“Maybe nothing—maybe it means nothing.”

“But if it does. What would they be?”

“Police. CIA. Castro’s men. Who can say?”

“But they were not watching your house?”

“No, I’d left the car away from my house and that was where I saw the man. Near the car.”

“Where were you yesterday that someone might have noticed you and taken down the license number of the Volkswagen?”

“The old man knows where I was. I reported to him last night by phone.”

Luz’s voice had the quality of a rusty hinge in motion. “You’ll have to stay out of sight for a while. Don’t go back to your home.”

“I know that, you don’t have to tell me.”

“And don’t telephone the house again.”

“He gets upset if I don’t report to him.”

“We’ll have to find a way to do it without telephones. El viejo no longer trusts their security.”

Luz drove east toward the airport. Cielo had never quite comprehended Luz’s exact place in the Draga scheme of things; Luz apparently was something between bodyguard and secretary, with a bit of valet thrown in, but the old man had secretaries and bodyguards and a valet besides Luz. There wasn’t much likelihood that Luz was of any importance in the management of the Draga businesses—Luz wasn’t a businessman, he was too coarse, he was nearly a thug. He was a Cuban mountain peasant whose parents had worked for the Draga interests in some capacity.

Luz was low-profile; he usually didn’t appear in public at Draga’s side and most of the world didn’t associate him with Draga, which gave him a certain freedom of movement; Cielo suspected that Luz perhaps acted as a sort of bagman in Draga’s dealings with officials and police and the Jews and Italians from Florida with whom the old man did certain kinds of business. It was old man Draga who in 1963 had acted as intermediary between the Free Cuba movements and the Santos Trega group of Sicilians; the Sicilians had made six separate attempts on Castro’s life. Santos Trega himself was Cuban, a former criminal boss in Havana, imprisoned in ‘61–‘62 by Castro, then deported—after a substantial sub-rosa payment to Castro—to Miami and New Orleans. Jack Ruby, who had shot Lee Oswald in Dallas, had been one of Trega’s associates; Cielo had heard rumors that Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli were part of it as well. In subsequent years old man Draga had withdrawn from most of his contacts with Trega and Lansky, mostly because he disapproved pragmatically of their ethics but also because he came to regard them as bunglers.

It was taken for granted by Draga and those around him that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had been formulated in Havana and dictated by Castro because Castro knew that the CIA had employed the Mafia to try to assassinate Castro: The killing of the President had been a retaliatory hit. Cielo had believed in these conspiratorial complexities for a long time but just recently he had begun to question them; he no longer knew what to believe—he no longer was sure he cared.

Along the service road beside the airport Luz slowed the Pinto. Its air conditioner blew a chill draft against Cielo’s throat and he reached out to change the direction of the vent ribs. By the side of the road a small station wagon was parked, a man in the front seat; its sun visors were lowered to indicate all clear. Luz drew past the station wagon and touched the brake pedal—three taps, to signal the station wagon—and drove on toward the big hangars that butted up against the chain fence. Cielo glanced back and saw that the station wagon was following. He hadn’t recognized its driver.

He began to think about the niceties of his situation: Was this an execution ride? But he knew better; he was relaxed when Luz stopped the car behind one of the hangars. “Is there anything you want me to relay to the old man?”

“No. Tell him I’ll be in touch.” Cielo pushed the door open and got out.

The station wagon drew up and its driver left the door open when he walked forward. The driver nodded civilly enough and went past him. Cielo recognized him now—he’d seen the man around Draga’s place a few times walking the dogs on leashes. He’d never seen the man out of uniform before; that was what had thrown him.

The dog handler got into the Pinto, the seat Cielo had just vacated; the Pinto drove away.

It was so hot there didn’t seem to be any air. Cielo went squinting to the station wagon and, shut himself in, grateful for the air conditioning.

He had a look around the car’s interior and opened the glove compartment to see if anything had been left for him—an envelope or whatever. There was nothing, only a flashlight and the car’s registration papers made out to somebody named Juan D. Ruiz at an address in Ponce—he was sure it was phony although it looked good enough to his untrained eye; Cielo had no talent for forgery.

He put it in drive and pointed it out toward the highway, thinking now of the old man up there possibly sitting over iced tea on his veranda overlooking the Cerromar golf course and all the tourists getting their exercise in electric carts: The old man sitting on his wealth and still deluding himself into the belief that he was the power behind the operation that would liberate Cuba.

The farm was deserted except for one man whom Julio had left on guard: Stefano—small, ruddy, quick, with an incipient potbelly and under his mustache a set of buck teeth like a steam engine’s cowcatcher. Stefano had a disconcerting wart at the corner of his lower lip. Stefano greeted him with a casual remark and an easy smile, and it struck Cielo suddenly how old Stefano looked—how old they all were getting.

Cielo sent out a three-second radio signal; then he popped the tab of an aluminum can and sat down on the porch trying to find the breeze; he tasted the thin Puerto Rican beer and thought how egotistical their dreams had been, how pathetically comic and how posturingly tragic. They had been blind to the realities of power. The old man and the other zealous exiles believed, against all evidence, that they needed merely to provide the spark and that the tinder would burst into flame immediately, fueled by a popular will that would sweep away the Castro commissars. It amazed him now how long he had been able to sustain his own belief in that scenario.

After about three hours the Land Cruiser appeared at the head of the cornfield and came forward along the furrows, Vargas at the wheel. Vargas’ big lips went all shapes when he smiled. Cielo dropped off the porch and tossed his bags in back and climbed into the passenger seat and Vargas turned the Land Cruiser around to head back up into the hills. Cielo looked back—Stefano waved to him. Stefano’s chest had caved in with age; his clothes looked as if they hung on a hanger that was too small. My God, Cielo thought, how ridiculous we are.

Vargas said, “Julio’s run out of books.”

“Hell. I forgot to bring more.” The damned science fiction. How did Julio tell them apart? They all had the same covers. Byzantine creatures with all sorts of eyes and arms.

“How goes the cave?”

“It goes. Not very fast.”

“That’s all right, there’s plenty of time. Everything’s out of sight?”

“We’re very careful,” Vargas said. “Enrique’s very stern, he doesn’t let anybody make mistakes.” Kruger’s first name was Heinrich but they’d called him Enrique for nearly twenty years—it hadn’t made a Latin of him.

“Did you see the old man?”

“A couple of days ago. In his counting house.” Cielo grinned a bit maliciously; it pleased him to think of Draga as a miserly Scrooge. The vault in Draga’s basement was truly formidable. Cielo had watched in amazement while the old man unhooked alarms, inserted keys, dialed combinations and turned handles up instead of down. “If a man turns it down,” the old man had told him with ferocious satisfaction, “he gets a squirt of disabling gas in the face.”