When her father called her Maria, it was always something serious.
“Maybe you can find out something about Patrick’s friend who died. What he told me sounds odd. A twenty-year-old falling from a balcony? Maybe they put something in his drink… I know that the police are investigating it… You have lots of friends in so many places…”
She realized that her father was just as worried about Patrick as she was.
“I’ll see what I can find out…and I hope that you don’t catch any snakes!”
“Well, honey, if it’s for the good of Mother Earth…”
Once back in the office, Maria called Elaine, her contact in the Immigration Department. She confirmed what Maria suspected. The fingerprints that she had found for Lazo matched those of Alberto Gonzalez who had been in Tamiami Park in 1980 and had entered the country at the age of seventeen. But there wasn’t anything else on him. It was as if the earth had swallowed him up.
With those facts, she went to see her boss to suggest that they send the prints to Cuba.
Larry had her come in and sit down as soon as her knuckles touched the door. He didn’t let her speak.
“I’m glad you’ve come in. I was just about to call you. We’ve gotten a response from the Cuban government. They suggest that you go there, and they say they’ll collaborate however they can.”
Maria moved uncomfortably in the chair. She had always wanted to get to know the mythic land of her parents. But she didn’t know if she was ready and whether she wanted to return in that way, on the job.
“Look, they say that you should get in touch with this policeman who will be the one to work with you.”
When he handed her the paper, she didn’t know if it was a joke.
“Boss, there’s no way. How is it possible that I’m supposed to work with Mario Conde? He’s a literary character in Leonardo Padura’s novels. I’ve read them all.”
“Maria, what do I know… maybe the character is based on a real person…”
“He isn’t going to use the same name…”
“Well maybe he’s called that because of the character, or it’s a coincidence. Who knows?”
“Look, Larry, I was coming to tell you that we’ve confirmed that the fingerprints match a certain Alberto Gonzalez who came through Mariel and said that he was seventeen, which was possibly true, although later in the papers it looked like he’d been born two years earlier. How about we send the prints to see if they can give us any information before deciding if I should go… It’s a huge expense.”
Larry knew that Maria’s doubts didn’t have anything to do with the budget, but he agreed to send the prints before they decided about her trip.
“It’s just that you’ve been on this case for two weeks now, and I’d like for us to resolve it soon.”
“You and me both. Believe me.”
Chapter 17
Day 17—Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Maria was awakened by the cell phone swoosh announcing she had a message. Lourdes wanted her to call her back. She saw that it was 6:50 a.m., the hour when her alarm would have rung. She turned it off, washed her face, and called her mother’s friend, who began to speak hurriedly.
“Oh, Mariita, this time he really left me… He packed his suitcase, told me that he had thought a lot about me and the children before making the decision, that I would hear from him later, and he left…”
“Without giving you an explanation?”
“Nothing, all he said was that soon I would hear from him. I suppose he must be talking about divorce papers. Imagine, more than fifty years of marriage!”
Lourdes was sobbing.
“Look, sweetie, there has to be another reason.”
Maria was trying to lift her spirits, but when she remembered that she had seen him with a young woman in Hialeah, she didn’t know what to think.
“But what else could have made him pack a bag and leave?”
“Let’s see, was it a large suitcase? What did he take?”
“No, it was a carry-on, and he packed two changes of clothing, pajamas, a shaving kit…a toothbrush…those things…”
“Anything else? Think.”
“Well, one weird thing, when he was at the door he returned to the office and grabbed a family photo that he had on his desk, and I think a small Cuban flag, too.”
“Lourdes, those aren’t things that a man takes when he’s about to leave his wife. Did he tell you where he was going?”
“No, but I’m almost sure that he had an airplane ticket…”
“Did he take his passport?”
“I don’t know…let me check.”
Lourdes had calmed down a little, and, while she waited, Maria made coffee. This morning she wasn’t able to hold out for her typical morning shot of coffee at the kiosk.
“The passport is here,” Lourdes said in a certain happy tone for the first time in the entire conversation.
“Lourdes, I assure you that it isn’t what you think. It’s probably a business trip…or one of those crazy political things that he gets into… Let me see if I can find out anything. And you promise me that you’ll calm down and let me know if anything changes.”
“Do you think that I should tell the kids?”
Maria answered her with a question:
“Why would you worry them and make them doubt their father? Later on, when it turns out to be nothing, you’ll regret it.”
“Alright…if you think so…”
“I’ll call you later to see how you are,” Duquesne promised her.
As soon as she arrived at the station, Fernandez greeted her with great excitement.
“We’ve had several calls from people who saw the sketches of the counterfeiters! I was waiting so that you could tell me whether you wanted to answer them yourself or if we should split the work…”
Maria was surprised because there were ten messages from various parts of the country. She took the five that were from Miami and the New York area and gave the rest to Fernandez.
“Ok, let’s begin. If you find out anything unusual, tell me, and I’ll do the same and we can compare notes in a few hours. Does that sound like a plan?”
Fernandez was happy to collaborate on the case.
The two first calls that Maria made were answered by voicemail, and she left messages. The third was to a woman in Miami that had arrived through Mariel and swore she had seen the couple in Tamiami Park.
“Here’s the thing, they approached me and told me they could get me out of there in a few hours, but when I saw that the papers were fake, I turned it down. I’ve always been a law-abiding person and if I told lies to be able to leave Cuba, it was for extenuating circumstances, but I was not going to keep on with the lies. That always ends badly.”
“Are you sure it was them?”
“Absolutely…they spent all their time circulating around the place.”
“Do you know of anybody who may have accepted their services?”
“Lots of people, but I don’t remember names. I never saw any of them ever again.”
“And have you heard anything else about them?”
“No…I heard rumors that later they went to For Chafi, is that how you say it?”
“You mean Fort Chaffee in Arkansas?”
“Yes, where they took lots of refugees…but I don’t know if it’s true. Then they told me that they’d had a daughter…but I can’t say that for sure either. I never saw them again.”
Maria’s heart fluttered. It was the first time that someone had mentioned the girl. She was more and more convinced that the couple had killed Lazo and kidnaped the baby girl, but why? And where was that girl who must be older than twenty-three now?
She asked the woman to call her back if she remembered anything else and jotted down in very large letters her name, phone number, and th
e information she had provided.
Before that, she sent an email to her friend Aldo del Pozo who had worked for a few months in Fort Chaffee, sending him the sketches and asking him whether he had recalled the couple. She immediately received an autoreply that he was on a trip. She would have to wait a few more days.
They must have written down the wrong number on the fourth call to New York because they got a recording that it had been disconnected. She asked the operator to verify the number of a call that had come in at 9:06 a.m. Sure enough, the last two numbers were inverted. When she finally got through, a man identifying himself as Pedro Gonzalez answered. He told her that he had arrived from Cuba in the sixties and, to her surprise, he said terrible things about Jacinto Bengochea, and he assured her that the couple had falsified documents for him. When Maria tried to get him to give more information about himself and details about the accusations against Bengochea, the man swore he didn’t know anything else and hung up. The most likely thing is that this diatribe against the successful Marielito writer stemmed from envy, thought the detective, and she decided that she would only look deeper if the accusations came up again.
The last call was to New Jersey. She spoke with Odalys Fuentes, an elderly woman who assured her that El Oso had died in an accident and that for a short time she had taken care of Sole when she was four or five, but then later Soledad and the child had left the area and she had never heard from them again.
“As much as I loved that child, and they didn’t even send me a postcard, or an address, or even a phone number! It was as if the earth swallowed them.”
Once again, Maria felt her heart speed up. She was sure that “Sole” was the missing child. The mother obviously lived on the run. She asked the woman whether she had any pictures of the child.
“Maybe one or two, but not many because with her being so beautiful, her mother didn’t like her to be photographed. One time she grabbed the camera out of my hands. Later she apologized and told me a bizarre story about how her little cousin had her portrait made when she was young and it brought her bad luck, but I think there was more to it.”
Since Odalys didn’t have email, Maria couldn’t send her any of the sketches that showed how the girl would look at different ages, but she took her name and address and agreed to send it by express mail.
“As soon as you receive it, please call me, and also if you find any pictures. It is extremely important.”
Even though she promised her, Maria felt like something was bothering the woman and did not want to hang up just yet. And, indeed, that was the case. When Maria asked if there was a problem, she said:
“Look, it’s probably best not to send it by express mail because sometimes they knock on the door, I’m a little deaf, I don’t hear well, and they hold it for me to pick up. The post office is far away and…”
Maria calmed her down:
“Don’t worry. I will mail it to you today through regular mail.”
Before going back to the earlier calls, she saw that Fernandez was coming toward her grinning from ear to ear.
“Maria, a teacher in Tampa had Soledad as a high school student. She recognized the mother.”
Detective Duquesne told her colleague what she had found out. She knew that the clues were getting them closer to solving the mystery. Fernandez suggested that they celebrate by going to lunch at a nice restaurant, but Maria preferred to drop by her father’s house.
As always, the old man was happy to see her when she arrived with two medianoches, a flan to share, and a Cuban coffee.
“I’ll pour us a beer…”
She was going to respond that she preferred not to drink when she was working, but an image on TV caught her attention.
“Turn up the volume, Papi, please.”
She managed to hear that a group of Cubans had declared a hunger strike in front of the New York Times protesting a series of articles against the embargo and in favor of renewing diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States. Standing in the middle of the crowd, she could clearly make out Lourdes’s husband. She was about to call her when her cell rang. It was Lourdes:
“Did you see? On a hunger strike in New York! Why didn’t he tell me anything? I wouldn’t have allowed it!”
“Well, that’s exactly why he didn’t tell you, Lourdita,” Maria answered with a chuckle.
Chapter 18
Days 18–21—Thursday through Sunday,
November 19 through 22, 2015
Maria doubted whether she should go see Gladys Elena Lazo and bring her up to date on the new developments on her daughter. During the last conversation that they had, she perceived that the woman was holding something back from her, and she was interested in seeing her again, but, at the same time, she didn’t want to give her false hopes. She was going back and forth on whether she should touch base with her or finish making the remaining calls when they informed her that Mercy had come to see her. She’d hardly had time to tell them to send her in when a whirlwind of a woman was standing right in front of her:
“Look, Duchess, my granddaughter’s alive. Now I know it for sure. You have to find her.”
“Take a seat, ma’am, please.”
But the woman preferred to stand, very shaken, talking with her hands, and speaking wildly.
Maria tried to calm her down:
“Look, Mercy, if you don’t speak to me slowly and tell me what’s happened, it won’t help us solve the case.”
“This is much more than a case! What you need to do is find my granddaughter who I know is still alive.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Yes…well, no…”
“What do you mean ‘yes, well, no’?”
“I haven’t seen her in person, just in dreams…but believe me, this has happened to me before… I haven’t talked about it with other people, but I knew that my husband was going to drown on that raft and that’s why I didn’t get on it… I saw it in a dream I had the night they left…”
“And now?”
“Look, you know how dreams are. Sometimes they don’t make sense… I saw my two granddaughters, Gladys Mercedes and Elenita. They looked so much alike that at first I thought both were Elena, one as a child and another a little older, so it was like, I don’t know, seeing her in the past and the future at the same time. But no, it was my older granddaughter, and she didn’t have her hair in a bob like the sketches portray her; instead it was very long, and she was wearing a cap and gown, as if it were her graduation…”
Maria began to pay more attention.
“Did you recognize the place?”
“No, I don’t know…it wasn’t in Miami…the lighting was different…there were other flowers that don’t grow here, and the buildings were made of brick…but not red, instead like gray…”
“Did they say anything in the dream?”
“The sisters were talking, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Without a doubt, the two of them seemed very happy and at the end they hugged one another. And there were a lot of people in the place, and lots of noise, but I don’t know what they were talking about. It was like they were celebrating.”
“And was there anyone else in the dream?”
“I didn’t see anyone else that I knew, but I sensed that the rest of our family was there but we weren’t. I can’t explain it…”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, I sensed a shadow near Gladysita, very strange, like good and bad at the same time.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you believe me?”
“I believe that you had a dream, but we have to keep investigating to figure out what it means.”
“But do you believe that my granddaughter is alive?”
Maria hesitated but the anguish on the grandmother’s face made her decide:
“Yes, Mercy, I too believe
that your granddaughter is alive, but you have to let me do my job to find her. I assure you that we’re doing everything possible.”
She had just returned from accompanying Mercedes to the door and asking her to stay calm when her cell rang.
“Oh, Mariita, you have to do something, I’m afraid that Ramon is going to die.”
“Lourdes, he hasn’t even been on strike for twenty-four hours. Nothing’s going to happen to him.”
“I don’t know, I see him going downhill…”
“That’s probably because he hasn’t shaved. Let’s see, is he drinking water?”
“I think so, it looks like they’re drinking water and there’s a doctor that goes to see them twice a day. But he’s the oldest one in the group! He’s crazy… What are they going to gain by this?”
“Lourdes, I don’t think he’s accomplishing anything, but he sees it differently. He’s someone who has never been able to accept what happened in Cuba. Opposing the Revolution is his reason for living.”
“But what about me and the kids?”
“I didn’t mean to imply that… There are many people in Miami just like him.”
“Your father isn’t like that…”
“Well, there are all kinds… What do the kids say?”
“Nothing, just that it’s one more of their father’s crazy things, that the strike will end and nothing will happen.”
“Well, they’re right.”
“Do you think I should go there?”
“What for, Lourdes? I don’t see you prepared to support him. I think you shouldn’t humiliate him and…”
“Ok, I’ll wait and see what happens, but if I think for even one minute that his health is at risk, I swear to you that I’ll be on the first flight to New York!”
Just as she hung up, she looked for Fernandez to compare notes and to continue with the calls, but the conversation didn’t last long because the chief called all of the police officers to an urgent meeting in the conference room.
Lawrence Keppler informed them with a solemn face that a blood-stained boat had been found washed up on the shore of Biscayne Bay, and the Coast Guard and the Miami Police were requesting that all divisions assist in the search for a missing man.
The Miracle of Saint Lazarus Page 10
