Death Comes in Through the Kitchen

by Teresa Dovalpage

  Here you can find bananas anywhere: at the farmers’ market, from street vendors . . . You can even grow them in your own yard. Butter and eggs are also available. Baking soda is sold at pharmacies. As for brown sugar, everyone gets six pounds a month.

  Normally I wouldn’t cook at the Institute, of course. Most of us go out for lunch or bring something from home. But I decided to make bread here because of a coworker who just wouldn’t stop complaining. She spent a whole morning criticizing the bakery bread because “it tasted like a sponge.” (What does a sponge taste like anyway?) I asked why she didn’t make bread herself, since she was so picky, and she looked at me as if I had asked why she didn’t build a rocket.

  “Tas loca,” she told me.

  To prove I wasn’t crazy, I set to work at the Institute’s underutilized kitchen. The building used to be the home of a bourgeois family and the kitchen area is as big as my apartment. Nobody uses it now, though. The cooktop was cracked on the edges and none of the four burners worked. Luckily, the oven was in perfect shape.

  I began by mixing flour, baking soda and salt in one bowl. In another, I combined butter and brown sugar, stirring until they became a creamy paste. I added beaten eggs and mashed bananas, and mixed everything. After pouring the mixture into a pan, I put it in the oven at 390 degrees and baked it for around fifty minutes.

  Voila, pan de plátano for everyone!

  The best part was the aroma of freshly baked bread. The whole Institute smelled so good that a few people who were consulting books at the library came over to ask us for a bite.

  “Don’t tell me you can’t do this at home,” I told my bitchy coworker. “Cuando se quiere, se puede.”

  Yes, when there is a will, there is a way.

  Little bread kisses to you all.

  Comments

  Cocinera Cubana said. . .

  It seems simple enough!

  Taos Tonya said. . .

  Here people used to make bread in hornos, outdoor ovens. Some still do.

  Maritza said. . .

  I don’t think it was a Cuban tradition to make bread at home. It was easier to buy it at a panadería.

  Yarmi said. . .

  It is easy, Cocinera. Give it a try! Bread is very forgiving so don’t worry about making mistakes.

  Tonya, I googled the hornos. Such interesting structures. I will show them to my parents when I go back to Los Palacios. Maybe they could build one.

  Maritza, you can still buy bread at bakeries. I only wanted to show my colleague that we don’t need to depend on them all the time. It feels good to be self-sufficient!

  I just remembered an old saying from Grandma Hilda: Las penas con pan son menos—sorrows hurt less with bread.

  Chapter Three

  And Lies Keep Piling Up

  The day after the café con leche surprise, Marlene deferred to Duty. Instead of getting herself out of the case as she had threatened to do, she continued working on it. It helped that the Seguridad agent sent her a printed copy of another post through internal mail, saying there were “a few more and some really interesting things” coming soon.

  By then the useless computer had been taken away and Marlene wasn’t missing it a bit. She had another meeting with comrade instructor, who shared what he’d learned from his visit to Fefita Comité and Yarmila’s parents.

  “I don’t see clearly here,” he admitted. “For her folks, she was a model communist. For Fefita, she was lukewarm at best. I can see her lying to her parents so as not to hurt their feelings but—”

  “I wasn’t able to sleep yesterday, thinking of her,” Marlene said. “After reading all these posts and meeting her boyfriend, er, boyfriends, I can’t help but feel some sort of a connection with Yarmila, though I didn’t sympathize much with her when I started working the case.” She realized that she had stopped calling her “citizen Portal.” “She might have been a counterrevolutionary, but I wish I’d met her.”

  “You’d have liked her,” he said. “Most people did.”

  “You knew her, didn’t you? What was she like?”

  She waited with anxious anticipation while her former teacher looked for the right words.

  “Very nice,” he said finally. “Chatty. Easygoing. But I never talked to her about anything of substance.”

  “She talked a lot, but didn’t say much,” Marlene mused.

  “That’s a good way to put it.”

  “Carmela, the gusana, said it.” Marlene looked through her desk. “I have notes from our interview. She befriended them, but wasn’t very involved with their activities. Now I am waiting for Jacobo’s input. He hasn’t bothered to tell me anything yet.”

  “Why is he keeping that poor Yuma in Cuba?”

  Marlene smirked. “That poor Yuma! Comrade Instructor, your client isn’t poor. He is richer than ten of us put together. That being said, I’m all for letting him go. I think Jacobo was so embarrassed about the CIA confusion that he’s trying to save face somehow.” She chuckled. “Culinary Institute of America—Ha! But unless there is something else going on, he will give him his passport back in a few days. Though with la Seguridad, one never knows.”

  They discussed the blog posts. He had finished reading them and pointed out some inconsistencies.

  “Yarmila wrote that her mother was a manager and a career woman, but she was not,” he said. “She is a housewife and not very educated.”

  “Maybe she was trying to make her folks look good.”

  “What for? None of her readers knew her family and I suspect they couldn’t care less. Then these detailed descriptions of dishes that ordinary people can’t afford . . . Even with CUCs, you can’t find steak anywhere most of the time.”

  The truck that delivered food to the police station stopped outside the building. The metallic noise of pots being carried through the hall filled the office. The chow usually consisted of rice and stale Spam.

  “You have to read the post about making banana bread from scratch,” Marlene said with an annoyed frown. “Where did she get her ideas?”

  “And selling lobster is illegal. People do it, but it’s against the law. She also said that Cubans were allowed to stay in hotels, but she forgot to mention that we can’t pay with pesos. How many people can afford to spend eighty CUCs for a night at the Hotel Internacional?”

  Marlene nodded. “Reading her blog, you’d think she lived in an alternate universe where everything was easy and nice,” she said.

  “Unless she was making it up. All of it.”

  “But as you said, Comrade Instructor, what for?”

  Later that day Marlene went to see Fernando Goicochea, the Communist Party Secretary for the Institute of Literature and Linguistics. She walked from the police station to the stone building, fronted by a portico with four marble columns, where Yarmila had worked. The receptionist led her to an office where a middle-aged man with thick eyeglasses, a white guayabera, and a Soviet-era Poljot watch sat behind a desk. As they made small talk (Marlene liked to put people at ease before starting an official conversation) she looked outside, curious to see the kitchen where the banana bread had been baked only a few weeks before. Then she caught Fernando eyeing her behind.

  Why are all men such pigs? Carajo! I’m so tired of this!

  “Let’s get to the point,” she said, cutting him off in the middle of a story about an award that Eusebio Leal, Havana’s City Historian, had conferred to the Institute. “When did you see Yarmila Portal for the last time?”

  The man’s face reddened and he stuttered a bit. “On February twenty-eighth,” he said. “It was a Friday.”

  “That was a while ago. Was she on vacation afterward?”

  “Not exactly. She had asked for two weeks off, without pay, starting the next Monday. Her Yankee boyfriend was coming so she wanted to ‘spend time’ with him. She said it in so
many words. But she also spent time with other, younger men. A boy right out of high school!”

  Fernando had an obscene grin plastered over his face. Marlene felt like smacking him.

  “How would you describe her?”

  “She—eh—how can I put it nicely?”

  “Don’t. This is a police case. We don’t have time for niceties.”

  “Fine, then. The truth is that she had ideological problems. I wouldn’t say she was a gusana, but she leaned that way.”

  “Explain how.”

  “In the first place, look at the kind of partner she chose. I am not as rigid as many other compañeros in my position tend to be. I do think that some Yankees—those who visit Cuba to find out the truth about our country—aren’t bad people. The fact that they were born in the monster’s entrails doesn’t make them evil per se. But still! Aren’t there enough good men in Cuba?”

  “Besides that, was she a good worker?” Marlene asked. “Did she come every day and fulfill her duties?”

  “For the most part, yes.” Fernando took off his glasses and began to clean them, a gesture that Marlene had learned to associate with nervousness. “But she was friends with some disreputable elements, both at the Institute and outside. I mean, we don’t have gusanos here, but there are a few who criticize everything, who complain for no reason—these were the ones that Yarmila liked to associate with.”

  “Did she argue with them?”

  “Argue? No, no—she encouraged them!”

  “But Yarmila knew that our economic problems weren’t the revolution’s fault,” Marlene said. “She thought that people should be self-reliant. She even made bread for you guys to prove her point.”

  Fernando put on his glasses and stared at her. “Made bread for us?” he repeated. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean what I said. She baked a loaf of banana bread here, at the Institute, for everyone to enjoy.”

  “Is that some kind of a joke?” Fernando shrugged. “Because, with all due respect, I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t joke around when I am working,” Marlene replied curtly.

  Fernando seemed perplexed. “This must be a misunderstanding,” he said. “People aren’t allowed to smoke on the premises, much less cook. The building is full of valuable manuscripts and we can’t risk a fire.”

  “It only happened once.”

  “That’s impossible. Where was she supposed to make bread? On a campfire in the backyard?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “There is no kitchen here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The way Marlene posed this question usually made people think twice and reconsider their answers. But the Communist Party Secretary didn’t show any signs of uncertainty.

  “Absolutely, compañera. There is a small area with a refrigerator, but we don’t have a stove or anything like that.”

  “What about the original kitchen? The one that the owners used when the Institute was the home of a bourgeois family?”

  “This place has never been a private home. It was built in 1947 for La Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País and has been a public building ever since.”

  Marlene gave up on the subject. “What do you do at the Institute, Comrade Secretary?” she asked.

  “I am investigador titular, head researcher. I’m also a linguist and a professor at the School of Philology.”

  “So you teach too.”

  “Yes, I have a doctorate from Lomonosov University and an honorary doctorate from Sofia University in Bulgaria.”

  What a pedantic jerk.

  “I’d like to see that small kitchen area you mentioned, if you don’t mind,” Marlene said.

  “Indeed, compañera. Please, follow me.”

  He escorted her to the end of a hall where a blue Soviet-era refrigerator (a contemporary of the Poljot watch) made gurgling sounds.

  “May I visit Yarmila’s office now?” Marlene asked, defeated.

  Fernando shook his head. “The deceased citizen didn’t have an office,” he said. “None of the young researchers do. There are around seventy employees here and many share a workspace.”

  “Did she have a personal computer?” she asked, thinking of her own fiasco.

  “A personal computer, compañera?” Fernando rolled his eyes. “Certainly not! They are assigned by the Minister to reliable people. We only have three computers in the building: mine, one that belongs to the library and another for our director.”

  “Did Yarmila use any of them?”

  “Not mine or the director’s. As for the one in the library, she’d have needed permission. They are all passcode protected.”

  “Did you know that she kept a blog? Do you know what a blog is?”

  “I do, compañera! I consult the internet from time to time.”

  “Here?”

  “We have limited access and our server is very slow. But I know exactly what a blog is and I don’t think Yarmila could have kept one. Not at the Institute, in any case.”

  Marlene was taken aback. She considered arguing but Fernando’s tone was conclusive. Maybe she only worked on it from her home computer. But why lie about such a trivial thing? She wished she could get access to Yarmila’s computer, but Jacobo hadn’t allowed her to even see it. Cabrón.

  They walked to the communal work area. Two young women and a man busied themselves with electric typewriters.

  “You may want to interview them,” Fernando said. “They knew the deceased citizen better than I did.”

  “I bet they have something nice to say about her,” Marlene muttered.

  It was then that she realized, for the first time since the investigation had started, that she was totally on Yarmi’s side.

  Larisa had short bleached hair and long acrylic nails painted red. She wore impeccable makeup and a pretty flowing dress with a floral print. Marlene looked at her own nails, short and unpainted.

  These ‘researchers’ take good care of themselves.

  Lively and a little impish, Larisa talked a mile a minute, gesturing with both hands.

  “Ay, compañera, I’m so sorry about Yarmi!” she said. “I can’t believe she won’t be sitting here with us anymore. She was always so upbeat and fun to be around. Everyone’s friend, you know? Even Fernando’s. He is talking all tough now, but Yarmi had him wrapped around her little finger. He liked her. He was so jealous of the Yuma and that Pato boy!”

  “Did you meet them?” Marlene asked.

  “I saw Pato a few times when he came looking for her.”

  “What about the American?”

  “The—?” Larisa extended her index and little fingers while holding her middle and ring fingers down with her thumb. “She often mentioned him, but I don’t think she would have brought the guy here. She didn’t brag about him, as many girls with foreign boyfriends do.”

  Marlene thought this over. She wouldn’t have bragged about an American boyfriend either—not that she had the slightest chance of finding one.

  “Did you consider Yarmila a counterrevolutionary?” she asked.

  “A counterrevolutionary!” Larisa gasped. “Did the old goat say that? Look, Yarmi wasn’t a gusana, no way, but she wasn’t afraid to complain when she didn’t like something. At times she criticized the government and then waited to hear what people answered. But I guess she did that to find out around whom it was safe to talk. She was smart, not like those idiots who open their yap and get in trouble.”

  By the end of the conversation, Larisa confirmed everything Fernando had said. Marlene was convinced that Yarmila had never used the Institute’s computers. Her colleagues had no idea that she kept a food blog. As for the banana bread story, Larisa laughed it off.

  “How could she have cooked anything here? With what ingredients? I don’t know of anybody who
bakes their own bread in Havana. Do you, compañera? Tell me so I can go and buy some from them!”

  On her way out, Marlene was so distracted that she ended up in the cavernous library instead of the lobby.

  Why would Yarmila lie about the banana bread and the Institute’s kitchen? Who cared, in any case? What was she trying to do?

  Carmela said that Yarmila was “fishing.” But she wouldn’t have needed to tell such absurd lies to catch a foreigner over the internet. A picture of herself would have sufficed. Who the hell was Yarmila? I need to find that out before I can even start on who killed her.

  Chapter Four

  Seventeen Moments of Spring

  When Marlene returned to the Unidad, still replaying in her head the conversation she’d had with Larisa, Gordo reported that Comrade Jacobo had been there a few minutes before.

  “He left something about that Portal case.”

  Marlene’s eyes lit up. “About time.”

  “It’s hot in here, cojones,” Gordo complained, handing her the package. “Do you think we can request an electric fan this summer, Comrade Lieutenant?”

  “Probably not, Gordo. The Unidad doesn’t have the budget for that. And please, don’t swear when you are on duty! I’ll be in my office, if anybody needs me.”

  Marlene tore open the sealed manila envelope with the Seguridad agent’s signature on the top flap. It contained several pages that, unlike the blog posts she had been reading for the past week, were written in Spanish. There was also a dog-eared book: Seventeen Moments of Spring, by Iulián Semiónov. She remembered a television series with the same title. The cover featured two Nazi officers.

  A Russian—I mean, a Soviet novel about World War II? Blah.

  It had been published by Editorial Arte y Literatura in 1975. The blurb on the back read, “Seventeen Moments of Spring (1970), the most famous book by Semiónov, is full of suspense and emotion. Colonel Stirlitz, a Soviet agent who has infiltrated the SS, outsmarts the enemy and contributes to the collapse of Nazi Germany.”