Following the flow of people, he found himself drawn into a small park.
Here he discovered an impromptu rumba band entertaining people waiting for service at the under staffed counters of an enormous ice cream parlor named Coppelia.
Occasionally people stared at him. His clothes, he realized, gave him away. He was a Yankee, a gringo, citizen of the country that had blockaded Cuba for three decades. But the people who stared did not regard him with anger. They seemed more curious than hostile, he thought.
He was approached several times by men offering to exchange pesos for dollars and twice by sultry young women, wearing tight tanktops and sporting flashy watches, who asked if he needed an escort. After he shook his head, a male youth approached, offering discounted Monte Cristo cigars. Janek shook his head again, then walked back to his hotel. The lobby was swarming with young people, expressions blank, milling or sitting, waiting for something to happen. The dollars-only shops were deserted. He thought: This is not a happy place.
He had bought a package tour through a Mexican travel agency. For six hundred dollars he got round-trip air transportation from Mexico City, five nights at the Habana Libre, breakfast and a second meal of his choice for four days, a bus tour of old Havana, an optional visit to the Hemingway Museum, and one admission to the floor show plus a prepaid champagne cocktail at the 'world famous' Tropicana Nightclub.
He decided to spend his first full day getting a feel for the city, then make his initial approach to Tania early the following morning. There was risk in this plan-if things didn't go well, he would be trapped in Cuba and vulnerable for two additional days. But there was more risk in waiting until the end of his visit because there was a good possibility that Tania would refuse to speak with him, would not be at home or would be unknown at the address given by her brother. In any of these events, he would need time to convince and/or find her.
And so, on the first morning, he set out on foot for the Malecon, the wide avenue that rimmed the elegant curve of Havana Bay, with the intention of following it along the seawall to the center of the old city. From there he planned to return in such a way that he would inconspicuously pass Tania Figueras's address.
Even at ten A.M. the heat was punishing. But he enjoyed the notion that he was walking freely in a foreign capital visited by few Americans.
Again he was struck by the small number of private cars on the street, the shabby condition of the buildings, the clusters of people waiting stolidly for buses that perhaps would never come.
Near the end of his walk, within a mile of La Punta Fortress, he noticed he was the only pedestrian on the Ma- lecon. Cubans, he decided, were too smart to take long walks under the broiling Caribbean sun. Perhaps he would do better to move from the hot, sun struck bay side of the avenue to the shady sheltering arcade that linked the buildings across the way.
He crossed, entered the arcade. Each of its sections was supported by a unique set of columns matched to the architecture of the building above.
Some columns had Greek style capitals, others were plain. Most were flaking, but one was freshly painted a bright, vivid blue and another a soft Pompeian red. What was most spooky, he thought, was that all the stores that had once fronted on this arcade were now abandoned and gated shut.
He was in the center of the red section when he noticed two men, in leisure suits and perforated shoes, bearing down on him fast. Sensing danger, he turned to find two more men, similarly dressed, coming up quickly on his rear. Clearly these were not street thieves. They moved with precision and were closing in.
There was, he could see, only one route of escape-he must run out of the arcade into the street. He was about to do this when a small black car pulled up, blocking his attempt. Its arrival, he noted with a certain admiration, could not have been more perfectly timed.
A middle'-aged man with handsome features, gray hair, a soft gray mustache and a steady gaze leaned out of the right front window. Janek immediately recognized him as a cop.
'Senior Janek?'
'Yeah, I'm Janek. What's going on?'
The man, who wore a white shirt open at the neck, flashed an ID bearing a red diagonal stripe. Janek saw the name Fonseca and the words 'Seguridad de Estado' stamped across the top. Fonseca's voice was disinterested, a well-practiced monotone. 'You are under arrest, senora.
Please get in the car.'
Janek turned. The four men who had trapped him stood in a close semicircle behind.
He looked back at Fonseca. Fonseca nodded gravely.
'Yeah, right,' Janek said.
He sat in the back squeezed between two of the young men from the street. The other two got into a second vehicle which had pulled up and now followed behind. His car, a small Russian model, moved rapidly down the spacious avenue, then abruptly entered a labyrinth of narrow streets. Unfamiliar with the city, Janek soon lost all sense of direction. Meantime, the bodies of the men on either side confined his arms, and his knees were crushed against the seat ahead.
Several times he tried to speak, to ask his captors what they wanted.
Each time Fonseca turned around and made a zippering motion across his mouth. When he did this the young men on either side of Janek looked out the windows and grinned.
So, all right, they would take him to their headquarters and there he would get an explanation. But why had they arrested him? He had done nothing and they couldn't possibly know why he had come.
Yet they knew his name and had trapped him flawlessly on a deserted stretch of sidewalk. Which meant, he realized, that they'd been following him from the moment he'd left his hotel.
He knew better than to blame himself. He was a detective, not an espionage agent. It was in the nature of his work that he follow others, not look out for others who might be following him. At that realization he was struck by the thought that this was the first time in his life he had been the subject of a police arrest.
Suddenly the car swerved off the road, entered a dirt track, stopped in the middle of a weed-choked field. The sun outside was blinding. For a moment Janek felt like throwing up.
'Close your eyes.' Fonseca issued his order without any emphasis. 'We are going to take a security precaution. Do not be unduly upset.'
Janek looked into the man's eyes and saw a hardness he often affected himself It was a no-nonsense way of looking at a person in custody, a signal that the person is without any power and must do as he is told.
The moment Janek closed his eyes, the men beside him grasped his wrists, pulled them together behind his back, snapped on steel cuffs. Then he felt them pull something pliant, smelling of oiled leather, over the top of his head. He struggled as they pulled it down over his face but relented as soon as he realized he could breathe. He felt a strap being buckled around his neck. He opened his eyes and then, for the first time, felt fear. They had blindfolded him, he understood, because now they were going to take him to a place they did not want him to see.
He had no idea how long he'd been sitting there, perhaps twenty-four hours, perhaps longer. The room was dank and smelled of disinfectant.
There was a plastic bowl of water on the floor and a plastic bucket that served as a toilet. In area the room was not much larger than a closet.
Its ceiling however, was very high. There was no window. A dim reset bulb, the kind used in darkrooms, burned from a socket far out of reach.
Also on the ceiling was a small ventilation grill. So at least, he thought, I'm not going to suffocate. Sitting on the floor, arms wrapped about his knees, he tried to take some comfort in that.
There was little else to take comfort in. When the car had stopped, the young men on either side had helped him out, then taken hold of his arms. When he had tried to speak, one of them had slapped him across the mouth. It had not been a hard blow, but it had stung, a message that he was not to speak again without permission.
They pulled him along between them into some sort of building, down a long corridor, down a steep flight of stairs, then marched him along another corridor until they reached a room. After they shut the door, one of them removed his handcuffs.
'Take off your clothes.' Fonseca's voice was colorless. Janek could feel the presence of others, perhaps all four of the young men who had cornered him on the street.
'I demand to see the American consul.'
For that he received another blow across the mouth, harder than the first. It made him reel.
'Shut up and take off your clothes. This is a standard precaution. Do not be afraid. We will give you
