted buttocks, and Melchior started slightly—he didn’t have the strength to get up again if the chair broke beneath his weight. But the sound reminded him again: he was real. He was here. And, however tenuous the link to his past seemed, he was an intelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had a job to do.
He took a deep breath to steel himself, only to have it turn into a thin, dry cough that shook his whole body. He had to grab the curule’s spindly arm to keep from falling off the back. He wondered if this was an attempt at irony on Raul’s part—in Roman times the curule was reserved for men of the highest rank—or if Segundo had simply chosen it because it was backless, thus making an audience with him that much more uncomfortable. If that was the case, he had certainly succeeded.
For his part, Raul continued to regard him silently. Then, in an easy, educated Spanish—for all his rough look, he and his brother, like most Communist leaders, were in fact the children of privilege—he said, “Your jailors call you the Magus. Do you know this word? The singular of Magi. The three kings who followed the star to Bethlehem to see the Christ child.”
“The Wise Men.” Melchior said, a flicker of a smile crossing his lips.
“They say you sit in your cell like a Buddha, meditating all day long.”
Melchior’s chuckle came out as another chest-wracking cough. “Clearly they don’t understand the enervating effects of malnutrition.”
“They grew up under Batista and Machado,” Raul said in a sharp voice, “all those other puppets of your government. They understand malnutrition just fine. They see it in their parents and grandparents, in their co- workers in the cane fields, in their children, dying of colds and flu because they are too weak to fight off the littlest infection.”
This speech did not seem to require an answer—or perhaps the answer had already come, in the form of the ’59 revolution—and Melchior said nothing. Raul allowed the silence to stretch for another uncomfortable moment before speaking.
“You are in a very curious position, Magus. A precarious position. Though we know you are an American, neither you nor your American superiors will admit to this fact. Normally such a situation frees us to execute you without fear of reprisal, yet in your case this is a less-than-attractive option.”
Melchior’s lip curled up in a weak grin. “I’ve failed at many things in my life, but never at being an ‘attractive option’ for public execution.”
Raul’s fingers drummed lightly on his desk. The marble surface was bare, yet Melchior still found himself imagining Segundo’s finger pressing a big red button: a trapdoor opening beneath this uncomfortable chair, a long plunge into a pit with blood-caked spears at the bottom. An image of Aunt Juliette’s puppy all those years ago flashed in his mind. The pitfall had been meant for Aunt Juliette—she had sent him to bed without supper for saying a dirty word—but the look on her face when she saw her dead puppy had taught him a valuable lesson: sometimes you can hurt people more by going after the things they love rather than attacking them directly.
A smile creased his face as all this ran through his mind. Raul noticed it, but didn’t ask. Instead, in a voice that had quieted somewhat: “Since the Revolution, we have been able to offer free education to all Cubans. Some of your jailers, perhaps eager to show off their new knowledge, call you not Magus but Melchior.”
“Melchior?” Melchior shook his head lightly to bring himself back to the present. “The black Wise Man?”
Raul nodded. “On some level this is ironic, since you probably resemble the Semitic Magi more than El Negro. Nevertheless, the color of your skin is precisely the problem—the color of your skin, and the quality of your Spanish, and your ridiculously detailed knowledge of Cuban history, which I confess puts even our newly edified citizenry to shame. In fact, you look and sound
“I never claimed to be American.”
“Indeed you did not.” Segundo’s smile was quick and cold. “It is a troubling situation. We do not know what to do with you. Contrary to the misinformation your government feeds the world, we do not execute people who have not committed a serious offense, and we do not execute foreigners at all, unless they are spies. But, though you are undoubtedly a spy, we would have a hard time convincing the outside world of that. So we find ourselves at an impasse. A public execution would only bring even more of the world’s disapproval on the revolution, but a private execution would accomplish nothing. Your government considers you too insignificant to acknowledge while you are living. Dead, it seems likely they would simply write you off and move on.”
In his three months in his cell, Melchior had come to pretty much the same conclusion, which, in addition to being both terrifying and infuriating—he had served his government faithfully for nearly twenty years, surely they could broker a private deal to get him back—meant that his life was completely in the hands of the man on the other side of the desk. His only comfort was the fact that he had been summoned here. If Raul wanted him dead, it seemed unlikely he’d’ve summoned him for a private meeting first.
And so, doing his best to keep his voice level, he said, “If you don’t have enough evidence to convince ‘the outside world,’ I don’t see how you can arrive at the conclusion that I’m a, what was the word you used,
The expression that flickered over Raul’s face could’ve been grin or grimace, but Melchior was pretty sure it
