by Burton Hersh
I could see that the whole scene terrified her. A resourceful cockroach crawled up out of her bran flakes and skittered as far as her elbow and launched itself into her closely trimmed curls. Worse, one stifling afternoon a week later one of the fruit rats dropped out of the calamandon tree and found itself trapped between her firm if modest breasts. It scratched her up pretty badly before, shrieking, she succeeded in shaking it out into the utility toilet.
She flushed it cheeping and milling in the converging flush. That evening Janice literally burned her bra on the outside grill. The next weekend she flew back to Chappaqua for a few days and didn’t come back for almost a month. I suppose I missed her, to a certain extent. What romance had flared among the file cabinets at Humper, Fardle had pretty largely dissipated. Long before we separated I’d realized that sex, for Janice, was in the end a mildly distasteful responsibility, like aspirating her sinuses. I suppose I blamed myself for never having aroused her temperament; afterwards I found myself dealing with a recurrent hopelessness, the fear that in me something was blocked, not capable of really making contact. There was a municipal warning sign posted at the turnoff into the Oval Crescent Annex that read: NO OUTLET. Afterwards it occurred to me we both should have taken that as a warning.
Carol had seemed to like Janice, but Wendy, being Wendy, never made the attempt. At the mention of Janice’s name Wendy would usually roll those delicately protrusive mahogany eyes of hers and clap her big sinewy hands together, as if in prayer. Lord Save Us! At that point Wendy had transferred down from Wheaton and was finishing up her undergraduate semesters at the University of Miami. She had been recruited on a tennis scholarship and was spending a lot more time on the collegiate tour than worrying about the soft-core sociology that was her alleged major. I believe she met Enrique Perez y Cruz in class, and before too long he started showing up at matches to applaud the big, perfectly timed overhead that petrified her opponents.
Neither of them had a chance.
3
Once Wendy’s infatuation with Rick got serious, Dad tapped the features specialist at The Miami Post-Dispatch, Freddy Wilmot, who had done a three-part profile of him when his Adam Smith broadside turned into such a blockbuster. Wilmot specialized in the local Cuban community. Taking on a son-in-law was a serious business. Dad thought it might be productive if I went down there and sounded out Wilmot personally.
Rounding out his fifties, Freddy Wilmot certainly looked his age, and more. He was very petite, and shriveled to the point of undernourished. A few token strands of hair were thrown back over his wrinkled scalp. His decades on the phone with the butt of one cheap cigarette after another burning down at one corner of his mouth had cured the tip of his long, twisted nose to something bordering on amber. “Fucking management is out this morning with today’s idiot brainstorm. Anything to demoralize the troops,” he greeted me. “No more water cooler. We buy the water, two dollars a bottle. And in that motherfucking crinkly plastic. Jesus!”
“Look, we appreciate whatever backgrounding you can come up with,” I said. “If there are any expenses—“
“There won’t be any expenses. Your dad helped me out.”
Before I got there Wilmot had scrounged around in the newspaper’s back files and surfaced a lot more detail than any of us expected. Most of the archive contained material that had never been published and was designated Sensitive, Awaits Further Attribution.
Because Ramon Perez y Cruz was turning into such a magnate all up and down Florida’s East Coast, the arrival of his son on the scene got picked up by several of the paper’s stringers, and ultimately merited a separate file. It had developed that Enrique – Ricky – had been brought into America after a State-Department-mandated six months in Canada late in the heyday of Bush I. He was barely a teenager, a big tawny muscular Cubano kid of thirteen who seemed to be watching everything and everybody, starting with the influential father who had pulled strings to get him in.
Rick’s father, the shadowy Ramon Perez y Cruz, had already justified a mention or two in the early Post-Dispatch reporting the month he first showed up in the States in 1963, at the time Castro traded off the survivors of Brigade 2506 for medicine and tractors in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. There was a background file on the Cruz forebears in Cuba; Ramon found his way into one reporter’s notes as a physician’s son with English enough to interview, on leave from his pre-medical semesters at the Universidad when he joined the resistance. He had been rescued from a dungeon outside Havana by John Kennedy’s negotiators. Of primarily Spanish antecedents, in Miami Ramon caught the eye of that emerging telephone cable tycoon and godfather of the Cuban contingent in South Florida, the podgy, explosive Jorge Mas Canosa.
Even as a flunky the watchful Ramon quickly came to understand that the underground wiring in the Cuban community ran in unexpected directions. “With those pricks, it was one hundred percent catch- as-catch-can, and keep your good hand on your balls,” Wilmot told me. “They arrived hungry. The place was in turmoil anyhow with Bobby Kennedy and those goombahs of his from Operation Mongoose tearing the absolute living shit out of the Cuban sugar refineries around The Island. The Mafia heavy hitters, starting with the sainted Santos Trafficante, worked out some kind of back-alley deal with Castro to lock up the cocaine traffic. Mas Canosa was somewhere in the middle of that, although we couldn’t prove a fucking thing.”
“And Ramon was involved?”
A tall, rather delicately built youngster in his early twenties, with long black hair like wire and huge Latin eyes full of insinuation, drifted into Wilmot’s cubicle, stepping carefully around a ficus plant. The boy had a powdered, hothouse look. The last couple of inches of a very dark tattoo emerged from his collar and narrowed out just below the lobe of one ear.
“Thiz Humberto Jiminez,” Wilmot said. “My intern. We like to pretend he’s learning the business. We hope he gets it right before the paper folds.”
We shook hands. Humberto’s palm was disturbingly moist.
“The story is, Mike here’s sister is going to marry the son of Ramon Cruz. That SEAL we did a feature about. I’m filling Mike in. He’s only around today.”
“Until tomorrow.” I said.
“Oh, yeah? Where you staying?”
“The Marriott downtown. On Bayshore Boulevard.”
“Used to be, the place wasn’t that bad,” Wilmot said. “Bit of a dump, these days.”
“Beats sleeping on the street.”
“So they tell me.” Wilmot’s gaze was following Humberto as he wandered out. “Kid’s got possibilities. But Christ, those tattoos! From asshole to appetite, if you know where I’m headed with that.” Wilmot looked down; he’d said too much. “Why don’t we take a walk? We just landed ourselves this dandy new executive editor who’s got a fucking goddamn Komodo Dragon up his ass about smoking inside the goddamned building.”
* * *
It was much hotter outside, strolling underneath the Royal Palms. “What I didn’t want to get into in there, a lot of what went down around here got done for people from the Agency. The CIA. They had some under-the table arrangement with Trafficante so they could skim running-around money off every sizeable cocaine deal that went down, even inside Cuba. Off the books, definitely off the books.”
“Castro looked the other way,” Wilmot went on, “and the frigging Comandantes cut up the payoffs. By then Ramon had brown-nosed his way up the pecking order and he was very, very tight still with Canosa and his hotshots. Except that at some point early in the Reagan administration a jurisdictional dispute among the Comandantes who looked after the retail cocaine deals kicked up and Ramon had to sneak back into Havana by way of Mexico. Their deal needed reworking.
“I’m informed that Castro -- trusting nobody, needless to say -- assigned one of the huskier female case officers in that very efficient spy shop he had, the Direccion General de Inteligensia, to stick with Ramon and keep the dictator up to speed on Ramon’s every maneuver. But Ramon outfoxed el Lid
er. He seduced Teresita his first night on the Island. He fucked her senseless, and when she drifted off he snuck out and put together some deal with his compadres down there. He also left her pregnant. With Enrique.”
According to Wilmot, it took almost thirteen years for Ramon to persuade Enrique’s doctrinaire mother to give Enrique up. Officials in both countries had to be bribed. When Rick finally turned up in Miami, Ramon expunged his son’s maternal surname and enrolled him as a boarder in Gulliver Academy a few miles from his business in Coral Gables. Ramon dropped by whenever he was out on the circuit extorting remittances for the Cuban-American National Foundation, Mas Canosa’s pressure group. Ramon prodded Ricky about his fitful English and even sported him to the occasional jai alai match. “I think he thought of himself as basically the kid’s father, but only when it occurred to him,” Wilmot explained to me, and ground out the last of a butt under his heel.
By the time Rick made it out of Gulliver his English was much improved, he showed something of a knack for mathematics – statistics especially – and he was a black belt in the Japanese combat discipline Goju-Ryu. He was beginning to dominate local martial arts competitions.
At that point Wilmot heard that Ramon was alarmed about Mas Canosa’s heedlessness, his susceptibility to his CIA handlers, the great man’s gullibility when it came to putting his own name on checks for limpet mines that made their way into the hands of terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles and wound up sinking Soviet and Cuban freighters and blowing out of the sky an Air Cubana jet liner. Mas Canosa had no scruples when it came to utilizing Ramon as a cutout on the riskier operations, a courier of money and instructions to psychos willing to demolish Castro’s suppliers.
Scrutinizing his irrational boss, an increasingly prudent Ramon was emerging from behind the scenes. He joined the Knights of Columbus. This provided legitimate associations once Ramon began merchandising himself, utilizing his important-family-in-Havana credentials with the Cuban exile shopkeepers and petit-bourgeois boat people and poverty clinic managers who had grumbled for years as they anted up to support Mas Canosa’s perilous brainstorms. Ramon started by tapping them modestly, selling them once-a-week custodial services.
What began as maintenance turned into unacknowledged protection, then property and casualty insurance. Ramon weighed in as a conspicuous contributor to the unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign of Jeb Bush in 1994; at that point Ramon’s corporation had started writing premiums on hospitals all the way up the East Coast to Daytona. He became a Third-Degree Knight of Columbus.
His financing became more imaginative. Under the expansive Bill Clinton the SEC was predisposed to look with favor even on Republicans like Ramon. His Sunrise Medical Ventures Corporation got green-lighted to issue an initial $5,000,000 of promissory notes. The notes paid better than 10% interest. A surprising proportion of the notes were absorbed by Ramon’s shoe-leather following in the tight-knit exile community.
The second Bush presidency found Ramon breaking in a young wife and two very young children in a gated residence in Coral Gables. Rick had become something of an afterthought. At his father’s urging, Enrique signed on for a hitch in the SEALS the day he graduated from Gulliver. Himself laid back, patient and calculating, Ramon continued to dismiss the burly and sometimes bumptious teenager as quick when it came to numbers but hopelessly in need of seasoning. “You’d see them together at the big Cuban rallies and political events once in a while,” Wilmot remembered. “It was like – Christ, what’s this? Fernando Llamas meets The Incredible Hulk?”
Rick survived the killer dropout rate at boot camp in Coronado and participated in the post 9/11 ramp-up in Afghanistan. He’d emerged unscratched after one fire fight with an unidentified Zodiac boat smuggling AK-47s into an Iraqi port. He ground through several exhausting weeks early in Operation Enduring Freedom scrounging with his squad among the caves of Zawar Kili for Taliban ammunition caches. Surprising several Al Qaeda asleep just before dawn one morning, Rick took a bullet in the thigh. Except for a barely discernable limp he seemed to come out of it all right. With that Rick qualified for a disability, which ruled out another hitch.
Paradoxically, the impact appeared to loosen him up. He could be gruff at moments still, but now you couldn’t miss a sort of precocious, hard-won fatalism about this strapping Cuban-American joven with his premature widow’s peak and his GI buzz cut. Battle-hardened, nothing fazed him. He enrolled at the University of Miami the same semester Wendy transferred in. They met in a quantitative analysis workshop – Rick was a business major – and there must have been so much obvious physicality coming off of both of them that they were a pair almost before they contrived to bump into each other.
I got a lot of the background for all of this from Wilmot while he was walking and talking and making up for lost time going through a pack of cigarettes as we circumvented Dispatch Plaza. As I was leaving I took a couple of Manila mailers Wilmot sent Humberto to fetch for me, plump with copies of everything the paper had on Ramon.
I carted Wilmot’s handout back to my room at the Marriott and spread everything out on the coffee table in front of the TV set. This kind of reporting took money and man hours. Somebody at the Post-Dispatch was biding his time. Most of the details about Ricky’s combat performance came out of Department of the Navy p.r. releases.
By seven that evening I had worked my way no better than halfway through the pile. I was taking notes – I am, after all, a lawyer. I decided to go downstairs to the Coffee Shop for a quick bite. As I was letting myself back into my room I sensed movement inside more than actually seeing anybody. The floor lamp above the coffee table snapped off just as I was letting myself in; I think I sensed more than I actually saw whoever it was rushing by me in the dark and out the half-open door. Whoever it was seemed agile, inexperienced, gasping in panic; I could smell talc. I was too stunned to move for three or four seconds. Then I edged back into the corridor just in time to catch a glimpse of a blue-black mane of hair as whoever that was scrambled through a fire door next to the bank of elevators and disappeared down the fire stairs.
My hoard of clips and awaits-further-attribution memos had been thoroughly culled. Anything at all startling or likely to upset Ramon was gone. I had my notes, and of course I remembered a lot of it. But that was largely hearsay.
Fortunately, just then, we really did not have a lawsuit in mind.
4
The two got married in 2004 in what must have been one of the great cross-cultural blowoffs even in Florida history. Ramon had a raft of insurance clients he intended to include, and the bride and groom both wanted something accessible for their college friends, so Dad and Ramon agreed over the phone to split the costs. A staff woman in the headquarters of Ramon’s investment syndicate staged this extravaganza on the side lawn at one of the nonsectarian country clubs outside Coral Gables. The vows were exchanged a couple of minutes before noon, beneath a tent; a Monsignor and a lesbian rabbi Dad found in Seminole traded off the speaking parts. Just before the ring ceremony Governor Jeb Bush and his entourage waded in from the back and everything stopped until his honor guard was seated.
Afterwards the restive mob trampled into the enormous dining room. Two bands alternated salsa and rhumba; the ballroom throbbed. Alongside the salty ambience of freshly boiled lobster the odor of pulled pork swamped the more delicate after-aroma of enchiladas and baked grouper and the side of beef turning over and sputtering on a spit just outside the kitchen. Blintzes were laid out next to the desert table.
“They’re for our benefit,” Dad said “I haven’t even seen a blintz since your Aunt Lillian overindulged after my grandmother’s funeral. They had to pump her out at Abbott Hospital. Lillian was a thrill-seeker. Mostly on the gastro-intestinal level.”
Mother was escorting Great-Uncle Lionel toward the buffet tables. Unsure of his footing, Lionel had the nervous look of a Presbyterian at the zoo who is wandering among the larger predators and not at all sure the cages are locked. Animate
d Cuban Spanish rose on all sides. At Ramon’s elbow a tall stripling I recognized with a start as Humberto Jiminez shouldered carefully by me without a word. Above the neck of his open shirt the tattoo of some kind of reptile with blazing emerald eyes had almost been whited out with powder.
A delegation including the governor advanced on our table. Everybody stood up.A small, monkey-faced aide with a slab of blond hair that looked molded onto his skull seized Dad’s hand. “Larry,” he said, “it is an honor for all of us, and I know I speak for the governor, to meet a genuine war hero like yourself.”
Dad’s full name was Lawrence Sylvan Landau. Everybody close in called him Sylvan.
“What we’ve got here is two war heroes,” the aide pressed on. “A father and a son.”
“Son-in-law,” Dad said. Dad stood up, careful not to step on the loosely woven straw hat edging out from beneath his chair.
“Doesn’t it amount to the same thing? I’ve always thought patriotism runs in families. You know the governor’s father, the first President Bush, won the Congressional Medal of Honor—“
The governor spoke. “Distinguished Flying Cross,” he corrected the aide. “He was the youngest airman in the Navy throughout the entire war in the Pacific.” Bush was a sizeable, neatly combed presence, his pudgy face fixed at the verge of boredom.
“I’m sure you know the governor and your daughter’s husband’s father go way back,” the aide said. “He worked with that incredible civic leader Mr. Mas Canosa. Like our irreplaceable Jorge, Ramon has been a reliable resource throughout both the philanthropic and the political crusades with which the Bush family has been identified for many, many years. We’d like to think that, going forward, we’ll be able to say the same of you.”