Thursday afternoon on Bahamasair, Key West to Nassau, Vernum Quick looked down at a glittering sea and watched a ship—one of those newlywed and nearly dead cruise liners—disappear into a cloudy mist. The entire flight, he hadn’t said a word to his Russian handler, a man so big he’d purchased two seats—same as two days ago when they’d landed in Fort Myers.
Kostikov was the guy’s name, supposedly. Who knew? In this strange business, lying was a way of life. It was easier to believe he’d been a super heavyweight way, way back in the day. Boxing or wrestling or weight lifting, Vernum hadn’t inquired. The man’s bad Spanish demanded a lot of work, as did his Cossack temper. Better to smile and pretend to understand.
One thing for certain: Kostikov was a killer. He could kill a man with his hands—snap his neck, crush him to death, or stick a pencil through his eardrum. Vernum had seen him do this in a grainy KGB video, a self-defense instructional that sacrificed three dumbass prisoners—Afghans, they looked like—who had volunteered. The huge Russian, after each demonstration, would grin as they dragged a body away. A man who had aged since those days but still loved his work.
As a mentor, however, Kostikov was a vicious old socialist. Bitch, bitch, bitch, all the way to the airport, then a final dig about Vernum’s cowardice last night because he’d yelled for help, then played dead to save himself from that crazy little bastard with a knife.
Well . . . Vernum had believed the shoe to be a knife, and no wonder: his wounds had required an ambulance ride to the ER. Which is why, aboard this cramped little airplane, he sat alone, his face bandaged and swollen. Thirty-three stitches to close those gashes around his eyes and to mend his lower lip; thirty-three, his unlucky number as of now.
A zombie from Hollywood is what he resembled in the mirror.
Never volunteer, he reminded himself.
Vernum was a thinker, not a fighter.
• • •
IN NASSAU, he found a seat far from the steel band so gringos wouldn’t gawk at him and opened his new laptop. Did his smiling act when Kostikov made eye contact, then reviewed a file he’d been secretly compiling. They’d told him lies, mostly, but he’d been putting it together on his own by eavesdropping, searching the Internet, or stealing peeks here and there.
“Vernum Quick is quick, man” was something he liked to brag.
The puzzle was taking shape.
A month ago, Cuban Intelligence Service—the DGI—had recovered an aborted listing on eBay that had been removed shortly after it was posted.
Fidel Castro, Love Letters to a Mistress, 1953–63
Seeing that magic year, 1963, had been enough. There was no record of the letters, no hint of what they contained, according to the Russian, but why risk linkage to the assassination of JFK?
Evidence was already out there, of course, but never in Fidel’s own hand.
The DGI made inquiries. No response from the seller. The DGI went to work on the seller’s passwords. Three weeks ago, for reasons Vernum still didn’t understand, the trail brought two special agents to his doorstep in the village of Plobacho, western Cuba.
“People say you are respected and feared here, a novice Santero who votes the right way. That you’ve helped police in the past.”
This was true.
“You served in air force intelligence until . . . well, an unfortunate incident, but the board’s findings might have been hasty. Care to reopen your case?”
Definitely not. This was a blackmail visit, the way the system worked. How much did they want? Vernum had posed that question. As a Santería novice, he had a little cash, but not much.
Both agents smiled. They didn’t want money, but there was a price. They named it by asking, “Do you know the Casanova family?”
Why . . . yes, he did—if you could call an old woman recluse and her retarded, murdering grandson a “family.”
The agents had liked that, or pretended to.
Was he aware that Figueroa Casanova had escaped from Havana Psychiatric?
Vernum played along. “The one by the airport, José Martí? I’ll help you catch the bastard if it’s true.”
It couldn’t be true. Criminals didn’t escape from that prison—not without a scar on their forehead or in a coffin. Vernum knew this. He stayed current on rumors about Havana Psychiatric for a reason: the place terrified him. Couldn’t even look at the building from the road. His fears were grounded in his own dark secret: a demon lived within his brain. Sometimes the demon had to be fed.
Over the years, only two witnesses—Figuerito and a little girl—had survived after learning the truth. This, too, had been a burden, but it was a Santería maxim that finally set him free: Blame not the heart for demons in your head, nor hungers that torment your soul.
My hunger—that’s the way Vernum thought of the demon now. Instead of an asylum inmate, he’d become a respectable citizen, believed he’d earned pleasure in whatever form it appeared. Like all religions, Santería was quick to forgive, but in a way that was tougher; none of that turn-the-other-cheek bullshit. You want something? Man, go get it. Prayer was okay, but potions and powders and the ancient spells were faster.
Another aspect of Santería that attracted Vernum was its reliance on blood sacrifice to appease the gods and bring good luck. The ceremony was so strict in procedure that it absolved even a young Santero of guilt. Coconut rind cut in four pieces represented the four corners of the Earth. A papaya freshly sliced resembled the undefiled chasteness of a girl. Turpentine, bluestone, ground cowrie shells. The knife must be clean, specially sharpened. The neck of the victim must be gently shaved before the first sure stroke, then tilted just so to fill a ceremonial gourd. All the while chanting Oggún shoro shoro . . . Oggún shoro shoro . . .
Say those words with passion, they assumed the rhythm of a beating heart.
Vernum’s favorite song.
Entering the priesthood was the smartest move he’d made. True believers were eager to reward even a novice Santero who produced results, which is why he had respect, women, and a little money—but never enough, it seemed to him.
The Cuban DGI agents didn’t care about Santería. What they cared about was the deal they offered the next day after driving Vernum to Havana.
“If we close the files on that unfortunate incident, would you be willing to help us?”
Hell yes, but Vernum didn’t want to appear too eager. He knew they thought he was just a dumb peasant who could be used as a mule or fall guy . . . something that now, sitting in Nassau, he was still ferreting out.
Kill Figueroa Casanova is what they wanted but didn’t admit. Said they wanted the little man detained and interrogated about a stolen briefcase (no mention of the letters) before he was sent back to Havana Psychiatric. A special drug, they had instructed Vernum, would provide the needed interrogation time.
That was another key to this puzzle. To store his new laptop, they’d given him a shoulder bag. Inside was a shiny silver Montblanc fountain pen. Use it like a needle, he’d been instructed. Just a scratch is enough and the defector will be cooperative for a week, possibly ten days.
There had been no demonstration. In fact, the DGI agents had behaved as if even the shoulder bag was dangerous. Nor did they touch the pen, which was oddly heavy as if lined with lead and stored in a metal case.
It was something a dumb peasant wouldn’t have noticed.
Vernum Quick did.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as he was aware. But success required that he make some behavioral changes. As village Santero, he had affected aloofness. He had spoken in parables and often began sentences by asking the blessings of Oggún, or hinting that a gift to the High Babalawo would impress the saints. Changó, his guardian saint, was a favorite topic.
But he had dropped all the theatrical bullshit the day he’d met the Russian.
The Russian . . . The man was now returning from the corridor, where tourists scattered to make way. Vernum closed the laptop, stored it, and decided to have fun with a little experiment. He stood and offered the bag to Kostikov, saying, “You mind holding this while I piss?”
“No talk now!” the man hissed, and stepped back—a familiar reaction.
Poison, yes, he’d been right about the fountain pen—a type of poison that required a lead case.
Vernum had researched that, too.
After using the men’s room, he ate some jerked pork and ruminated over a new puzzle: the saints had delivered Figuerito into his hands, no doubt. But how could he keep that little psycho alive long enough to get rich—and without getting killed himself?
• • •
THEY FINALLY SPOKE on the government flight to Havana, safe now unless this shitty old Tupolev, with two propellers and a broken door, fell from the sky.
“Comrade, how you like that jerked pork?” Vernum asked. Interested because he’d added a few drops of special oil when he’d added more sauce.
“Ummm,” Kostikov grunted. “Ummm-huh.” The man chewed with his mouth open, red sauce all over his chin. “I tell you plan now.”
Vernum had been wondering about this return to Havana but preferred to look out the window while the man explained. Figuerito had escaped from Key West in a sailboat, the Russian told him. They knew the boat’s name: No More.
“No Más?”
The Russian nodded. “Scarecrow man we saw last night is captain. I still laugh the way he talk so tough. Hah! This hippie boy-girl threatening me, Kostikov.”
Maybe that really was the big guy’s name. It was painful to smile with thirty-three stitches, but Vernum managed. “Yeah, he’s nuts. That’s what I was thinking at the time. But if they’re in a boat, why didn’t we just rent a faster boat and catch them?”
“You question orders?”
Orders? Vernum hadn’t heard any orders. “No, man,” he said, “just asking.”
“The scarecrow likes hear himself talk to women, tells them everything. Don’t worry, we have plan.” The Russian balled up his napkin and lobbed it forward, where a woman sat alone behind the pilot, one of the blondes Vernum recognized from last night. She was lighting a cigarette in a noisy plane that had a rattling door and wasn’t pressurized.
Vernum said, “I didn’t realize there was a connection, but—” He stopped himself before inquiring how the Russian had found time to locate her. At the ER, they’d wasted two hours, counting the cops and the stitches.
“Many sources,” Kostikov said. “Now you go home and wait. That’s all now.” He turned around, his big butt taking up two seats.
Huh? Vernum slipped across the aisle. “Whoa! man. You mean my job is done? You haven’t interrogated Casanova yet. And what about the briefcase?”
The Russian had more hair on his eyebrows than his head, so looking him in the face was like confronting two cornered animals. Lots of vodka and violence and ruptured veins stared back. “You claim used device on defector, yes?”
The Montblanc pen, he meant. Yes, Vernum had tried to use that bad boy, but said, “Well, I think so, but, man, we was punching the hell out of each other. You know how that goes. Those two probably left for a day sail and they’re back in Key West right now.”
The Russian motioned to the overhead bin. “You still have device?”
Uh-oh. He hadn’t expected that but stayed cool, got to his feet and bluffed, saying, “Of course. Issued by my government. I’ll get it for you.”
“No!” The big man didn’t relax until Vernum was seated again. “We have many sources. Information no need for so many people to share. You understand meaning?”
Yes and no—the Russian was a pig and couldn’t speak Spanish but apparently knew where Figuerito and the hippie were headed.
“Sorry I doubted you.”
“No, is good you want this defector so strongly. I see this in you even after so much stupid coward shit you do last night. But”—Kostikov pushed closer—“I think you be fast at learning this trade. You would like?”
Had the Russian attempted a fatherly tone?
“Yeah,” Vernum replied, “I’ll do whatever it takes, man.”
“Oh?”
“An opportunity to serve my country, of course.”
“A patriot, eh?” The Russian’s tone said Bullshit. “I am told you are criminal. A deviant who buys girls with opium of religion. As patriot, you have read Karl Marx, yes?”
“Uh . . . I’d have to think back. What do you mean?”
“God, all your gods, are shit. That was truth Comrade Marx wrote. Your Santería is more shit than even Papist shit.”
Vernum thought, Dude, you are playing with fire, but changed his approach. “Man, you’d have to experience where I live. It’s all dirt roads and oxcarts, the same tired village women every goddamn day. So I—”
“Your women are superstitious fools,” the Russian said. “They fear stupid fears—even a devil in the cane fields, I hear. Is true?”
Vernum shrugged, thinking, Uh-oh.
“Your DGI say some hide their children, or defect on rafts, because of you. See? Religion total shit. Is large difference between devils and a man who is deviant, huh?”
That question, in an odd way, disapproved of superstition but not deviants. Vernum felt a tad better. “As long as you understand what I’m dealing with. Think what you want, but, as a respected Santero, I’ve gotta, well”—he risked a man-to-man wink—“restrain my interests in things that Havana, Key West—name any city—can offer men like us.”
Two bloodshot eyes stared through him, then swiveled toward the blonde or the pilot, who wore a headset and was also smoking. The Russian looked out the window—blue ocean a mile below—then asked, “You have phone with camera?”
DGI agents had given Vernum a cheap one, but what did that have to do with anything?
The Russian used a finger to wag him closer, then leaned his nose an inch from Vernum’s face. “No more your coward bullshit. I give order, you obey. I say truth, you obey. You want learn trade, you obey. Is clear?”
This was more than Kostikov had spoken in three days. “Sure . . . yeah, never question your orders. Damn clear . . . comrade.”
“Come. I want you take video.” The plane listed slightly when the Russian stood and he pulled himself seat to seat past the German blonde to the pilot, who he tapped on the shoulder, the pilot not surprised, more like I’m ready when you are, sir. Then put out his cigarette and fastened his shoulder harness.
Vernum, standing in the aisle with his phone ready, noticed and thought, We’re either landing or he’s trying to scare the shit out of me.
He looked out the window—nothing but water down there, José Martí International still twenty minutes away.
The Russian turned and spoke to the blonde, not loud enough to hear but congenial in manner. The blonde had been subdued but suddenly smiled and said, with her grating accent, “Yah. I have camera. Anything, comrade, for you.” Unsnapped her seat belt and stood, the cigarette in her mouth, and dangled her white breasts when she leaned to dig through her purse.
Why did Kostikov need both of their cameras?
Vernum thought, Fat pig, he’s screwing with me, and was sure of it when the Russian laced a wrist through some cargo netting near the door and ordered, “Come, hit video button. You ready?”
It was the way Kostikov grinned that warned what was coming—his assassin’s grin from the KGB video—but Vernum was so goddamn scared, he crept a few seats closer anyway and watched it happen through the viewfinder.
Kostikov saying to the blonde, “Ah . . . such beauty, your necklace,” which she took as a compliment to her tits. She smiled, aiming her camera, but used a free hand to tease her blouse open, just a flash of nipple, before scolding him, “You are very, very bad man.”
That grin again. “Yah. Bad.” Kostikov reached as if to touch her tits but ripped the necklace off.
The way the blonde’s face paled, from sunburned to dead white, Vernum found himself breathing heavier, hungry, very hungry, the demon inside him demanding to be fed. He called to the Russian, “Wait . . . let me change angles,” and ducked in two rows behind the woman, swung his legs over an armrest for a better view, which Kostikov confirmed, before he forced the door open and lifted the woman by her hair while wind roared, debris scattering as if they’d flown into a sandstorm.
“Don’t stop,” the Russian ordered, “use camera!”
Vernum, deafened by the noise, realized those orders were for the blonde, who already looked dead, her eyes so wide and still, but rallied and did exactly as she’d been told while Kostikov looked into her lens and spoke Russian as if addressing future KGB agents.
“Obey always me,” he told the woman. “Keep doing.”
Hopeful, the expression on her face until he swung her out the door, held her there while the airstream ripped at her clothing, but, by god, she didn’t drop that phone.
Vernum thought, I would marry her, and then leaped to his feet when the Russian signaled Come closer.
“How’s this?”
“Nyet, coward, here.”
Mother of hell, this was a test, he realized, and so far only the blonde was passing. He shuffled his feet, video rolling, while he brachiated from seat to seat. The opening was no wider than Vernum’s shoulders, but a universe of screaming reality out there when he was at the door. A mile down, miles above, nothing but blue.
“Is angle good?” The assassin showing his artistic side while the blonde clawed at his wrist, her shoes gone, her blouse shredding like a flag.
Through the viewfinder, Vernum managed eye contact with the woman and fell in love with her face, a perfect blend of horror and pain that fired his deepest needs within. I would give anything, he thought, to trade places with that pig. Why isn’t he laughing?
Kostikov was more concerned with his lesson for today. Yelled a phrase of Russian at the lens, barked something else to the woman, his manner stern, and that was it—he dropped her with a Good riddance swipe of the hands, didn’t even watch her body rocket downward, tumbling, although Vernum captured it on HDV.
My god. Ecstasy. Even without reviewing footage, he knew this was something he would watch over and over a thousand times, at night, alone—or with that right special someone just before he ate her soul.
• • •
“SECRECY,” THE RUSSIAN SAID when they were seated again, “is first rule of importance. Here, I show you.” A satellite phone was produced. On it a Facebook photo: the scarecrow hippie and two female German agents, all naked, but only one of them wearing the KGB necklace that now dangled from Kostikov’s pocket.
Vernum, for a change, spoke with respect. “Comrade, this is the work I have searched for all my life. Please give me another chance to—”
“Shut your talk” was the reply. “Obey orders, that second rule of importance. Tell truth to superiors, that third.” The Russian was slow on his feet, but his hand grabbed Vernum’s chin before he could react. Pulled him across the aisle until they were nose to nose. “Fourth rule: I am your only superior. Is clear?”
Yes.
“Above all others.”
Oh, yes!
“Is true you are sex deviant?”
A trick question. Vernum was screwed either way, so he tried a broader truth. “I like . . . killing.”
“Good.”
Really?
Yes, the Russian approved. “Is okay with women or girls, even boys. Bugger ten dead goats, what I care? But do not lie to Kostikov.” A pause. “I tell you something—just us. Your DGI agents are idiots. Your government is shit. What you think of that?”
Vernum could only nod.
“I tell you use device or take gun, shoot all Cuban generals, what then?”
“Follow orders, comrade” was the correct response.
The Russian released him. “Okay. I want briefcase. Just me. Same with defector of name Casanova. Just me. You will help.”
Vernum, close enough to smell the man’s breath, said, “Of course,” but had to wonder, Is this another test?
“In DGI debrief, you will confirm whatever I say. No mention of German whore”—the man was fishing something from his pocket—“or video that you now make for me copy. What this called in Spanish?”
“A memory stick,” Vernum replied. He glanced forward and, for the first time, realized their pilot was Russian. My god, it was true, he was being recruited by the KGB. “Right away,” he said. “I’ll make a copy before we land, then delete it from my phone.”
Smart—that was Kostikov’s reaction. He appeared to relax a little, settled back and gave Vernum permission to watch the footage first.
Hunched over his phone, hunger is what he felt.
“You enjoy?”
Oh my god, yes. Twice he played it, always pausing when the blonde made eye contact, and knew he could never bring himself to delete the footage.
Kostikov sat back, hands laced behind his head. Taking it easy now that the job was done. “Is important to have hobby. Like me. I have hobby.”
Vernum’s attention zoomed. “More videos like this?”
“No, a hobby is for amusement. That is question I have for you. About your village, I hear story of time before Fidel. You know this story? I think was 1958.”
Even now, speaking Fidel’s name was dangerous, but that isn’t why Vernum evaded. “A story about . . . ?”
“Motorcycles,” the Russian said. “Do you know story?”
Vernum was too frightened not to tell the truth. “I do. Three Harley-Davidsons. I know where they’re hidden, but not exactly where. But that traitor Figgy Casanova, he knows.”
The Russian’s tongue circled his lips. “Story contains stupid game, baseball. Three fascists during Cold War—”
That’s as far as he got. The man burped, touched a hand to his belly, and his thoughts turned inward while jerked chicken filled the air. Burped again, looked out the window. “Must shit,” he muttered and called something to the pilot that might have been Hurry up and land.