“My doctorate.”
“A professional student. How many pages do you have to turn in?”
“Fifty.”
“And how many more do you have to write?”
“Fifty.”
“Aha.” Naz laughed. “I can understand why you’re so, um, furrowed in the brow area. What’s your dissertation on?”
“Oh please,” the man swatted her question away. “Can’t we just start with names?”
“Oh, pardon me. Naz, I mean—” She broke off. So much for an alias. “Naz Haverman,” she said, offering him her hand. “Nazanin.”
The man’s fingers were cool from his glass. “Nazanin,” he repeated. “Is that … Persian?”
“Very good. People usually think I’m Latin. On my mother’s side,” she added in a quiet voice.
“Sounds like there’s a story there.”
Naz smiled wanly, sipped at her empty glass. “You haven’t told me—”
“Chandler.” His hand pressed hers so firmly that she could feel a pulse bouncing off his fingertips, though she wasn’t sure if it was hers or his. “Chandler Forrestal.”
“Chandler.” The name made her conscious of her mouth. The lips had to purse to pronounce the
“Forrestal. I feel like I know that name.”
Chandler offered her a pained smile. “My uncle perhaps. He was secretary—”
“Of defense!” Naz exclaimed, but inside she was less excited than suspicious. This seemed a bit … fortuitous, given the circumstances. “Under Roosevelt, right?”
“Navy under Roosevelt. Defense under Truman.”
“Well. I had no idea I was chatting with a member of the political elite.”
But Chandler was shaking his head. “I keep as far away from politics as I can. As you said, I’m a professional student, and if all goes well I will be till I die.”
They both suddenly realized they were still holding hands and released each other simultaneously. A true gentleman, Chandler had eased off his bar stool to introduce himself. He slipped back on it now, but even so, Naz felt a closeness between them that hadn’t been there a moment ago. She relaxed then. She’d been at this long enough to know when the deal was closed.
“Would you excuse me a moment? I have to powder my nose.”
Camaguey Province, Cuba
October 26–27, 1963
The road to the village Bayo had named cut through a swath of jungle that had been cleared and grown back so many times it was all one height, like a thirty-foot-tall golf green. The dense weave of trunk, vine, and leaf was as intricately layered as chain mail. This, Melchior thought, was the real difference between forest and jungle: not some measure of latitude or climate, but the willingness of lesser plants to yield to greater. In the temperate zones, oak and maple and conifers choked out all the other life with their spreading canopies and root networks, whereas in the tropics lattices of vine strangled the trees—eucalyptus and palm mostly, the mahogany and lemonwood and acacia having long since been harvested. Strange succulents took root in the trees’ bark and branches, leeching the life from them until they were left whitened skeletons. If he were prone to generalizations, Melchior might’ve seen something symbolic in this: the top-down stability of northern democracy versus the bottom-up anarchy of southern revolution. But a lifetime in intelligence had made him a practical man, one who dealt in facts, not abstractions, targets rather than causes. Eddie Bayo; his Red Army contacts; and whatever it was the latter hoped to sell to the former.
He cursed himself again for shooting Bayo. It was the kind of mistake he couldn’t afford to make. Not tonight. Not after two years spent crisscrossing this godforsaken island. The only thing that gave him any hope was the fact that no one seemed to know anything about the deal. Cuba had more intelligence agents per capita than any place this side of East Berlin—KGB, CIA, the native DGI, plus God only knows how many paramilitaries hopping from one sponsor to another like the local tree frogs, fat, warty fuckers whose skin exuded a poisonous mucus (the frogs, not the paramilitaries, although the latter were if anything even more toxic). At any rate, the blackout suggested the operation was small. Melchior himself would have never gotten wind of it if he hadn’t been keeping tabs on Bayo for more than a year. Two would be perfect, he thought now. Two Russians, two buyers, four bullets. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t miss, or else he’d end up with a lot more holes in his suit than the one over his heart.
He reached the rendezvous without surprising anything more than one of the island’s ubiquitous feral dogs. Melchior’s relationship with them stretched back to the beginning of his time in Cuba: early on in his eight months in Boniato, he would toss dead rats through the bars of his window after lacing their corpses with strychnine. The guards used the poison as a rodenticide, but the inmates gathered up as much of it as they could, partly to use to kill one another (or commit suicide when they could no longer take their captivity), but mostly because the rats were the steadiest source of food in the prison. Later on Melchior, too, learned to keep the rats for himself, but for a while it was fun to watch two or three wretched mutts fight over a poisoned corpse, only to have the winner collapse in a pool of its own vomit. One thing you could say about the dogs, though: they knew the value of keeping a low profile. The bitch bared her teeth when Melchior’s flashlight passed over her, but she didn’t snarl or bark.
In fact, Melchior’d been hoping one of them might show up. He’d brought a sack of meat from Bayo’s house, and he used morsels of it to keep the bitch trotting behind him all the way to the burned-out sugar plantation and the single structure still standing, though barely: the mill. Its main edifice, a large barnlike structure, was a dark shadow against the moonlit sky. The windows had been boarded up, but flickering light came from a thousand chinks in the siding.
