Adios Muchachos (19 page)

1250 hours

Anyone who has not experienced a tropical downpour cannot possibly imagine what it is like to have a veritable curtain of water drop two or three inches of rain in just a few minutes. Fortunately, a few minutes were all it lasted.

Alicia stood in her garage with the door open and the bag of money on a piece of canvas, waiting for Victor to pick her up. The huge drops were splashing water on her legs, and her shoes were a sorry sight.

Victor brought the Malibu right up to the garage overhang so that Alicia could climb in without getting any wetter. Then he moved the car up a notch to pick up the bag and put it in the back seat.

They drove in silence for a few minutes. As the car turned onto First Avenue, Victor pulled over where they could look at the sea and flashed his Mel Gibson smile. He gave Alicia a double high-five and broke out into a sincere laugh as he reached over to embrace her. He held her for a moment and screeched out Mexican style: “Hoohooy, hooey, hooey,
puta madre
, with these
pinche
millions, no one is going to
chingar
with our lives any more!”

Alicia laughed along with him and made fun of his Mexican expressions.

“Oh, jes, Cisco, now gwee gonna be dee man,” she spoofed, kissing him with true feeling and yearning for immediate affection.

Victor delicately pulled away. “Not now, Alicia; first we’ve got to get our heads together and see how we’re going to get rid of … of …”

“Yes, the parcel,” Alicia completed, helping him out of his stammer. She had lost the crest of her desire and was now arranging her clothes and hair for a different kind of combat. “OK, what’s the plan?”

“We have to get rid of him as soon as possible—before they get suspicious and before the police get wind of it. That means today.”

“Right now?”

“As soon as it gets dark out.”

1315 hours

When they were safely in the house in Siboney, Victor dropped the bag on the table and, eyes glittering with childish impatience, opened it to look at the prize. Like Alicia, he paused to smell the rose.

“I thought you might have kept it at home.”

Alicia took the rose from his hands and looked at it with disappointment. After a second she put it carefully aside and said, “I would have, if it had been from you …”

“Come on,” Victor chided, “this is no time to get romantic. We still have some very important things that have to be done.”

Alicia put the rose behind her ear, assuming a rebellious pose to protest Victor’s attitude. Victor put the bag into the closet and, taking Alicia by the hand, walked over to the computer where he keyed in a message to himself.

“The most pressing thing now is to get rid of the corpse. Number two is putting the money some place safe until we figure out how to spend it or get it out of the country—”

“Getting rid of the body,” Alicia interrupted, “is not going to be any problem. My backyard is huge and I’ve already spoken to my mother—”

“Are you completely out of your mind?” Victor shouted, leaping out of the chair and waving his arms like a windmill. “I can’t believe you really went and told your mother—”

“Don’t get high and mighty on me, Victor King! Of course I told my mother. First of all, she has an insurance policy—”

Victor slammed his fist against the wall, yelling, “What the hell are you talking about? Insurance against what?”

“Against you, goddamnit, against you. Now settle down and listen to me. To begin with, any secret is safer with my mother than it is with you; second, I trust her more than anyone else in the world. Do you catch my drift?”

The argument went on for about half an hour—Victor declaring that “need to know” had to be the guiding principle; Alicia insisting that her mother was a good ally—and on and on they went until Victor finally calmed down. He still thought she was a blabbermouth, but what was done was done; there was really nothing to be gained from arguing.

“OK, OK, I give up. But sooner or later there is a distinct possibility that they will tie one of us, and therefore both of us, in with this business, and the first thing the police are going to want to do is dig up the whole fucking neighborhood. I think the other place you showed me would be a lot better, in practical terms, and furthermore, there is nothing to link us to it.”

A few years earlier, before Alicia had even thought of embarking on her pedaling career, she had had an affair with a senior official, a married man, who went to great pains to protect his reputation, position, and standard of living. They had only met a handful of times, never in his official car and always in the same place: on Thirtyeighth Street in Nuevo Vedado, next to a huge sinkhole left by the collapse of the roof of an ancient cavern. At the time there was a military unit stationed there, with secret underground facilities and strange antennas. But earlier that year, she happened to go by the place and noticed that the military facility was gone. She could not see any sign of the former installation, nor of the fences and screens that hid the bottom of the pit from view. What she did see was a huge grader pushing dry fill around, apparently for some construction project.

On the high end of Thirty-eighth Street, there were a few private homes and a single multi-story building that was in its early construction stages, but along the last five hundred yards, there was absolutely nothing. The military had not wanted anyone around when they were there; now that they were gone, there were no buildings or facilities. The street descended in a very tight curve to the Almendares River and was walled in by a cliff on the left side and the pit on the right, leaving some three hundred yards where, except for someone cruising by, there was total privacy.

When Alicia first took Victor there, he had commented that it would be perfect for hiding the stiff … as well as for actually getting rid of the corpse. If they could camouflage it for a few hours, the constant procession of trucks dumping fill into the pit would cover Rieks and all that was human about him, for eternity.

“OK! You want the hole, you got it. Now, let’s get moving,” Alicia said.

“Wonderful. Where can we put him so he’ll defrost?”

“Waddaya mean, ‘defrost’?”

“Of course. We have to make him flexible and put some make-up on his face so that he can ride in the back seat of the car. You can make believe you’re making out with—”

“Oh, yeah,” Alicia said feigning boredom, “making out with a corpse is a great idea, only you’ll have to get your mother to do it. ’Cause me, I don’t ever want to even see Rieks again.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“I suggest we put him in a sack of some kind and put him in the trunk, where corpses are supposed to ride.”

Victor doubted, bit his lip, tweaked his head to the side. “OK! He gets the sack.”

1730 hours

The rental car pulled into the garage. When the automatic door closed, the dark man with the moustache got out, took off his wig and moustache, and fished some papers out of the glove compartment. Turning to Alicia, he said, “Here, you take them. They’re the papers they gave me at the rental agency … Oh, and by the way, you’re going to love the way this hatchback works.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“Come over here,” Victor said, enthusiastic as a child with a new toy. “Look how the back seat folds forward; you see that?”

“So? I don’t see the point,” Alicia commented, perplexed.

“Try to follow me. When we get to the place, we make out for a little while … time enough to make sure there’s no one around. Then we hop into the back seat, fold down the back rest, open the hatch from the inside, and simply push Rieks up and over without ever getting out of the car.”

“Great!” Alicia said matter-of-factly. “That’s the kind of technical stuff men are good at. And since you’re so strong, you push him out. I refuse to get near him. And by the way, he was stuck to the bottom of the freezer again, so I had to pour hot water on him and all that. I’ve just about had it with him.”

They walked into the kitchen together, past the table with the frozen food that had covered the corpse, and on to the freezer.

“While you were renting the perfect car, I found some old drapes with a tropical garden print that will be the perfect camouflage for the corpse. From the top of the cliff, it’ll look like just so much grass and weeds.”

“Great!” Victor retorted, “That’s the kind of stuff women are good at.”

“Touché! Now let’s get him wrapped up.”

Together they tipped the freezer over to avoid having to touch the body any more than necessary, but as it slid off its metal stand, the door flew open and the frozen body skidded across the room and almost out the back door.

“Catch him! He’s getting away,” Victor joked, and they had a moment’s laugh that did them both a lot of good.

They wrapped a couple of towels around him and maneuvered him onto the drapes. With the body in a fetal position, there was enough material left over to tie a knot on the head side and another on the feet side, t0 serve as handles with which to haul the weight. From that point on, it was a piece of cake to get Rieks into the garage, where Victor had to lift him into the trunk. Something else men are good at.

1910 hours

Alicia’s mother opened the front door and almost fainted. Standing in the threshold was a dark, good-looking man, about forty, with a taxi waiting.

“Fernando! What are you doing here? We weren’t expecting you for another couple of months.”

The man embraced her, gave her the traditional two pecks (Cubans only peck once), and stepped back a yard: “You look marvelous, Margarita. If I weren’t in love with Alicia … I just got here, as you can see,” he said, pointing to the taxi, “and I wanted to surprise you both.”

“Oh dear,” Margarita said, “I’m afraid Alicia is up to her neck with her classes and her exams. She told me she would be staying at a friend’s house tonight to see if they can finish a project for her creative architecture class.”

“Well, too bad,” he said, a little disappointed. “In that case, I’ll go on to the hotel and get some rest. If Alicia should come, tell her I’ll call her later this evening. I bet she’s going to be surprised.”

You bet your sweet ass she’s going to be surprised,
Margarita thought, and suddenly looked up with apprehension, as if the handsome Argentine could read her mind.

When he reached the taxi, Fernando turned toward Margarita. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Through torture and tarnation,” Margarita said.

“I’ve arranged everything in Buenos Aires and I’ve come to marry Alicia!”

At her age, having lived many years in different countries with different cultures—where people have sex only on Fridays, or where they eat raw bacon, or where they eat with their fingers from a common platter, or where they find it good manners to burp and fart to their heart’s content—Margarita thought she had exhausted her capacity for surprise. But she was, just a little bit, surprised.

1922 hours

The little car wound its way along the wooded road where the alleged kidnappers had abandoned Victor to his fate, crossed the bridge over the rapids of the Almendares River, and struggled up the steep grade that led from the water to the high ground of the fashionable Nuevo Vedado neighborhood. Four blocks up the grade, it turned right to head down Thirty-eighth. It passed right by the houses on the high end. There were three or four people loafing around the building being constructed. As the vehicle coasted toward the low end of the street, a dog started to bark; then a chorus of dogs got into the act.

At the cliff, Victor backed the car up slowly and carefully. It would not do to have the car go over the embankment, and Alicia was visibly nervous. When the car’s rear axle was about a yard from the edge, putting the hatch about a foot from the sheer drop of thirty feet, Victor turned off the engine and began to do his breathing exercises.

“Does that stuff really work?” Alicia asked, truly interested.

“Believe me, if it didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.”

“You’re going to have to teach me some day. I could really use something like that right now.”

They waited for their eyes to get fully accustomed to the dark and then settled down to give the impression that they were just a couple of lovers minding each other’s business. Up and down the street they peered, trying to detect the slightest movement, the slightest indication that someone could be there watching them.

Satisfied that they were completely alone on that hidden stretch of street, Victor began to climb over the back of the front seat and into the rear, where he fought down one side of the backrest and then the other. He had already rigged the lock of the hatchback with a piece of clothes hanger so that he would not have to wrestle with Rieks to get it open. Holding the hatch open but near to the closed position, Victor whispered to Alicia, “Get into the driver’s seat and get ready to drive away. Make sure there’s no one around.”

“I’m looking … I’m looking … Now, Victor! Do it!”

Despite the fact that he had prepared everything, he still had to get the body over the six-inch back wall of the trunk. Propping himself against the front seat, Victor pushed the body back with his left foot and shoved with his right foot to try and get it to roll over and out of the trunk.

When the body suddenly flipped out of the car, it scraped against the edge of the cliff, and then nothing for a few seconds, followed by a distant, mute thud.

With the lights off, Alicia let the car coast about twenty yards down the street, then turned onto the shoulder and started the engine. When the car was facing the other way, she turned the lights on and, for all intents and purposes, another car was just passing by.

2011 hours

The buzzer on Karl Bos’s front door sounded twice before he was able to open it. A young black man stood in the doorway, accompanied by the building superintendent. He showed her his identification card from the National Revolutionary Police and asked to speak with Mr. Bos.

“I’m Karl Bos. Please come in,” Bos invited. “Have a seat; what can I do for you?”

Getting directly to the point, the young man pulled a card from his pocket and, handing it over to Bos, asked, “Do you know this man?”