by Burton Hersh
“But even if you bring off a thing like that,” Bougalas asked, “How will you enforce it? You know, these garlic mashed potatoes are tremendously good. Do you think they’d bring me another serving?”
“I assume it would be self-enforcing. The ones that agreed to the standoff wouldn’t want to compromise themselves further by going after us. They’d have to keep an eye on the others. If there was trouble – and I would stress this in Havana – any of us that survived and/or friends they would never identify in time would get the facts into the public domain in a hellova hurry.”
“Again,” Bougalas said; he was signaling the waiter. “Olivia slips into Cuba and rounds all these people up. Then?”
“My father and I will be at the hoary old Hotel Nacional at a sort of convention on the island the weekend of June 8. We’ll book some sort of room where we can talk directly to everybody involved. If Olivia would bring them in, and translate wherever that is necessary, we’ll take care of the rest. I hope we will. We’ll reserve a room for her.”
The waiter made it to the table. “I don’t suppose there would be one last serving of these delectable potatoes left in the kitchen for a wounded old combat veteran like myself,” Bougalas wanted to know. The waiter nodded, and disappeared.
“Care for more potatoes?” Bougalas asked Olivia.
“I believe, no.”
“How are the alligator balls?” I asked.
“Quite rich,” Olivia said, and bestowed on me the mildest of smiles. “In places, stringy. I think they need to marinate them perhaps a little bit longer. Still, the idea is entzuckend.” She examined Bougalas for a moment. “What about the money?”
“Women!” Bougalas erupted. “Forever preoccupied with animal needs! Narcissists every blooming one of them.” He turned in his chair to confront me, full-face. “Let us say fifty thousand dollars.”
“That could happen,” I said. “Half shortly, half afterwards?”
Bougalas managed to look stricken. “Do I detect an element of mistrust?”
“At least an element.”
“You’re not an easy man to do business with,” Bougalas said. “I had an afterthought. Something to sweeten the deal. What if you were to turn over to my associate here and myself the overseas banking locations and account numbers of the Comrades who are already dead? Perhaps the firing-squad victims.”
“So you could con your way into those safe deposit boxes, and pretty soon their survivors are hunting us down? Get serious. What did my law-school pals from Chelsea say: ‘Don’t make me laugh, my lips are chapped.’”
“I think you spent a little too long in law school, lad,” Bougalas said. “It has warped your relationships with your fellow man.”
“It’s worse than you think,” I said. Outside, the rainstorm was pounding against the low metal roof above our heads. “It’s starting to pour,” I said. “And here we are with three months at least to go before the hurricane season.”
“Let’s not invite catastrophe,” Bougalas said He was finishing the potatoes.
Perhaps a half hour later, when we finally left, it was really coming down. We had to splash all the way through the parking lot to make it to our cars.
20
When we arrived to board our flight to Havana on June 6, Dad and I discovered that our fellow members of The Global Round Table on Preemptive Debt Reduction took up most of the American Airlines charter. Which was just as well, because the dozen or so Cubans on American Eagle Flight 17 needed every leftover inch of space -- I spotted several microwave ovens still in their discount-house cartons, many unidentifiable items in shrink-wrapped packaging, a half-a-dozen Queen Size blankets stuffed into one garbage bag, a duffel so packed with canned goods it took two Cuban heavies to chivvy it into an overhead rack, a cage with parrots, canaries and something that looked like a Plymouth Rock hen which one extremely swarthy and rotund traveler cradled on her lap. I have no idea what made it in the baggage compartment.
I had assumed it would be foolhardy to carry that precious trove of letters from Ramon’s safe into Cuba myself. Both Dad and I would have to get by with vestigial high-school Spanish at best to explain away anything the inspectors turned up while we were processing through customs. Still, when our little charter banged onto the crumbling runway of the Jose Marti International Airport outside Havana I began to wonder whether I had been too apprehensive. Emerging from that airless cabin – which, after an hour and a half, stank overpoweringly of chicken shit -- our delegation was barely questioned. Nobody ransacked the bags. The languid airport security clerks showed very little interest in our passports. We all trudged directly onto the big air-conditioned bus in front of a nostalgic billboard of Che Guevara and another of George W. Bush subtitled Terrorista! We were on our way to the hotel in fifteen minutes.
The Hotel Nacional de Cuba, where all The Global Round Table members would be staying and where our colloquia were booked in conference rooms, is itself a kind of massive cultural artifact, a showplace for the furtive nostalgia even many Castro-era Cubans nurture for the disappearing past. Crowned by its Iberian bell towers, after more than eighty years the Nacional conveys a kind of soiled dignity all its own, a sprawling high-rise layer-cake in its own park that overhangs the swarming pedestrian life along the Malecon and affords guests lucky enough to book rooms on the water side unbroken exposure to the Straits of Florida.
The Nacional opened up for business in 1930 and immediately attracted an American clientele that knew what it liked. Hollywood hard cases consorted with Joe Kennedy and his feckless son Jack here, the Mob held Commission meetings to welcome Lucky Luciano back from exile in Italy – Frank Sinatra sang – and agree on Bugsy Siegel’s execution. Meyer Lansky oversaw the Casino. Until Castro took over, the susceptible flocked to Havana to partake of what Graham Greene later characterized as the “louche atmosphere” of the capital, “the brothel life, the roulette in every hotel…I liked the idea that one could obtain anything at will, whether drugs, women or goats….”
By June of 2008 goats were hard to find around the Nacional, but there were plenty of suggestions that even the sternest revolutionaries were not above a secret hankering for the old indulgent days. Incapacitated by diverticulitus, Fidel had handed off the presidency to Raul a few months earlier, but as long as el Caballo was conscious there was no doubt on the street about where the power lay. The Nacional was a relic, a museum of capitalist temptations with which to tempt the tourists. Huge posters of George Raft and Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth were plastered up around the walls of the Cafeteria el Rincon del Cine in the basement of the Nacional. Movies of the era ran non-stop on the giant TV screen.
Dad and I identified the Cafeteria immediately as a potential hideout between – in my case, usually, during – the jargon-choked presentations the academics in our party were so eager to share with their fellow Round Table conscripts. Several times even Dad sat one or another of the papers out. Once Mary-Ellen Fondling herself sneaked out after she had made the introduction and found us in the Cafeteria.
“I heard Maxine give an earlier version of that paper in Albuquerque,” Mary-Ellen offered by way of apology as she seated herself at our table. “They’ll have to forgive me.” She gave Dad what I suspect she thought as a very wicked look. “I’ve gotten a lot better at forgiving myself since my divorce from Stanley,” she wanted Dad to know.
Mary-Ellen was a pleasant looking woman in her fifties, perhaps a little bit fully packed but assertively in the game. When she scurried off to introduce the next speaker I asked how long Dad had known Mary-Ellen.
“I was her tutor at Yale.”
“At least that. How was she?”
“How was she?” Dad gave me a mischievous look. “Pretty good shtupping, actually. Except that afterwards there were always the tears. She came from serious Irish-Catholic stock, the O’Shaughnessys. The day your mother came along that was all over. Things got a lot more cheerful.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” I sa
id. It was eleven AM. Just before I met Dad downstairs I had found Olivia Broulee in the lobby as prearranged and pinned down our timetable. Olivia had on a perfectly tailored black pants-suit and a velvet cloche trimmed with what might have been woodcock feathers. I was beginning to catch on that for Olivia, as with Sakwa, feathers were very important.
Olivia had been able to locate and alert nine of the eleven survivors on Ramon’s list and all but one agreed to meet Olivia at the hotel entrance at three, when she would conduct the party directly to one of the smaller conference rooms. I had booked Seminario Casa C. “The ones I talked with have told me they can deal with the others.” Olivia said. “I think you have them entirely frightened.”
“That’s fine with me. I just don’t want any State Seguridad types busting in when we make the trade.”
“Have you got the letters?”
“They’re on the way,” I assured Olivia. They had better be, I couldn’t help thinking.
“I got the room across from you,” Olivia put in, brightly. “From you and der Vati.”
“How did you work that out?”
“How? Liebling, I make a lot of business in this hotel.”
By 2:30 I was back in the lobby, flopped into one of the overstuffed chairs within sight of the main entrance. The lobby was enormous, one grouping after another of badly faded art deco furniture. Stupendous overhanging chandeliers. I watched the door for a couple of minutes and then headed – mostly for something to do, I was very nervous – toward the Gentlemen’s Lavatory somewhere behind the lines forming at the check-in desk. I made my way by a couple arguing and a nun in a wheelchair and a puffy-faced gaffer in a baseball cap with grizzled hair flowing down his back and Koolray sunglasses and a prosthetic limb of some kind clamped on to replace his left calf, which stuck out sideways while he dozed. Just as I was passing I heard the old man attempting to clatter to his feet and begin stumping along behind me. I pushed through into the Men’s Room and, just as I had begun to organize myself, the gaffer staggered into the urinal stall next to the one I was using and grabbed the intervening marble barrier for balance.
“Are you OK?” I said. “Can I help? Ayudar?”
“What did you have in mind?” the gaffer wanted to know, popping something that looked like a pair of small foam-rubber water wings out of his mouth. “I catch you anywhere near my parts and you are in for heap big trouble, white boy. Is this the sort of behavior you indulge in on foreign soil? I’ve heard about people like you. Caucasians, mostly.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Sonny! I was just about to run down to the Malecon and jump into the sea. You’ve got the letters and the rest of that stuff?”
“I said you’d have everything by 2:45, and here we are. Do you always transact business with your pecker out?”
“Lately I seem to. It just works better that way.”
“I’m having second thoughts about you. You may not be brother-in-law material after all.”
I took the plump dark postal mailer Sonny had extended to me and sighed, heavily. I was at the same time relieved to have the letters and banking confirmations as promised and petrified that this entire transaction could go sour in a New York minute and there I would be, implicated by enough evidence for a dozen lifetimes in one of Castro’s blackest lockups.
“I’m still very high on you,” I assured Sonny. “What are you going to do now?”
“Stick around. Catch up on my sleep in the lobby. If you aren’t back down here by four I’ll figure out what else I have to do to make sure you get out of this piss-hole in one piece.”
“That wasn’t part of the arrangement,” I said. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for the father of my newest nephew. Or niece. Even Linda isn’t sure yet.”
“What?”
“Obviously the last to know. And you’re surprised? Didn’t they teach sex education at B. U. Law School? If you will please zip up I will be on my way. The caballero that just walked in is eyeing you. He may be cruising for a date, and how could I explain your motives?” Sonny slipped the water wings back into place, adjusted his cap, and hobbled towards the door.
My head buzzing, I made my way across the lobby and headed up to our room on the fourteenth floor for ten minutes to catch my breath. I tucked Sonny’s envelope into a document case and stretched out on one of the beds. I was too tense. I got up and went back out and summoned the elevator.
Back in the lobby I identified the correct side corridor and spotted Seminario Casa C. For most of the previous hour Dad had been holding forth in front of the Roundtable group about Keynes and countercyclical public spending during the Great Depression. But he had shut the questions off early and joined me at three precisely.
For five minutes nobody else showed up, which was unnerving in and of itself. Seminario Casa C was truly a dump – the walls were stained with mold streaks the color of black tea and much of the plaster ceiling had come away in big shags that revealed the underlying wooden lath. The air was dusty, a dry putrescence from inside the walls.
Havana itself was like that, I had been reading. Twenty-three percent of the housing, including the atrocious high-rises the Soviets had contributed, was in constant danger of collapse. Houses were falling in on themselves every day, brought down as often as not by an afternoon rainstorm, crushing inhabitants and piling up as rubble for months or years before the authorities got around to clearing the sites.
They didn’t need that many parking lots for the cranky Ladas and vintage 1958 Pontiacs that survived on the streets. Bicycle rickshaws were a commonplace. Everything was controlled, forbidden for the most part. Citizens, hungry all the time on their reduced quotas of rice and beans, were living in a kind of time-lapse demolition site. Meat was so precious that rumors were going around that used condoms got mixed with the sauce to thicken pizzas as they were sliding into the oven.
Around ten minutes after three we heard the delegation approaching in the hall. Olivia conducted them in. Seven had actually showed up. Two of the men -- I had to assume that they were the deputies to the State Council – were way up in their seventies or early eighties, both dressed in the olive-drab fatigues of the revolutionary militia, both with the emblems of rank and full if scraggy beards and glittery eyes and capped teeth that marked Fidel himself. That should have tipped me off that this was not going to be that simple, but I was elated that we had gotten this far. The other five looked like ordinary Cubans – the three men in slacks and open shirts and the women in middle-class skirts and unadorned rayon blouses, very buttoned-up.
Olivia introduced them all; it was confusing at first to keep their names straight. One of the women, a short, wiry editor from the staff of the official daily Granma with a stupefying wen underneath one eye, stepped forward and announced immediately that she commanded enough English to interpret for the group. She came over as inherently disapproving, her lacquered hair pulled back in a tight bun. One of the younger arrivals, a moon-faced civilian named Lopez whom Olivia identified as the delegate to the People’s Assembly, positioned himself above the short woman’s shoulder. Her commissar, I suspected, proctoring every word.
In simplified but coherent Spanish Olivia laid out what case we had. We were, above all, innocent parties. It happened that a daughter of el Senor Landau here had married into a family of Cuban immigrants in Florida. An influential member of that family, Ramon Perez y Cruz, seems to have developed a professional sideline by means of which he was able to help transfer certain—certain assets that individuals associated with the regime had collected to depositories abroad for safekeeping. There was correspondence involved, bank vouchers. Paperwork which could prove confusing to the authorities in Havana.
By accident Senor Landau came into possession of this information. Purely by accident. We have now been made aware that individuals implicated in these transfers – people in this room, let us remain honest – people here discovered the situation and were so alarm
ed that incidents of violence have now occurred in the United States. Against the families of Senor Landau and Senor Ramon. We wish these incidents to stop.
We have come here to give to you the evidence we have. We wish the matter to end with this meeting. We ask nothing – no payback, no remuneration. You take the evidence, the letters, the deposit slips…. Whatever you do after that we do not wish to discover. You are people of honor. We require only the word of all here who made use of Senor Ramon’s services that when you take these papers back we will disappear from any future transactions. That you will ignore us after this.
Olivia stopped talking. I had the documents from Sonny in the zip-up briefcase under my arm. I expected the editor to respond for the group, but instead a kind of low-grade tumult broke out. There was obviously disagreement, fierce at moments, too frantic for me to begin to comprehend.
“Perhaps we step out in the hall,” Olivia said, letting her voice rise. But the exchange was much too intense for any of them to respond. “We go into the hall,” Olivia said, very loud. Dad and I followed her out.
Outside in the corridor stood two burly specimens in checked shirts I had not been aware of earlier, probably plainclothes policemen. “This wasn’t part of the deal, as I understood the deal,” I complained immediately to Olivia.
“I did not understand this either,” Olivia said. Dad and I walked down the hall a few steps, and Olivia followed. She slipped into place to where we could shield her from the stares of the policemen and opened her copious handbag.
“A Walther with a silencer!” Dad burst out, then covered his mouth.
“By me I have also a concussion grenade,” Olivia said. “Wenn this goes too bad stay by me near the door, and I will roll it in there under the window and we go blitzschnell through to the back. We have a van waiting. To a private aircraft.”
“You guys are full service providers,” Dad mumbled. The cops in the hall had started to watch us.