The woman slips a plastic card through a slot along the side of her computer screen. “Here, bring this right back. What’s your name?”
“Mercedes.”
“Okay, Mercedes. It’s a good thing you did not approach him yourself here in the lobby. That would have been grounds for reporting you to the head of housekeeping.”
She takes the service elevator to the thirteenth floor. There is a sign, No Molestar, on the door of room 1317. But she saw him in the lobby, absorbed in the newspaper, and she has the card. The pretty desk captain did not mention anything about signs on the doorknobs, but what harm could there be in opening the door just long enough to reach into the closet?
The door clicks shut behind her. She knows she shouldn’t delay, but she can’t help it. This is her first time in a tourist’s room. She lets her gaze linger for a moment on the objects on the vanity in the entryway: a modern electric razor, neat cotton socks, and a calculator. Where is he from? Where did he get these things? He does not look especially sophisticated, but she has heard stories about how in other countries even auto mechanics and laundry ladies can save up the money for an annual vacation, whereas one night in this room costs more than she will make in her entire first year on the job. For foreigners, it doesn’t take a job as a nuclear physicist to afford all of these simple luxuries.
She peeks around the corner at the bed. The bed is made, she guesses by the guest, because it would not pass the head of housekeeping’s expectations, and she can tell the carpet has not been vacuumed. There is a map on the bedcover, some electronic items, and two balls of something that looks like clay. Could it be drugs? The door opens and she jumps.
“¡Qué coño—!”
“Perdone, señor,” she says, reaching into the closet to show him the shirt wrapped in plastic. “Tengo su camisa aquí.”
He is looking over her shoulder at the bed that he made, and she feels a sudden shame when he finds his voice. “Can’t you read? I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“I’m very sorry, señor.” She puts the hanger on the rod in the closet.
“Eres una berreca. ¿Cómo te llamas?”
She tells him her name. He stands there holding the heavy fireproof door, and for a moment she does not know how to get past him. Is he trying to block her way?
In a move she practiced dozens of times with Andrés, Mercedes straightens her shoulders, bows her head, and steps forward into uncertainty. Fortunately, the guest’s manners return and he yields. Brushing his shoulder, Mercedes passes through the space between the guest and the doorway.
She makes her way down the hall to the service elevator and does not look back. She hears her own footsteps on the padded carpeting and does not hear his door close. When the elevator doors open, she turns around and sees his door click shut.
Riding down, she feels her face and neck burn with disgrace. What had she been thinking, bringing the shirt up here? She should have given it to an experienced housekeeper, one who would know what to say. Should she report that she thought she might have seen drugs? No, she would just make more of a fool of herself. She would not know illegal narcotics from cow dung. Now she is certain she will get a complaint. She should never have taken herself out for ice cream.
Mercedes gives the plastic card back to the woman at the front desk and returns to her basement room. The second encounter with this irritable guest leaves her with an even worse feeling than the first.
MIAMI: THE ROOM
Hand over hand, I let my body drop desultorily down the pipe chase. How does a human body, age twenty-eight, get so old so suddenly? I am a spent skin, an empty bag of bones. Nerve endings, deprived of water for days and riddled by gout, sing with pain. Muscles burn. Every shred of tissue is pickled in lactic acid. The descent is accomplished not so much by shimmying as by surrendering to gravity and fatigue. Drop, drop in painful lurches down inside the walls, and hear Radio Mambí blaring from the upstairs hall. Meant to deprive me of sleep and preclude my own attempts to cry for help, the booming beats and screaming deejays now cover up the noise of my escape.
The rough plywood scrapes my stomach, arms, and legs. A stray screw scratches my face, and I feel something wet against my left cheek and taste a trickle of blood in the corner of my mouth. If I had gone down facing left, and if what the doctors speculated about my Havana Lunar is correct, such a cut would mean my death in a matter of minutes.
I finally make it to the bottom and the wall panel is already loose. I slide it aside and step into the basement. I take the flashlight and next to it find a Miami Dolphins T-shirt and a can of Goya coconut water. I take a small sip of water and pull on the shirt. There is also a fresh pair of running shoes. I step into them. They are loose, a size or two too big, but they are clean, new, and feel good on my feet after forty-eight hours barefoot and dehumanized. When I feel something inside the right shoe, I take it off and reach inside: a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. Turn off the flashlight, but take it. To leave the flashlight would be to implicate my father. I flip it off.
Now, put one foot in front of the other. The thought paralyzes me with terror. Turn around. Do not try to leave. Go up, put everything back in place. Could I possibly climb back up the pipes? Not in my state. Go up the stairs. Carlos or Yuyo is right outside the room. What could I do? Ask to be let in. Insanity. I am raving. I am raving. If I tell myself this, will I listen? Put one foot in front of the other. The fatigue is crushing. But I must plow on through the pain. I go to the back of the basement and open the bulkhead doors. I have to try to get to José Martí Park, but first I have to make one more call.
Every step is more agony, but I’m no longer caged and I must keep going. One step and then another. One step in front of the other. Five steps. Stop. Lean against the wall. No: I cannot do this. Not for long. I have to think of a way to trick myself into taking more steps. The only distraction I have at my disposal is the can of Goya, so I have another sip and take another step. I convince myself that I get the power from each sip to take five more.
An ocean glow backlights downtown Miami while I stumble down the alley in the direction of José Martí Park.
LUNES, 15 SEPTIEMBRE
The Tourist
That housekeeper with the shirt: why is she hounding him? How many times has she entered his room? He has to get this over with and check out before dawn. He has everything he needs, so he returns to the basement for the final time.
When his eyes have adjusted, he finds his way to the first corner and pushes a ball of gray putty into the joint at the juncture of two girders. He secures the travel clock and the detonator to the section of putty with duct tape, and he activates the alarm.
In the next corner, he does the same thing, though he does not rip the duct tape, leaving the roll attached to the bomb. He won’t be needing it any longer.
The tourist returns to his room and packs in a hurry. He knows that nothing will happen for close to an hour, but it makes him uneasy just being inside the building, knowing what he has set in motion.
The beautiful black front desk captain is kind to him. Will she still be on duty at sunrise? He knows he must dissimulate this thought just to go from moment to moment, knowing what he was holding in his Timberlands. The toe of the right boot carried the charge for the east support beam, the toe of his left for the west. One hundred vertical meters of glass and steel have been leaning on two legs every morning for forty years. There is no one who should take for granted that they will not give way on any morning, not even this morning. He is simply going to expedite the inevitable.
Just before dawn, the tourist checks out.
MIAMI: THE STREET
A desolate strip of red lights stretches straight for five miles to downtown. I must stay off Calle 8, so I stick to the callejones between the backs of storefronts and go up to 6th. Make my way east, toward the ocean and the sunrise, and keep an eye out for pay phones on the corners. Pain. Daze. Fatigue. Coco agua. Small sips. Should be resting. Should have an I
V with saline. But have to keep moving. Get away from Little Havana. First a pay phone . . . but I have no quarters. I have no change whatsoever. I check the coin return on the telephone and it is empty. How do I do this?
I almost do not remember the number. In a daze, I let my fingers find the pattern in the buttons. “Please deposit twenty-five cents.” I do not have twenty-five cents. There is no more important telephone call that needs to take place at this hour, on this day, anywhere in the world. In any world. Of this I am certain. Important for peace. Important for humanity. And yet I have no money. “Please deposit twenty-five cents.” How the hell do I do this! I have no quarter. Look for a gas station or convenience store that is open. Stay away from 8th. Hear a car and duck behind a dumpster—terrified it might be Mendoza’s SUV.
When I step inside the 7-Eleven, the notification sound chimes in the empty store. I have learned enough from Eckerd to know this means that the attendant shall emerge any second from the back room where she takes naps, or whatever, on a quiet night. She does emerge, and I raise myself up as straight as possible and hold up my father’s twenty-dollar bill. I summon all possible composure despite my dirty and decrepit state, not so much because I feel shame but because I know the short transaction required to make change must proceed without delay, and it will proceed more quickly if she and I tacitly observe the rituals of the complicit customer and cashier.
“¿Por favor, me puede dar cambio para hacer una llamada?”
“Lo siento, mi amor, pero no puedo darte cambio sin que compres algo.”
She calls me my love, but she still can’t make change without a purchase. There is much I would want to buy: Comida por libra. Croquetas de pollo. Croquetas de jamón. I am starving; I have not eaten in days. But I know better than to make any of these my first meal—they would ruin me. I hold this authentic president, Andrew Jackson. We will part ways without incident. And no closed-circuit camera will record our exchange for storage longer than the proscribed erasure time. A banana—that is what I find. A one-dollar banana.
“May I please have four quarters?”
“Cómo no, mi amor.” She must notice how bad I smell, but she pretends not to.
Good. I need to make a call. A very important call. Do not stand between me and the change from my banana.
I push the buttons and insert a quarter. The machine takes the coin and I fall to my knees in the phone booth. It is five a.m. Light is dawning on Miami ten minutes earlier than it does in Havana. But there is no ring. A robotic female voice intones, “This number is no longer in service.” I must have dialed wrong. I push the buttons again, very slowly, and there is still no ring. “This number is no longer in service.” The machine spits back the quarter.
How could the number be out of service? How could the line be dead? “Hello! Hello!” I yell. This is a trick. This has to be a trick. I feed the machine all four quarters and dial again. It has to be a decoy recording. Could this be what DSS meant when they said that there would be an announcement to signal the evacuation? “This number is no longer in service.” Are they listening? Although I want to yell, I whisper, “Havana Libre Hotel, that is the real target—” but am interrupted by loud buzzing, a harsh staccato connoting hang up now so much more powerfully than in Cuba, where the signal for a dropped call sounds so weak. “Today. 15 September. Not the 26th. It is this morning. Cóño—it is now . . .” The line is dead. The machine swallows the coins.
I fall to my knees on the floor of the dirty phone booth. I cry, but there are no tears. All that is left is to get to José Martí Park. The cashier looks at me from the bright windows of the 7-Eleven as I run away down Calle 6. All that separates me from the safety of Mercedes’s and hundreds of lives at the Havana Libre is a vast, hostile country of concrete.
Miami at dawn.
LUNES, 15 SEPTIEMBRE
Mercedes
The sun, coming up over the hill behind the Capitol, shines its everyday drama on the Havana Libre from the top floor on down all the eastern windows. Mercedes awakens before the light has reached the bottom. Today she has to decide whether to spend her seven dollars in tips for the week on a liter of milk or a dozen eggs.
Mercedes chooses to save it, tucking the money into the hem she has made in her apron. She has a few pesos she’ll spend to get herself a treat. But the dollars she sews up in her hem so she won’t lose them or spend them. They are for her baby. She will need them.
At the other end of the hall, Mercedes starts her day in the hotel laundry room. Up above, hundreds of tourists sleep and watch TV and make love. Mercedes launders their sheets. She is free.
MIAMI: THE STREET
José Martí Park is empty in the twilight, but I am stopped by a hiss from the edge of the Miami River where on my first day I saw the ragged fisherman. I look over the railing and see a figure at the bottom of the steps. “Follow me.”
When they told me the park, I did not know I would be getting into the river. I descend the concrete steps to the moorings below. Alongside a nice fishing boat stands a man: it is Eduardo, the computer expert from DSS. “Suba, doctor.” Someone calling me doctor is comforting, and I climb aboard. Again he does not offer a hand.
“Wait!” I stop him before I get in the boat. “There is an urgent message to get to Havana. The Havana Libre—”
“Ya lo sabemos, doctor. Cogieron al segundo terrorista. El hotel y la gente están a salvo.” We know, doctor. The second bomber has been caught. The hotel and the people are safe.
I have to back up to catch what I have heard. “The people at the Havana Libre are safe?”
“I know you have a lot of questions, but right now the essential thing is to very quickly get you far from Florida.”
I have no words. Eduardo works efficiently and quickly to untie us from a piling. Only when we are slowly motoring through downtown Miami does he break the spell by saying, “It was good of you to come alone.”
“How did you get here so fast?” I ask.
“I live in Miami.”
“Are you Giro?”
“No, I’m not Giro.”
“Avispa?”
“Wasp, yes, if you wish. I come and go because I was born in the US. It will be very noisy for the next couple of hours. There are some blankets down in the cabin. Why don’t you get some rest? You will have ample opportunity to get debriefed in Havana.” He gives me a bottle of oral rehydration solution, the kind I would administer to a child with severe diarrhea. “You’re a doctor, so I don’t have to tell you to drink slowly.”
I climb the ladder down into the dimly lit cabin. There is a wraparound sofa, a V-shaped berth with a stainless-steel sink and a cooler, and a tiny dinette area. I sit on the edge of the berth and take small sips to slowly bring myself back to life. The lights are suddenly turned off and I sense a change in course. When we make it into open water, Eduardo throws the boat into full throttle and forces me to lie back in the berth. The bouncing of the hull over the waves and the penetrating vibration of the engine cannot forestall my need for real sleep. I do not take off the Nikes my father left for me. Collapsing into oblivion, I realize that I will bring back Yorki’s mordida after all.
HAVANA LIBRE
When the engine powers down I awaken with a start and briefly panic. It takes a few seconds to realize that the motor is not a sound effect on Radio Mambí, the footsteps above not one of the Rivera brothers about to come and get me. I reassure myself that there will be no more Who is Giro? and I never told anyone anything about José Martí Park.
I drag my sore body out of the berth and climb the ladder to the deck. Havana flickers in the distance. This is not the bright skyline of a great capital of Latin America, but it relieves me all the same to see el Castillo del Moro. No cities of cereal. No dogs in little ballerina costumes. No six-packs of beer for dessert. Mi Habana.
I know from my cousin Emilio that the coast guard has a station not five miles from here, but the way Eduardo pilots us in, we look entirely at home among t
he multimillion-dollar fishing boats of Marina Hemingway. Eduardo says to me, “Look, I know how badly you must want to get out of here, but Pérez would like to debrief here and wait until nightfall to move you off the boat. Would you mind terribly staying down below for a little while longer?”
I have to tell him what I am thinking, because he may be one of the few I will be able to tell my story to who will understand. “Eduardo, compared to the past few days, this fishing boat is heaven.”
The cabin has a small bathroom with a toilet and shower. There are dry towels, a clean T-shirt and pair of sweatpants, and several new bars of soap still in packages. Peeling off the filthy clothes of my captivity, I find eighteen dollars in my pocket. I spend a long time under the stream of hot water. After rinsing once, I discard the first bar of soap and open a second. When I emerge from the bathroom in the clean clothes, a doctor is there waiting for me. He checks me out and gives me more drinks in more flavors of rehydration salts. He also brings some vegetable broth and flavored gelatin.
His care is thorough, and he is not in a hurry. I have been in America for fewer than seven days, but I find myself wondering who will get the bill. “What’s your name?” I ask him.
“Martinez.”
“Where did you intern?”
“Calixto Garcia.”
“What year?”
“’95.”
Nineteen ninety-five. Two years ago. Five years behind me. It makes me proud to know there are young physicians this good.
When Pérez comes aboard, he brings a fine bottle of wine. “You are probably not ready to drink this yet, so I won’t open it.”
“Never again shall I accept an invitation to share a bottle of wine with you, colonel, no matter how good the vintage.”
“Take it home with you tonight.” I drink rehydration salts while he sips water and debriefs me. “The bomber’s work was somewhat clumsy insofar as concealment goes, but if they had been detonated, the charges would in all likelihood have caused the intended and horrible effect. The hotel was never evacuated. During interviews, a Spanish subcontractor confessed to copying the plans but claimed he had no knowledge of how they would be used. This led us to the bomber, a Salvadoran who was foolish enough to meet with the Spaniard in the same neighborhood where he often stayed in the home of a jinetera.”
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