Havana Twist

by Lia Matera

  I wanted to say, no, I don’t work for you. I’m too tired, too sad, too close to falling apart.

  But he was a pro. And if it helped us figure out who’d killed Agosto, we might be closer to knowing what had become of my mother.

  “Okay,” I said. “In no particular order …” I blithered about the time I’d spent with Cindy and Dennis in Cuba—the car rides, the dinners, the hike to Lidia Gomez’s house, the drive to the women’s prison, their appearance in the plaza when the white-coated man accused them of being CIA agents.

  “You told all this to the FBI and State Department people, I gather?”

  “Oh yes. Many times.”

  “And they didn’t comment.” It wasn’t a question. “Okay, go on. What did you learn about them in Mexico City?”

  I described their apartment. “Marules and Agosto didn’t talk much about them. You know, like you don’t about someone you both know.”

  “But you didn’t know them. They didn’t say anything to you like, ‘It would be just like them to … ‘ or ‘How odd of them not to … ‘ Nothing like that?”

  “If so, it’s not coming back to me. I’ll think about it.”

  “Fair enough. What about when you came up here with Diaz? Did he talk about them at all?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “And you attributed it to worry. Same reason you didn’t talk to him about your mother.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m really sorry about your mother. I hope you know that. I hope I wasn’t … you know, on the phone.”

  I made a hand motion—copacetic. I couldn’t really talk, not with the lump in my throat.

  I gave it a minute, then said, “Tell the truth. Do you think there’s a chance…? Do you think she could be in Cuba somewhere? Alive?”

  We stared at each other. He looked as though he was struggling for the right words.

  Finally he said, “The Cuban government would have every incentive to find her and send her home. And she’d be so damn conspicuous there, easy to spot, easy to find. So …” He squinted as if it pained him to say so, “I guess, no, I really don’t think she could be missing in Cuba. I don’t believe she wouldn’t find a way to get word to you. She’d find a helpful Cuban or one would find her. And you’d know if she was there.”

  “If she was alive.” My voice sounded flat.

  He didn’t say anything.

  I sighed, sitting back in the chair. I could feel tears spill down my cheeks. “That’s what I think, too,” I said. “My father, too. And the State Department people, you can tell they think she’d have turned up by now.” I swallowed, wiping my cheeks with my hands.

  Surgelato slid off the bed onto one knee. He took me in his arms, and I put my forehead on his beef flank of a shoulder. He stroked my hair.

  I hadn’t spoken to him for two years before this week. But it didn’t matter. We’d done something years before that cemented a connection. In the interim, he’d remarried his ex-wife, and I’d moved away. But something was still there. At least, I felt it.

  I put my arms around his neck and clung to him as if he were the tether I’d been wishing for.

  I don’t know why he clung to me.

  21

  We went home with nothing resolved. I stayed with my father until he got over the worst of it, until he stopped rattling around the big Haight Street flat like a moth in a lantern. Then I went back to Santa Cruz, to my new place near the yacht harbor, a place I’d hoped to love, but could now only live in.

  I listened to news broadcasts and C-SPAN speeches, but if foreign policy toward Cuba was affected, it was impossible to tell. We still shook our fists at them and kept our citizens from spending dollars there. We kept out computers and clothes and food and medicine, as usual and as best we could. But that had nothing to do with my mother, or with Cindy and Dennis, or with Myra Wilson and Lidia Gomez. It was the same course we’d been steering for over thirty years.

  The San Diego police hadn’t closed the file of Alicia Mendoza or Agosto Diaz, but if they’d had any new leads, they sure hadn’t called me.

  I never thought it would end this way, with my mother lost. I never envisioned giving up before I’d found her. But what more could I do? I couldn’t return to Cuba. Even if the State Department didn’t find a way to stop me, the Cubans had thrown me out. They certainly wouldn’t let me back in. And I didn’t know where else to look for Mother or for Dennis and Cindy.

  I had, at one point, driven back down to San Diego out of sheer frustration, hoping to thrust myself upon the elusive, scuba-diving Ernest B. Hemingway, M.D. I’d already learned that he was Myra Wilson’s boyfriend, as Agosto and I had supposed. She’d gone to Cuba to see for herself the conditions her partner had fled. When she didn’t return, Hemingway purchased her house so Wilson wouldn’t lose it to a mortgage company in her absence. At the time, he’d begged the State Department to raise a fuss and get her out, but they wouldn’t, saying they couldn’t interfere with a drug bust. Later, when he’d learned about the computers-to-Cuba caravan, he’d resorted to asking WILPF to go to the prison to see Wilson, to make sure she was okay. My mother and Sarah Swann, her WILPF buddy, had both spoken to him about this. Though they considered him a gusano, they’d agreed to do it.

  They were certain, Sarah explained to me, that they’d find Wilson thriving in a perfect penal environment. And the scary thing was, Sarah thought they had. She and my mother had been favorably impressed with the “airy, homey” women’s prison.

  And as for Dr. Hemingway, he claimed to know nothing more about my mother or the San Diego murders.

  So why had he jumped off the dive boat? He’d called home on the boat’s phone and learned his maid had been killed. He saw me and Agosto waiting on the pier and assumed we were reporters wanting to discuss the murder—and wanting to dredge up painful stories about Wilson’s arrest.

  His explanation held together well enough to pass muster with the police. It may have even been true, though I doubted that was all there was to it.

  When I pulled up in front of his house after a long bummer of a drive, ten hours from Santa Cruz, I knew right away something was different. I knocked at the door, and found a play group of toddlers being minded by a harried-looking woman. She’d purchased the place from a Dr. Hemingway, yes. She believed he’d moved out of town. He’d closed his practice, she knew that. But she didn’t know where he’d gone.

  I got his office address from the phone book, and I drove there. A different doctor’s name was on the door. The receptionist told me that Dr. Hemingway was in Iowa now. Or was it Indiana?

  I ended up driving back up the coast, keeping a firm grip on the wheel in case my evil twin tried to wrench the car off the cliffs into the sea.

  I drove straight up to San Francisco and spent the next day with my father. He seemed so old without the impish humor, the quick flash of dimples, the goofy wit that rarely found expression anymore. The place was quiet without my mother and her constant phone calls, her infinite outrage over little things, her sudden volcanic enthusiasms.

  My father had been spending more and more time with a guru, of sorts. Mother had loathed Brother Mike, as he called himself, because he was apolitical, a New Age “futurist” with a quantum physics vocabulary. Without her carping, my father was growing more and more cerebral, living in cyberspace and working on the guru’s quasispiritual computer projects. Because Mother would have hated it so much, that was almost the hardest thing to bear.

  And as for my new practice, well, I made sure I did enough work to pay for my little house and my little office. But I preferred, above all else, to sleep. I put a hammock in my back yard, and most afternoons by four o’clock, when the pain was unbearable, I would go home and lie in the hammock and rock in the sun until it set. The hammock, I sometimes thought, was the only thing keeping me together.


  I had two friends in town, Fred and Edward Hershey. They stopped by fairly often despite the fact that I was lousy company. Edward, a private eye, kept going down to San Diego, trying to get new information. He never mentioned it to me, but I knew. For one thing, he was fond of my mother. And Fred, a psychiatrist, kept trying, as tactfully as possible, to draw me out and help me “work through my feelings.” Neither of them had any success.

  And so it went for months, five and a half very long months. Autumn blew through with cold, fragrant winds that whipped leaves off the liquidambars. Winter brought cold mists and high tides. Now wildflowers were coming up everywhere, so colorfully and plentifully that it might have seemed like heaven if I’d been happy.

  Then one day that seemed just like the days before it, my home phone rang, and it was Don Surgelato.

  His voice was tight and deep with excitement. “I may have a lead,” he said.

  I hadn’t even presumed to think he was still working on it. I leaned against a wall to steady myself. Hope can knock you off your feet.

  “What do you mean, a lead?”

  “San Diego Homicide’s been sending me copies of what it gets in. You know, professional courtesy and all that.”

  He’d spent two days in meetings with various cops and government officials, months ago in San Diego. They’d respected his rank enough to include him in the nitty-gritty of the investigation despite his having no real business there. They must have thought it was odd, or maybe they assumed that we were lovers or former partners. But if they hassled him about it, he never let on.

  When he returned to San Francisco, he kept in touch for a while. My father said he’d stopped by the flat a couple of times to see how he was doing. But I hadn’t spoken to him in at least three months. I didn’t realize he was still keeping involved.

  “What did they send you?”

  “You know the State Department interviewed Jamieson and Travolta?”

  “Yes.” The Cubans believed “Mr. Jamieson” and “Mrs. Travolta” were CIA agents, and assumed these were the real names of Dennis and Cindy. But according to Martin Marules, they were merely Cindy and Dennis’s landlords. “I was told they’d been interviewed in Belgium, but that they had nothing to contribute to the investigation. Or words to that effect.”

  “Well, they got back to Mexico City last week. Moved back into the apartment. It’s been sitting empty all this time.” He paused. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” It was just hard to think of Cindy and Dennis vanished, their things packed up and shipped off to family members somewhere, their apartment reclaimed by its previous occupants. It was as if they’d been erased.

  For a while, their fellow AP reporters, as well as friends at UPI and Reuters, had made something of a mission of going to Cuba to try to track them down. But the months had passed, and there was so much news to cover all around the world.

  Don continued, “I got word they were back. But nobody had the manpower … and it was just a hunch.” He cleared his throat. “I was just hoping to fill in some of the gaps.”

  I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say. I waited.

  “I hired a couple of detectives to go down there and watch them for a while.”

  “You did?”

  “Look, I didn’t want to tell you because probably nothing would come of it. And, well, you know, I’ve got the money, it was no big deal.”

  Yes, he had the money. But it certainly was a big deal. “Are you saying the detectives found out something?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, but maybe. Do you have a fax there at home?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then I’ll fax a photograph to your office. Can you go there and take a look?”

  “Who’s it a picture of?” Don’t get my hopes up? It was as if someone had taken a defibrillator to them.

  “Remember I had you do a session with our police artist?”

  “Yes.” Surgelato had gotten hold of photographs of Cindy and Dennis, Myra Wilson, Lidia Gomez, Agosto, Dr. Hemingway, his maid Alicia, and a few other players. But he’d wanted artist’s sketches of the rest, the ones in Cuba—Señor Emilio the Yum King, the supposed Radio Havana man in the white jacket, Ernesto, the Chinese guard I’d yanked into the tunnel and fallen on top of. “Of course I remember.”

  “Okay, today Jamieson and Travolta picked up someone from a Cubana de Aviación flight. I’m not sure if he’s one of your Cubans. My guy got a picture of him. I want you to go take a look at it.”

  I stood with eyes closed. Oh, please, let it be. Let there be something more that I can do.

  “Don, thank you. Either way.”

  “No, don’t even … Just call me back.”

  I raced to my office, a little suite in a building with two small law firms and an accountant. It was right downtown, and my upstairs room had a view of leafy, light-strung trees and Starbuck’s patio. I shared a receptionist and a conference room downstairs. Parking was impossible, but I liked being a staircase away from bookstores, outdoor cafés, and weird little galleries.

  I entered as the other lawyers were leaving. Only I closed up shop at four o’clock. Only I needed hammock therapy then, though I suspected a couple of my suitemates popped Prozac. I skipped the small talk and ran upstairs to my corner room. My fax already had a sheet in the tray. I pulled it out, my hand trembling and my breath held.

  I stared at it, shaking my head.

  I stepped backward, toward my office chair. I was just sinking into it when the phone rang. I hit the speaker button. The receptionist, cranky to have been delayed on her way out, said, “A Mr. Surgeelo?”

  “Put him on.”

  A few seconds later, Don’s voice crackled out of the speaker. “You got it?”

  “Yes.” I stared at the young face, with its wide eyes and excited smile. “It’s Ernesto. From the sea wall.”

  A brief silence. “The boy you ran away from that last night?”

  “Yes.”

  I listened to him breathe. Finally he said, “You want to leave this to the police?”

  “The San Diego police? Isn’t it way outside their jurisdiction? Would they even care? Ernesto certainly didn’t have anything to do with the murders up there.”

  “They’ll take this photo and file it. I know they won’t cross the border to question a Cuban national with an alibi.”

  “And the Mexican police have never been involved.”

  “The FBI might go down there. The State Department.” He sounded a little angry. “But then again, they might not. And this kid could be on the move. He could be gone tomorrow.”

  “I want to go down there. I want to talk to him. I can’t stand to think of him slipping away.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  I stared at the phone’s speaker as if that would explain what I’d heard. “You’re offering to come?”

  “Yes. Let’s do it, let’s go. Maybe nothing’s going to come of it. But I agree with you. We can’t let the kid slip away.”

  This was scary enough without hearing him use the word “we.” He continued, “I’ll book tickets out of San Francisco. I’ll call you back with flight information. You can meet me at the terminal. How long a drive is it for you?”

  “An hour and three-quarters.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to get us on something as soon after that as possible. Preferably tonight. Sit tight. I’ll phone right back.”

  “No, call me at home. I’ll go throw some things in a bag. Don?” I didn’t know how to say this.

  He seemed to know what was coming. “Naw,” he said.

  Then he hung up.

  22

  Mexico City is about as far from San Francisco as Chicago is, so it was a long flight. I kept glancing at Don. He still wore the suit he’d worked in, dark gray wool with a white broadcloth shirt now unbuttone
d at the throat. I could see dark chest hair on his olive skin. I could smell his toiletries. Whenever he caught my eye, there was a short intense flash of something, sympathy maybe. Or determination. At one point, he took my hand, holding it until I pulled myself together.

  In San Diego, he’d worn a wedding ring. Tonight, he didn’t. Not that it made a difference. But I noticed it within seconds of spotting him in the airline terminal.

  The flight seemed endless. I tried to talk myself into being realistic: Probably nothing would be gained, probably this was just a waste of time. I shouldn’t count on anything. After all these months, any leads were likely to be cold, and any news was likely be bad.

  On the other hand, Ernesto had presented himself to me as an impoverished young Cuban who dreamed of floating to Miami on a homemade raft. Now he was among the palaces and plazas of Mexico City, a guest of the couple whose tenants he claimed to have seen the evening after they disappeared.

  Ernesto was no poor Cuban boy, that much was certain. He knew something about Cindy and Dennis and maybe about my mother. I just prayed he didn’t slip away from Don’s detectives. He was all I had.

  At Don’s urging, I managed a few brief naps. I would be glad of it later. It took hours to get through customs and into a rental car. It was almost dawn before we reached the apartment of Mr. Jamieson and Mrs. Travolta.

  The first thing Don did was to drive around the neighborhood, scowling out the windshield as if memorizing every turn and landmark.

  Then he pulled up behind a black Volkswagen Beetle. I was surprised when he flashed his headlights. I hadn’t noticed a man slumped behind the wheel as if dozing. But when the light hit his rearview, he sat up, grabbed something from the passenger seat, and slid out of the car.

  He was a portly, dark-haired man with a bristling mustache and mussed hair. He climbed into our back seat.

  “Good to see you, sport,” he said to Don. His accent was Southern Californian. I guessed he was a PI out of San Diego, not a local.