by Burton Hersh
“Why would somebody go that far? You’re in the business.”
“Maybe somebody got scared. Ramon Cruz might have known something, or maybe he had been dealing with some people who didn’t want their involvement to get out. They must have decided that something was starting to leak.”
“Leak where?”
“Start with the office. That Medical Ventures fiasco. Olivia here knows incomparably more about that than I do. She flew over to Miami personally a couple of times to nail down our piece of the— pertaining to practical arrangements. Her Spanish is A number one.”
A number one. I really was dealing with a gaffer. “So what was your take? I asked Olivia.
Olivia recrossed her endless legs. Suddenly I could smell her perfume. “Nothing so special,” she said after a moment. “Everything goes very Latin over there. Ramon is the big boss. El Jefe, gets everything he wants.”
“That isn’t so surprising.”
“One of the things he wants, natuerlich, is one of those secretarias in the office.”
“I bet I know which one,” I said. “The one with the boobs.”
“You been there!”
“I stopped by, at one point.”
“Except that gets problematic. One afternoon when Ramon was late the one with the boobs saw how I knew Spanish. She is called Caridad. One time I got there early, and we were there alone, and she started to cry, and then she explained to me how Ramon was not being attentive like he was the first two years. He has decided now he is going to remain with his wife. But then the one with the boobs gets excited, and I started to hear all about how she worked before she came to Ramon at the Venezuelan consulate. The people over there love her. Maybe she will go back….”
“Isn’t that where most of our business with the Cuban regime gets processed?” I asked Bougalas.
“Pretty much.” Bougalas pushed out his lips and bulged down his brow. “You think the secretary might have stumbled across something in the office and ratted Ramon out to interested individuals on the island? Who arranged to bomb his car? Stupefying! What in God’s name could she have picked up on?”
“Lord knows,” I said, standing up. But I knew.
“You’ll need to establish that,” Bougalas announced. “This might be a context in which we could be of service. As you might expect, I know the Miami expatriate community intimately. For years a lot of what got those cabelleros into business in the first place was – should I be delicate? – drug-related. I was DEA. To operate effectively they required – I’m sure you can fill in the blanks. Protection. That’s how I first got to know Olivia.”
“She was a DEA agent?”
“She was a perpetrator. For several years the most interesting thing inside those padded, push-up brassieres everybody admired so much was not Olivia. It was cocaine. Heroin.”
“She was a smuggler?”
“She was a courier. She is Alsatian. As a French national she was free to move in and out of Cuba every month. Drugs paid a lot of the bills for the Castro regime, Olivia’s Spanish was serviceable and she understood how to make herself very useful at a profit to movers and shakers in Havana all up and down the line. She still knows a lot of the power players down there.”
“She brought in drugs mostly?”
“She brought in everything. Diamonds. Rare manuscripts. Whatever.”
“In her bra?”
“There are other places.”
Olivia turned to me. “Where the sun don’t shine,” she said, and arched her well-plucked eyebrows and minced her lips a little.
“Olivia is very versatile,” Bougalas said. “She doesn’t go cheap, but she gets it done.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Exhaling heavily, Bougalas levered himself out of his office chair with both hands and rounded his desk to escort me out the door. “I take it everything between us remains privileged, isn’t that right, counselor? I would also assume you’re aware that everything that goes on in this office we videotape. You know how that goes.”
“Likewise, I’m sure,” I said, and tapped my belly just below my necktie where I had taped on my microrecorder. “Let’s work this together from now on.”
I walked out toward the elevators with as much aplomb as I could muster. Going down my mouth was dry, I was awash in perspiration. I was totally out of adrenalin. The more I began to figure this whole thing out, the more the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.
16
By May, as ever, the tourists and Snowbirds had pretty largely given up on Florida and round-the-clock mugginess was setting in. The prospect of the summer’s hurricanes put an edge of drama on our workaday lives. By that point Linda and Penelope were spending more time on the Pink Streets than at Mulcahey Court. Linda’s job at Walmart seemed to be panning out; Penelope was excited by our fenced-in yard in the back and kept the squirrels jumping and rolled back and forth among the fallen calamandons. Waiting for Linda to get off shift I occasionally took Penelope to the pet compound at Lake Vista Park, where she could fetch sticks with the other dogs. I was getting domesticated.
Once Dad’s properties got returned to us the events of the winter began to feel like episodes in somebody else’s life. Conceivably my visit to Bougalas had resulted in word processing down the line that we would not make trouble if we were left alone. Nobody wanted the Bureau involved.
We had fought our battles; perhaps we had won. My law practice was picking up, with a lot of foreclosure renegotiation starting to come in as adjustable-rate mortgages reset. Halfway into April a Palm Beach brokerage that plugged overseas buyers into Florida investments approached Dad about disposing of a number of our up-market properties through their international clearinghouse. Newly rich Danes and Greeks and Irishmen had started to panic about the sovereign debt overhang to the Common Market and yearned to have their capital locked up in something substantial in the First World, something they could touch, like real estate in Tampa Bay.
Lawyers for the Palm Beach brokerage with power of attorney had prospects waiting. Most of the big luxury condominiums we had taken back from Ramon were still fully priced. The quickest way to transact business was for Dad personally to show up at the Bank of America complex in Miami and sign over the properties. We picked the first Monday in May; he insisted that I come along, to review the transfer documents. We could expect to receive a bank check in the neighborhood of twenty-two million dollars unless there was something none of us expected tainting any of the deeds.
At that moment averages on the Big Board were slipping into free fall, a precursor to the spring and summer of demolition that lay ahead. “It’s 1987 all over again, only bigger!” Dad huffed as we started south that Sunday. “Hunting season!” People were getting hurt, he understood that, but his blood was up.
I think Dad needed somebody to talk to. I had been really bearing down in my office the previous few weeks. Everybody seemed to be someplace else. Sonny was spending time at the reservation in Oklahoma, after which he intended to drive their mother back to Florida in his Equinox to look in on Linda. It took some heavy-duty arm-twisting, but Linda, who had been tossing in her sleep lately dreaming of her abandoned son, wheedled Savage Owl into letting us pick up three-year-old Carl at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki museum at the Reservation on our way back through on Monday. His chance to meet his grandmother. Meanwhile, Mother was in Philadelphia for a work-up by her trusted rheumatologists.
It had occurred to Dad that five hours was a long time in my BMW for little Carl to sit placidly in the back and look out the window. I remembered the Welcome Center just off the Tamiami Canal. Carl might enjoy that cockamamie zoo, and possibly an airboat ride? Dad wasn’t that captivated by the idea. We needed a second opinion. Hadn’t Enrique grown up in Coral Gables, a few miles up the road? He probably knew the place, which sounded like a dump to Dad. As things were working out, Rick wasn’t that far away, Rick had been in and out of Ramon’s offices ever since the bombing in mid-April, keeping an eye
on security there, showing the flag. Maybe he would join us.
Frankly, in view of the winter’s events, I was leery of involving Rick. Dad was absolutely convinced that we were beyond that, everything was straightened out and including Rick that morning would amount to a vote of confidence. I certainly wasn’t convinced but – as always with Dad – I didn’t get much of a vote.
To celebrate the recovery of so much capital we splurged and stayed at The Four Seasons on South Ocean Beach. I had gone downstairs to take care of the extra room charges on our bill while Dad closed up his rollaboard and packed his pajamas and toilet kit in the scruffy little canvas top-loader duffel he always hauled along on camping trips or weekends in British country houses – wherever, a place to stow last-minute items and bottles of water and energy bars.
I got back into the room just as Dad was finishing up an exchange on his cell phone with somebody in Ramon’s office. If she would just get the word to Enrique? We expected to pick Carl up close to ten at the reservation, just off Alligator Alley, then head south to Route #41 and show up at the Welcome Center at – what? – eleven o’clock in the morning or thereabouts. We’d have the little fellow with us. If Rick could make it, we’d love to have him along.
“I hope she got at least part of that,” Dad mused as he clicked off. “The English wasn’t wonderful. Bilingual, Caina hora! At least, we tried.”
We did pick little Carl up around ten at the Big Cypress Reservation museum. I introduced Savage Owl to Dad as Charlie. Charlie was sullen, suspicious. He had not packed any kind of a bag for the child; as Carl was clambering into the back Charlie hung over the BMW as if he were tempted to grapple with the car and heave it into the Swamp. Possibly he was waiting for some kind of tip to justify parting with Carl, which he didn’t get.
We did in fact get to the Welcome Center no more than a few minutes after eleven. By then a lot of the sky across the west was darkening. The roll of very distant thunder, no doubt opening up just then over Venice and Naples, boomed faintly across the sultry late morning. Dad took Carl by the hand and showed him the gorilla --- which was defecating with an expression of pensive concern stressing his leather features, a major primate solving a great riddle -- in a high cage behind the lavatories. The African crocodiles were as logy as on our last visit. I left Dad and Carl on their way to the aviary and went back toward the office to buy tickets for the next scheduled departure of one of the air boats. The atmosphere was very heavy.
The parking lot was filling up. I noticed a Jeep Cherokee that reminded me a lot of Ricky’s. A couple of compact-looking Latinos with thinning hair were sitting in their car with the doors open, smoking filtered cigarettes. The plump little woman we’d joked around with last time waited behind the counter, selling the tickets.
“Finally gonna get it right?” she demanded as I handed over a fifty-dollar bill. “Go get your rocks off playin’ with them ‘gators? You wait and see. It’ll be rewardin’ for you, guy! We had one woman here last week, didn’t want to go near the marsh, she come back and she told me it was the greatest single experience of her en-tire life. Soaked her britches, though. She had on one of them old-fashioned mini-shirts, and you could easily see what she done from the back. How many in your party?”
“Three. An adult, a senior, and a three-year-old child.”
“Which are you?”
“The three-year-old. “
”I like you,” the woman said. “You got a sense of humor. I b’lieve I might jist run your irreverent ass ‘round the Swamp myself. Ever’ onct in a while I experience a personal cravin’ to cut loose and whale the motherhumpin’ piss out of the surrounding countryside. You’ll forgive my language, I know you will.”
“It’s that time of day,” I said.
“You got that right. You all hafta meet me over on that landing you can see over there on the left in maybe five minutes. Boat on the right. Take any place you wanna sit. We don’t go no-place lessn every swingin’ dick got on his life preserver. That’s the law.”
As we were pulling out and headed around the first wide break in the surrounding sawgrass I saw the two Latinos climbing into the other airboat. They were carrying what looked like big bags of camera equipment. “Erskine can run them fellas around,” the plump woman said. She adjusted the tiller. “He’s my son by an earlier relationship. Not that my hubby these days shootin’ blanks. I can allus tell.”
Now that we were moving faster and into the Swamp it was getting hard to follow her patter. The huge caged propeller above and behind us that drove the boat set up an intense droning whirr. Dad was holding Carl, who was very excited. His tiny hand kept jerking out to point at a flight of roseate spoonbills lifting off the water as we powered around the first bend and into the depths of the course. A gigantic carp exploded into an arc in front of us and rebroke the surface; a stippling of very fine raindrops little more than a thickened fog swept through a grove of cypress to our left and roughened the greenish water. The woman gunned the engine and executed a hairpin turn, which raised a sheet of spray.
“Moptop here is starting to get soaked,” Dad said. He clawed into the little duffel between his knees and worked out a light scrolled windbreaker, which he pulled open and wrapped around Carl’s shoulders. “You want some water, Buddy?”
Carl nodded, solemnly. Dad unscrewed the top of a water bottle and turned it over to him.
The squall showed signs of turning into a downpour. Thunder cracked; a bolt of lightning hit somewhere, miles to the west.
“You think I should take it in?” the woman said.
“How about you, soldier,” Dad queried Carl. “Had enough?”
The child shook his head, with vigor.
“Let’s go find us some alligators,” the woman said. She throttled the boat up again and another heavy spray rose as we powered ahead into the depths of the preserve. The thunder was abating now; I thought I could make out the controlled sputter of the other airboat, on some parallel course. We plowed through a deserted pond of lily pads and spooked a whitetail doe and a couple of fawns, which pranced in great lunging leaps through the enveloping muck and were lost at once in the high grass. Suddenly we were hedged in on three sides by mangrove. “This little corner of our universe here is gator heaven,” the woman said. “See them openings in the briars? Them’s gator holes, they live and breed and look after their young down there in such places. Whichever babies they refrain from eatin’ themselves.”
Where the mangroves ended there was what looked through the incoming rain like a stand of willow. I thought I heard the engine of the other airboat just beyond there for a few seconds; then it stopped. Just where the waterline met the willows I thought I glimpsed the silhouette of a canoe. Another squall was starting to sweep in. At that moment it occurred to me that it might actually have been Rick’s Cherokee I saw in the parking lot.
“Dad,” I found myself shouting, “when you called Ramon’s office this morning. Who did you speak with?”
“Who? I don’t know. Some secretary. Unusual name.”
“Caridad?”
“Yeah. That’s right. I remember noticing that. Charity, doesn’t it mean?”
“Let’s hope so.” But I could feel my stomach tightening.
The squall hit, unloading a real soaker, and the thunder opened up, and the sputter of the other airboat among the willows stopped and I could see the outline of one of the Latinos standing stiffly in the bow. There was the regular throb of something exploding in sequence; feet from our boat, muck was kicking up all along the gunnel .
“That’s automatic weapon fire,” I heard Dad mutter; he was milling a little frantically in his open duffel. “Sounds like an old-fashioned AK 47. He’s establishing the range. Any second he’ll raise his sights and finish us all.” Moments later I watched Dad shove a clip of cartridges into the handle of his Beretta, steady his right wrist with his left hand, and get off the first couple of shots. The Latino seemed to be reeling momentarily in place; his weapon co
ntinued to fire on its own but wildly, high and into the overhanging foliage.
“I think I took his shoulder out,” Dad said. He seemed ice-cold, academic. “You always want to hit just a little bit below and to the left of the muzzle flash.”
The chunky woman running our boat was coming out of her paralysis. “Erskine!,” she bellowed across the water as the main torrent of the storm struck. “Baby, it’s time you get your shit together now. You bail out, hear? You get your randy little can out that boat, you hear me? I mean that, honey -- forget about the boat--”
* * *
But by then the sky had opened up, the air was a waterfall, the shooting had stopped, and there was nothing any of us could do except to wait for the monsoon to clear. Dad crouched in front of little Carl in an attempt to reassure him. “It’ll be all right, pal.” Dad said
The child looked up, round-eyed and excited. “Bang Bang,” Carl said with tremendous enthusiasm. “Bang, bang, bang.”
The storm passed over with as little warning as when it struck. A hatch of deerflies poured up out of the thicket of mangrove and descended to pepper us, something to slap away as we trolled warily closer and closer to the high boat stranded in the willows. As we came alongside it became clear that we were confronted by two bodies, the Latinos, both unconscious from multiple lacerations and heavy bleeding. Dad’s bullets had in fact torn away much of the right shoulder of one of them. The AK 47, if that was what it was, had already disappeared into the muck.
Erskine, who had been alert enough to splash out into the willows when the machine guns started sliding out of one of the camera bags, had scrambled and swum to where the crud was solid enough for footing behind a stand of bulrushes. Once the rainstorm passed over, and he could see us pulling alongside, he was starting back.
One of the Latinos had toppled into the swamp water. Blood was spreading and scintillating around him, like oil. The Swamp smelt rancid.