39
MY FATHER WAS LIVING IN MEAN QUARTERS. A DECOMMISSIONED SAFE house had become available through the Agency rental office, and he picked it up for low rental. I believe it was his pleasure to save money in this manner in order to have more bounty available for food and drink. To celebrate my arrival, he took me to Sans Souci.
We had a splendid meal on Saturday evening, and the restaurant was so full, and the mood so powerfully festive, that we talked freely. Given the din, no recording mechanism yet developed could have picked up our conversation, and I, after a week of closing down Hunt’s desk and living as liaison to the ice-cold executive team of Will and Jim, was as merry as a man on the first day of vacation.
“It may interest you to know,” Cal offered, “just what happened to the last batch of pills.”
“The ones given to the girl?” I asked.
He nodded. He began to laugh.
“Well, what did happen?” I asked.
“It appears,” said Cal, “that the girl put the pill in the bottom of her cold cream jar in order to take it through Cuban customs. A couple of nights later, lying there beside a soundly snoring Fidel Castro, she got up to dig out the little pellet and drop it in a glass of water on the end table within reach of the Caudillo’s hand. The pill was missing, however. Either it had melted in the cold cream, or Castro’s security had found it.”
“Are you saying that they were witting to her?”
“The girl thinks so. Castro had been, it seems, a masterful lover that night—which was considerably out of character for the kind of buckeroo he usually is—at least, according to the girl. On this particular evening, however, he was Superman. This, apparently, kicked off her suspicions. She says he is a man who would take pleasure in knowing a mistress was trying to kill him provided, of course, she could not succeed. In fact, he might be sufficiently amused by it to be generous afterward. She is now back in Miami and tells her boyfriend, Fiorini, that Castro says no one will ever be able to kill him because the highest practitioners of santería gird his person day and night with all varieties of sorcerer’s protection. ‘For a Marxist, I am curiously partial to magic,’ Castro actually said to her.”
“Did you get all this from Maheu?”
“Hell, no,” said Cal. “The bare outlines Maheu provided made me curious enough to interview the girl myself.”
“And what did she look like?”
“Ravishing, but frightfully nervous. She is just sufficiently paranoid to believe that the DGI could have a hit man out looking for her.”
“And what is her boyfriend like? This Fiorini?”
“Adventurer. Heavily suntanned. He’d look happy with a bloody shark’s head on his deck.”
“Isn’t he linked with Masferrer?”
“I expect you’re right.”
And Masferrer, I told myself, was linked with Mario García Kohly, who was ready to kill the Executive Committee of the Frente—or would it be now the Cuban Revolutionary Committee?—when they landed on the beachhead in Cuba. I must have been growing paranoid at the length of these link-ups, for I asked, “Did the girl have fabulous dark hair?”
“Yes,” said my father, “and green eyes. A nice combination.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
“Regretfully, no. Not with me tonight.” He took a sip of his Grommes and Ulrich bourbon, a bottle of which, he confided to me, Sans Souci always kept on hand for him. “By the way,” he said next, “I’ve been researching into some of that santería stuff. You won’t believe the potions those mayomberos cook up. I obtained a recipe for confounding any and all dark purposes of your enemies: You boil the head of an executed murderer together with seven scorpion tails from midnight to two in the morning. You add a little blood from the mayombero’s arm, shred a cigar butt, dissolve a drop of quicksilver, put in lots of pepper to season the cadaver meat, fold in ground herbs, tree bark, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, ten live ants and twenty live worms, offer several carefully selected incantations, add one dried lizard, one squashed centipede, a quart of rum, two dead bats buried last night and dug up tonight, three dead frogs, ditto, a small log of wood teeming with termites, and the bones of a black dog. Last of all—crucial to the soup—one quart of Florida water. I call that cooking.” He roared with happiness. “I suppose gathering all that stuff is no more life-consuming than tradecraft.” His face went blank for a moment in the midst of his laughter, an indication to me, as always, that he was debating whether to tell more.
“We’re but a couple of weeks away from the beachhead,” he now said in so low a voice that I was just about reading his lips. Without pause, he said, “Let’s get you some Hennessey for the coffee,” and signaled to the waiter. “Now that you’re working down the hall,” he went on, “I want you to have a better conception of what went on last month. Needless to say, treat it like homeopathic medicine. One drop at a time fed to others when necessary.”
“Yessir.”
“Trinidad was the place to land,” he said, as soon as the waiter who brought my brandy had stepped away, “but Dean Rusk put the weight of the State Department into blocking that option. I don’t trust Rusk’s goodwill. When he was head of the Rockefeller Foundation, Allen asked for a look at the diaries of Rusk’s top people on their return from visits to international figures. Didn’t Rusk just refuse! Couldn’t imperil, he said, the integrity of the Rockefeller Foundation. Whereupon, Allen went ahead and managed to read their mail anyway. Through an operation—it may interest you to know—that Hugh set up. I don’t know how it happened, but Rusk found out. Now Rusk does not trust Allen. You can bet he doesn’t! All we keep hearing from Rusk, therefore, is that the President does not want the Cuban affair to jeopardize larger U.S. interests. Goddammit, Harry, there’s nothing larger right now than Cuba. Cuba is the hot spot and we’re mucking it up. Trinidad was the town to hit. Good landing beaches, and all the rest. But Rusk had to put the kibosh on it. Too much noise, he said. What if women and children get killed? So we lost to State. Trinidad was out. The new landing place is located back of the devil’s asshole. An area called Bahía de Cochinos. Bay of Pigs. Cherish the name.”
“Does it have any virtues?”
“It’s inaccessible as hell. We will establish a beachhead with no pain. How we are going to deploy from that perimeter, however, is another matter. The beachhead is surrounded by swamp. It will be hard for Castro to get at us, but just as hard for us to get out. Of course, there won’t be noise. Just us Cubans and the fish. Compliments of Dean Rusk.”
“Could he be passing on negative signals from Kennedy?”
“No question,” said Cal. “Kennedy’s inclination is to mañana the invasion. We had a date in March, now it’s been moved into April. In fact, I don’t believe we would have any date at all without Allen. He keeps pressing on the President as hard as he dares. Informs him that the Soviets are supplying Castro at such a rate that by May, it will be too late. Keeps telling Kennedy that the Joint Chiefs have rated the Brigade as the best-trained force in Latin America. ‘Mr. President,’ says Allen, ‘if the Brigade is never employed, you are going to have a disposal problem. Think of this incredibly motivated force rattling around in southern Florida with nothing to do.’
“‘Well,’ replies Kennedy, ‘the invasion must appear Cuban. Since all the world is bound to know we’re behind it, the bandages must be clean.’
“‘Nothing will show,’ says Dulles. Then he says to the President, ‘I feel more confident about this Caribbean job than I ever did about Guatemala.’”
“I can’t wait,” I said.
“You’ll be in it,” said my father. “You are going to the beachhead with Howard Hunt.”
“Definite?”
“Definite.”
That fine leap of fear, almost as sensuous as the stirring of sex, went from my heart to my lungs, to my liver, to all of the capital cities of my soul. A large phrase, but then the brandy was ready to declare what everything was all about.
“Take my advice,” said Cal. “Keep a diary over the next few weeks. I never did during the war, and God, I miss it now.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Security is always a problem, but you can insert your pages in the mail slot in my safe. No one goes near my safe.”
I was silent. I was trying to mask an amalgam of small panic and pride that my father thought enough of me to suggest a journal.
On our way out of Sans Souci, Cal said, “I forgot to tell you that while I was in Miami to interview Fiorini’s lady, I happened to take in the third Patterson-Johansson fight.”
“You didn’t tell me you were in town.”
“I’ve been in Miami a number of times without telling you,” he said so clearly that I had no desire to pursue it.
“How was the fight?”
“A good club fight, no more. And they are supposed to be champions! I mention the evening only because I happened to run into Sammy Giancana again, and he was in a splendiferous mood. Had the most attractive girl on his arm. A true stunner. The sort you have to be ready to kill for. Most marvelous combination of black hair and green eyes.”
“Did you get her name?”
“Something like McMurphy or maybe it was Mo Murphy. The name hardly suited her.”
“Is she the same girl who was with Castro?”
“Certainly not. What gave you that idea?”
“You described Fiorini’s girl as having black hair and green eyes.”
“I didn’t.” Now he was distressed. “Did I misspeak, or did you mishear? Fiorini’s girl is a blonde with green eyes.”
“Then I believe you misspoke.”
“How peculiar.” He punched my bicep hard enough to let me share his pain. “Maybe a mayombero is doing a job on me,” he said.
“Never.”
“Before your brains go, keep a journal.”
“Yessir.”
“Bequeath it to someone from the start. It will focus your entries.”