Comrades in Miami

by Jose Latour

  “Aren’t we overdoing it, Vicky?” Pardo wondered. “This man has been an illegal for … how long?”

  “Twenty-two years.”

  “Is there any reason to suspect his phone line has been bugged since you called him?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “I don’t want to sound like I think I’m an expert on this. You are. But what’s the problem with calling from here? Not this hotel, of course. I mean calling from Naples.”

  “No problem. It just isn’t the sensible thing to do. Fugitives—it’s what we are, whether we like it or not—are not supposed to call from a place they can be easily traced to. Naples is not New York or Chicago, you know? Oh, hell, maybe I’m being too theoretical and negative. Let’s go find a booth at a big hotel.”

  …

  To say that Eugenio Bonis had endured an adventurous although pathetic life would be quite an understatement. His grandfather, a foundry worker victimized during the first years of corrupt Cuban capitalism, joined the Communist Party in 1925, at age thirty-five. His father, a dropout and shoeshine boy indoctrinated by his ancestor in proletariat ideology, signed up with the Communist Youth in 1935, at age fifteen. Eugenio Bonis, whose real name was Alfredo Aparicio, had been merely nine years old when he started hawking a communist magazine in 1960, sixteen months after the Batista dictatorship had been toppled, one full year before the Chief proclaimed the communist nature of the Revolution. Alfredo joined Cuban Counterintelligence as an informer in 1966, three weeks after his fifteenth birthday.

  In postcapitalist Cuba, the overwhelming majority of card-carrying communists under thirty belonged to the Union of Communist Youth, the party’s junior organization. Gaining admittance into the party at a younger age was an honor reserved for those who excelled at something, from science to sports. Precious few were granted full party membership at eighteen—in most instances for having distinguished themselves on the battlefield or in matters related to the security of the Revolution. Alfredo was one of those.

  He had been admitted to the party at this tender age for spending 1968 and 1969 in a prison camp, purportedly doing hard labor under the Vagrancy Act. In fact, he informed on Catholics, gay men, and hippies who had been convicted for their religious, sexual, or cultural beliefs and practices. Alfredo ate lousy food improperly cooked, slept on lice-infested bunkers, spent nine hours daily from Monday through Saturday—plus four on Sundays—tilling the land, and lacked proper medical care. Despite all this, he enormously enjoyed snitching on the papists, degenerates, and joint-smoking longhaired drunks he pretended to befriend.

  Such self-sacrifice won him the respect of State Security’s top brass. From June 1970 to December 1971, at an SS farm fifty-five kilometers from Havana, he passed a course on the theory and practice of Intelligence and Counterintelligence with flying colors. His total commitment to the cause and to espionage, and an everyday conduct premised on total obedience, made him the consummate agent, the sort of hand every skipper wanted on board. Thereby, throughout the seventies, Alfredo lived a peripatetic life. He smuggled weapons, explosives, and money into Nicaragua and El Salvador; trained agents in Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela; liaised between field spies and their case officers in four African nations; smuggled gold worth several million dollars out of Lebanon, executed two traitors, and learned passable English and Portuguese.

  Even though most females considered the heterosexual Alfredo an extremely attractive man, he didn’t see much difference between ejaculation and defecation. Both were physiological functions, unavoidable discharges. For many years he masturbated ten times for every occasion he took a woman to bed. In his thirties he came to the conclusion that ignoring overtures from members of the opposite sex seemed to make him even more fascinating to the ladies, so he practiced a limited, easy flirtation that worked with most. The notion of starting a family had never crossed his mind. Alfredo had two loves—the homeland and the Revolution.

  In 1978 the Chief decided to revitalize and improve upon what up to then had been a rather amateurish—albeit fruitful—intelligence-gathering effort in the United States by planting experienced cadres in Miami, Key West, Tampa, New Jersey, and New York. American and Cuban embassies in all but name had already been opened in Havana and Washington. He had authorized Cubans residing abroad to visit relatives living on the island. The bleeding heart liberal in the White House would most probably win a second term in office, he told his brother. The timing was perfect. Alfredo Aparicio’s name had been the third on the list, following the resident director and his deputy, which the Commander personally approved.

  Sent back to the farm, Alfredo learned gardening in the mornings and contemporary espionage technology in the afternoons. In the evenings, he perfected his English. The course was nearing completion when, in April 1980, the Chief set in motion the Mariel boatlift. The minister of the interior judged the occasion made-to-order, a comment that elicited an enigmatic smile from Number One as he gave the go-ahead. Under the name Eugenio Bonis, Alfredo Aparicio was locked away at Combinado del Este, the oversized Havana penitentiary, and twenty-six days later he became one of several thousand convicts that Castro shipped to the United States.

  Unsuspecting American institutions took Bonis at face value and issued him the proper documentation to find employment and housing, to be allowed to travel, open bank accounts, obtain credit, get free health care and tax exemptions. During his first weeks in the United States, caring Cuban-Americans provided what he needed, from clothing to money. Bonis applied for and was granted citizenship in 1986. He opened his business with an SBA loan. Five years later he married an Anglo woman to bolster his legend. “Taking advantage of the contradictions of imperialism”—communist terminology to describe the opportunities existing in democratic, First World societies—was not a situation fraught with difficulties.

  By 2002, Bonis had successfully pursued landscape gardening and espionage for twenty-two consecutive years. As baseball-mad Cubans like to say: If not a record, a good batting average.

  Now, driving along the causeway into Miami, the gardener found inner peace. He felt at ease, especially after completing a mission. This, however, was a strange and surprising emotional state. He sensed that the most important years of his life were nearing to a close, that he had accomplished the mission for which, in the distant future, when exploitation no longer existed and imperialism had been resoundingly defeated, his deeds if not his name would merit a few lines in history books.

  Returning to the fold—the secret yearning he had refused to cherish to avoid frustrating postponements—seemed closer than ever. In a few days he would be leisurely strolling along the Malecón, getting drunk, smoking a real cigar. This coming July 26 he would celebrate in style. He would do the things that had been forbidden to him for so long. Entering a cane field, machete in hand, to cut a ton of cane stalks; riding a crowded bus; visiting the few old comrades still alive; reading newspapers that denounce imperialism. And he would at long last get to visit his father’s grave and say to him: Viejo, I did my duty. I followed your example.

  He would get his ass off this neon-lit sewer. Never see again its revolting class structure: the dirty rich riding Rolls-Royces at the top, the despicable traitors who betrayed their homeland only to end up begging for coins in the streets at the bottom. He would not have to endure anymore of those cowards who, from the air-conditioned studios of American radio stations, urge Cubans living on the island to take up arms against the Revolution. Those who pay mercenaries to plant bombs in Havana and want the U.S. Army to do the job for them, the same bastards who hope to exploit the Cuban people like their forefathers did in the past. The shysters, pushers, addicts, gamblers, shylocks, corrupt officials, and alcoholics. The hypocrite papists who molest boys, the faggots, and the prostitutes who sell their bodies to rich old men, or rich old women. At last he would leave behind that human flotsam.

  Of course, there would be parties, celebrations, and a decoration. After a
week or two, though, he’d rejoin Counterintelligence to operate against the so-called dissenters, independent journalists, and human rights activists who within Cuba denigrated the Revolution on a daily basis. Was the Chief going soft on them? Why did he let them meet with foreign politicians, grant interviews to journalists, talk on the phone with Miami radio stations? It had to be part of a strategy and, as a soldier, he had no right to outfox the Commander in Chief. A revolutionary never questions the party, and he prided himself on his discipline. He felt sure that, sooner or later, the order would come to squash them without mercy. Then he would volunteer to arrest and/or execute as many as possible.

  Once in North Miami, the gardener realized he had to concentrate on his immediate plans. First he called his wife (an intensive care nurse at Cedars Medical Center on the 3:00 to 11:00 P.M. shift) from a pay phone and told her not to wait for him for lunch, he’d be late. Then he drove along 125th and parked three blocks away from a rent-a-car outlet. Twenty minutes later he parked a Chevy Impala behind the van, moved the bag of fertilizer with the money and the tote bag he had bought at Burdines, now holding a fresh change of clothes and a shoulder holster for his Beretta, to the rental’s trunk, then locked the van. He dropped Maria’s glass and the casing in a sewer before driving to a motel on Flagler and Thirty-seventh, where he rented a room. Before showering, he tore up Maria Scheindlin’s check and flushed it down the toilet, then ordered a pizza and a beer. After lunch, satisfied and unconcerned, he asked the desk clerk to awake him at four. He took a long nap and dreamed he was hawking Mella magazine at Havana’s Central Park.

  At a quarter to five, neat in the fresh set of clothes, he steered the rental to the home of Ms. Gene Hagstedt, a widowed retired realtor who owned a modest house at Ninety-sixth Avenue and SW Thirty-second Street, West Wood Lakes. To supplement her pension, she ran an answering service with ten steady and several temporary clients to whom she charged thirty dollars a month. The gardener had chosen her because people learned of her business by word of mouth. She was not registered as self-employed, nor did she pay income tax on what she earned as a service provider.

  At no time had Ms. Hagstedt asked Eugenio his marital status, yet she firmly believed that the calls she fielded for him were of the sort a married man couldn’t take at home. Although seventy-seven years old, the lady still had an eye for attractive men. She considered that if there were two middle-aged hunks in Miami, the Cuban gardener was one. He got just three or four messages a month and nearly all came from Ana, a husky-voiced woman who merely said “Please tell Eugenio Bonis to call Ana.” Ms. Hagstedt thought that if Eugenio was half as good in bed as he appeared to be, both his wife and Ana were extremely lucky women.

  Once or twice a month Eugenio dropped over unannounced around half past five in the afternoon. He said something sweet about her blue eyes, her smooth skin, or how absolutely lovely she looked in that forty-year-old photograph atop the mantelpiece before sitting to read a magazine or watch TV until, when the clock struck the hour, her phone rang. He’d answer it, listen for a while, jot down something or say or read from a piece of paper a phrase or two in unintelligible rapid-fire Spanish, then hang up. On these occasions he tipped her a fiver.

  “You look ravishing,” Eugenio said when Ms. Hagstedt opened her screen door on the afternoon of May 7, 2002. “I feel like getting down on my knees and begging you to marry me.”

  …

  Pardo and Victoria took a taxi to the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point, found their way to the golf course’s clubhouse, and from its lobby called Bonis’s number at 6:00 P.M. sharp.

  “Call my other number, please,” the machine said.

  When Pardo told this to his wife, she knitted her brow and squinted suspiciously.

  “Okay. Hang up and dial 305-555-1965.”

  Pardo did as told. Ms. Hagstedt’s phone rang.

  “Hello?” the gardener said.

  “Uh, Mr. Bonis?” Pardo probed.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Mr. Villalobos.”

  “Right. Tell your wife I found your geraniums,” he read from a handwritten note he had taken from his wallet. “I have to leave for West Palm Beach early tomorrow, so I’ll leave the seedlings in your front lawn at 7:00 P.M. today. Good-bye.”

  Pardo hung up and echoed the message to Victoria. Blocking from view his maneuvering to unclip the recorder, she tilted her head and frowned, slightly intrigued. They made it back to the Comfort Inn and Victoria asked her husband to rewind and play the tape. She listened to it standing by the chest of drawers.

  “Didn’t I say it word by word? Almost?” Pardo wanted to know, hoping for a compliment.

  “Shush. Play it again.”

  “Why?”

  “Play it again, Pardo, please.”

  Pardo heaved a sigh and pressed buttons.

  “Okay. Let’s decipher,” Victoria said. Sitting on the bed, she emptied her purse on the mattress. Pardo rewound. She took off a hairpin, bent it backward, and with one end repeatedly picked at the stitches in the purse’s internal protective lining, alongside the metal frame, until a piece of thread came off. From between the lining and the fake leather, she extracted an A6-sized page of paper with both sides printed in the smallest typeface.

  “Give me a blank page. Play it again.”

  “Again?”

  “And make a pause every five or six words.”

  “You got it.”

  She wrote down each word. When the recording ended, Pardo turned off the gadget.

  “Unless I’m much mistaken, 7:00 P.M. today means 1:00 A.M. tomorrow, right?” he said.

  Victoria nodded while shifting her gaze from the note she had just made to the code page.

  “What does the rest of the gobbledygook stand for?” asked her husband.

  Victoria finished making notes, then said: “West Palm Beach means Miami International Airport, Flamingo garage, second level. He said ‘leave’ twice to indicate he’s got both things, my passport and the cash, ready for delivery. Geraniums, plural, indicate we both have to be there. And that he’ll leave the seedlings in my front lawn means he has lost contact with Havana.”

  “Okay. Let’s go take a bus to Miami.”

  Victoria remained sitting, reflectively gazing at the wall ahead.

  “Why does he tell me he’s lost contact with Havana? He knows I know that. Why does he ask for the two of us to be there? That’s a mistake.”

  “Beats me.”

  A short silence followed.

  “Is there any way to find a map of the airport’s garage?” Victoria wondered.

  Pardo pressed his right hand under his left armpit and cupped his chin in the palm of his left. “I’m sure we can print a map from the airport’s Internet site,” he said a moment later. “Concourses and gates and shops, that sort of map. But I don’t think they’ll have a map of the parking garages.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “It’s early, Victoria. A quarter to seven.”

  “Let’s head to Miami. We’ll go to an Internet café. And we should get to this airport garage as early as possible. Try to be there three hours ahead of time. There’s a snag in that message that I can’t figure out.”

  …

  Nobody heard the shrill scream that Jenny Scheindlin let out at 9:06 P.M. Then she started spinning around several times, dreading an assassin in hiding, and scurried from one place to the next turning on all the lights in the living area. When the notion that nobody was lurking in the shadows sunk in, Jenny stared at her mother’s body for almost a minute while biting her closed fist. She was unable to muster the necessary courage to get nearer, much less search for vital signs. The inertness of the body made her feel sure Maria was dead. A hot sphere climbed up her esophagus and she vomited gastric juices on the polished hardwood floor. Breathing deeply, Jenny recovered enough to wonder what she should do next. She rinsed her mouth with water in the bathroom where Maria’s murderer had put on his gloves and drawn his gun. At 9:14
P.M., shaking uncontrollably, Jenny gathered her wits and dialed 911.

  Two minutes had gone by when a Bay Harbor Police Department cruiser, its flashers spinning wildly, arrived at the scene. The officer steered the car through the open gate, screeched to a stop, killed the engine and the lights, and got out. Jenny stood silhouetted in the wide-open front door.

  “Base, Team Four,” the intrigued-looking spotter on the graveyard shift said into the two-way radio.

  “Go ahead, Four.”

  “A police cruiser just went into the subject’s driveway.”

  “Come again, Four.”

  The spotter used exactly the same words.

  “Why?” Base wanted to know.

  “I have no idea, sir.”

  The Bay Harbor police officer, who was new on the job and had never seen Jenny Scheindlin, followed the hand signs made by the obviously terrified and seemingly mute young woman. Without touching the body, he doubled back to Jenny, gently steered her to a club chair, told her not to move, and talked into the mike on his left shoulder. Bay Harbor police will not touch a murder with a ten-foot pole, so the dispatcher called the North Miami Beach Police Department. At 9:29 a Crime Scenes Unit team arrived at the Scheindlins’. A Miami Medical Examiner Department vehicle came in at 9:45. Practically all the lights of the house were turned on. The FBI spotter reported these developments to Base as they unfolded.

  For its part, Base frantically tried to ascertain what had taken place. A dozen phone calls and some computer-assisted personnel search revealed that the photographer on duty at the North Miami Beach Crime Unit had applied for a job with the bureau seven months earlier and would probably be willing to explain what the hell was going on at the Scheindlins’.

  The man’s cell phone rang at 10:19. An FBI photographer identified himself and asked his colleague whether he could possibly spare a minute and get to a private place where they could talk. He sure could, the North Miami Beach photographer said. Walking around the edge of the pool, staring at the underwater lights that someone had inadvertently turned on, he reported that a deeply suntanned woman in her fifties had died as the result of a gunshot wound in her face. The weapon was nowhere to be seen, no casing had been recovered, and gunpowder marks on the victim’s face suggested she had been shot at close range. Her daughter had discovered the body. He had heard the ME estimate that the stiff had died between eight and ten hours earlier. The photographer believed she had been murdered.