by Burton Hersh
Mother and Wendy looked at each other.
“Male chauvinism not intended,” Dad said. “But don’t you think it’s time the gentlemen hid out at safer altitudes? Brandy and cigars?”
We repaired to the pergola. When Enrique and Wendy got married Ramon had sent Dad a box of Cuban panatelas, the real thing, impossible to find. He broke them out on holidays or special occasions. That Easter Dad had one, and I had one, but Buckley had brought a pack of his evil-smelling cigarillos and Rick took one of them – a gesture of solidarity with Buckley, I suppose. We all smoked silently for a couple of minutes. An afternoon squall was coming in across the Bay, padded out with thunder and the very distant wrinkle of lightening. The air was extremely close.
“So you’re about to have a boy?” Dad said, finally, to Rick.
“Maybe. However it comes out, I got a fifty-percent shot, ‘s verdad?” He raised his hand to extract the cigarillo; his enormous bicep almost grazed his wrist. It was hard for me to see Rick without envisioning him hoisting himself through the casement window and pillaging Dad’s file cabinets.
“Linda has got gifts in that department,” I said. “She is a little bit …telekinetic, if you know what I’m getting at. She has insights.”
“As well as a hellova rack,” Buckley put in.
“Always the one comment that raises the tone,” I said.
“I would think your father would get pretty excited at the prospect of a grandson,” Dad said. “Another generation to break in down the road? Ease into the business? Have you picked any names?”
“Not yet,” Rick said. He looked uncomfortable.
“We’ve got a couple that have come down on my side of the family. How about Yonkel? Still carries a lot of prestige around the stetl.” He popped his cigar back in.
Rick looked both concerned and bewildered.
“Dad’s just screwing around,” I said. “Sometimes he can’t control his Jackie Mason side.”
“What I want to explain you is, the way things look there ain’ gonna be no business,” Rick broke out. He was still feeling his cocktails. “You pull your real estate, I know you got your worries too, but we been dependin’ on heem. We know you got your rights and your abogados in Philadelphia but you know we got some pandillaros backing us, bad hombres, investment gunslingers out of Miami, sabe? Who we got to have as counterparties. Who are into us, man, they get a killer risk premium—“
Dad got serious. “We don’t have much of a choice. We would definitely like to participate financially in Cuba down the road. But real estate in this country in for trouble, there is a shitstorm brewing. Whoever has those properties in a year is going to take a tremendous beating, it’s already sliding off the peaks. If I could liquidate them soon enough maybe Ramon and I could work something out--” At that moment, on cue, a heavy, driving curtain of rain broke against the pilings and threatened to swamp the pergola. “See, Nature speaks. It’s time for everybody to pull in his horns.”
“Economics is too complicated for a simple little ding-dang lawyer like myself,” Buckley said. “And worse than that, my cigar is soaked.”
We all ran together for the ocean-side door just as the sky unloaded. It let up for long enough for the girls and their husbands to scurry out into their cars on the tarmac off Brightwaters Boulevard. Linda and Mother were talking about something.
“I thought it went all right,” Dad said. “Little flare-up from Ricky in the pergola. He’s obviously worried about Ramon. Those ‘counterparties’ probably have Ramon’s nuts in a vice, as the lady reminded the bishop.”
“I’m not sure how that affects us.”
“Maybe we ought to lay off for a couple of months. Take the pressure off. Let the legal system work its magic. But you don’t agree,” Dad decided. “I can see it in your face.”
“What you are liable to get out of the legal system is an ever more extortionate fee schedule. That’s one meter you never want to leave running. Those are our properties. Your properties. Mother’s properties.”
“Look, boychik, hok mir nisht a chinik about properties. We have other assets. It’s only money. They are part of our family now. A grandson is on the way, remember?”
I didn’t say anything. Dad was wrong, and I would have to deal with it.
“She is a very interesting young woman,” Dad said, with a nod toward Linda. “A lot of substance. I haven’t seen your mother so absorbed in conversation with anybody for a long time.”
“There is a lot there,” I said.
14
I spent the day after that on client work. The following morning, while Buckley was chasing down a personal injury lead, I donned a pair of latex gloves, and rescued a long-ignored Olivetti typewriter from obscurity in a dusty closet, and rolled in a piece of blank paper and typed a short note to Ramon Perez y Cruz.
“Senor,” it said, “I am an admiror of yours who have been follow your activities for many years. I know that your fund is fighting the return of a number of valuble mortgages held once by the Landau family, who I also know these years. Give them back!!!!! I have in my possession many letters from persons we both knew the old days in Cuba. You are helping this people, I think. I send you copies of a few – I have more!!!!! You no return the mortgages by Apr. 7, copies of all letters go to reporters we know in Miami Post-Dispatch, Miami New Times, New York Times, Wall St. Jernel. Others. How do your once friends from our Batista time think when that comes out?
“Es un placer trater de negocios con Ud.”
The final phrase, which I found in a Berlitz paperback in the office, was no doubt the only grammatical sentence in the note. I copied and included several of the letters I had found in Ramon’s safe from officials whose looted valuables he spirited off the island, including the one from Raul Castro. Mapquest supplied me with the address of the Sarasota post office closest to Cedric Bougalas’ mailing address . I remember driving over the Skyway Bridge with my head buzzing. I posted my letter to the Coral Gables office priority, no return receipt requested.
I had no doubt that it would be obvious to Ramon and his people where my note originated. It also seemed to me that the spectacular clumsiness of my approach might lead Ramon to suspect that other people might also be involved, qualified extortionists and blackmailers, more insidious and without a doubt more competent in covering their tracks. Bougalas, possibly, a conniver with DEA credentials, the mention of which alone was likely to panic that generation of cocaine-smuggling Cubans. The question was: Were Ramon and his backers geared up to take that risk?
I had my answer ten days later. Ethan Stokes telephoned Dad to crow that Humper, Fardel had brought it off. Attorneys for Sunrise Capital Partners had been in contact late the previous week and decided to drop their challenge and return to us uncontested title to our real estate. Documents to follow.
* * *
I was well aware all along that extracting our commitment to Ramon’s hedge fund the way we had was not going to sweeten up intra-family relations. But from the outset we hadn’t attempted to terrorize anybody, certainly nothing remotely comparable to blowing the safe in Wallaye’s offices. Whatever the upshot, we were at most responding. We’d gotten our properties returned, and so it seemed to me that we were back where we started.
I began to discover how naïve I was a little more than a week after we recovered our deeds. I came in late in the morning on Friday; Andrea, our part-time intern, met me with news that the FBI field office in Tampa had been trying to locate me since the previous afternoon. She had two numbers for Special Agent Hardagon.
An hour later I was in his office. For a phlegmatic man, Vince Hardagon had a gift for cranking up threat. “There’s been a development,” he informed me before I could sit down. “There was a nasty incident in our Miami district.” He checked his report. “That Cuban investment hotshot or whatever he is who is some kind of shirt-tail relative of yours, Ramon Whosis -- some S.O.B. blew his Lexus all over bleeping LeJeune Road in Coral Gables. The wife wa
s driving, but she had left the two little daughters in the vehicle and was gone into a boutique or someplace to pick up a watch. Some kind of magnetic device, somebody slipped it under the frame and set it off by radio. Engine went twenty feet in the air.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What about the girls?”
“They got lucky. Burns, shock – they won’t forget that morning in a hurry. I take it you had nothing to do with anything of that nature?”
“How could I—“
“Well, you said you were headed to Miami.”
“Not to blow anybody up. I’ve been around here the last couple of weeks, I can establish that.”
“Worth a shot. The thing is, we think the two cases are related. I know I haven’t been in touch, and civilians like you think federal employees just sit around drinking coffee and pulling our puds all afternoon….”
“I don’t think that.”
“Well, it’s only partly true. What I’m trying to tell you is this, it took a while but our people got around to comparing some scrapings. We’re actually starting to utilize the computer these days, not like the Louis Freeh era when the lab guys were told to depend on Ouija boards or whatever the hell they used. It develops the nitro somebody used to take that safe out the other day and the nitro in Coral Gables came from the same batch. Those munitions in Portsmouth. Spectrometer readings, same chemical signature. So there’s a connection.”
“And you want me to—“
“Make the connection for us.” He gave me that wide, insincere Irish smirk of his. “Somebody was after those documents of yours, and now the guy who supposedly wound up with the documents gets blasted—“
“It makes no sense,” I said. “Ramon and his backers appear to have rethought the whole thing, and now they’ve decided to give us back our properties. We got the paperwork earlier this week. I doubt there’s any connection.”
Hardagon exhaled hard, the snort of a bloodhound giving up on a scent. “What you want to do is stay in touch with us, counselor,” he conceded after another moment or two. “We’ll skip the polygraph. ’jever do any good with our field office down on North Miami Beach? Hector Diaz? Cute, an exceptionally cute piece of work. Talk about dubious collaborators in high places….”
“Never got that far.”
“You got lucky. As I say, stay in touch. You got my numbers.”
I had to regard that summons as fair warning, a testimony to suspicions around the Bureau that there was a potentially noisy game afoot and that I – we – were implicated. A few days later, Sunday evening, I found myself mulling over the bombing in Coral Gables and the extent of my personal culpability throughout the opening-night Passover seder Mother insisted on hosting every Easter season. I never thought Dad was that enraptured with formal Judaism -- he claimed he had barely survived several years of Saturdays and Sundays as a small boy in the basement of the synagogue in Minneapolis squirming through unending sessions of rote Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah. But Mother was very firm in her conviction that this was part of our family tradition. We ought to recognize that too.
It developed that I was the only sibling in town that April to observe. Carol and Buckley flew up to White Plains to celebrate with Seymour Glickman, Buckley’s father, and his screechy third wife, who was borderline Orthodox. Without mentioning why to our parents, Wendy and Rick drove down in Coral Gables to visit the bandaged-up little step-sisters in the hospital and support Annilita and Ramon. Earlier in the day Wendy had telephoned me to describe Ramon as withdrawn and obviously unnerved, by no means the light-footed promoter the rest of us would recognize.
To round the table out Dad had invited Rabbi Sheila Ginsburg from Seminole and her partner Angela McCarthy, a big aggressive feeder and a loud talker. I invited Linda and her brother Sonny, who was just back from a quick visit to the reservation in Oklahoma. I wanted Dad to meet Sonny.
Jews throughout the world have supposedly been celebrating the feast of the Passover for 2300 years, since Moses conducted his rabble of ex-slaves across the Red Sea and Jehovah parted the waters. As a woman of the cloth, hung with tallises, Rabbi Ginsburg sat at the head of the table and led us through the Haggadah, back to front. Once we had gotten to the recitation dealing with the building of the pyramids, and the travail of the Israelites beneath the whips of Ramses’ overseers sweating to produce bricks without straw, Sonny was resolutely studying the text.
When the time came to deposit a drop of red wine on our plates for every plague that Jehovah visited upon the Egyptians, culminating with the angel of death wiping out all their first-born males, Sonny looked up. “Big Chief Jehovah mean serious business,” he commented.
“The Biblical God?” Rabbi Ginsburg responded. “Definitely a hard-ass. You don’t want to yank the chain of the Lord of the Hebrews. Tit for tat. Or tat for tit, reading from left to right. But now I think I need to readjust my brassiere. ”
Everybody laughed. Angela shoveled a heavy load of horosis onto a segment of matzo and scarfed it down. “That is good stuff,” she decided, and suppressed a belch.
“Then when they finally got away?” Sonny wondered.
“Moses made them wander in the desert for forty years. Allow the slave generation time to die off.”
“It’s like the Trail of Tears, except with unleavened bread,” Sonny said.
Several of us chuckled at that, if a little uneasily.
“Cultural overlays in tribes tend to be very much alike,” Dad broke in. The red wine was getting to Dad, which invariably risked bringing out the pedagogue in him. “You want to remember that the Christians started out for several hundred years as a Jewish cult skulking around bazaars outside Athens and hiding in Roman catacombs. Humble, taking Christ’s teachings seriously. Then Constantine decided to unify the Roman Empire by imposing Christianity on the infidels, and ever since then it’s been the cross or the sword.”
“That’s very informative, Sylvan, dear,” Mother said, “but what has that to do with Moses?”
“Moses was one more empire builder. He put those slaves through hell so he could turn them into an army. Exactly the same thing happened with the perception of Jesus. I remember the chorale we used to sing in chapel when I was a kid in my Episcopalian Country Day School outside Minneapolis. Supply the pipe organ accompaniment yourselves.” Dad began to sing, something all of us dreaded:
“’The Son of God goes forth to war
A kingly crown to gain,
His blood-red banner streams aloft,
Who follows in his train?’
“Whose Jesus is that, for Christ’s sake?” Dad challenged us all. “I suspect that that’s the Jesus who rounded up Sonny’s ancestors, and Linda’s ancestors, and herded them out of all that valuable prairie real estate and into the detention camps we like to refer to as reservations.” Dad took another swallow of wine. “Does that sound about right to you, Sonny?”
Sonny was examining Dad, piercingly. “White man speak truth,” Sonny said. “A few of the details need a little work, but who could have a problem with the bottom line?”
“And a lot of the same reasoning applies to our adventures these days in the Middle East,” Dad concluded. “Which doesn’t detract in any way from the sacrifice by our troops.”
“Don’t back off now, darling,” Mother said. “I think you’ve managed to make just about everybody at this table uncomfortable, one way or another.”
“Well,” Rabbi Ginsburg piped up, “sometimes that’s a good thing.”
“I have to protect my reputation as an equal opportunity blasphemer,” Dad said. We all laughed.
“I got a nephew in Afghanistan,” Angela McCarthy said, snapping in half the last matzo on the common plate and starting in on that. “He is a beast. You ought to see the triceps on that mother.”
* * *
Linda was the youngest at the seder, and I wanted her to participate. A few minutes later, once everybody had started to relax again, I convinced her to ask the four question
s. That got her into the ceremony a little, but a few minutes later she demurred when it came to searching out the afikomen. Linda was obviously shy about roaming Dad’s house unattended. When the time came to open the door for Elijah Linda perked up. I tried to explain who or what Elijah was: an ancient prophet, who returned over the millennia -- dropped off no doubt from a chariot of fire -- to help reconstitute the remnant of Israel. “Didn’t make it to the Happy Hunting Grounds yet?” Linda mused. “With us, after four days, the ghosts of warriors aren’t supposed to come back.”
Mother served a light meal, chicken pot pie and salad. Anastasia was coming in later on to clear things away. Afterwards there was a cherry cheesecake, which Angela seemed to relish, several slices.
Just as Rabbi Ginsburg was leaving she drew Mother and Dad aside. “We had a very enjoyable time,” the Rabbi said. “Angela I could see especially enjoyed herself. The cherry cheesecake in particular was a tremendous hit.”
“Why don’t you take the rest with you?” Mother offered. “We’ll never eat it here.”
“Don’t tempt me. As it is I need a map and a compass to get around Angela when she stops all of a sudden.” Rabbi Ginsburg hesitated. “Maybe it’s not my place,” she said, “but my mother in Boca sent me a clipping from The Miami Herald Tuesday. Your Cuban in-law, Ramon? The bombing? I wanted to say I was very glad to read that the children are going to be all right. I remember them from the wedding. Adorable, and so intelligent-looking.” She deliberated a moment, and peered into Dad’s eyes. “These Cuban business people—it’s no joke, geferlekh.” Rabbi Ginsburg looked away and pinched off her yamulkah and slid it into her handbag.
Dad started to say something, then stopped himself. He walked the Rabbi and Angela to their car. Mother and Linda were rounding off one of their fervent exchanges, fellow spirits; Sonny waited for Linda to detach herself so he could run her back to Muldavey Court. I touched her waist and she laid her palm on my cheek.