He approached his apartment as he always did when bicycling—not from the street out front but by looping around back and entering the parking lot from the rear, threading between a Dumpster and a large bush of sea grapes, where the bike rack was.
He locked the bike and headed for the stairwell. Through the breezeway he spotted an unfamiliar car at the curb out front, a black Lexus in a No Parking zone. No one except deliverymen ever dared to stay there more than a few minutes. His antennae twitched.
He crept slowly up the stairs in a half crouch. When he reached the second floor he poked his head just far enough around the corner to look at his doorway. All quiet, so he crept closer. The door was shut, the window blinds still drawn. If anyone was inside they’d be watching for his approach from the bedroom or living room, keeping an eye on the street and the small lawn in front of the building.
He placed an ear to the door. Nothing. His heart began to calm. The Lexus probably belonged to a visitor at some other apartment. He was overreacting. He was just about to reach for his keys when he heard a mutter—a few words only, unintelligible, and the sound of a shoe sliding on a gritty floor. His poor housekeeping suddenly seemed like a boon to his well-being. Then more words were spoken, a low conversation in Spanish, barely loud enough for him to pick up a few words. At least two men were in his apartment.
He backed away from the door and eased around the corner, then crept down the stairs as silently as possible. They should have spotted him coming, of course. Should have posted a lookout for the rear as well as the front. But they were sloppy, the way things had been going for years.
So he got back on his bike and, deciding that they probably still weren’t looking in this direction, he pushed between the Dumpster and the sea grapes, making the big waxy leaves rattle like plastic. He headed for the alley that connected to a side street.
Where to now? Not Lucinda’s. They might be there as well. He should warn her. It was almost time for her to leave for work. What he really needed was a safe house, but none was safe enough for these circumstances. Should he call on one of his recruits? Perhaps even they couldn’t be trusted now.
Then he thought of his friends down on the beach, his loose corps of regulars. It was time to take that next step, to dig a bit deeper into their lives, or to let them a bit deeper into his. But which of them should he ask for help?
Not the GI, Ed Harbin. He would ask too many questions. The Germans, Karl and Brigitte, would be welcoming and want to do the right thing, but they would also want neatness, order, everything in its place, which would require explanations, a logic he couldn’t offer.
The Lespinasses, on the other hand, were from Haiti. They, better than anyone, would understand the importance of not asking questions at the wrong time. And it was a Thursday, so they should be there. Gonzalo turned his bike south.
Everyone was on the beach, just as if they’d planned it in advance. A little send-off for a friend they didn’t even know was leaving. Harbin was in the surf, stroking steadily for the buoy, his bronze back glistening in the sunlight, hard as a tortoiseshell. The Stolzes sat beneath their striped umbrella, sun hats flopping in the breeze around their pale Nordic skin. And there were the Lespinasses, seated by their cooler, the bounty of a tropical feast spread before them on a tattered white sheet.
Their four-year-old daughter, the youngest of their three children, got up and ran toward the turquoise surf.
“Hello, Gonzalo,” Charles called brightly. Karl and Brigitte waved.
It was rude to rush things, but conditions were urgent.
“I need your help this morning,” he said in a low voice, looking Charles in the eye. “A ride somewhere, as soon as possible. Two places, in fact, and one is in Fort Lauderdale. I can pay for the gasoline. Jeanette and the kids can stay here.”
Charles didn’t hesitate.
“We will all go,” he said firmly, already gathering a pineapple and some oranges from the sheet. “Whatever you need. And you will pay no money. You are a friend.”
And so the wall was breached, just that easily. The children protested a bit or they wouldn’t have been children. Two hours of sitting on hot vinyl seats with the itch of sand and salt on your backside was asking a lot. They were sullen for most of the ride. But Jeanette and Charles moved with a sense of mission, having come from a place where one never questioned the need for urgency once someone had whispered a cry for help.
The first stop was at a bank up in Aventura, a high-rent district where tellers and managers were accustomed to asking no questions, even if they weren’t accustomed to having their customers pull into the parking lot in a rusting old Chevette with all its windows rolled down and three dark children crushed together with their mother on the backseat.
The transaction went smoothly. Gonzalo showed his ID, presented a small key that he always kept on his chain, and then was escorted into a paneled office, where an assistant manager brought him a safe-deposit box, then left him alone. Inside were a New York State driver’s license with Gonzalo’s photo and several charge cards. All carried a name that Gonzalo’s employers, even his boss, had never heard of. There was also an envelope with ten thousand dollars in cash, his entire savings from years of work as a security guard and deskman. Wasn’t this, after all, the American way? Building that nest egg for the future?
On his way out of the bank Gonzalo spotted a phone booth and decided to make a quick call. No telling when he might next see one that still took coins.
“Lucinda?”
“What a nice treat to have a midmorning call from my lover.” Then, as if the urgency of his tone had just registered, “Is something wrong?”
“I have to go out of town for a few days. For work, of course.”
“Oh.” The enthusiasm gone. “Of course.” Some remark about “the crazies” would doubtless follow unless he acted promptly.
“Lucinda, there may be some people who will be asking about me in the next day or two. They’ll be looking for me, saying they’re my friends. You’re to tell them nothing, but don’t act alarmed.”
“Gonzalo, what is it? What’s happened?”
“Please. Trust me. It will be over in a few days. Then we can talk again about some of your ideas about moving, okay? I’ve been giving them some serious thought.”
“Yes?” He could tell she couldn’t decide whether to be elated or alarmed.
“Yes. This Saturday maybe?”
“Of course. My apartment?”
“Well, it may be a little more complicated. You may need to pack a bag. But we’ll discuss it later.”
“Okay.” Her tone went flat, dumbfounded. “Gonzalo? You’re not really one of the crazies, are you.” A statement more than a question.
“No.”
“Maybe I always knew that.”
“It’s fine. Just keep it to yourself.”
“I will. Be careful.”
“Of course.”
Traffic was heavy as always on I-95, but in another forty-five minutes they were pulling to the curb of the departures lane at Fort Lauderdale’s international airport. Before hopping out of the Chevette, Gonzalo pressed five new twenties into Charles’s hand, and then spoke over the man’s protests.
“Please. It is only fair. For all I know, you’ve saved my life. And if anyone asks about me, say nothing. Even if it’s Ed Harbin, or Karl and Brigitte.”
Charles nodded, his face resolute. Jeanette did the same. Everyone said good-bye, but it was the parting words of Joseph, their eight-year-old, that snagged Gonzalo as he turned on the sidewalk to go.
“Will we see you again, Mr. Rubiero?” he piped sweetly, his little round face poking from the rear window.
“I don’t know, Joseph. I really don’t know.”
Then he was off to tend to his business.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
FALK SUPPOSED HE HAD known all along where his journey would end, no matter how roundabout the course. But it wasn’t until he was on the phone that ni
ght with an airline reservation clerk that he acknowledged his choice by finally stating it aloud.
He called from a cheap hotel on the outskirts of Kingston, where he sat exhausted on the edge of a swayback mattress, clinging to consciousness after a hot scrub in a closet-sized shower. He had dined at a nearby bar on conch fritters and two bottles of Red Stripe.
The last leg across the water from Navassa Island covered eighty miles. He and the old fisherman had collected their gear from each other’s new boats. Then Falk napped a few hours in the sun while the sea continued to calm. Around 1 p.m., having gulped down nearly a gallon of water and devoured both peanut butter sandwiches, he deemed himself fit for another long spell at the helm.
Despite a scouring by the tropical rain, the old boat stank of dead fish and machine oil, but it handled better than expected. The engine was another matter. His speed topped out at fifteen knots, meaning he didn’t reach Jamaica’s Port Antonio until six thirty that evening. He could have made it to Haiti in a third of the time, but entering the United States via a Haitian airport, especially under a British passport, would have been far trickier, not to mention the hazards of dealing with Haitian authorities.
Not once during the crossing did he hear a helicopter. The silence told him that they’d written him off for dead, were looking in all the wrong places, or had decided to hush things up. The rumors on the base would have been rampant, and mounting a noisy search-and-rescue operation would only have spread the word elsewhere more quickly. Better to keep it discreet. They must be counting on him to turn up at some border crossing under his own name. Or, who knew, maybe they thought he had sailed a little ways down the coast to give himself up to the Cubans—the wily old traitor finally showing his true colors. He supposed Fowler might believe that, once he heard the backstory. Bo would know better. Pam, too, he hoped.
Hardly anyone gave him a second look on the docks at Port Antonio—another encouraging sign—so he slung his duffel on his back and hailed a wheezing cab for the twisting, hour-long ride to Kingston, skirting the foot of the Blue Mountains.
And that was where he sat now, tethered to the phone in the stale-smelling room as the sunset bronzed the window. He reserved a seat on a 6:45 a.m. American Airlines flight to Boston, via Miami, in the name of Ned Morris of Manchester, U.K. He told the clerk he would pay at the counter in cash. On such short notice the costs were exorbitant. At this rate he would be out of money by Saturday.
He then called Hertz to reserve a car in Boston, only to hang up after the first ring when he remembered that Ned Morris didn’t have a driver’s license. Shit. He would either have to hop a smaller plane up to Bangor, then thumb the rest of the way—another few hundred dollars tossed into the wind—or take a bus from Boston, which sounded interminable, especially to someone whose eyelids were nearly drooping to the floor.
Tomorrow, he told himself, sinking back onto the bed with a creak of rusty springs. Tomorrow he would sort things out. Then he drifted into deep sleep, still feeling the motion of the waves in his weary muscles, as if bracing for a big roller to chase him down in the dark.
Next morning, bleary-eyed, and with barely enough time for a cup of coffee, he rushed to the airport to make his early flight. He didn’t bother with a British accent—too tired—and he slept through the short layover in Miami. It didn’t occur to him until the leg to Boston was under way that his face might now be getting some airtime, even though there had been nothing about Guantánamo on that morning’s news broadcasts. So, he spent the rest of the flight huddled behind an in-flight magazine, lest anyone recognize him.
He was nervous in the passport line at Logan, but breezed through with hardly a pause. It was the Jamaicans who were getting all the grief, nodding repeatedly as they answered question after question. The customs agents smiled and nodded as Falk strolled past with a wave, trusty duffel stained with salt water. Thank goodness they weren’t yet fingerprinting incoming Brits. Then he burst through the doors and past the babbling line of welcomers and limo drivers with their hand-lettered signs.
He’d made it. He was officially in the country. But there were still miles to go before he slept, and after buying a ticket on a 5:17 Delta flight to Bangor he rushed to a newsstand for copies of the Globe, the New York Times, and USA Today. A quick scan didn’t turn up a single dispatch from Guantánamo. Not a word. The same was true of the news channels airing loudly in the concourse bar. Perhaps General Trabert was still coming up with a cover story. In Gitmo, it seemed, Washington had finally achieved its ideal in media management. No news was emerging without consent, or at least not without a delay of weeks, or even months. Falk was not naive enough to feel smug or secure about this, even if for the moment it was working to his advantage.
By the time the plane landed at Bangor, shortly after 6 p.m., he had napped and snacked enough to regain his energy, and he set out in excitement for the final sixty miles. It took only a few minutes to flag down the first ride, which carried him to a turnoff just past Bucksport. Waving good-bye as the car disappeared around a bend, Falk experienced a deep sense of comfort in the silence of the narrow roadway. The evening sky tinted the scene a glowing pink. Spruce and poplar leaned in from both shoulders of the road, and the rough pavement was buckled and bowed. The air smelled of resin, grass, sunshine, and the slightest hint of brine.
The second ride got him to South Penobscot. The driver of the third vehicle, a refrigerated truck that had just delivered a load of lobsters, said he was going all the way to Stonington. And just like that, before he had really had time to prepare, Falk was riding home, bouncing across the humpbacks of Highway 15 as they passed familiar inlets and the homes of long-ago friends
Just before passing the town of Deer Isle they drove by the house where he had spent his earliest years. The clapboard sides were spruced up, the whitewash replaced by robin’s-egg blue. The roof was patched, the flower bed weeded. Across the road, the McCallum place had gone beyond gentrification and become an art gallery. But next door he saw Mr. Simmons—he must be in his eighties—out riding his mower just as he always had, bobbing along in an oily cloud of exhaust while he navigated between the same five birdbaths that had stood in his yard forever. In one of Falk’s earliest memories he was setting paper ships afloat on their placid waters.
The sights multiplied, and the trickle of memory became a deluge. There was the field that led to the trailhead for Lily Pond, his old swimming hole. The town of Deer Isle flashed by, and he glimpsed the small library where he’d spent so many hours. It would be closed for the day by now, yet he could imagine peering in through a windowpane at its silent shelves, the oaken table, a ticking clock on the wall. He saw tourists strolling past antiques shops, but they might as well have been ghosts haunting this museum of his childhood. Yes, he would be able to hide here well enough, because there were a thousand nooks and crannies where he had already learned to do so.
When they reached Stonington, literally at the end of the highway, he found a room at a small B&B with a French name that was much fancier than the plain but immaculate decor. It was a gray clapboard house on a leafy rise overlooking Greenhead Cove, the small inlet where his dad and all their friends had moored their lobster boats during the season. The only room available was a single by the kitchen, no view, with a bath down the hall.
“Two-night minimum, breakfast at eight,” said the innkeeper, who smiled but gave him the once-over. She wasn’t familiar to him, or he to her, which was just as well. He was painfully aware of needing a shave and a shower, and his duffel suddenly seemed suspiciously insufficient for a tourist on the move.
“We don’t take plastic,” she added.
Fine with him.
As soon as he had paid up, he strolled outside to gaze upon the calm waters of the cove, gilded by the sunset. He searched in vain for the familiar white hull and its dark blue trim among the dozens of boats bobbing on an incoming wake. As a boy he had been able to swim in this chilliness at least two months out of e
very summer, as sleek as a young seal. After his first Marine year at Gitmo, Falk had visited the Massachusetts shore—as close to home as he had ever dared to venture until now. He had discovered then that he could no longer stand the icy temperatures of the North Atlantic for more than a few seconds. At the time he had decided it was a good thing, a sign that he was acclimating to other places. Now he wasn’t so sure.
It was well past closing time at the docks of the Stonington Lobster Co-op, where some old-timer might know what had become of his father, so he instead walked over to the town’s tiny main drag. A bike-rental kiosk was just about to close, so Falk signed one out for the next twenty-four hours under the name of Ned Morris. This way he could make his first stop, a few miles away on Airport Road.
He pedaled hard to get there while there was still enough light. The exercise felt good in his thighs and calves as he inhaled lungfuls of the clean and bracing air. But when he saw the trailer his spirits fell. It was empty and sagging, every window cracked or missing. The yard was overgrown with thistle and tall grass, and the old lobster boat was up on blocks. Weeds sprouted like a green geyser from the staved-in hull. Nothing was left of the paint job but a few peeling strips. The rest of the wood had bleached gray. It would have taken years of inattention to reach this state.
Only then did Falk admit to himself that he had been holding out hope of finding his father here. He had built a mental image of a quiet old man, demons tamed, who would be washing the dinner dishes while a Red Sox game played on a radio by an open window.
Falk could have forced open the trailer door easily enough, but the place was so obviously abandoned that he didn’t care to move closer. He just stared from the pavement as the light faded, listening to the tree frogs tuning up for the night. Then he pedaled back to his B&B and strolled across town to a local restaurant, the Fisherman’s Friend, where he decided to splurge on a lobster. He needed an extravagant taste of home to dispel the ghosts of the trailer, which seemed to have followed him back into town.
The Prisoner of Guantanamo Page 34