Field Gray Read Free

out of Havana?” I nodded. “Yes, it makes sense now. When one casa gets bombed, it’s bad for all of them. In which case it will be safer if we share a room. I’ll say you’re my wife. That way you won’t have to show them your identity card.”
    “Look, Señor Hausner, I am grateful to you for taking me with you to Haiti. But there’s one thing you should know. I only volunteered to play the part of a chica to get close to Captain Balart.”
    “I was wondering about that.”
    “I did it for the—”
    “The Revolution. I know. Listen, Melba, your virtue, if there is anything left of it, it’s safe with me. I told you. I’m tired. I could sleep on a bonfire. But I’ll settle for a chair or a sofa and you can have the bed.”
    She nodded. “Thank you, señor.”
    “And stop calling me that. My name is Carlos. Call me that. I’m supposed to be your husband, remember?”
    We checked into the Gran Hotel in the center of town and went up to the room. I crawled straight to bed, which is to say I slept on the floor. During the summer of 1941 some of the floors that I slept on in Russia were the most comfortable beds I ever had, only this wasn’t as comfortable. Then again, I wasn’t nearly as exhausted as I’d been back then. About two o’clock in the morning I awoke to find her wrapped in a sheet and kneeling beside me.
    “What is it?” I sat up and groaned with pain.
    “I’m so scared,” she said.
    “What are you scared about?”
    “You know what they’ll do to me if they find me?”
    “The police?”
    Her nodding turned into a shiver.
    “So what do you want from me? A bedtime story? Listen, Melba. In the morning I’ll drive you to Santiago and we’ll get on my boat, and by tomorrow night you’ll be safely off in Haiti, all right? But now I’m trying to sleep. Only the mattress is a little too soft for me. So if you don’t mind.”
    “Strangely enough,” she said, “I don’t mind. The bed is quite comfortable. And there’s room for two.”
    This was certainly true. The bed was as big as a small farm with one goat. I was pretty sure about the goat because of the way she took me by the hand and led me over to the bed. There was something erotic and alluring about that; or maybe it was just the fact that she left the sheet on the floor. It was a hot night, of course, but that didn’t bother me. I do some of my best thinking when I’m as naked as she was. I tried to picture myself asleep in that bed, only it didn’t work because by now I’d seen what she had displayed in the window and I was about ready to press my nose up against the glass and take a better look. It wasn’t that she wanted me. I can never figure why a woman wants a man at all—not when women look the way they do. It was just that she was young and scared and lonely and wanted someone—anyone would have done, probably—to hold her and make her feel like the world cared about her. I get like that myself sometimes: You’re born alone and you die alone, and the rest of the time you’re on your own.

    B y the time we got to Santiago the next day, the dark orchid of her head had been resting on my shoulder almost a hundred miles. We were behaving like any young courting couple when one of them happens to be more than twice as old as the other, who also happens to be a murderer. Perhaps that’s a little unfair. Melba wasn’t the only one of us who’d pulled the trigger on someone. I had some experience of murder myself. Quite a lot of experience, as it happens, only I hardly wanted to tell her about that. I was trying to keep my thoughts on what lay ahead of us. Sometimes the future seems a little dark and frightening, but the past is even worse. My past most of all. But now it was the very present danger of the Santiago police I was worried about. They had a reputation for brutality that was probably well deserved and easily explained by the truth of Doña Marina’s remark that all of Cuba’s revolutions got started