Shift: A Novel (50 page)

Well, it wasn’t as cold and gray as Moscow. Caspar could’ve told you that.

Just then he broke through the clouds. Immediately he snapped into focus. He could see a few twinkling lights in the distance, judged the nearest to be at least three miles away. The area directly beneath him, however, was a dense black void. It could’ve been open water or a cane field or …

“Aw, shit.”

Melchior jerked his feet up as the jagged outlines of forest canopy suddenly came into view. Pablo’d dropped them directly over the goddamned Zapata Swamp. He tried to steer clear but ran out of airspace way too soon. His right ankle slammed against a branch and he whirled around in an explosion of pain. He did his best to shelter the volatile cargo in his backpack even as branches pounded his legs, ribs, arms, head. A sudden jerk and then a long tear as the chute tangled in the branches. Something smacked him right in the kisser, something else slammed into his gut, and his descent came to a sudden, stomach-churning stop.

He hung there for a moment until he could breathe, then opened his mouth, let a thin stream of blood and saliva fall to the ground. A faint splat reached his ears about two seconds later, meaning he was about twenty feet up. He flexed his throbbing right ankle. It didn’t seem to be broken, but even so. This wasn’t gonna be fun.

He was reaching for his knife to cut himself free when he heard a rustle, grabbed his light instead. A pair of green eyes glared up at him, but it took a couple of seconds to discern the outline of the full beast. Some crocodile-looking critter, jaws wide open like a toothy funnel, as though all it were doing was drinking the drizzle still falling from the sky. It was only seven or eight feet from nose to tail—an iguana compared to the behemoths he’d seen in the Congo—and it seemed to be alone, as well, but Melchior wasn’t in the mood to mess around. Although it occurred to him to light one of the cigars and drop it in the croc’s mouth, he pulled his sidearm out instead, sighted between the twinkling orbs of its eyes, squeezed the trigger. The croc collapsed like a punctured tire. Melchior waited thirty seconds to see if anything else came running, then used his knife to sever the strings of his chute one at a time, slipping and jerking his way downward. When he was about six feet off the ground, he unbuckled his harness and dropped right on the croc’s back. He took most of the weight on his left leg, but his right still screamed with pain. If he got out of this pissant country alive—never mind if this cockeyed plan came off—he vowed to put his throbbing foot all the way up Richard Bissell’s pasty white ass. He’d save the cigars for Sidney Gottlieb.

He figured the shot would bring the others to him, so he sat down on the dead croc, took off his right boot, reached for one of the rolled strips of fabric he always carried with him. It had been one of the Wiz’s first field lessons all those years ago. Flat ribbon was more compact than a similar length of rope, and more versatile too: you could use it to bind wounds as well as wrists, write ciphered messages, or rappel out a third-floor window. Sturgis found him before he’d finished wrapping his ankle. One of the exiles—García, it turned out—came in about five minutes after, but there was no sign of Robertson or López or Donny.

They found Robertson hiding in the low branches of a mangrove, a half dozen empty candy wrappers littering the base, which smelled strongly of urine. They found López a half hour later. He’d broken his wrist in the landing but was otherwise okay. Melchior set it with a pair of sticks and a couple yards of fabric, and then they spent another two hours combing the swamp before they finally found Donny—or what was left of him, which was mostly the smell of his cologne. He’d drifted two miles east of the drop point. Whether he’d landed in a nest of crocs or they’d simply come across his dead body (Sturgis joked that the weight of all those names was too much for his parachute to carry) was anybody’s guess.

“Guess it’s only fair,” Sturgis said, leering at Melchior. “We killed one-a them, they get to kill one of us.”

“But we didn’t
eat
it,” Robertson said, his protest reeking of Spam and nougat.

“Surprised they managed to keep him down,” Sturgis said, “what with that nasty-ass perfume he wears. So, Poco?” He turned to Melchior. “You think it’s about time you let us in on the plan?”

Melchior looked at Sturgis, who was trying to work Donny’s crucifix free from what remained of his head and neck. Even so, there was more of him left than Pablo.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Sturgis gave up and just snapped the chain. He rinsed the gore off in a puddle of swamp water and dropped it in his pocket. When he stood up, his rifle was hanging loosely off his shoulder, the snout pointing directly at Melchior.

“Try me.”

Melchior combined what he knew with what he surmised, presented it all as though he’d been in on everything from the beginning. Bad enough that he was the Company representative for such a stupid plan; no need for him to look like a patsy as well.

What he knew for sure was that before the revolution Donny had worked in the Sans Souci with a man whose wife’s sister or daughter or cousin was a chorus girl turned housekeeper, now employed in Castro’s private offices off the Plaza de la Revolución. What he surmised was that the housekeeper had agreed to add one of the Company’s exploding cigars to the box on Castro’s desk, presumably in exchange for payment, or else because the Company had something on her. Castro’s love of a good cigar was well known, as was the fact that the box in his office always contained a representative selection from the island’s top growers: Diplomatico, Bolívar, La Gloria Cubana, and of course Montecristo, which was the name on the band Sidney Gottlieb’s whitecoats in TSS had wrapped around their boom-boom sticks. When Sturgis asked him how powerful the explosive was, an image of Pablo’s headless torso flashed in Melchior’s mind.

“Let’s just say the housekeeper should be working below the belt by the time Castro’s on his third or fourth puff. And she shouldn’t use too much hairspray that day.”

“Ha!” Robertson burped. “That shouldn’t be a problem! I bet they don’t even
got
hairspray in Cuba no more!”

The real problem, of course, was that Donny didn’t have
arms and legs
no more, so it was going to be a little hard for him to deliver the cigars to the housekeeper, and God forbid
one other member
of the team should’ve known her name. Welcome to the new CIA. Streamlined and simplified. Apparently the endangered Cuban crocodile hadn’t been let in on the new bureaucratic structure.

Once they made it to Havana, García and López tried bribing random female members of the Ministerio’s housekeeping staff, which got García arrested the second day and shot, as far as they could figure, sometime on the third. Then Robertson took half a dozen of the cigars to the Mexican embassy. First he tried to reach Howard Hunt at the Mexican field office, and then he tried to convince the Mexican Ambassador to Cuba to present them to Castro as a gift, which got
him
deported the fourth day. On the evening of the fifth day, after García’s execution had been announced in the papers under the headline
TRAITOR TO THE REVOLUTION BROUGHT TO JUSTICE
, López got so drunk that he smoked one of the cigars himself, or at least that’s what Sturgis and Melchior assumed when they found his headless, armless torso slumped in a chair, the fingers of his left hand still wrapped around the neck of a bottle of Cuban rum. At that point, Sturgis just bolted, which left Melchior by himself, nothing but a half-full box of exploding cigars for company, along with a little rum still left in the bottle in López’s hand.

Three days later, as he was leaving a whorehouse in Barrio Chino, he passed a couple of police officers on their way in, one fat and dopey looking, the other more solid, and scowling.

“You smell like shit, my friend,” the fat
policía
said genially enough. “What were you doing, fucking your girl up the ass?”

In fact, Melchior
had
penetrated Rosita anally. Another of the Wiz’s field lessons: the Company only provided one condom per man per mission, but bastard children, whether fathered on a Cuban prostitute or a field slave like the one the Wiz’s grandfather had owned, always came back to haunt you, so one had to improvise. And besides, Melchior’d doubled the girl’s rate, so as far as he was concerned, he’d paid for any inconvenience.

Nevertheless, the two
policías
reminded him a little too much of Robertson and Sturgis, and he was half blind on rum to boot: before he knew what he was doing, he’d kicked the fat
policía
’s nuts through the roof of his mouth. Over the course of the next fifty years, he would realize that that single action, more than anything since the day the Wiz picked him and Caspar out of the orphanage, set him on his destiny.

He turned to go for the second
policía
, only to find a Makarov trained on him.

“I would much rather give one of these ladies an evening of pleasure then take you to the station. So please. Give me an excuse to pull the trigger.”

Melchior looked up from the stubby, rust-flecked pistol to the
policía
’s piggy little eyes. All four of them. Really, the resemblance to Sturgis was uncanny.

Even shit-faced, he had enough self-awareness to know that his smile wasn’t the kind of smile that set other people at ease.

He smiled anyway.

“I’m sure we’re all reasonable men,” he said. “Why don’t we discuss this over a nice cigar?”

It hit her as she passed through the muted spotlight over the inner door: not just the heat, the smoke, the urgent murmur of voices. The
need
. Though no one actually stopped what he or she was doing to inspect her entrance, she still felt her presence sizzle through the room like an electric current. Felt the sidelong glances and equally circumspect feelings that accompanied them, that ineffable combination of lust and derogation on the part of the men, sympathy and jealousy on the part of the women.

The emotional miasma swirled around her as palpably as the smoke. Against its press, all she could do was fasten her eyes on the bar and forge ahead. Fifteen steps, she told herself, that’s all you have to take. And then you can reward yourself with a nice tall glass of gin.

The men looked at her openly now, their stares as tangible as the sweaty hand of a soused uncle at a wedding reception. Barely five feet, four inches in heels, Naz was inches shorter than the rangy lasses scattered around bar stools and tables, but there was something oversized about her presence. Her pearl-gray dress directed their attention to her hips, her waist, her breasts—her cleavage—but it was her face that held them. Her mouth, its fullness made even more striking by lipstick the color of a darkened rose; her eyes, as large and dark as walnuts. And of course her hair, a mass of inky black waves that sucked up what little light there was in the smoky room and radiated it back in oily rainbows. Or who knows, maybe it was just her nose, which had more length than any native-born woman could carry off, let alone work to her advantage. It would be thirty or forty years before anyone in the room would recognize the faint dimple in her left nostril as the mark left behind by a nose ring, ceremonially administered on her thirteenth birthday, and removed less than a year later when Uncle Kermit put her on a plane to the States carrying a single suitcase equipped with a false bottom into which the remnants of her mother’s jewels had been stuffed. Even without that tidbit of knowledge, everyone in the bar could see the newcomer was foreign. Exotic. If it was a husband she wanted, a boyfriend, some kind of lasting connection, she wouldn’t have stood a chance. She was too strange. But strangeness was a virtue in her line of work and, well, no one came to the Firelight for a lasting connection.

The women noticed her too, of course. Their stares were as hard as the men’s but significantly less friendly. They recognized her for the threat she was. It was Tuesday, after all. Business was slow.

“Hendrick’s and tonic?” The bartender was already setting a chilled Collins glass on the bar. “Easy on the tonic?”

The man’s voice and face were professionally neutral, but Naz could feel the pity behind them, knew just what he thought of her. Knew too that it didn’t prevent him from wanting her, like all the other men in the room.

“A slice of cucumber, please,” Naz answered. “I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

She tried not to gulp her drink as she perched on the bar stool and turned halfway out. Not quite facing the room—that would read as too obvious, too desperate—but not quite facing the bar either. The perfect angle to be looked at yet not seem to be looking back.

She brought her glass to her lips, was surprised to find it empty. That was quick, even for her.

“Another?” The bartender was already there, his voice a bit bolder, the heat of his desire a degree warmer. Naz knew it would happen one day. It always did, and then she would have to find another bar.

“May I get this one?”

She turned rapidly on her stool. A young man was sitting next to her. She wasn’t sure if he’d been there the whole time or if he’d sat down after she arrived. He was tall and taut as a ripcord on a parachute, affected a broad-brimmed fedora that he pulled low on his forehead despite the heat and the dimness of the bar. Naz noted that it was an expensive-looking suit, probably bespoke—Saville Row, she guessed, acquired during his postcollegiate European tour. Cartier watch, matching silver cuff links. So he was a rich boy, which automatically set him apart from everyone else in the bar, as did the fact that he radiated none of the sexual energy everyone else here did. But his smooth-skinned, shadowed face, though slightly smug, was honest looking. All Naz felt was curiosity and a slight sense of … of mischief almost. No malevolence. No lust. But still. A free drink was a drink.

“Thank you.” She tried not to clutch the drink. “My name is Joan.”

“Really?” The boy’s mischievous grin widened. “I thought it was Nazanin. Nazanin Haverman.”