“I see,” said Cooksey, “and very good sense it makes, too. Now tell me this: you came a long way from your home to stop us dead people from killing your forest. So I have heard from my friends. Tell me, how do you think you will stop them?”
So Moie told the story of what he had learned from Father Perrin after he was killed, and as for how he would stop it, he knew he could not. Just one man could not stop such a thing, and he was not a fool to think it. But Jaguar had promised him that if he brought him to the land of the dead, then Jaguar would stop it.
“And how will he do that?”
Moie made a peculiar gesture using his hands and his head that was easily interpretable as a shrug. “We say: we can ask Jaguar what will happen, and ask him what we should do, but we never ask him how he will do what he does. And if he told us we would not understand.”
“That’s probably wise,” said Cooksey, and then they spoke of many things, Cooksey answering many of the questions Moie had about the land of the dead, until, observing an increasingly impatient Jenny, he added in English, “Well, I think the thing to do is return to the property for a bite of lunch, and then we might venture to discuss how we can help our friend here. Drive on, Jennifer.”
At about this time, some miles to the north, three men were seated at a white-clothed and silver-set table in a small executive dining room on the thirtieth floor of the Panamerica Bancorp Building. All three were of the same background, Cubans and the sons of the families who had ruled that island for generations before the revolution of 1959. They had left Cuba as young men (and not floating on rafts either) and had prospered in the United States. In purely financial terms, they were vastly richer than their forebears, yet they harbored, along with most of the rest of their class and generation, a sense of grievance. Their American contemporaries, with whom they did business and played golf, were men of power, but they had never owned a country absolutely and owned all the people in it. Their power was not of that sweetest kind. These Cubans had been able, with the acquiescence of America, to transfer much of their culture to South Florida, which they ran as a kind of fief, the unalterable principle of which was that no one could ever become president of the United States who would normalize relations with the Monster across the Straits of Florida. They were confident, sensual, intelligent, unimaginative, industrious gentlemen, and if they shared a fear, it was that they would never get to dance on Fidel’s grave.
And now another more instant fear: the man who had called this meeting, Antonio Fuentes, had been murdered the previous night, for they had contacts in the police and knew the truth about the full horror of the crime. Cayo Delgado Garza, the host of the luncheon meeting, and the chairman of the eponymous Bancorp, had wanted to cancel it, out of respect, but the other two had insisted that it go forward. These were Juan X. Fernandez Calderon, called Yoiyo, the most vigorous of the three, a developer and financier, and Felipe Guerra Ibanez, who owned a large trading concern. They were all dressed in expensive dark-colored suits and quiet ties; Garza and Ibanez had pins of fraternal organizations in their lapels, in place of which Calderon wore an enamel American flag. They all had immaculately trimmed heads of hair, light brown in the case of Calderon, silver on the other two. They had soft manicured hands, on the wrists of which hung inherited gold watches. Garza was paunchy, Ibanez thin, Calderon still trim and athletic. He played tennis and golf frequently and kept a yacht; unlike the others, he had blue eyes.
A silent brown waiter in a white jacket with shiny buttons served drinks and vanished. They drank the liquor in grateful drafts and spoke feelingly of the dead Fuentes. The waiter returned. Another round of drinks and the lunch ordered, and now they turned to business. Garza asked Calderon, “So…Yoiyo: what do we make of this?”
An eloquent shrug. “I’m just as baffled as you. Who would kill Tony? As far as I know he didn’t have an enemy in the world. And to tear him up like that! It makes no sense.”
“It does if someone is trying to frighten us,” said Garza quietly. Calderon stared at him for a second and then shot a look at Ibanez, who indicated by the subtlest possible expression that this was something worth considering. It was clear to Calderon that they had discussed the matter without him, and he felt a jab of anger. But the three men had been doing business together profitably for years. They knew one another well, at least in the way of business.
“What, you’re suggesting that this had something to do with Consuela?”
“He was the chairman, the public face, to the extent it has a public face,” replied Garza. “And there was that incident the other afternoon, the reason why Tony wanted to meet.”
“That’s insane, Cayo. Some little bird-watcher is not going to chop up a man to make a point.”
“He had a South American Indian with him,” said Ibanez.
“So he had an Indian, for which, by the way we only have the evidence of that dumb secretary and the dumber security guards. How many South American Indians have they seen? I mean, think about it for a minute! A man bursts into a business office, yells a lot of propaganda, gets tossed out, and then what? He goes to the businessman’s home and murders him and chops him into pieces and tries to make it look like some kind of tiger did it? It’s preposterous.”
“They knew about Consuela and the Puxto,” said Garza. “Maybe that makes it a shade less preposterous.”
This appeared to take some of the bluster out of Calderon. He nodded and drank his Laphroaig. “Yes,” he said, “that’s troubling. They shouldn’t have known about the Puxto. But it’s still stupid to connect the two events without more information. The two things may be unrelated.”
“Do you think that’s likely, Yoiyo?” asked Ibanez gently. Calderon looked straight into the seamed turtle face and said, “Why not? Look, what was it, eight or nine years ago? That nigger maniac chopped Teresa Vargas into pieces, and that was connected to nothing at all. Some insane cult, whatever…so this could be the same, the cat prints. It’s Miami, these things happen. You never think it’s going to happen to someone you know, but now it does. It happened to the Vargas girl, and now it happened to Fuentes. That’s one possibility. The next possibility is it was political. Tony gave money to the resistance, he was quiet about it but it wasn’t a secret. We all do, yes? So maybe it was that.”
“You think Fidel sent an agent to kill Antonio Fuentes?” asked Garza, incredulous.
“Of course not. I’m just laying out the logical possibilities. So, next, we have, yes, something connected with the Consuela deal. Something out of Colombia. Why? Everything is arranged at that end and has been for months. So we don’t know, and frankly, I’d find it hard to believe. As a matter of fact, it feels like a maniac again to me. Maybe that nigger left disciples, only this time he’s going after men and not pregnant girls.”
“But you’ll check out the Colombian angle, won’t you?” said Ibanez. Again Calderon saw that look between the two of them. Consuela had been his deal, and the message here was that if there was any mess associated with it, it was his to clean up. He got a quarter, no, now a third, of the profits but had all the work to do. A certain resentment here, but if things had to be done he would rather do them himself than leave it to this pair of viejos. He took, however, a considerable time before responding, to show he was not their errand boy. “Of course,” he said then, “I’ll be glad to, Felipe.”
The rest of the lunch passed pleasantly enough, in discussions of other matters of business, local politics, and their various interests. After lunch, Calderon called his driver on the cell phone and found his white Lincoln waiting for him when he reached the street. He was driven back to his firm’s headquarters, housed in a new mirrored glass cube on Andalusia in Coral Gables. His private office was furnished in mahogany, leather, and worn old Persian carpets, all expensive, understated, and chosen by an interior decorator not often employed by Cuban businessmen. Calderon did not want to be associated with that sort of Cuban at all, the people who had run little shops in Hava
na and were now magnates in America. Cursileria was the word for the style of such people, vulgar and ostentatious.
He was efficiently rude to his staff, and after some scurrying and scraping, he conducted a meeting about a golf course and resort condo development he had begun near Naples, on the west coast of the state. It was the largest thing he had ever attempted, and he had financed it with an unstable structure of rolling credit, in addition to nearly all his own liquid capital. The profits would be colossal, but he was now somewhat overextended, which was the main reason why he had organized Consuela Holdings LLC. The timber money should start coming on line just in time to cover the first series of notes on Consuela Coast Resort and Condominiums. Provided everything went off on schedule.
When he was alone again, he dialed a number in Cali, Colombia, and after a few brief conversations in Spanish with underlings, he was connected to a man with a low, quiet voice. Calderon understood that Gabriel Hurtado was what the U.S. media called a drug lord, but he was quite capable of cloaking this knowledge from his ordinary consciousness. He was a man of aristocratic pretension and habit, and the ability to ignore the ultimate sources of one’s wealth is a commonplace talent among such men. The Kennedys and the Bronfmans spent bootlegging dollars with clear consciences, and the fortunes of his own family and those of most of his Cuban friends derived at a couple of removes from slave labor. Money washes, as the saying goes, and in any case Hurtado was not a mere thug. He was well connected with the government of his nation and was at least as well insulated from drug cartel massacres as Joe Kennedy had been from the machine guns of Al Capone. There is an immense flood of Latin American money swimming around Miami seeking safe investment, whose provenance does not bear too much inspection, and many such dollars under the control of Hurtado had over the years swum into the projects of JXF Calderon Associates, Inc., to the mutual profit of both men.
They exchanged pleasantries, and then Calderon told him about the events of the last few days, stressing especially the knowledge of the Puxto business shown by the maniac in Antonio Fuentes’s office.
“So the reason I’m calling,” he went on, “is to check out whether the leak came from your end.”
“That’s impossible,” said Hurtado. “My people know how to keep their mouths shut.” This was said with a certainty that could not be doubted, although Calderon’s mind did not long settle upon what made for such certainty. He said, “Of course. What I meant is the possibility that someone down there wants to make trouble for us, for you, in some way. A rival. Someone who thinks he didn’t get enough of a…consideration, a commission, whatever.”
A pause on the line. “I’ll look into it. There was some crazy priest down there in San Pedro who was threatening to make a stink, but he’s out of the picture. Meanwhile, you got some cabron wandering around Miami with information he’s not supposed to have. What’re we going to do about that, Yoiyo?”
“I’ll handle it at this end,” said Calderon.
“You may need some help.”
“I’m fine, Gabriel. I was just checking with you.”
“That’s good, but I want you to remember that I have commitments on this thing, to people down here. I’m talking about significant people. So it can’t go sour on us. You’re clear on that, yes?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Fine. Your family okay? Olivia and Victoria and Jonni?”
“Everybody’s great,” said Calderon.
“Good. You’ll keep me informed, yes?” The connection broke before Calderon could respond. It was not really a question anyway. Calderon was now trying to recall whether, in the course of their extensive business relationship, he had ever mentioned his family to Hurtado. It would not be a thing he routinely did. He had the old-fashioned Cubano sense of strict separation between the world of affairs and the interior world of the home. He was, however, absolutely sure that Hurtado had never asked about them by name before. Suddenly he discovered that he wanted to leave the office and have a strong drink of scotch.
Moie watches the world float by from the windows of the wai’ichura canoe that floats on dry ground. He says the name car in his head and is grateful to the Firehair Woman for having given it to him. It is always good to have the names of things. He is happy to have met Cooksey and to have received answers to many of the questions that troubled him. He now understands that the wai’ichuranan cannot change the stars in the sky, and also that they didn’t know they were dead at all, but thought they were living life. He thinks of the stars again, that they are not always the same in the sky but like trees along a path, and that as you move a long way across the earth they change in the same way. This is a wonder to him and makes him a little sad.
The car turns and enters a compound of several buildings and they dismount from it, all three of them. There are other dead people there, including the Monkey Boy, who looks a curse at Moie, which he averts with some words in the holy tongue. There is an angry woman who speaks too much and too loud and one man with a beard who speaks slowly and is the chief of this place, and another man who has a hairy face but does not speak much. They chatter in their monkey talk but also to him in Spanish, and when he does not understand, Cooksey says in Runisi what they have said.
They sit at a table, and the Firehair Woman brings food that tastes like clay and hot brown water. He is not hungry at all but takes a little so that the gods of this place are not offended. The Angry Woman talks about the death of the man of the Consuela whom the Monkey Boy screamed at the day before in the house the size of a mountain that you go to in a little hut with no windows that hums in a way you can feel in the belly. The Monkey Boy is happy he is dead, but the others are confused. Who has killed him? they wonder. Moie says in his own language that it is Jaguar, and they all look at him strangely. They are silent for a moment. Then Cooksey asks, “Moie, did you kill this man yourself?” And Moie answers, “Perhaps I would have, if he came to my country, but here I have no power. No, it was Jaguar alone who did this. He is angry at the men who want to destroy his country, and if they don’t say they will stop, I think he will kill others, too.” He sees that they are amazed, but they say nothing more about it at this time.
Five
The wailing dragged Paz out of the dream, brought him onto his feet stumbling as the dream paralysis passed from his limbs. He struggled into a robe. His wife, now awakened herself, cried, “What is it?”
“Amy’s having a nightmare.”
“Oh, Christ, not again! What time is it?”
“Four-thirty. Go back to sleep,” said Paz, walking quickly from the room. Entering his daughter’s bedroom, he saw by the glow of the Tweety Bird night-light that Amelia was sitting up in bed weeping and clutching her old pink blanket to her face. She stretched out her arms to him, and he sat on the side of the bed and held her to his body, cooing and stroking her hair. This was the fourth one in the last couple of weeks.
“What was it, baby, did you have a bad dream? Tell Daddy, what was it? Did you see a monster?”
Gasping, the child said, “It was a aminal.”
“An animal, huh? What kind of animal?”
“I don’t know. It was yellow and it had big teeth and it was going to eat me all up.”
At this, Paz felt a shock of fear shoot through him. It was at this moment that he understood that he had come to the end of the seven years of peace. What he always referred to as “weird shit” had now officially returned. He wanted to join Amelia in tears but instead took a deep steadying breath and asked hopefully, “You mean like a dog?”
“No, it was a little like a dinosaur and a little like a kitty cat.”
“Boy, that sounds scary,” Paz said, terrified himself. “But it’s all gone now. It can’t get you, okay? Dreams are just in your head, you know? Animals in dreams can’t really bite and scratch you. We talked about this before, you remember.”
“Yes, but, Daddy, I waked up…I waked up and the aminal was still here. I was all waked up and i
t was still here.”
She had slipped a little back into her baby talk, not a good sign. He said, “I don’t know, baby, sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly when you’re all waked up, especially if you’re having a bad nightmare. Anyway, it was just a dream. It wasn’t real.”
“Abuela says dream sare real.”
Paz took a deep breath and uttered an inward malediction. “I don’t think that’s what Abuela meant, baby. I think she meant that sometimes dreams tell us things about ourselves that might be hard to find out otherwise.”
“Uh-uh! She says brujos can send you bad dreams and they can choke you forreal.”
“But the dream you had wasn’t like that,” said Paz with authority. “It was just a dream. Now, it’s the middle of the night and I want you to try to get back to sleep.”
“I want to read first.”
“Oh, honey, it’s the middle of the night…,” he whined, but the child had already leaped light as a fairy to her bookcase and brought back a large-format volume called Animals Everywhere, and Paz had to leaf from Aardvark through the beasts of field and forest, ocean and stream, one for each letter, reading each caption, and not missing out on a word, for the child had the whole thing nearly by heart.
“That’s the animal that was in my bad dream,” she declared, pointing her small finger at the page.
“Uh-huh,” said Paz nonchalantly. The smart move here was not to get excited and move on quickly to the harmless Kangaroo. She was out by the Opossum. He shelved the book, tucked her in with a kiss, and left, but not back to bed.
In the kitchen, he found his wife wrapped in a pink chenille robe, in the act of placing a large, blackened, hourglass espresso maker on the burner.
“How is she?”
Paz said, “Fine, just a dream. You’re going to stay up.” He gestured to the coffeepot and took a seat at the counter.
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