The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  Later, carrying the Queen with them in the shopping bag, they walked to a late lunch at an outdoor café at a side-street corner of the square, not far from the bank where it had been arranged for Annie to meet Raffy’s cousin, the assistant manager, in 2 1/2 hours, just before the bank closed. Over lunch she kept looking around the Plaza, hoping to see the coppery-haired woman, Helen Clark, at one of the other outdoor cafés. Her eagerness was curiously blended with dread.

  They had finished their tapas when suddenly Dan startled her by clapping his hands together. “Got it! Your dad said ‘our picture.’ ‘Our picture.’ He meant yours and his. The one I saw your phone number on the back of.”

  Annie knew instantly what Dan meant, and knew that he was right. It was the Breakers picture of her dad and her, sitting in the banquette. “He had the copy in his wallet.”

  Dan rubbed his hands violently through his curls. “Damn, I wish I had that picture now!”

  “I’ve got it.” She found the old tattered photo in her purse that she’d palmed from her dad. Together they examined it in the strong sunlight but it was hard to see details. Annie said, “We need the original. On the piano at Pilgrim’s Rest. It’s much bigger and clearer.” She would have called Sam but they’d been emphatically instructed not to make, or try to make, any phone calls from Cuba.

  They studied the picture: The small birthday cake on the banquette table. Annie in her velvet dress and cowboy boots, leaning happily against her father. Jack, his perfect suit and slender tie, with his deep-tanned smiling face and his trim fair mustache, with his arms stretched out, and a cigarette in his tanned fingers. Behind them, other diners filled in the background, laughing women, other men in thin ties and perfect suits. Among them were five men seated together, smoking, smiling. They were too small to distinguish. It was these men that made the photo matter so much.

  Annie and Dan found a shop in the Plaza where there was a copier. They enlarged the picture as much as possible. Dan identified two of the diners (call them A and B, he said) as two very famous men who had been notoriously prosecuted later for political bribery and racketeering. A was still in prison and B had mysteriously died in a plane crash shortly before a congressional hearing at which he’d agreed to testify. The third man was Archbishop de Uloa. Next to him was Feliz Diaz. Both were recognizable, although the photograph had been taken almost twenty years ago and their hair was black, not gray.

  The fifth man would be recognizable to almost anybody. And, as Dan said, anyone with a memory (unfortunately in America, that included few citizens and almost none of the press) would remember that this powerful public figure had consistently claimed, even under oath, that he had never met A or B in his life.

  Annie and Dan plotted what they would do. An hour passed. Raffy didn’t return. They went back to their hotel room. In their absence the room had been—according to Dan—“tossed by pros,” ransacked carefully but perceptibly and then restored to order. Whether the break-in had been carried out by the Havana police or by American undercover agents or by associates of Feliz Diaz, it was impossible to guess. Maybe the infiltrators had been looking for the Queen of the Sea, maybe for clues to Jack Peregrine’s whereabouts, maybe just conducting a routine search. Dan and Annie carefully checked their belongings but nothing seemed to be missing.

  Another half-hour passed with no sign of Raffy. They walked to Ramirez Gold and Silver, a once handsome if now dilapidated shop with walls blue as the sea and doors and windows of iron filigree. In the main window were displayed a gold chain and a silver bowl with tongs. The shop was closed.

  They strolled around the Plaza de Armas, looking for Raffy. They returned to the café on the side street where they’d eaten lunch. Now a young hard-muscled man in black jeans and a black T-shirt with a portrait of the rock band KISS was sitting at a table. He was the man whose photograph Fierson had shown them at the Sigsbee meeting.

  “Fred Owen,” Annie said.

  Dan was amused. “Feds. We’re supposed to think he’s from Moscow or what?”

  Noisily the old pink coupe de ville bounced to a stop near the café. Oswardo rolled down his window and told Dan in Spanish that Raffy had been detained but that they should go as scheduled to the bank, where everything was arranged.

  “Is Raffy okay?” Annie called to Oswardo but he had rolled up the window and the old Cadillac was jouncing away over the cobbled bricks.

  A nearby church bell rang the hour. Dan stood up. “Let’s go, Sundance.”

  Annie smiled tensely; she wasn’t sure she liked the analogy.

  Like much of Old Havana, too poor to be ruined in the ’70s and ’80s, the branch bank was beautiful, unrenovated, with a floor of old soft-edged cream and black marble squares; the walls were a pale-green plaster, the grillwork Spanish black iron, black ceiling fans languidly turning.

  Annie and Dan waited in chairs that looked like they’d been taken from a 1950s restaurant. “I’d love to get a couple of these chairs,” Dan said, bending down to check out the curved aluminum legs. “Don’t look now but there’s our FBI buddy Willie. He really ought to work out more. Man’s a mess.”

  Annie glanced behind her. The chunky FBI agent was leaning against a counter by the wall, filling out a bank form. He was sweaty in the heat, even in his white Cuban shirt, open-collared, short-sleeved.

  The younger muscular man wearing all black stepped inside the bank. Dan grinned. “Look at his shoes. Now look at Willie’s shoes. Same. Why don’t the Feds work on their shoes?”

  The two agents ignored them.

  The assistant manager of this small branch of the Banco Central appeared out of the back and introduced himself in Spanish as Teofilo Ramirez. He asked, ¿Donde está Rafael?”

  “No clue,” Dan admitted with a shrug. “Oswardo said to come ahead anyhow.”

  Nodding, Ramirez led Annie and Dan to a sitting area near the rail separating the lobby from offices. Slim, youthful, courteous, he apologized for any tardiness. There had been none. Ramirez wore a blue suit with a blue tie. His hair was a short neat version of his cousin Rafael Rook’s glossy black ponytail. His dark eyes were far less trusting than Raffy’s, in fact they were rather cynical. But he began with polite pleasantries; they lasted longer than they would have in America. To Annie’s surprise he brought out a color copy of her official Navy identification photo. He showed it to her, then returned it to his pocket. He smiled. “No soy un tonto. Soy un banquero.”

  Dan nodded. “He says he’s not a fool, he’s a banker.” The whole conversation took place in Spanish, with Dan translating for Annie, although she had the clear notion that Ramirez could understand English perfectly well.

  Raffy’s cousin said they would not waste one another’s time. There were certain passwords necessary to access the account. “Démelos por favor.”

  Annie spoke slowly from memory, reciting the numbers whose meaning she had figured out on a night that now seemed to have taken place a lifetime ago, during the flight to St. Louis in the King of the Sky. The alphanumeric stood for her birthday and her birth weight and her time of birth, for Lindbergh’s plane and her father’s plane: She looked directly at Teofilo Ramirez. “The passwords are 362484070N and 678STNX211. I’ll repeat those.”

  Dan translated each number and letter slowly and carefully. With a polite compliment to Annie’s memory, Señor Ramirez wrote everything down. “Tres seis dos cuatro ocho cuatro cero siete cero N. Seis siete ocho S. T. N. X. dos uno uno.” He asked Annie to check what was written for accuracy.

  She did so. “Yes, that’s right. Thanks.”

  He nodded at her.

  “Muchas gracias,” said Dan and handed him discreetly, but with a courteous tilt of his head, a sealed business envelope. The envelope contained twenty thousand euros in cash. The assistant manager took it nonchalantly. He told them he would return momentarily and stepped backward, disappearing behind a door at the far end of the bank marked Privado.

  Annie and Dan waited nervously on a rattan
couch. They kept their hands on the shopping bag between them. Two old loud-ticking round metal clocks on opposite walls showed different times in the vicinity of 4:45 p.m.

  Finally the private office door reopened. Ramirez returned, this time carrying a blue zippered pouch the size of a large book; it was embossed with the name of the bank. He told Dan in Spanish that he would now need to ask her (he referred to Annie throughout as ella–“she” or “her”) to provide him with answers to three questions that the signatory on the account (he never mentioned the name, Jack Peregrine) had added as a security check. Annie said that she would answer the questions as best she could. “Did my father prepare the questions? Mi padre?” She pointed at the pouch. “Mi padre?”

  The well-dressed bank manager bowed to her but didn’t answer. Instead he read from the sheet of bank stationery he carried. “En primer lugar. El Rey del…?”

  Dan turned to her. “He’s asking you for the king of something.”

  Immediately Annie heard her father’s voice, softly like a far-away echo, when he’d called her last night and then she’d seen him shimmery in the ghost light by the pool in Key West. “King Queen Sam,” he’d told her then. “King Queen Sam. King Queen Sam.”

  She smiled solemnly at Ramirez. “I understand. My father’s first question is, ‘The King of the what?’ The answer is ‘Sky.’ The King of the Sky.”

  Dan said to the banker, “El rey del cielo.”

  The slim man nodded, checking the answer against his paper. “Sí, gracias, sí. King of the Sky. Y, en segundo lugar. Y,…del Mar?”

  “He’s asking for the something of the sea,” Dan said.

  Annie had anticipated the question. The King of the Sky, the Queen of the Sea, her lost father, her lost mother. “Queen,” she told Señor Ramirez. “La Reina Coronada del Mar. The Queen of the Sea.” She looked over to the two FBI agents, who were pretending they weren’t watching her. Somehow she began to think, perhaps irrationally, that her father’s life, not just his jail sentence—but his life depended on her correctly answering these questions. She could feel her heart quickening, pulsing in her neck. Would Feliz Diaz take revenge for the poker debt, for the statue scam, by killing her dad? Would the government just let that happen? Or would the government itself get rid of him, because of his knowledge of the photograph, if Annie failed to provide what was wanted? Could she make Fierson believe there was no further threat?

  “Annie,” Dan urged her, “One more question to answer.”

  Ramirez closed his sheet of paper and smiled with an ironic shrug at her as if the third question were useless. “¿Y, por último, cuál es el nombre de su madre?”

  Annie was startled. She frowned at Dan. “Did he just ask me for the name of my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Heart thudding now, Annie hesitated. Was this a trick of her father’s? Perhaps she was supposed to say, “Claudette Colbert.” Or give one of the other false names he’d offered her? But which one? She didn’t know the name of her mother. Wasn’t that what this whole journey had been about? Wasn’t it to find the name of her mother that she’d come after him all this way? She didn’t speak.

  “Annie?” asked Dan, scowling. “Your mother’s name?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  She heard her father’s voice’s again, “King Queen Sam. King Queen Sam.”

  Her father was telling her the truth.

  She smiled the radiant smile she’d given Sam when she’d taken her first steps into her arms. “Sam,” she told the manager, so softly that he leaned toward her inquisitively. “The name of my mother is Sam.”

  “Sam?” asked Dan, puzzled.

  She nodded. “S-a-m. Samantha. Sam. Samantha Anne Peregrine.”

  Teofilo Ramirez was unable not to smile back at her. “Sam, sí. That is correct. Gracias.”

  Dan hugged Annie. “That’s all three.”

  With a bow, Mr. Ramirez held out the navy-blue lettered bank pouch. When Annie didn’t seem to see him, he gave it to Dan. “Gracias. Adios. Buenas vacaciones.” With a surprising quickness, he walked away and vanished behind the iron rail.

  “Beautiful,” Dan put his arm around Annie, who was breathing hard, fighting off exasperating tears that made it hard to see. “You okay? You did great.” He handed her the dark-blue pouch. “Sam, huh? I thought she was gay.” He spoke in a nonchalant way, gently wiping her eyes with his fingers. “Okay, they’re watching us. Take your look in the pouch. Make it easy going.”

  Dan kept talking casually to her until she took a deep breath and took a look inside the pouch, checking through the contents. “Got it,” she said quietly. She zipped up the pouch. “Ready?”

  “Yep. Now we hand the pouch over to Mr. Fred Owen as instructed.”

  They strolled toward the bank doors and through them and into the sun-bright street, followed by the two agents. Outside the door, Willie, breathing hard, passed by, bumping them. The younger man in the black KISS shirt slipped the pouch out from under Annie’s arm and walked with it to an old white Chevrolet waiting at the curb. There he opened the pouch and Annie saw him pull out the photo, quickly identify it and slip it back inside. Willie’s view had been blocked by a tall man who passed in front of him. Then Owen gestured for Willie to hurry to join him. Willie ambled across the plaza and got into the Chevrolet, which sat there parked.

  “You made the switch?” Dan asked Annie.

  She smiled. “Yep.”

  “Damn, you’re quick.” He hugged her affectionately. “I should take you to Las Vegas.”

  “That’s what my dad used to say. I took the negative. But Fred Owen’s got an eight-by-ten print of the photo of us in The Breakers. There were also two emeralds, three rubies, six sapphires, two diamonds. The rubies are about the size and shape of tiny eggs, but there was nothing anywhere near a 135-carat star ruby in there. And if there were supposed to be seven emeralds in the crown? There are three in the queen now and those two in the pouch makes only five. Where are the other two?”

  Dan said he suspected that Jack and Raffy planned to hold back an emerald each. “Finders’ fees. Well, look’s like poor old Willie’s out of the loop on this deal. I’m going to take him out for a drink when we get back to Miami and tell him to watch his step on those big fat flat feet of his.”

  Somehow, strangely, Annie knew that she would see the beautiful coppery-haired woman in the café, just at the table where she was sitting. There was a row of tiny bamboo café tables next to a row of little orange trees in wooden boxes, next to the open square. The woman wore large elegant sunglasses and thin brown linen clothes. On the pavement at her feet was a small soft brown leather suitcase and a shopping bag that looked very much like the one in which Annie now carried the Queen.

  Dan kissed Annie. “I’ll be down the block.” He pointed in the direction of the Ramirez Gold and Silver shop and kept walking without looking back as Annie headed toward Helen Clark.

  Taking a chair at the table next to the woman, Annie quietly studied the crowd of shoppers and tourists milling about in the Plaza. A waiter moved nearby and she used her little bit of Spanish to him. “Camarero. Una botella de agua, por favor. Gracias.” After he left, she said to the woman, “You’re Helen Clark.”

  The woman nodded yes without looking at her.

  Annie set down the old shopping bag between their tables. “But your real name is Ruthie Nickerson. You’re Georgette’s aunt, aren’t you? I met you in Emerald once. Did you pick the name Clark from Clark Goode?”

  The woman’s head lifted in surprise. Now she looked over at Annie, who couldn’t see her expression because of her sunglasses. Then she took the glasses off and Annie saw that her eyes were as blue as the sea. She had the lovely low voice of the woman who had made the phone call warning Annie to stay away from her father’s criminal pursuits.

  “Hello. It’s been a long time.”

  Annie looked from the woman’s face to her hand, which was
suntanned and freckled. The hand rested on the table near the small white cup of Cuban coffee. Ruthie’s fingers closed around the cup. She wore no jewelry.

  “You helped me with my algebra,” Annie said.

  A long silence. Finally the woman spoke again. “How are Sam and Clark?” Her voice was measured. “Good friends to me.”

  Annie told her they were both fine. “And you were a friend of my father’s?”

  “I suppose friend’s a word.” She sipped at the dark coffee.

  “I really think all he wanted to do was sell Feliz Diaz that stupid statue and leave me a lot of money. Kind of sweet and silly.”

  “All he wants to do is make life exciting. He almost got himself killed, not to mention me. Or you.” Ruthie glanced down at Annie’s shopping bag. “The statue didn’t belong to him. So, that’s the Queen of the Sea in there?”

  Annie said that it was.

  Ruthie told Annie what was in the other shopping bag and that Jack had arranged for it. “The art of the con,” she smiled.

  “Did you know Dad’s dying?”

  “Did he think he wouldn’t?” Ruthie drank a sip of coffee. She spoke not unsympathetically. “But I’m sorry to hear it. He was the best dancer I ever met.” Her eyes moved slowly left to right across the busy plaza. “We can’t sit here long. How many gems in the bank pouch?”

  Annie saw no reason not to enumerate the contents. “The real Queen’s got three big emeralds in her crown already. Dad must have put them back in the statue.”

  “Just three?” Ruthie set down her coffee cup in a thoughtful way. “How about the 135-carat star ruby?” She moved her perfect teeth over her lower lip when Annie shook her head no. “This could be a problem. Feliz is paying Jack a great deal of money for La Reina Coronada. He expected more emeralds and that ruby to go back on that silver box with the Holy Thorn inside it. Now he won’t have either. He’s a mobster but a good Catholic. He honestly believes the Queen should go to the Church, and go looking good. I’m going to have trouble selling this…‘as is’ sale to Feliz.”