Comrades in Miami

by Jose Latour

  “No problem,” Pardo said.

  “Think you could give me my money now?” asked Amieba.

  Without saying a word, Pardo turned, rummaged through the duffel bag, and extracted something wrapped in a page of Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and the penlight. “Here you are. A hundred one-hundred-dollar bills. Count it.”

  The newspaper page made the ensign chuckle; he let it glide to the floor. Pardo turned the penlight on, pointing its beam down. Amieba flipped over the wad peering at the corners of the bills, not counting, just checking that all had the right number. Then he drew a plastic bag out from a flap pocket of his trousers, dropped the cash into it, slipped a rubber band off his wrist, put it around the bag, and dropped it into the flap pocket.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “No, thank you. Could you send your men in now, Amieba?” asked Pardo. “I want to pay them. We’ll wash and change after that.”

  “Great. One by one. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Pardo agreed.

  Uncertain whether Amieba had explained clearly to his men how they would go about it, before giving them their money Pardo briefed the soaked sailors. He and his wife did not exist. They were seeing things. No civilians were on board. The crew had sailed to Key West on the spur of the moment, sick and tired of Cuban misery. INS officials would interrogate them separately, make promises, offer deals, give their word. But none of this would be fulfilled if so much as one of them admitted that they had transported civilians. Instead, all would be tried and sentenced as human traffickers and sent back to Cuba. They would most probably be searched, Pardo warned. If their cash was found, what could they say? That it had fallen into their laps, like manna from heaven? It would be obvious they had not fled Cuba on the spur of the moment, so he advised them to hide it somewhere before turning themselves in.

  Not before reaching Tampa would he and his wife go to the INS. Once there, they would say they had arrived in a raft. Should they be nabbed in Key West, they would say the same thing. In the event one of them, or the whole crew, bumped into him or his wife at a cafeteria, in the street, or in jail, greetings, winks, and every other sign of recognition were strictly forbidden. Under no circumstance would he and his wife admit having sailed in the cigarette boat.

  “Understood?”

  “Understood, comrade.”

  No offense was meant or sarcasm intended when using such a term. Over the years “comrade” had become a household word to such a point that sometimes a son or daughter answered a parent’s question with “Yes, comrade.” Victoria, however, was addressed with the more respectful señora. All three had an identical reaction when given their cash: wide-eyed admiration at pocketing twenty fifty-dollar bills. Each young man politely thanked Pardo before returning to the cockpit.

  “Feeling better?” Pardo asked his wife.

  “By the minute since we slowed down.”

  “Want to wash and change now?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Once they rinsed their faces, Pardo emptied the duffel bag on the wraparound sofa. Victoria took off her gun, keys, jeans, shirt, boots, and underwear, then slipped into pantyhose and a strapless, black lacy bra. Next, she donned for the first time an elegant, albeit somewhat dated, black halter-neck evening gown bought by Pardo in Madrid in 1998. She put on black moccasins and reached for a plastic bag containing new, high-heeled black shoes. Finally, she seized a black purse that had inside a brand-new wallet with two hundred and fifty dollars, cosmetics, and the key to a safe-deposit box in Paris, France.

  Meanwhile, Pardo undressed and donned cream-colored slacks, a white dress shirt, a dark blue sports jacket, and brown loafers. He put a money clip with four thousand dollars in one-hundred dollar bills into the left side pocket of the slacks, slipped his wallet with nine twenty-dollar bills into the back pocket, inserted his wife’s gun over his lower back. The Costa Rican passport with his photo, and a CD with banking information went into the inner breast pocket of the sports jacket.

  Following this, he thrust the discarded boots and clothing into the duffel bag. He pulled the drawstrings tight, seized it, reached the entranceway to the cabin, stooped, and went out. Amieba concentrated on steering and peering into the darkness. His copilot was holding the infrared binoculars to his eyes. The other two coast-guardsmen sat in the backseat, AK-47s on their laps, in wartime silence. Pardo could see city lights not too far away. The sea was calm. The outboards hummed quietly.

  “Chief,” the youngest sailor warned Amieba in a hushed tone after seeing Pardo emerge from the cabin. The ensign turned in his seat, spotted Pardo, looked him up and down, raised his eyebrows, and gave him an approving nod, saying “You all dressed up” with his expression.

  “This bag …”

  Amieba shushed him, then beckoned him over.

  With two steps, Pardo was at his side. “Voices travel far over water,” the ensign whispered. “What do you want?”

  “This bag holds the old rags we wore and two pairs of boots,” Pardo explained, his voice lowered to a whisper, too. “They shouldn’t be found here. I want them to sink to the bottom. Any problem with that?”

  Amieba considered it for an instant. “We’ll see to it. Give it to Jesús, the guy to my left” was his reply.

  Once the youngest sailor had the duffel bag, he cast a questioning glance at the skipper for instructions. By jerking his thumb out twice, the ensign signaled to get rid of the bag. Then his forefinger pointed at the bottom of the boat. Jesús assented, loosened the draw-string, bent overboard to port, held the bag by the strap until it filled with seawater to the top, pulled the drawstring tight again, then let the bag go. It dropped sixty-five feet to the bottom.

  “Thanks,” Pardo said, then went back inside the cabin. He addressed Victoria. “We are nearer to Key West, I suppose.”

  “How do you know?”

  “City lights look pretty close.”

  “Oh.”

  For the next fifty minutes, like a nearly invisible virus invading an organism several trillion times its size, the purring outboards slipped the cigarette in. To fight off what she judged an acute attack of anxiety, Victoria closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She couldn’t stop turning over in her mind the events that had taken place in the last few hours. Pardo kept checking the immediate parts of their project. They had considered two possibilities—arriving undetected or getting caught—and had plans for both. They sat on the wraparound, Victoria comfortably against the back of the seat, Pardo hunched forward as the gun prevented him from reclining, both staring at the entrance. Following what seemed like an eternity, they felt the boat scrape something. Were they motionless now? It seemed so. The outboards barely whispered. Victoria pressed the light of her Casio. 1:35. Amieba came into the cabin less than a minute later.

  “Would you please go ashore, comrades?” displaying his best smile.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Victoria mumbled in a quivering voice.

  Unbelieving, they went up. The cigarette was moored to a ten-slip, five-foot-wide dock, alongside a Chrysler 26 Cruiser sailboat, across from a Thomas Point forty-three-foot power cruiser. Side-moored at the end, too huge to fit anywhere else, a two-deck, over one-hundred-foot power cruiser dwarfed the other vessels. To their left, a slick-looking, two-story white building with a pagoda-like blue roof and a verandah sparkled against a fuzzy background. Somewhat behind it, to its right, a five-story building identically painted seemed the overgrown mama’s boy of the nearer construction.

  “Hurry, Pardo,” Amieba, urging him. “I can’t waste a second.”

  “But what’s this place?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  Pardo leaped out first and helped Victoria. Jesús stood on the dock holding a mooring line, looking uptight. Pardo waved to Amieba and his crew, gave Jesús a pat on the back. Victoria blew kisses to those on board, kissed Jesús on his cheek. Holding hands, the couple ambled away along the dock. They heard the outboa
rds coming to life and turned. Jesús had hopped in, the boat was going out again.

  “C’mon, let’s move on,” Pardo whispered.

  They reached the end of the dock, crossed between mama and her big boy. After fifty yards or so they found a sign that read HYATT MARINA RESORT. Victoria paused, extracted the high-heeled shoes from the plastic bag, shook off the moccasins, put on the new shoes, dropped the moccasins into the bag, and abandoned them behind a shrub. Two minutes later they were in Mallory Square.

  …

  The first thing Pardo and Victoria did when they found a diner was to use the restrooms. Afterward, although only one customer was sitting at the counter having a cup of coffee, they chose a table at the back. The server, accustomed to tourists, was not in the least surprised by their accents. Victoria asked for a cup of chamomile tea, which she sipped slowly. Her husband devoured a huge Cuban medianoche: thin slices of Southern-style ham, lacey Swiss cheese, roasted pork, and pickled cucumbers in a special bread onto which mustard and butter had been generously spread. What made medianoches unique were the bread and the pork, in particular a pinch of sugar and something else in the bread dough, malt maybe? He downed it with a beer.

  “This is excellent,” he commented halfway into the sandwich.

  Victoria wondered how it was possible that her husband could be so flip as to sit there eating a damn sandwich with so much relish. Men!

  Later, waiting for his change, Pardo registered what he hadn’t noticed in the darkened cabin or under the streetlights: Despite having put on a little makeup in the restroom, Victoria looked gaunt and pale, with dark crescents under her eyes.

  “How are you feeling, Vicky?” he asked solicitously.

  “Better. These shoes are killing me, though.”

  Pardo wondered how it was possible that his wife, after such a grueling experience, still recovering from an asthma attack, on the cusp of an amazing life change, could complain, of all things, about a fucking pair of shoes. Women!

  The server put a plastic plate with the change on the table.

  “Could you call us a cab, please?”

  “Sure,” the woman said and marched away. Pardo left two one-dollar bills on the plate.

  “You tipping two dollars for a sandwich, a beer, and a cup of tea?” Victoria murmured.

  “And a phone call.”

  “Yeah, and a phone call.”

  “Vicky, this is Key West. You don’t want to attract attention, you tip generously. You want this woman to remember us forever, you leave her a quarter.”

  Victoria breathed a sigh. “Okay, sorry. I forgot.”

  In the cab’s backseat, Pardo reclined after sliding the gun to his left side. The cabman drove them to the bus station at Twenty-seventh Street, but warned them that it would be closed at this hour. Pardo asked him to wait while they got out and questioned a security guard. The man said the next bus to Miami was a Key Line Express that departed at 5:00 A.M. Pardo’s watch read 2:32. He thanked the man and went back to the taxi.

  “Hey, my friend, where can we spend the next two hours?” he asked the cabbie.

  The man half turned in his seat and raised his eyebrows. “There’re a zillion places. Sloppy Joe’s, Hard Rock Café, there’s this nice Irish pub on Grinell Street, Finnegan’s Wake …”

  “No bars, please,” Victoria pleaded.

  “Ma’am, this hour, churches ain’t open.”

  “C’mon, honey,” Pardo said to his wife in English, squeezing her hand, “let’s check out this Irish place. You don’t have to drink alcohol. Just a soda or something.”

  Victoria agreed, realizing they had no choice. Tonight, for Latin-looking foreigners, staying outdoors was not such a good idea. The plan was that, once they hid their money, Amieba and his guys would walk into town, find a police officer, and give themselves up. Then ringing phones would awaken every official in Key West; more phones would get journalists on their feet. Definitely not a good time to be on the street.

  This was why they let themselves be taken to 320 Grinell Street. Steil gave the driver a ten, told him to keep the change, and asked to be picked up at 4:30.

  “Place closes at four, Mister.”

  “Okay, at four then.”

  It was a two-story wooden structure painted white. Through a double door flanked by shop windows and potted plants, they entered a quaint pub where polished dark wood reigned. At the curved bar, talking in low tones, nursing their drinks, sat two white-haired overweight men. The bartender looked bored. Patrons stared at the latest arrivals on account of their clothes. Everybody else was wearing T-shirts, shorts, and sandals or flip-flops.

  They chose a table for two at the back and took the place in. Flags and pictures on the walls, a small bandstand, lamps hanging from the ceiling. Three nearby tables were occupied by people who, judging by their slurs and the boisterous fun they were having, would wake up tomorrow afternoon with a lousy hangover. The place was evidently winding down, its staff looking tired. A longhaired, good-looking brunette server strode past tables and approached them with a giant smile, as if waiting on people made her the happiest person in Florida. When Victoria said she was not having anything, the brunette refined her act, began wheedling the customer. How come? With so many wonderful drinks to be had? A margarita? A frozen Kahlua? A pina colada? This elicited a smile from Victoria. Why couldn’t Anglos pronounce the letter ñ?

  “No drinks, thanks.”

  “How about a sandwich, a dessert maybe?” moving to food.

  Victoria cocked her head and stared at her.

  “A Cutie pie? An Irish bread pudding? How about hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream?” the waitress probed.

  “Hot apple pie?” Victoria asked, and the young waitress knew she had this Latino woman in the bag.

  “Yes, ma’am. Homemade.”

  “Okay, I’ll have a portion.”

  “And to drink?”

  “Iced tea, maybe?

  “Excellent choice. And you, sir?”

  “Just a beer.”

  “Draft, domestic, imported?”

  “Ah … whichever.”

  “Whichever sir?”

  “Heineken.”

  “Be right over.”

  Her first encounter with the consumer society impressed Victoria.

  “Did you see that?” she asked Pardo.

  “What?”

  “The quality of the service? Mommy wouldn’t let me go to bed on an empty stomach.”

  “It’s how the system works. She probably earns a basic hourly wage, plus a commission on sales. She wants us to leave her a nice tip, too.”

  The young woman came with their order less than a minute later. Having found the pie and the ice cream delicious, Victoria perked up a little.

  For the nth time they distractedly made the comparisons and reached the conclusions 99 percent of Cubans make and reach when traveling abroad. Individuals think about helping others only after their basic needs are satisfied. Communism goes against human nature, ergo its failure. For Cuban servers, the client is the enemy because they earn the same miserable wage if they serve fifty or five hundred on their shift. Where the dollar is the valid currency, they must donate part of their tips to the government. Since there is little motivation, clients are not welcome. They interrupt conversations, thwart watching a favorite TV program or listening to music on the radio, interfere with eyeing the chicks with the hefty behinds going by. Barmen and kitchen staff put less rum in the mojito and serve meager portions to sell surpluses on the black market. But it was not a revelation; they had discussed this many times in the past few years.

  “The furniture here seems pretty old,” Pardo, changing the subject. He was beginning to tire of discussing the same topic over and over.

  Victoria gazed around thoughtfully. “Yeah, trying to preserve an ambience, I guess. You saw the photos on the walls? The thirties, Hemingway, that sort of thing.”

  “The tourists probably eat it up.”

  “Proba
bly. But you know what? I’m sick and tired of old things. Havana is frozen in time. I want to see modernity, macho.

  They kept shooting the breeze, Pardo ordering a second beer. There were periods of silence as well, five, six minutes long. They had discussed every step of the way so many times and at such great length, there was no need to do it again. What they yearned for was a place to sleep.

  “Victoria. You are incredible.”

  “Why is that?”

  “When you told me you had denounced me to the minister, I almost peed in my pants.”

  “It’s why I told you after doing it. You would’ve been against creating a diversion.”

  “I would’ve been against that diversion. My life was at stake.”

  “No. It wasn’t. Had it been, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “It worked.”

  “Of course, it had to. Now, if you hadn’t accessed your account …”

  “I know,” raising his hands to ward her off. “I know. It was so stupid of me.”

  “We all make mistakes.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes, macho. Everybody.”

  The white-haired men at the bar lumbered off their stools and took their leave. The young waitress eyed the remaining clients warily. At 3:53, smiling to pretend she hated to spoil the fun, she left the tabs on the tables.

  “How much?” Victoria wanted to know.

  “Fourteen bucks,” Pardo said, taking his wallet out.

  “I can’t believe it,” seizing the check, reading the total, putting it back on the plate. “Fourteen dollars for a pie, a scoop of ice cream, a glass of iced tea, and two beers?”

  “And an hour and a half killing time here, Vicky. This is a tourist town. But I don’t expect prices to be much cheaper anywhere else. This is the U.S. of A. You better get used to it.”