Havana Best Friends (41 page)

Sartorially speaking, they didn’t belong at the Pickwick, a modestly priced hotel for low-income or unpretentious or thrifty people visiting Manhattan. For many years Carlos Consuegra had been an underprivileged New Yorker who couldn’t afford designer labels or expensive places, so when he had to suggest an indoor location with a pay phone for Elena to field the long distance call, the Pickwick’s lobby came to mind. But on this last day of the year the blind man looked wealthy and impeccable in a champagne-coloured, wool-and-silk three-button suit over a cotton piqué shirt, a silk tie, and leather shoes. Marina had chosen
it for him and, after tenderly feeling the materials, he had forked out over $2,700 for the outfit. The camel coat hanging from the coat-hanger had cost him another $1,100.

Elena’s transformation was even more striking; only Marina could fully appreciate the metamorphosis. The teacher looked stunning in a pale grey wool suit over a black polo-neck jersey, black tights, and high-heeled boots. She had a string of artificial pearls around her neck and matching earrings. A Cartier watch added a dash of ostentatious affluence. Even in multi-racial Manhattan, where beautiful women abound, Elena Miranda drew admiring glances.

Six weeks earlier, after much haggling, a diamond trader had paid Carlos $49,000 for a mid-sized diamond. Elena got $43,000 for one of hers; Marina received $51,000. The trader planned to sell the blind man’s gem for not a penny less than $175,000; Elena’s was a bargain at $150,000; Marina’s might fetch a minimum of $180,000, perhaps as much as $200,000. The sellers suspected they’d been fleeced, but being hard-pressed for money and lacking proof of ownership, they had no alternative. Lawson had been the man with the contacts; his death left them without expert guidance.

The nice clothes were part of a strategy to appear wealthy and gain respectability. They were also doing a lot of research on diamonds and their prices at public libraries. Elena and Marina read in whispers and took notes; Carlos, sitting between them, memorized as much as he could. It was discouraging to discover things were much more complicated than they had imagined. A market for rough stones and a market for polished stones coexisted. “So, let’s concentrate on polished.” But the polished-stone market is essentially a credit market for cutters, reacting to inflation,
money markets, interest rates, Treasury bill rates minus inflation, the peak of 1980, the trough of 1986 … “Coño, qué complicado es esto,” Elena would complain; the Spanish equivalent of “This is too fucking complicated.” Carlos rightly judged that Marina was a bad influence on the teacher: Elena’s swearing and cursing had increased noticeably since they had met.

After a month and a half of amateurish research, they’d decided that it would be best to sell the stones one at a time, keeping the rest in safe deposit boxes. Marina would offer one of her smaller diamonds for sale to a different trader in January, then Elena would try a third buyer in February, Carlos would sound out a fourth in March. They figured they could bide their time; the really difficult thing was part of the past and they wanted to forget it.

Realizing early on that Carlos and Elena were seriously attracted to each other, Marina decided to remove herself from the scene. She detected all the signs at the very beginning and, following a couple of weeks of slight resentment, felt glad for them. It seemed as if the blind man – impressed by the outcome of the adventure, appalled at the teacher’s naïveté, sympathizing with her suffering, acting as her counsellor on numerous matters, seduced by her voice and charm, and maybe because sharing a cultural heritage creates invisible ties – was falling in love with Elena Miranda. The good thing was that Elena seemed enthralled too, hanging on his every word. If this was happening before they slept together, Marina thought, once Elena enjoyed a night in the blind man’s bed she would be completely hooked. Marina hoped that Elena was an experienced lover too; Carlos was accustomed to uninhibited women who knew the full bag of tricks.
These two deserve each other
, she reasoned. But she still hadn’t revealed to her
associates that she was considering moving to Florida. Marina was not in Paris with a boyfriend; she was scouting real estate in Winter Haven before flying to Miami to have one of her biggest gems appraised.

“You feel better?” Carlos asked.

“Of course. He’s in the clear.” She blew her nose into a tissue, rolled it into a ball, and dropped it into an ashtray.

“I’m so glad. You’ve been so tense, especially these last two weeks.”

Elena sighed. “I just couldn’t get him out of my mind. Had he not called this morning, I think this would’ve been the worst New Year’s Eve of my life.”

The conversation lapsed. Looking at a taxi releasing a new guest with a black carry-on that resembled hers, Elena was thinking she still hadn’t adapted to her new self. Would she ever? Witnessing violent death had transformed her forever, but on top of that she had swapped countries, cultures, clothing, climates, friends, neighbours. She kept losing her gloves, nearly always had to return to the cloakroom for her coat when she left a place, feared getting lost in the subway, couldn’t adapt to the crazy pace of life, to the pretence. Luckily, Carlos was there. She was gradually becoming his eyes; he was gradually becoming her love.

“When you feel like it, I’d like to know what he said,” Carlos said after a minute.

Elena turned her gaze from the street to the scars on his face, the dark glasses. “Well, the corpses were discovered on Monday. The next-door neighbour I mentioned – remember?”

“Yes.”

“She told the police she had seen us – Marina, Dad, and me – leaving the apartment building at noon on Sunday, so they
interviewed Dad on five occasions. They would have got to him anyway. His fingerprints were in the kitchen and the living room. He admitted nothing, of course. I knew he wouldn’t. He stuck to the story he concocted. Dad’s that kind of guy; they put a gun to his head he won’t talk. They cut his balls, he won’t talk. Pardon my French.”

The blind man grinned, then groped for his glass and sipped from it. “That’s all?” he asked.

“No. The police told Dad the dead men were tourists, so they must have found their passports.”

Carlos nodded, then frowned. “Bruce said he’d use Canadian passports. But if the guy who killed him had been living in Cuba for years, the police wouldn’t say he was a tourist. A foreigner, yes, a tourist, no. Are you sure your father said tourists?”

“I’m sure. He said
turistas
, not
extranjeros.”

Carlos shook his head. “I’m a rich man at the expense of my best friend’s life.”

Elena rested her hand on his. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know. And you know what I take comfort from?”

“No, what?”

“From the fact that your father avenged my buddy.”

He held her hand across the table. Nothing was said for a while.

“Do you believe in destiny?” he asked.

Her answer was a shrug. It happened frequently to her, forgetting that he was blind. But he sensed the shrug in her hand.

“I mean, my father was a
batistiano,”
he said. “Yours was one of the
guerrilleros
who toppled Batista, which was why we fled Cuba. It would be difficult to find two lives on more widely divergent courses.”

“I guess so,” she agreed.

“And we’ve been thrown together by the most bizarre set of circumstances, like it was meant to be. And since I met you, well not since the first day but in the last few weeks, I regret …”

Carlos stopped talking. His jaw clenched. Elena stared at him. “You regret having met me?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he said, shaking his head, angry at himself.

“What do you regret, then?”

“Nothing. I was going to say something stupid.”

“Tell me.”

“I regret that you were unable to talk to your father sooner.”

“That’s not what you were going to say.”

“You read minds?”

“No, I can read your heart.”

The blind man smiled. “I’ll tell you someday.” Then he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly. She reached over the table and lightly caressed the scars on his face.

Outside, heavy snowflakes began to whirl down.