Havana Best Friends (17 page)

Fact: The only person whose reaction remained unpredictable was Elena Miranda. Extremely attractive, gullible, kind, probably principled. She reminded him of a minefield. You are mindful of it all the way, then make a mistake on the home stretch and
boom
. Plan A was to get her out of her apartment, make her stay with them at the Copacabana. Plan B followed if she refused their invitation. He would be forced to resort to Plan C if she also refused B, and he’d do it with a heavy heart, but he’d do it. Nobody would stand in his way. They would go and see her at noon tomorrow; she was on vacation. He had looked it up on the Internet; the school summer vacation in Cuba ran from early July to late August.

Fact: Tonight he would tell Marina that Pablo was dead. He feared her reaction if she learned what had happened to him in front of Elena, like gaping at him slack-jawed as she realized he must have ordered it. Elena was fast, would catch on immediately. She would wonder why Marina was so shaken by the death of a man she had seen only twice in her life. He needed Marina
cool and unconcerned, focused on the deal at hand, not shaken by the news.

Fact: Early in the morning he would find a hardware store and buy a chisel and hammer. And that was it. Preparations complete. Seventy-two hours, tops. Go in, snatch the stuff, get out. Being the only one who knew this operation down to the last detail made him feel reasonably certain of success. Of course, there were the uncontrollable factors that fools and wise men call luck. He took pride in admitting the existence of chance. It implied he was a wise man.

Sean sipped a little whisky. As he was returning the glass to the low plastic round table, he spotted a man elbowing a friend and gaping at someone. The friend stared too. Sean followed their gaze. Marina, in a white high-waist bikini, a towel in her left hand. She also wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, and leather sandals. He preferred slim women, but admitted she had the kind of figure many men lust after, probably making her disdainful of oglers. It could be one of the reasons why she enjoyed the company of a blind man so much. To feel wanted for non-physical reasons for a change, not to be stared at like a juicy sirloin steak. Real or feigned indifference is the best approach to her kind, Sean thought.

In his opinion, Marina would never get beyond the aspiring-artist category. Women who, at twenty-five, unable to figure out how the latest starlet has made it with half their looks and talent, begin messing around with married men, smoke pot now and then, have a couple of drinks every evening. By their mid-thirties, after countless unsuccessful auditions for lousy parts (or unsold paintings, unpublished poems, songs never recorded), what started as a benign nymphomania has turned them into professional
seductresses, victims of the great male conspiracy, who retaliate with occasional forays into lesbianism and drinking binges. In their early forties, when the first symptoms of menopause develop and alcoholism has set in, they start frantically hunting for an old rich guy to persuade him that prenuptial arrangements are for people who don’t love each other as they do. She seemed brighter than most of her kind, though.

Marina came over, stooped, kissed his cheek, pulled up a sun lounger. Then she spread her towel on it and lay down.

“Oh, this is great,” she said, throwing her arms back and interlacing her fingers over her head. She took a deep breath of sea air and exhaled with a satisfied “aah.”

“You said you felt like a nap.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

A smiling waiter approached them and discreetly inspected the woman from head to toe. Marina ordered a mojito. The waiter departed.

“It’s weird,” she said. “I usually have trouble sleeping when I’m jet-lagged, not when I stay in the same time zone.”

“There’s a first for everything.”

“I guess so. Nice sunset.”

“Yeah. No sunscreen?”

“Not at this hour.”

She closed her eyes, sighed, relaxed. In the time it took for the waiter to return with the drink, while Marina silently luxuriated in the late-afternoon warmth, Sean considered whether this was the right moment to tell her. The waiter came back. Marina thanked the man, took a sip, then rested the glass on the lounger’s edge.

“Wouldn’t it be great if Pablo had moved or had an accident or something?” Sean asked after a minute.

Marina grinned. “I don’t believe in miracles.”

“Yet, they happen, you know.”

“C’mon, Sean. A realist like you?”

“Just for argument’s sake.”

Something in the man’s tone made her slowly turn her head.

“Are you trying to tell me something?”

Sean fastened his eyes on hers. “Yes.”

Marina squinted behind the sunglasses. “What is it?”

“He had an accident.”

Following a moment’s hesitation, Marina swung her legs round and sat facing Sean, drink in hand. She stripped the sunglasses away. “He what?”

“Lie back. Lower your voice.”

“What do you mean he had an accident?”

“Get a hold of yourself. Lie back. People are staring.”

Marina gazed around. Yes, forty feet away two guys were eyeing them. Feeling that she was about to learn something nasty and dangerous, she did as she was told. “What happened?”

“Somebody killed him.”

No initial reaction from Marina. She wondered if she had heard right. She began getting up, couldn’t complete the action, fell back. “Oh, my God. You … Oh, my God!”

“Relax. It had nothing to do with us. It happened three days after we left.”

Marina drained her glass in two gulps. “I told Carlos and I told you,” she gasped. “No threats, no violence.”

“Take it easy.”

“Take it easy?” Marina jumped at the opportunity of speaking her mind. “Listen, brother, you want me to take it easy, you come clean with me or I’ll get a cab to the airport and leave this city so fast your head will spin.”

Sean chuckled away the threat, making Marina extremely angry.

“Don’t you laugh at me, you sonofabitch,” she hissed.

“Okay. It had nothing to do with us, you understand? Nothing. It happened three days after we left.”

“Oh, really? It had nothing to do with you? Just blind luck, right?” She oozed sarcasm.

“Believe it or not, it’s just that.” Sean raised a hand to quell an interruption. “Listen to me, Marina, just listen to me. I know an American who lives here. He hijacked a plane in the 1970s; can’t go back because he’ll be tried and sentenced. Remember the afternoon I went out alone? You stayed at the Nacional?”

“Yes.”

“I went to see him. The guy is having a hard time, has little money, makes a living translating documents. So, I asked him to keep an eye on Pablo after we left. I cooked up a story for him. I said I was acting as middleman for an American investor who wants to gain a foothold in Cuba and hopes to buy the company Pablo used to work for. I said we wanted some inside info Pablo could provide. I also told him Pablo seemed unreliable to me, and I wanted him to find out as much as possible about him. For $500 he promised to do his best. What I really wanted was for him to keep an eye on Elena and Pablo. Suppose they moved? Then we would have to deal with new people, maybe a bigger family. See my point?”

“Keep talking.”

“Well, the guy agreed to do this for me. I said I’d give him a call in late July. So, I called him a week ago and learned that Pablo had been murdered three days after we left.”

Exasperated, she turned to face the sea. After a second, she confronted Sean again. “Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“Because I feared exactly the reaction you had a minute ago. That you would suspect I had done Pablo in and refuse to come. Think. It’s impossible. We were together every single minute from the time we left the
paladar
until we landed in Toronto. I couldn’t have done it.”

Marina pondered this for less than two seconds. “Right. But you could have ordered this hijacker to do it for you.”

“Listen, Carlos is my best friend. I’d do anything for him. Except murdering someone or ordering a hit. You think I’m a gangster or something?”

Returning her gaze to the sea, Marina took a deep breath.
The fucking iceman
. A moment later, she faced her partner again. “Why are you telling me now?”

“Because tomorrow Elena is going to tell us the news,” he said in a patient, condescending tone. “I don’t want you to react like you just did, staring at me as if I had ordered him killed, choking on a glass of water or some other extreme reaction. Elena is bright, she would wonder why you were acting so confused and nervous over the death of a man you had only talked to twice in your life. We have to show a little grief, say how sorry we are, and that’s it.”

Marina placed her empty glass on the cement floor and pondered the whole thing for almost a minute. Sean couldn’t have killed Pablo. He was right, it was impossible. He might have ordered the job, though. Should the expatriate living here be
desperate for money, a snap of Sean’s fingers might make him do whatever the iceman wished. It smelled of foul play from a mile away. She hadn’t liked Sean from the start, well, not from the very start, but a little after. She sensed there were too many dark episodes in his past, things normal people don’t do, but now she hated his guts. The kind of guy who stops at nothing to achieve his aims. And his suspicion turned out to be right. Had he told her in New York or Toronto, she would have bailed out. But here, now, what could she do? Carlos came to her mind. He had such high hopes in both of them. And maybe, just maybe, Pablo’s death had nothing to do with their project. A coincidence that would greatly increase the possibility of winning over Elena and make things easier for all three of them. Her anger had fizzled out somewhat, but she felt it surging again as she turned to address Sean.

“Don’t remind me of the ground rules you set at the beginning, Sean. I don’t need to be reminded. But from now on I won’t be just a passive interpreter. I want to know in advance all the moves you’re planning. Right now. And if Elena says no to the deal, she walks. You harm her in any way, kill her or have her killed, I’ll turn you in. I swear to God I’ll turn you in and you’ll spend the rest of your fucking life in a rotten Communist prison, if they don’t shoot you at dawn. Now, what’s with the limp? What’s the cane for? And drop the frigging patronizing tone, you bastard.”

Her decision to never again believe a word the motherfucker said remained unspoken. The horizon had swallowed half of the setting sun when he began talking.

Unbeknownst to both conspirators, at that exact moment the tall, overweight man who’d told Pablo Miranda his name was John
Splittoesser disembarked from a LACSA flight originating in Toronto, Canada. The Cuban Immigration lieutenant who examined the Canadian passport and compared its photograph with the traveller’s face didn’t pay any attention to the name of its holder. Had he done so, he wouldn’t have learned anything useful. The document had been issued to one Anthony Cummings. The killer’s real name was Ernest Truman and he was not Canadian.

Truman was a native of a violent neighbourhood in East St. Louis, a tough Illinois town. Deserted by his mountain of a father, raised by his hard-drinking mother, the boy found out early in life that he was the tallest and strongest of all the kids his age (even those one or two years older) living around the intersection of Margate Avenue and Winder Street. From the age of seven he had hung out with friends on garbage-strewn streets where whores peddled their wares, junkies mainlined, vicious fighting was not uncommon, and cops were on the take. Ernest learned to discriminate against greasers, spics, and rats, to shoplift and run numbers, to sort out important, low-profile people from flashy nickel-dimers. At eleven, Ernie smoked his first joint, watched his first porn flick, sent a fifteen-year-old to the hospital with a fractured skull. The term
streetwise
was invented for the likes of Ernie Truman.

By the time he enrolled in junior high, Ernie felt sure that his size and strength, coupled with his proclivity to kick the living shit out of motherfuckers, would greatly influence his choice of profession. He didn’t excel in his studies, but was uncommonly bright. Calling school crime “kid’s stuff,” in his free time he got a job counting cash for a drug dealer. He also played football, lifted weights, practiced jiu-jitsu and karate. Deploring the fact that the Vietnam War ended before his time, Ernest Truman volunteered
for the U.S. Army in 1978. The drill sergeants eyed the bull of a man admiringly and taught him nine different ways to kill with his bare hands. When he completed his training, Truman considered himself a quiet, well-adjusted man with a great future. In 1983, already a four-stripe sergeant, he was one of the military advisers instructing the Nicaraguan Contras.

The first time Bruce Lawson saw Ernest Truman was in a picture taken in the Nicaraguan jungle by a war correspondent. The photograph showed the bodies of two shirtless Sandinistas lying on their backs, their chests ripped open. Facing the camera, a grinning Truman squatted between the dead men, elbows supported on spread-apart knees, bloodied hands clutching something.