Annie was quiet a minute, then she said, “How much did my dad, or Fierson, tell you about the photo at The Breakers? The one with your friend Feliz Diaz in it.”
The woman looked baffled. “McAllister Fierson?”
“Yes. The government big shot who arranged for me to get here to Havana. My dad told me last night that what Fierson really wanted from that bank pouch was a photo.” Annie described her birthday party picture and named the men who sat laughing together in the background of the restaurant. “Fierson specifically told me to stay away from you if you were in Havana. You might want to watch out for him. My dad told me that the negative to that photo was his gift to you. I’ve got it here.”
Ruthie leaned away, thinking hard. “Well, Jack has surprised me…” She stubbed out her cigarette.
Annie said, “The negative and a print were in the pouch with the jewels. I left everything but the negative in there for this FBI agent Fred Owen.”
“Fred,” said Ruthie. There was a world of contempt in the word. “He’s over there in that Chevy with Willie Grunberg. Willie’s a good guy.”
“I’ve got the negative under my hand.”
Startled, Ruthie glanced over at Annie for a moment. Then she asked if anyone, and she meant anyone, had possibly seen her remove the negative from the pouch?
“No,” Annie assured her. “I’m very fast.”
Ruthie said there were now at least two men at the café and there was another man standing in the Plaza; all three were watching them right now. Before too long, Annie had to leave the negative and the Queen and walk away.
Annie said, “Dad used to give me lessons every day. Five years old, I could palm the wallet right out of your purse, study everything in it, put it back and tell you the contents to the last detail. And you’d never know your wallet had been out of your purse.”
Ruthie Nickerson smiled slightly. “I recall that your dad had great hands.”
The remark startled Annie. “You were lovers,” she blurted out.
The woman’s mouth softened. “No. Never. He said he was in love with me. I wasn’t with him.”
Annie was confused. “I thought you were lovers.”
“We could have been. But we weren’t. Those were crazy times. Clark was going back to Vietnam. He’d reenlisted. So back he went and ended up a POW.” She shook her head ruefully. “Funny. Jack couldn’t talk me into loving him. I couldn’t talk Clark out of leaving me. I never figured Jack would do what he did. Take you, I mean.”
Annie stared a long time at her eyes. They looked familiar because they looked like her own eyes. “Are you my mother?”
The older woman looked at her, looked past her, replaced the sunglasses. “I came to the same conclusion. But only a week ago.”
Annie’s eyebrow arched. “In St. Louis?”
Ruthie took a cigarette from a leather purse. Annie noticed her hand was shaking slightly. “Yes, in St. Louis. Of course Jack knew all along but he kept it to himself. Unless he told Sam. But I never thought it until I saw you there in the airport. I had assumed…” She frowned. “That you were growing up happy in Ohio. The way I’d planned.”
“In Barbados…Why?” Annie asked.
The woman’s brow tightened. “…College. I talked my way into a fellowship; I wanted a career.” She laughed. “Not exactly the one I have. Jack tracked me down to the island, tried to stop me, and—although I certainly didn’t know about it at the time—after I left for the States, he, well, stole you.” She smiled. “You’re the most beautiful thing he ever stole.”
Annie rubbed at the back of her neck. “You didn’t think I was your baby when you visited Sam that night at Pilgrim’s Rest and helped me with my algebra and she told you I was Jack’s daughter?”
She shook her head. “No. I just remember thinking how lovely you were, and how lucky you were to have Sam. I figured Jack had met someone, had a baby with her. But in St. Louis, when I saw you…and I, I don’t know, I just knew.” She was quiet a moment. “I went to St. Louis trying to help keep that idiot Jack from getting himself killed, which is exactly what Feliz was ready to do to him. Jack was sure he could get out of his gambling mess by selling Feliz La Reina. It was another one of Jack’s crazy schemes. But Feliz seemed to fall for it. Like I say, the idea of making a big gift to the Church appealed to him. I did what I could to scare you off. Back in Miami I reamed Jack out about the whole thing. I told him if he didn’t back off from you I’d see to it that he was locked up for twenty years.”
Annie thought about this for a while. Then she asked Ruthie if she’d ever really met Claudette Colbert.
She said that she had. “Briefly.” In Barbados, during her pregnancy. The movie star had been very kind and helpful to her.
Annie felt a bitter taste. “Everything was ‘briefly’ with you, wasn’t it?”
“No.” Ruthie looked at her, then with a wry smile, added, “I say this not ruthlessly, and not without rue.” Annie immediately thought back to the night in the Pilgrim’s Rest kitchen, the glamorous stranger punning on the word “Jack” during the peculiarly intense Scrabble game with Sam. “I’ve done serious work for a quarter of a century. That’s not brief. I’ve worked with the agency, always undercover.” Ruthie called to the waiter for her check. “For years, I’ve been passing along to our government useful things about Feliz and his friends. To find those things out, I make Feliz trust me. That’s my work.” Ruthie took another cigarette from a pack in her purse.
“You shouldn’t smoke.” Annie leaned forward as the waiter left. “Okay. The negative is in your jacket pocket now.”
Ruthie nodded; the wry smile widening into a version of Annie’s smile. “Good for you.”
“By the way, Trevor Smithwall told me you had my back.”
The woman frowned, shaking her head. “He shouldn’t tell you things like that. I’m the mistress of Feliz Diaz.” The waiter set down checks at both their tables. Ruthie gave him money. “And you, you train flyers on combat jets for the Navy. I heard that from Sam. I called her once, just to see how she was. She told me about you and the Navy. Of course, she’s a peace freak but she’s very proud of you.” Her hand moved forward, brushed past Annie’s.
Annie paid her own check. “Are you in danger from Diaz?”
Ruthie shook her head. “The irony is, Feliz loves me and I’m actually…fond of him.” She touched her pocket into which Annie had slid the negative of the photograph at The Breakers. “At the right time, this will help. McAllister Fierson has started to distrust me. He’ll find out he was right…” She glanced around the plaza again. “We’ve been sitting here a little too long. You need to go. Your friend Dan Hart? In Miami, they say he’s a very good cop.” She smiled. “Getting fired can be a sign of a good cop. You two look fond of each other.” She bent toward Annie’s table, moved her hand over to hers and this time let it rest there for a little moment, her fingers moving quietly, like a heartbeat. She said in her lovely voice, “I thought the world would be different.” She took off the sunglasses again and her eyes wetted to a darker blue.
Annie touched her mother’s fingers. “The world is different. I had it easier.” As she said this, she felt a clear sense that what was real between the two of them had little to do with the words they were speaking to each other, the words that made sounds in the air. But that what was real was as indefinite as water and that the meaning of it all floated somewhere between them, side by side, nearly together, as submerged as a ship’s keel in the ocean, moving unseen through the waves. And then Annie slipped her hand away.
All at once there was a loud screeching noise of horn and brakes in the street beside the café. People jumped to their feet at the other tables.
Annie saw a two-tone taxi slam to a stop. A small man in bright green trousers flopped across the cab’s fender, rolling over its hood and falling to the crowded cobbled pavement.
An old woman shouted in alarm. Customers ran from their tables at the café and others rushed o
ut of the restaurant, swarming in front of the boxed orange trees near the front row of small tables; all were trying to catch a glimpse of the accident.
In the midst of the hubbub, Annie stood up and saw a slender recognizable hand move smoothly across Ruthie Nickerson’s table-top. She saw two green sparkling objects fall from tanned fingers into Ruthie’s hand. Then the people behind jostled her and she lost sight of her father.
Annie squeezed quickly between the little boxed trees and raced into the plaza. She spotted Dan Hart running out of a low stucco arch toward her. Across the cobbled opening, on the other side, a little apart from the crowd, Jack Peregrine stood, thinner, frailer, in cream silk trousers and Cuban shirt, dappled gold like Ruthie’s brown leather bag that he held up to her in the sunlight. He waved the Fed Ex envelope that Sam had sent to Key West in his other hand. She started running toward him but he grabbed Dan’s arm, thrust the leather bag at him and then slipped through the arch, turned, waved his hand in good-bye, and vanished.
Annie spun around to look back at the café. The small bamboo table was empty. The shopping bag with the Queen in it was gone. The white coffee cup sat there on the café table, coppery lipstick on its rim. Beneath the table the other shopping bag sat beside Ruthie’s chair.
Dan and Annie took the bag back to their hotel room and unwrapped the Queen of Sea. Well, at least a modern copy of that statue, done in gold plate and without jewels in its crown. But modeled—Ruthie had told her—on the real Queen; made right here in Havana by the talented goldsmith, Maria Ramirez, Raffy’s mother.
Chapter 52
The Right Stuff
Rafael Rook hugged his guitar to the dancing alligators on his shirt as the Cessna Amphibian plane moved away from its moorings and bounced across the choppy waves. “Your papa astonishes me,” Raffy called up to Annie in the cockpit. “There he is, dying in Golden Days. Then kazaam he’s stealing Skippings’s car. Then he’s drowned in the bay. Then kazaam here he is today, standing in Plaza de Armas in Havana, Cuba. All of a sudden, I hear Jack’s voice. I turn around and he shoves me forward. ‘Flop that taxi now, Rafael, now, do it!’ And I do it, I don’t think and think and think and worry. I just do it. That’s how we’ll be in paradise. We’ll just do it the way with your dad somehow I could just…do things.”
Dan sat in the plane seat beside the Cuban grifter as they motored away from the harbor rocks to where they would get take-off clearance from a Ramirez relative in the harbormaster’s station. “So,” Dan asked, “Raffy, you little bastard, flopping was Jack’s idea?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, kazaam times two. I’m standing in the Plaza and there he is. ‘Hi, Dan,’ he says. ‘Take care of her,’ he says. And he shoves this damn leather bag here at me. He shows me this FedEx. It’s from Sam, he says, and it’s all the insurance he needs. And poof he’s gone while we’re all watching you rolling around on the hood of an old cab. Willie spots him and gives chase. But you can just imagine who won that race.”
The Cuban nodded. “Jack was the wind. You never know what he’ll do next.” Annie heard that she was cleared for take-off. As she opened the throttle, she yelled at Raffy that he should look to see what was in the bag. “It’s going to be money,” she predicted to distract him.
Raffy unzipped the soft brown leather bag. He was so focused on the fact that he was staring at what would prove to be, when they counted it, a million dollars, that he forgot to be terrified that Annie was taking off into air. “Madre de Dios!” he shouted. “Whoever saw so many dollars? We did it! Jack, we did it!”
Dan thumbed one of the stacks of bills like a deck of cards. “Yep, if you’ve got to be left holding the bag, this is the way to do it,” he agreed.
As Annie came out of their climb and headed North by Northwest, Dan and Raffy counted up one hundred bonded stacks of one hundred hundred-dollar bills,
Annie burst out laughing. “So he did leave me a million dollars?”
Rafael’s enthusiasm overwhelmed him and he had to pat his chest to calm himself. “I told you, Annie! I told you! It was never the money with Jack. See how he gives away the money. Easy as a smile. He always said, ‘I’ll leave Annie a million dollars.’ Of course, if you could see your way to sharing say maybe a quarter, okay, a tenth, with me? That would be very kind. With Jack, it was, well, with Jack—” The small man pulled at his ponytail, trying to think of the right way to say it. “Jack’s ‘nature is subdu’d to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.’ That happens to be the Bard of Avon’s view on art and if the Bard tells you something, you can definitely take it to the bank.” The slender Cuban put down the money and picked up his guitar. “Art. It’s a little past the wit of man.” He played a melody softly.
Los amigos me olvidaron
Sólo mi madre lloraba
A Dios pedía y rogaba
Que salvara su hijo.
While the Cuban sang, Dan told Annie that he had forced Raffy to go see his mother in the goldsmith shop and that Raffy’s reunion with her had been “a calamity, more or less,” that Mrs. Ramirez had called him a criminal ne’er-do-well musician and had shut the shop door in his face. In fact, on learning that Raffy would be returned to prison in Florida (which unfortunately he’d told her was absolutely true), Mrs. Ramirez had called him, in comparison with his older brother, the shame of the family name.
Slumping over his guitar, Raffy sighed to Annie that Dan was right. His mother had thrown him out of her life as a failure; for a Communist, Maria Ramirez really seemed to care only about what the Bard would call, putting money in her purse.
“You’re going back to Havana right now!” Annie abruptly turned the Cessna TU206 around in a high-banked 180-degree curve.
“What are you doing?” Both Raffy and Dan were shouting at her.
Annie steered the plane back toward the coast and over the Viñales Valley, so low she could see fields of tobacco. The bumpy flight at low altitude sent the two men in the rear seats falling against each other. “I’m taking you back,” she told Raffy.
“Are you crazy?” shouted Dan. “He’s in my custody.”
“I’m sorry,” Annie told him. “Raffy’s going home to Havana. Give him half of the money in that suitcase, $500,000. Come on, Dan. Do it!”
Raffy shouted, “What?” He was torn between his horror at the flight and shock that she was giving him half Jack’s money.
Annie yelled, “You’re going to tell your mother you made all that money playing guitar. That you’re not a failure, that you’re a great big success, a musical star, in America.”
At first stunned, Raffy pulled himself together enough to protest vehemently. First of all, Annie couldn’t re-land the plane at Puerto Esperanza! Raffy had only been able to guarantee that one tiny time when his relative was on duty at the harbor. That time was past. If they tried to land now, they’d be arrested!
Annie called back, “Then I’ll fly you to a drop-point over land and you’ll have to, as my dad used to say to me, ‘Jump!’ Put a parachute on him, Dan.”
Raffy grabbed Dan by the jacket, “Save me. To tell you the truth, Annie’s more like her dad than I thought. I mean, crazy. Do something.”
Dan pried loose Raffy’s cinnamon-colored fingers from his jacket lapels. “I don’t think she’s joking about this. Have you ever jumped before?”
“No! And I never will!”
Annie yelled, “Work it out fast, guys.”
While she made a large loop over the mountains, Dan located the parachute. He told Raffy he was a practiced skydiver and could talk Raffy through the process. Piece of cake. Annie said she was going to circle back and put him down right over a little beachy area they’d passed. She could see a road not a mile from the beach. He could hitch a ride.
Raffy absolutely, definitely refused to put on the parachute. As much as he dreaded returning to a U.S. prison, as much as he knew a coward dies a thousand deaths, as much as he would love to see his mother’s face if he showed her $500,000�
��Annie’s offering of which, coincidentally, showed, as Shakespeare would tell her, a giving hand—as true as all these things were true, there was no way in the entire history of the infinite and eternal universe of the God of all creation that Rafael Ramirez Rook was going to jump out of an airplane in the middle of the air.
“For Christ’s sake,” Dan said finally, exasperated as Raffy kept slipping away from his efforts to attach the parachute. “Annie, just get us as close to the sand as you can and I’ll jump out with him!”
Annie twisted her head around. “What?”
Dan said he was serious. “I’ll jump out with the little bastard myself just to shut him up. Come back for me! I’ll swim out to you! Can you do that?”
Dan tossed about half of the packets of hundred-dollar bills out of the suitcase onto the floor of the plane. He zipped the rest in the bag.
Annie was circling again, flying low away from the western sun, heading for a lagoon with a small sandy crescent beach. She called back, “Dan! There’s a little boat moored to a buoy. See it?”
Dan looked out the plane window. “Got it.”
“Swim out there. I’ll pick you up!”
Dan stripped off his clothes to his boxer shorts. Then he strapped the parachute on. He thrust the bag of money hard into Rafael’s arms.
Raffy was shouting that Annie couldn’t seriously be planning to put him down in the middle of nowhere in Cuba?
“It’s your country,” she said. “There’s no place like home. When we get to Key West, we’re going to say you pulled a gun on us and jumped out of the plane.”
“I would never do that!” the musician cried.
Dan told him, “We’ll make you sound like Jimmy Cagney. They don’t know what a wuss you are.” He shouted up to the cockpit, “Annie, it’s looking good down there. So, okay, Raffy, I’m going to count, we’re going to jump, just like in the movies, right?”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 49