Havana Twist

by Lia Matera

  I stared at the prison, a box of cement with wire-reinforced windows. I wanted Don to be right. I wanted to believe that my mother was alive and within reach.

  I could sort out the rest later, figure out who to be angry with later. For now, I just prayed she was in there. Alive and where I could see her.

  Don was scanning the neighborhood. “I’m going to find out if they’ve got a phone.” He pointed to a small market with bars over the windows and a dog tied to a metal rung in the sidewalk. “Why don’t you go stand behind the prison vans—less conspicuous.”

  I didn’t object. As much as I’d have liked to grab Marules and Swann and shake the truth out of them, if my mother was indeed inside, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Don was gone maybe ten minutes. I assumed he was trying to reach his PI, Conner. I hoped the length of his absence meant he’d gotten through.

  Just when I was wondering if maybe I should walk over there and check, I saw Marules, Swann, and Gomez emerge from the building. Sarah was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

  It was a twist of the knife. Was Mother okay? Was she sick? Hurt?

  Marules put his arm around Sarah as if consoling her. Gomez checked her wristwatch.

  I hung back, staying out of sight. But my frustration level was rising fast. I wanted to dash across the street and grab Don. I wanted to do something, anything but wait here and watch them drive away.

  The threesome climbed into the minivan, Gomez behind the wheel. It pulled out of the parking lot, turning as if to retrace the route back onto the highway.

  I trotted across to the store. The tied dog looked up as I walked past. I entered, surprised to find it was a bar, not a grocery store. Short, dark-skinned men with gray stubble slumped at bar stools, knocking back shots. A florid woman with a white streak in her hair poured refills with apparent disapproval.

  Don stood beside the bar holding a big, old-fashioned rotary phone. His shoulders were rounded and he was turned away from the bar patrons, his finger in his nonphone ear.

  I didn’t disturb him. Marules would be just as gone in two minutes as in ten.

  When Don hung up, he seemed startled to find me behind him.

  “It’s going to take a while to get confirmation,” he said. “If she wasn’t booked under her exact name, they’ll find out who Marules and Swann just visited. We’ll get a name that way.”

  He walked me out. The woman stared at him angrily.

  “You paid for the call?” I assumed.

  “Oh yeah.” His tone told me he’d paid a great deal more than the going rate. “My Spanish is shit. I let dead presidents do my talking for me.”

  “Marules, Swann, and Gomez, they left.”

  “I’ll be interested to hear what Marules tells us later. In the meantime, Conner’s on his way to pick us up.”

  The tied dog watched us. He looked so defeated with the rope around his neck, so sad that I nearly untied him.

  “Do you think it could be true? Do you think she could be in there?”

  “You’d know better than me. Would she want to hide it from you?” But he knew the answer already. He’d heard me freak out over my imprisonment years before. He’d seen what I’d done just this morning, with machine guns pointed at me at the Cuban airport. He knew how I responded to the idea of jail.

  “She’s been inside eleven times,” I told him. “Seventeen arrests, fourteen convictions, eleven jail terms.” I hugged myself, thinking of all the times I’d been shuttled to teachers’ and neighbors’ apartments, all the times I’d fended for myself while she’d served out her terms of conscience. All the months I’d been consumed with fear for her—and anger toward her. “She’d lie about it if she could.”

  “To spare you the worry.”

  “And spare herself my wrath.” I choked on my tears, making a fine spectacle of myself.

  I pulled myself together when the tied dog got up on his hind legs and tried to lick my face. You have to take stock when a chained animal tries to cheer you up.

  35

  Conner picked us up in his rented black Beetle. His first comment was, “Lady, you don’t look so good.”

  “I was socked by an airport worker,” I explained.

  “What, you smoked outside a designated area?”

  “She tried to run from four Cuban soldiers with machine guns,” Don said dryly.

  Conner laughed. “In that case, you could look a whole lot worse.”

  “Any news about Jamieson and Travolta?” Don asked.

  Conner barreled down the highway, the Beetle rattling like a Yahtzee shaker. “They walked out of their apartment and, poof. They started hopping in and out of taxis, walking through mercado crowds—they’re good. They lost me pretty fast. Then I went back to their place and waited. Waited some more. Next thing I know, there’s a fellow moving boxes out. Works for a storage company. Says the couple’s gone. I call the landlord like I’m interested in taking the place. He says fine, but he’s going to repaint first, call him next week. I followed the mover, so I know which storage place. I’ve been parked there for lack of anything better to do. But, like I said, poof. “

  “And Price? He never showed up?”

  “Oh, get this: He got turned back at the border.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. He went home to sleep between shifts—cute new girlfriend, worth the commuter flight, you know how that goes.” He cast a glance at me. “When he tried to get back across the border, they made him deplane, saying he couldn’t come in. He tried a couple more times, no dice. For now, he’s apparently blackballed.”

  “How’d Jamieson and Travolta get his name?”

  “He used his credit card to rent the surveillance car.”

  “Dumbshit,” Don said crossly. “What’s on Marules’s diskette?”

  “I had to FedEx it to my office. My guy up there’s not positive, but he thinks it’s letter-and-number combinations. Usually when we see that, it’s flight information.”

  “Tell him to check the code against Aeroflot flights, especially from Georgia. Anything with layovers in Cuba.” Don turned to me. I was sprawled in the back seat. “Marules knows which flights might be carrying extra passengers from Cuba. He alerts Pirí, and if he gets a call that someone extra’s on board, he pays for the ticket, pays Pirí, and arranges the next step, whatever it is.”

  “If my mother came in that way, why did Marules leave her dangling? Why didn’t he take care of things for her?” A better question was, why did he do it for anyone? Loyalty to Señor Emilio?

  “His receptionist’s been handing over diskettes with this stuff on it. Maybe the CIA caught on and tipped off the airline. Maybe Pirí’s bosses were there watching.”

  “But Jamieson and Travolta didn’t rat out Pirí?”

  “No. It looks like they use him occasionally, too, to chaperone folks with phony passports through customs.”

  I recalled Pirí leaving Jamieson and Travolta’s apartment with a couple who’d just had photos taken. Passport photos, almost certainly. Pirí worked for everyone, it seemed, for anyone who paid him. And they say Mexicans lack the Protestant work ethic.

  “But wait.” I sat up. “If my mother was sneaked onto Aeroflot, she’d have landed when Jamieson and Travolta were in Belgium, or wherever they were.”

  Don nodded. “She landed when Cindy and Dennis lived in that apartment.”

  I sighed. Cindy and Dennis had seemed so nice. Too nice to be CIA agents. “And they went to Havana afterward to try to figure the scheme out. Try to figure out why Emilio was moving people out of Cuba. Especially an American who could have left just as easily with the rest of her tour group.”

  “It sure looks that way,” Don agreed.

  “And they used me to go places where they didn’t want to be photographed. Like the women’s prison.”

&n
bsp; But when they learned the Cubans knew they were CIA agents, they decamped. I supposed a boat had picked them up, just as Mr. Radio Havana had surmised. (The desk clerk at the hotel, to her detriment, must have found their luggage and passports unattended and seized the chance to use them.) Cindy and Dennis would be well into their next assignment by now—perhaps in Russia?

  “Emilio’s underground railroad—sky road—would be a perfect way to shuttle out prisoners,” Don mused.

  “Like Lidia Gomez?”

  “Maybe she was Marules’s reward, what he got in return for his millions.” Don turned in his cramped seat to look at me. “Maybe this isn’t just politics. Maybe it’s love.”

  “Love?” A week ago, I might have questioned how much a person would do for love. But with my insides turning to jelly at his glance, I was more inclined to respect the concept. And Don must have been, too. Hadn’t he just spent a fortune, just risked rotting in a foreign prison? “Cindy and Dennis kept asking Emilio about Gomez. They said they were friends of Marules’s, and they kept mentioning Marules’s wife. Like that would make Emilio more forthcoming.”

  “Marules isn’t married to Gomez,” Conner put in. “He’s married to one of the richest women in Mexico. I looked it up—lots of pictures on the society pages. Rat-faced woman with a mustache.”

  “It’s traditional among upper-class Mexican men to have a mistress, isn’t it?” Don said.

  Men always think it’s traditional to do what suits them.

  Don continued, “So Marules channels his ugly wife’s millions to Cuba, to Emilio. He helps get people out when Emilio needs him to—maybe smugglers on the brink of getting caught. Emilio wants to bring in as many dollars as he can, but he doesn’t want to end up executed, like General Ochoa. And in return, Marules feels like he’s helping Cuba—helping get food and medicine to the little people. And, on a personal level, he gets Lidia Gomez, a brilliant literary light, probably a fascinating woman, and apparently someone he cares a great deal about.”

  “So why did Marules come to fetch us yesterday?” I wondered. “What was that about? He makes it possible for us to go to Cuba, then he jumps on a plane to find us there and tell us to hurry back home.”

  “To lead us into a trap?” Don suggested. “That was the outcome.”

  “No, Marules looked so scared. If he was just there to screw us over, why did he look terrified?” I sat up, trying to clear my mind. The side of my face where I’d been punched was throbbing. Even more distracting, I had a sudden hope of seeing my mother again.

  “He might have learned something about Emilio,” Don conceded, “something that worried him.”

  One thing sprang to mind. “Like finding out his compañero was behind the murders of Alicia Mendoza and Agosto Diaz.”

  Don nodded. “Emilio’s connection with Marules was burning out. General Miguel knew about it, for one thing. He knew Marules was funneling money to Emilio. And he knew Emilio was sneaking passengers aboard Aeroflot layovers—he wouldn’t have shown up at the airport otherwise. If Emilio couldn’t use Marules anymore anyway, it would make sense to kill Gomez. She might go public. And if Ochoa’s execution proved anything, it’s that Fidel won’t stand behind his people if they get caught. Not even for dollars.”

  “You’re assuming Emilio let Gomez go as a favor to Marules.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And that Marules was too smart to let anyone know she’d stayed in Mexico City. When Diaz went looking for her in San Diego, word must have gotten back to Emilio, maybe through Pirí. So Emilio sent someone to kill Gomez—he thought it was Gomez—and Diaz, too.”

  “In case Marules had confided in Agosto?” I swallowed my tears. “Agosto would have figured it out sooner or later. He was a quick study.”

  “All the more reason to kill him.” Seeing my expression, he added, “I’m sorry.”

  We were silent a few minutes.

  “You’d think Marules would have suspected that jerk Emilio right off the bat,” I fretted. “I wonder why he didn’t.”

  “Self-interest?” Conner suggested. “Marules has been breaking all kinds of laws himself—he wouldn’t want any of this coming out. Maybe he just didn’t let himself think along these lines.”

  I considered Mother’s caravan to Cuba. Marules’s funding of Emilio’s projects. The face-off between the practical young urban Marxist, Emilio, and the idealistic histórico, General Miguel. There were certainly a great many ways to be a Cuban patriot. Whether the revolution had succeeded or not, it had inspired fervent devotion in several countries. Perhaps, the closer the Cuban economy came to collapse, the more inspirational it became to those who didn’t live there—maybe more so than to those who did.

  “It might have been blind allegiance,” I put in. “To Emilio, to Cuba, to the Revolution.”

  Cuba was an island soaked with the blood of stubborn idealists and loyal friends.

  I just prayed we’d guessed right, and that none of the blood belonged to my mother.

  36

  We tried Marules’s home, we tried the newspaper office, we tried Jamieson and Travolta’s (former) apartment. But we couldn’t find him.

  Over a long-delayed meal, we talked it through again. If our theory was correct, Marules had finally learned he’d been playing with fire. Emilio had ordered the murders of Lidia Gomez and Agosto Diaz. He had tried to arrest us all.

  Now Marules had been to see my mother, as if he were making apologies, as if he regretted how things had worked out: Pirí should have alerted Marules when Mother arrived. Marules should have come through with the money for Aeroflot. Mother should have been home months ago.

  But for whatever reason Emilio put Mother on a plane, Marules had muffed things. She’d been an accidental casualty of Marules’s relationship with Emilio.

  There had been a far worse occurrence. If we were right, Marules would be making another apology now, one that would fall on deaf ears.

  We found him kneeling in a small mausoleum, facing a drawer in a wall, one of perhaps twenty. He was rocking slightly on his knees and praying, kissing rosary beads as he did so. Praying—not a very revolutionary thing to do. Another sign of disenchantment?

  He jumped when he saw us, his arms jerking so that the beads flew from his hand and skittered across the alabaster floor.

  The day was cool and overcast, and it was chilly in this small stone house. The majority of drawers bore the name Marules, with dates of death going back to the late seventeen hundreds. But he prayed to a door marked “Agosto Francisco Diaz Portillo.”

  Marules wore fresh clothes. He hadn’t been home, so perhaps he’d stopped at an apartment he shared with Gomez. But he was, as far as we could see, alone. There was no sign of Gomez, Sarah Swann, or anyone else here. It was just Martin Marules and his ghosts.

  He got to his feet, one hand clapped over his heart. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. He wiped his cheeks. He looked old.

  “Who picked you up at the airport?” Don demanded.

  He hesitated a moment. “Jamieson and Travolta,” he lied.

  “Why? What did they want?”

  “Information. About Juan Emilio.”

  “How did they know you were there?”

  “Pirí. The customs agent. He phoned them.”

  I walked to the metal plaque with Agosto’s name on it. So young, so much energy, so much intelligence—there’s always some cause ready to steal a life. The Cuban Revolution had claimed plenty of them.

  My hand covered the date of death. I said, “My mother is in prison here. For how much longer?”

  He recoiled as if I’d thrown something at him.

  “How much longer?” I repeated.

  “Seven weeks more.” His voice was low and tremulous. “Not forever. I have done everything to make her comfortable. If there is any extra thing to be purchased for her comfort, it is im
mediately done.”

  I wanted to punch him. Judging from the look on Don’s face, he was going to do it for me.

  “Don’t you know what you’ve put us through, me and my father?”

  “She would not let us tell you.” Tears filled his eyes. “I swear this to you. First she would not pay the mordidas, then she did not wish for you to know.”

  “She must have wanted us to know something. She must have tried to send us some word, let us know she was alive.”

  “But it would have been dangerous, do you not see? No matter what excuse she offered you, you would have gone to make sure it was the truth. You would have seen through her lie so clearly.” Tears spilled down his cheeks. “It was a cruelty to you. But we agreed that we could not deliver her messages. Not without your search for the truth leading you—”

  “To Pirí, to the Aeroflot counter, to Emilio and his dollar-grubbing schemes?” It was all I could do to master my rage. “You didn’t think I’d search for my mother if I got no message at all?”

  “But your search could only be vague. You could not rule out alternatives, as you could if she had specified.”

  “What did she want you to say?” Don demanded. “What was her message?”

  “That she was working in Cuba. In the AIDS colony. She said you would believe this.”

  And indeed, I would have. For a while. Then I’d have grown concerned about her. I’d have gone there to make sure it was really true, that she hadn’t been arrested. Or harmed.

  Marules was right. If I’d gotten her message, I’d have soon learned it was a lie. And I’d have rattled cages all over Havana, making a big mess.

  I had caused quite a commotion anyway, of course. But only because Don had hired detectives. Only because he’d had the money and the savvy, and had cared enough to help me.

  “Why did she leave Cuba the way she did?”

  “She was discovered in the home of Lidia Gomez.”

  “And the house was empty because Gomez lives here with you.”

  He closed his eyes as if too afraid to deal with us. “Your mother was detained, and so she missed her flight. Because of where she had been, this was an embarrassment to Juan Emilio. He did not wish certain others, political enemies, to discover the blunder. And so he offered your mother a seat on an Aeroflot flight to Mexico City. We had done this often, Juan Emilio and I. Pirí should have alerted me to pay for the ticket. Always before it had worked perfectly.” He whispered, “I told Juan Emilio after that, he must make the house appear occupied. He must hire someone to make it appear that Lidia remains under house arrest. It should never have become known that she escaped.”