Free Murder in Havana by Margaret Truman Page B

girls, the
jineteras
, meaning literally “jockeys.” Seemingly they were everywhere; he’d been propositioned twice during his short walk on the Malecón. No; too old at thirty-plus, in too good shape. If she was a whore, she was a spectacular one. He’d been told that the major hotels—was his a major hotel?—kept out prostitutes. Maybe she worked in concert with the bartender, a hefty fellow with a healthy head of salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a loose-fitting, white guayabera, the ubiquitous dress shirt of Cuban men.
    Pauling motioned for the bartender and asked for the check. He was asked whether he was a guest of the hotel.
“Sí,”
he replied.
    While the bartender went to the end of the bar to fetch a hotel charge slip, the woman called out softly after him, “Chico?”
    The bartender did not turn. Not his name, Pauling thought. But then it registered.
Chico
. He turned and faced her. She smiled.
    “You’re—?” he started to ask.
    The slightest shake of her head indicated that he was to be silent.
    She stood, smiled at him again, and left the bar. Pauling signed the charge slip and followed. She’d gone to the street and was walking up Paseo. She moved slowly, allowing him to easily catch her.
    “You’re Sardiña?” he asked as they walked side by side, not looking at each other.
    “Yes. And you are Max. I asked for you at the hotel desk and they said you’d left. I waited for you in the bar.” Only a trace of an accent infringed on her English.
    “Why did you assume I’d come into the bar?” he asked.
    “I didn’t. I felt like a drink. It didn’t matter whether you came in or not. I would have called your room until I reached you.”
    Pauling chuckled.
    “What’s funny?”
    “All this secrecy about meeting you. I didn’t know you were—a woman.”
    “Does that bother you?”
    “No, of course not.”
    Did she sense he was lying? That she was a woman in the general sense of it was fine. That she was a woman in whom he would be placing his professional faith was another thing. He hadn’t known many female operatives in his career, and had worked with even fewer. But one experience in El Salvador had soured his view.
    He’d been sent there under embassy cover to “handle” a woman from that country named Gina, who’d come over from the other side; his superiors in Langley had assured him that she could be trusted. They’d worked together to set up a sting in which she seduced a government official from El Salvador’s military establishment in a hotel room rigged with a camera. It went smoothly. The official had been compromised. The photos would go tohis wife and children unless he provided information from within his agency.
    A meeting with the official was arranged for late one night in a secluded suburb of San Salvador. Pauling showed up at the scheduled time, but Gina did not. Nor did the government official. Waiting were a dozen armed militia members instead, intent on taking him captive and, he was certain, torturing him to death. His antennae, however, had been fully extended, he saw them before they saw him, and he made his escape, avoiding physical confrontation with the militiamen.
    Later, during a debriefing at Langley, he learned that Gina had been the official’s lover for more than a year. Their lovemaking had been practiced, old hat. Rather than setting up the official, she’d used the situation to target Pauling. So much for Langley’s intelligence inside El Salvador. That he’d run the risk of being killed didn’t keep certain colleagues from kidding him about the episode. Somehow, he didn’t find it funny.
    Gina’s pretty face came and went when he looked at Sardiña.
    Cognitively, he knew that he was supposed to view the opposite sex as equal—equal opportunity and equal pay—it was expected, and he’d tried, not wanting to be out of the mainstream of thought these days, even espousing his belief in the notion of no difference between men and women, at