3

HUNT HAD SPOKEN OF A MOTEL OUT ON CALLE OCHO WHERE A FEW NOTORIOUS Cuban exiles used to hide out after their attempts to assassinate President Prio and President Batista had failed. Since the motel’s name was the Royal Palms, I expected a modern hostelry with four or more stories and picture windows in aluminum casements. Instead, I found a damp tropical patio surrounded by an equally small motor court, low in rent, one story high, and painted dark green to hide water stains on the stucco. A couple of moldy palm trees showed infestations of insects around their scabrous base. I was no lover, I discovered, of stunted palms, fallen fronds, and rotting shrubs. Indeed, the courtyard was so cramped that you had to park your car around the corner. Although each of the rooms off the patio was in perpetual shadow, the motel caught my reluctant rent money; I seemed to have a tropism for dank living quarters. A corner of myself seemed to insist on the lower depths. I used to go to sleep at night thinking of all those frustrated Cuban gunmen who had perspired on the same mattress as myself.

Living in the kind of place Raymond Chandler might have chosen for Marlowe to visit long enough to knock on one sleazy door, I did not learn as much as I expected. Single men were occupying some of the rooms and whole families squatted in others, all Cuban; the management consisted of an old lady, blind in her right eye from glaucoma, and her dark and gloomy son. He was missing almost all of one arm but nonetheless proved dexterous with a broom, tucking the end of the handle into his armpit. At night, accompanying the sounds of many a quarrel, I would hear a good deal of Cuban music issuing out of portable radios, and the din would have been sufficient to keep me from sleeping if I had not learned from reading a few books that the Afro-Cuban blood of the drummers was speaking directly to the gods—to the African gods and all their attached and saintly Catholic ghosts. In the ears of the gods, therefore, would I fall asleep as my neighbors turned up their radios. The air smelled of garlic and cooking oil.

I slept easily. I was happily tired. My early work in Miami harbored an astounding parade of faces and locations. If I was still, by gross description, an office worker, I now spent half of many a day driving my government-issue Chevrolet Impala at high speeds over the endless, welcoming boulevards and causeways of Miami and Miami Beach, not to speak of field trips out to the Everglades and the Keys. We were seeding an operation in Southern Florida that would extend from north of Fort Lauderdale two hundred miles down to Key West, and from Dade County across Big Cypress Swamp to Tampa and the Gulf. Since we also had to be able to disavow the operation, we needed safe houses that could never be recognized as such, and many of them, in consequence, were loaned to us by wealthy Americans or Cubans living part of the year in Miami. Later in my career, I would learn that the Company was not above keeping castles on the Rhine, chateaux in the Loire, and temples in Kyoto, but those were exceptions: The best security, by standard rule, was inconspicuous safe houses, austere and functional.

In Florida, that law was broken many times over. If I saw my fill of cheap hotel rooms and seedy apartments, I also met with Cubans in houses flanked by large lawns and swimming pools. Outside the picture window, cinched to the dock, was the launch that belonged to the residence. In this empty house, the half dozen Cubans who had been brought together for a meeting were temporarily fumigating any aura of excessive wealth with an around-the-clock smoke-out of cigars.

Do I speak of such meetings abstractly? Be assured—I was not without my private awe at the unpredictability of our Cuban friends. Some were as mustachioed as pirates, others as bald as well-seasoned politicians, but one of my tasks was to chauffeur them out to whichever posh safe house had been chosen by Hunt in Key Biscayne, Coconut Grove, or Coral Gables for the political meet. Later, I would bring them back to rooms almost as mean as my own and would wonder at the logic of transporting them to an elegant if temporary milieu.

Hunt continued to be my guide on such matters. “If we were to keep them in top-drawer accommodations, their arrogance would be unholy in a week. You have to get a grasp on Cuban mentality,” he said. “They are not like Mexicans, and they are certainly not comparable to Uruguayans. They are not in the least bit like us. If an American gets depressed enough to think of committing suicide, well, he just might, but if a Cuban thinks of packing it in, he tells his friends, has a party, gets drunk, and kills someone else. They’re even treacherous about their own suicide. I attribute it to the tropics. The jungle excites hysteria. A beautiful jungle trail allows you to step on a scorpion. A caterpillar can drop on you from a leaf tree overhead and sting you half-unconscious. Cubans act macho in order to keep down that hysteria. Our task is to punch into all their emotional lack of balance, and I’ll tell you, boy, it can be done. That’s exactly what we did to Arbenz in Guatemala.”

He had told me the story in Montevideo, but I was to hear it again. “Harry, we had only three hundred men, three patched-up planes, and”—he held up a finger—“one radio transmitter working out of the Honduras side of the border, but we kept sending out messages to imaginary troops using a code so simple that we knew Arbenz and his people would be able to crack it. Before long, we had them reacting to our fake messages. We’d mention military units loyal to Arbenz, and talk in code about how they were plotting to defect. Within a week, Arbenz was keeping his battalions locked up in their barracks. He thought they’d march straight over to us. We kept increasing the size of our army, too. ‘Can’t dispatch two thousand men right now, but will manage twelve hundred today. Tomorrow we can send you the rest.’ It was all calculated to sow maximum hysteria in the other side. Arbenz quit Guatemala before the three hundred men we did have could even march into Guatemala City, and all the commies broke for the hills. One of our most masterful jobs.

“Now, we are going to hit Castro with so many reports of multiple landings that he won’t know which tip of Cuba we’re aiming at.”

“May I serve as devil’s advocate?”

“That’s one reason you’re here.”

“Castro,” I said, “knows all about Guatemala by now. Che Guevara was one of the people working in Arbenz’s government.”

“Yes,” said Hunt, “but Guevara is only one voice among many. Our built-in advantage is that Cubans are without equal in the energy they devote to rumor-mongering. That little vice is going to be used by us. Right now, right here in Miami, with more than a hundred thousand of them already defected from Castro, we are going to flood their rumor mill with misleading information which will end up on Fidel’s desk. Since we are positioned in the very center of that hive of rumors, we can push Castro in any direction.”

“Can’t we be as easily misled by the disinformation Castro sends back?”

Hunt shrugged. “Call it a battle of disinformation. I’ll take our people over his. We are less hysterical, after all.”

Hunt had been a novelist, I kept reminding myself, before he became a Company man. I could sense a romantic fellow who might be even more of a wild goose than me. Since he could also be as close as a straight-edge at keeping to the Company book, he kept me aware of the separate manifestations of Alpha and Omega, and that was an insight I could do without. Alpha and Omega inundated me with thoughts of Kittredge. A little later that day, forced off the road by a caterwaul of rain, I sat on the shoulder, motor turned off, my head on the wheel, and—to my horror—came close to weeping. Just so suddenly had I been overcome by whole longing for her. It was often like that. In the turn of a mood I would be desolate at the whole absence of Kittredge’s presence. I suffered abominably from the frustration of not being able to write to her, and kept writing letters in my mind. Tonight, before I went to sleep, I might compose another. But for now, the rain having ended, I started my car and sped down the highway again along interstates pale as ivory in the sun. I even had the luck to see a white egret standing on one leg in a dark swamp to the side of the road.