by Burton Hersh
I dragged a third Adirondack chair in next to Rick and attempted to follow the match. Gretchen won her serve but was losing the receiving game; Wendy rocked onto her feet and hooted “Go-go-go, woman! Don’t let her drop-shot you like that.” Wendy spotted me and gave me the finger, a traditional gesture of purest affection.
“When did you get in?” I asked Rick
“Twelve, twelve-thirty. I flew. They were supposed to take off at seven, and three times I wen’ to the gate an’ three times there is a problem. They didn’t take off. What happen, something with the gas line. So they keep saying, no importa, but still nobody boards.”
“But you got off.”
“Absoluto. Three hours late.”
“Still, you got here.” Rick shrugged. His cheeks and forehead and the backs of his hands looked badly scratched up.
A few minutes later Gretchen lost the first set and Wendy hoisted herself to her feet and turned to me. “You’re sure Mother is all right, Mikey?”
“I think so. Maybe better than she’s been for quite a while. Lupus is tricky.”
“Everything is tricky. Try pregnancy. I’ve been here forty-five minutes and I have to hit the head again.”
That seemed like a good idea; I trailed Rick into the men’s toilet. Nobody else was there. There was one urinal, which was perennially backed up. It gave off a stench somewhere between congealed uric acid and a decomposing animal. A poster of Jim Courier was tacked up on the curling sheetrock above the urinal. Rick unslung his mighty pecker and directed a stream that might have come from a fire-hose into the beak of the urinal. As he was zipping up I thought I might as well say something.
“Listen, pal,” I started. “We owe you. We know we owe you. How did you figure out what was coming down?”
Rick hesitated. His eyes grew calculating and he started to clench his heavy jaw. “That just happen,” he said after a moment. “I pick up the extension and Caridad was telling some dude in Miami she knows how you was going to that Welcome Center, which I know where it is, and whoever that was says, well, we have backup here. We take care of this.
“I don’t think Caridad understood what that means. But I understood. So I got there first.”
“Needless to say—“
“You let us down with the stakeholders importante. Nobody forgets that. But you are in our family,” Rick said. “It’s like the SEALS: Nobody gets left behind.”
“That’s how Dad feels. You are the father of his first grandson. In any case, the same torpedoes who are after you are after us, apparently. “
“I get the picture,” Rick said.
“I think I’ve figured out where the problem is, and what they’re after, and how we can get them off our backs. But first I need to sit down and talk with your father. Can you make that happen? Don’t tell Caridad.”
“With Ramon? He can be a mule, but I will make him talk to you.” Rick smiled, broadly, a rare event. He put his giant hand on my shoulder. “Don’t push too hard. Since that bomb went off he is un hombre cambiando. No mismo, not the same.”
“Get him to call me on my cell phone, but not from his office. We’ll pick some neutral spot and work the details through. Tell your father I promise I will be mucho agreeable.”
“Your Spanish is like my English,” Rick said. “A horrors show.”
I got the call from Ramon around three the next afternoon. I had left our office around noon to run Sakwa over to Snell Isle to check Mother out. Like any medical practitioner of integrity she insisted on a follow-up visit, and Linda had to put in her stint at Wal-Mart. Sonny expected to head back to the reservation with his mother the next morning, after swinging through Big Cypress to drop off Carl with his father.
I think Sakwa was deeply pleased to find Mother so reinvigorated. But given her heritage she was at great pains to remain impassive, prodding Mother somberly here and there to ascertain the blood flow and interpret Mother’s vital signs. Mother’s scalp was dry now and tingled, Sakwa indicated – excellent omens, that meant the ghosts had probably given up and fled. When Mother suggested that she would like to reimburse Sakwa for everything she had done Sakwa shook her weatherbeaten face, very gravely. This was for Linda, she told Mother. Mother had been kind to Linda. Once she got back to the reservation Sakwa would have to find herself another antelope belly-button.
Carl had come visiting with us. He intrigued Mother. Between the Prince Valiant haircut and his dusky, self-contained Swamp-Indian personality the three-year-old was an utter novelty. A doll from everybody’s primeval origins, like a tiny onlooker in a George Catlin tableau of a traditional prairie rain dance. Carl was willing to accept another bowl of ice cream and strawberries.
I had just run Sakwa and Carl back to the Oval Crescent Annex and let Penelope out to chase Carl around in the yard when Ramon telephoned. At first his manner was wary, if not hostile, but he was listening. He was out of his office. Yes, he understood that we certainly had nothing to do with the dynamiting of his Lexus. Yes, Enrique had divulged to him that there had been an attack on us, on Dad, sometime the week before. Ramon hoped we would understand that as a matter of honor he would not have known in advance about anything like that, he personally would have prevented such an indescribable brutalidad. He was very proud that Enrique had taken it upon himself to help….
The difficulty appeared to be, I attempted to suggest to Ramon, that information about Ramon’s more—more confidential sidelines, if that was the right word, had leaked. Caridad in his office was in touch with her ex-officemates in the Venezuelan consulate. Ramon’s most substantial clients – people of importance on the island – these people were alarmed. They had written letters, and Ramon was holding these letters. And so much exposure was extremely dangerous for people of such importance, Fidel was still potent enough to exact a terrible revenge on even the closest of his life-long comrades once he had determined that they intended to abandon the revolution—
There was a long, long pause on Ramon’s end. So, he said finally, what did I propose that he should do?
I said I felt that there was only one way. Meet me. Give me the originals of all the letters. I had a way to return them to their senders. Along with that I would need all the contact information he could come up with about his clients – addresses, telephone, bank account numbers and locations. Enough so that when they realized how much damage we could do them they would feel compelled to back off.
Once I got all the ammunition I would need I would turn up in Havana personally and turn over the originals myself to Ramon’s list of disillusioned functionaries. Along with that I had a few ideas about how to keep them worried enough to leave us alone from now on.
Ramon was silent for some time. But what if the comrades refused to do a thing like this? he asked when he had decided to speak.
Then they would probably kill all of us, one by one. But that’s what they’ve obviously decided to do in any case. Let’s try and make it too expensive for them to think about.
Perhaps a minute passed. Ramon’s inflection when he did decide to respond was heavy, resigned. Where did I want to meet? he asked.
There is a Hilton Garden Inn on the main road to the raceway where Interstate 4 deadends at Interstate 95 just west of Daytona Beach. I had stayed over there during Bike Week a couple of times during a passing flirtation with a Harley toward the end of my teens. The motel was two-plus hours from Coral Gables and perhaps four from St. Pete, enough of a haul to discourage in-town surveillance. Anybody tracking our cars on the highway should be easy to spot.
I got there perhaps forty minutes before Ramon and settled into a chair in the lobby with a clear view of the entrance. That week the first real stint of insufferable heat was settling in, day after day, and everybody was scurrying from one air-conditioned refuge to the next. Ramon appeared in the kind of cord suit and hand-painted necktie I had not seen in Florida for years.
He walked in and looked around, but I wasn’t at all sure he recognized me. He looke
d a lot older than he had at Ricky’s wedding a few years earlier. His hair was thinning fast and he was permitting it to go to gray and beneath his eyes had developed the tell-tale pouches of a man for whom sleep didn’t come easily.
As I stood slowly and approached Ramon he did summon up that hard professional smile. “It has been too long a time,” he greeted me with. “Enrique tells me every time what is happening with your part of the family, and Annilita and I myself speak very often how we should just hop in the buggy and come see our Tampa relatives.”
“We’d like that,” I said. Ramon’s stilted, transliterated English struck me now as moving. Endearing.
We sat down; Ramon put his attaché case down so that it leaned against his chair. “All during the drive on the Interstate I think about what you say,” he opened. “The letters.” Ramon extruded his lower lip. “Maybe that works, I don’t know. But how do you bring the letters to Havana? I don’t think through the customs. The inspectors will just grab them, don’t you think?”
“I certainly wouldn’t carry them in with me,” I said. “I’ll have them there when the time is right.”
“Ah. The certitude of the young. When the time is right, si. Claro.” Ramon looked down, an expression between irony and resignation lighting up his pinched face. “But I can tell you do things sometimes by which I have been surprise. You or the father. You get what you are after.”
“What I am after here, Ramon, is putting together some kind of an arrangement following which your unhappy ex-clients in Havana don’t blow all our miserable asses to smithereens.” The vehemence of my own response startled me. I knew that I was bluffing to a certain extent; probably I was overcompensating. “This a dangerous fucking game, Ramon, and nobody in our group wants another round of tribal warfare, or whatever the hell this is.”
Ramon looked at me.
“You’re going to have a grandson pretty soon,” I pressed on. “We don’t want him looking over his shoulder until he’s ninety years old. We’re all going to have to take some chances. Your cover is blown, and our cover is blown, so let’s bring this thing to a head one way or another. I’m really not here to negotiate.”
Ramon continued to examine me, his brow drawn down, on the edge of surly. At that moment I thought I had overplayed it.
He stood up. I stood up. Ramon opened his attaché case and extracted a large, thick mailer. Still rigid with bruised machismo he handed it to me and headed toward the revolving door. A gusher of heat enveloped the lobby.
19
Making arrangements for Havana turned out to be – on the logistical level – a lot easier than I expected. In the post-Soviet austerity tourism was stressed; entry procedures for foreigners were comparatively lax – none of the groping and orifice-searching that plagues us in the States. No incoming ninety-one-year-old incontinent would have to worry about the authorities wringing out her dignity breeches before she got her shoes back on to make sure her overflow wasn’t combustible.
Little by little, as the Mas Canosa generation continued to age, the U.S. government began to relax its ruinous embargo. Interest groups, professional associations, could bloc-book and fly in directly and take advantage of the dollar as against the discredited peso. Like an antiquated leper colony, post-Cold-War Cuba was absorbing to scientists, economists in particular. Academic groups from the frozen north liked to collect in conference rooms and auditoriums around Havana; such groups rarely scheduled meetings into the late spring.
One did that year. The Global Round Table on Preemptive Debt Reduction had arranged to meet in Havana the first week of June, 2008. Its chairperson, Doctor Mary-Ellen Fondling, was somebody Dad once liked to kid around with during his apprenticeship in New Haven. One call and Dad had been penciled in to read a paper on Keynes. I would accompany him as his research assistant. There was even grant money.
The hard part now was to alert that killer’s row on Ramon’s list and strike the deal. A B.U. classmate of mine who had migrated to Miami and built a law practice that specialized in the thin flow of business litigation authorized between the States and Havana had access to computer screens designed to spell out who was who among the Maximum Leader’s favorites along with the last known contact information . It stood to reason that a number of the names and a lot of the locations Ramon had turned over to me were out of date. I’d have to find somebody savvy and connected enough around Havana to jump onto the island well ahead of both of us and make the bureaucratic rounds personally, track Ramon’s clients down and set up a group meeting.
* * *
When I had hinted to Cedric Bougalas that we would be working together to deal with the Cuban problem I had been spouting bravado, misdirection. But now I realized I really didn’t know anybody else with savoir faire enough to work both sides of the street in that ramshackle but still very dangerous dictatorship.
As things developed, I was able to bypass the twit at the front desk and get through to Bougalas in mid-May and arrange to meet at a seafood restaurant in Palmetto, The Crab Trap, just beyond the Skyway Bridge on the highway to Brandenton. We got together over dinner one stormy Thursday evening.
Bougalas’ henchwoman, Olivia Broulee, was very much along. The Trap was popular, it didn’t take reservations, but we got there early enough to pick up an out-of-the-way booth for three. The place was clamorous with the initial sitting of the evening, pouring down rum-based cocktails and feeding, heavily. Cedric Bougalas was obviously pleased that I had turned to him: he oozed complacency, a compound of the kittenish and the sinister.
Olivia was all attention. She wore a loose, low-cut, off-the-shoulder dress that did not leave a lot of questions about her mature poitrin. Whenever she leaned forward – which she arranged to do, several times, always in my direction -- every question was answered.
To start things off we sipped a round of mimosas. “I realize you have a lot on your plate,” Bougalas opened, “but before we tackle anything substantive I want to emphasize how—how incomplete we both felt when you turned on your heel and bolted our office last month. Chewed us out, made very clear what dummies you had played us for, and vamoosed. We just sat there looking at each other. And Olivia here is not the sort of female whose animal spirits you want to depress .”
“Probably I was rude,” I admitted. “We were under attack. I needed to sort things out.”
“But now you’re under the impression you have the upper hand.”
“I think there might be a way to relieve ourselves of this nightmare.”
An aproned waiter laid out a complementary serving of cheese-stuffed portabello mushrooms and waited for our entrée orders. I selected the rock lobster tails, Bougalas took the crab au gratin, and Olivia decided on the alligator bites.
“You are an adventurous eater,” I said. “Alligator?”
“They are extremely tasty,” Olivia assured me in her saucy Alsatian inflection. “Gamey, and a bischen oily sometimes, but always very flavor full.”
‘Still – alligator?”
“It’s worse than you think,” Bougalas said, about to rock with laughter. “These people are attempting to remain genteel, but all over Creole country this dish is advertised as alligator balls. And why not? People eat hanger steaks and nobody thinks anything about that. Aren’t we primarily carnivores?”
“I’m just waiting around to find out what Olivia is having for dessert,” I said. That definitely broke the ice.
Once the waiter finished laying out the main course I got down to business. As I had indicated in Sarasota, our family had been attacked. There had been a follow-up attack earlier in the month. There was a lot of evidence that all this was instigated by highly placed individuals in the Cuban government who were worried as hell because we were aware of the extent of their trafficking, through Ramon Perez y Cruz – Bougalas’ other recent employer, I couldn’t resist adding – in valuables stolen from the bourgeoisie at the time of the revolution. These valuables were now supposedly awaiting the functionaries
who had pilfered them in banks all around Europe and the Caribbean.
We knew who was corrupt. We knew where the loot was stored. We had acquired the originals of every piece of correspondence with our mutual acquaintance, Ramon Perez y Cruz, as well as receipted vouchers and deposit numbers from quite an array of foreign banks. The governments on every side of this betrayal of trust in the Revolution were guaranteed to clamp down swiftly if they got evidence of any of this. It had the makings of an international media circus. Nobody involved would survive the scandal.
“That’s not too far from what we surmised,” Bougalas acknowledged, suppressing a belch. “Those hypocritical greasers down there are without a doubt already moistening their knickers at the prospect of any of this getting out. Where do you see Strategic Opportunities in all this?”
“It’s not that complicated. We want a truce. You might send somebody like Olivia, who you say knows her way around Havana and speaks the language. Let her hand-deliver our assurances to any of Ramon’s old clients that we have their letters and all that paperwork from the depositories. That we would like to trade. After that we make an appearance in Cuba and give them their correspondence back, and they forget about us. “
“That sounds like a lot of assumptions,” Bougalas said. “But what the hey, nothing is totally out of the question. How many on the list?”
“I researched that. Fourteen over the years, but three have died. Two in front of firing squads. Three women, eight men left. A couple of the men have made it all the way to the top – deputies, elected to the Council of State, just under Raul. One is still a delegate to the People’s Assembly, three work in the agricultural bureaucracy, and two in the office that watches over the media on the island. Such as they are. The rest appear to be retired. I managed to track down recent addresses.”