by Lia Matera
“You’re kicking me out of Cuba? But my mother … Where is she?”
“Perhaps you will find her already waiting for you at home.”
“Cindy and Dennis—I think you’re wrong about them. I’m worried about them.”
Should I tell him about Ernesto? Express my fear that he’d been luring me someplace to steal my passport? Suggest that he find the boy and question him about Cindy and Dennis, about my mother?
But what if I was wrong? Would Ernesto end up in the prison he called Throw Away the Key?
Mr. Radio Havana said, “We will wait outside for only twenty minutes. Then we will reenter and escort you onto the next airplane to Mexico City, which leaves at dawn.”
Kicked out of Cuba. That would look terrible on my lefty résumé.
13
Mexico City seemed fabulously opulent after my three days in Havana. The outdoor markets with their tottering stacks of toys, clothes, and souvenirs, everything so bright and gaudy and useless, trinkets in staggering profusion—it was beautiful to my eyes. The sight of food carts on virtually every corner, their griddles frying meats and tamales and tacos, their cooks and vendors splendid in eye-popping floral prints, it seemed so luxurious, so sensual. I stuffed myself with fried foods. I drank neon-colored pops. I wandered through mercados, rejoicing in the overkill of ugly T-shirts and cheap wristwatches.
I used pay phones, happy to be able to call my father, even though I didn’t reach him. At least here, I could try as often as I pleased. I could leave him messages. I could talk to Mother’s friends, though they had no news. It was good to feel connected again, to feel comfortable.
I sat in the main square, the Zocalo, and admired the perfectly maintained old stone of the Palacio National, the Catedral Metropolitana, and the supreme court building. I wandered the alleys, appreciating the paint on stucco houses, the windowboxes of flowers in bloom, the plumpness of small children.
And people spoke the Spanish I was used to hearing. They didn’t lose their s’s and n’s, they didn’t mumble like speed freaks on a rush.
I would have been happy to be here but for the fact that I hadn’t accomplished anything. I’d just found a couple more people to worry about.
I’d taken a room rather than going on to San Francisco because I wanted to know if Cindy and Dennis really were Associated Press reporters living here. I didn’t dare hope I’d find them at home, but I wanted to know whether they’d lied to me.
In a way, I hoped they had. I hoped they were CIA agents, after all, in Guantanamo or back on U.S. soil, filing secret reports as busily as Boris and Natasha. I hoped they weren’t in a Cuban prison. I hoped they weren’t lying in some field on the outskirts of Havana. Whoever they were, I hoped they were safe. (My respect for safety had grown fervent, almost devotional.)
And if they were in any position to do it, I hoped they would help my mother.
I started at one of the city’s biggest newspapers. It was a vast suite of offices in a building that seemed more impressive than convenient. The ceilings were high and ornate, and the air was chilly and still. The furniture was heavy and the floors were worn alabaster.
I asked the woman at the front desk if I could talk to someone about two Associated Press reporters living here in Mexico City. I didn’t know Dennis’s last name. Cindy’s name was Corlett—I remembered it because it sounded like a kind of bird.
The names got her attention, but she seemed determined not to offer any comment or information. She suggested I ask the editor in charge of receiving AP stories for the newspaper. But she didn’t think he would want to be disturbed now. Perhaps I wished to leave a note?
We haggled for a few minutes, me insisting this was very important, and she reassuring me that the note would be delivered.
Finally, I sighed, taking the sheet of paper and the pen she pushed toward me. When I asked the name of the person I should address, she said, “Martin Marules.”
Martin, as in the mutual friend of Cindy, Dennis, and the Cuban Yum King? I tried not to get excited.
“Mr. Marules, he’s the short, corpulent man with the gray hair?” I asked her.
“No, no, his hair is very black and thick.” She blushed as if she liked that in a man. “And he is more distinguished than corpulent.”
“But very tall,” I said with certainty.
“Under six feet.”
I turned my attention to the note. I wrote, “Cindy Corlett and her companion, Dennis, mentioned your name to me in Cuba just two days ago. Now they are missing and accused of working for the CIA. Their passports were stolen and they are being sought as accomplices. It is urgent that you call me.” I added my hotel phone number.
Then I left the building, and walked around back to see if there was an exit. When I saw there was, I found a side street from which, with minimum walking, I could frequently check both the front and back doors.
I got very sick of the cobblestones on that narrow street. They were six-inch squares of gray stone, and I learned too much about their spacing and arrangement. It seemed as if hours ticked away, but my wristwatch insisted I’d been pacing only twenty minutes.
A man of above-average height with thick black hair and a pot belly under a sweater-vest and brown suit exited the back way. He clipped along quickly. With a sigh, I followed him. An awful lot of Mexican men fit the description I’d been given of Martin Marules. I could only hope.
I trailed at what I prayed was a discreet distance. The entire time, I marveled at the beauty of this well-maintained city. I kept thinking of my long bike ride behind Ernesto, comparing these stone palaces and freshly painted buildings, the colorfully overdressed people, the kids with tacos in each hand, to what I’d seen in Havana.
Most of Mexico lived in rural poverty—I knew better than to think its capital was typical. But as poor as the country might be, no one was actively keeping out medicine and food. It might not filter equally to the middle classes and the poor, but it existed, it was here. Cuba didn’t stand a chance.
The man strode purposefully down alleys full of hookers, waving them aside as they tried to interest him. He blitzed through mercados hung with cheap clothes and stacked with Kmart-reject toys. He dashed across streets and cut through narrow alleys. Just when I began to worry that I was tailing the Marathon Man, he stopped in front of a pink stucco building with grillwork balconies and an intercom out front. He pressed a bell repeatedly.
When no one answered, he stepped back, craning his neck to look up at a second story balcony. He returned to the intercom and, I thought, rang a different bell. He had a short, intense conversation into the speaker, then he waited.
A man in slippers, slacks, and an unbuttoned shirt over a sleeveless T opened the door to him. When they went inside, I kept my eyes on the second-floor balcony. Soon, I could see Martin Marules’s brown suit near the sliding glass balcony doors.
I crossed the street and looked at the door buzzer. The nameplate read “G. Jamieson.” I heard myself murmur, “Oh no.” But I pressed the buzzer anyway.
A hesitant voice, very deep, said, “Yes?”
“Señor Marules?”
There was a pause. Another voice came through the tinny speaker. “This is he. Who is there, please?”
“Willa Jansson. I left you a note this morning. I just saw you go up there. Please let me in. I need to talk to you.”
A second later, he buzzed me in.
The lobby was cool and quiet, with marble floor tiles and faux silk wallpaper. I climbed steps carpeted with an anchored runner.
At the first landing, Martin Marules waited in the frame of an open door. He was scowling as if he would gladly shoot the messenger.
I didn’t think, at first, that he was going to back up to let me in.
Behind him, the other man finished buttoning his shirt. He carried a bunch of keys and had the look of an
inconvenienced concierge.
Marules said to him, “We will leave the front door open so you can check on us at any moment. But you have seen me here many times. Please allow me a private conversation at the home of my friends.”
The concierge seemed relieved to go.
I looked around Dennis and Cindy’s apartment. It was immaculately clean. A television was the living room’s focal point—CNN junkies? There were bookcases stacked with magazines and papers, but very few books. At regular intervals along the floor, brightly painted carved cats faced the center of the room.
Marules had his back to the sliding balcony doors. Despite the silhouette, I could see he was fiftyish and close-shaven with an excellent haircut.
“Your letter struck a very serious note,” he said. “What can you tell me about my friends?”
I sat on a soft couch, relieved to be off my feet after a great deal of pacing and a very fast hike. “They aren’t back, are they?”
“To my knowledge, no. I see no luggage, no fruit, no garbage in the waste bins. I can only assume they have not yet returned from the film festival.” With a sigh, he crossed to the couch and sat three cushions away, angled toward me.
“Are they really reporters? For AP?”
He nodded.
“The Cuban government thinks they work for the CIA.”
He made an impatient gesture, as if to say, No, they don’t.
“I was taken aside and shown their photographs. I was told their real names were Garrett Jamieson and Angela Travolta. I was told they worked for the CIA.”
Marules shook his head. “No, no, perhaps you misunderstood. They are merely subletting this apartment from the Jamiesons, an American couple currently in Belgium.”
“Are the Jamiesons CIA agents?” I felt silly even uttering such a question. But presumably there were real CIA agents in the world.
“Of course not. They are a retired couple with children abroad. They do little more than travel.” But his brows pinched. “I believe, however, that she uses her own name, Travolta, rather than her husband’s. But enough about them. How and with whom did you come to discuss Dennis and Cindy? And you—do you have identification?”
I handed him my passport. “You’ll notice I left Mexico four days ago and returned yesterday. I went to Cuba to look for my mother. She was there with a tour group, and she didn’t come back with the rest of them. Cindy and Dennis were staying at my hotel. In fact, I went with them to meet a ministry official who’s a friend of yours. They told him your wife’s expecting a baby.”
He flushed. Apparently it was true.
“They didn’t tell him they were journalists, though. And their real agenda seemed to be to ask him about a poet named Lidia Gomez.”
For a moment he froze. Then, with a pshaw wave of the hand, he said, “There has been a great deal too much ink wasted already on this minor poet.”
“Well, I saw her with my own eyes. She’s been beaten badly enough to have her head and one eye bandaged. She’s under house arrest guarded by Chinese soldiers.”
He looked more than a little reluctant to accept this on a stranger’s say-so.
“Dennis and Cindy also asked me to visit an American who’s being held prisoner there, a woman named Myra Wilson.”
“The cocaine smuggler?”
“Cindy and Dennis don’t think so. Or they think she’s taking the rap for someone higher up. They brought up General Ochoa.”
“Ochoa?” He sounded surprised. He slipped his hand into his suit jacket pocket, jiggling something in there. Change? Rosary beads?
“I went to see Myra Wilson. They’d bused most of the prisoners away. There were only a handful left, and they were drugged, you could tell. Wilson was trotted out so I could see her. I tried to ask her, in a veiled way, about my mother.” I sighed. Too much detail. I wanted to know what he knew, not blither on about my trip. “Anyway, that night when Cindy and Dennis were occupied, I was approached by a man who never did tell me his name. A small man with lots of light brown hair. He accused them of being CIA agents and said if I’d spy on them, he’d give me information about my mother. The next morning, they disappeared from the hotel. A Cuban couple tried to use their passports to board a flight to here. And because I’d spent time with them, I was escorted onto the first plane out.”
Marules rewarded me with a dropped jaw. He shook his head slightly.
“It’s true,” I assured him. “Dennis and Cindy are somewhere in Cuba without passports—I assume, anyway—and the government thinks they’re CIA agents.” I ran my hands through my hair. “And I guess … I’m afraid my mother might be in the same boat. So if you’ve got any influence or any ideas…? Can you intercede with your friend in the Interior Ministry?”
His shoulders rounded, and he hugged himself, straining the seams of his elegant jacket. He looked over the apartment as if seeing it for the first time: the television around which the furniture was grouped, the carvings on the floor, library tables pushed against windows as if Dennis and Cindy liked to stare outside when researching or writing. The place was clean, spare, nothing on the walls but almost enough windows for it not to matter. It didn’t seem to say any more about the couple than their tasteful, serviceable clothes had.
Finally Marules rose. He scowled at me for a moment, then walked to a telephone on a library table. He picked up the receiver and ran his finger down what seemed to be an autodial list. He hit a key, then waited. A moment later he said, “Agosto.” His voice was tremulous. “There is someone I need for you to see.” A pause. “Yes, right now.”
He cast me a confused glance, as if wishing I would disappear and take this problem with me. Then he told Agosto (whoever he was) to come to Dennis and Cindy’s. “Yes, yes, I know they are in Cuba! That’s the problem. Hurry, chico.”
He returned to his spot on the couch, sighing as he turned to me. “Please wait. Agosto Diaz is one of our fact-checkers. He works frequently with Dennis and Cindy. He is a close personal friend. Perhaps he will have an idea.”
“Okay.” God knew I didn’t.
We mostly avoided each other’s gaze for the next ten minutes or so. The concierge popped his head in a couple of times, but didn’t seem concerned to see us sitting there in uncomfortable silence.
I was lost in thought when I heard the bell sound. I jumped up, startled. Marules gave me an odd look as he went to buzz Agosto Diaz in.
Diaz appeared at the door looking like a tennis star who’d survived a hurricane. He was big and handsome, with wildly disheveled hair, sports slacks and tennis shoes, and a white sweater that had at some point been tied around his neck but now dangled one sleeve on the floor. He was panting slightly, looking at Martin Marules as if ready to shake some words out of him.
“There she is,” Marules said, gesturing toward me. “She says she has been in Cuba with Dennis and Cindy. That they have vanished there. Someone else attempted to use their passports.”
Diaz all but pushed him aside to get to me. He dropped onto one knee in front of me. Under any other circumstances, it would have been a bit of a thrill. With his big dark eyes, cleft chin, and strong nose, he looked like a cologne ad—Mexican Love Match.
He said, “Yes?”
I told him about it.
He listened, motionless on one knee, a testament to his well-disciplined muscles.
A few times, he prompted me for details. His voice was deep and refined, a college-educated and urbane voice.
When I was through, he commented, “Your Spanish is very fluent.”
“I was born in Mexico.” More to the point, I’d been speaking it for the last four days.
Diaz crossed to the couch and sat beside Marules. “First thing, we had better search this apartment. Then, we will go try to find out if anyone has used the passport of this lady’s mother or of Myra Wilson to enter this country.”
“Dennis and Cindy are accused of giving their passports to impostors. The day before, they are doubting the reason for Myra Wilson’s arrest and detention. Perhaps there is a connection.” He raised his arms in a huge shrug.
“How can you find out?” I wondered.
“Customs records, airline records. Regarding your mother, the dates are obvious. For Myra Wilson, we will first determine when she was arrested. That would be within a few days of her passport being used by another.”
“If it was used by another,” Marules said. “This is mere word association, Agosto.”
“But because Cindy and Dennis’s passports were stolen, I think we should seek a pattern. It could fit with the norteamericana’s mother not returning.”
“But surely not with Myra Wilson,” Marules insisted.
“Cindy and Dennis did not believe the charges against Wilson are true. So who knows?”
I wasn’t sure I followed. “If Wilson was arrested for turning her passport over to someone else, why wouldn’t the Cubans just say so? That’s as much a crime as drug smuggling.”
“Ah, but drugs may be blamed on the decadence of capitalist societies. The desire of ordinary Cubans to flee their homeland, that is more embarrassing.”
Marules made a pooh-poohing noise.
I had to agree—embarrassing or not, gusanos were no secret. “And why would Wilson confess to drug smuggling?”
“We begin by checking what we can.” Diaz grinned. “Eh, Marules? So you always tell us.” He ran a hand over his dark waves. “Perhaps Myra Wilson is trying to protect the person to whom she has given her passport. If we can find that person, we will know more about this passport scheme. Perhaps it will point us toward this lady’s mother. Perhaps it will tell us something about the fate of Cindy and Dennis.” Marules looked distressed. “If we are to go through their things, we had better do so quickly. I would not want to try to explain to the concierge.”
Diaz jumped to his feet, going straight for the library tables against the windows. Marules followed his lead, going to the other desk.