Havana Twist

by Lia Matera

  “Mother went to see her because I harped on it, I made a big deal about Gomez,” I told him. “Not because she believed anything had happened to her.”

  “The populace has gone mad from lack of food and electricity,” Marules said. “There are factions and paranoias abundant. The people attack without sense or reason. Lidia is a good revolutionary, a true patriot. Yet she was attacked by a mob. She had to be removed from there, for her own safety.”

  “And Emilio helped you.”

  “Which proves, does it not, that she is a patriot?” He blinked at us as if hoping we could agree with this, at least.

  “It proves he wanted your money, your wife’s money,” Don said. “Gomez used Myra Wilson’s passport?”

  “They are gusanos, counterrevolutionaries, Wilson and this doctor of hers. Emilio made use of her, yes. But she chose to do this, believing stupidly that Lidia was not a patriot in a difficult time, but a worm like herself.”

  “You and Emilio set Wilson up to spend seven years in prison? For turning over her passport? For doing you a favor?”

  “Lidia was attacked, she was not well. She was in physical danger, and might have been arrested at any moment by General Miguel. We could not wait for the usual means, the airplanes from Russia. It was urgent that she leave immediately. We did not suggest to Myra Wilson that she offer her passport. She chose to do this.”

  “Because she believed Gomez would come here and speak out against the oppression in Cuba!” I wanted to smack him. “She didn’t do it so Gomez could come here and keep her mouth shut, living in luxury on your wife’s money and blaming the Cuban people instead of its leaders. She didn’t do it so you and Gomez could tryst to your hearts’ content while she rotted in prison.”

  “No. But she is guilty of a crime, and her sentence is not unjust.”

  “Except that she keeps quiet about what her real crime was, assuming that Gomez is doing a lot of talking. Maybe even agitating for her release.”

  Don squinted at Marules. “Emilio greased the skids, letting Gomez slip out with the false passport. Then Willa’s mother went to Cuba and tried to see Gomez. She found Gomez gone. Emilio detained her, and she missed her flight. He told her he was sorry, the Revolution didn’t mean to inconvenience her, and he put her on an Aeroflot layover. She’d think of some excuse for her family, and nobody in Cuba would be the wiser. So what happened then? What went wrong?”

  “That day, Pirí swears he was watched, that supervisors and officials came especially to watch him. Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is a delusion. But so, Pirí let me down. It is the only time.” He looked more than merely troubled.

  “Maybe Pirí let you down, or maybe the CIA decided to mess with your smuggling scheme,” Don countered. “But something else went wrong, too. That’s what’s got you so spooked now. That’s why you went rushing to Cuba to get us out of there. That’s why you called Sarah Swann a few days ago and told her to drive down here. That’s why you had Pirí phone her to pick you up from the airport this morning. That’s why you went to check on Willa’s mother today. You’re tying up loose ends like someone who’s afraid he’s got the devil after him. Someone’s got you running scared.”

  “Es correcto,” said a voice behind us.

  I turned to find a silhouette against the white sky showing through the mausoleum door.

  I was at a loss. I’d never seen this man before. And yet, here he was, pointing a gun at Marules as if it were so natural we should all applaud him.

  “Ernest Hemingway, I presume,” Don said.

  The man inclined his head. He spoke English: “I have been listening to your interesting story. And it occurs to me that for the most part, the ending is quite happy. Señor Marules is in love. Señorita Gomez lives like a princess in a fine penthouse in Mexico City.” When Marules gasped, Hemingway continued, “Oh, yes, I have just come from there, Señor, looking for you. I’m afraid the attack she wished to avoid, from those foolish Cubans who do not realize the loveliness of the revolution which imprisons them by the thousands? Well, she could not hope to avoid all disgruntled Cubans forever.”

  Marules blanched. “You have not harmed her? Please, Doctor?”

  “Oh yes, I have. Decidedly. My true love, you know, sits in a Cuban prison. Six more years before I will kiss her sweet face.”

  Six years. I thought about Wilson’s glazed eyes, her drugged responses. Sedated, she could be trotted out and shown to visiting Americans. But how did they treat her when no one was watching?

  “It has taken me many months and all my savings to learn where Lidia Gomez has gone—why she has not come to my home, to Myra’s home. Why she has not spoken out.” He was a light-skinned man with a great deal of gray in his black hair. Deep furrows marred his forehead. It looked like it had been a very long time since he’d stopped frowning. “You knew that I had finally discovered the truth?”

  Marules shook his head. “I knew only that you had come to Mexico City, Doctor.”

  “Of course you knew. I made a fuss at the airport, I threatened your precious Pirí, for that very purpose. And then I watched you try to hide Señorita Gomez and run to Cuba, run to your master like a good puppet.”

  I was confused. If Marules went to Cuba to warn Emilio that Hemingway was looking for Gomez, why the charade about protecting us, getting us out of there?

  “You meant it,” I said to Marules. “Maybe you went to Cuba to talk to Emilio about Hemingway and Gomez. But then you found out he was going arrest us.”

  “No,” Marules said. “No. On the contrary, I learned that General Miguel had prepared the order for your arrest.”

  “General Miguel? But he saved us.”

  “He did so only because Juan Emilio had betrayed us. The general did not come to the airport to help us,” Marules insisted. “He came to capture us. It is only because Emilio betrayed us, and only because the general is an enemy of Emilio, that he decided to let us go.” Marules was shaking. “You see what has happened in Cuba as a result of the long starvation? They are like rats biting each other’s ears. We were merely inside the cage with them.”

  The general would have arrested us if Emilio hadn’t beaten him to it? We’d been freed just so the general could thwart his enemy?

  My knees felt weak. I’d been even closer to prison than I’d thought. And god, no wonder Marules had looked even more terrified than Don and I had.

  “What do you know about Cuba, rich man?” Hemingway exploded. “You make pronouncements about the revolution and the people as if you had lived there. Can you begin to understand what it is to have ears listening constantly for some word that is not sanctioned by your dictator? You who pray at this grave, do you understand the despair of praying in secret in the dark so you will not be reported to the vigilancia, so you will not be labeled a counterrevolutionary, so you will not be fired from your job and unable to put food on your table? When Amnesty International tells you Cuba has prisons full of poor men who did nothing but speak the wrong phrase, when they say men by the thousands are beaten and tortured there, you ignore it. You choose instead to believe rhetoric over proof. Hundreds of thousands have fled Cuba in the last twenty years, but you dismiss them as worms. Hundreds of thousands of desperate creatures give up a homeland, a heritage, to live in poverty and exile, and you discount them, refusing to hear them, refusing to believe them.” He raised the gun and pointed it at Marules. “You use us for your own ends. You play upon the heart of Myra Wilson for your own purpose. You steal seven years of her life without regret.”

  Don lunged at him, knocking him over as he fired the gun. I screamed, seeing a flash of metal on metal beside me, feeling a hot spark burn my hand. A bullet had ricocheted off Agosto’s plaque.

  The mausoleum was filled with gunsmoke. It stank of saltpeter. And something else.

  I fell to my knees. Don still grappled with Hemingway, but the gun was on t
he alabaster floor now. I would have reached for it, but Marules was on the ground, too, between me and the gun.

  Funny he would be prone. Perhaps he’d reacted with panic, as well. Perhaps he’d dropped to the ground when I had, when the gun went off.

  Hemingway was making wild grunting noises, a madman fighting. I had to get the gun. I had to put a stop to this before Don got hurt.

  “Marules!” I cried, trying to get him to move aside. Trying to get him to grab the weapon.

  I started reaching over him, Hemingway’s cries echoing in the mausoleum. The smell hit me again, reminding me of something I didn’t want to think about. I saw the huge stain on Marules’s trousers.

  I scurried backward. The stink came from relaxed bowels and a voided bladder. I’d smelled it before because I’d seen a dead body before.

  On the pale gray alabaster of the mausoleum floor, a red stain spread slowly beyond Marules’s body.

  Thanks to Don, Hemingway had missed Marules. But the bullet had ricocheted in the small chamber, hitting Marules anyway.

  I looked at my hand in horror. There was a small pinpoint burn where the spark from the bullet on Agosto’s plaque caught me near the thumb.

  I was still staring at it when Conner ran in, having heard the shot from where he was parked, waiting.

  37

  By the time Mother was released from the women’s prison in Mexico City, Dr. Hemingway had been tried and sentenced to six years. He claimed (lied, in my opinion) that he’d fired only to frighten, not to wound. Ironically, he and Myra Wilson would be released within months of each other.

  Lidia Gomez presumably recovered from Hemingway’s beating—she vanished rather than face deportation. But Martin Marules didn’t survive the gunshot.

  I couldn’t help but mourn Marules. His reasons had been complex and, in effect, cruel. But I’d lived with idealists most of my life. I knew how much they were willing to sacrifice, even when it wasn’t theirs to give up.

  I was more angry with Sarah Swann. She had agreed with Marules that it would be counterrevolutionary to give me and my father the numerous messages from my mother. I would see through them, Sarah was sure. I would go to Cuba, and I would learn too much. I would use it publicly to cast Cuba into a bad light. My mother wouldn’t want that.

  My mother had been told the family had gotten her messages—it was no use adding to her burdens, Sarah thought. It had comforted Mother to think we’d accepted her lies. She knew how much 1, in particular, hated thinking of her in jail.

  And Sarah Swann was right about one thing. When Mother learned why Sarah had decided not to give us the false messages, she agreed with her.

  Mother agreed with her! She understood that Sarah had acted unselfishly for the benefit of the Cuban people and the revolution. She forgave Sarah almost immediately, despite the fact that I’d nearly ended up in a Cuban prison.

  Mother resisted believing any portions of my story that reflected badly on Cuba. I wasn’t in prison, was I? I must have been mistaken. Sarah had only done what Mother might have done under the same circumstances. She had acted in good conscience, and mother was determined to bless her for it. If anything, they were closer than ever.

  Mother was much more confused about Don’s motives. She was much less willing to understand his reasons for taking me to Cuba the second time. It hadn’t been necessary, and to her mind, it had just stirred up animosity between Señor Emilio and General Miguel, and that couldn’t be a useful thing for Cuba, could it?

  Her continuing suspicion of Don, dating back to his politically incorrect shooting of a famous radical who’d killed a number of our friends (but never mind that), was particularly ironic now. Don had been instrumental in keeping the State Department from stepping in and arresting Mother for “trading with the enemy” and, in general, wreaking so much havoc. I didn’t kid myself that they’d declined to prosecute because Mother had meant well. They’d dropped it because Don, a respected law-enforcement official, had persuaded them to.

  If that didn’t win him any points with Mother, it certainly cinched my feelings for him. Man, was I in love.

  So the good news was that we had Mother back. And the bad news was that she hadn’t changed a bit.

  When Don warned me, one gorgeous evening as we lazed around his house, that I might find his old-fashioned Italian mother to be a bit of a trial—“She doesn’t believe in divorce, so she’s not happy about our relationship”—I had to laugh, I really did.

  Don’s mother a trial.

  I love my mother, but in that regard, she’s got no competition at all.

  About the Author

  Lia Matera is the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity Award–nominated author of nine novels. A graduate of UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was editor in chief of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Matera was a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School before becoming a full-time writer of legal mysteries. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1998 by Lia Matera

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-6670-9

  This edition published in 2021 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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