Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  “I’m an American citizen,” Deal said. “I’m not allowed to go to Cuba.”

  Vines seemed not to hear. “Fuentes may have no scruples, but he does have influence. There may be no other person, in fact, as practiced as he in brokering arrangements that channel illicit monies into legitimate enterprises worldwide.”

  “Imagine my surprise,” Deal said. “I took him for an honest old guy who needed a carport built. Now you tell me he’s a money launderer.”

  Vines made a waving motion with his hands, brushing it all away. “We have reason to believe that among the men Fuentes is in contact with in Cuba is a person of extreme political importance.” He paused then, for emphasis. “We believe that this person is poised to assume the presidency once Castro is out of the way.”

  Deal stared at the man for a moment. “Maybe that’s a reasonable assumption,” he said, “given what Fuentes and his crowd seem to have in mind. So what? I still don’t see where I come in.”

  “There’s been no end of speculation as to who’s next in line over there,” Vines said, “but no matter who it is—even if it were Castro’s brother himself, and we very much doubt that it will be—there will be undeniable and massive changes in how our government and Cuba’s interact.”

  “Is this the kind of pep talk they gave Teddy Roosevelt before he charged up San Juan Hill?”

  “It’s not going to be gunfire that determines the course of the next round of political change in Cuba, Mr. Deal. This time it’s going to be dollars. Whomever Fuentes is in contact with, that’s where the real power is located. You can trust me on that.”

  “I wouldn’t trust you to lock the door on your way out, Vines.”

  The man was unfazed. “You have a unique opportunity to help change the course of history; that’s what I’m trying to convey to you. You can be a part of the solution to an immense political and social problem that has plagued this country for almost fifty years. Right now, people are out there in those straits, riding inner tubes and smugglers’ boats, risking their lives to try to get to this country,” Vines said. He swept his arm vehemently toward the tasteful, wood-shuttered windows of the condo.

  “At the same time, you’ve got the Florida exile community, working the other side,” he continued. “They’re one of the most powerful lobbying group in Washington, clamoring for an agenda that makes the NRA look like a pack of liberals.” He shook his head as if bewildered by his own words. “The heartache, the expense, the strife for everyone…you can be a part of the solution to all of it.”

  “What if he’s the wrong guy?” Deal said.

  Vines stared back, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  “Say I come up with the name, you don’t like who it is.”

  Vines threw up his hands. “Then we’ll deal with it, if you’ll pardon the expression. It’s the information we’re after. The ability to prepare to respond. That’s the key…”

  “Forget it, Vines,” he said. “Go find yourself another contractor.”

  “You are the right man,” Vines said, his tone resolute. “You have no political agenda. Your reputation is impeccable.” He paused, an odd expression crossing his features. “When it comes right down to it, we want you over there for the same reasons Fuentes does.”

  “I must be doing something wrong,” Deal said, weary. “I am attracting entirely the wrong class of client.”

  “Ah, yes,” Vines said, as if he had forgotten something. “There is that, too.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and withdrew an envelope, then held it out toward Deal.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” Deal asked.

  “We don’t expect you to take time away from your business affairs without recompense,” Vines said. He extended the envelope another inch, practically waving it under Deal’s nose.

  Deal’s curiosity got the better of him. He took the envelope and peeled it open under Vines’ watchful eye. Another cashier’s check, he saw, another offshore bank. Not quite as many zeros as on Fuentes’ check, but not bad for a few days in sunny Havana.

  “Government work pays a lot better than I remember,” he told Vines.

  “Some of it may,” Vines said. The tone of his voice made Deal wonder if he’d finally struck a chord.

  “I wish I could help you out,” Deal said. He handed the check back toward Vines who stared as if it were a snake in his outstretched hand.

  “I don’t know where you got that,” Vines said, indicating the envelope, “but it certainly wasn’t from me.”

  Deal didn’t miss a beat. He crumpled the envelope and tossed it onto the kitchen counter. “We’ve wasted enough time, Vines. I want you out of here, now. I’ve got work to do.”

  He started forward, ready to brush by the man, but Vines didn’t move. “You’re a tough one to convince,” he said, with something like a smile on his face. “They said you would be, but I had no idea it would be this difficult.”

  “Is that right?” Deal said, sizing the man up. “We’ve been through fraternity, liberty and cold, hard cash. What’s next, rubber hoses?” Vines was barely six feet, maybe went one-seventy. “You have some help on the other side of that door?”

  Vines shook his head, and Deal thought the man’s expression shifted toward something resembling sadness. “It’s about your father…” he began, then faltered when he saw the look in Deal’s eyes.

  “You’d drag my father into this?” Deal felt his hands clenching. The hell with it, he thought, let Vines bring in his hidden SWAT team for backup. He was going to put an end to things right now. It was getting light outside, maybe one of his neighbors would be up early, hear the ruckus, they’d call the cops and bail him out.

  “Hear me out,” Vines said, raising a warning hand. “Just give me one more minute. If you don’t want to listen to any more after that, I’ll leave.”

  Deal hesitated, caught by some flicker of sincerity in the man’s gaze. “It better be goddamned good, Vines.”

  Vines nodded, edging away a millimeter or two, perhaps. “Your father died under something of a cloud, I can appreciate that…”

  “I’d call it more than a cloud,” Deal said. “More like a hurricane. Category Five. It’s been blowing for a dozen years or so.”

  “Barton Deal’s reputation was greatly diminished,” Vines continued. “And you’ve suffered as well. A promising career upended, a life spent since trying to rebuild a once-powerful firm…”

  “I appreciate the condolences,” Deal said. “But your minute’s just about gone.”

  “I can make it go away,” Vines blurted.

  Deal shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “That cloud, that force-five hurricane you were just talking about,” Vines repeated. “I am in a very real position to put a few things right for you.”

  “You’d have to be quite a guy, Vines,” Deal said.

  “Just listen,” the man said, his confident tone at odds with his unprepossessing appearance. “I know all about you, dammit. You’ve been bearing this cross for a dozen years. I can help you get it off your shoulders.”

  Deal blinked, not sure if he should let Vines continue or drop him with the punch he’d been yearning to throw at someone since the night he’d found his father in his study all those years before, since the moment the captain had offered him that holier-than-thou opportunity to slink off from the department and into the night.

  Just one dead-solid-perfect blow of retribution. That’s all. Maybe Vines wasn’t the perfect candidate, but he was suddenly looking pretty promising.

  “For the love of God,” Vines persisted. “What I’m offering you just doesn’t happen in this business. Not in my experience, anyway.”

  Deal felt himself teetering on the edge of some vast abyss, but whatever was down there in that darkness, it was impossible to fathom. Rage? Madness? Simple oblivion?

  He was exhausted, his head pounding, his emotions bouncing wildly inside hi
s skull. “Get it out, Vines. Get it over with.”

  “When Talbot Sams came to you for help some time back, he told you that your father had been one of his informants for years. He told you furthermore that he’d approached your father at a time when he had compromised himself with a certain group of clients and made a proposition he could not refuse: Your father was to feed information along to Sams about certain unsavory characters DealCo did business with and by doing so could keep himself out of prison, am I correct?”

  “Of course, he got to make a few bucks in the process,” Deal said, unable to contain himself any longer. “Sams became a kind of procurer by the time it was over. He’d send the scuzzwads my old man’s way, let him build hotels for crooked pension funds, banks for Colombian drug lords, then bust the bad guys when the time was right.” He broke off for a moment and threw up his hands in dismay.

  “It was an arrangement that made Sams a legend, I gather, and unless I’m mistaken, he managed to skim off a few bucks for himself. I guess my old man was able to live with it for a while, but in the end that’s what killed him. He blew his brains out, but it might as well have been Sams who pulled the trigger.” Deal’s chest was heaving by the last of it. He felt as if he’d picked up a safe and chucked it out the window at Vines’ back.

  Vines stared back, his voice soft now. “Everything you say makes perfect sense,” he said. “But can you prove it?”

  Deal scoffed. “Of course I can’t. That doesn’t mean…”

  “I can.” Vines cut him off.

  Deal stopped, staring. Vines reached into his pocket and tossed a key onto the tabletop beside them.

  “What is it?” Deal asked, his gaze moving from the key to meet Vines’ intent gaze.

  “A key to a safe-deposit box,” Vines said. “Inside it is everything from Sams’ own files pertaining to his arrangements with your father. Sams was a very thorough man, Mr. Deal.” He paused and shrugged. “He came on board when Nixon was vice-president. Maybe they shared the same mentality, a compulsion to document even the crimes they committed.

  “In any case, it’s all there. Proof that he blackmailed your father, the illicit business arrangements authorized by Sams himself, a record of wire transfers, everything.”

  Deal stared down at the key, then back at Vines. “So I take a trip to Cuba with Fuentes, you give me back my father’s reputation?”

  Vines looked away for a moment. “Don’t think that I’m comfortable with any of this, Mr. Deal. I don’t call the shots. I just do what I’m told.”

  Deal nodded, his mind traveling back to that dreadful night, the sight of his father sprawled backward in his chair. “It all comes a little late for my old man, doesn’t it?”

  Vines turned back to him, his gaze as close to sincere as it was likely to get. “Sure it does,” Vines said. “But it’s not too late for you.”

  Deal shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

  Vines gestured at the key. “Along with everything else, there are copies of the documents Sams planted in your old man’s office, the stuff they found the night he died.”

  It took a moment, but the import of what Vines had just told him seemed to reset the ground beneath Deal’s feet. “It was Sams who set me up, got me tossed?”

  Vines looked away. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t do much good to say that now…”

  Deal laughed, but it was a strangled, off-key sound. “Not Schnecter and his pals, then…”

  Vines had a plaintive look on his face. “It can’t change what’s happened, but it vindicates you and your old man, John. At least there’s that…”

  At least there’s that, he thought. How much of every bit of effort of every day had he spent trying to find some way to make his life seem right? Every setback, every blow along the way not just bad luck, not just part of life, not to him.

  He’d taken every punch with the inner certainty cosmic forces were at work, that it was his Job-like lot to reel and reel and keep himself standing upright for more. Now here was a man named Vines standing before him, suggesting that it didn’t have to be that way; it didn’t have to be that way anymore.

  Deal took a deep breath, gesturing at the key that lay between them on the table. “How do I know all this material you’re talking about really exists?”

  Vines reached into his pocket and withdrew a computer disk. “Much of what I’m talking about, you’ll find a copy of it on here. It’s an encrypted file. You can open it, you can read it, and then it’s gone.” Vines gestured through the doorway into the living room where Deal had set up a desktop computer in anticipation of Isabel’s arrival. “I wouldn’t try copying it if I were you,” he added.

  Deal eyed the disk, then gestured at the key that lay on the table. “I just take that to the bank, everything’s mine?”

  “You’ll need a second key, and some authorizations, but once you’re back from this run to Havana, you’ll have our complete cooperation.” Vines gave him what passed for a smile. “You get to keep that, too,” he said, pointing at the wadded envelope on the nearby counter.

  Deal felt his lip curl. “Not to mention the satisfaction that I’m doing my patriotic duty?”

  Vines nodded. “It’s quite a package, when you put it all together.”

  “And why should I trust you to come through?”

  Vines shrugged. “The information we’re talking about is of no value to anyone but you, Mr. Deal. Talbot Sams is dead, his criminal activity a matter of record. If you’re willing to be of assistance, we have no reason not to hold up our end of the bargain.”

  Deal found himself thinking of Fuentes, who suddenly seemed the soul of magnanimity in comparison to the man who stood before him. Fuentes, after all, was just an ordinary criminal who wanted to cut him in on the action, and rather handsomely at that. How on earth could you characterize people like Vines?

  He thought next of Fuentes’ check, tucked safely inside his wallet, those printed red numerals fairly pulsing in his mind’s eye. There’d been no mention of any million-dollar check by Vines, which had to make him wonder.

  One man seemed intent on filling Deal’s pockets with cash, and another seemed equally intent that he let it happen, and give him back his father’s soul in the bargain.

  “All I have to do is go over there, keep tabs on who I meet?”

  Vines glanced away momentarily. “That’s just about the size of it.”

  Deal heard something in his tone. “What else, Vines?”

  Vines turned back. “Just a couple of procedural details, that’s all.”

  Deal caught a hint of pink sky out the kitchen window, and glanced at his watch with a sigh. “I’m going to make some coffee, and then I’m going to go to work,” he said to Vines. “You’ve got ten minutes to tell me exactly what you want me to do over there.”

  “I can do it in five,” Vines said. He was actually smiling as he handed over the disk. Then he reached into his jacket to pull an envelope from his pocket.

  Chapter Ten

  “Stand up,” said the man in the suit, driving his foot into the old man’s side. “Don’t you see who it is?”

  The old man had been sleeping, his buttocks resting on the concrete floor, his back propped against the wall of his cell. It was a preferable arrangement to using the thin mattress, which was infested with lice.

  He had been dreaming of his preparations for a hurricane. He’d ordered truckloads of styrofoam packing peanuts brought to his house, and was engaged in filling all the spaces of every room, as if it were one huge multicompartmentalized box to prepare for shipping. He had reasoned that with all that packing jammed inside, nothing could break, even if the strongest winds hit. He was going to be the last item packed, just sit down in his favorite recliner with a cooler of beer at hand, have the fellows from the truck blow in the last of the styrofoam peanuts, pack him up tight, right in place, let the four winds blow.

  That’s when the kick awakened him
, more or less. He peered up at the two men who had entered his cell and blinked in the bright light. He had no idea what time it was, for there was no window in his cell and the bulb that dangled from the high ceiling was always on, except for the times he had managed to knock it out with a toss of his shoe.

  They’d beaten him the first couple of times he’d done it, then finally wised up and taken his shoes. They didn’t make you a prison guard because you were smart, not even in Cuba.

  He recognized the man in the bad suit as someone who had participated in the beatings. Certain things were hard to forget. But the other one, a bearded man in green Army fatigues, he was not so certain of.

  “Stand up!” the man in the suit was shouting. “Salute your comandante…” He was positioning himself for another kick when the bearded man stopped him.

  “It is not necessary,” the bearded man said.

  He knelt down, his eyes level with the old man’s. “Do you know me?” he asked, his gaze keen on the old man’s eyes.

  “Now I do,” the old man said with a nod.

  “Of course,” the bearded man said, a smile playing at his lips. He glanced up knowingly at the man in the suit.

  “You’re Jesus Christ,” the old man said. “Come to save me at last.”

  The man with the beard hung his head. “I think you are playing games with me,” he said. He directed the first of it to the floor, then brought his gaze back to meet the old man’s. “My friend of so many years, how could you forget?”

  “We were friends?” the old man asked.

  “Good friends,” the bearded man replied.

  “Then why don’t you get me out of here?”

  The bearded man smiled tolerantly. “Joseíto here has questions for you, important questions. There are people who wish me harm, old friend. You know these people, and you know of their plans. If you will only speak of these things to Joseíto then you will be on your way.” He waved as if the notion were impossible not to grasp.

  “People want to hurt you?”