Comrades in Miami

by Jose Latour

  “Internet. Wires and articles on the Wasp network trial.”

  “Oh.”

  As head of the Miami desk of Cuban Intelligence, Victoria could close her eyes and see in her mind a map of Dade County with all its public buildings and certain specific addresses. She refused to brag about it, though.

  They used the restrooms first. After washing, Pardo stripped away four hundred-dollar notes from his money clip and put them in his wallet. They had a hearty breakfast, then returned to First Avenue to look up domestic banks in the Yellow Pages hanging from a pay phone. At the Bank of America branch on Third Avenue, Pardo asked a teller to break the four hundred-dollar bills for him, in tens and twenties, please. Next the couple set off for clothing stores in the vicinity. Cursing under their breath the airline that had lost their baggage, they stocked up on inexpensive casual wear at a nondescript haberdashery in which they also acquired a decent roll-on to pack all they had purchased. At the First Street Payless they bought cheap trainers for him and a pair of black pumps for her. Her high heels went into the roll-on, and she left the shoe shop shod in the pumps.

  At a bookshop they picked out a good city map before checking the Yellow Pages for hotels. Pardo argued in favor of a two-star without pool, gym, and restaurant. It was probably the kind of inexpensive place where lower-middle-class Latin American tourists stayed, he said. Besides, the Lexington was very close, on First Street. Victoria had no reason to oppose her husband’s choice.

  But before heading there, to avoid going insane with curiosity, they wanted to find out how things were going in Key West. Suspecting that the story had broken much too late to make the morning editions, Victoria searched for a public library in the green pages that listed government buildings and found that the Miami Public Library was at 101 West Flagler Street, a short walk from where they were standing at 12.44 P.M.

  Shortly afterward, they ascended the ramp access to a modern, somewhat Moorish-looking building across the street from the courthouse. Three smokers were standing outside, near plastic ashtrays. Making the most of a partly clouded sky, several people on their lunch hour were munching their snacks or chatted at a small plaza dotted with white plastic tables and chairs. An automatic door slid open, they went in and asked the receptionist what they had to do to check their e-mail.

  “Just go to one of the computers upstairs,” the woman explained, “but you can’t take that roll-on in,” she added.

  Realizing that he would grasp the main points of unfamiliar software faster than she would, Victoria decided she would stay in the lobby. By 1:17, Pardo had signed for a desktop and logged in to the Miami Herald website, where he learned that four Cuban coastguardsmen had grounded their cigarette boat on Higgs Beach, surrendered to the authorities, and applied for political asylum. “Their spur-of-the-moment sprint for freedom apparently caught officials in both countries by surprise,” the piece said. Victoria chuckled with delight when Pardo told her this. They wondered where the four deserters had hidden their money.

  The hotel was not a fleabag, but the room was austere. It had a seventeen-inch color TV set on a metal frame screwed to a wall, an old air conditioner, a phone extension, a double bed, two bedside tables, a lamp, a window from which the magnificent view of a bare cream-colored wall could be contemplated, and a small bathroom. While frantically undressing, Victoria quipped that, although it was a radical change from a two-story penthouse in Vedado, they could get over it, and the thirty-dollar rate was very reasonable. Pardo concurred and the buck-naked couple hurried to the tiny shower stall. Victoria realized she still had her glasses on, stripped them off, backtracked to the room, placed them atop a bedside table, and rushed into the bathroom.

  Their huge sense of accomplishment elevated their sexual desire to new heights. The notion that they had been accomplices in criminal acts and were looking forward to committing a few more didn’t cross their minds.

  Under the shower, while soaping themselves, they engaged in hurried foreplay. After hastily drying each other, they flopped onto the bed. Uncontrollable passion made them dispense with fellatio and cunnilingus. On top, facing Pardo, she filled herself with him and came for the first time. Victoria’s second orgasm likewise happened with her on top, but facing his feet. Her third took place when they were side by side. They reserved the rear entry position, Victoria’s “prehistoric fuck,” for her fourth, most intense orgasm and his enormously pleasurable ejaculation. The whole act lasted only half an hour, but its intensity was supreme.

  This time, though, their lovemaking had something different that neither lover would have found easy to define. Both were wondering about it as overpowering drowsiness began turning off sections of their consciences. A subtle physical poetry in each movement, a delightful rendition of a song in which sighs and moans of ecstasy and mumbled terms of endearment substituted for musical notes and lyrics. Such tenderness, affection, mutual understanding, or whatever it was had been absent in the past, or they hadn’t perceived it. Was it brought about by the risks and fears shared? By the promising future? Whatever the reason, in the last few days something important had burgeoned.

  They slept soundly for nearly five hours. Hunger and a stiff awoke Pardo. Dusk was in its final stage, the room in shadows. He began kissing his wife’s arms, shoulders, back of the neck. She stirred, turned. A second, more reposed and sophisticated round of sexual activity began. It was completely dark by the time it ended.

  “I am so hungry,” Pardo grumbled after a while, breaking the spell.

  “So am I.”

  “Should I go out and bring something in or you want to come, too?”

  “Let’s go find a McDonald’s. Those quarter-pounders look so tempting.”

  “Ughh. Junk food.”

  “Tell that to the Cuban woman in the street. Besides, I have to make the first phone call.”

  “Right. It slipped my mind completely.”

  “Nothing can slip our minds, macho. Nothing at all.”

  Following the cheeseburgers and sodas, Victoria went to a pay phone, dropped in thirty-five cents, and dialed a number.

  “Bonis Landscaping,” a machine said. “Leave your message.”

  “Hi, Mr. Bonis. This is your new client, Olga Villalobos,” in Spanish, enunciating clearly. “I hope you are well. Would it be possible for you to do my garden next Monday, May 6? Would 9:00 A.M. be okay? Thank you. Bye-bye.”

  “Olga” indicated that a passport for a white woman in her forties was needed. “Villalobos” signified that other identity papers under the same name on the passport, such as a social security card or credit cards, although not indispensable, would be most welcome. “I hope you are well” meant that photos of the woman would be delivered. “Would it be possible” said that two days were to be deducted from the delivery date mentioned. “My garden” specified that the live drop where the photos were to be handed over would take place at the Burdines store at 22 East Flagler, fourth floor, luggage department. “9:00 A.M.” in reality meant six hours later: 3:00 P.M.

  “That’s it?” Pardo asked in amazement once Victoria replaced the handset.

  “That’s it.”

  “But how can this … guy?”

  “Shush. Don’t ask,” taking his hand and walking away from the pay phone. “It’s very simple, really, but too complicated to explain. I just memorized what I had to say. Olga indicates that a white woman in her forties will use the passport. If the name is … any other, it means a woman in her thirties, or in her fifties, or in her twenties; dark-skinned black, or light-skinned black, or Asian, or half-Asian. Maybe Gladys means a black woman in her forties, I don’t remember. Every possible situation is included, or so we think. The illegal has these words and phrases in a diskette, the real meaning next to each, so he decodes what I said, word by word. ‘My garden’ means a place for a live drop, ‘my backyard’ means another, ‘trimming the garden hedge’ a third. It’s no big deal.”

  “Well!” Pardo was smiling and shaking hi
s head. “I thought you’d use colored chalks, secret writing paper, coded pads, or microdots. This is so … passé.”

  “Communication is severely restricted at present,” Victoria explained. “Even radio messages. What you just heard is the backup emergency code.”

  “What happens if he doesn’t have a passport that belonged to a white woman in her forties?” asked Pardo, his eyes on the sidewalk.

  “We wait, keep in touch, call him every Tuesday and Friday at 11:00 P.M. sharp, and listen to the recorded message.”

  Pardo’s facial expression—lips curved downward, raised eyebrows—showed his doubts that this could work. “Poor bastard; what a life,” he sympathized.

  “I’m not so sure of that. Maybe he derives intense satisfaction from his secret mission, believes he was born for it.”

  “You think so?”

  “Politically motivated illegals are in a class of their own. Their psychological profile is extremely interesting.”

  “Well, they are all crazy, if you ask me.”

  “I wouldn’t expect your purely logical, mathematical mind to reach a different conclusion. Politically motivated illegals come from the worst kind of idealists: poets, writers, artists, especially frustrated actors. The cream of the crop is indifferent to money and willing to postpone social recognition for posterity.”

  They went over it some more on the way to the hotel, Pardo mostly listening attentively. In the end, both admitted they lacked the stuff good spies possess in abundance.

  “I’m so tired,” Victoria moaned inside the elevator cage.

  “Me, too.”

  They made it to the room at 11:22, undressed, and were fast asleep in a short while.

  …

  At 11:17 A.M. on Tuesday morning, Victoria pressed the buzzer of a metal box to the left of a gate closing the entryway to a huge one-story, L-shaped residence painted gleaming white. It had a gabled green-tile roof, tinted-glass louvered windows, and privet hedges alongside a well-tended lawn. Two slender date palms and beds of flowers flanked the ninety-foot-long concrete footway to the front door. Three paved parking spaces by the sidewalk substituted for a garage. Tall treetops toward the rear of the lot suggested a sizable backyard.

  Neither the psychologist nor her husband had any notion what that kind of mansion, on a lot this size, in such an exclusive neighborhood, could possibly be worth. A fortune probably. 101 was a perfectly paved, one-block street in the strictly zoned, 103-acre west islet of Bay Harbor Islands.

  “Yes?” came from a speaker.

  “Good morning, madam,” Victoria said.

  “Good morning” a woman’s voice, heavy with Spanish accent.

  “Are you the lady of the house?” deliberately worsening her accent.

  “No. Who is this?”

  “My name is Angela. Can I speak to the lady of the house, please?”

  “Lady expecting you?”

  “No.”

  “What you want lady of the house for?”

  “We, my husband and I, are looking for part-time work. We clean houses, pools, mow lawns …”

  “Mire señora, óigame bien, la dueña de la casa está ocupada y, además, aquí no hace falta nadie. ¿Me entiende? Mi esposo y yo nos bastamos y sobramos para hacerlo todo. Así que pueden marcharse, ¿me entiende?”

  Strike one, Pardo thought. Victoria shrugged and smiled at him. The Spanish-speaking servant at the intercom, having identified from Victoria’s accent that she came from a Latin American country, had refused to let them speak to the lady of the house. The servant didn’t want competition. They had not pondered that possibility. They moved on to the next residence, same sidewalk, where their second deflecting maneuver of the day was to take place.

  They had got up at seven, rested and euphoric, and donned items of the tawdry casual wear bought the day before, the kind most recent poor immigrants can afford. Forced to carry the gun, the cash, and the other things he could not leave at the hotel room, Pardo had to wear his jacket, too. After breakfast at a Cuban cafeteria, the couple had rushed to the downtown bus terminal. It had not been easy to figure out the proper bus route to take by looking at schematic maps, but they correctly deduced that a Route H bus would take them to Bay Harbor.

  “Bay Harbor, Bal Harbour, what’s the difference?” Victoria had asked, not expecting her husband to provide an explanation. She had been standing on the sidewalk by the bus stop, looking at the map, gazing around. The air of affluence was impressive. The beautifully landscaped Bal Harbour Shops, nestled between sea grape trees and silver buttonwood and patrolled by security guards in red-and-black British-looking uniforms, indicated that it was a fashion mecca for the very rich. The natural aromas of seabreeze, earth, flowers, and evaporating dew blended with the artificial fragrances of the priciest French perfumes, genuine leathers, single malt whiskeys, and wet enamel paints. This world was not 180 miles away from Cuba; it was 180 light years away.

  “Beats me,” Pardo had mumbled after a moment, moving his eyes away from the Sheraton Beach Resort to his wife. “Maybe to live in Bay you must prove a net worth in excess of five hundred million, whereas a mere two hundred million will gain you admittance to Bal.”

  “You take that down to fifty and twenty, respectively, I’ll buy it.”

  “Sold.”

  Making fun of themselves for having overestimated their riches so much, acknowledging that in all probability $2 million was the deposit a butler had to make to get a job at either place, they had taken Kane Concourse on foot, crossed the eastern islet, and reached its sister at a quarter to eleven, nearly an hour past their schedule. Tropical vegetation thrived everywhere, and the royal palms made them feel somewhat nostalgic. The difference with the other islet appeared to be the absence of condominiums, apartment buildings, or other kinds of multifamily dwellings. Just stately homes to north, south, east, and west. The impression was of an architectural competition in which the most money didn’t always bring about the finest result. The two-story house whose intercom button Victoria pressed next, not as pleasing to her eyes as the first, served as an example.

  Sitting twenty or so yards from the ornamental white picket fence by the sidewalk—ineffectual for protecting the manicured lawn, flower beds, and shrubs from being trampled—it also had a gabled roof, but in red tiles. Its cream-colored exterior matched the sash windows painted white. High treetops at the back and swimming pools hidden from view seemed to be standard features in Bay Harbor.

  “Who is it?” the cultured voice of a woman.

  “My name is Angela, madam. May I speak to the lady of the house, please?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Madam, my husband and I are from Costa Rica. We are looking for part-time jobs. We clean houses, pools, mow lawns, scrape and paint walls, all this at very reasonable rates. If there’s something you need done, we would do it gladly.”

  Several moments slipped by.

  “I do not need your services, Angela, thank you. I already have people who take care of that.” No foreigner this one, Victoria thought. Maybe a slight upper-class Boston accent?

  “Well, thanks anyway, madam. Do you happen to know if a neighbor or friend of yours living nearby could be interested in our services?”

  The second pause was longer, as though the woman was carefully pondering what to say.

  “No, Angela, I don’t. Nevertheless, assuming you and your husband are decent people trying to make a living, let me give you a piece of advice. In Bay Harbor, your approach is wrong. Nobody here will admit perfect strangers into their homes. In point of fact, some may call the police and report you. I suggest you either ring doors somewhere else or place a classified ad in a newspaper. Have a good day, Angela.”

  The couple stared at each other. They had not considered this obvious danger. Their rounded eyes proclaimed: “Have we turned stupid overnight?”

  “Thank you, madam.”

  “You are very welcome.”

  The speaker clicked, signaling
that the intercom had been turned off. Somewhat stunned, Victoria and Pardo started walking toward the adjacent house.

  “After all the trouble, I think we ought to go for it, anyhow,” Victoria opined.

  “Right. And if she turns us down, get the hell out. Fast.”

  “Immediately.”

  The next residence was Maria Scheindlin’s. Pardo pressed the buzzer. Their eyes roved about the front garden, the colonnaded entry, the overhanging balcony, the slate path leading to the front door.

  “Who is it?”

  Victoria repeated her pitch. A tiny wireless microphone, disguised as a dry twig and secured with superglue atop the concrete column in which the intercom was embedded, picked up her words.

  “No thanks, honey. I don’t need anybody. Take care.”

  The intercom clicked.

  “Let’s call it a day,” urged Pardo.

  “Not a minute too soon,” Victoria commented.

  From a mansion across the street, a video camera followed them.

  Half an hour had gone by and they were sitting in a bench on Collins Avenue, waiting for the bus, when Victoria drew a conclusion.

  “Remember in Key West you said I never made mistakes? Well, this trip here today was a crass error of judgment. This is a new world and we’re outsiders, we don’t get to first base here. We don’t know habits, patterns of behavior, security measures, nothing. So, I’m telling you, we must be very, very careful, macho. Take nothing for granted.”

  …

  Thirty-three hours later, at the FBI’s safe house, Elliot Steil was watching a large-screen TV in fascination. Yes, no doubt about it. But how had these two made it to Miami? That the FBI was keeping Maria Scheindlin’s home under surveillance was almost as surprising as seeing the spurious XEMIC executives walking the streets of Bay Harbor. Hart, McLellan, and a third man introduced as Mr. Smith peered closely at Steil, who shook his head in wonder, turned away from the screen, and addressed Hart.

  “Those two,” he said pointing at the screen, looking and sounding astonished, “are Carlos Capdevila and Berta Arosamena.”