Havana Twist

by Lia Matera

  “Oh yes. They have asked for two bicycles. Do you wish to see them? We can wait at the house of my friend with the bicycles.”

  I was glad he couldn’t see my face. I was close to tears, I was so relieved to think I’d see Dennis and Cindy again.

  “Yes, let’s go wait for them. But, Ernesto … if they don’t show up soon, can you get me to the airport? I need to get home.”

  “Your flight is tonight?” He sounded distressed.

  “I thought I’d catch the next plane out, wherever it’s going, and make connections.”

  “But, Señora, you have just gotten here.”

  Whereas to me, it seemed I’d been here way too long.

  He mused, “Perhaps Dennis and Cindy will cheer you up, and you will stay longer, after all.” We rounded a corner. “It’s very close, the house of my friend.”

  “When did Cindy and Dennis pick up the bicycles?”

  “Not so long ago, perhaps five o’clock, when the tour bus returned.”

  “The tour bus?” I tried to keep my tone normal. “You mean from the film festival?”

  “Yes.” He sounded confident. “They came off the bus and walked to me at the sea wall.”

  “They didn’t go into the hotel and freshen up?”

  He hesitated a moment. “Did you see them at the hotel?”

  “No, I haven’t seen them since last night.”

  “Perhaps they freshened up. The tour bus was still unloading, but if they went in quickly, I don’t know.” There was a question in his voice as if he weren’t sure which way this story should play out. “The bus was still there.” He’d probably seen the tour bus pull up, all right. “And then they came to me. I think they will be back with the bicycles very soon.”

  I walked beside Ernesto wondering what to do now. He was lying to me. Should I turn and run? Or would he just chase me down?

  Worse yet, how close were we to whatever trap he was leading me into? Was he working for the man with the white coat? Was he going to turn me over the Cuban government at its request?

  Or was he just taking me somewhere to rob me of my dollars?

  I stopped. “My hair’s so light it’s conspicuous,” I said. “Will you ask that girl over there to sell you her scarf?” I pulled a dollar out of my pocket. “I’ll feel more comfortable if my hair’s covered.”

  He hesitated. “She will see you here. And getting the dollar … she will maybe talk about it.”

  “How about if I give you the dollar, and I go around the corner where she can’t see me?”

  “For a Cuban to spend a dollar on such a stupidity …”

  “Maybe you can act like it’s a way to try to get a date with her. Please, just think of something.”

  He remained very reluctant.

  But I pressed the dollar into his hand. “Hurry. Before my hair screams out at somebody. I’ll be right around the corner.”

  “If you are stopped? If someone approaches you?”

  “I’ll act like a dumb tourist. Just go. Hurry up.”

  Our relationship had been such that he was pretty much obliged, I thought, to go fetch, to continue doing my bidding. I rounded the corner, waiting a minute to make sure he wasn’t following.

  Then I took off running.

  I was afraid to return to my hotel, afraid to go near the hotel with the bar, and now, I was afraid to approach the sea wall.

  So I headed for the one area I could be sure was full of tourists. At least there, my hair wouldn’t call out, Look at me, I’m different.

  Twenty minutes later, I ducked into a colorful little bar gleaming with hardwoods and cozy with potted plants. Ernest Hemingway’s photo was up on the wall—I supposed he’d helped keep a few bars here afloat in his day. I sat in a corner behind a group of laughing Germans, and I ordered seafood and a mojito. The latter went down so easily I quickly ordered another. And because it went well with dinner, I had a third.

  I’m not used to rum. I wonder how many excuses, plea bargains, and divorces have begun with those words. In my case, what started as an attempt to hide, eat, and think things through, ended with me very much in my cups, all but blowing kisses to the portrait of Papa Hemingway. Except for the fact that I didn’t trust a soul I’d met here, Cuba (the Cuba of historic restaurants with ceiling fans and palms in brass pots) seemed like a great place.

  Anyway, I reasoned, it was no use running off to the airport. There probably weren’t any flights tonight. And the ticket clerks were undoubtedly required to phone some ministry or other when drunken Americans demanded immediate exit.

  This must be what it was like to be a Cuban. (Well, except for the good meal, the hotel room full of clothes, the passport, and the pocket stuffed with dollars.) There was just no way to get the hell out of here. Short of grabbing an inner tube and floating to Miami, I was stuck.

  I returned to my hotel, almost too belligerent to care who might be waiting there. But no one stopped me on my way up to my room. And when I opened the door, no one was waiting behind it.

  I looked up at the light fixture with the hidden bug. “Fiat lux,” I said. “Let there be light.” Fiat Lux, wouldn’t that be a great name for a model of Fiat? But I guessed they didn’t get many Fiats here. “And at these prices, you won’t get many more!”

  When you’re drunk, the old jokes are the best. I lay down and giggled myself to sleep.

  12

  A nightmare couldn’t have been more frightening. I was startled out of a deep, rummy sleep by a pounding at my door. I sat up, thinking I’d overslept, that housekeeping needed to get in—a problem I’ve had in many a hotel. But the room was still dark. I groped for my wristwatch on the night table. It was one in the morning.

  I sat up in a cold sweat. I was in Cuba. I’d gone places I shouldn’t. I’d harmed, maybe killed, a Chinese soldier. I’d consorted with people who might be CIA agents.

  The pounding on my door stopped. I clicked on a bedside lamp just in time to see the bolt turn as the door was unlocked from the outside.

  I jumped out of bed, and climbed quickly into my sweatpants. Not quite quickly enough—Mr. Radio Havana and two Cubans in military fatigues saw more of my legs than any recent dates had. But I was too scared for mere indignation. Was I about to be arrested? Was there bad news about my mother?

  I stood there in my T-shirt and sweats, clammy with fear, staring at them.

  Strangely enough, they looked equally surprised to see me. It was a moment before Mr. Radio Havana cleared his throat. “We were informed that no one has seen you at the hotel for many hours. We did not expect to find you here.”

  I shook my head, still mystified.

  “We are sorry to burst in on you in this fashion, but … You did not answer our repeated announcements through the door.”

  I stammered out the word “Mojitos.”

  One of the soldiers grinned.

  “We are afraid that a situation has arisen. We will need to question you. We can go to my office or we can remain here. As you wish.”

  I motioned him to take a seat. If I could avoid leaving the hotel for some scary elsewhere, I might yet avert a heart attack.

  He motioned the soldiers outside and closed the door so it didn’t quite latch.

  He took the room’s one flimsy chair. I sat on the bed, finger-combing my hair as if tidiness would enhance my sobriety. I was so dehydrated, my mouth felt fur-lined. Judging from the taste, skunk fur.

  He reached into his pocket and extracted more photographs. I braced myself for more questions about Mr. Jamieson and Mrs. Travolta, the CIA’s own Avengers.

  But the people in the small color photos looked like pale-skinned Cubans. The woman was thin and dark-haired, without makeup. The man was curly-haired and slightly swarthier. There was something vaguely familiar about them.

  I said, “Who are they?
”

  “You tell me.”

  I scowled down at the photos. They looked so hopeful. I hadn’t seen this expression on many faces here.

  “I don’t know.” And I didn’t want to know, not unless it helped me find Mother. The last thing I wanted to do here was get some Cubans thrown into jail.

  “Take your time.”

  “I really don’t know. I mean, maybe I’ve seen them somewhere. But I have no idea who they …” What was it about them? Something was setting off alarm bells, making me very damned uncomfortable.

  “You have no idea?” he prompted.

  “I’m sure I haven’t talked to them. But there is something familiar about them.” Despite my disquiet, I was glad not to be looking at a photo of a dead Chinese soldier.

  “Could it be the clothing?” Mr. Radio Havana asked.

  “Oh my god!” I felt tears spring to my eyes. “Oh god, it’s Cindy’s blouse. Dennis’s shirt.” How many Cubans had access to natural-fiber, button-down clothes? “What happened? Did something happen to them? Did these people rob them?”

  “These people,” he said, taking back the photos, “attempted to purchase airline tickets departing Cuba using the passports of the Americans you call Cindy and Dennis.”

  I shook my head. “But they don’t look like Cindy and Dennis.”

  “The passport photographs had been replaced by photographs before you. They were adequately, but not perfectly, substituted.”

  “Where are Cindy and Dennis?”

  “We do not know.”

  “These people have their clothes.”

  “Yes, it would appear that Mr. Jamieson and Mrs. Travolta have cooperated in this charade.”

  “No,” I disagreed. “No, come on. If the CIA were involved, wouldn’t the passports look—how did you put it?—perfect. I think Cindy and Dennis got robbed. You haven’t found them?”

  “No!” He looked angry enough to take it out on me. “Perhaps a boat has come to return them to your country. Or to Gitmo.”

  I scooted backward on the bed. Cindy and Dennis were gone, and their clothes were on the backs of Cubans trying to sneak out with their passports. “Wouldn’t you know if a boat came for them?”

  “We cannot patrol everywhere at once. We have six thousand kilometers of coastline in Cuba.”

  “But if they left on a boat, why bother altering the passports? Why not just take this couple with them?”

  He said nothing. Perhaps this logical flaw had kept him from bursting in and arresting me for consorting with the CIA.

  “Where’s Gitmo?” I wondered.

  “Your illegal naval base in Guantanamo.”

  I slumped, thinking over what Ernesto had told me. He said Cindy and Dennis had come to him for bicycles. I hadn’t believed him because I’d been told they’d left Cuba. There were two possibilities: Either Cindy and Dennis had turned over their passports in an altruistic attempt to smuggle some Cubans to America, later renting bicycles to go … where? To a pickup point along the coast? Or Ernesto had led them off this morning and stolen their passports. If so, I shuddered to think what might have happened if I’d stayed with him tonight.

  “Could they have driven or bicycled to Guantanamo?” What I really wanted to know was whether my mother might have gone there. She’d hassled military men in bases up and down California and the eastern seaboard. Perhaps she’d hoped to shout some sense into the soldiers here. Perhaps they’d detained her.

  “No, no. There is no entrance by land, only mine fields and fences, guarded on both sides. One must fly from Havana to Miami, and then fly back with the approval of your military to Gitmo.”

  “Could a person swim over from the Cuban side?” My mother was no Esther Williams, but it couldn’t be far to paddle.

  “The sea there is thick with jellyfish, very deadly. No sane person would attempt this.” He sat straighter, as if exasperated. “But it is irrelevant. Clearly there are accomplices with a boat.”

  I had to assume even Mother wouldn’t swim through schools of deadly jellyfish to proselytize.

  “You must tell us what you know about your Cindy and Dennis.” He spoke the names as if only a fool would believe them to be correct.

  “They told me they were reporters from Associated Press based in Houston and living in Mexico City. They said their next assignment was in Moscow, and that they were learning Russian. They said it’s impossible to get reporters’ visas, so they attach themselves to tour groups and come in as tourists as often as they can.”

  “Why?”

  “To get news.”

  “Did they tell you what news they get?”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out he’d be more, not less, unhappy with me if I told the truth. So I said, “No, not really. They went to see someone who’s a friend of a friend of theirs. They were glad to hear that rumors about some poet weren’t true.” If Cindy and Dennis were still on the island, maybe a few white lies would help them. “The only negative thing they said was that some Cubans were bitter about a general who was executed. But they didn’t seem to agree with those people. They just seemed … interested without being judgmental. Like reporters.”

  I hoped that’s all they were. Even more, I hoped they were all right. I hoped Ernesto hadn’t led them off somewhere and killed them for their passports.

  “What about their bags?” I asked. “Did these people have Cindy and Dennis’s luggage?”

  “Yes.”

  “So they were able to get into their hotel room.”

  “Not necessarily. The luggage might have been given to them.”

  “The desk clerk, she’d know whether Cindy and Dennis checked out and took their bags.”

  He watched me impassively.

  “Right? Did you ask the desk clerk?”

  “The woman in the photograph,” he said finally, “she is the nighttime clerk here.”

  “Oh.” I thought about it. “But doesn’t that settle it? She lied to the incoming shift. She had their passports and bags.”

  “This does not answer the question of whether Mr. Jamieson and Mrs. Travolta conspired with them.”

  I supposed he was right about that.

  “In the usual course of such matters,” he continued, “the impostors might have managed to board this morning’s flight to Mexico City. However, given our suspicions of Jamieson and Travolta …” He shrugged.

  Of all the luck: The Cuban couple had doctored the passports of suspected CIA agents. I felt the profound empathy of a chronic screw-up.

  “Look,” I said, “if someone is stealing tourists’ passports … do you know if it happens often? Do you know if someone used my mother’s? Do you know where my mother is?”

  He glanced at the hotel door. He sighed.

  I wanted to grab him by his startlingly white lapels and shake an answer out of him. “Can’t you just tell me if you know my mother’s okay?”

  He leaned forward. “I should not speak of this. But I sympathize with your feelings.”

  I sat very still, not wanting to do anything to change his mind.

  “We believe you should look for your mother … elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere?” That didn’t narrow things down much. “Do you know she’s not in Cuba?”

  I hadn’t asked anyone in government yet. I’d asked a boy at the Malecon and two reporters who might be CIA agents. I’d asked a poet under house arrest and a drug smuggler under actual arrest. As long as a bureaucrat was offering answers, I wanted to be quick with questions. “Does your ministry have information that my mother left?”

  He shrugged. “It is not up to us to monitor these matters.”

  “But do you know?” I imagined the Ministry of Revolutionary Armed Forces knew a great many things it wasn’t “up to” them to know.

  “I have said all that I wi
ll on this matter. I am here to question you about Jamieson and Travolta.”

  “Is this a problem you’ve been having for a while? Passports being stolen and altered, Cubans sneaking out?” Was there any way my mother might be involved in some aspect of this?

  “We have a word here for Cubans who turn their backs on the revolution for their own personal narrow interests, their own selfish fantasies.” His eyes flicked again to the door. “Gusanos, worms. Every society has its small portion of gusanos. And so, yes, we have the rafts and occasionally the theft of passports.”

  Small portion? When Castro got fed up in 1980 and offered to let the gusanos go, over a hundred thousand fled the island. There were almost a million in Miami alone.

  “Have you ever found the people whose passports are taken? What happens to them? How are the passports stolen?”

  “They are not stolen. In every instance where we have discovered the true owner of a passport, that person has been not a victim, but an accomplice.” His brows were raised. He watched me carefully.

  Were we talking about Cindy and Dennis or my mother? I was tired and intoxicated, but I’d have been confused regardless.

  I said, “My mother believes in Cuba. She agrees with Castro and admires your revolution. She would treat her hosts with more respect than to turn her passport over to a gusano, as you put it.” But Mother’s bleeding heart was sometimes at cross-purposes with her ideologue’s mind. “If you know where she is, you’ve got to tell me.”

  It was all I could do not to lie back down. I felt shaky from the stress, the mojitos, the lack of sleep.

  “I am afraid that I cannot help you,” he concluded, rising. “And, since you will not assist us on the matter of Mr. Jamieson and Mrs. Travolta, our government must request that you leave Cuba. We have lost confidence in your willingness to uphold our laws. We have tried to make you welcome, but we now feel that you are no longer welcome in Cuba.”

  I blinked up at him. If I didn’t give him information I didn’t have, he wouldn’t give me information he did have? Or was he bluffing?

  He answered that question quickly enough. “We have come to escort you to the airport, Miss Jansson.”