“All the time we’re digging in the basement and the sea was digging for us,” Hans-Peter Schneider said. “Gott mit uns! It could hold a ton of gold. Who knows about it?”
“Nobody, señor. The other gardeners were in the front yard. The old man is an ignorant bracero.”
“Maybe it is you who is ignorant—or is it whom is ignorant? I can never remember English grammar. I’ve seen that old fart before. Get him. Send the rest of the gardeners home. Tell the old one we need him to help us. Say we’ll give him a ride.”
Out on the bay the loud crab boat was working back up the trapline, dumping rebaited traps now, the two deckhands throwing a trap overboard about every twenty yards in a steady rhythm.
In the wheelhouse Captain Marco fixed his binoculars on the garden of the Escobar house. He saw Hans-Peter and the others in the waterside garden, and he saw Felix and Bobby Joe bring Benito to join them.
“Rodrigo, drop the trapline,” Captain Marco said. He pointed with his chin. “Mayday, muchachos. Strap up. We go in hot if Benito has to jump.”
On the patio, Benito stood in front of Hans-Peter.
“I know you,” Hans-Peter said.
“Old men look pretty much alike, señor. I do not remember you.”
“Take off your shirt.”
Benito did not comply. It took Bobby Joe, Umberto and Felix to get his arms behind him and bind his wrists with two zip ties.
“Take his shirt off,” Hans-Peter said.
Felix and Umberto tore the shirt off Benito, pulled it out from under the straps of his overalls. Bobby Joe patted Benito’s pockets but not his chest. He poked Benito on the faint tattoo still visible on his rib cage. The tattoo was a bell suspended from a fishhook.
Hans-Peter nodded. “Ten Bells thief school.”
“Some foolishness from my youth. You can see it has faded away.”
“Felix, he belongs to Don Ernesto,” Hans-Peter said. “You hired him, Felix. You and Bobby Joe can take him for a ride.”
From the crab boat, Captain Marco saw Benito’s shirt torn off, saw Bobby Joe’s gun. He took out his cell phone.
A half mile up the street Antonio in his pool truck answered the call.
“Antonio, one of Schneider’s pendejos pulled on Benito. We’ve got to get him out. I’m going to the dock and cover him if he jumps in the water.”
“I’m going after him,” Antonio said.
Antonio pushed the old truck hard. It was not far to the bus stop where weary gardeners and maids were waiting to start the slow ride home. Antonio got out. Several of the people waiting greeted him by name.
“Transporte libre!” Antonio called to them. “Estoy celebrando! Voy a transportar cada uno de ustedes a su casa! A ride directly to your house! No dinero, no transfer. Vengan conmigo! Vamos a parar en Yumbo Buffet. Podemos comer todo lo que queremos! Plus takeout! A free ride to your doorstep. All you can eat on the way! Todo libre!!”
“Antonio, no manejas borracho?”
“No, no. I have not had a drink. I invite you to smell me. Come on!”
The bus riders piled into Antonio’s pool service truck. Two in the cab with him and three in back.
“First we pick up one more,” Antonio said.
Cari Mora was upstairs in the house with a six-pack of toilet paper and some lightbulbs. The bedrooms were a piggish mess, towels and a copy of Juggs Triple DDD skin magazine on the bathroom floor. The one made-up bed had some lewd comic books and the five parts of a field-stripped AK-47 scattered on it. A lube can oozed onto the coverlet beside two loaded banana clips. She picked up the lube can with two fingers and put it on the dresser.
Her telephone buzzed. Antonio calling.
“Cari, take cover. Get ready to bail. They got a gun on Benito. I’m coming after him. Marco’s coming to the dock.” He was gone.
Cari looked down from the high bedroom window. She saw Bobby Joe poke Benito with the muzzle of a pistol.
Slap slap click click—Cari put the gas tube on the AK-47.
When she pushed the hammer down with her thumb and held it out of the way with the trigger, the bolt and bolt carrier slid in easily, then the wavy recoil spring and dust cover. Function check. She inserted a banana clip and jacked a round into the chamber.
Locked and loaded in forty-five seconds. She went back to the window. The front sight of the rifle covered the bump on the back of Bobby Joe’s head. The front gate was swinging open.
As Antonio drove in the gate he called Captain Marco on the boat, put his phone on speaker and dropped the phone into his breast pocket.
Antonio could see Umberto putting three concrete blocks and some baling wire into the back of Felix’s truck. Benito stood beside the truck with Bobby Joe and Felix. Benito’s hands were behind him, probably cuffed, Antonio thought. Antonio drove close. He got out of the truck and approached the old man.
Seeing Antonio’s truck crowded with people, Bobby Joe held his gun behind his hip.
“Hey, Benito! Hey, señor! I’m supposed to take you home,” Antonio said. “I’m sorry I forgot.”
“We’re taking him home,” Felix said.
All of Antonio’s passengers were watching.
“No, señor,” Antonio said loudly. “I promised his Lupe to get him home for supper completely sober.”
A laugh from the people crowded into the truck. A few of them were puzzled, almost positive Lupe had been dead for years.
“She’ll kill me if I don’t show up with him.” Antonio turned to his passengers. “Will or will not Lupe kill me?”
“Sí,” said several in the truck. “Cierto. Definitely. Lupe will kill you, as she has killed all others who gave him the chance to drink.”
Bobby Joe came up beside Antonio and muttered, “Get the fuck out of here.”
“Shoot me in front of the jury, butt breath,” Antonio said softly.
Hans-Peter Schneider came out on the front steps. Bobby Joe and Felix looked to him. Schneider gave them a small shake of the head. Felix sidled behind Benito and cut the handcuff strips. Hans-Peter Schneider came down the steps and gave Benito a sizable roll of bills.
“We’ll need you in two weeks, comprendes? I give you another like this. There is no reason we cannot work together.”
There was much grumbling and joshing among the passengers as Benito found a seat in the back of the truck.
Antonio was talking down into his pocket on his telephone with Marco. “Where’s Cari?”
“I’ve got her. She’ll be coming out the back, I’m at the dock for her. Go!” Marco said.
Antonio backed the truck toward the gate. Hans-Peter held his hands out, palms turned back toward his men.
“Let them go,” Hans-Peter said.
Cari ran down the winding stairs carrying the rifle. She encountered nobody. She took the bird out of its cage and put it on her shoulder. “You better hold on. And leave my earrings alone,” she said, backing across the yard toward the dock where the crab boat waited, pressing with its bow hard enough to shake the dock.
She passed the rifle to Marco in the bow and jumped for the deck, the bird flapping. The crab boat backed away with a great thrashing, Marco with the gun covering the blank rear windows, seeing nobody.
Antonio drove away from the house, the gate swinging shut behind the loaded truck.
“Your shirt is a disgrace,” the man sitting on the spare tire told Benito. “They will never allow you in Yumbo Buffet.”
Chapter Eight
Captain Marco sat with Benito and Antonio under the open shed. A single high floodlight shone down on the boatyard. Five minutes of rain and they could smell the wet ground. Runoff from the roof tapped a line in the dirt.
“You think Felix is working both sides of the street?” Captain Marco said.
Benito shrugged. “Probably. He could have asked me like a man to be silent, paid me an honorable sum—but he had to show me his knife. I think his knife would fit into his asshole, but loosely, with room for his sunglasses.”
“To speak further of holes, this one under the patio goes back all the way under Pablo’s house?” Captain Marco said.
“I don’t know, but it’s deep. The sea dug where the FBI did not. You can hear it sucking, it’s open to the bay underwater at the base of the seawall.”
Big moths flew around a bare bulb above the men. One lit on Antonio’s head. Its feet tickled his forehead until he fanned it away.
Captain Marco poured a short round of rum and squeezed a lime into his glass.
“How long have they got the house?”
“There’s a thirty-day filming permit posted on the gate,” Antonio said. “It was issued to Alexander Smoot of Smoot Productions.”
Benito rubbed a lime on the rim of his glass. The rum was Flor de Caña 18 and the taste of it made him close his eyes for a happy second, tasting it off Lupe’s mouth from moons ago as though she were here in this moment.
When the men saw Cari Mora coming out of the boatyard office, Benito made her a drink like his own and Antonio brought another cane chair to the table. She had the bird on her shoulder. The big cockatoo climbed off onto the top of the chair. She passed it a grape from a bowl on the table.
“Touch it, Mamacita!” the bird said, a reference to an earlier venue in its checkered life.
“Shh,” she said, and gave the bird another grape.
“Cari, you have to stay well clear of that place,” Benito said. “Hans-Peter will sell you, do you know that? He will never believe you are not with us.”
“I know.”
“Does he have any idea where you stay, away from that house?”
“No, and neither does Felix.”
“Do you need a place to stay?” Benito said.
“I have an extra room,” Antonio said quickly.
“I’m okay. I have a place,” she said.
Captain Marco tapped the building plans on the table.
“Cari, do you know what’s going on here?”
“They made some holes in the walls and they’re tearing up the basement looking for something,” she said. “It’s not hard to imagine what it is. Clearly you look for it too.”
“Do you know who we are?”
“Probably. To me you are my friends Señor Benito and Antonio and Captain Marco. That’s all I want to know.”
“You can be in or out,” Captain Marco said.
“I am out, but I want you to win,” Cari said. “Maybe I can tell you what little I know and maybe you don’t tell me secrets I have to keep.”
“What did you see in the house?”
“Hans-Peter Schneider got in a couple of yelling matches on the phone with somebody that he called Jesús. He used a phone card to call Colombia. Mucha lucha. He kept asking, ‘Where is it?’ They swept with metal detectors from the attic down. Lot of rebar in the foundations, they drilled a couple of times. They had a big magnetic drill press, like eighty pounds, and two air hammers.”
“What were you supposed to think with them tearing the place up?”
“Felix said don’t worry, it was his responsibility as rental agent. I said write that down. He said no. The one Schneider flashed some money. To me, quite a lot of money.”
“Did he pay you?”
“Oh, no. He just waved it around and gave me grocery money. I have a new text here from Felix. He says: The boss does not want you some more, but you can come get your money. Or we will send it to your home when you give us the address, or meet you with it at my earliest convenience.…Right, I’ll jump on that.”
“Did anybody see you leaving the house?”
“I don’t think so but I’m not sure. I think they were all in the front.”
“They’ve missed the gun,” Marco said. “Maybe they will see it again.”
“I’ll go now,” Cari said.
Antonio got up quickly. “Wait a little while, Cari, and I’ll take you to wherever you may or may not be staying for all we know.”
“There’s a comfortable seat out on the dock,” Marco said.
Antonio carried her drink out for her and went back to the table.
“Schneider has to be careful now,” Captain Marco said. “The federales see him digging in Miami Beach, they’ll be on him like a man falling out of a tree.”
Marco unrolled some building plans on the table and weighted them down with the bottle and a coconut.
“Pablo’s lawyer filed this plan with the city to get the permit years ago when they built the patio,” the captain said. “See, it’s on concrete piers. That’s why it didn’t collapse when the sea dug it out underneath. You saw the picture Felix took?”
“Just over his shoulder,” Benito said. “He was hugging it to his chicken chest. I have this one. What can you expect from a flip phone?”
“How big was the box you saw?”
The old gardener put his lumpy finger on the building plan. “The box was about here. For scale I only have the skull beside it in this dim picture. The box is bigger than a big refrigerator. Like the big ice machine at Casablanca Fish Market.”
“That big a cave, the hole under the seawall may be big too,” Antonio said.
“Big enough to drag out a big ice machine?” the captain said.
“Nacho Nepri could do it from his barge with the big winch,” Antonio said. “He moves pieces of riprap bigger than that with his winch and crane. If we could get him to do it.”
“We need to see the hole under the seawall. How much water you got there at high tide?” the captain said.
“Along there, eight feet,” Antonio said. “I can look at it underwater from the bay side.”
“You want to go off the crab boat?”
“No, I can get into a place down the street where I do the pool. I’d rather slide along the seawall from there.”
“Tomorrow ebb tide starts half an hour before sunset,” Marco said. “The forecast is clear. Bad glare off the bay into their faces and most likely a raft of grass on the tide. Don’t go in the hole, Antonio. Just slide in there under the grass and take a look. You got air?”
Antonio nodded and rose to leave.
The old gardener lifted a glass to him. “Antonio. Gracias for the ride today.”
“De nada,” Antonio said.
“Though I thought my bill at Yumbo Buffet was excessive for all those people in the truck,” Benito said. “After stuffing their faces, they shamelessly ordered to go, with three gaseosas to wash it down. Antonio…escúchame joven: You will have to watch it now. Bobby Joe will be looking for you.”
“If Bobby Joe’s luck is really bad, he will find me,” Antonio said.
Captain Marco went home to his spare efficiency near the boatyard.
Benito fired up his old pickup and rattled off home. They left a fire in the incinerator, the door open for the firelight.
Lupe was waiting at Benito’s house, in spirit, in the small garden she had made behind Benito’s house. He felt her presence warm and close to him as fireflies winked over the white blossoms, luminous under the moon. Benito poured a glass of Flor de Caña for himself and one for her. He drank both of them sitting in the garden with Lupe, and being there together was enough.
Cari and Antonio sat on an old car seat on the boatyard dock and looked up at the sky. The bass thump of some distant music came across the water.
“What do you want?” Antonio said. “What would you like to have?”
“I want to live in a place that belongs to me,” Cari said, biting the lime and dropping it back in her drink. “A house where every place you put your hand down is clean. And you can walk around barefooted and the floor feels good.”
“Live by yourself?”
She shrugged and nodded. “If my cousin had a good place too, and some help with her mom. I want my own house. Close the door and it’s a sweet quiet. Keep it up yourself. You can hear rain on the roof and you know it’s not dripping in on the foot of the bed, it’s running off into the garden.”
“Garden now.”
“Cómo no? I’d like to have some little place to plant stuff. Go out and pick something green and cook it. Steam a snapper in a banana leaf. Play loud music in the kitchen when I want to and maybe have a drink while I’m cooking, dance around in front of the stove.”
“A guy? You want a guy?”
“I want to own the front door. Then maybe I invite somebody in it.”
“Say I showed up on the front steps and knocked. Like, you know, Single Antonio shows up.”
“You gonna be Single Antonio, Antonio? Antonio Soltero Antonio?” The rum felt pretty good.
“No, I’m not going to be Antonio Soltero. Not now. If I do that, somebody’s got to leave the country. I’m not doing that. I got my citizenship serving in the Marines. She can’t get hers that way anymore. She’s got to wait. She’s my friend so I wait with her. Her brother was with me in the service. We lost him.” Antonio tapped the globe and anchor tattoo on his arm. “Semper Fi.”
“Semper Fi is a good one. But that’s just one of your tattoos.”
“The Ten Bells? I was a kid. It was a different kind of school. Different set of skills. I don’t have to justify to you.”
“True that.”
“I’ll just say, when I get my business straight, like, to suit you? You will have to burn the front steps out from under me.”
Music from the dark ships up and down the river where televisions glowed. Now Rodrigo Amarante’s strange and beautiful theme from Narcos. More conga than tune reached them across the water.
Antonio had a voice he thought was pretty good. He looked directly at her and sang along.
I am the fire that burns your skin,
I am the water that kills your thirst…
I am the castle tower,
The sword that guards the flowing spring.
For a moment a ship’s horn drowned him out.
Cari Mora Page 4