Havana Run (17 page)
Russell Straight awakened to find himself alone in his bed, a mild headache gnawing at the back of his head. After a moment he swung his feet onto the cool marble tile, then rose and padded to the bathroom, which he found empty. He turned and went down the short hallway to the sitting area and found that empty as well.
It had occurred to him, as he looked about for Delia in his still-groggy state, that he and his brother and his mother—and during rare periods, his father as well—had lived in a house that was no larger than this hotel room he now occupied. His brother, Leon, had escaped all that, of course, no matter how briefly. Leon had gone to college, and though he’d barely learned to read, much less manage to graduate, had gone on to play professional football, until the injuries and the resultant drug habit had caught up with him.
Leon had died where he’d started out early, back in the company of bad people, but at least he’d had a taste of the good life, Russell thought, and who could begrudge him that? For Russell, though, such luxuries as he was enjoying just now seemed manna from heaven itself. He couldn’t imagine ever taking such things for granted. In the eyes of the woman he’d been with last night, for instance, he was a man of wealth, a perspective he would strive to be mindful of.
He walked back into the bedroom, then, and though he thought less of himself for doing so, pulled out his wallet and checked the contents. He should have known better than to suspect Delia, but he had spent some years in prison and certain habits died hard.
He went back into the bathroom then and allowed himself the satisfaction of a luxurious whizz with no one on either side of him casting surreptitious glances at the wand he held in his hand. When he was finished, Russell pulled the dangling chain that worked the old-fashioned toilet, and when the cycle was finished, pulled the chain again, just for the hell of it. By the time he had showered and shaved and put on a fresh polo shirt with “DealCo” embroidered in the cloth that strained across his pec, and pulled on a pair of khakis of the sort that his boss had gotten him accustomed to, he was feeling about as good as two or three of himself.
He made his way down the hallway to Deal’s room and knocked, and even the fact that there was no answer did not faze him. As he was showering, he had developed an inner certainty that coming to Cuba had been one of the most inspired actions of his relatively short life. He had the sense that Antonio Fuentes, slimeball or not, was going to bring a lot of business down DealCo’s lane. And something told him as well that he had not seen the last of the lovely dancer he’d been with last night, and never mind her momentary vanishing act.
Russell strolled toward the elevator doors whistling tunelessly, his only downcast thought having to do with his brother, Leon. And wasn’t it a pity they could not share such times together? Though his brother had been drug addled by the time he died, Russell might have been able to turn him around, if he’d been on the outside, anyway, but whose fault was that? He was on the ground floor now.
He pushed sad thoughts aside and stepped out of the elevator and crossed the pristine lobby with its tasteful jungle plants and its squawking, mother-huncher birds and found the entrance to the restaurant that he and Deal had ducked through last night. Fuentes’ driver was right there in the reception-area chair he’d parked in last night, another newspaper in his hands. You want to know what’s going on in Havana; Russell thought? There is the man to ask.
He walked on inside the restaurant, and sure enough, there was Antonio Fuentes, all right, looking starched and chipper in a fine wool suit, and ready for some kind of business summit meeting, whatever that might turn out to be. Yes indeed, Russell Straight told himself, just one more good day in a long run of them shaping up.
It wasn’t until Fuentes glanced at his watch and asked him where John Deal might be that anything like worry shook a finger in Russell Straight’s way, but it sure as hell went way downhill from there.
Deal stepped from the tiny shower in the bathroom of the apartment Angelica had brought them to, reaching for the towel she’d left folded neatly on the toilet tank. Hardly the luxurious bathroom of the Santa Isabel, he thought, but then again, it was a decided step up from the grave.
He blotted himself with the thin fabric, then stared at the trousers and shirt she’d left along with the towel. Victor’s clothes, he supposed, not surprised when he had to roll the cuffs of the pants up a notch.
On the other hand, he wouldn’t cause much of a stir in makeshift dress; he had already learned that much this morning. They’d crawled out of the smuggling compartment into the predawn darkness, then made their way on down the hillside where the Hemingway compound sat, using a path, she informed him, the museum workers took.
“What if we run into one of them?” he had asked.
“Too early,” she’d assured him. “Besides, they are not the ones to worry about,” she’d added.
A twenty-minute walk brought them to the side of a dusty highway where a score of people milled around in the gloom, waiting for one of the double-sectioned “camels” to take them into the city. Some of the crowd were wearing what looked like service-staff uniforms, and here and there a woman might be attired in a smart blouse and skirt, but there were more than a few men whose appearance made Deal look like a barely rumpled country squire. In any case, the still-sleep-worn crowd barely noticed the arrival of two more of the downtrodden.
Angelica found a discarded baseball cap trampled beneath a bench at the bus stop and slapped its dust away against her thigh. “Put this on,” she said, handing the battered cap his way.
The thing had been black once, he supposed, but had faded to match the color of the concrete curb where they stood. “Havana Club” read the script above a rendering of the Betty Grable-like babe he’d seen on the card yesterday. “Ron” was scripted beneath her heels. He’d seen the same label on rum bottles in his parents’ bar.
He took the cap and looked inside it doubtfully, then mashed it down on his head, tugging the bill low over his eyes. “How do I look?” he asked her.
“Like a Russian,” she said. She glanced toward the road where one of the massive buses wheezed over a rise and began to slow on its way toward the stop. “Let’s go.”
***
Though they were among the first passengers on the dimly lit bus, both compartments were crammed by the time they’d reached the outskirts of the city. Yet somehow more and more people managed to squeeze on board at every stop.
“
Aquí
,” she’d said to him finally, as the bus pulled up before a busy intersection. She’d pulled him through the crowd struggling to get on the bus, then on a dash across a busy street where smoking Fiats jockeyed with smoking Ladas and ancient Chevies and Fords, all of them outdone by scooters darting and whining like motorized wasps.
Once across, she led them off the thoroughfare down a street between two tenements, then stopped to check behind them. Abruptly, she ducked into an unlit building entrance that reeked of a half-century’s decay, pulling him in after her. “Up,” she said, pointing at a staircase.
Deal glanced at a set of elevator doors set into a rear wall of the gloomy entrance and turned back to her with a questioning expression. “Can’t we use that?”
“It hasn’t worked in years,” she said, and led him to the stairs.
Seven flights up, and at every landing the smell of decades grew one layer thicker: must and mildew and cooking and living and sweating and breathing, he thought, and no crispy air-conditioning to whisk all the evidence away. Meanwhile, Angelica undid two locks on an apartment door and took them inside.
She’d showered first while he lay exhausted on a couch that he remembered vaguely as in the style of Danish Modern, a fad his mother had sniffed at in his youth. He’d noted idly that the listening device he had planted on his shoe last night was gone, probably scuffed off during that struggle over the jungle path. Maybe they were listening to the sounds of iguanas mating over in the Interests Section right now, he thought, as Angelica emerged from the bathroom in jeans and a bra, toweling her dark wet hair.
When she noticed him staring, she’d shaken her head as if he were an addled child. She pointed at the bathroom. “Don’t waste time,” she said. “We cannot stay here long.”
***
When he came out, he found her busy in the small kitchen that opened off the living area, pouring coffee into a pair of espresso cups that sat on a two-person table. There was a chunk of thick black bread there, along with a dish of butter and a jar of what looked like jam.
“Feel any better?” she asked, surveying him. He nodded. “Thanks.”
“I hope you like Cuban coffee,” she said.
“I’m from Miami, remember?” He reached for one of the cups, but she put out a hand to stop him. Even her touch felt different, he thought, glancing at her hand, where it lay on his.
“Please,” she said, “sit. For just a moment.”
His eyes met hers briefly. She stared back, then seemed to realize her hand was still on his. She lifted her hand and glanced away.
He glanced at the table again, noticing that a gold signet ring lay beside one of the cups. He sat down and lifted it between his fingers. “What is this?”
It was a wasted question, though. Anyone would have known it by the tone of his voice. He was already certain what it was. He’d held it often enough as a boy, slipped it onto his own tiny fingers back and forth, back and forth in one of the idle bedtime games the two of them had invented.
It had felt as heavy as lead on some giant planet then. And so it felt now. BMD still the initials cut into the flat gold face. The facets rounded a bit by time, perhaps, but no mistaking what they stood for: Barton Malory Deal. His father rarely acknowledged his ancient namesake, but he ought to have. If you were Barton Deal, why not call yourself after the man who’d invented the legend of Arthur?
“Where did you get this?” Deal asked. He had slipped the ring onto his own finger without noticing. A perfect fit, some distant part of his brain announced.
She stared back with an expression that suggested she wasn’t sure that she should tell. He could understand that, some part of him reasoned. He wasn’t certain he really wanted to know.
He saw that there was a packet extended in her hand, the very envelope Victor had tossed to him in the farmhouse the night before, just as the shooting had started. There was a splash of something dark across its face now, along with smudges of what must be dirt.
“Look inside it,” she said. “Please.”
He took the package from her hand and undid the clasp, then reached inside. A set of photographs, he saw, as he withdrew his hand. He gave her another glance, then pushed his coffee cup aside and spread the images on the table before him.
Four pictures, he saw. An old man in what looked like a jail cell. Curled asleep in a fetal position. Sitting with his head between his hands on the edge of a cot. Lifting food from a tin plate toward his mouth with his fingers. Sitting on the floor of his cell, staring up into the camera with an expression impossible to define.
“So?” he said, looking up at her. His voice sounded dead in his own ears. He thought that a part of him might be closing down, refusing to recognize any more.
“Look more closely,” she said.
He turned back to the photos, fighting the certainty that was already seeping into his brain. You can build a concrete roof and make it two feet thick, the odd thought came; if the rain water sits up there long enough, it’s going to make its way down through anything.
The shots were grainy, out of focus, poorly lit. And the man’s face was hidden or distorted in most of the shots. But the longer he stared at the photographs, the more impossible it was to deny the truth.
“It’s my father,” he said at last, and stared up at her, his mind strobing through a thousand possibilities at once. He was exhausted, his brain already turned inside out. Whatever notion of reality he’d carried around with him prior to these last few days, that baseline measure had long ago disappeared.
Was this woman friend or foe? Had he once made love to her, or was that all some crazy dream? Impossible to tell. He could have been staring at a sorceress, for all he knew.
She said nothing. Simply stood and nodded in answer to his madman’s plaintive stare.
“When were these taken?” he managed. He was already inventing impossible scenarios, none of which presented logical explanations. He’d seen his father’s body sprawled in his chair, had mumbled incoherent good-byes at grave-side years before. And yet…
“Last week,” she said, her voice even.
“Bullshit,” he said. He swept the photographs off the table, flinging the coffee cups with them. Cups and saucers shattered as he rose to snatch her by her shoulders.
“Tell me the fucking truth,” he shouted. “Tell me what’s going on or I will kill you. I swear to God I will.”
She stared back at him, making no effort to break his hold. This was a woman he’d seen ready to put a bullet in the first three men to cross her path, he reminded himself. “You’re going to attract attention,” she said to him calmly.
“You’re goddamn right I am,” he said, shaking her again. “Tell me the truth.”
“I
am
telling the truth,” she said, staring back at him. “It is your father in those pictures. They were taken last week, inside the Castillo Atares, the headquarters of the National Police here in Havana.”
“My father is dead,” he told her, shaking his head as if to shed her words. “I saw his body. He blew his brains out with a shotgun in his own goddamned office…”
He was still raging when he felt his hands slide away from her shoulders, felt his legs give under him, felt himself slump into the chair where he’d been sitting moments before. His hands were on his face now, trying to stanch the tears.
He felt her hands cradling his head gently as he wept, felt her pull him close. It was all crazy, he understood. It was impossible. It could not be true. He would wake up soon, and with any luck, he would find that the last dozen years of his life had been nothing but a dream.