Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes Read Online Free PDF Page B

have, but now they will question you about me and you must tell them we only talked about painting and Santeria and of course they will believe you, for you look so innocent. He was shooting now and he will kill before he is killed. The guardia at the Palace will also deliver sacrifices today. She could see Diego shooting on the Palace stairs, so agile, so alert to the living instant, and she crawled to the museum’s stairs to see everybody below, all crouching or flattened by the guns, which stopped, began, stopped, began. Why are they firing at Bellas Artes? We have no guns.

    Diego saw Aurelio hit and lifted backward into the air and saw his pistol and grenades fly out from his belt. He saw Hernández, a year away from being a doctor, run toward the gate and die in a sprawl. Castellanos came yelling, “Lo logramos,” we got it, and shot a guard who had left his machine gun and was running back into the Palace.
    The Fast Delivery was full of holes and Gómez sat behind it, waving his arms, already dead, the cement dust billowing around him. Diego saw Aurelio shake himself and stand up, without a weapon. The ground floor was empty of guards but bullets kept raining down across the open patio. Diego moved upstairs onto the left wing of the Palace’s second floor with four others—Carlos, Almeida, Goicoechea, and Castellanos.
    Five others had made their way up and along the second floor’s right wing and from there Machadito lit the fuse of a seven-stick dynamite bomb and threw it to the soldiers on the third floor—who thought it was artillery, and their firing stopped, momentarily.
    The five on the left moved along corridors and when the phone rang in an empty room Diego answered it. The caller asked was it true as José Antonio announced on Radio Reloj that Batista was dead? And Diego answered, “Yes it is true, we have seized the Palace and killed Batista. Viva el Directorio! ” Then he followed Carlos across a corridor toward Batista’s office. But the map from Prío showed an opening where now there was a locked door.
    Carlos shot the door, which opened into a dining room—dirty dishes on a table and three servants crouching in a corner. Goicoechea wanted to martyr them, but Carlos said no. He asked where was Batista? They said he’d just had lunch but they didn’t know where he went.
    “ A singar, ” Diego said, fuck!—and he ran toward the Hall of Mirrors and to the glass door into Batista’s antechamber. Diego heard voices beyond the door and called to them to surrender and a gunshot shattered the glass door in reply. Carlos tossed a grenade through the broken glass but it did not explode; he threw another, then a third, duds all. Diego dropped in a grenade that blew off the door and they entered the Batista sanctum shooting at two corpses.
    The butcher has fled.
    They looked on Prío’s map for the secret passage to the third floor but found nothing. From the Hall of Mirrors balustrade they looked down at a dozen patrol cars on the Avenida de las Misiones where police, shielded by trees, fired up at them. They found their way across to the right wing to meet the five who were now four: Menelao shot, unable to get up, Machadito, Carbó and Prieto all firing upward, and Brinas dead in front of them.
    Carlos tested the stairs going up but fell back from the shooting and said we need our backup men, I’ll get them, and before Carbó could stop him he went toward the down stairway where Brinas had been shot and ran under the fusillade that was the last thing to touch his life.
    Diego was hit but running. “I’ll cover your retreat,” said Machadito, and his machine gun silenced the troops above while Carbó and Prieto and Goicoechea made their way down, and then the last five were out of the Palace, all bleeding and running from the guns on the Palace roof.
    Carbó was running with Diego toward Bellas Artes, but the gunners on the roof hit both—Carbó’s arm, yet he kept running, and Diego, his