Isabel had turned into an entrepreneur as soon as it became legal to run private restaurants in people’s homes. She had been a nurse at the Van Troy Policlinic for twenty years, but quickly figured out that opening a paladar made more financial sense than working for the government—even with the heavy tax that had to be paid regardless of the business’s income or lack thereof. As a nurse, she had taken home three hundred Cuban pesos a month. Now, she usually got a net profit of two hundred CUCs every month, the equivalent of 2,500 pesos.
She did so well that Luis, an accountant for the Ministry of Transportation, also quit his job and became a waiter at La Caldosa. They hired Taty, who passed as Isabel’s nephew, to help in the kitchen and be an occasional busboy. And though it was supposed to be a family business, their success had sparked Yarmila’s interest. She couldn’t have worked there legally (only relatives were allowed to jointly operate a paladar) but she nevertheless became first a cook and later a clandestine capitalist partner.
“How did Pato Macho take it, Isa?” Taty asked. He mixed the onion rings with slices of ripe avocado, sprinkling them with oil, salt and a splash of vinegar.
Isabel added a bay leaf to the sofrito and stirred it. She avoided Taty’s expectant gaze. “He is devastated,” she said at last. “Furious too. He wants to find out who did it and beat the bastard to a pulp.”
“He loved her very much.”
“He did, but it’s all over. Love will not bring her back. I’ve told him to get the hell out of Havana.”
“Did he go?”
“Nah, he never listens to me. You know how he is.”
“Do you think the police will blame him?”
“He is suspect number one, the way things are.”
“But Pato didn’t mind it,” Taty said. “I mean, Yarmila never hid the fact that she had a Yuma partner. In any case, the cuckold was that guy, not—”
“Let’s leave Pato out of this!”
Isabel stopped stirring the sofrito and put a hand on Taty’s shoulder. “Do not talk about Pato and her to anyone, hear?” she said firmly. Saliva flew from her mouth. “This is serious business.”
“Of course I won’t talk!” Taty replied, offended. “I am not a gossip and Pato is like a brother to me.”
She turned to her pots again. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I am scared and sad. Ay! I still remember the last time I saw Yarmi, when I brought her a chicken because she was going to make croquettes for us.”
“That was two days ago.”
“Yes, just two days. She looked so happy and full of life,” Isabel choked on the last word. “She wanted me to go upstairs but I said no, my legs were killing me. I told her to come down and get the damn chicken. I was rude to the poor girl! If I had known that would be the last time we were going to meet—”
The door chime rang.
“Is it someone coming in or someone leaving?” Isabel asked.
Taty stuck his head through the rattan curtain that separated the kitchen from the dining room. “It’s Padrino,” he said.
A slightly built, short-haired man in his fifties was led by Luis to the only empty table. Padrino wore a white linen shirt, white pants, and a white handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket. His light brown skin looked darker by contrast. A long Santería necklace of blue beads hung loosely around his neck and a bracelet in the same color encircled his right wrist. He also wore a shorter necklace of three red beads alternating with three black ones.
“A beer and the arroz con pollo special, please,” he said to Luis, after shaking his hand.
Back in the kitchen, Isabel scooped a generous portion from the chicken and rice pot and made sure it contained only thighs, which Padrino preferred.
When Luis came in to fetch the beer from the refrigerator, Padrino’s order was ready.
Ten minutes passed. The solitary foreign diner left, followed by the Spaniards. A young Cuban couple came in, studied the menu, and decided to split an arroz con pollo. The Germans ordered more beers and the dollar-area patrons settled on a flan for dessert. Padrino ate slowly, savoring his meal.
Isabel put another batch of chicken in the sofrito and began to sauté it. The door chime rang again.
“Yes, this will turn out to be a decent night after all,” Isabel started to say. But she cut herself off. There was a cop at the door. Behind him, the red and ice blue lights of a cruiser flashed scandalously. The cop stopped in the threshold as if waiting for someone else to join him.
Luis came into the kitchen, pale and shaky.
“Whatever happens, do not charge Padrino tonight,” his wife told him. “I’m afraid that we are going to need the orishas’ help.”
Chapter Five
Lieutenant MartÍnez
By looking around the office he was sitting in, Matt could tell that Lieutenant Martínez was the neat, everything-in-its-place-and-a-place-for-everything type. Such a logical person would understand that he didn’t deserve to be locked up, he told himself. They had nothing against him, as Pedro had so clearly said.
What good would it do to keep me here? I am not a suspect. Yarmi had been dead for—I don’t know, hours, maybe a whole day, when I arrived in Cuba. Yarmi, my love. Did she suffer a lot? How did she die? I didn’t see any blood, but the water could have washed it away. I didn’t look too closely either. God. Who could have hated Yarmi so much to do that to her? Did she have enemies at work, in the neighborhood, at that Caldosa place? I can’t imagine anybody trying to steal from her . . .
He stood up and walked around the office. His legs were weak and numb. He returned to his seat.
It could have been an accident too. Why didn’t I think of it before? That makes more sense! A heart attack, a stroke—but she never mentioned any health issues, did she? Pedro was right: I know so little, not only about Cuba but also about Yarmi’s life. I only know what she shared with me, and that wasn’t an awful lot.
He tried to evoke the lively dark-haired girl who had welcomed him the year before, but instead saw her pale face and closed eyes, the soaked yellow dress. He forced himself to remember the emails they had exchanged, their long, heartfelt phone calls and their love at first sight—or almost at first sight. When he arrived in Havana, she had been waiting for him at the airport. It was mid-July, hot and humid. Perspiration and anxiety made his shirt stick to his back as soon as he stepped out of the plane.
He recognized her immediately. The young woman was shorter than he had expected, around five feet tall, when he’d imagined she would be five four at least. Yet that didn’t matter because her bright brown eyes, like prisms of light, were much prettier than in the photo, shining with an intensity that surprised him—and scared him a bit. She had an oval Mona Lisa face framed by shoulder-length hair. Her light caramel skin exuded a warm, primal fragrance. He liked everything about her, even her accent, though he couldn’t always understand what she said. Yarmila crushed words together, omitted final consonants and often accented the wrong syllables. She wrote better than she talked. Still, she spoke English remarkably well for someone who had never been abroad.
“I know what many words mean because I’ve seen them used in books,” she explained. “The problem is that I haven’t heard them so I just take a guess on the pronunciation. Too bad that English doesn’t have written accents, like Spanish.”
He had hailed an almendrón outside the airport—a yellow Chevy Impala—and they had ridden together to the Old Havana building where Yarmila lived. There was a feast waiting for him, she announced. In truth, the meal consisted of a dozen fish croquettes, white rice, black beans, and fried plantains, but Matt pronounced everything “scrumptious.”
“That’s a new term for me!” Yarmila laughed. “Is it the same as yummy?”
“Even better.”
“Qué good.”
Since the beginning they had communicated in a private
kind of Spanglish, a made-up language of love.
At that time Yarmila owned a small computer with a monochrome green monitor. A mountain of cables were piled behind the desk.
“This is where I write my food posts,” she said proudly.
Matt surveyed the keyboard with its faded letters and the square mouse with three buttons. It looked ancient to him.
“Maybe I can send you a new computer,” he said.
“Why? Mine works fine.”
The kitchen had been bigger than the one in the Espada Street apartment and better equipped with a porcelain sink and a freestanding range stove. Yarmila’s apartment had been the home’s kitchen and pantry area when just one family, the original owners, had occupied the building. Now the former mansion housed twenty-seven people. Yarmila was the only one who lived by herself.
The next-door neighbors had two kids, she told Matt, taking away four croquettes. And at the end of the hall was an elderly couple who subsisted on a meager pension—she set apart a dish for them too.
“Here, we like to help each other.”
Matt had been moved by her generosity and fearful, at the same time, that she might expect him to “help” as well, to give her money, to buy stuff for her . . . What if she was really a jinetera, a prostitute in disguise? Estrada had warned him: Cuban girls are smoking hot but they are also trouble. I once had a Cubanita in TJ and she screwed me over royally. She asked for dresses, shoes, perfumes, every chingada thing under the sun. Then one day she took a powder. People said she ran off to Miami with someone else. So you be careful, man. Pónte abusado.
“I’m not rich,” Matt had hurried to say, too fast and curtly. “I don’t make mucho dinero.”
As it turned out, he didn’t need to be concerned. Yarmila told him that she worked as a translator and researcher (Matt didn’t understand what she researched, exactly) for the Institute of Literature and Linguistics. She wasn’t working at La Caldosa yet, or at least she hadn’t mentioned it. Her Institute salary, though only in Cuban pesos, was enough to cover her needs, she assured him.
“I am a college graduate,” she said, pointing to a diploma on the wall.
Yarmila held a Licenciatura, the equivalent of a BA, conferred by the School of Foreign Languages of the University of Havana. It was written on parchment, with the Cuban coat of arms on top.
“Many of my former classmates are now working in hotels because they make more money there,” she told him. “But I can’t get myself to do the same. I didn’t study five years to make somebody’s bed.”
“Good for you.”
“Still, it’s nice to have extra income, verdad? I often cook for other people who want something special, like a birthday cake or a cheese flan.”
“Do they pay you well?”
“A few CUCs always help.”
Matt had never heard of CUCs before.
“Are they the same as dollars?”
“Sort of. You will need to exchange your dollars to CUCs if you want to buy in tourists’ shops.”
“And at your day job, are you paid in pesos?”
“I’m paid in CUPs.”
Matt kept asking questions about Cuba’s double currency, which he found mystifying—he later learned that one CUC was equivalent to twenty-five CUPs, or regular Cuban pesos. Though he was attracted to Yarmila, he didn’t dare to make a move yet, and felt awkward being alone with a pretty young woman inside that small room that smelled so strongly of sofrito. Yarmila, on the other hand, seemed happy and at ease.
“I didn’t used to cook when I lived in Pinar del Río,” she said with a smile. “That was my grandma’s domain. Thank God I took the time to write down some of her recipes. Once I was on my own in Havana, I found out that I liked to experiment with dishes and twist them around. I also wanted to practice my English and communicate with people abroad, that’s how Yarmi Cooks Cuban was born. Mom still can’t believe that my posts are read in faraway places like San Diego!”
“Oh, they’re great. And you must be very good with technology to maintain a blog. They are kind of a new thing, aren’t they? I wouldn’t even know how to open one.”
“Well, this isn’t my first. I started one in Spanish, then closed it.”
“Why?”
Yarmila seemed suddenly uncomfortable, as if she had said something she shouldn’t. She changed the topic of conversation and Matt didn’t insist.
They finished eating, the surprise of the night being a flan covered in pink meringue, with the word bienvenido on top.
“A special flan for this special Yuma,” she said, pecking him on the cheek. Her natural, fresh scent settled into his skin.
That had been the extent of their physical contact that evening and for several days afterward. Yarmila flirted with him cautiously and behaved in such a good-girl manner that Matt was ashamed of his initial assumptions. Even when she finally slept with him, the weekend before he left Havana, she had been modest and almost shy in bed.
Contrary to what Estrada had predicted, Yarmila hadn’t shown any interest in dresses or shoes, not even when he took her to the tourists’ shops. Though she protested, he went ahead and bought a few kitchen utensils, like a good set of carving knives and forks that cost ninety CUCs at the Quinta y 42 St. Store. And meat, oil and imported cheese because they weren’t available anywhere else. Matt didn’t know how she managed to make all those fancy dishes because the grocery stores were bare.
An hour had gone by, but Matt hadn’t even noticed the passage of time. He was still lost in his thoughts when the stocky guard came by.
“Do you want water, compañero?” he asked in a friendly tone.
“Yes, please.”
He brought a can of condensed milk full of water, which was room temperature, but Matt drank it till the last drop. The can reminded him of a post Yarmila had written about a dessert made with condensed milk. She called it “little mud.”
The guard went away and Matt was left alone again in the company of his memories. The next person to come to the door was a young woman. Matt didn’t see her face, zooming in on her behind instead. It was a big, round, monumental butt ready to explode inside the tight uniform pants. He stuck his head out of the office to take a better look at her. The woman, who had gotten to the end of the hall, punched a card, turned around and caught him staring. He pretended to be distracted and focused his attention on Castro’s photo, which depicted the president as a strong, middle-aged man in green fatigues.
I bet he doesn’t look like that anymore. Does he still have a beard? It must be all white now.
His musings were cut short by a female voice. “Good evening, compañero.”
To his embarrassment, Matt found the woman with the epic behind standing in front of him. She was around twenty-five years old and very tall, with short brown hair and stern gray eyes. Despite her youth, she looked imposing and severe.
“Good . . . good evening,” he stammered.
“I’m Lieutenant Martínez.”
He gaped at her, too shocked to say a word.
“Are you with me, compañero?” she asked.
“Yes,” he muttered. “I’m with you.”
Lieutenant Martínez’s attitude was different from Pedro’s. Though she wasn’t openly hostile, she acted in a cold, official manner that made Matt feel on edge and insecure. She might have been assigned the role of the bad cop. But she could have also been offended by his ogling her butt.
She proceeded to question him. Matt told her, as he had told the Seguridad agent, how he had met Yarmila, that he was back in Cuba to see her, and how long they had known each other.
“I explained all that to Pedro,” he couldn’t help but say.
“We work in different departments,” Lieutenant Martínez replied. “So you will have to explain everything again to me.”
After Matt finished h
is story, he hesitated before asking, “Could you please tell me if Yarmila was—if it was an accident or—?”
“It was a homicide.”
Matt looked down and studied Lieutenant Martínez’s black uniform boots. They were old, carefully polished and a size nine at least.
“When was the last time you talked to her?” Martínez asked.
“Yesterday,” Matt said. His heart was beating fast and hard.
“Do you remember the time?”
“Early in the morning.”
Anne arrived from LA at ten o’clock and he had already called Yarmila by then, but he preferred to omit that fact. He didn’t want to get Anne involved.
“How did she sound?”
“Fine, as usual. She was excited. She said she would be waiting for me.”
It hadn’t occurred to him yet that the four of them could ride together in Yony’s car. Anne was the one who suggested it later, when they were already on the plane.
“You didn’t have any communication today?”
“I tried to call her from Monterrey between connecting flights, when I found out that we were going to be delayed, but she didn’t answer.”
“When was that?”
“Around noon.”
“Did you call her place of work?”
“No. I called her home.”
Martínez asked for the number and wrote it down with a puzzled expression.
“For how long did she have this number?” she asked.
“I don’t know. That’s the only number I ever had for her.”
She made a quick annotation and asked point-blank if he suspected anyone. Matt shook his head mechanically, lost in his private purgatory, until the next question took him by surprise.
“What about Pato Macho?”
Death Comes in Through the Kitchen Page 4