Act of Betrayal

by Edna Buchanan

  I stared, mind racing. Could Bravo have told me the truth? No way. Maybe. “So you think they’re related?”

  “Now that is something worth checking into.” He pointed his index finger at me. “That’s exactly what we plan to do once this freaking storm blows over.” He pushed his chair back. “Come on, Billy, we’ve gotta get back out there.”

  “Was the card new, like he got it here? Or did it look like it came with him from Cuba?”

  “Dirty, dog-eared, had been wet and dried off.” Hanks looked to Billy, who nodded in affirmation as they went out the door.

  How can I reach Bravo? I wondered. I called Reyes. He answered his home phone himself.

  “Mr. Reyes…”

  “Juan Carlos,” he corrected. “I tried to reach you, Britt. First and foremost, I am deeply concerned. WQBA radio news reported that you and Jorge Bravo were present, together, when a murder took place in a hotel downtown.”

  Drat, I thought, now the FBI will know for sure, unless they’re too busy boarding up to listen to Spanish-language radio.

  “I cannot emphasize enough my grave concern,” Reyes was saying, “for your safety, for your reputation. Bravo is a madman. Dangerous. He will stop at nothing. I strongly suspect that he is a Castro agent.”

  Hell, was everybody in Miami a Castro agent?

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Many reasons, among them his constant efforts to malign and slander me and my organization. You are aware that I am a threat to Fidel as his economy and his leadership falter and weaken. Fidel knows this. Of course you understand all that. The other reason I attempted to contact you was that Wilfredo, my aide, did as promised and I now have the diary of your father.”

  “You have it?” I blurted out. “Jorge Bravo claims he has it.”

  “You see, he is a madman. I am looking at it at this very moment. Here at my desk. Holding it in my hand. Fragile, dusty, but definitely intact. At this moment, I am preparing to leave. The island neighborhoods must evacuate, as you know. But when the storm has passed I will personally deliver it to you and Catalina.”

  Now that would be a scene.

  “No, I’ll come right now. I’m on the way.”

  “Impossible.” he said. “I’m sure the police will no longer allow traffic onto the island. Out of the question. I will be in touch with you later.”

  The connection broke.

  I upended my purse onto the polished conference table, pawing frantically through the contents. Did I have it? What had I done with it? It had to be here.

  A scrap of paper fluttered to the floor from the inner lining. I snatched it up. The contact number Bravo had given me for especialista Luisa.

  Nothing else seemed to matter. Other goals had come first all my life. I followed through on every story, always put my job first, but had never done for myself what I had so often done for others. This one was for me. This time I would follow through, for my father, for myself. The storm was nothing. I had lived in the eye of a storm all my life. Nothing could stop me.

  I grabbed my bag, punching the number into the cell phone as I ran up the stairs to the lobby.

  “Britt?” said Miriam. “You’re not going out there?”

  “I’ll be back,” I said. “Something I have to do.

  “Answer, answer,” I muttered at the phone. I had trouble pushing open the front door, surprised by the force of the wind that buffeted me as I stepped out. It nearly knocked me off my feet. Head down I fought my way to the car.

  “Hola.” Someone answered at the other end of the phone as I slammed the driver’s side door.

  “Luisa! Is that you?”

  “Si.”

  “I must talk to Jorge Bravo, right away,” I said, identifying myself, turning the key in the ignition.

  “¿El comandante?”

  “Si. It’s an emergency.”

  “¿Emergencia?” I heard her speaking to someone else. “Give me your number.” I did. “He will call you.”

  “Now!” I said. “As soon as possible.”

  The call came almost immediately, as I pulled out onto Tenth Avenue. “I don’t know what’s going on, Jorge. But I just talked to Reyes. He said he had the diary in his hands. I am going to his house right now, to see for myself.”

  “Wait! It is not true. He lies! It is too dangerous. Wait, I can prove to you…”

  “I don’t know who or what to believe,” I said. “This whole thing is weird and I intend to get to the bottom of it.”

  “The storm…”

  “Fuck the storm!”

  “I will meet you.”

  “No, I’ve tried that. It never worked out.”

  Garbage and an entire garbage can blew across the street in front of me. I swerved to avoid it. Miami looked like a ghost town with boarded windows and deserted sidewalks.

  “I beg you, Montero, do not risk this.”

  Did he ever say that to my father?

  “What about Alex Aguirre?” I said. “Was he really on a story?”

  “The information I gave you was correct. Armando Gutierrez was bringing the diario…” A burst of static and we lost the connection.

  As I approached the causeway, a lone Miami patrol car inched through the residential waterfront neighborhood. The driver was broadcasting over a public address system.

  “You must evacuate. It is the law. You must evacuate. If you do not have transportation, we will assist you.”

  Oh sure, I thought, heart sinking. We are from the government and we are here to help you. That is when you know you are really in trouble.

  Oh God, I thought, as turbulent skies closed in overhead. Please let Reyes still be there. I might have just enough time to get the diary and get back to the morgue.

  20

  The guard shack stood empty. The wooden arm barred the entrance but the exit side was open. As the T-Bird wobbled and wavered on the wind-blasted bridge, I heard the latest advisory. A storm surge of fifteen to twenty feet was predicted across Miami Beach from the ocean to the bay. Those who had not evacuated were told it was too late and warned to stay off the road and hunker down where they were. Were my mother, the Goldsteins, and my pets in a safe place? Was there a safe place?

  Darkening clouds masked the sun, and the sky glowed an eerie shade of maroon red. Palm trees bent in the wind, pliant fronds thrashing like warning flags in the gale. As I approached his home, I saw Reyes’s electronic gates wide open. The Libertad danced on black waves at its moorings behind the house, despite more than a dozen lines that tied it down. His Range Rover stood in the driveway. He was closing the lift gate.

  I pulled up behind his car. He frowned. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he shouted, above the wind. “It’s rime to leave.”

  “I want the diary!” I followed him as he darted back into the house. The huge hallway seemed eerie with all the windows now shuttered.

  “I packed it in the trunk,” he said impatiently. “We must leave.”

  “No, I want to see it.”

  “Don’t you understand, have you heard the reports? The storm is nearly upon us!”

  “I’m tired of being put off,” I said stubbornly. “I want the diary.”

  “Are you crazy?” He snatched a stack of files from his desk and threw them into a valise. “Hand me those,” he said, gesturing impatiently toward several small silver-framed photos on a shelf behind his desk. I picked one up, of a small blond boy astride a pony. Another boy, with Reyes’s eyes, stood solemnly beside the animal, holding its lead.

  “Is that you?” I had not seen it before.

  “Yes.” He glanced at the photo for a moment. “My boyhood in Camagiiey.”

  “The other boy?”

  “My American cousin. He was visiting.”

  “I didn’t know you had relatives here.”

  “Is there a Cuban who does not have American relatives?” He reached for the photo of him and the Presiden
t.

  As he did so, I saw he wore a gun in a shoulder holster. That, or something he had said, reminded me of the elusive detail I had been trying to remember. What was it? Out in the main hall the front door blew open, and the wind found its way into the house.

  “We must leave,” he said.

  “I want to get out of here as much as you do,” I said. “Please, just give me my fathers diary and I’ll go.”

  Then I realized it was not the wind in the front hall. Reyes heard the sounds at the same moment I did. A cane.

  In the process of removing a commercial-size checkbook from a cabinet, Reyes swiveled toward the door.

  Bravo stood there, one hand on his cane, a gun in the other. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “You!” Reyes said.

  “Give her Antonio’s diario,” Bravo said and grinned. His smile had no humor. Rain drummed against the shutters.

  Reyes glared at him. “Get out of my house!”

  “Call the police,” Bravo said gleefully.

  Reyes continued to glare.

  “Give her the diario.” Bravo turned to me with a little bow. “He cannot. Why? Because I have it here.” His teeth gleamed in a wide smile. He used the barrel of the gun to lift his guayabera, exposing a weathered book stuffed in his waistband.

  “I told you, Montero. You would not listen to me. Just like your father. I could not save him, but I will save you from this would-be tyrant. He would have killed you.”

  “You are in league with Castro,” Reyes said, his face twisted in rage.

  “Perhaps Castro sent Antonio’s words to Miami to stop you.” Bravo shrugged. “So be it. Perhaps for the only time, Castro has done something for the Cuban people. The asesino you sent to kill Armando Gutierrez and steal the diario read Antonio’s words and would not deliver it to you, even though he knew he would not be paid. He is Cuban first, that is what you misunderstood.”

  He turned to me. “When you publish your father’s words, the world will know—and Reyes is finished. Ask him what happened to the young rubio, the boy who joined us in Camaguey. They told the parents he died in prison.” Bravo shook his head slowly.

  “Pervert!” He spit out the word.

  And that was when I remembered. Ohmigod.

  “Watson Kelly, one of the missing boys, called his parents from a pay phone in the downtown arcade, the one you own.” Reyes, eyes half closed, lips working, said nothing. “Chades Randolph was last seen coming here to work for you. You know what happened to them, don’t you?” I remembered the questions he had casually raised about the investigation. His attitude change when the task force was appointed.

  “He is a pervert!” Bravo said.

  “Where are they?”

  Reyes ignored my question, his eyes deep wells of darkness.

  “You are both crazy,” he said, and glanced toward the shuttered windows, resounding with pounding rain. “I suggest we save ourselves from the storm first and continue this discussion when it has passed.”

  The lights flickered and went out. The power was gone.

  “You see!” he said angrily. He was barely visible in the shadows. The only light filtered through the thick glass of two decorative porthole windows high on the wall. Bravo shoved his gun back into a holster clipped to his waistband. He pulled out the book and presented it to me.

  “For you, Montero. The truth, a legacy from your father.”

  I held it in my hands. At last. I wanted to take it and run but where? The wind might tear it from me. I wanted to go to my car for my bag, my flashlight. But when I cracked the door, it took the three of us to close it against the storm.

  We were trapped. The bridge would be impassable.

  “We need candles, a lantern,” I said, clutching the diary. Reyes led us through his huge kitchen into the pantry. He found some candles and a powerful beam flashlight, a big one encased in plastic.

  We returned to his office where he stood the flashlight straight up on the bar, pointing to the ceiling, its beam illuminating the room in a soft glow.

  Gravel, stones, and tree branches barraged the house. My mind was racing, full of questions. Reyes seemed strangely calm, almost suave. He offered us something from the bar and, when we declined, selected a bottle of Scotch from the shelf and mixed himself a drink. I sat on the arm of a chair, fingers curled around the cracked leather of the book held next to my body. Bravo took a chair nearby.

  “We are together for the duration,” Reyes said, raising his glass. “As politics makes strange bedfellows, so does the storm. We should be sociable.”

  The house shuddered in the scream and boom of the wind. Walls shook and reverberated. “Do not worry,” Reyes said. “There is no reason to be alarmed. This house will withstand anything.” He tuned in a battery-powered radio. The storm, indeed, was upon us. The house was being battered now by flying debris.

  As we sat in semidarkness, a newscaster interrupted the storm coverage with a warning.

  “All emergency personnel, police and fire, have been ordered to seek shelter for their own safety. No calls for assistance will be answered. I repeat, no emergency calls will be answered.

  “Miami,” he added, “you are on your own.”

  The voice of authority had just informed us that there was none. The words filled my heart with dread. What about accidents? Sick people, heart attacks, those injured and bleeding in the storm? We were alone. Reyes finished his drink.

  “Britt,” he said calmly. “Give me the diary.”

  “What?” I was startled. “It’s mine. I’ve waited all these years.”

  Bravo struggled to his feet. “This is the man who betrayed your father!”

  The house rocked. I remembered that at its height, the hurricane of my childhood screamed with the high-pitched shrieks of a thousand women. Yet this storm rumbled with a deep-throated roar, like a freight train. Each storm must have its own distinctive voice.

  “If you fear that your home is becoming unsafe,” the newscaster was saying, his voice compassionate, “hunker down with your family in an interior closet or bathroom. Use mattresses for cover.” I prayed that those I loved were safe.

  Reyes snatched the flashlight from the bar with an abrupt move. I thought he was leaving the room. Instead he stepped swiftly toward me, shining it in my face. I couldn’t see. Was this how it was in a prison interrogation?

  “You will never read this book,” he said. I shrank back blinking. “You were stupid to come here, stupid and naive like your father. Let me tell you about your father; he was a worm.”

  “I trusted you.”

  “So did your father. Only fools trust.”

  Something heavy crashed upstairs and the house began to shake, as though pounded by a bulldozer. As Reyes reacted, directing his light toward the stairs, Jorge stepped forward, gun in hand.

  “I will not permit this. This history must not be repeated. I cannot allow it to happen again. Get behind me, Montero.”

  Reyes cursed and flicked off the flashlight, plunging us into a black well as the house rocked and moaned. Bursts of gunfire lit up the dark, four, five shots almost drowned out by the bricks and roofing tiles slamming the outside walls like machine-gun fire. I hit the floor. Glass shattered and I heard Jorge draw in a shuddering breath and fall. The wind whined and whistled, finding cracks in the metal shutters.

  He lay near me somewhere on the floor. I reached out to touch him and felt the warm blood on his shirt.

  “No, no,” he whispered. “I want to die in Cuba.”

  The flashlight beam blinded me before I even thought to grope for his gun. Reyes kicked it away, standing over us, unhurt, breathing hard. “Loco old fool!” he said.

  “Montero,” Bravo mumbled.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Antonio…”

  “Call an ambulance,” I muttered to Reyes.

  “There are no ambulances, no police, no doctors. Remember? Just
us.”

  “How could you do this?” I said tearfully.

  “You saw,” Reyes said, indignantly. “He tried to kill me.”

  Jorge’s body quivered, he was gasping. I found his maimed hand, caught the other, and held them both. “Give me some light,” I pleaded. “I have to stop the bleeding.”

  “Too late,” he said coldly. “The old fool is dead.”

  He was right.

  Jorge Bravo was a poor man compared to Reyes and his riches. Like my father, he spent his energy, his health, and finally gave his life to free Cuba. But quick death by firing squad had to be easier than thirty years of frustration, heartbreak, and defeat. Bravo had no political plans. He did not feign patriotism to make money. He did not talk about freedom, he struggled for it, not on the streets of Miami, but in Cuba. He did the best he could.

  Green lightning flashed outside the porthole windows, illuminating the trees as they twisted, writhed, and toppled. The house shuddered. Wood ripped and splintered.

  I ran to the front door. Reyes followed with the light. Rivulets of water were creeping in over the top. “Don’t open it!” he shouted. The door buckled in the wind. We pushed a heavy bookcase against it, but the roaring gale began to move the bookcase, inching it toward us.

  I ran back to Bravo, stumbling across his body in the dark. I tugged at his shoulders, trying to move him into a sitting position, hoping to somehow drag him onto the sofa. I didn’t want him wet, exposed. But he was too heavy and the front of my blouse grew sticky with his blood.

  One of the small round windows exploded. Rain and debris peppered the air like bullets. Metal shutters were snapping off.

  “The bathroom,” Reyes said urgently from behind me. I picked up the radio, following the beam of his light as we fled to an interior bathroom with no windows.

  “Mattresses,” I shouted, “we need mattresses!”

  He ran to another room and returned dragging a twin-size mattress. “Help me!” he said.

  I followed him to another small bedroom at the back of the house. His light skimmed the ceiling. It was sagging. Reyes cursed wildly as we tore the mattress off the bed, pushing and pulling it out the door as the ceiling split open like overripe fruit. We hauled it into the bathroom and slammed the door.