Miami Midnight (12 page)

Voodoo. Santería
.

She rolled over onto her stomach. The blood in her temples was throbbing. When she closed her eyes it was strong enough to make the whole darkened room vibrate. Like hearing one’s own heart thrumming and pumping, magnified a thousand times.

Gaby knew in some curious way she’d fallen asleep. She was back in Florence, in her room in the
pensione
on the Via Strattore, above the street where the little Vespa motor scooters always woke her in the morning with their popping and thundering. Motorbike engines had that same pounding beat.

She knew, after a while, that she was lying in someone’s arms and he was holding her tightly. His body was muscular and warm, his satiny skin irresistibly sensual, but his heart was beating so loudly that she tried to pull away from him. Every inch of her reacted to the feel of that desirous power, the hard pressure of him against her. There was such a desperation in him, a sense of need, that it frightened her. He wanted her. She knew that without being told.

Whoever he was, he held her as though he would never let her go, so close, so desiring, she felt the warmth of his breath against her lips. That terrible desperation that she sensed in him grew, and with it her fear. No one could want, could
need
someone else as fatally as this! A smothering, breathless feeling of pure panic attacked her again.

No
, she cried out soundlessly as she struggled.

Suddenly a strange roaring that seemed to come from a leaping ring of fire burst into the dream. The sound crashed through her, overriding the measured sound of her heartbeat, a skull-bursting scream. A dazzling flickering like lightning. The shriek of violently compressed air.

It brought Gaby awake, bolt upright in bed, a barely stifled scream on her lips.

She was home, she realized, shaking. In her own bedroom. She was wringing wet. Bright slivers of moonlight spilled through the blinds and across the sheets. What had she been doing dreaming of Florence, she wondered groggily, of motor scooters? Of someone who wanted her, with arms like steel bands that wouldn’t let her go? Of something that screamed like airplane jet engines?

Then she listened. The hot dark night quivered faintly. It was not the wind, nor a window fan. Nor the refrigerator downstairs. But it was there, thrumming in the walls.

She swung her feet over the edge of the bed and padded out into the hall, the gallery above the
sala grande.
She was following the strange beating, drumming sensation that seemed to hang in the sultry air.

Down below, David was sleeping on the couch. She could make out the tumbled white sheets and the shape of his big body in the moonlight.

Shivering, her arms wrapped around her, she tried to tell herself that she’d had a nightmare. But if she’d been dreaming, why did that mesmerizing half sound, half mental throbbing go on, now that she was awake?

There was a scent, too, stronger here in the gallery. Burnt wood, green jungle. Sunshine. Hot, pungent cooked food.

She saw David stir, open his eyes, and look straight up into the darkness. In one abrupt, catlike movement he slid from the couch and to his feet. He wore his jeans, his upper body gleaming bare and muscular. He slowly turned to gaze up at her as though he’d known where to look, perhaps even whom to look for, there in the middle of the night.

Gaby stared down at him. There was a gleam, almost forbidding, in his shadowed eyes. She knew how she appeared to him at the gallery railing, in a ragged old nightgown, her hair drifting around her shoulders, bathed in the light of the bright full moon.

The faint throbbing like jungle drums enveloped them. The scent grew stronger, evoking tropical islands and the sea. And hot, baking landscapes. With a thrill of fear Gaby knew that David heard it, smelled it, too.

“David,” she whispered. The vast room echoed her words. “This has nothing to do with the Escuderos. It’s directed toward
me,
isn’t it?”

He didn’t have to answer. She could see from his expression that she was right.

Chapter 8

The bumper sticker on the car ahead had a picture of the Stars and Stripes and read: WOULD THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE MIAMI PLEASE BRING THE FLAG?

Crissette swung the newspaper’s rental car onto Miami Beach’s thoroughfare, Collins Avenue. “I haven’t seen one of those stickers in a long time,” she said, “but I’m not surprised. Anti-
latino
feeling just doesn’t lie down and die in this town. It’s not only rednecks, either. The black community has a lot of problems with Hispanics, too.”

Gaby stared out the window at the renovated hotels and apartment buildings of the Miami Beach National Historical District. It might seem presumptuous to declare “historic” the area that stretched north on Collins Avenue, an improbable vista of 1940’s lavender, pastel pink, lime green and baby blue. But the Beach had done it, and immortalized its garish art deco buildings. “Maybe there’s just too many Latin Americans,” she said thoughtfully, “for one city to absorb.”

Crissette shook her head. “Hey,
latinos
work hard and believe in the American Dream—like all of us used to, once. And not,” she added, “like this cat we’re going to interview this morning, General Rodolfo Bachman, the South American politician-you-most-love-to-hate.” She shook her head again. “I’ll bet you the
Times-Journal
is going to get a bunch of hate mail just for interviewing him.”

“His wife,” Gaby corrected her, staring through the windshield as a hotel in beige and magenta with chrome trim flashed by. “I’m going to interview Señora Bachman about her shopping trip and the clothes she bought here, not the general.”

General Rodolfo Bachman was notorious for torture of political prisoners under his country’s past regimes. But he was admired, unfortunately, by a good number of right-wing U.S. congressmen. When the general stayed at the Fontainebleau Hilton Miami Beach, his party took up two hotel floors and included half a hundred aides, staffers, and bodyguards.

Gaby looked at her wristwatch. “Crissette, we’re running awfully late.”

The photographer promptly stepped down on the gas pedal. “Don’t worry, honey. This fascist pig is running on ‘Latin time.’ Ten o’clock sharp means ten-thirty or maybe eleven o’clock, depending on how long it takes everybody to eat breakfast and get dressed, do a couple of tangos, and watch the señora put on her jewelry.”

Gaby’s interview with Señora Constanza Bachman had nothing to do with politics. The
Times-Journal
wanted a fashion story on Señora Bachman’s annual spending spree in Miami. Midsummer in the northern hemisphere was, in South America, the depths of winter. In July and August thousands of South Americans descended on Miami to enjoy the warm weather and shop for bargains in malls and department stores. Jack Carty had decided an interview with the general’s wife was well worth doing, if only to have on file. Just as it would have been worthwhile doing a story on Evita Perón in her heyday.

“Good Lord,” Gaby cried suddenly, “what is that?”

They were driving straight down Collins Avenue toward a gigantic marble Greco-Roman archway flanked by towering, vaguely Egyptian female statues that straddled the thoroughfare. Gaby couldn’t ever remember seeing anything like that in Miami Beach.

Through the four- or five-story gateway could be seen the curving white bulk of the Fontainebleau Hilton Miami Beach and its famous swimming pool. Built to resemble the Blue Grotto of Capri, it even boasted an outsize artificial waterfall. Over the Fontainebleau in a typically azure blue Miami Beach sky floated two white puffy clouds.

Gaby gasped and clutched the dashboard with both hands as Crissette abruptly wheeled the rental car to the left. They passed the gigantic arch instead of going under it. The car doglegged a sharp right and drove up into the driveway of the real Fontainebleau Hilton and stopped.

Crissette turned and grinned at her. “I didn’t think you’d seen the famous fool-the-eye mural. There’s no archway there. It’s a fake, painted on the side of the building.”

It was, Gaby realized, a giant trick in Day-Glo colors just where Collins Avenue took a sudden left northward. It had looked exactly as though they were going to drive straight through. “Good heavens, how big is that thing, anyway?”

“I don’t know, a couple of hundred feet maybe. It was Steve Muss, the hotel man’s, idea.” Crissette turned the car over to the Fontainebleau’s uniformed parking attendant and unloaded her cameras from the trunk. “Hotel developers are into a campaign to make the Beach look like fun again. Kitsch was always high art out here. This is sort of the big bang, a gigantic mural art out here. This is sort of the big bang, a gigantic mural on Collins Avenue.”

Gaby followed Crissette through the Fontainebleau’s crowded reception area. The garden side of the hotel was still as she remembered it, but the old lobby was now a vast room with a bar and lounge that overlooked the famous Blue Grotto swimming pool, palm garden, and artificial waterfall—just as the gigantic trompe l’oeil mural on Collins Avenue depicted it. The place was packed with noisy, expensively dressed, vacationing Venezuelans, Chileans, Argentinians, and even a number of Portuguese-speaking Brazilians.

“We go to the Dining Galleries,” Crissette said, and steered Gaby in the direction of the hotel’s premier restaurant.

The interview had been set up for breakfast at the not unusual hour, for South Americans, of ten A.M. But Gaby hadn’t expected to find the general’s party had commandeered the entire restaurant. A pair of muscular bodyguards in military uniforms were at the oak doors.

Crissette pushed Gaby ahead. “
Estamos aquí,
” she announced. “
El Miami Times-Journal,
dudes. Open the door!”

The paramilitary guards looked over the black photographer in a lime silk jumpsuit and high heels, her camera bag slung over one shoulder, and registered monolithic impassiveness. “
Identificación,
” one uttered, not moving his lips. “
Carnet.
”

Gaby fumbled in her pocketbook for her press pass, but Crissette demanded loudly, “Are you kidding, Jack? For a bunch of you cats in
your
country maybe, but
no aquí
!”

With an imperious sweep of her arm Crissette reached between both men and grabbed the doorknob of the big oak doors. Fortunately, the doors opened inward.

Over her shoulder she ordered, “Let’s move it out quick, Gabrielle.”

Gaby scurried after her, holding her breath. But Crissette’s breezy authority had gotten them through. The guards only stared, open-mouthed.

They paused at the top of the steps to the restaurant. The Dining Galleries’ decor was plum-colored velvet, with imitation Louis XV furniture and outsize crystal chandeliers. Each mauve damask-covered table was set for lunch, with massive two-foot-tall silver epergnes brimming with real fruit and tropical flowers. Life-size bronze statues of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses stood knee-deep in living greenery at points around the room.

At a large table littered with the remains of an extensive breakfast, the whole Bachman family waited expectantly: General Rodolfo Bachman in a spectacular gold, red, and green dress uniform holding a croissant and a cup of coffee; and beside him a small, plump woman in a gorgeous Christian La Croix turquoise chiffon cocktail dress with silver sequins. Standing around the general and his wife were secretaries and aides. Beyond them were at least twenty uniformed bodyguards. At the center of this picturesque group were half a dozen well-dressed children, including a toddler playing with an empty silver creamer on the restaurant’s purple carpeting, and a surly-looking teenager wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a silver Rolls-Royce on the front. The Rolls’s headlights were red glass, battery operated, and blinked on and off, nonstop.

“Jeez,” Crissette said under her breath.

The Bachmans beamed at them happily. Crissette and Gaby stared back.

This was supposed to be, Gaby reminded herself, only an interview on what clothes the general’s wife had bought this trip, but it looked like a state-of-the-union press conference. She felt her knees buckling with apprehension.

Just then a totally unknown emotion seized her. Gaby was aware that she couldn’t go on like this any longer, being scared to death, immobilized by her own feelings of inadequacy. Crissette was looking at her with a concerned but impatient expression that said she might as well get her act together. Or quit.

Gaby knew at some point she had to stop expecting the worst of herself. Right now dozens of dark, gleaming South American eyes were fixed on her, waiting.

Conscious of Crissette watching, Gaby squared her shoulders.

The interview, Jack Carty confirmed later, was just one of those things reporters encounter every once in a while. The general treated his wife’s fashion interview as though it were intended for world circulation. All that was missing were the television cameras. For the first time so far in her newspaper career, Gaby wasn’t hamstrung by self-consciousness. The Bachmans were so strange, at least by American standards, it probably didn’t matter how she wrote them up.

An interpreter, a slender, nervous young woman who spoke perfect idiomatic English, introduced herself. While Crissette set up her tripod Gaby perched on the edge of a purple velvet chair with her notepad in her lap, smiling determinedly. It was the only thing to do. The entire group was beaming back at her.