Killing Castro by Lawrence Block

revenge come off you have to get away with it.”
    “I’ll go along with that,” Turner said. “But I don’t think we can seal our boy in a wine cellar. How are you with a gun?”
    “I don’t know. I never used one.”
    “Not even in ROTC?”
    Hines colored. “I managed to cop out of that. I brought a note from my doctor telling them I was a bed-wetter. I’m not, really, I just—”
    Turner laughed out loud. “Oh, to hell with it,” he said. “I used to be fair with a rifle but it’s been a long time. And you have to be lucky. There’ll be a crowd around and taking a pot shot at Castro would be like buying a lottery ticket. That much chance of it working. I was thinking about a bomb.”
    “A bomb?”
    “The homemade kind, the kind you throw. We’ll blow him to hell and then figure out a way to get home. How does it sound?”
    “It sounds fine,” Hines said. “I guess.”
    Turner rolled down the window next to him and flipped out his cigarette. Hines said something, some conversational feeler, but he didn’t bother listening or answering. He didn’t feel like talking any more. They were hitting the outskirts of Havana now, passing through middle-class suburbs. Turner saw Morro Castle on the right, La Cubana fortress on the left. Then there was the bridge, a wide modern span across the strait separating Havana Bay from the ocean.
    And they were in the city.
    It was a city, he thought. It could have been part of New York or Philly or Charleston or San Diego. It didn’t feel foreign. The people in the streets were Cuban and the signs were in Spanish, but there were neighborhoods like that all over the States—Spic Harlem in New York, Ybor City in Tampa, Mex Town in San Diego. Hell, the neighborhood here was a little poorer, the people were more down at the heels. But Spanish Harlem and Ybor City weren’t exactly the Ritz. He noticed a prostitute soliciting, a cop ignoring her.
    “I heard Castro closed the whorehouses,” he said to Moreno in Spanish. “Made hustling against the law.”
    “There are still prostitutes,” Moreno said.
    “I figured there were. She didn’t look like a nun.”
    Moreno managed a shrug, an expressive one. “There will always be putas ,” he said.
    “Yeah. Well, thank God for that.”
    “You wish to meet a girl?”
    He laughed. “No,” he said. “I’m just a sightseer. This place of yours much farther?”
    It wasn’t. Moreno turned a corner into La Avenida de Sangre and pulled up at the curb. The Avenue of Blood, Turner thought. And Matanzas meant slaughter. Christ on wheels.
    The house Moreno led them to was a two-story frame dwelling. It needed paint. There was a front porch, and an old man rocked on it in silence, a thin black cigar in his mouth. His eyes looked up sleepily, then looked away.
    “He is old and quiet,” Moreno said. “ El Viejo , the old one. Toothless and harmless, no? You may see that his hand is inside the jacket of his suit. There is a gun in his hand. He knows me. Otherwise you would have been shot before you entered this house.”
    “I’m impressed,” Turner said.
    The door opened. A woman, stout and matronly, smiled benignly at them. She stepped inside, murmured something polite and let them pass. She had hair the color of a gray flannel suit. A thin scar ran from the corner of her mouth halfway to her eye. It looked to Turner as though it had been made by a knife. Moreno introduced her as Señora Luchar. She mumbled something pleasant again and went off to find coffee. She brought a tray of demitasse cups that were small without being dainty. The coffee was very thick, very hot, very black. Turner liked it.
    Moreno finished his coffee and left. He took a long time to finish the coffee and a longer time to leave. He kept speaking in Spanish to the woman, telling her how important the task of the two Americans was, telling her to render them all possible assistance. The woman—Señora Luchar—listened to all of this with no