Annie shrugged. “So why don’t you shoot the dog, you’re such a killer?”
The musician snatched a cloth napkin from an uncollected lunch tray to wrap around his wound. “I’m not necessarily going to kill you.”
“No kidding?”
She noticed a blink of messages on the room’s phone. “Excuse me.” Indecisively he shook the gun to stop her but it was evident he had no instinct for violence.
The first message was from Rook himself, left hours earlier, urging her to “say nothing more!” to Sgt. Daniel Hart of Miami Vice.
The other message was from that same Sergeant Hart, apologizing gruffly. He’d been dealing with Rook, then gotten called in by his division chief and, thanks to Annie, reamed out. He’d be in touch. Sit still.
She slammed down the desk phone. “Why is it my fault he got reamed out by his chief?”
“With cops, it’s always blame somebody else,” the young Cuban growled. “I’m taking that emerald now.”
“Fine by me.” She handed it to him.
Raffy studied the jewel appreciatively. “So give me the case.”
“Sure,” she said. “The combination lock on the handle is four numbers. I don’t know what they are. There’s also a long password my dad needs. Maybe two passwords. I’ll give you those for free.” She said them very quickly, knowing he couldn’t possibly remember them. “362484070N and 678STNX211. Maybe it’s a bank account, maybe it’s a computer code.”
Rook squeezed his eyes tight, puzzled but intrigued. “You didn’t make those numbers up?” She shook her head. “He said you could remember numbers like that! I wish I could remember Shakespeare that way. I can only keep a line or two in my head, not like your papa; till his illness, he could do whole scenes. Write those numbers down for me.”
“Nope.” Annie opened a jar of expensive peanuts from the minibar, offered him some. Malpy crawled out from under the bed to beg to be fed. “Do you know what the passwords are for?”
With an elongated shrug, Raffy tried both to claim and deny knowledge. “We need to talk to Jack. Let me use your phone.”
Maybe, thought Annie, her father hadn’t confided everything to Rafael Rook. Maybe the Cuban was not a partner but just a flopper, a street musician who made his living by rolling off the front fenders of slow moving cars, then pretending that he’d been struck down by drivers like Joyce Weimar, whom he would trick into paying him not to call the police. Annie knew about floppers; her father had said they were low down in the ranks of his profession of swindles and frauds. Floppers threw themselves in front of the cars of senior citizens who were terrified of losing their licenses and were thereby encouraged to “settle” with the scam artists right then and there to cover their minor injuries: A few hundred in cash should do it, the flopper would say, and the frightened drivers would pay off in order not to risk getting charged with some troublesome misdemeanor. It was the bottom-feeding floor of con work, her dad had said; it was “Slots Life” rather than high stakes.
Rook was helping himself to cashews as if he hadn’t eaten all day as he tried to reach his friend Chamayra at Golden Days; finally he left her a cryptic message to call back ASAP, telling her mysteriously that ‘the Coach’s daughter’ had a big present.
Annie studied him for a while. “You ever get hurt flopping?”
He admitted that once he’d broken his arm falling under a Land Rover. But usually it all worked out. He only flopped on women drivers, many of whom “to tell the truth, carry a quantity of cash Santo Trafficante wouldn’t be ashamed of. Mostly I look to see if they’re Jewish, because they’re the ones with my attitude, which is, you never can tell when and where outrageous fortune is going to sling a sea of arrows at your head. My papa’s papa, Simon Rook? His papa was Rabbi Rook from Amsterdam who was stung to death by wasps in Naples, Florida. Who could predict that? Grandpapa Simon was always looking for doom to strike him in an instant. And it did.”
“This was the man at the Bay of Pigs?”
“Yes.” Sadly, Raffy kissed his gold cross. “Face-down in wet sand. A teenager he went to Mexico—I think it was gunrunning, but the family never said—and he met those bastards Ché and Fidel there and went off with them to fight Batista. My grandpapa fell for revolution absolutely without reservations. He fought all the way into Havana. Then he fell in love with my abuela because she ran from the sidewalk and kissed him when he marched with the rebels into the city.” Raffy slid a much-worn photo of two women from his wallet; he pointed not at the slim middle-aged woman with glossy black hair and beautiful eyes but at an old little bent woman in a black scarf and a black dress, leaning on an orthopedic cane, letting the younger woman embrace her but begrudgingly. She did not at all resemble anyone who would push her way out into the street to kiss a strange soldier in a triumphal parade.
“That’s your grandmother?”
“Later in life. That’s my mother next to her. So, after Castro takes over, my grandpapa stays in Cuba and gets a big job in the Departamento América. The DGI. He marries my grandmama and they move in with her family, Ramirezes, gold- and silversmiths.”
She gave him back the old photo. “Simon Rook gave up his U.S. citizenship and became a Communist? So he was actually fighting the Bay of Pigs invasion?”
“Not exactly. Here’s the secret, which he never told even his own wife. Simon Rook was CIA from that very first trip to Mexico. His whole family was clueless for years. Then one day he disappeared. Vanished. My papa was young.” Annie felt a curious empathy with Rook. He saw her response and nodded at her. “Yes, it hurts a child. But I did the same to my poor mama. Left her and came to America with her brother Mano, the only one with the brains to see that the money had left Havana and moved to Miami.”
Raffy finished eating the entire jar of nuts. She suspected he’d had nothing else for lunch and while she didn’t mind giving him dinner as well, she didn’t want to sit here waiting to do so. “How long before this nurse is going to call?” she asked.
“Chamayra is a true beagle.” Raffy opened the minibar and removed a Coca-Cola. He carefully poured the soda into a glass. “Well, Annie, enterprises of great pitch and moment their currents turn awry. My grandpapa Simon left his son, my papa, a letter to be opened after his death that told the whole story. Papa showed the letter to me. My grandpapa admitted it; how the son-of-a-bitch CIA had recruited him. They rewired his head and he became a major player.”
She looked skeptical. “A major player?”
“God’s truth!” He kissed his cross. “My grandpapa knew Posada and Bosch and Chi Chi Quintero. He knew the guys who worked on Phoenix and Condor. That’s right!” Rook lowered his voice as if the room were bugged. “Simon Rook is in the Operation 40 photo with Feliz Rodriguez and Porter Goss but you can’t really see him because a waiter’s in front of his head. You heard of Brigada 2506?” Annie shook her head no. “You should read about it. Operation Zapata? Well, my grandpapa was one of the guys who sneaked the guns in on the Barbara and the Houston. But then comes April 17, he’s floating in the Bay of Pigs.”
Annie said she was sorry to hear it but wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with Jewish people carrying lots of cash on their persons.
Raffy drank his Coca-Cola in one long satisfied gurgle. “The point is my grandpapa Simon Rook carried five thousand dollars in a belt beneath his undershirt. For an emergency. I don’t know what else you’d want to call the Bay of Pigs. But I guess some bastard stole it off his dead body or it floated out to sea at Puerto Esperanza, one or the other, or maybe the funeral home guy got it because it sure wasn’t there when my papa went to see Grandpapa’s Simon’s body.”
Annie’s cell phone rang. As she reached for it, Raffy pointed the large revolver at her. “Don’t answer that phone unless it’s Chamayra.”
“Don’t point a gun at me!” Losing patience, Annie whacked him on the wrist, hitting the same hand that the little dog had bitten, knocking the gun loose. With a heartbroken groan, Rook writhe
d on the floor. She leaned over him. “As your pal Shakespeare would say, ‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.’” Picking up both his gun and the emerald, she checked his wrist. “It’s not broken.” She answered her phone.
It was Brad. He wanted her to know Hopper Jets had called him to confirm that the jet she’d “borrowed” had been safely returned. Also that in St. Louis the Hopper machinist was repairing the King of the Sky’s engine. Annie could leave the King there as long as she liked. Or Brad could arrange to have a Hopper pilot fly it home to Emerald for her.
“Thank you, Brad. I’ll take care of it but now I’ve got to go.”
Hang on. He was in Atlanta, enjoying barbeque with Mama Spring and Brandy and her kids, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Annie. How about if he flew to Miami tonight?
“Thanks, you’re sweet but I’m okay. Don’t come. I’ll have to call you back.”
“What’s that noise?” he asked suspiciously. “Somebody’s moaning.”
“It’s a friend of my dad’s. I had to take his gun away.”
“A, what the hell’s going on there? You always told me you didn’t care about your dad.”
Annie sighed. “Everybody ‘cares’ about their dads, even if they hate them. Give me a break. You and your mother still spend weekends watching home videos of you in the Swing-o-matic and do you really like her?”
“I love her to death.”
“Hmmm. Don’t come here but thank you. Bye.”
Hanging up on Brad, she knelt down beside the Cuban, who was now squeezing his hand against his chest. “All right, Raffy, I’ve had it. I’m going to Golden Days right now. Either with you, or with the cops.” She showed him the gun. “Use your head. How tough do you think a woman my size has to be to fly combat missions for the U.S. Navy? Tough enough to shoot you in the knee?” She moved the muzzle down the veins of his arm. “How about this same wrist my dog bit? Talk about the day the music died.”
He stared at her for a moment with his soft dark eyes. “Buchstabe…your dad’s checked in as Coach Ronny Buchstabe.”
Incredulous, she sat back on the rug. “My dad is calling himself ‘Ronny Buchstabe’?”
“You play the hand you’re dealt.”
Annie pulled the Cuban to his feet by his uninjured arm. “I’m going to change my clothes. If you leave here while I’m in the john, I’m going to make sure the Miami police arrest you. Not to quote the Bard—it’s my way or the highway.”
He nodded with a bow. “My friend Chamayra comes on duty in half an hour.”
“Raffy, ‘the readiness is all.’”
“Is that Shakespeare?”
“Sure is.”
“You had a good education.”
In the bathroom Annie dressed in her white Navy officer’s uniform, jacket and slacks. She smoothed the starched collar, tightened the tie. Returning to the bedroom, she took her father’s old leather flight jacket from the closet. Raffy sat in a chair leaning over a gleamy guitar, softly plucking the strings, singing in his rustle of a voice.
Si te contara lo que me hizo esa morena
Esa mujer que solo me hace suspirar
Con su cadera
Near him Malpy danced in circles on his back legs as if trying to learn the rumba. Annie stood in the doorway for a while, listening to him play. He was a good guitarist. “That’s very pretty,” she said when he finished.
He thought she meant the instrument, which he held up proudly. “It’s a beauty.” The guitar had rosewood sides, a mahogany top, and an ebony fret board. “This guitar,” he said with affection, “belonged to my grandmother. My mother’s mother. Her family was very traditional. She wanted to play guitar but they wouldn’t let her be a professional of course. Such were the times. On her deathbed, she gave the guitar to my cousin Rita. In prison with your papa, a bastard guard smashed my guitar to pieces and so my cousin Rita gave me this one. She said, ‘You are the musician. You take it.’” He sighed sadly. “I’m not so good.”
“You’re not bad at all. And your singing? I liked it.”
As Annie put out water for Malpy, Raffy strummed the guitar softly and sang,
What is love? ’Tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What’s to come is still unsure…
“Shakespeare. I can’t remember any more. Just don’t have the brain for it.”
“It’s lovely.” She picked up her cell phone and dropped it in her purse, then folded her father’s flight jacket over her arm. “Ready.”
He sighed, fitting the guitar back into its case. “‘The readiness is all.’”
Chapter 32
Ace of Aces
The sun was setting and its glow lit up the lawn of Golden Days where a dozen elderly patients (gold suns embroidered on the pockets of their waffled bathrobes) sat slumped in wheelchairs on the lawn. They looked as if visitors, suddenly remembering more pressing engagements and rushing away, had abandoned them there.
The grass was neon-green; big red and purple flowers grew in bright heaps along curving concrete walks. In trees, yellow lemons and fat oranges weighed down the branches, glistening as candy drops.
On a bench beside a turn in the walk, three thin little women sat together, their skin shriveled from their bones, so small that their white-socked feet dangled loosely above the grass. The woman in the middle of this group struggled with a red tangle of knitting in her lap while the other two wound together a big twisted skein of blood-red yarn. Against their chalky hands, the red wool looked like a bouquet of roses they were fighting over. Annie set Malpy down on the grass and he ran over to them.
A black Mercedes smoothly stopped at the curb. Its black-suited driver slid out and leaned against the dark tinted window, staring at them from behind his wraparound sunglasses. He wore a phone earpiece. His large black car had a mournful air but the driver looked too stylish in his linen shirt for the funeral business. Rafael reacted in surprise, as if he knew the man.
A well-built gray-haired man in a gray silk suit slipped out of the back seat of the Mercedes. Raffy had been watching the car carefully. When he saw this man in the gray suit take off his sunglasses, he sucked in his breath loudly.
“What’s the matter?” Annie asked the Cuban.
“Nada.” But he abruptly grabbed Annie’s purse and with it raced off to the side of the Golden Days building, disappearing behind flowering bushes.
The gray-haired man bent down to re-tie his glistening shoe. Then he started up the hospital walk, passing not far from where Annie stood near the old women’s bench. He passed close enough for her to see that he had a black mole beside his mouth. Nearby, a male nurse stood smoking on the lawn. The gray-haired man approached the nurse, began asking him questions. Their conversation went on for a while. Finally the nurse nodded, pointing at the top floor of the stucco building.
At that instant a slender woman slid out of the backseat of the Mercedes and ran toward the man. Handsome, she looked to be in her forties. She wore oversized sunglasses and a loose stylish linen jacket over a short skirt; everything about her looked like bright metal—from gold bracelet to bronze-hued shoulder bag to dark-gold hair so brilliant it was like a snaky coil of copper wires. She hurried onto the lawn, sliding her arm under the man’s arm and urging him back toward their driver. The driver energetically waved a cell phone and called to him, “Jefe! Pronto!”
Across the path, the woman caught Annie’s eye and she took off her sunglasses. They stared at each other for an instant; it felt longer to Annie because so many disjointed images flashed at her, like slides too quickly changing. The woman looked familiar, yet Annie didn’t know her. She had a jarring flash of the woman with pink sweatshirt and flip-flops outside the lobby of the Admirals Club at the St. Louis airport. But the two women weren’t at all alike. Besides, why should a woman she’d seen a day before in the Midwest be here at Golden Days in Miami? Then two other images pushed the present aside. Both were out of place here in Miami.
They were Emerald images from long ago. One was a picture on the wall of Georgette’s bedroom; one took place in the kitchen at Pilgrim’s Rest, where Sam sat crying.
Again, the driver called, “Jefe!” and waved his phone. Exasperated, the gray-haired man jerked around, striding back to the car, grabbing the cell phone from the driver. Whatever the caller said to the man, it changed his mind about visiting Golden Days. Angrily, he slid into the rear seat of the Mercedes, gesturing at the woman to join him.
The three elderly patients, scrambling up from their bench, accidentally tangled themselves against the woman as she hurried toward the car. Fighting free, she knocked two of them onto the concrete walk.
Malpy jumped on the woman. She flung him off with a violent gesture. With an ear-piercing squeal, the little dog hid in the azaleas.
Annie helped the two old people struggle to their feet. She called after the woman, who had now reached the Mercedes door. “Excuse me! How about an apology?”
The woman turned, took off her sunglasses again; her deep blue eyes looked blank. She slipped into the car, her coppery hair ablaze in the low slant of sun.
The black sedan sped away.
Annie stood watching until it was out of sight. She couldn’t shake the picture of Sam at the kitchen table at Pilgrim’s Rest. Annie, in her early teens, entered the room. Seated across from Sam was a woman who looked a little like this woman. Sam was crying. Annie stopped in the doorway, struck by the emotional intensity. Sam and the woman looked up at her. That was all she could remember of the scene. It had been so long ago, so brief and so vague she couldn’t even be sure exactly how old she’d been when it had happened.
On the Golden Days lawn, the three patients pressed around her, thanking her. One was bleeding from a scrape on her knee; another was clutching her elbow. Annie retrieved her father’s flight jacket. “She knocked you down. I saw the Mercedes’ plate number. I could call the police.”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 25