Read Online Night Work by David C. Taylor - Free Book Online Page B

you out of Havana.”
    He led them back downstairs to one of the garages where a 1952 Chevrolet Bel Air waited with its hood open. A blanket lay across the driver’s side fender to protect the paint from tools. The valve cover, carburetor, air cleaner, and other pieces Cassidy could not identify were on a workbench against the wall. “Valve job,” Tomas explained. Cassidy helped him roll the car back to the door. The floor underneath it was caked with oil and grease. Tomas scrubbed some of it away and then screwed a handle into the hole he had cleared, and pulled. A section of the floor tilted up on counterweighted hinges. There was a ladder leading down into a pit. “Wait,” Tomas said. He went down into the pit and opened a low door at one end and ducked in. A moment later a light came on in the room beyond the door and he reappeared and climbed back out. “A good place. They will never find you here. You’ll be safe.”
    Or trapped in a hole, Cassidy thought.
    â€œI’ll bring you food and something to drink. I’ll push the car back over, but even so there is just enough room to open the trapdoor and crawl out. Just in case.” In case something happens to me, he meant, a man who lived with that daily reality, the midnight knock on the door, the car with darkened windows, the room where men waited with questions.
    They went down the short ladder into the pit and then into the room at the end, and the trapdoor thunked down as Cassidy lit a cigarette and took in the hideout room. It was not much bigger than the cell Dylan had left. A mattress took up half the floor. There was bucket in the corner, a wooden stool and small wood table on which Tomas had put a plate of ham, some cheese, half a loaf of bread, a bottle of water, a bottle of rum, two glasses, and a knife. A bare bulb glared from overhead.
    She studied him carefully in the silence of the room, and then smiled. “You haven’t changed, Michael. You look the same.”
    â€œSo do you.”
    â€œLiar.”
    Her face was thinner, and there was a shadow of something that had not been there before, sadness, or pain. Her eyes did the same shift from blue to green, depending on the light, green now, and fathomless, eyes to drown in. There was a thin white scar at the corner of her mouth. He touched it with his finger and she did not flinch. “Did I do that?”
    â€œYes.” She touched it with the tip of her tongue. “Every time I looked in the mirror I thought of you. Where were you? What were you doing? Were you even alive?” She took his cigarette from his mouth and took a drag and gave it back to him, an intimacy from when they were together in New York four years ago. “Did you think of me?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œA lot?”
    â€œYes. A lot.”
    â€œDo you believe in Fate, Michael?”
    â€œNot much.”
    â€œThey were going to kill me today, and then you came and got me. It has to mean something.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t know. Something.” She accepted the glass of rum he offered and lit a cigarette off the burning coal of his. “I always thought I would see you again before I died, but lately I began to lose faith that it could happen. I know that at the end of it in New York you believed I came to you because my superiors ordered it, because they needed to know if you had the photographs. It was like that in the beginning. But by the end, I loved you for me, for you, and this morning all I wanted was to see you one more time before they took me to the wall.”
    Almost five years ago the murder of a Broadway dancer who turned out to be a blackmailer had led him into the middle of a KGB operation. Dylan had been sent into his orbit to find out whether he had discovered the blackmail photographs that were to be used against men high in the U.S. power structure. The unintended consequence was that they fell in love. When Cassidy blew