“Just leaving,” Annie replied politely, which likely would have been the end of it if Raffy hadn’t started slamming his fist on the elevator button, yelling, “Run!”
Skippings stiffened, barricading their way. “No visitors on Floor Five. You’re here to see…?”
Annie didn’t like her tone and turned sarcastic. “Well, certainly not Dr. Parker since he was nowhere to be found.”
“Dr. who?”
Annie gestured widely at the empty hallway. “In fact, where are any doctors? If my father is ill—”
“What’s the patient’s name?”
Annie paused. “…Buchstabe, Ronny Buchstabe.”
Skippings began flinging through the pages of a folder she carried.
Raffy, grabbing at Annie, pulled her behind him. “We’re not here for anybody. We accidentally by mistake went to the wrong floor. ¡Perdón! ¡Perdón!” His finger pushed at the down button. “Come on!”
Skippings’ springs, already tightly wound, snapped with a sudden nasty thought. “The Miami Herald!” she exclaimed.
Raffy nodded, “Absolutely not. Good-bye.”
“I told you people I’d have you arrested for trespassing. We’re doing nothing we need to be investigated for!” She poked the slender Cuban in the sternum.
Flaring, Annie stepped between them. “This is a military matter now.”
Confusion momentarily unsteadied the tall blonde woman. “Military matter?” Recovering, she thrust herself closer to Annie. “I’m chief administrator at Golden Days.”
“Good for you. I like to see women go to the top.”
Skippings now poked Annie on the arm. “Show me the visitors’ badges they issued in reception.”
Annie flicked away the woman’s hand. “I’m with the United States Navy. We skipped reception.”
Skippings widened her mouth. “Excuse me?”
“Look, there’s no need to be such a bitch. We skipped reception. We came up the back steps.” Annie looked over at Raffy, who appeared to be praying to the elevator buttons.
Golden Days visitors did not speak this way to M. R. Skippings. (And patients were too intimidated to speak to her at all.) She let out the steam dangerously compressed in her long throat. “Well, then, we have a serious problem.”
Annie surveyed her. “Pancreatic cancer, serious problem. Genocide in Rwanda, serious problem. Hunger, land mines—serious problems. Whether or not we stopped by reception? I don’t think so.”
But in M. R. Skippings’s pink-stucco universe it was. “Are you refusing to show me those badges?”
Annie grinned. “Are you really actually saying to me ‘show me your badges,’ I mean actually really?” The elevator doors opened. Chamayra stepped out of the car. She looked at them horrified but didn’t speak and trotted quickly away down the hall. Annie shoved Raffy inside the elevator, jumping in with him. Skippings struggled to wedge open the doors.
Annie smiled at her pleasantly. “‘We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!’” The doors closed. “Treasure of Sierra Madre,” she explained to the wide-eyed Raffy as they descended. “I could feel it coming. That’s the correct quote; most people get it wrong.”
He appeared not to know what she was talking about. “I need a moment.” The slender man slumped rapidly down the elevator wall.
Annie leaned over him. “Are you okay?” He nodded weakly as she pulled him up by his armpits. “Raffy, pay attention. I want my father out of this place tomorrow. Let them arrest him and put him in a real goddamn hospital!”
“We’ll do that, first thing tomorrow. You’ll see Dr. Parker; we’ll make arrangements. Before we go to Cuba.”
“We’re not going to Cuba.”
Raffy took a deep breath as the elevator shuddered to a stop at the basement. “That was great, how you said, ‘This is a military matter now.’”
She smiled bitterly. “Well, I’m a con man’s daughter.”
He led her by backstairs up to the Golden Days lobby. “But what I mean is, you move fast. I guess you gotta, you fly planes.”
In the lobby, she glanced at the rumpled man and sighed. “You know how fast Mach 2.4 is?” He admitted that he did not. She said, “Well, you don’t drive your car that fast.”
“To be honest with you, my car has been temporarily repossessed.”
“You and my dad aren’t doing too well. Everything’s repossessed.”
Unhappily he smoothed the flamingos on his shirt. “We had a lot of setbacks lately. Looking for the Queen.”
“Sure.” She tapped an insignia on her uniform jacket. “Well, Mach 2.4 is what a Navy Tomcat F-14 could do. I trained on one. The Tomcat could go over 1500 miles per hour.”
He nodded appreciatively. “That’s fast.”
“It could climb 30,000 feet a minute. The Super Hornet goes even faster. And you know what? They’re replacing it with jets that may be able to go over 2500 miles per hour.”
“That’s very fast.”
Annie walked Raffy quickly past Miss Napp at reception while she was preoccupied with her fingernails. “The old Blackbird SR-71 can fly at 33 miles per minute, that’s Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound. It flies faster than a speeding bullet. Plus, there are unmanned jets that can go twice as fast as that.”
They hurried toward the front entrance. “Why?” he asked her.
“Why?”
Raffy stopped her. “Why do you need to go faster than 1500 miles per hour?”
Before Annie could answer, a tall well-built young man, looking upset, suddenly bolted around the corner at the end of the lobby. She was astonished. It was the same man who had been staring at her from the newspaper rack in the St. Louis airport last night. He still wore the old boots and jeans but now had on a blue linen shirt instead of a blue T-shirt.
Equally surprising, Raffy let out a curse of horror when he saw the man. He squeezed his hands in supplication at Annie. “Help me!” But without waiting for help he bolted to the front doors like a sprinter and slipped quickly through them.
Annie saw the man recognize the Cuban musician as well and start through the lobby toward them. She could tell he hadn’t seen her yet. To slow him down, just at the last second when he passed by, she crouched as if to tie her shoe and the man tripped over her back.
His arms were warm as he pulled her up to her feet. Both said they were sorry for the “accident.” He recognized her. “Wait a minute!” he growled. “You’re Annie Goode. Damn it, you’re here with Rook!”
She thought the man must be one of Feliz Diaz’s criminal henchmen. That he must have been in St. Louis on Diaz’s behalf, chasing her father, that he must have been the man who’d beaten her father up. “Let go of me!” Spinning free, she dropped back to a crouch and pushed him. He lost his balance, tripped backwards and crashed into an empty wheelchair.
Annie raced out the front doors before he could untangle himself.
“Malpy!” She shouted for the Maltese.
On the lawn, the dog was trotting around with a cheap little American flag clamped between his teeth. A candy striper was handing out the flags to patients, presumably for a belated Fourth of July. Malpy effortlessly dodged two overweight security guards who were trying to catch him. The old people fiercely cheered as he dashed through their wheelchairs and leaped into Annie’s arms.
Rook, who’d been hiding again in the huge hedge of bougainvilleas, hurried her into her rental car. Across the street a city bus wheezed to a stop; a man using two canes slowly climbed out of it.
Opening his car window while Annie was backing out of the parking place, Raffy craned to look behind him. “Go, go! There’s Sergeant Hart!”
Annie glanced amazed at the crippled man who’d been left on the curb by the departing bus. She pointed. “That’s Daniel Hart? The man getting off the bus with the canes?”
“No! Him!” Raffy pointed back to the Golden Days lawn. “The man that’s chasing us!”
The young man
in the blue shirt was running in and out of clusters of old people like a running back through an extremely sluggish defense.
“I thought that man worked for Feliz Diaz! I thought he was after you!”
“He is after me! He’s with the s.o.b. Miami police! He’s Sergeant Hart.”
“Rook!” Hart was shouting as he jumped over an azalea bush and raced up the middle of Ficus Avenue in pursuit. “Rook! You’re under arrest! Halt!”
Annie looked in the rear view window, astonished. “That’s Daniel Hart?”
“Go! Go!” Raffy twisted around to yell out the window. “Cingao!”
Unable to catch the accelerating car, Hart bent over in the middle of the street, gasping for breath. Still doubled up, he gave Raffy the finger.
The Cuban, leaning far out the window, returned the gesture, shouting back at Hart, “Son-of-a-bitch Miami police!”
Annie watched in her rearview window as a white van suddenly drove up beside Hart in the intersection. It jolted to a stop and two men in suit jackets hopped simultaneously out of its side doors. One wore a porkpie hat. Annie stopped her car to watch but a passing SUV blocked what was happening from her view. When the SUV moved on, she could see that Daniel Hart was no longer standing there. The white van was speeding away, leaving the street empty.
Making a quick 180-degree turn over Raffy’s protests, she looked for Hart along the side streets but didn’t see him or the white van anywhere. She phoned the number in her cell phone for the detective and when he didn’t answer, she left him a message: she didn’t know what was going on and she really needed to talk to him. She apologized for tripping him in the Golden Days lobby but she’d thought he was a, well, a criminal. She didn’t know why he hadn’t gotten in touch with her. She would make any reasonable deal that would keep her dad out of jail, including giving her dad up to the police. Call her back as quickly as possible.
Raffy pounded the dashboard. “Why are you turning your papa in to Hart?”
“He needs medical attention! Golden Days is a joke!” She squeezed her fist around the pink flamingos on the Cuban’s shirt, pulling him toward her while she drove. “Raffy, we’re going to the Dorado. We’re going to sit down, sort this whole thing out, and fix it. You, my dad, the Queen of the Sea! Start now with Daniel Hart. Why’s he after you?”
The thin young man held up his hands, shrugging dramatically. “Better to be brief than tedious.”
Annie forced herself to slow down. “Couldn’t agree with you more.”
“That s.o.b. Hart has a passionate fixation on your papa and me. Shtup es in toches,” he called over the seat back as if Hart were still behind them. “For years. I can’t say why.”
“Oh, yes, you can.” She shook him. “You’re going to sit still and talk.”
“Today’s not good. I’ve got a final today. Extension class. Composition. Education is the key to human happiness.”
She gestured at his bandaged wrist. “In your case, I’m the key to human happiness. We’re got a problem here; we’re going to solve it!” Driving with one hand, she grabbed his rayon shirt with its three fuchsia flamingos. It ripped.
“Oh, gracias, gracias, my favorite shirt! I played ‘Chan Chan’ with Company Segundo in this shirt on the stage of the Hotel Nacional!”
“I don’t give a shit. All I want is my mother’s name!”
He stroked the flamingos. “I don’t know a thing about your mother! Except, wait a minute, I asked your papa once, when he was boasting about you. He said a name…wait, wait. Kay Denim.”
“Denim?”
“No, Denham. Kay Denham.”
She hadn’t expected a real answer and wasn’t sure it was one. “He said my mother’s name was Kay Denham? Why should I believe that?”
Raffy made a face. “Why shouldn’t you?” His soulful eyes met hers and she decided he knew no more than he was telling her. “But to be honest, Annie, your mother? You should let her go. When I left Cuba, I said to my own mother, I was headed here to Miami with Uncle Mano, I said, ‘Come too, Mama! Hop in the boat.’ She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t leave her homeland. I had to give her up. That’s life, more or less.” Raffy leaned over to pat Annie on the shoulder.
Appalled, she asked if his mother was right there in the water with him when he left in the boat?
“No no! I was speaking in—oh, what is it?—synecdoche.” He shook his head. “My mama is still in Havana, still in the family business. Silversmiths to the finest people, not that of course we aren’t all equal brothers and sisters at present thanks to that son-of-a-bitch Castro. She lives with my big brother, who’s turned her against me. When you fly us to Cuba, I’m bringing my mother a wonderful gift, due entirely to Jack. And then she’ll see that I am not nothing.”
At a stoplight, she studied his nervous face. “We’re just going to talk, Raffy. Don’t worry. And I’ll even buy you a drink.”
He looked sadly out the car window. “Gracias, no. I’m eight months into my recovery. Alcohol was once a personal problem of mine.”
“Just goes to show you. Problems get solved.”
***
Under the big Miami moon, Annie walked her dog around the Hotel Dorado pool gardens. Raffy had to hurry to keep up as they trotted along the bougainvillea-banked path. Back in the lobby, she handed him Malpy. “Okay. Now talk to me about this Cuban bank where my dad says these jewels are.”
His story was inevitably a long one, punctuated with quotes, but what she distilled was that there was a secured account at a branch of the Banco Central in old Havana near the Plaza de Armas. Jack Peregrine had been renting a bank drawer there for years under a foreign passport. Only Jack or his designated heir would be allowed to open it. Moreover, to do so they would need not only proof of personal identity but knowledge of two passwords. Annie knew those passwords. Annie could fly a small plane. So for both reasons, with Jack incapacitated, they needed Annie to go to the bank for them and it was unfortunately in Havana.
She asked, “And inside this bank drawer?”
The four biggest emeralds from the crown of La Reina Coronado del Mar, each one worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus a 135-carat ruby worth many times that much.
Annie scoffed. “And these alleged jewels actually belong to…?”
“Jack,” Raffy insisted with conviction. “But getting hold of them?”
They moved to the bar and found a table by a window that looked out to the ocean. Annie neatly set her phone and her Blackberry down beside her.
Raffy looked around carefully. “Jack is sadly, well, and so am I, temporarily paisano non grato with a number of people living in Miami and, well, also in Cuba.”
“Let me guess. That number of people includes the Miami police, as well as the glitzy couple in the Mercedes outside Golden Days, correct?”
“There’s also the PNR. Policía Nacional Revolucionaria. Cuban police?” Raffy offered her a placating smile. “Also, the police in some other American cities where…Jack honestly does not like to be closed up in a cell.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t have gone in for a life of crime.”
“It’s more a philosophical point of view.” Raffy sipped at his soda. “I didn’t mind jail so much; it’s a quiet place to think things over. ‘I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world and vice versa.’ That was one of the speeches your dad tried to teach me. Richard the Fifth, I believe.”
Annie nodded. “Richard the Second.” She hesitated. “Maybe Third.”
She knew Raffy was not exaggerating her father’s fear of imprisonment; Sam had told her of his being punished by being locked in a closet. She remembered how he had always left doors of rented rooms wide open whenever he could; he’d kept bathroom doors open as they slept, with the lights on.
“Raffy, have you ever,” she asked, “actually seen this so-called ‘Queen of the Sea’?”
“No,” he admitted. “But I never saw the Empire State Building either. Or for that
matter, Jesus the Savior Christ that my mother was always telling my padre to believe in, which he did not, not that he went to synagogue either. How about a mojito for you? All you drink is water.”
“Water’s good for you. Sit still, I’ll be right back.”
Leaving Raffy in the bar, she took Malpy upstairs to her room and waited till the maid left after turning down her sheets and putting chocolates on her pillows. The maid had turned on the television. After Annie collected the metal case, she clicked through channels on the TV remote, searching for news headlines. She paused at an old black and white movie. To her surprise it was Rosalind Russell in Flight for Freedom, the movie her dad had quoted to her when he’d called from St. Louis. Rosalind appeared to be having serious engine trouble as she flew a secret mission over a foggy Pacific.
When Annie returned to the bar, Raffy was there talking to the piano player. He hurried to her when he saw the stainless steel courier case. His large brown eyes widened. “La Reina?”
Annie laughed at his excitement. “My dad is a con man. Since you are also a con man, surely you know that the Queen of the Sea does not exist.”
Raffy’s glowing eyes scanned the gleaming case as she placed it on the bar table. His fingers stretched for the handle.
She slid the case away from him. “Look at yourself! My dad gets everybody all excited about something and then because they’re searching for it, they believe it’s real! It’s a swindle. It’s the big con. It’s like…like a Florida land deal.”
The Cuban smiled, his large dark eyes dreamy. He told her to look out the windows of the Dorado at the glamorous skyscraper skyline of Miami. “What is that out there? It’s a Florida land deal…” He pulled from his pocket a worn dirty folded piece of Xeroxed paper and smoothed it out on top of the metal case. On the paper was a drawing of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and handwritten beneath the figure, “La Reina Coronada del Mar.” Crabbed scribbles in Spanish covered the margins. Raffy translated them for her.
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 30