Valley of the Templars

Families might have different names now, but they still rule Cuba with an iron fist.”

“The Knights of the Brotherhood of Christ,” whispered Holliday. “The Spanish Templars!”

Eddie’s mother made a hissing sound and waggled her long, gnarled fingers in some strange ritual motion, then quickly crossed herself on both chest and forehead. “There is no Christ in these people—they go to La Templete to make their three circles around the ceiba tree. They are devils!”

“Ceiba tree?” Holliday asked.

“I will explain later,” said the Cuban. The old lady looked as though she was going to have a fit. Eddie laid a calming hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Mama, tranquillo, tranquillo.…” He turned to Holliday. “It is like your friend in Toronto said, Doc. Fidel’s family were named Vazquez. They came from Lancara in Galicia. Galicia borders Portugal. They were sailors and conquistadores.”

“Si.” The old woman nodded. “The devils met at La Templete. Domingo thought they would protect us. The fool, the fool!” she wailed again.

“What happened?” Eddie asked.

“I do not know,” said Eddie’s mother, weeping openly. Teo Fidelio appeared not to notice. He lit yet another cigarette and sighed a huge cloud of smoke toward the plasma TV. Eddie’s mother wiped her tears away on her apron and spoke again. “I only know that Domingo said if there was any trouble you were to go and see Leonid.”

“Leonid?” Holliday asked.

“Leonid Maximenko,” said Eddie. “Which means my brother is in very bad trouble.”

6

Leonid Maximenko lived in Atares, a barrio, or slum, on the western edge of a low hill that overlooked the southeastern end of Havana Harbor. The barrio was named for the stone fort that still stood on the summit of the hill. The bottom of the hill was skirted by the multiple tracks and switch points of the Christina Railway Station.

The barrio itself was enclosed by Avenue de Mexico Cristina on the east, Arroyo Atares on the north, Avenue de Maximo Gomez on the west and Calzada de Infanta to the south. Fifty square blocks or so encompassed some of the poorest and most wretched people of Havana; it was not a district often mentioned in any of the guidebooks.

Maximenko lived on Calle Fernandina, roughly in the center of the area. The residence was a barabacoa, a word originally meaning grill or barbecue, but in the barrios it meant a two- or three-story building subdivided with extra wooden floors and rooms that are invisible from the street. Maximenko’s room was on the top floor of a crumbling building reached by a narrow set of stairs that wound its way upward, past a dark shared toilet with no cover and a pile of torn pieces of newspaper on a bench beside it and an open area that was clearly some kind of communal kitchen. Smoke from a makeshift brick stove and oven went up through a series of rusted stovepipes directly through a rough-sawn hole in the wooden floor, presumably venting outdoors. Several older women were cooking simultaneously while a gaggle of crying, laughing children dressed in scraps of clothing milled around their skirts playing some kind of game. In one corner of the room an old iron bed had been set up with a thin mattress and was occupied by an elderly man in a grayish diaper and nothing else. His eyes were the blind white of cataracts and the right side of his face sagged like putty.

Eddie and Holliday kept climbing.

“Viva la revolucion,” snorted Eddie.

“I thought Fidel made sure everyone was equal in his great society.”

“Some of us were more equal than others,” said Eddie.

“Where do they come from?”

“They’ve always been here, mi colonel,” sighed Eddie.

Maximenko’s room had bare walls, the plaster rotted down to the stone and mortar that had made up the outer shell of the building for two hundred years. The floor was covered in small, cracked and broken diamond- shaped ceramic tiles that were a faded turquoise color. There were four pieces of furniture in the room, a bed like the one on the floor below, a sagging couch with no feet, a wooden card table that held a green-labeled half-empty bottle of Santero Aguardiente, a cloudy plastic drinking glass, a package of Populars, a book of matches and a tin ashtray. Beside the table was an ancient-looking Victorian cracked green leather chair that looked as if it might have belonged in a men’s club a hundred years ago. There was a small window at the far end of the room that looked out on a courtyard crisscrossed with hanging lines of laundry.

Sprawled in the chair, asleep and snoring, his head thrown back and his mouth open, was a large man in his late sixties with the ruddy complexion of a heavy drinker, presumably Maximenko. He was wearing a pair of filthy cotton pants, a stained and equally filthy guayabera and a pair of bright pink rubber flip-flops. His toenails were crusted and thick as horns and his feet were dark with grime. His hair, what Holliday could see of it, was long, stringy and gray. Bad hygiene or not, the man had a barrel chest, bulging biceps and huge ham hands that looked as though he could have cracked walnuts with them. Once upon a time Maximenko had been a powerful man.

“Leonid!” Eddie said sharply. Maximenko didn’t move. “Leonid!” Eddie called again. Holliday saw the man’s eyelids flutter and his snoring changed its rhythm slightly. “Leonid!” Eddie called a third time. One of Maximenko’s hands slipped between his heavy thigh and the side of the chair and came up holding an ancient-looking Tokarev semiautomatic. He sat up, coughing up something nasty and then swallowing it again. “Pochemu vy ne mozhete pozvolit’ starym spat’ chelovek?”

“Because you’re not sleeping—you are drunk,” said Eddie, speaking English for Holliday’s benefit.

“Kto poluslepo odin?” Maximenko growled, looking at Holliday. The Russian expatriate poured half a glass from the green bottle, swallowed it like medicine and lit a cigarette.

Eddie spoke. “He is my friend, Leonid, and be polite. Speak English.”

“Who are you?” Maximenko asked Holliday, wetly clearing his throat.

“A friend of Eddie’s.”

“You sound American.”

“I am.”

“You fought in wars, yes? You look like you fought in wars.”

“A few.”

“What happened to your eye?”

“Afghanistan,” said Holliday, not bothering to explain the idiotic accident that had taken the sight from his right eye. Besides, with the scar from the attack at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, the wound looked much fiercer than it really was.

Maximenko grinned around the fuming cigarette and used one hand to pull the Cuban shirt up over his expansive belly. The Tokarev didn’t waver in his other hand. A thick keloid scar snaked through the wiry gray hair from his navel halfway to his armpit. “Fucking mujahideen and those Stinger missiles you gave them,” he said, smiling. “A piece of the Flying Tank I was sitting in did that,” he said almost proudly. “An illiterate peasant with a goat for a wife shoots down the most sophisticated helicopter gunship in the world.” He pulled down his shirt. “The Taliban are still using them.” He laid the Tokarev on the table beside the bottle as though the comparison of war wounds had made them friends. “What is your name?”

“Holliday. My friends call me Doc.”

Maximenko nodded sagely. “The dentist gunfighter with tuberculosis. Best episode of Star Trek ever. ‘Specter of the Gun,’ twenty-five October 1968, Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon. Very surreal, like a Chekhov play. You see it?”

It was Holliday’s turn to smile. “In reruns a hundred times. I was in Vietnam when it aired originally.”

“Vietnam!” Maximenko said with a barking laugh. “In 1776 the Americans are the guerrilla fighters and the