Cuban Death-Lift

by Striker, Randy

  “You’re sure he really wants to go to America? Maybe he’s just clam-happy over here working for the dream of socialism?”

  She smiled at me and winked. “Maybe. But I have to try. I’m going to change and flag down one of those government taxi boats that keep going by. Apparently there are a few tiendas up harbor at Pier Two where they sell beer and food and stuff, and a government bus leaves there every hour for some hotel—I think it was called the Triton—where there are phones and the immigration people have offices.”

  “So I’ll just slip into my good shirt and pants and play escort—”

  “No!” The firmness with which she said it surprised even her. “I mean, I’d feel terrible if you went off and left your boat unguarded and something happened to it.”

  “Are you still trying to give orders?”

  She reached out and ran her short fingernails down my thigh. “For now. How about it, ya big lug? Stay here and mind the store while I go into the city for an hour or so. Believe me, I’ll hurry right back.”

  She said it like some peroxide blonde in a 1930 detective film, and I had to laugh.

  “You play a bad Harlow with that Spanish accent of yours.”

  She wiggled her finger, telling me to come to her. When I did, she kissed me lightly, then harder, and even the breaking away held promise. “Keep that for me until I get back, okay?”

  “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

  She smiled, cupping my chin in her small hand. “You’re something special, Dusky MacMorgan. Very special.”

  “And so are you, lady. So are you. . . .”

  The moment her taxi boat disappeared behind the first shrimp trawler, I started looking for a taxi of my own. She had left in an old confiscated Woodson trihull painted bright red with a muscular Cuban at the wheel. He wore small black bikini trunks, and he gave me a dirty leer as I waved goodbye to Androsa.

  That’s right, fella. She’s mine. And don’t forget it.

  By the time I’d flagged down a boat, she was halfway across the harbor, and I knew I’d have to hurry to catch her. When the skiff pulled up, I thought about locking Sniper—then decided that would probably be the worst thing to do. If the Cubans wanted to search her badly enough, they’d just bust in to do it. So, still zipping up my pants and trying to slide into my Topsiders, I swung down onto the waiting skiff.

  There were two men aboard. One was obviously the government driver. He wore the standard baggy green pants, cut off at the cuffs instead of hemmed. He was about forty, haggard and unshaven, and a stub of cigarette butt grew from the corner of his mouth. He looked bored and uncommunicative.

  “Quanto dinero?” I asked him.

  He held up a spread palm. Five bucks, American.

  I shoved a ten at him. “Tu hablas inglés?”

  He shook his head. I got the feeling that if he did speak English he wasn’t about to let me know it. I slapped my hand on the gunwall of the skiff.

  “Damn!”

  I could reach into my memory and give him enough bad Spanish to make him understand I wanted to go to Pier Two, but what if the woman’s skiff veered off, made an earlier stop? Shoving the driver aside and taking control of the boat might make me seem a bad risk in the eyes of Captain Lobo. And I couldn’t afford to let him become any more suspicious of me.

  “Do you need some help there, Yank?”

  For the first time, I noticed the second man in the boat. He wasn’t Cuban—no doubt about that. He was a little younger than I, in his early thirties, and he had copper-colored hair and a bright-red beard. The size of him and the musculature made me think of the Vikings: just under six feet tall, 190 pounds, maybe, with the shoulders of a wrestler. He had the gnomish face of a Scandinavian seaman, and an accent that seemed to be a mixture of heavy Irish and light British. His thighs were thick, heavily muscled beneath cutoff shorts, and he wore a black T-shirt inscribed: Bodden Town Dive Trips.

  “If you speak Spanish, and you’ve got some spare time, I can use all the help you can offer,” I said.

  He grinned and stuck out his hand. “Westy is me name. Westy O’Davis. And I do speak Spanish—bloody bad Spanish, but Cubans speak the worst kind of Spanish, so they understand mine jest fine. So what kin’ I do for ya, Yank?”

  Roughly, I explained the situation to him after introducing myself. There were plenty of holes in my story, but he seemed to sense it wouldn’t do to ask questions.

  “So you want ta follow the lady, but you don’t want ta catch her—that about right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He looked amused, his left hand tugging at the red beard. He thought for a moment, then nodded his assent. “So be it! No, don’t thank me. It’s yerself who are favoring me. After twenty-two days in this hellhole of a harbor, it’s a pleasure to have the company of an American. I’m a one who trusts his instincts, and me instincts say yer okay, Yank. So let me have a word with this mutton-headed driver and we’ll be on our way. Right!”

  It was more argument than conversation. Westy O’Davis kept his hands on his hips, bent slightly at the waist, nose aimed right at the nose of the government boat driver. Every time the driver tried to speak, the stocky Irishman shoved loud Spanish into his face, refusing to allow his demands to be challenged. Finally, the driver relented, worn down and taciturn.

  “Done!” said O’Davis, swinging toward me, smiling. “Didn’t tell ’em we wanted to follow a boat. Jes tol’ ’em we wanted to travel ’round the harbor a bit—and that we would tell him where to go. These reds are suspicious people; didn’t figure it would do to tell ’em we was shadowin’ a lady.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “I appreciate it. Now look, I’m not keeping you from some kind of business, am I? I know you’re not riding around in a government taxi boat for your health—”

  He held up his hand, the gesture implying the unimportance of his own plans. “Do you see that big black wind ship over there a piece?”

  I did. And it wasn’t the first time I had noticed her. She was a beauty: a gaff-rigged schooner, taller aft mast made of stout golden pine, the foremast flying the blue British ensign with the flag badge of the islands in the center.

  “You’re from the Caymans?”

  He nodded. “And she’s my pride and joy. The only time she and myself part normally is when I go tarpon guiding in the spring up to Boca Grande, Florida, in your own U.S.A. to make a few extra for her and me own pocket. But after three weeks aboard listenin’ to that bloody loud Spanish, an’ smellin’ the foul smell of me own self, I’m about to go ravin’ looney.” He spread his arms. “So you see, Yank, I’m a takin’ you under me wing outta graditude. One scarred-up old seaman to another in a harbor full of fools. How ’bout it?” He spit in his palm, offered his hand, and I took it.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  And I meant it. I had seen it before in foreign lands. Friendships among strangers are struck up with no better criterion than a lost look or the color of your hair. In a country of aliens and alien ideology, kindred spirits come together as if drawn by magnets. And surprisingly, the friendships usually continue long afterward. Joined in the common bond of circumstance, all the bullshit social hurdles fall away and you are left with an honesty that demands either mutual loyalty or mutual hatred. And with this stocky Irishman, I knew it would be mutual loyalty. I also suspected that, no matter what, I would have met Westy O’Davis sooner or later. Because that’s the way things happen in a place like Mariel Harbor.

  I kept a close eye on the bright-red Woodson. And so did he.

  “Yank, I believe yer lady friend is headed for the Love Boat.”

  “The Love what?”

  He chuckled. “That bugger Castro has thought of jest about every way possible to make money in this hellhole. It’s that medium-tonnage ocean liner over there—the Comandante Pinares. Folks ’round here call it the Love Boat ’cause there’s whiskey an’ food—an’ women too, if you’ve money enough.” He tapped the driver on the
shoulder and told him where we wanted to go. The driver acted as if it took every ounce of his strength to force the skiff onto plane, the little Russian outboard belching oil as we went. It was a good half mile to the liner, and as we pounded along Westy O’Davis tried to replace my growing anxiety with conversation. He told me how, as a kid of sixteen, he had shipped out of Dun Laoghaire on Ireland’s east coast on a Honduran freighter. On the freighter he had learned two things: how to speak Spanish, and never to trust any vessel with a Liberian registry, Honduran or otherwise. Or, as he put it, “Them bloody Africans would register a bamboo raft as a thousand-ton oil tanker if you paid the bribe in cash!” He had jumped ship off Cayman Brac, swum to shore, then worked his way to Grand Cayman, where a friendly Englishman helped him get a work permit from Government House. In time, he got a job guiding scuba-diving trips in Bodden Town, and an American had talked him into going to America to run his big Chris-Craft as a tarpon boat in Boca Grande during the big spring run. With the money he had saved, he made a down payment on his black schooner. And this Cuban trip would pay it off.

  “And no island woman snapped you up during all that time,” I said, teasing him.

  The look which came into his eyes was a stoicism underlined with the tragic. “Aye, one did. But she’s gone now.”

  I didn’t press for an explanation.

  The Comandante Pinares was about three hundred feet of antiquated liner painted a shoddy white, bottom-fouled, anchored solidly fore and aft. Floating aluminum docks crushed up against the hulls, and the docks were surrounded by small boats, loading and unloading. Harsh Latin music was being piped around the crowded decks through tinny speakers, and soldiers and plainclothesmen stood conspicuously at the boarding ladders.

  “What’s th’ matter, Yank? You look troubled.”

  “I can’t understand why she came here. She told me she was going to a place called Pier Two. She was supposed to catch a bus there and talk to the immigration authorities in Havana.”

  He slapped me on the shoulder. “You never kin figure ’em out, mate—I’ve tried. But if it’ll ease your mind any, there’s immigration people here, too. Upper deck, where you see that line o’ people. Maybe she jes’ changed her mind.”

  The red-hulled Woodson was tethered up at the floating docks, the muscular taxi pilot still aboard, but Androsa was nowhere in sight. So now what? Board the liner and take the chance of letting Androsa know that I was following her? Why not? I had a right to be concerned. If she saw me, I’d play the roll of the overprotective lover. It couldn’t hurt. No way.

  Right.

  “What’s the plan, mate?” Westy looked at me expectantly.

  “The plan, my new friend, is for you to go on about your business. It’s just a hunch, but I think my lady friend might be in a little trouble. And I’d hate for you to get involved—”

  “Horsefeathers!” He looked genuinely offended. “Was it not I meself who spit in me palm and offered you me own hand? Sure it was. Blast your trouble!” He grinned at me. “Besides, I can’t very well abandon a mate with a fine name like MacMorgan, now, could I—Yank or not.”

  “Okay, okay—you can tag along on one condition.”

  He spread his arms in grand gesture. “You’ve only to name it.”

  “If it looks like there’s going to be any rough stuff, you get your ass out of there quick.”

  “Mush, mush—and do I look like a fool? A course I will, a course I will. I swear it on the grave of me own dead mother.”

  When our driver finally managed to nose up to the crowded docks, I jumped out and pulled O’Davis up behind me. He was surprisingly nimble for his size. Before we headed up the ladder to the main deck, he turned and wagged his finger at our Cuban driver, railing at him in a guttural Spanish.

  “What were you lecturing him about?”

  “No lecture, Yank. Convinced him to stay until we came back out.”

  “I hate to be a spoilsport, but these Castro Cubans aren’t known for keeping their promises.”

  Westy O’Davis gave me a conspirator’s wink. “This one will. I told him you were a very important man, mate. Had to lie a wee bit—told him you were a Russian adviser. Believed me, too—imagine that.”

  14

  The bar of the Comandante Pinares was long and narrow, with the obligatory mirror behind the sparse liquor stock and a floor made of aluminum sheeting that seemed to bow with each step. Booths along the outer bulkhead were packed with Cuban-Americans busy with plates of black beans and yellow rice. Frail waiters dressed in white shirts and black ties moved sluggishly through the noise and smoke. There were a couple of stools open at the bar, so my red-bearded friend and I took a seat and ordered beer.

  Westy lifted his eyebrows, questioning me. I shook my head. “She’s not in here,” I said.

  It was a Czechoslovakian beer served in big dark bottles, and the entire head when poured consisted of about four massive bubbles which suggested, it seemed, that the brewer had included dishwater in his recipe.

  But it was good beer, strong and cold, and Westy did quick justice to it and ordered more. When it came, he poured his glass full, tasted it experimentally, and clicked his tongue, pleased.

  He said, “Nothin’ like that first taste of beer, eh, mate?”

  “It does rank right up there.”

  He swiveled on his stool, toying with the glass. He had a big blunt ruddy face, a trace of scar between cheek and Gaelic nose, and bright-blue eyes that were easy to read.

  “Having some second thoughts there, O’Davis?”

  He squenched up one eye mischievously. “Hah! Yank, once me mind’s made up, I’ve made up me mind.” He paused for a moment, and then: “I’ve sailed most a the world, spent half me life in foreign ports. Seen a lotta boatmen white and otherwise and I’ve learned to know the ones that aren’t worth a flip and the ones that are, and—well, I give you me hand, didn’t I?”

  “But you’ve been thinking,” I added.

  “Sure I’ve been a-thinkin’. I’ve been a-sittin’ here wondering how important that lady is that we’re chasin’. Is she your wife or your wench or jest a charter or what?”

  “Just a very important person, you might say, O’Davis.” I felt him eyeing me, and I had to grin. “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m being secretive. But there’s a reason. Tell you what—next time you’re in the States, come to Key West. You can stay with me for a couple of weeks and we’ll fish and drink beer all day and tell tall tales. And I’ll give you the whole story. But for now it has to be my way.”

  “And don’t be a-thinkin’ I won’t take you up on that kind offer. You have the look of the mystery about you, brother MacMorgan, and a very interestin’ story it will be, no doubt.”

  “And you have the look of one very nosy Irishman, O’Davis.”

  He cackled at that. “Sure an’ it’s true, true! But sittin’ here among these wolves and mother dogs, who else do you have to trust?”

  As we sat there, O’Davis told me all he knew about the layout of the Pinares. Just aft of the bar was a little souvenir shop where they sold green cigars and T-shirts. Outside and up the stairs was the immigration office and, cabined beside that, a larger room where, for a price, there were prostitutes and gambling.

  “What about below?”

  He shook his head. “Never been down there—an’ I’ve been jest about everyplace an outsider can go in me three weeks here.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “An’ what does that mean, Yank?”

  “It means you should stay here while I have a look around.”

  “But ya canna go strollin’ down inta the belly of the ship like ya own the place. There’s guards, mate. I’ve seen ’em me own self. Two of ’em above an’ God knows how many below.”

  “All I can do is try. I don’t want to lose that woman.”

  There was a kind sympathy in his blue eyes. “Ya talk like a man who’s lost a woman before.”

  “And you talk like a man who kno
ws what that means,” I said.

  When I turned to go, he grabbed my shoulder. “Hold on there, now. You’ll be needin’ a diversion, I’m a thinkin’.”

  “Or maybe just a lost look. You know how easily us stupid Americans get lost.”

  “But a diversion would be a fair sight better.” He held up his finger as if lecturing. “Have you ever noticed, Yank, what a hot-blooded people these Cubans be? Fine folk, mostly—but hot-blooded.” He nodded toward two men sitting on stools down from ours. They were young, wore T-shirts, and both had tattoos. “Now take those two fellas. I’d be willin’ to bet me last Cayman dollar, picture of the Queen an’ all, that if I was to suggest to one that the other told me his sister was a putana, why I bet there would be one hell of a diversion.”

  “Don’t try it, O’Davis—”

  But it was too late. He was already stretched out over the counter laughing like a drunk, barking Spanish at the two men in his Irish brogue. It didn’t take long for them to react. While the one glowered at O’Davis, the other stood up and dumped beer on his former friend, yelling challenges. The other answered with a roundhouse right that sent chin and body crashing into the next table. When the guards rushed in to break it up, people started shoving and more fights broke out. Pretty soon the narrow bar of the Comandante Pinares was, indeed, one hell of a diversion.

  Westy O’Davis picked his beer up gingerly, careful lest it be spilled by the combatants, then backed away, nudging me ahead of him.

  “Do ya see what I mean, friend MacMorgan?” he said in a silly half-whisper. “Hot-blooded!”

  “O’Davis, you fool, you swore to me on your mother’s grave that you wouldn’t get involved in any rough stuff.”

  “Ah, ’deed I did, ’deed I did.” Then he glanced at me with a sly look. “Funny thing about me mother’s grave—it’s empty, it is. The old girl runs a little pub in Kilcullen outside Kildare. Last I heard, she was still arm ’rasslin’ the farm lads for bottles o’ port.” He tapped me on the shoulder. “Here they come, Yank—the guards from the bowels o’ the ship. Now’s the time to make yer move. I’m thinkin’ I’ll jest stay up here and enjoy the spectacle.”