Havana Best Friends

by Jose Latour

  After that evening she grew closer to Carlos. Until Robert Klein came into her life, she had had sex only with the blind man. Even after she and Robert became engaged, she occasionally went to bed with Carlos. It wasn’t love; it was a combination of compassion and physical attraction made more enjoyable by the fact that he never detected the former and didn’t take seriously the latter. Language was a factor too. She liked her native language enormously and Cuban Spanish sounded so different: deviously insinuating was the term she coined for it. It was so sweet when, inside her, rubbing her clitoris with his crotch, Carlos murmured in her ears the most beautiful love poems in Spanish. Such exalted orgasms. He never asked for commitment, never planned, never said a word concerning the future. Carlos just enjoyed what life presented him with, which was perfect. So, on the day Robert announced it was over, the first thing that came to her mind was how nice it would be to renew her leisurely strolls along Central Park holding hands with her favourite blind man. Maybe her favourite man, period.

  Once she learned Carlos’s secret, she wondered whether he had been planning on using her these last two years. Carlos knew Sean didn’t speak a word of Spanish and would need an interpreter. But she had met Carlos before he’d learned from his dying father about the hidden treasure. The blind man was familiar with other Spanish-speaking women; she had seen them openly flirting with him at parties, especially when he played the piano: Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Spaniards, all swooning as he lost himself in the finest romantic music of the century. Still, he had chosen her. And if it all turned out well, she would be set up for life. Never object to being used when the payoff is high.

  Still, she wanted to believe she was not going to Cuba for the second time in three months only for the money. Carlos deserved a break and she wanted to be instrumental in bringing it about. A nice home of his own, a grand piano by the fireplace, fiction in Braille in both languages, as many books on tape as he liked, all the fine music he adored and the best CD and tape player available on the market, a chauffeur-driven car, servants. It was great that her aspirations and his well-being harmonized so fittingly.

  “Carlos is such a nice person,” she said, wanting to share her feelings with someone who knew the blind man.

  Sean gave her a baleful look before pointing at the tape player. “Yeah,” was his only comment.

  The fucking paranoid iceman, Marina thought and she inhaled deeply. What was the matter with this guy? Everybody was a suspect, all the rooms and cars were bugged, everything had to be on a need-to-know basis. There was probably a lot more going on that she didn’t know about. The careful planning, she understood. What he called the recon trip, she understood. The fake names and passports, she understood. But why couldn’t she know his real name, for God’s sake? Well, he didn’t want to know hers either. A stupid rule that transformed Rita Petrone into Marina Leucci. And they had to pretend to be honeymooners; straightforward exchanges were forbidden except in open spaces. Now, to top it all, the cane and the limp. It was ridiculous!

  However, the guy was covering all expenses and so far he must have invested a lot of money in an unsubstantiated story. How much did four passports with all the right stamps and visas cost? Plus the plane tickets, hotel rooms, meals, the rental, and who knows what other expenses that he kept to himself. She had no idea. Carlos didn’t have a penny, and she hadn’t been asked to contribute anything, so the iceman was the sole provider of funds. Anyone would want to believe Carlos’s incredible story – she herself had been instantly seduced by it – but planning the whole operation, and sinking a lot of money into it, demanded the kind of risk-taking found only in professional adventurers.

  Come to think of it, it was like a treasure hunt. You invest a lot of money and you may or may not locate the sunken galleon. A risky investment, this one, where the really difficult part was not finding the loot but getting it out. The iceman had worked out how, but he wasn’t saying. Compartmentalization, he called it. Carlos shrugged and said okay. What else could he do? He couldn’t make demands, was forced to accept whatever his friend considered best.

  “Listen, darling,” Carlos had argued when she complained, in bed, one night he spent at her apartment. “He’s the only man I know who has the brains and the balls to pull this off. But even if he didn’t, he’s the only man on the face of the Earth whom I trust all the way. We were buddies in high school, were drafted on the same day, did basic training together at Fort Polk, were in the same platoon in Nam. He saved my ass twice, carried me to safety when I was wounded, was the only friend who came to visit after he was sent home.”

  Carlos had paused and frowned. His scars grouped close every time he knitted his brow, like lizards huddling together for warmth.

  “He changed after he quit the army, though. When I wanted to know what he was doing he became evasive. ‘Different things,’ he would say. Or ‘Selling junk door to door.’ Over the years he became very secretive. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. It probably has to do with his line of business, which I ignore. One day he said he was moving to California to get into the record business. Only he knows where he really went; it could have been to hunt polar bears at the North Pole or pump oil in Nigeria, for all I know. Then, all of a sudden, he knocks on my door. And the moment I heard his voice, I knew he was the man I was looking for. What amazes me is he never crossed my mind before he visited. Incredible. And when he agreed to the recon, he said, ‘Your friend does what I tell her to do. She asks no questions, makes no suggestions. Can she live with that?’

  “He won’t double-cross me, won’t short-change me either,” Carlos had added. “If it’s there he’ll get it, bring it back, find a buyer, collect our money. Then we’ll split it three ways and you and I will pay him back what he spent. There will be no argument. What he says, we pay, fifty-fifty. Now I ask you, can you live with that?”

  She had told Carlos that she could and made the same promise to Sean in person the next time they met. She would do it for personal gain and out of compassion. But she hated unreasonable obedience, especially when it involved a woman submitting to a man. It was why she pitied Elena and sympathized with her. It would be nice to offer her the possibility of a fresh start in the country of her choice, the chance to leave behind the frustrating life she had lived so far and to become independent of her freakish brother. And all this time, she’d been living hand to mouth with millions hidden under her roof. Nice woman. She deserved a break.

  “I remember this,” Sean said. They were at Malecón and G Street. He steered around the monument to General Calixto Garcia and headed for Miramar.

  “It’s like a giant lake,” Marina commented, staring at the calm blue sea where a few kids were swimming.

  “Full of sharks,” Sean added.

  Fucking iceman, Marina thought one more time as she shot a disapproving glance at him.

  Four hours later, Sean Abercorn was reclining on a white plastic sun lounger by the pool. He wore swimming trunks, sunglasses, and flip-flops; his right hand closed around a tumbler of Scotch on the rocks. Under the lounger, a thick aluminium cane rested. A gentle breeze played with his hair and the setting sun warmed his body.

  He was watching the action at the biggest of the Copacabana’s swimming pools – a hundred yards long, forty yards wide. It had been blasted into the rocky coastline and, as waves rolled and ebbed, and when the tide turned, the water flowed in and out through crevices along the concrete wall facing the sea. Sean let his gaze sweep east and west all along the seashore. It seemed as if Havana had neither sandy beaches nor high-rises. The city would have been much more appealing to tourists had it resembled Rio de Janeiro in that respect, he thought. Okay, this was the right moment to review the whole thing for the last time.

  Fact: He hadn’t really known Consuegra Senior. They’d never bridged the generation gap. But every time he picked Carlos up for a double date, a ball game, or a party, he shook hands with his parents, eased himself onto the couch, exchanged a few words.
His buddy’s old man had been a fanatical anti-Communist who supported all Cuban exile groups ready to do something to topple Castro. Despite having been astute enough to move part of his fortune to Miami prior to the collapse of the Batista regime, Consuegra Senior was consumed by anger and frustration. Now Sean understood why. It hadn’t been posturing. His anguish back then added credibility to his bizarre deathbed story.

  Fact: His first foray into Havana seemed to confirm the stuff was still there; Marina was 100 per cent sure. She said the soap dish hadn’t been touched in all these years, repeated it to Carlos in his presence, and, most revealing of all, had returned to Havana with him today. For all her compassion toward his blind buddy, the interpreter wouldn’t have left New York if she’d had the slightest doubt.

  Fact: The expert would arrive tomorrow and stay in this same hotel until next Tuesday. He’d probably ask him to his room on Sunday morning, if all went well. It was an extra precaution in case Consuegra Senior had been fooled by the smartasses in the trade. He had to make certain the prize was worth the risk of getting caught smuggling it out of the country. The old man had been an accountant, part of President Batista’s political machinery, didn’t know the first thing about what he’d hidden.

  Fact: The main obstacle, the short guy, had been removed from the scene. He’d been the kind of man who, after greedily giving his consent to everything in the beginning and encouraging his sister to do the same, would have tried to renegotiate once he saw the merchandise. The son of a bitch would have caused real trouble. He might even have tried to double-cross them, run away with the loot, call the police. He had dealt with that sort of motherfucker in the past, knew his kind. It was why he had included Truman in the recon trip. Well, the short guy was no longer a factor.

  Fact: The only person whose reaction remained unpredictable was Elena Miranda. Extremely attractive, gullible, kind, probably principled. She reminded him of a minefield. You are mindful of it all the way, then make a mistake on the home stretch and boom. Plan A was to get her out of her apartment, make her stay with them at the Copacabana. Plan B followed if she refused their invitation. He would be forced to resort to Plan C if she also refused B, and he’d do it with a heavy heart, but he’d do it. Nobody would stand in his way. They would go and see her at noon tomorrow; she was on vacation. He had looked it up on the Internet; the school summer vacation in Cuba ran from early July to late August.

  Fact: Tonight he would tell Marina that Pablo was dead. He feared her reaction if she learned what had happened to him in front of Elena, like gaping at him slack-jawed as she realized he must have ordered it. Elena was fast, would catch on immediately. She would wonder why Marina was so shaken by the death of a man she had seen only twice in her life. He needed Marina cool and unconcerned, focused on the deal at hand, not shaken by the news.

  Fact: Early in the morning he would find a hardware store and buy a chisel and hammer. And that was it. Preparations complete. Seventy-two hours, tops. Go in, snatch the stuff, get out. Being the only one who knew this operation down to the last detail made him feel reasonably certain of success. Of course, there were the uncontrollable factors that fools and wise men call luck. He took pride in admitting the existence of chance. It implied he was a wise man.

  Sean sipped a little whisky. As he was returning the glass to the low plastic round table, he spotted a man elbowing a friend and gaping at someone. The friend stared too. Sean followed their gaze. Marina, in a white high-waist bikini, a towel in her left hand. She also wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, and leather sandals. He preferred slim women, but admitted she had the kind of figure many men lust after, probably making her disdainful of oglers. It could be one of the reasons why she enjoyed the company of a blind man so much. To feel wanted for non-physical reasons for a change, not to be stared at like a juicy sirloin steak. Real or feigned indifference is the best approach to her kind, Sean thought.

  In his opinion, Marina would never get beyond the aspiring-artist category. Women who, at twenty-five, unable to figure out how the latest starlet has made it with half their looks and talent, begin messing around with married men, smoke pot now and then, have a couple of drinks every evening. By their mid-thirties, after countless unsuccessful auditions for lousy parts (or unsold paintings, unpublished poems, songs never recorded), what started as a benign nymphomania has turned them into professional seductresses, victims of the great male conspiracy, who retaliate with occasional forays into lesbianism and drinking binges. In their early forties, when the first symptoms of menopause develop and alcoholism has set in, they start frantically hunting for an old rich guy to persuade him that prenuptial arrangements are for people who don’t love each other as they do. She seemed brighter than most of her kind, though.

  Marina came over, stooped, kissed his cheek, pulled up a sun lounger. Then she spread her towel on it and lay down.

  “Oh, this is great,” she said, throwing her arms back and interlacing her fingers over her head. She took a deep breath of sea air and exhaled with a satisfied “aah.”

  “You said you felt like a nap.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  A smiling waiter approached them and discreetly inspected the woman from head to toe. Marina ordered a mojito. The waiter departed.

  “It’s weird,” she said. “I usually have trouble sleeping when I’m jet-lagged, not when I stay in the same time zone.”

  “There’s a first for everything.”

  “I guess so. Nice sunset.”

  “Yeah. No sunscreen?”

  “Not at this hour.”

  She closed her eyes, sighed, relaxed. In the time it took for the waiter to return with the drink, while Marina silently luxuriated in the late-afternoon warmth, Sean considered whether this was the right moment to tell her. The waiter came back. Marina thanked the man, took a sip, then rested the glass on the lounger’s edge.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if Pablo had moved or had an accident or something?” Sean asked after a minute.

  Marina grinned. “I don’t believe in miracles.”

  “Yet, they happen, you know.”

  “C’mon, Sean. A realist like you?”

  “Just for argument’s sake.”

  Something in the man’s tone made her slowly turn her head.

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  Sean fastened his eyes on hers. “Yes.”

  Marina squinted behind the sunglasses. “What is it?”

  “He had an accident.”

  Following a moment’s hesitation, Marina swung her legs round and sat facing Sean, drink in hand. She stripped the sunglasses away. “He what?”

  “Lie back. Lower your voice.”

  “What do you mean he had an accident?”

  “Get a hold of yourself. Lie back. People are staring.”

  Marina gazed around. Yes, forty feet away two guys were eyeing them. Feeling that she was about to learn something nasty and dangerous, she did as she was told. “What happened?”

  “Somebody killed him.”

  No initial reaction from Marina. She wondered if she had heard right. She began getting up, couldn’t complete the action, fell back. “Oh, my God. You … Oh, my God!”

  “Relax. It had nothing to do with us. It happened three days after we left.”

  Marina drained her glass in two gulps. “I told Carlos and I told you,” she gasped. “No threats, no violence.”

  “Take it easy.”

  “Take it easy?” Marina jumped at the opportunity of speaking her mind. “Listen, brother, you want me to take it easy, you come clean with me or I’ll get a cab to the airport and leave this city so fast your head will spin.”

  Sean chuckled away the threat, making Marina extremely angry.

  “Don’t you laugh at me, you sonofabitch,” she hissed.

  “Okay. It had nothing to do with us, you understand? Nothing. It happened three days after we left.”

  “Oh, really? It had nothing to do wit
h you? Just blind luck, right?” She oozed sarcasm.

  “Believe it or not, it’s just that.” Sean raised a hand to quell an interruption. “Listen to me, Marina, just listen to me. I know an American who lives here. He hijacked a plane in the 1970s; can’t go back because he’ll be tried and sentenced. Remember the afternoon I went out alone? You stayed at the Nacional?”

  “Yes.”

  “I went to see him. The guy is having a hard time, has little money, makes a living translating documents. So, I asked him to keep an eye on Pablo after we left. I cooked up a story for him. I said I was acting as middleman for an American investor who wants to gain a foothold in Cuba and hopes to buy the company Pablo used to work for. I said we wanted some inside info Pablo could provide. I also told him Pablo seemed unreliable to me, and I wanted him to find out as much as possible about him. For $500 he promised to do his best. What I really wanted was for him to keep an eye on Elena and Pablo. Suppose they moved? Then we would have to deal with new people, maybe a bigger family. See my point?”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Well, the guy agreed to do this for me. I said I’d give him a call in late July. So, I called him a week ago and learned that Pablo had been murdered three days after we left.”