‘And her name?’
‘Angelina,’ I said reticently. I knew what was happening. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. Hernández was soliciting all the information he could with the appearance of concerned interest.
‘Such a tragic thing, Mr Perez . . . my condolences.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and turned back to my magazine.
‘And I understand that you have now come here to stay in Cuba?’
‘Perhaps, I am not sure. After the death of my wife I wanted to be away from America for a while. Such a thing is very difficult to come to terms with, and I felt it would be better for my son to be away from any reminders.’
‘Of course,’ Hernández said. ‘If it were me I am sure I would feel much the same way.’
I turned and looked out of the window. I could feel beads of sweat breaking beneath my hairline.
‘And you came in with a visitor’s visa or as a Cuban national?’ Hernández asked.
‘As a national,’ I said. ‘My father was born here in Cuba and I possess Cuban national status as a hereditary right.’
‘Indeed you would, sir,’ he said. ‘Indeed you would.’ He looked at me askance, and then he leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs. ‘I have one question,’ he said, and he smiled like a man setting a trap for something he knew was defenseless.
I looked back at him and attempted to show nothing of any meaning in my expression.
‘I understand that you are looking at the possibility of engaging in this business with Raúl Brito?’
‘We had discussed such a thing,’ I replied.
‘But the details of the agreement have not been worked out?’
I shook my head.
‘It is not something you wish to do? You have changed your mind perhaps?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I have not yet made time to attend to the paperwork.’
Hernández nodded his head. ‘So I understand. I happened to be speaking with the lawyer assigned to this matter, a Mr Jorge Delgado, and he told me you have failed to make both of the appointments he has arranged with Mr Brito and yourself to conclude the documentation.’
‘That is correct,’ I said. ‘I have been very busy with my son’s schooling.’
‘But you are not so busy now,’ he replied, and once again he smiled his reptilian smile and looked at me through slitted eyes.
‘I am not,’ I said, for there was nothing I could say in my defense.
‘Then I think it would be a good idea, if only for Mr Brito’s peace of mind, that we conclude this matter this afternoon. I think it would be fair, in order to further prevent any inconvenience for both him and Mr Delgado, that we go to your house now, collect your identification papers, and sign these partnership agreements.’
I smiled. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I think that would be an excellent idea.’
Hernández rose immediately. He looked very pleased with himself. I gathered my coat, threw it around my shoulders, and with a sense of ease and lack of concern I showed Hernández to the door and followed him out into the street.
We conversed as we walked, of nothing consequential – the weather, the shameful lack of care shown to some of Havana’s more historic and beautiful buildings – and it was little more than fifteen minutes before we reached Avenida Belgica and the house I had rented.
The thoughts that passed through my mind were those thoughts one always encountered solely in hindsight. I had considered entering Cuba under an assumed name even as I left America, but I was so caught up in the necessity to leave that country, so unwilling to engage in any formal investigation of the murder of my wife and daughter, I had fled as I was. Of course I possessed a Cuban passport, and it was in my birth name, but that passport had been purchased for seven hundred and fifty dollars some years before from a skilled counterfeiter. In America I had carried no social security number, no formal identification, and the customs and immigration people at the Havana docks had no more than glanced at my documents as I entered. Leaving would have been different, a far more difficult enterprise altogether, as I knew from experience with my father so many years before. The passport I would show Hernández would be identified as a forgery under scrutiny, and that was a road I did not wish to travel.
I welcomed Hernández to my home graciously. I had prayed that Claudia and Victor would be away, and my prayer was answered. The house was still and quiet. I showed Hernández through to the main room of the house where Victor’s study books were spread across the table, the room where he would sit with his tutor and learn everything he could of the world. I asked Hernández if he wanted a drink, and he accepted.
I walked back through to the kitchen and started to make some coffee. He called out questions through the half-open doorway. How long had I been living in America? What business had I been involved in there? Did I have any other living family here in Cuba? I answered tactfully, diplomatically, but I realized even as I was speaking that it made no difference what I said to him now.
I returned to the room bearing a tray, upon it two cups of fresh coffee. I asked Hernández if he wished for some warm bread, perhaps some cheese with his coffee. He declined politely, took his coffee, and then asked if he could see my papers.
I smiled, and said, ‘Of course, Señor Hernández’, and once again left the room.
When I returned he was sitting quite relaxed in the chair. In his hand he held his coffee cup.
I walked towards him, my forged passport in my hand, and when he reached out to take it from me, as he closed his fingers around it, I lunged forward suddenly and buried a steak knife through his right eye. I jerked the knife upward and then down. He seemed transfixed, his other eye looking at me with such an expression of surprise I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing, and it was almost as if Hernández smiled, as if this was some kind of practical joke, as if I had somehow managed to create the image of his impending death, and then would suddenly retrieve him from his fate. The smile did not last long. A second, perhaps two, and possibly it was nothing more than some involuntary reflexive action taken by the muscles in his face as they fought the intrusion of the blade. Perhaps, and this may be closer to the truth, it was nothing but my own imagination.
Hernández leaned forward as I released the handle of the knife. His hands clawed at his face, almost out of control, and then he rolled forward off the chair onto his knees.
There was little blood, almost none at all, and for this I was grateful. Visions of Carryl Chevron and the wide lake of blood that had pooled out of his body and across a dirty linoleum kitchen floor a thousand years before came back to me. I stepped away. I watched Hernández struggle with the pain, the shock, the agonizing disruption of all bodily functions, and then from his throat came a stuttering feral snarl like some wounded animal in its final death throes. And then he was still. I leaned over his body. With my right hand I pressed against the side of his throat. There was nothing. Constabulare Hernández was dead.
I removed my tie and jacket. I rolled up my sleeves. I dragged his body towards the edge of the rug and then I proceeded to roll him sideways until he centered it. I put my foot on his chest and used both hands to withdraw the knife. The muscles had already tightened around it and it took two or three sharp tugs to remove it. I walked to the kitchen, and with the remainder of the hot coffee I washed the knife thoroughly. I took a bottle of cleansing bleach from the cupboard, half-filled the sink with water, emptied the cleanser into it and then submerged the knife. I walked back to the main room and looked down at the cocooned body that lay there.
I was alert for any sound from the front of the house, of Claudia and Victor returning. I had no idea where they had gone or when they would return. I contemplated the situation I had created. A body does not disappear. A body is a body. One hundred and sixty pounds of deadweight that will stay one hundred and sixty pounds of deadweight until it becomes something else. The house had no furnace, there was no rapid passage to the sea and, unlike
Louisiana, there were no nearby everglades where such a body could be submerged and forgotten in moments.
I sat down where Hernández had been seated. The chair was still slightly warm from where he had relaxed. Through the end of the rug I could see the side of his face, the single open eye that seemed to look at me askance. I leaned down and closed it. He still seemed accusatory and suspicious even in death.
‘You should not have been so interested in business that did not concern you,’ I told him, and ‘You should have attended to matters of greater significance and importance than this. This is your penalty for being too concerned with the details of other people’s lives.’ I considered the perfect irony of the situation. After all the things that had been done, after so many lives had been abruptly terminated by my hand, this man had been perhaps closer than anyone to discovering who I was, and all because of some paperwork.
Having reprimanded him, in and of itself nothing more than a poor explanation to myself of why he was now dead, I was still faced with the grim reality: on my front room floor, wrapped in a rug, was a dead constabulare, and until I did something decisive he was going nowhere.
Fifteen minutes later I got up from the chair and started pacing the room. I walked around Hernández clockwise, and then anti-clockwise. At one point I stopped near his head, leant down, peered into the hole where his face lay and said ‘¡Hijos de puta!’ with such venom that spittle flew from my lips.
I felt vexed, angered by his silent presence, and though my first impulse was to take something heavy – perhaps a hammer, or a large stone – and beat his head to a useless pulp, I restrained myself. This matter was a problem enough without further complications to clean up. And then in back of that reaction was a sense of regret, a narrow sense of guilt perhaps. I felt a momentary panic as I considered the possibility that Victor might return and see a dead body in his house. I was not afraid for myself, but when I thought of my son my viewpoint changed. I wanted the past behind me, and yet here, even as I stood over the dead body of the constabulare, the past was making its insidious way towards the present.
I glanced at my watch. It was a little after two. I went out to the front and backed my car up as close to the house as it would go without attracting too much attention. I unlocked the trunk and propped it open with the edge of a blanket inside. I returned to the house, and from a strong cord I found in a drawer in the kitchen I cut two lengths which I used to tie up each end of the rug. Hernández was not as heavy as I had imagined, and I was surprised at the ease with which I hefted him up onto my shoulder. I stood within the doorway of the house until I was certain there were no passers-by or people standing on their porches, and then I hurried across the few feet of pathway, used my knee to push the trunk upwards, and lowered Hernández’s body into it. I had to bend Hernández at the knees to get him inside, and then I slammed the trunk shut and locked it. I drove the car down to the edge of the road and parked it once again. Visions of Carryl Chevron came back to haunt me. I remembered how the death of the salesman had started me along this path, how I had been a similar age to Victor, and the sense of coincidence was almost painful.
Claudia and Victor returned no more than half an hour later. I greeted them warmly. I had taken the steak knife from the sink, dried it carefully and replaced it in the drawer. I had warmed some bread, sliced some dried meat and eaten a sandwich. I felt level-headed, altogether in control, and while Claudia prepared our evening meal I sat with Victor in the main room and listened as he read to me.
Later, evening closing up against us, I asked Claudia if she would be willing to stay with Victor for an extra hour or so as I had a small errand to run. Claudia was more than happy to facilitate me. I believed she was lonely perhaps, her husband having been dead more than three years, and the time she spent with Victor, the hours she spent in my house catering to us, seemed to give her purpose and respite from a world she felt no great desire to long inhabit. I took my car keys; I left the house. I let the handbrake off and rolled the car down to the end of the street before I started the engine. I did not turn on the headlights until I reached the junction at the end, and then I took a route north along Belgica onto Avenida de las Misiones. I headed out towards the coast, to the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta, and down there, down along the edge of the Canal de Entrada, I pulled the car to a halt above a dark gully that climbed down to the edge of the water.
From the trunk of the car I lifted the rug with Hernández’s body inside and carried it to the edge of the high verge. I rolled him out from within, folded the rug and returned it to the trunk. I took a small can of gasoline from the back of the car and doused Hernández’s body liberally. I stepped back and struck a match. I watched the flame for a moment, like a single candle against the night sky, and then I tossed it towards his body. The body ignited with a sudden whoosh, and flames swelled upwards. I was panicked for a moment. Such a fire would be visible all along the coastline, but by then it was too late. I hurried back to the car, started the engine without illuminating the headlights, turned around, and headed back to the road. At the top of the incline, perhaps three or four hundred yards from the fire, I killed the engine and sat watching for a while. No-one came. There was no sudden alarm raised. It was as if the eyes of Cuba were turned the other way. How long the body burned I did not know. After thirty or forty minutes I started the engine once again and drove away. I was half a mile from Hernández before I switched on the headlights, and by the time I reached the house I had almost forgotten the man existed.
It was three days before Hernández’s body was finally identified, more than a week before another constabulare came to Raúl Brito’s shop to ask if Hernández had been seen there in the previous days. Raúl, forgetful at the best of times, said he could not recall the last time he had seen the man, and I acted patient and yet suitably ignorant of anything but books and cigars. I had already spoken with Raúl, told him that all necessary documentation had been signed, and had given him the first thousand dollars of the ten he was due. Raúl did not question me, I was his friend, and there was nothing requiring further discussion. I heard mention of Luis Hernández once more in the subsequent week, and then there was nothing. He seemed to have been a man of little consequence in life, and equally lacked consequence in death. The lawyer never contacted Raúl Brito regarding any incomplete documentation and the matter became unimportant. Each month for the subsequent nine months I gave Raúl a further thousand dollars, and Raúl – he of the old ways – never felt any need to consign the money to a bank. I was a partner in spirit, not on paper, and this arrangement served me well.
For three years my life with Victor became a simple and uncomplicated matter of moving from one day to the next with merely the darkness providing the seam between. He was schooled well, and by the time he reached thirteen years of age I could see in him the wide-eyed longing for the world that had been present as a young child. He asked me of America frequently, of the things I had done, the life I had lived in the New World. I lied to him in small matter-of-fact ways. It seemed unnecessary to tell him anything he would not have been able to comprehend, and thus he heard what he wanted to hear and he imagined the rest. The better part of a year later, as we entered the fall of 1996 and I approached my fifty-ninth birthday, Victor came to me one evening and sat facing me in the kitchen. Claudia had long since left for the night, and the house was quiet. He brought with him a book filled with pictures, landscapes and night-time horizons, and he showed me the towering image of Manhattan against a brilliant sunset.
‘You have been to New York,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper.
‘I have,’ I said. ‘I lived in New York for some years.’
‘Before I was born.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, before you were born. I left New York in the spring of 1982 and you weren’t born until the summer, and by then we had moved to Los Angeles.’
‘And you met Mommy there?’
‘Yes, I met her at the beginning of 197
4 and we were married in May of 1977.’
‘Where did you live?’
I smiled. I could remember the sounds and smells, the faces of the people in the street. I remembered almost word for word the discussion that was held regarding a man called Jimmy Hoffa.
‘We lived in a small suburb of New York called Little Italy.’
‘Italy? Like the country?’
‘Yes, like the country.’
Victor was quiet for a time, pensive almost, and then he looked up at me and said, ‘What was it like, Daddy . . . what was America like? I find it hard to remember much at all.’
I leaned forward and took his hand. I held it as if it was my lifeline to something precious and eternal. ‘It is a vast country,’ I said. ‘Many, many, many times larger than Cuba. Cuba is just a small island near the coast of America. There are millions of people, tall buildings, wide streets, shopping malls larger than the Old Wall Ruins. Sometimes it is difficult to walk down the street because there are so many people coming the opposite way. It has everything good and everything bad that can be found in the world.’
‘Bad?’ Victor asked. ‘Like what?’
I shook my head. ‘Sometimes it is difficult to understand why men do the things they do. Some men kill, some men take drugs and steal other people’s property. Some men, out of desperation perhaps, feel that this is the only way they can live their lives. But against that it is possible for anyone to be happy in America. There is enough of everything to satisfy, and if a man works hard and keeps his word the whole world can be his.’
Victor was quiet again. I watched his face. I saw the light in his eyes, and I knew what he would say.
‘I want to go back to America, Daddy. I really want to go back to America and see it. I want to go to New York and see the buildings and the people. Could we do that?’
I sighed and shook my head. ‘I am old, Victor. I have come here to live the rest of my life. You are young, and when I am gone there will be all the time you need to see America . . . all the time you need to go anywhere you want in the world, and you won’t have your old father slowing you down.’
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