Storm Clouds Over Havana - Mike Marino (read full novel TXT) 📗

think knew I wrote for them, but turned the other cheek for my clandestine “eye for an eye” Village Voice” style. His hatred for Mailer had no bounds. The bone of contention Blake had with Norm is for what Norm introduced as the “new journalism.” Later, Blake would also despise a young protege of mine years later. A young sports writer named Hunter Thompson who worked freelance for us. He was working as a sports reporter at various newspapers in Puerto Rico and South America and filling filler pieces to us for syndication to get his feet wet in the ocean of journalism. I enjoyed his style of reportage. We hired him to cover Caribbean sports, including Cuba, as a freelancer for feature articles on the game. He eventually left the nest and our employ, going solo and opened the door to the Ninth Gate of the Hells Angels, and thus the new era of what is known as “gonzo journalism” where the journalist is part of the story, part and parcel. (Truth be told? Steinbeck and Hemingway had already blazed that trail in literature!)

As we made our way to Terkel’s table Norm jumped and threw a fake jabs at me. “Well, well, if it isn’t our newest foreign correspondent. We bow to you sir,” he said as he bent in half in a bow with the flourish of Liberace high on one too many sequins.
“Norm, you old punch drunk hack. How the hell are you?” as I raised my hand in greeting to Studs.

“The young lady can stay, you get the hell out of her,” Studs cajoled has he broke into laughter. “Sit. Sit. Tell us all about the world of the foreign correspondent.”
We sat. I was puzzled. As we had lost the game, Penny was thirsty and ready to get as drunk as a pirate’s wench in Tortuga.

“Penny this unfortunately is Studs and that sorry excuse for a writer is Norman. Both assholes. Loveable assholes but assholes nonetheless. How the hell did you guys hear about my assignment?” I queried with mind racing. How much did they know? This was supposed to be top secret. Off the books. You don’t exist stuff.

“It’s all over the street,” Studs chimed louder than the church bells at St. Patricks on Christmas. “You my young friend are heading up the Features and Sports Desk in Latin America for the chain. Great opportunity. Hell, you get an office in Havana and take in floor shows and interview visiting celebs. What a life! You made it amigo. Warm weather, no snow and lots of showgirls.”

Norm put his arm around my shoulders. “Look when you get down there, look up Hemingway. I already telexed him you’d be down there and to get you drunk and laid on your first night. Also there’s a kid down there, well in Puerto Rico. Young fellow named Thompson. Henry, Harry, Hunter. Something like that. Writes sports down there. Bowling, baseball, anything he can get his hands on. Ha, wants to be a writer. Good luck I told him. Anyway, kid’s good, needs polish and could be valuable to you as a write arm. He can cover some sports, you can get laid while he’s sitting it out in the bleachers. Here’s his number. I told him you’d call.”

The drinks came, glasses clinked, toasts roared off the assembly line as more of my contemporaries came by to congrats me. It was a great night. Penny was impressed. So impressed, she forgot, or didn’t care that the Yanks lost...I was on a roll tonight, feeling high on a cloud of visions of future fame on my horizon and scoring with Penny afterall. Mickey Mantle may not have had a good day on the diamond, but I would be MVP in Penny’s bed tonight!

My mind was on overdrive. I couldn’t tell these guys or Penny what I was really going there for as Blake and Sean must have leaked the diversion story on the street to cover me. Politics, especially Cuban politics makes for strange bedfellows. Tonight in bed with Penny, however, I wouldn’t be a stranger in a strange land. I was all too familiar with her sexual turf, and I was anxious to hit a high fly ball out of her park!

Chapter Seven - Latin Heat and Cuban Wet Dreams

 

Havana Harbor came into full panoramic view as I looked out of the small window of the commuter plane I hopped aboard in Miami after my connecting flight from La Guardia hours earlier. The port was looking for all the world as a frenetic bas relief Italianate sculpture similar to a Picasso version of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise”.

 

Below were waters of tranquil turquoise and of the deepest blue I had ever encountered. The harbor at this red-eye hour of the morning dawn was beginning to extricate itself, (as was I) from sleep as it began to come alive with moored yachts bobbing gently in the small waves alongside massive cruise ships and a flotilla of Meyer Lansky’s floating casinos where modern day pirates took you to the cleaners at the roulette and gaming tables.

 

Add to this a proletarian parade of local patched up fishing boats of every stripe, shape and size from stem to stern as the daily ritual of hoisting anchor got underway to begin the search for the day’s catch and the meager income derived from it to afford any repairs to the hull should it hit a shoal in low water. One has to earn enough to keep the boat afloat as well as a growing family in food. All that was missing was the Battleship Maine to make the portrait a visual historic diorama on a cheap postcard.

 

The taxi ride from the airport to my newly rented apartment (paid for by the accountants at the CIA) at Calle San Lazaro was a mixture of proud “this is my country” cabbie chatter, stifling tropical humidity, far worse than anything a New York August could hammer you with, and of course the obligatory boom cha cha boom Xavier Cugat music blasting from the scratchy AM radio of the 10 year old Chevy cab with worn springs and the confines of the cab thick with clouds of finely rolled Monte Cristo cigars.

 

I had ample time to look over the packet of information Sean had left with Blake to give to me when I left La Guardia. Photos and dossiers on Castro and his brother Raul, and a flamboyant character later destined for T-shirt fame, Che Guevara. To this old school Eye-talian Catholic I named the three of them The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit of the rebellion.

 

As the tattered excuse for a cab wound through streets clogged with Chevy’s, people on bicycles, kids begging for American dollars, and pushcarts pushed by tired old men weary and wearing skin the texture of leather footballs due to the fact they spent their lives in the sun, day in day out tallying me bananas or rolling tight cigars with only a corrugated steel shed to shield them from the heat. The neighborhoods were a Picasso painting of laundry hanging on ropes to dry from small cramped apartments. Gauguin had pleasant Polynesia to paint...this was Boticelli’s “Chart of Hell” by comparison.

My new apartment in Havana would prove to be modest, but by comparison to what the cab waded through from the airport it was the Ilamur Kasri palace built by the Sultan Abdulmecit of old Moslem Istanbul.

 

I was on easy street. Paradise, cream assignment with a touch of danger. Not bad for a 35 year old hack newspaper writer. My new place was being paid for by our own red, white and blue government out of some off the books budget. It was a 10 story apartment complex that was owned secretly by the CIA to be used as a safe house for agents from different bureaus coming and going from Prague or West Berlin and other invisible compass Cold War points around the globe while plotting assassinations or whatever they do for fun.

 

I had read three of Ian Fleming’s spy novels and was a huge fan of his writing style and the character James Bond in “Casino Royale” and his latest release early this year “From Russia With Love” Ian also had a vacation house in Jamaica. I felt with this proximity I would have a chance to meet him, I’d arrange that through Blake to pave the 007 road.

I have to admit...I was looking forward to rubbing shoulders with double agents, triple agents and maybe a defecting KGB agent looking for the American Dream. I was was imagining myself in a dapper tuxedo ordering a martini in the Nacional, shaken, not stirred while I offered a Turkish cigarette to a femme fatale from Finland.

 

My modest digs back in New York were also being paid for by “The Company” as they like to be called, with monthly checks mailed by Penny back at the office. Officially the landlord and my co-workers and the word spread on the street among my fellow Fifth Estate contemporaries is that I was setting up a Latin Bureau for news feeds from the region for the paper and our news syndicate to enable us to accommodate the needs of a growing Latin population and to increase our profits. We aren’t philanthropists...we’re Capitalists.

 

My salary had tripled on this assignment with additional monies from CIA funds funneled into my account. Free rent in Havana, free rent on my apartment in New York, increase in salary and the promise of a $10,000 bonus when the mission was completed. It was also arranged that I would maintain an “office” (a desk in a corner really) at Santiago’s People’s Record-Bulletin newspaper now being run by his former editor, now publisher emeritus, Jorge Gallegos who knew better than to cross the Batista line in the sand. Moderation was the word now at the paper. I knew I too would have to be careful when filing my “stories”. We would be watched carefully by Batista’s secret police and the incognito Castro spies who were everywhere.

 

The delicious frosting on the Cuban cake was the fact that my apartment was 2 blocks away from many of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky’s hotel casino operations. All work and no play makes a spy horny. Even a junior spy without a plastic decoder ring from a box of Cracker Jacks. I was already salivating and contemplating the comped perks I knew Meyer would toss my way. Two days ago, we talked briefly long distance and he assured me I’d love the sports action and the nightlife. I was now a peaceful smiling Buddha ready to recite obscene haiku’s aloud while engaging in the Cuban version of the Kama Sutra.

 

The mob ran the brothels and they were the Disneylands of sex, where you can get a double scoop of the girls who came in delicious edible varieties of mixed racial flavors that are sure to make your "banana split" Light Chocolate? Dark Chocolate? Almond Joy? You can choose from a wide array of undulating Ebony bodies with enough hydraulics in their well formed rear ends and enough magic in their wonder thighs to pull your own personal rabbit