Havana Twist

by Lia Matera

  I felt strange about joining them. I rose reluctantly. Unlike these two men, I didn’t know Cindy and Dennis well enough to invade their privacy. I walked slowly into their kitchen, looking at the tidy tile counters, the clean appliances, the rust rings in the porcelain sink. There was a note taped to the fifties-era refrigerator. It listed things someone named Consuelo should do in their absence. Judging from the items on the list, Consuelo was their maid.

  I wandered through the rest of the apartment. The bedroom was tidy, the closets were clean and understocked. The couple definitely stuck to beiges and wheats and light browns, very mix and match, very practical. The walls were bare, but as in the living room, there were almost enough windows to disguise the starkness.

  I tried to imagine the life of an Associated Press reporter. There would be little incentive to accumulate souvenirs, especially large wall hangings, when they’d have to be packed up for frequent moves. It wouldn’t be like living in a military family, piling everything into a truck every year or so. No, moving from Mexico City to Russia, dealing with customs on both ends, bribes to various officials, the inevitable damage and theft that must occur along the way … it would be much easier not to accumulate anything, to keep a minimal wardrobe and not much else.

  Diaz joined me in the bedroom. He went through the pockets of every article of clothing in the closet. He looked inside shoes. He checked the closet walls and ceiling, presumably for crawl-space panels. He went through the drawers in a plain wood dresser. He pulled back the bedding, felt the sheets, stuck his arm between the mattress and the box spring, running it along the full perimeter. He looked under the bed. He examined corners. He tapped at floorboards.

  When he was through, we both returned to the living room. Marules stood near a window, looking at a sheet of paper, creased as if recently unfolded. He looked troubled.

  Diaz crossed the room in a few long-legged strides. He took the paper from Marules, who was saying, “Just the Señorita’s note to me.”

  Diaz looked at me. “Come with me, Señorita Jansson. We may be able to help each other.”

  The concierge appeared at the door. “I’m thinking that perhaps I have waited long enough, Mr. Marules? Shall I lock up now?” When Diaz turned, the concierge flashed him a friendly smile. Apparently he’d seen him before.

  Marules seemed on the verge of asking the concierge something—strange comings and goings, perhaps? But he must have thought better of it. Instead, he shook the man’s hand.

  As we left, I watched the concierge pocket the currency Marules had pressed into his palm.

  14

  Marules and Diaz walked straight over to a Volkswagen Beetle, of which there seemed to be thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, in Mexico City. Diaz held the passenger seat forward for me, and I climbed in back. Marules took the front seat, as any Latin male would. Crammed behind the two men, I felt little nostalgia for the Beetle’s demise in the United States. As we rode the narrow streets toward the Zocalo, I tried to ignore the loudness of the engine and the stink of exhaust coming up through the floorboards. I tried to enjoy the scenery through a back window the size of my hand.

  Diaz parked near the newspaper office. Marules went straight inside, while Diaz took a moment to help unwedge me from the back.

  “If you will just wait with the car a moment …” He pulled some bills from his pocket, handing them to me. “If the police ask you to move, give them this mordida and tell them the car belongs to Marules.” He trotted off, leaving me standing there open-mouthed.

  But I didn’t have to bribe any policemen during the twenty minutes or so that I waited. I’m not sure I would have, in any case. This part of the culture, like haggling over prices, made me uncomfortable. If I was too capitalistic for Cuba, I wasn’t enough of a free-marketeer to be comfortable in Mexico.

  When Diaz returned, he looked grim. He motioned me into the passenger seat. “Unfortunately, I have no news of your mother—I am sorry. But on the other matter, I have had better luck.” He put the car into gear. “It was a simple matter to learn when Myra Wilson was arrested in Cuba. As to her passport, some money will have to change hands, naturally, before details will be forthcoming. But I have been given the hint that someone used the passport of Myra Wilson to come to Mexico City.”

  “You found out so quickly?”

  He looked a little surprised. “Of course. It is my job to find out things, to check details. It is not for nothing that I have apprenticed myself to a famous chilango lawyer.” Mexico City natives called themselves chilangos. But the rest of his statement made no sense to me. He noticed my bewilderment: “It is most crucial to pay exactly the correct mordida for the occasion. To give less is an insult, to give too much shows a naïveté that is suspect. Therefore lawyers and sometimes reporters apprentice themselves to those with experience, those who know to the peso the appropriate mordida. And I have, on this occasion, made exactly the correct offer.”

  I supposed it couldn’t be any more inconvenient than my having to learn conflicting rules for county, state, and federal courts, not to mention individual judge’s prejudices. And it was certainly more direct.

  “I have requested a search of customs records for the week before and the week after Myra Wilson’s arrest,” he continued. “The newspaper has excellent contacts at customs. Do you know how many stories we write about illegal immigration?” A half smile. “ The grass is greener when it is fenced,’” he said in English. “Isn’t that the adage?”

  “Close enough.”

  We blasted down Reforma, a boulevard built to showcase the giant statues and monuments of which Mexicans are very fond. I expected to go to some old building with dark hallways and little rooms with nervous immigrants filling out paperwork. So I was surprised when we got on the freeway, heading toward the airport.

  A person could grow very sick of Mexico City’s airport. For one thing, it’s about five times as crowded as any U.S. airport. For another thing, it has spooky charred aircraft lying around its tarmacs.

  We rushed through the international flights terminal at the speed of lifelong chilangos. I caught up to Diaz as he was knocking on one of several closed doors in the customs and duty area. To our right, bedraggled travelers stood waiting for lights to flash green or red, letting them know whether to step aside and have their bags searched.

  A cranky-looking man opened the door to us. Diaz greeted him warmly, clasping his hand in a long handshake. The customs agent slipped his hand into his pocket afterward, making it clear to me that a peso-perfect mordida had changed hands in the process.

  The office was a hovel of paperwork. A one-way mirror allowed us to look out at block-long lines behind red and green lights.

  “Look,” he said, “this will go no farther, and you did not hear it from me.”

  “That is understood, Pirí,” Diaz assured him. “As always.”

  “But this time I mean it. You have come from Marules, yes? He has asked for this, correct?”

  “Yes.” Diaz looked surprised. “Call him if you like.”

  “I had a message from him already, but I was having my lunch. And then you called me.”

  “Yes, yes,” Diaz assured him, “Marules sent us. He called to speed things along, Pirí. So let’s get to it.”

  “The party came through customs on …” Pirí referred to a file, giving us the date. “She was detained for looking excessively nervous, and her baggage was searched. No contraband was found, although it was noted that there was very little in her luggage, just clothing and what appeared to be photographs of a family in Cuba. An Instamatic picture was taken at that time.” He slid his fingernail under something apparently glued or taped to the file. “You may look, Diaz, but not take. Clear?”

  “You must let me copy the photo, Pirí. It’s useless to me if I can’t show it to anyone.”

  “What do you want from me, Diaz?”
His voice and his color rose. “You want me to dance through the main room to the copy machine? Under the eyes of everyone? Are you crazy?”

  “Photographs must fall out of files all the time,” Diaz protested. “Just let me have it.”

  “And what if someday someone besides you is interested in the file? What then?”

  “Who will know you took the file? Put it back. No one will ever look at it, but even if they do, so what? The picture fell out. It got lost. None of your concern.”

  I was getting nervous. What if Diaz’s theory needed to be verified at some point? What if this photo could, down the road, be used as proof of a passport scheme? I hoped I wouldn’t regret watching evidence disappear into Agosto Diaz’s pocket.

  The customs agent was shaking his head.

  Diaz slipped something into his hand. The agent glanced at it, eyebrows raised. He said, “This woman is very important to you, eh?” With an avuncular sigh, he added, “I never could deny you anything, Diaz. You and Marules are like family to me.”

  He closed the file, letting the square color snapshot flutter to the ground. He turned his back on us, pretending to look through some papers.

  Diaz quickly plucked the photo from the worn, superwaxed linoleum. It was in his pocket before Pirí turned back around.

  As we walked back through the airport, Diaz whispered to me, “Two mordidas—he is a vulture, a bloodsucker! It won’t be easy to pad my expense account sufficiently to hide this, believe me. The accountants are not as practical as Marules.”

  When we were back inside the car, Diaz took the snapshot from his pocket. He almost dropped it, he was so excited.

  “I couldn’t risk this disappearing, which it definitely would if certain people knew about it. Caramba! It was worth the extra pesos.”

  “You recognize her?”

  He laughed deep in his throat. “Oh yes. I’m not surprised the illiterate vampires in customs did not. But, oh yes, a great many Mexicans would recognize this face.”

  I stared at the big-eyed, hollow-cheeked, middle-aged Cuban woman in the photograph. “Who is it?”

  “You do not recognize Cuba’s most famous poet? Or perhaps she has not been translated into English?”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “Yes, yes. This is Lidia Gomez.”

  “But … I saw Lidia Gomez. In Cuba. She was under house arrest. Her face was bandaged.”

  “Bandaged? Like The Man in the Iron Mask? The real Gomez escapes to Mexico while her double remains sequestered?”

  “I guess so.” No wonder there were no guards at the back window. Gomez was long gone. “Why would someone pretend to be her? Why would the Cubans want that?” A sense of unreality settled over me. The last few days seemed almost imaginary. “It makes no sense.”

  Diaz frowned. “They do not want anyone to know she has managed to leave. Nor even that she would wish to leave, perhaps. Or …” A smile lit his face. “Perhaps they believe she is the real Lidia Gomez.”

  “If Gomez made it out of the country, why didn’t she speak up? Why didn’t she go public, discuss Cuban politics, try to build pressure to get Myra Wilson out of prison?”

  “Mexico does not share your government’s attitude about Cuba. It would very likely extradite Gomez. The question is, why did she not go to your country? Did she lack confidence that you would take her in? One thinks she could have traveled north to make her denunciations.”

  “We’ve taken in every Cuban who’s ever floated to Miami,” I pointed out. “And we especially love dissident writers.”

  “We wondered why Cuba announced repeatedly that Myra Wilson was convicted of smuggling. Not that they could have kept it secret, but frequently they prefer to let these matters leak out as they will.”

  “You think they were trying to smoke Gomez out of hiding?”

  “If they believed she was here in Mexico, yes. Because in that case she would certainly be returned to them.” He started up the Volkswagen and backed it out of its parking place. “Whereas if she crossed the border to your country, she would become a poster child for anti-Cuban propagandists in Miami.”

  The Beetle engine was so loud he was practically shouting. He pulled onto the freeway, where at least a tenth of the other cars were Beetles. No wonder the air was a brown-tinged gray. Diaz drove at rattling speed, making me hope we had somewhere in particular to go.

  “But why would Myra Wilson play along all this time?” I asked him. “If you’re right.”

  “Because she is in custody. Because, perhaps, she is protecting Lidia Gomez. The sentence would be no shorter for passport fraud than for drug smuggling. And it may be that in exchange for her lies, they have promised her better treatment. Or promised not to search for Gomez.”

  “Using the women against each other?” Were the Cubans using Wilson as a hostage to keep Gomez quiet? With Wilson playing along to keep the Cubans from coming after Gomez?

  He glanced at me, his brows raised. “It is a happier alternative than Gomez observing the silence of the dead.”

  But the theory must not have inspired much optimism. Our next stop was the city morgue.

  There, Diaz left me on a wooden bench in a vast corridor that looked as if it had been built for titans in a grander past. He went inside to try to match his expensive Instamatic photo to those clipped to Jane Doe files. A friend who worked in the morgue had to be bribed first, of course. But the sum for medical examiners was small, Diaz observed. Not like the mordida for judges and politicians.

  He came back out into the corridor an hour or so later, looking tired. He shook his head.

  “So far so good. But she could have died anywhere.” He stuck his hands into the pockets of his tennis slacks. “Equally, she could be living anywhere. If she is maintaining her silence in order to protect Myra Wilson … Well, I don’t know how we could find her. We certainly can’t show her photograph to the entire population of Mexico City.”

  “Is there anyone at the university, maybe in the literature department, she had close ties to? Someone she could have gone to for help?”

  He rubbed his chin. “A good thought. Let’s check with Marules. He knows all the literary people. He is their groupie—he adores them.”

  I looked forward to talking to Marules. I’d been sitting in a corridor for (it seemed) half the afternoon, marveling at what Diaz had discovered. Lidia Gomez had slipped out of Cuba using Myra Wilson’s passport. She might still be here somewhere, keeping silent to protect the woman who’d made her flight possible. I was still boggled by the news. I wanted to watch someone else gasp over it.

  “But why Myra Wilson?” Diaz said, when we were back inside the cramped hell of his car. “Why this woman? We have of course researched her life when she was arrested—the only American woman in a Cuban prison. My impression was of an uneducated woman of the working classes, nothing special. So why has she done this for Gomez? We will have to rethink our story, undertake our research from an entirely new angle. Perhaps …” He cast a glance at me. “Perhaps we should go to the hometown of Myra Wilson.”

  “Jersey City?”

  “Jersey…? But no, I am sure that she was from San Diego, California. I recall that Martin sent someone from one of our small news bureaus, one close to the border, into San Diego to interview her family.”

  “But she told me she was from Jersey City.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps this was her way of trying to protect her people in case you were not simply a tourist but a reporter. Although, if you were a good reporter, you would have known it wasn’t true.”

  Dennis and Cindy hadn’t corrected me when I’d told them. Had they known?

  “Maybe that was the point?” I said. “To see if I contradicted her?”

  “Or perhaps under the circumstances, it simply did not matter to her what you believed about her origins.” He glanced at me
. “If she has people still in San Diego, perhaps it is worth a trip?”

  I wanted to burst into tears. I was so tired already. I just wanted to be home.

  But I also wanted to know what the hell had become of my mother. And having run out of other options for finding her, I guessed I’d go just about anywhere.

  15

  Martin Marules looked a half-shade away from apoplexy. “But no! No! Lidia Gomez here—I can hardly take it in.”

  He was seated behind a desk so heavy and grand, he should have been wearing purple robes with gold threads. Everything about his office was ornate, especially the high ceiling and the Rivera-style murals of nineteen-thirties reporters typing on old manuals or rushing around with notebooks and fedoras.

  Marules, with his heavy frame and thick hair, his ageless suit and Mexican good looks, might have stepped straight out of a mural panel. Only his computer, his television with VCR, and a tiny microwave created a sense of contrast. Modern journalism, his office seemed to say, was a matter of Internet research, videography, and quickly heated takeout.

  “Willa here”—I was surprised to hear Diaz speak my name—”she has suggested we go to the university, see if perhaps the famous poet found refuge with someone in the literature department.”

  “Ah,” Marules said. “Leave that to me.”

  “Ask them if they’ve seen Lidia Gomez since she got here in March,” Diaz put in.

  Marules raised a hand as if to say, I know my business!

  “March?” Something about this set off an inner alarm. What had happened in March?

  I hadn’t moved to Santa Cruz yet, but I’d started work on a pro bono case there. Mother, I recalled, had been scrounging computers for a caravan to Cuba. The idea had been to drive a convoy of trucks across the Mexican border, then air-ship the parcels from there. But the convoy was stopped at the Mexican border by U.S. Customs and State Department officials. The computers were offloaded in the rain, ruining them. Then they’d been confiscated.