Dusky MacMorgan: Cuban Death-Lift Part 12

Lobo punched me solidly in the stomach with his elbow, and I had to grit my teeth to keep from showing any pain. "You must learn, gringo, to show proper respect for a Cuban officer." He never took his eyes off the woman as he spoke.

So it was show time. It had been a long night for Castro's toy troops. They had gunned down an unarmed man and had worn themselves out searching for the corpse. Now it was time for a little recreation. Time to force the pretty senorita to strip.

Right.

She b.u.mped into me and stopped. End of the trail. Zapata came up, standing toe to toe with her. He grabbed the lapel of robe and she knocked his hand away.

The soldiers on the gunboat roared with laughter. See the beautiful woman fight the big strong capitn!

So the audience was with us, not him. It might make a difference. I might be able to make a move, and they might laugh instead of shoot, and . . .

Maybe h.e.l.l.

Zapata was yelling at Androsa, now-furious. He was tired of being made a fool of. He kept nodding at me as he spoke, and it became clear what he was accusing her of-being a wh.o.r.e for the big blond gringo. It was the old s.e.xual taboo, a light-skinned person s.e.xually intimate with the darker-skinned. And that seemed to make him madder than anything.

This Zapata was a jerk, all right.

And I prayed the opportunity would come for me to even the score.

Tired of having his orders scorned, he grabbed the woman and ripped the robe back. And just as quickly, she pulled it tightly around her and, with her free left hand, slapped him a loud stinger across the face.

More laughter from the gunboat.

"Puta!" he screamed. His face was crimson from the slap. He touched the swelling area, hesitated, then slapped her in return, jerking her head back. I caught her in my arms.

It was time to make my move; to take care of Zapata before he forced the robe open and saw the bloodstain. And I knew what I was going to do. Cold-c.o.c.k the skinny b.a.s.t.a.r.d, then a.s.sume the roll of the gringo clown, hoping the soldier-audience would laugh instead of shoot- But I didn't have time to try it. With a low animal screech, she launched herself at Zapata, using hands and fingernails at his face, backing him up. Then she brought that left hand of hers from waist high in a sizzling uppercut. Zapata was in the absolute worst position for it. He was bent at the waist, head down, trying to protect his eyes.

So the lancing fist caught him flush on his bird nose. There was a surprisingly loud thwack, an explosion of cartilage and blood, and it sent him wheeling backward.

And he didn't have far to go.

The transom caught him thigh-high, and he went tumbling a.s.s-end first into the black water.

There was a tense moment; a moment of indecision for the soldiers. And then Lobo led the way. His laughter-loud and genuine-detonated the glee of the others. They roared in spasms, holding their stomachs, pounding the deck of the gunboat. By the time they had regained sufficient control to remember their fallen captain, he had floundered his way back to the surface. He screamed threats at the world. He singled the woman out again and again, pointing dreadful promises at her with his index finger.

And he meant every one of them.

When the gunboat finally rumbled away, I pulled the woman close to me. She was s.h.i.+vering noticeably.

"We're going to have to watch out for that one from now on," I said.

"Yes, I know. I was probably very stupid." Her dark eyes were glazed with the shock of what she had done; of how close we both had come to capture.

"It wasn't stupid," I said. "In fact, I was going to punch him if you didn't. It was our only chance."

She said nothing, just leaned there trembling against me; the shock coming in low swells, flowing through her body. "Hey," I said. "It's over. You can relax now."

She slid around so that she faced me, her arms around me, small hands low on the base of my back. A satin wisp of hair covered her left eye. I reached down, brushed it away, and when I did she touched my hand with her lips.

"There's only one way I can relax now, Dusky."

Her lips were moist, slightly parted, and the mahogany eyes seemed to bore into mine. "Please, Dusky. I . . . I don't want to be alone tonight. Not down there. Not where he . . ."

I kissed her gently, a searching kiss, asking her if she wanted only companions.h.i.+p, to be held-or more. Her mouth opened, tongue communicating without words. Her long legs pressed, then curled around mine, and I lifted her up into my arms, still caressing her lips with mine. I said her name softly, a whisper: "Androsa Santarun. You are quite a woman, Androsa Santarun."

Her response was a weary smile. She frowned for a moment, as if trying to remember something, and then I heard her words like an echo of my own. "Yes," she said. "I'm something. I'm a real G.o.ddam ace. . . ."

12.

The next morning, several hours before the radio informed Androsa that immigration authorities wanted to see her in Havana, I spent the glowing dusky dawn time alone engaged in the idle musings of a man who has seen his life of the-straight-and-narrow dissolve into a strange existence of cricks, crinks, and clashes in the fast lane.

It was an airy blue morning. Molten gold in the east: the sun spinning hard toward a billion tiny lives in the western hemisphere.

That's you, MacMorgan. One rogue speck in the giant montage of living cells. See yourself? That's right. Get out the big microscope. . . .

A brash night wind had come down out of the mountains of Mesa de Mariel and blown the factory smog away. It cleaned the air and made the harbor seem almost pristine. Even the rattiest among the thousands of American boats in the harbor looked clean and white in that morning light, and you could see the little thatched-roof village on the plateau of distant cane fields plainly.

It was a good morning for breaking rules, so I cracked a rare bottle of Heineken dark and sipped at it while I dressed. Put on clean khaki fis.h.i.+ng shorts, soft and stained with the blood of many good fish. Add the old leather belt with the bra.s.s anchor, strap on the Gerber knife in its oil-blackened case, and, just for the h.e.l.l of it, check the blade. Sharp enough to shave blond hair off the left arm-but it could be sharper. A good way to spend the morning: sip at the beer, work on the knife with honing oil and ceramic stone and watch the morning filter across the Cuban landscape.

I pulled on a white cotton s.h.i.+rt, then poked my head into the veeing of master berth.

Androsa was asleep. Her hair fanned out beneath her head like a black satin pillow, and her nose flared slightly with every inhalation. The white sheet was pulled up just over her pelvis, and the outline of hips was a shadowed curve with the soft lift of inner thigh tapering toward long legs. Her thin ribs were alternately visible and invisible with every breath, and her right arm curved up under the delicate chin, flattening the right breast, showing only a portion of the dark-brown aureola of nipple.

Funny how intimate contact sharpens your attention, focuses your eyes. You notice the little anatomical variants that you did not see before.

There was a tiny white fingernail of scar below her left cheek. And just the slightest hint of lines at the corner of her eyes, sun-furrowed. Confident of her natural beauty, she wore no makeup and did not employ the little cosmetic tricks most women use. So her eyebrows were in light disarray, and her lips were pale, without lipstick. Her skin was the color of sandalwood, sun-darkened, with thin white bikini marks around her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Gently, I kissed her on the forehead.

She stirred, flinched, dreaming. . . .

"Dusky . . . ?"

"Hum . . . ?"

"Dusky . . ."

"Go back to sleep, lady."

I went topside with knife and stone and oil can, dark beer cold in my hand.

People were beginning to stir on nearby boats. Men in underwear came out onto their morning decks, hacked, spit, stretched. In the freshening wind was the smell of bacon frying, and the diesel odor of the harbor. Over on the beach by the little military outpost, the guard had been doubled. Cuban soldiers in their baggy uniforms walked the beach, urging their German shepherds to find the body that could never be found.

So you did it, MacMorgan. You outfoxed the foxes. And how many other bodies have you had to hide in your lifetime? Just those two? Right. The first, a North Vietnamese, had been easy. You only needed to buy a few extra hours to get your men out. So who would think of looking in the highest branches of an avocado tree for a point guard? The second had been tougher-even tougher than the one last night. A Russian special forces ace who had been sent out for one reason, and one reason only-to nail the Navy SEAL who had the disconcerting ability to drift jungle rivers at night, make silent one-man a.s.saults on important Commie strongholds, then disappear leaving only the corpses of officers and double agents in his path, arrow holes or knife smiles in each and every one. Yes, the body of the Russian had been the hardest to hide because you could not afford to let him ever be found-not there, not where he had finally walked into your trap. Even if it meant the grizzly business the job demanded, the one and only way to strike him and his remains from the face of the earth for ever and ever . . .

Remembering, I felt the revulsion low in my stomach, and then I took a sip of the cold dark beer, feeling the memory wash away like phlegm.

A good morning for idle musing-but not about that.

So I worked at the knife, oiling the blade and carving at the whetstone. And I thought about how it had been with the woman.

Some woman.

Some lover.

Androsa Santarun was, in love, much the same as she was in life: straightforward, without guile, a person of strength who knew what she wanted. But all of these qualities were shaded with a gentleness and the hint of vulnerability that made her as pa.s.sionate about pleasing as she was pa.s.sionate about her wanting.

I had steered her down into the cabin, both hands on her frail shoulders, feeling her trembling beneath my touch. The main cabin lamp was on, throwing a glaze of yellow light across the big vee-berth. And when I reached to switch it off, she had stopped my hand.

"I . . . leave it on. Please, I want to see . . ."

The robe fell off her shoulders, and she turned to me in the golden light, nipples erect beneath a thin fabric of T-s.h.i.+rt, hips moving with the motion of the first long kiss.

"You're sure," I said, doubtful even then of the wisdom of changing our relations.h.i.+p so irreversibly.

And she had pulled my mouth back down to hers. "Yes. I've never been so sure about anything."

There was a desperate, feverish quality to our first long joining; a surge of total wanting that was at once both exciting and troubling. It pulled at my mind for a time-until I remembered the source of it; something I had read. During the bombing of London in World War II, the underground shelters had sp.a.w.ned a whole new race of children; some legitimate, most not. People of that time had written about the increased s.e.xuality of love during the bombings-like some biological drive to procreate on the razor's edge of death.

And, strangely, that's the way it was with Androsa; as if some blackness watched from outside, waiting only until we had finished our feverish coupling to strike.

"Is this all right . . . ?"

"Oh Dusky, oh yes, yes, yes-but turn . . . turn around so that I can . . ."

It was a night of distilled wanting, of concentrated emotion pouring from the two of us; sometimes gentle, sometimes savage, always churning toward the timeless merging into oneness that left the strangers-which we were-far behind.

"Oh Dusky, you are so . . ."

"You don't have to say anything, Androsa. But just for the record, you are too."

And later, after our voracious hunger had been temporarily satiated, we talked.

Or, more correctly, she talked. She told me of her difficult adjustment to American life, of her college years, and of the husband she had loved so much and wanted everything for, only to see all hopes destroyed by some drunken driver who did not notice the jogger one sunlit Sunday afternoon.

But mostly, she talked of her childhood in Cuba.

"I was born on a large island south of the mainland," she told me, her soft weight stretched out on top of me, b.r.e.a.s.t.s mashed firm and flat against my chest.

"The Isle of Pines?"

"Yes! Isla de Pinos-do you know it?"

"Not well. You tell me about it."

She rolled off me, holding me across the chest, speaking softly into my ear. "As a child, I thought it the most beautiful place in the world. We lived in a little village in a harbor called Ensenada de Siguanea, and the water was very clear, and even as a child I would swim out to watch the fish that lived around the coral. I think that we were probably very poor, because our house had only two rooms and the roof was made of thatch. But we always had plenty of food, and bananas and oranges grew outside, and there were always fish and rice and mangos."

"You're making me hungry." I reached over and brushed hair from her face. "Did you have any brothers or sisters?"

She hesitated for a moment. "Yes. A half brother. And such a good brother, Alvino. He was only two years older, but even then he spoiled me."

"Hum, you don't taste spoiled. So is your brother in America now? Why didn't he come back to Mariel for your father?"

I felt her tense momentarily. "My brother . . . my brother is dead. Castro's people murdered him. Like animals, they killed him."

"So you have only your mother now?"

"And my father."

I expected the tension to ease out of her, but it didn't. The reserves were up again. I had planned on following her lead; hoping she would tell me the truth about her mission so that I could tell her the truth about mine. Instead, she evaded questions about her home life, her occupation, and fell into a brief lie about the man we had come to get, her fictional father.

"I don't remember much about him. Only that he was very large and smelled of tobacco, and he was a soldier. I remember that he frightened me. And that he was always away."

"Was it your father who taught you how to shoot?"

"What? Oh, yes-in a way. He was not home that much. Even so, he is my father, and I am dedicated to him in my own way. We are of the same blood, you see. To a Cuban, that means everything."

"Your father is very lucky to have a daughter like you."

She touched my lips with her fingertip, silencing me.

"Please," she said. "No more talk. We will have many days to talk." She rolled back on me, kissing my chest, my stomach, sliding downward. "This is the time for loving. Like before, only . . ."

"Only what, lady."

She smiled, almost blus.h.i.+ng. "Only even harder. Much harder. I am a strong woman, Mr. Dusky MacMorgan. You cannot break me. . . ."

So I sat in the starboard fighting chair, swiveling back and forth idly, working at the knife. The blade was looking good: only two or three burrs from fishbone, and the ceramic stone was working them out nicely. Once I had loaned the knife to a tourist fisherman down at the docks. He was having trouble getting the heads off some small barracuda he had caught, and was just about ready to toss his frail Sears fillet knife into the water when I came along. It seemed like a harmless request, so I unsheathed the Gerber for him, and went about my business aboard Sniper. When I returned to the cleaning table, the man was gone. Someone said he had headed up to the marina. I went after him on a dead run. And I got there just in time. He had the grinding wheel going and was just about to "resharpen" my knife to "thank me" for the loan.

If it hadn't been such an honest effort to do me a favor, I would have dropped him in his tracks. Even so, he looked a little taken aback by the lecture I gave him. You don't use a grinding wheel on a fine knife, ever, ever, ever, buddy. It's like trying to clean a handgun by throwing it in the was.h.i.+ng machine. . . .

I checked the blade on my arm again. Blond hair came off as readily as if the folding knife were one of those twin-blade razors. I folded it, housed it back on my belt, then went below to start breakfast for the woman.

I cracked six eggs, stirred them into a pan, added chopped onion and a touch of A&B hot sauce. By the time the omelet was ready for cheese and a careful fold, Androsa came out of the master berth, head tilted, combing her long black hair with a brush.

"Food's almost ready."

"Hum. Good."

I listened carefully for any sign of new reserve in her voice. If there was to be an awkward time, this would be it. It is the most modern of afflictions: how do total strangers deal with each other after they have just shared the most intimate of experiences? There is the forced hilarity or the coy shyness, or the manufactured innocence of "Gee, did it really happen, because I'm normally not like that."

But Androsa Santarun displayed nothing but affection and a wry sense of humor. She strolled by me, still combing her hair, then reached over and gave me a surprise kiss on the lips.