FIFTY-NINE
In jail, Alex lost track of time. Hours passed, hours on end. No one had a watch. The other prisoners mostly stared at her. The cell was obscenely hot, humid, and sticky – and infested with roaches. It smelled of urine, sweat, and disinfectant. A film of white powder covered almost everything, dust from the disintegrating paint and plaster on the walls.
She offered no conversation to any of the other women. Then night came. She barely slept. Breakfast was served: hard bread, a banana, and water. Then, in what must have been midmorning, a male guard arrived, called her name, and grabbed her. The guard pulled her out of the cell and ordered her to walk.
Alex was led to another area, deeper within the prison where the heat was even more relentless. The guard pushed her along when she didn’t walk fast enough. She tried to engage the guard in conversation, to find out if she could get a lawyer or a public defender, but she was told to keep quiet, otherwise she would be sent to solitary.
“Solitary sometimes lasts for months,” the guard said. “So shut your mouth,
Alex’s mind was already doing somersaults, but she knew she needed to get a message back to Washington or New York, to tell them where she was, at least to the extent that she knew, and what had happened. She realized, however, that she was unlikely ever to be free again if her captors found out she was American. Her only hope would be a neutral third-party nation.
But she knew that Paul Guarneri was part of this picture as well.
Why had he come to Cuba? What was the
And then there was the CIA – wouldn’t they simply find it easier to ditch her?
“Follow,” the guard said. With trepidation, Alex obeyed.
They went into a small room, where a medical technician waited with a female nurse. A doctor walked in. He was middleaged, with a big belly and bad breath. He told Alex to undress. She resisted at first by standing perfectly still. Then he shouted the order at her. She undressed down to her undergarments and stopped. This seemed to satisfy him. He told her to sit on an examination table and she did. The nurse stood nearby and observed.
The doctor made a visual inspection. He had Alex open her mouth; then he checked her ears and eyes. His attention settled upon her shoulder and the wound marks left by bullets. “What happened here?” he asked in Spanish.
“I hurt myself,” she said.
“How?”
“Playing sports. Archery. An arrow ricocheted,” she said.
“Looks like a bullet wound,” he said.
“It was an arrow,” Alex insisted.
The doctor laughed. “Undress completely,” the man insisted.
Having no choice, she did. He then examined her gently but thoroughly. Alex had the impression that he was looking for microchips. He found none. Silently, she prayed an old prayer she had known from childhood, just to take her mind off the indignity of the present.
Meanwhile, the female guard took her clothes out of the room and returned with a tunic and three fresh pairs of underwear. The doctor had finished, a lousy physical exam and a thorough humiliation at the same time. He told her she could get dressed. Alex did, quickly, as the female guard watched. Then the female guard took her to yet another cell, this one having a more permanent feel to it. There were eight bunks in it and seven other women who stared at her when she entered. A single open toilet stood against one wall. Six of the women were dark skinned, one was mocha skinned. Alex stood out like a nightlight. The other women had removed their tunics because the heat was so intense, sleeping only in their undergarments, if that. Alex kept her tunic on because the mosquitoes were worse than the temperature.
One more night passed completely. She had been a prisoner for two full days. She knew she had missed the rendezvous with Violette and the mission now bordered on catastrophe. Her spirits were in freefall. She spent a good deal of time praying quietly to herself, praying as she never prayed before. She assumed the airplane had left that morning without her, and the thought tortured her.
In the middle of the third day, in what Alex thought was the afternoon, almost all of which she spent sitting on her bunk, the mocha-skinned woman came over to her. She started a small halting conversation in Spanish.
The woman was Creole, it turned out. Alex switched to French. The woman said she had come to Cuba with a male friend, and he had abandoned her. The woman’s name was Margritte, and she had been arrested a month earlier for stealing food from a market. She had stolen the food, she said, because she was starving. She was hoping to be deported to Barbados, since she had family there, and then she could work her way to her home village in the mountains.
The woman also had a small wooden cross around her neck. For some reason, the guards had not taken it.
“How long do you think they’ll hold you here?” Alex asked.
The woman shrugged. “Many years,” she said, as if she didn’t have anywhere better to go. Then she began to touch Alex with some longing and affection. Alex pulled away.
On the evening of the same day, dispirited and tired, two male guards roused Alex again. They led her down another yellowing corridor and into an office. They shoved her into a chair in front of a man who wore the insignia of the Havana police.
He sat behind a desk with a Cuban flag to his right. In the center of the wall behind him was a picture of three heroes of the revolution: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Frank Pais, an early rebel leader who’d died in an assault on one of Batista’s army barracks in 1957. The poses were neo-Stalinist heroic, three handsome, macho young men in jungle fatigues, outlined against sky and mountains, presumably in the Sierra Maestra.
The officer gave her a moment to settle in. She looked at him and recognized him. He waited until the two guards had departed and closed the door.
“Hello,” he said in extremely good English. “Welcome to the Democratic Socialist Republic of Cuba. What a pleasure. We meet for the third and final time. I am Major Ivar Mejias of the Cuban National Militia.”
She processed his name and face immediately. He was the commander who had headed the reception committee on the beach and the officer who had examined her passport in the lobby of the Ambos Mundos.
She tried Spanish.
With no smile whatsoever, he shook his head.
“No, no,” he said, remaining in English. “No lawyers. Not necessary. A trial is not even necessary. You’re an American criminal and counterrevolutionary,” he said. “And you’ve had the misfortune to be captured. Ten years in prison? Twenty?” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to be you. Your luck has run out. Unless you cooperate with us, your freedom is gone forever.”
SIXTY
Alex was sweating profusely. The white dust from the prison had formed in patches on her skin. It itched and was beginning to cause a rash. Now her heart was jumping too. She knew the man in front of her not only had been on her trail since the moment she arrived, but he was a professional interrogator.
Several seconds passed. They looked eye to eye. Nothing from Alex.
“I have a theory,” Major Mejias continued in Spanish. “It’s my own theory but I’m proud of it. It goes this way: each one of us has only a certain limited amount of deception in us. We can waste it incrementally on the small things, or we can blow the whole bundle on one big life-size lie. Either way, it runs out eventually, our supply, and what we’re left with then is the truth.” He paused. “What do you think?”
She blinked, stared at him, and said nothing.
“All right. Let me put another question to you,” he said. “You would seem to be an educated woman.
