Hall passed his cigarettes around. The shepherd accepted one with a shy smile. "I am glad that you are not angry, Señor Cuban Major," he said. "I have never had a Cuban cigarette before."
Chapter eighteen
"Fantastic! Sheer fantasy on paper, but it's all true. All roads lead to San Hermano. First, Lobo. Then, today, the man from Spain. Then ..." Felipe Duarte could not sit still. He walked around Hall's room at the Bolivar like a referee during a fast bout between flyweights. "Ostensibly, Lobo came to represent Batista at the funeral yesterday. Actually, he came to bring duplicates and even the originals of most of your negatives—as well as a report on Androtten. I don't know what's in the Androtten report yet; all I know is that the American Intelligence Service had something on it, and they gave it to Lobo."
"I tried to reach him on the phone."
"He's busy, Mateo. He's closeted with Lavandero. That's not all ..."
"I know, the de Sola affidavit. I'll have to tell you about Havana, Felipe. And about the all-night march to Cerrorico through the woods with Segador and the school teacher and the Notary's mules." Mateo, eh Mateo, what did you see in the shepherd's hut? Tabio's picture? All I could see was poverty, Mateo.
"Hey, you're not listening? What are you thinking of?"
Hall put his shaving brush down, inserted a fresh blade in his razor. "A thousand things. Cerrorico. The mining stronghold. Segador said the communists had a good press and that they were reliable. He wasn't kidding. They must have run off a million leaflets with reproductions of the Ansaldo pictures and the Havana documents by the time I left." Later, he would tell Duarte about the ride from Cerrorico in the engine cab of an ore train, and hopping off at dawn at the Monte Azul station, and being met by a Pepe Delgado who wore a freshly washed and ill-fitting reservist's uniform and drove a small army lorry. Segador had gone ahead on an earlier train.
"You should have seen the leaflets yesterday, Mateo. Just as the funeral procession was at its greatest the army planes appeared overhead and started to drop the leaflets by the ton. And an hour after the leaflets fell from the skies, the pro-United Nations papers were all over the country with front-page reproductions of the pictures and the documents."