I’d asked Jose if Mena was Ramfis’s bodyguard, and was surprised when he told me Mena was not merely a security officer. Jose knew all about Mena because the man had a reputation. Mena was half Latino, half German. Technically he was in charge of Trujillo’s Military Intelligence Service—called the SIM in the Dominican Republic. “Secret police, assassins, thugs, torture, censorship,” Jose had said. “We could use someone as efficient as Johnny Mena and his SIM here in Havana.”
“So we see you again, Señor Cutter,” Mena said. “Surprisingly, the police did not catch the man with the bomb. They were not able to even find the putas that had distracted the guards. What do you think of such police work?”
I wasn’t sure if I was being baited, so I lapsed into the truth, facts they knew themselves. “Have you tried driving across the island? You can cross most of this country east-to-west in an hour by car, but you wouldn’t live to tell about it. People die every day, some of them are rebels, but it’s even getting difficult to tell which side anyone is on.”
“Johnny,” Ramfis said, “we are guests in Cuba, it would not be polite for us to talk local politics. Besides, it is not Señor Cutter’s duty to find those who try to kill me, it’s yours.”
“You must join us tomorrow morning when we take on the Havana polo club,” Rubi said to me, quickly changing the subject.
From body language and tone of voice, I got the impression that the dictator’s son and the dictator’s henchmen were not on the friendliest of terms.
“These Cubans have boasted loudly that they are going to stomp us,” Rubi said. “Ramfis and I plan to teach them a lesson.”
“I’d love to attend but I have an appointment tomorrow afternoon, one I can’t change.”
“Ah, that means the woman has a husband and she must meet you at a precise time,” Rubi said.
“No such luck. My contact is a man.” I leaned closer to Rubi and Ramfis. “I would appreciate it if you keep this strictly confidential, but I am meeting a man who has a treasure map.”
Both of them cracked up. Even the dour Mena joined in the laughter.
“Ah, another map to sunken treasure. How many treasure maps have you been offered this week?” Rubi asked Ramfis.
“Counting the one to Captain Lopez’s million pieces of eight waiting at ten fathoms, five maps,” Ramfis said. “But the week is young.”
Rubi gave me a friendly tap on the shoulder. “I apologize for taking the liberty of laughing, amigo, please don’t take offense, but when you spend your whole life in the Caribbean, it is inevitable that you will come across many stories of treasure—and many offers to sell them.”
“You’re right, that’s why I would never get involved. I’m just going to talk to this archives guy and tell him to take a hike, as the Americans say.”
“The archives guy?” Rubi asked.
I brushed the question away with my hand as if I was now embarrassed by the subject. “I hate to be a cultural desert, but I’ve never seen a polo game, though I hear they’re exciting and dangerous.”
“Then you have never seen poetry in motion,” Rubi said. “It is polo, not horseracing, that is the sport of kings. The game originated in Persia as practice for horse soldiers going into battle.”
I listened attentively as Rubi enthusiastically described the play of the game. Two teams of four players on horseback used mallets to knock a wooden ball down a greenway, scoring goals by getting the ball between goal posts. I wanted to say it sounded like croquet on horseback, but kept my mouth shut.
Hotel staff removed the banquet table and brought out an entirely new assortment. We ate and drank and talked. After a while, Ramfis played a little poker with some Cubans who Rubi told me were high-ranking members of Batista’s foreign service, but he played without enthusiasm. I suspected that having so much access to money without working for it had left him a little bored about money. No one seemed to be into gambling. I was eating caviar on a cracker when Luz appeared at my side.
“I’d like to get some air. Would you take a walk with me?”
I hid my surprise behind a blank look and followed her out of the inner sanctum. Crossing the gaming floor, she asked, “I notice you don’t have much interest in gambling.”
“It’s rigged for the house. I’d rather try my luck at something with an even playing field.”
“You’re very fortunate, you come from a society in which you have great personal freedom. From my vantage point, everything is rigged for the house.”
I didn’t know if she meant having a dictator running the country or the way women were pigeonholed into the traditional home-and-sex roles by Latin men.
“You must forgive me, señor, I realize it is a man’s world, but occasionally I ask myself why it isn’t also a woman’s world. There are a growing number of women in Western Europe and the States who ask the same question. Unfortunately, the world of the Caribbean and Latin America lags far, far behind, eons, not years behind.”
“Personally, I’m all for liberated women.”
“As my father would say, you are full of mierda.”
“Nice language. I guess you think that being equal to a man means you have to talk like one, too.”
That shut her up. It wasn’t easy, not when you were dealing with a woman who was much more intelligent than you were. Of course, there was the kind of book-smarts she had—and the street-smart, smart-mouth, wise-ass intelligence people got when they’ve been forced to fend for themselves at an early age. I had street-smarts, but I admired someone like Luz who had that more refined, finishing-school, political- and social-awareness upbringing.
We went out of the casino and walked along a wooden boardwalk that ran along the ocean. Like I said before, I wasn’t used to looking over my back in Havana, but now that things had gone to hell politically, I used panoramic vision. I’d just as soon have stayed inside where there were lights and action, but my chances of making it with this beautiful woman were better under a romantic moon than casino lights.
“I want you to answer a serious question,” I said.
“You’re not trustworthy.”
Nothing like getting quickly down to the bottom line. She had guessed that I wanted her to define why she didn’t like me.
“Okay, give me one reason why you don’t trust me.”
“I’ll give you two. One, Cuban revolutionaries don’t throw Molotov cocktails into arenas. By the time the man lit the wick on a bottle of gas and reared back to throw it, he would have been shot at least twenty times. They use hand-grenades, of which they seem to have an almost unlimited supply. A Molotov cocktail is something a Russian would think of. You are a Russian. And you denied knowledge of what a Molotov cocktail is.”
“Half-Russian. I’m also British.”
She shrugged.
“Have you shared your thoughts with your friends?”
She stopped and leaned against the wood railing. “Should I?”
My turn to shrug. “Do what you like.”
She touched my face, cool fingers caressing my cheek. “Latin men like women with blond hair and blue eyes. Latin women like men with blond hair and blue eyes. My brother went to Finland once. He said the women were crazy about his dark skin and hair.”
I kissed her hand and held it against my chest.
“If I told them my suspicions,” she said, “you would be picked up by Batista’s secret police and they would take turns with Trujillo’s secret police and beat you. You’re not too pretty now, but your face would look even worse when they got through.”
I pulled her to me and kissed her. My lips melted into hers. I felt the kiss down to my groin. After the kiss she stared at me intently for a moment and then let me kiss her again. With her breasts pressed against me, my blood surged.
She drew away from me and walked slowly down the promenade.
“I need your assurances that you mean no harm for my friends,” she said.
I shrugged. “I’m a businessman. I want to buy
into your country. That was my only motive.”
“Was?”
“Now that I’ve met you, my interests in the Dominican Republic have gotten broader.”
She paused and leaned against the railing. A cool breeze teased us and made the night magical.
“Why are you interested in, as you put it, ‘buying in’ to my country?”
“It’s obvious that Batista’s losing the war. I don’t know what’s going to happen, whether this communist rebel Castro is going to win, whether the Americans will intervene, or if there’ll be a coup and Batista will be kicked out. Whatever happens, Cuba is slowly going down the drain. However the cards fall, it’s not good for business. Smart people are already bailing out. I’ve got an offer to buy into a casino for chump change. I’m not buying in. My holdings are in the outskirts of Havana and in the Pinar del Rio region. I have a distillery that processes thousands of gallons of rum every day. The molasses for the distillery comes from sugarcane fields and a processing plant for the cane. In the last month, three of my trucks have been hijacked by the rebels. Naturally, the bastards took the finished product coming out of the refinery and not the raw stuff coming in.
“It’s not just the rebels taking the rum. It’s Batista’s militia. They’re as out of control as the insurgents. And it’s getting worse every day. I’ve started paying ‘protection’ money to keep the road open, to the rebels and the militia. The barbarians are at the gates and Batista is drinking piña coladas and doing the rumba.”
“So your plan is to relocate to my country.”
“Relocate and retool. Just like Cuba, your country is one of the world’s major sugarcane producers. I need the cane for my rum. And tobacco’s a big product in the Dominican Republic. I understand your family owns a tobacco plantation.”
“Yes.”
“Good, I’ll expect it as part of your dowry.”
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t think I would reveal all of my secrets without marrying you, do you? When Cuba falls, most likely Castro will take over. The Americans are already foaming at the mouth at the idea, but they’re doing nothing to stop it. I told you I don’t gamble in casinos, but life is a gamble. Right now I’m putting my money on this Fidel guy to win by a nose—no, make that a length or two. When that happens, the Americans are going to get uptight and self-righteous and slam the door on Cuban imports. When the market for Cuban cigars closes, who’s going to fill the void?”
“I see. The Dominican Republic has a like climate to Cuba and can produce like tobaccos. In fact, it was there that Columbus first saw the Indios smoking cigars through a tube they called tobago—thus tobacco got its start and name in my country. I can see now that it is because of Christopher Columbus you wish to marry me.”
“You’re a smart woman.”
“No, if I were smart I’d say no to your proposal.”
“Which one?”
“That I marry you. However, before we marry, I must tell you that Rubi told me to take you outside and use my feminine wiles to get some information for him.”
I broke into a smile. “He wants to know about the treasure map.”
“Exactimente. You knew he would be fascinated by the mention of the archives. There is only one archive that is important to treasure hunters in the Caribbean, and that’s the Archives of the Indies in Seville. It has the records of all the treasure ships sunk on the Spanish Main back in the days when the Caribbean was a Spanish lake. Supposedly a man employed for many years as a curator in the archives has tried to sell a map that he claims shows the location of a Spanish treasure fleet galleon.”
“That’s right.”
“And you are in contact with this man?”
“No, I’m in possession of the map. I bought it from him a week ago.”
“Does it show the location of a sunken-treasure fleet galleon?”
“That’s what it claims to show, but so do a lot of other maps. But what makes this map unique are the qualifications of its seller. He is the former curator, and I had him checked out. He took off from Seville with his children’s seventeen-year-old baby-sitter and a bad case of midlife crisis, and knocked around for a while until he ran out of money in a casino where I know the management. I bought the map after he had a bad run at the roulette table. Havana casinos being what they are, I arranged for the bad run.”
She shook her head. “Your schemes know no bounds. You knew Rubi would be fascinated because he was once involved in a treasure hunt. He lost a lot of money but he loved every moment of it. You do your homework, don’t you, Señor Cutter? When you set out to ingratiate yourself with the men who run my country, you were professional to the extreme. Criminally professional.”
“Nick, call me Nick. If we’re going to be lovers, it’ll look funny if we don’t use first names.”
We were entering the casino when something occurred to me. “You said there were two reasons you didn’t trust me. What’s the second?”
“You’re too damn attractive. There’s something about a good-looking bastardo that attracts a women.” She frowned at me. “Even one that should know better.”
DOMINICAN
REPUBLIC
36
Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic, 1960
Luz put down the telephone and sat very still. Her mind and body froze. She was seated at her dressing table, staring at herself in the mirror, shocked by the news she received.
“Las Mariposas son muertas,” the voice on the phone had said.
The Butterflies are dead.
She was in the apartment she shared with Nick in the capital of the Dominican Republic. They had been together for nearly two years, living together outside matrimony, to the scandalization of her family, because she refused to marry Nick. Havana and the rest of Cuba had fallen to Castro on January 1, 1959, when the dictator Batista fled the country—flying to the Dominican Republic and the arms of Trujillo—with bags of money at the conclusion of his annual New Year’s Eve party for his loyal supporters—many of whom soon found themselves in Castro’s prisons or before his firing squads.
“Señorita?”
Rosa, the housekeeper, stood at her door.
“Are you and the señor dining home tonight?”
Luz stared stupidly at Rosa. It took a moment for the question to filter into her consciousness.
“Señorita, are you all right?”
“I—yes, yes, Rosa, I am fine.” The words came out like an automated computerized voice. “No dinner tonight. We’re eating out with businesspeople. Call Don Quixote’s and reserve a table for six, please.”
Luz got up and went into her bathroom. She shut the door behind her and leaned against the door, taking deep breaths to calm her nerves and get her breathing back in control.
She left the apartment fifteen minutes later. Their penthouse occupied the entire tenth floor of a building overlooking the bay. It was a very expensive piece of real estate but Nick had an ability to make money—and spend it. Their life together had been mostly ships not passing in the night but occasionally bumping together—he was busy building a business empire to replace the one he had had in Cuba, and she was busy with her friends at the university and her job teaching Spanish literature. They came together at night, for late dinners and lovemaking. “That’s all we seem to do together,” she told him one night, “eat and fuck.”
He hadn’t seen anything wrong with the scenario.
The only quality time they had together were trips they made to her “secret” place. She had inherited a small house, not much more than a beach cottage, in an isolated area on the north coast of the country, near the ruins of La Isabela, one of the first European towns founded in the New World. She had inherited the property from a maiden aunt. It was her secret place because few people knew she owned it and she told no one when she went there. When she lived alone she had gone there to hide out and work on her university projects in complete isolation. She managed to lure Nick there twice, but he went
stir-crazy with the isolation.
Her mind swirled with thoughts as she waited for the elevator. She realized that her whole life had changed because of a single phone call, that someone had shifted the sands of time, that the life she had known was no longer possible.
She came out of the building’s underground parking lot in a 1960 Ford Thunderbird that Nick had bought for her. A pearl-white convertible with red seats, it was the only one like it in the city, making it both special and noticeable. But being noticed was not something she wanted at the moment. Six blocks from the apartment, she pulled onto a side street in an affluent section and left the car. She walked back to the main street and flagged down a taxi.
“Parque Colon,” she told the driver.
The park dedicated to Christopher Columbus—“Colon”—was near Rio Ozama, the river that ran through the city and met the Caribbean, in the heart of the city’s historic colonial district.
Santo Domingo, the city’s name before General Trujillo renamed it “Ciudad Trujillo” in his honor, was over four hundred years old, making it the oldest European city in the Americas. It was a city of American firsts—the first true city, first cathedral, first palaces of the great, first true seat of government as Columbus, the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” and then his son, Diego, the “Viceroy of the Indies,” ruled as princes. It was where Hernando Cortés came first, before he sailed from Cuba to conquer the vast Aztec Empire with five hundred soldiers and sixteen horses, where Ponce de Leon dreamt of the Fountain of Youth and went on to discover a place he named for its many flowers—Florida.
But it was also a city of contrasts, where the language and culture was supposed to be Spanish but most of the people had an African heritage, where people with old and new money lived in luxury and the streets were crowded with people whose only possessions were the rags on their back and hopes for their next meal, where sidewalk cafés hugged buildings or lined plazas constructed a couple centuries before the American Revolution.
The Betrayers Page 21