Havana Best Friends (16 page)

Her thoughts shifted to him. One of the nicest, kindest, most attractive men she had ever met, living on a pension, alone in New York. The worst kind of unmalleable macho, the kind who made women foolishly believe he was at their beck and call. Poet, pianist, lawyer, bilingual, charismatic. She recalled the evening, two or so years earlier, at a party, when someone asked him how it happened. Nine or ten people had polished off a dozen bottles of wine and tongues were loose.

She had never dared to ask him, nobody had in her presence. They were introduced in 1996, she met some of his friends, heard him recite the poems of Neruda, Mistral, Machado, Dario, and
reminisce about his childhood in Cuba. She had taken him to her favourite places in Greenwich Village, Central Park, Chinatown, accompanied him to innumerable parties. Nobody had ever dared ask him how it happened.

“I had a premonition,” he began in his flawless English, head high, glass in hand. Then he chuckled. “We all saw it coming. You know when something really bad is going to happen to you. To us grunts on the ground, I mean. Not to the colonels hovering five thousand feet above in command-and-control choppers. You tread into the swamps, into the jungle, into the rice paddies; five months to go, four, three, two. The ultimate countdown. With each passing day the probability of being sent home crippled for life or in a body bag increases. We were being screwed by everybody: the brass and the VC. The brass needed body counts for its charts, and we were sent out so the gooks could ambush us, and then our hardware could wipe them out. The gooks knew and prepared for it. That particular day I was up behind the point man walking along a trail when the point man snags a tripwire. I heard a blast, then blacked out. I learned later we had walked into a claymore mine rigged alongside the trail. The platoon retreated, the whole area was napalmed, but no VC bodies were found. Of course. You plant booby traps, then flee. So, there was no body count, only an eyes count – mine.”

“Do we take a left here?” Sean asked as he waited for an opening in the traffic along the Luminous Fountain, his eyes on 26th Street.

Marina consulted the map on her knees. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Let’s stick to the road we know. Keep going straight ahead. Boyeros all the way to Malecón. Left onto Malecón.”

“Okay.”

There had been resigned bitterness in Carlos’s voice. When he’d finished the story, he’d shrugged, then smiled, and it suddenly hit her. Before that evening she had never lost a moment’s sleep over the fate of soldiers, over the enormous price war exacts from ordinary people, the lunacy and injustice of it all. She had been thirteen when he was wounded in 1973. Back then, Vietnam was for her a remote corner of the world with funny-sounding names (Saigon, Ho Chi Minh, Vietcong; it sounded like Japanese music:
tong, ting, tang, bong)
where most people were named Nguyen, and where some bloody war was going on that the Buenos Aires media reported daily in all its gory detail. Later, her family moved to the United States. When a military coup happened in Argentina and news of torture and disappearances made headlines in New York, it all seemed as distant and alien as Vietnam.

After that evening she grew closer to Carlos. Until Robert Klein came into her life, she had had sex only with the blind man. Even after she and Robert became engaged, she occasionally went to bed with Carlos. It wasn’t love; it was a combination of compassion and physical attraction made more enjoyable by the fact that he never detected the former and didn’t take seriously the latter. Language was a factor too. She liked her native language enormously and Cuban Spanish sounded so different:
deviously insinuating
was the term she coined for it. It was so sweet when, inside her, rubbing her clitoris with his crotch, Carlos murmured in her ears the most beautiful love poems in Spanish. Such exalted orgasms. He never asked for commitment, never planned, never said a word concerning the future. Carlos just enjoyed what life presented him with, which was perfect. So, on the day Robert announced it was over, the first thing that came to
her mind was how nice it would be to renew her leisurely strolls along Central Park holding hands with her favourite blind man. Maybe her favourite man, period.

Once she learned Carlos’s secret, she wondered whether he had been planning on using her these last two years. Carlos knew Sean didn’t speak a word of Spanish and would need an interpreter. But she had met Carlos before he’d learned from his dying father about the hidden treasure. The blind man was familiar with other Spanish-speaking women; she had seen them openly flirting with him at parties, especially when he played the piano: Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Spaniards, all swooning as he lost himself in the finest romantic music of the century. Still, he had chosen her. And if it all turned out well, she would be set up for life. Never object to being used when the payoff is high.

Still, she wanted to believe she was not going to Cuba for the second time in three months only for the money. Carlos deserved a break and she wanted to be instrumental in bringing it about. A nice home of his own, a grand piano by the fireplace, fiction in Braille in both languages, as many books on tape as he liked, all the fine music he adored and the best CD and tape player available on the market, a chauffeur-driven car, servants. It was great that her aspirations and his well-being harmonized so fittingly.

“Carlos is such a nice person,” she said, wanting to share her feelings with someone who knew the blind man.

Sean gave her a baleful look before pointing at the tape player. “Yeah,” was his only comment.

The fucking paranoid iceman
, Marina thought and she inhaled deeply. What was the matter with this guy? Everybody was a suspect, all the rooms and cars were bugged, everything had to be on a need-to-know basis. There was probably a lot more going on
that she didn’t know about. The careful planning, she understood. What he called the recon trip, she understood. The fake names and passports, she understood. But why couldn’t she know his real name, for God’s sake? Well, he didn’t want to know hers either. A stupid rule that transformed Rita Petrone into Marina Leucci. And they had to pretend to be honeymooners; straightforward exchanges were forbidden except in open spaces. Now, to top it all, the cane and the limp. It was ridiculous!

However, the guy was covering all expenses and so far he must have invested a lot of money in an unsubstantiated story. How much did four passports with all the right stamps and visas cost? Plus the plane tickets, hotel rooms, meals, the rental, and who knows what other expenses that he kept to himself. She had no idea. Carlos didn’t have a penny, and she hadn’t been asked to contribute anything, so the iceman was the sole provider of funds. Anyone would want to believe Carlos’s incredible story – she herself had been instantly seduced by it – but planning the whole operation, and sinking a lot of money into it, demanded the kind of risk-taking found only in professional adventurers.

Come to think of it, it was like a treasure hunt. You invest a lot of money and you may or may not locate the sunken galleon. A risky investment, this one, where the really difficult part was not finding the loot but getting it out. The iceman had worked out how, but he wasn’t saying. Compartmentalization, he called it. Carlos shrugged and said okay. What else could he do? He couldn’t make demands, was forced to accept whatever his friend considered best.

“Listen, darling,” Carlos had argued when she complained, in bed, one night he spent at her apartment. “He’s the only man I know who has the brains and the balls to pull this off. But even if
he didn’t, he’s the only man on the face of the Earth whom I trust all the way. We were buddies in high school, were drafted on the same day, did basic training together at Fort Polk, were in the same platoon in Nam. He saved my ass twice, carried me to safety when I was wounded, was the only friend who came to visit after he was sent home.”

Carlos had paused and frowned. His scars grouped close every time he knitted his brow, like lizards huddling together for warmth.

“He changed after he quit the army, though. When I wanted to know what he was doing he became evasive. ‘Different things,’ he would say. Or ‘Selling junk door to door.’ Over the years he became very secretive. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. It probably has to do with his line of business, which I ignore. One day he said he was moving to California to get into the record business. Only he knows where he really went; it could have been to hunt polar bears at the North Pole or pump oil in Nigeria, for all I know. Then, all of a sudden, he knocks on my door. And the moment I heard his voice, I knew he was the man I was looking for. What amazes me is he never crossed my mind before he visited. Incredible. And when he agreed to the recon, he said, ‘Your friend does what I tell her to do. She asks no questions, makes no suggestions. Can she live with that?’

“He won’t double-cross me, won’t short-change me either,” Carlos had added. “If it’s there he’ll get it, bring it back, find a buyer, collect our money. Then we’ll split it three ways and you and I will pay him back what he spent. There will be no argument. What he says, we pay, fifty-fifty. Now I ask you, can you live with that?”

She had told Carlos that she could and made the same promise to Sean in person the next time they met. She would do it for
personal gain and out of compassion. But she hated unreasonable obedience, especially when it involved a woman submitting to a man. It was why she pitied Elena and sympathized with her. It would be nice to offer her the possibility of a fresh start in the country of her choice, the chance to leave behind the frustrating life she had lived so far and to become independent of her freakish brother. And all this time, she’d been living hand to mouth with millions hidden under her roof. Nice woman. She deserved a break.

“I remember this,” Sean said. They were at Malecón and G Street. He steered around the monument to General Calixto Garcia and headed for Miramar.

“It’s like a giant lake,” Marina commented, staring at the calm blue sea where a few kids were swimming.

“Full of sharks,” Sean added.

Fucking iceman
, Marina thought one more time as she shot a disapproving glance at him.

Four hours later, Sean Abercorn was reclining on a white plastic sun lounger by the pool. He wore swimming trunks, sunglasses, and flip-flops; his right hand closed around a tumbler of Scotch on the rocks. Under the lounger, a thick aluminium cane rested. A gentle breeze played with his hair and the setting sun warmed his body.

He was watching the action at the biggest of the Copacabana’s swimming pools – a hundred yards long, forty yards wide. It had been blasted into the rocky coastline and, as waves rolled and ebbed, and when the tide turned, the water flowed in and out through crevices along the concrete wall facing the sea. Sean let
his gaze sweep east and west all along the seashore. It seemed as if Havana had neither sandy beaches nor high-rises. The city would have been much more appealing to tourists had it resembled Rio de Janeiro in that respect, he thought. Okay, this was the right moment to review the whole thing for the last time.

Fact: He hadn’t really known Consuegra Senior. They’d never bridged the generation gap. But every time he picked Carlos up for a double date, a ball game, or a party, he shook hands with his parents, eased himself onto the couch, exchanged a few words. His buddy’s old man had been a fanatical anti-Communist who supported all Cuban exile groups ready to do something to topple Castro. Despite having been astute enough to move part of his fortune to Miami prior to the collapse of the Batista regime, Consuegra Senior was consumed by anger and frustration. Now Sean understood why. It hadn’t been posturing. His anguish back then added credibility to his bizarre deathbed story.

Fact: His first foray into Havana seemed to confirm the stuff was still there; Marina was 100 per cent sure. She said the soap dish hadn’t been touched in all these years, repeated it to Carlos in his presence, and, most revealing of all, had returned to Havana with him today. For all her compassion toward his blind buddy, the interpreter wouldn’t have left New York if she’d had the slightest doubt.

Fact: The expert would arrive tomorrow and stay in this same hotel until next Tuesday. He’d probably ask him to his room on Sunday morning, if all went well. It was an extra precaution in case Consuegra Senior had been fooled by the smartasses in the trade. He had to make certain the prize was worth the risk of getting caught smuggling it out of the country. The old man had
been an accountant, part of President Batista’s political machinery, didn’t know the first thing about what he’d hidden.

Fact: The main obstacle, the short guy, had been removed from the scene. He’d been the kind of man who, after greedily giving his consent to everything in the beginning and encouraging his sister to do the same, would have tried to renegotiate once he saw the merchandise. The son of a bitch would have caused real trouble. He might even have tried to double-cross them, run away with the loot, call the police. He had dealt with that sort of motherfucker in the past, knew his kind. It was why he had included Truman in the recon trip. Well, the short guy was no longer a factor.