by Jose Latour
“Okay, señorita, I’ll … notify Fermín. Thanks. Bye.”
Fermín hung up and stared vacantly at the wall for a few seconds, the time it took his feelings to overcome his prudence. Plainclothesmen busted him in the fourth-floor corridor and shunted him to the Bureau of Investigations. Sergeant Ureña ordered the handcuffed prisoner to sit down on a backless granite bench and went to see whether the Bureau’s special interrogation room was in use. It wasn’t. The obese sergeant steered Fermín to it, closed the door behind them.
“You know what goes on in here, Gallego?”
Fermín took the place in. It was painted gray, and in the center of it was a high-backed hardwood armchair with buckled leather straps for arms and legs. The indescribable smell of fear could be discerned. Two nightsticks and four three-foot-long pieces of rubber hose lay on a table close to the only door. To his right, a tape recorder on a small writing desk. A typewriter to his left, on a tiny four-wheeled typist’s stand. Three wooden chairs, a three-legged piano stool, two huge buckets, a sink, a fan. A four-tube fluorescent lamp hung from the ceiling. In a far corner, on the floor, lay a heap of hand tools. The room deserved the top mark on the scale of luridness.
“Sergeant, I haven’t done anything.”
Ureña sighed patiently. “I don’t approve of this. But ten minutes after I start interrogating you, they’ll ask me if you spilled the beans. If you haven’t—and I know you’re thinking of sticking to this dumb ‘I haven’t done anything’ line—they’ll bring you here. I won’t be part of it, but I can’t prevent it, either. You understand what I’m saying? And in here, my friend, you’ll tell all the secrets of your life. If some nasty old man buggered you when you were ten, if you can’t get it up, if your mother was a whore or a saint—everything, Gallego. In here, people confess to crimes they haven’t even dreamed of committing. And we know you were in on the Capri job, with Ox and Abo. So, what’s it gonna be?”
“I don’t know anything ’bout any job, Sergeant, I swear it on my mother’s grave. Who was, by the way, a saint,” he said in a pat, unconvincing response.
Ureña shook his head in commiseration, called it a day, and went home. By the time he was taking his shower, Fermín was getting the standard punch-and-kick treatment. While the sergeant was slurping his soup, the prisoner was being stripped naked and then strapped to the hardwood armchair. The fingers of his left hand were spread out and immobilized by the five tubes of an iron contraption specially designed and forged for interrogations. The palm of his hand rested on its base. The tubes left the fingernails exposed.
Corporal Talavera had broken new ground in the field of duress. He was a gray-eyed man of average height and build who smiled a lot. That evening he wore regulation blue, the cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt folded up to his elbows. Had he been treated for sadism, his medical records would have made it to a world congress on psychiatry. Sitting on the piano stool facing the prisoner, gripping a pair of pliers and smiling broadly, he asked once again:
“Who pulled off the Capri job, Gallego?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Corporal.”
The corporal plucked them off unhurriedly, like a manicurist intent on doing a fine job. The prisoner groaned and howled and screamed and sweated like never before. Under the chair, blood and urine formed a stinking pool. Having finished with the little finger, the corporal raised his eyes to those of the prisoner, which were closed. Fermín was gasping heavily.
“Who talked you into it, Gallego?”
“Nobody talked me into nothing.”
The iron contraption was moved to the right hand, whose fingers underwent the same ordeal. Later, the corporal paused to wash his own blood-soaked hands in the sink. He also let water run over the pliers before dropping them in the corner, where two more pairs of pliers, one hammer, a clamp, and two screwdrivers rested. He looked the implements over carefully, scattering them a little with the toecap of his left shoe. A stainless-steel surgical knife flashed ominously under the fluorescent lighting. Sergeant Ureña was watching the evening news when Talavera picked up the knife and went back to the stool.
“I’m gonna cut off your balls, dwarf,” he said with a toothy grin as he oscillated the shimmering scalpel in front of the prisoner’s eyes.
Fermín knew this was no vain threat. It was common knowledge that in the outskirts of Havana had often been found the emasculated bodies of revolutionaries. Perhaps this same man with this same knife had been their gelder. For the first time, he became absolutely terrified. The excruciating pain suddenly abated. He blinked openmouthed several times as his scrotum speedily contracted.
“Corporal, you’re gonna disgrace me for the rest of my life, and I’m innocent.”
“Later, I’m gonna take one of those nightsticks over there—see them?—and shove it up your ass all the way. Maybe you’ll like it. From pimp to fag in five minutes.”
“Don’t do this to me, Corporal, please,” panting hard.
“I’ll do it real quick,” Talavera said as he deftly reached for Fermín’s testicles with his left hand. Gallego made a superhuman effort to back off; the straps held him firmly. He watched in horrified fascination as the knife edged up to his lap, giving him time to realize what was about to happen; then he felt the blade graze his left testicle.
“NO, COÑO.”
“Then spit it out, cocksucker.”
“Ox talked me into it!”
“When?”
“Last July.”
Talavera rose. His smile vanished; the fun was over. Fucking fatso’s orders. He marched to the table and turned on the tape recorder. The mike had a long cord, and he took it back with him to the stool.
“Suspect Rodríguez, who talked you into the Capri robbery?”
Fermín stared at the door. The beaming corporal raised his right hand, and the scalpel glistened in front of the prisoner’s eyes.
“Ox talked me into it,” in a whisper now.
“And who is Ox?”
“Ox is Mariano Contreras, my buddy.”
In the beginning, Fermín tried to reveal a bare minimum. He kept to himself the participation of Loredo and Rancaño; didn’t say a word about the Naguib connection, the rented house, or the Château Miramar murders. But when Gabriel Castillo replaced Corporal Talavera, the suspect was expertly cornered.
“C’mon, Gallego, you want me to believe you didn’t know who was driving the getaway car? You think I’m stupid or what?”
“Ox brought him in. Didn’t say his name. I only met the guy a couple of hours before the heist.”
“What’s his name?”
“I … really don’t recall. It was an alias.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was a mulato, short and overweight.”
“Short and overweight like you?”
“More or less.”
“You leveling with me, Gallego? Witnesses say he’s a mulato all right, but young, tall, and good-looking, like me.”
“If they say so …”
“Tell you what. Talavera must have finished his supper by now. I’ll leave you with him. I feel like screwing a broad I met yesterday. She’s a dish, you know?”
“Sergeant, for the love of God, don’t call that beast.”
“Let’s cut a deal then. You tell me the name and address of the driver, I’ll send for a coupla cones of water. You must be pretty thirsty, ain’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a cooler out there. Ice-cold water.”
“Promise me you won’t hurt him.”
“Not if he cooperates.”
“His name is Melchor Loredo, Wheel his aka, and he lives in Marianao.”
Two paper cones of water.
After he fingered Rancaño and explained what he did, Fermín’s arms were unbuckled and ethyl ether was sprayed on the tips of his fingers. His legs were untied when he concluded an overview of the planning and organizational stages. Delineating the roles of Ox and Abo
during the robbery won him enough credit to get dressed. And finally, at 5:35 A.M. on October 14, a Tuesday, just as Sergeant Ureña was getting up after a restful night and the protracted questioning was drawing to a close, the crestfallen and totally demoralized Fermín Rodríguez moved from admitting the undeniable to blurting out unverifiable details.
“You don’t know him, Sergeant. His right hand doesn’t know what his left is doing. He wouldn’t tell his hiding place to his own mother.”
“You leave me no option. I’ll send for Talavera.”
“You can send for him; he can cut my nuts and throw them to the dogs, or I can start making up addresses to remain a man a little longer, but I don’t know where Ox, Abo, or any of the others are hiding. Just like they didn’t know where I was.”
“But you told him you’d be at the National Library on Friday afternoons.”
“Exactly. He said he wasn’t gonna go.”
“And you didn’t go up to apartment 35 of the Château Miramar on the night of the murders?”
“I didn’t.”
Sergeant Gabriel Castillo pretended to do some hard thinking for half a minute. During the night, other officers had corroborated Fermín’s story. Witnesses at the Château Miramar had denied the possibility that a third nonresident could have entered Naguib’s apartment. Police cruisers had found the pickup and Contreras’s Chevy where Fermín said they were. Di Constanzo, after consulting with Lansky, had admitted why and where Grouse had been murdered and that no, it wasn’t the shortest of the Frankensteins who had done him.
“I’m gonna give you a break, Gallego,” Castillo said. “But gut instinct tells me you’re hiding something.”
“Nothing, Sergeant, I swear it,” the prisoner said, trying to sound convincing. He knew that if he mentioned the only thing he’d kept to himself—the Grava-Naguib connection—he was a dead man.
“Okay. I’m gonna send you to the infirmary for a cure. Then you’ll have breakfast and at nine we’ll go for a ride.”
“Where to?”
“To the bank, Gallego. To pick up all that dough.”
…
“Nah, that guy’s older, and look at the uniform—he’s a bus driver,” the man sitting on the left of a ’57 Dodge Kingsway’s backseat said; then he coughed and spat out the window. The other three officers in the car remained silent.
Six minutes later a dark-skinned Negro emerged from the roofless hallway. A Glidden cap and paint stains on his shirt and trousers gave away his trade.
“Too black, too short,” the driver said after a few moments.
The unmarked vehicle was parked on Sixty-sixth Street between Thirty-first and Thirty-third Avenues, a block with four long, two-story apartment buildings that provided modest homes to poor families. An experiment in low-cost housing was going on in that section of the city. The goal was to triple invested capital in twenty years, a 10 percent annual capital gain.
The cops on the stakeout were looking over early risers on their way to work.
“What’s his apartment number—I forget,” the man sitting in the passenger seat asked.
“Eleven. It’s in the back,” a hoarse voice directly behind him answered.
A cigarette was lit. The men in the front wore regulation-blue drill uniforms, corporal stripes on the left sleeves of their shirts. The pair in the backseat wore civvies. Around 6:17 A.M., the hoarse-voiced man spoke.
“C’mon, let’s go.”
After quietly closing the doors, they crossed the street. The plainclothesman in charge carried a Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun. His partner had a .30-caliber M-1 carbine. As they entered the hallway, the uniforms pulled .38-caliber regulation Colts from their hip holsters.
“Cover the other building, Rigoberto. If he’s in, he might try to hop over the backyard wall and take a powder,” the man in charge whispered.
The civilian with the carbine did an about-face, turned left at the sidewalk, and entered the next building’s roofless hallway. He sized up the wall to his left. Nothing impressive—maybe nine feet high, a single line of bricks with a flimsy sand-and-cement facing. Ten yards ahead of him a thin middle-aged man opened his front door, gaped at the weapon-toting stranger, fell back inside, shut himself in. The cop suppressed a smile.
In the adjoining hallway, the three police officers reached apartment 11, next to last on the ground floor. One corporal stood to the left of the front door, the other to the right. The plainclothesman knocked softly three times.
Melchor Loredo came out of his customarily light early-morning slumber and experienced foreboding an instant before realizing what was going on. It surprised him to feel just a little sad, almost melancholic. He’d never own an apartment building, never open a cafeteria. His gaze focused on the single bed where two small boys were sound asleep. Then Loredo rested the tips of his fingers on the full lips of the woman by his side and smiled at her as she awoke.
“Ask who it is,” Loredo whispered. Silent as a cat, he got up and reached for his pants.
“Who is it?” the beautiful black woman shouted, an edge of alarm in her voice.
“Is Wheel in?” wanted to know a hoarse voice with a friendly inflection. She threw a questioning look at her husband. Loredo shook his head as he buttoned the waistband.
“No, he’s not. Who wants him?” she said, loud enough for the man to hear, in a frightened tone.
“We’ve never met. I’ve got a message for him, from Gallego. I can leave it with you.”
Her fearful gaze shifted back to Loredo, who was simultaneously putting on a shirt and slipping his feet into loafers. He nodded.
“Well … tell me,” she said.
“Lady, I’m supposed to give this message to you or to your husband, not the whole block.”
“Then you’ll have to wait a minute. I’ll get dressed.”
“Okay. I’ll wait.”
From under the mattress, Loredo produced a .357-magnum Smith & Wesson. His wife wrapped her arms around his knees and whispered “No, no, no” over and over. Loredo inserted the gun in his waistband, freed himself, then hurried to the kitchenette, where, without a sound, he slid back the bolt of the narrow door to a tiny courtyard. Right behind him, the wide-eyed woman grabbed his arms, rested her left cheek between his shoulder blades, and whispered, “Give yourself up, honey, please, give yourself up.” The black Venus had on light blue panties, nothing else. Loredo stepped into the courtyard, lifted his eyes to the rose-tinted sky, and sniffed the morning air like a wild dog.
“Señoraaaa …,” the voice said, closer now to the limit of its patience.
“Coming, señor, coming …”
Loredo quickly kissed his wife, reached for the top of the courtyard wall, and pulled himself up, feeling the gun scratch his crotch. When his eyes reached the top, he stole a look at the hallway of the neighboring building, then gave one more powerful upward jerk. For an instant he sat astride the wall, then he slipped down the other side.
“Don’t move, Wheel,” ordered a voice at his back.
The fugitive spun around as he pulled the gun free and fired, but his aim was terrible. A powerful impact on his chest threw him back; a flame caught his eye. Falling, he realized that the bang from his shot had been absorbed by a second, booming roar. Loredo couldn’t figure out whether life was kissing him good-bye or if death was welcoming him to perpetual darkness, but he sure felt glad he’d told his wife where she should dig if something happened to him. Then he hit the ground with a nasty thud and lay still, gazing at the sky, as rivulets of his blood started zigzagging toward the closest of five drains.
…
Valentín Rancaño was living unforgettable hours. Everything had softer shades, sweeter fragrances, tastier flavors, richer sounds, more tender surfaces. He dipped the well-toasted triangle of bread into the milk-and-coffee combination Cubans favor, then studied the butter varnishing the surface with golden streaks. Life looked promising; with each passing minute he felt increasingly certain he wo
uldn’t lie low until November. He raised the piece of soaked bread to his mouth and enjoyed its savor.
Having brushed aside Contreras’s advice, and not given to de-emphasizing his sudden transit from rags to riches, Rancaño had splurged on expensive new clothes and shoes; he carried a fat roll of bills in his pocket too. The previous afternoon he’d rented the place for his gambling joint. From there he’d sauntered over to La Marina, a restaurant famous for its seafood on the corner of Amargura and Oficios. There he had lobster enchilada, rice, fried plantains, and two beers.
Feeling horny, he’d taken a cab to the Shanghai Theater, a porno movie house. Surrounded by tourists of both sexes, the women hiding under dark glasses and headgear, he’d watched three twenty-minute films before dim lights were turned on. A slide projector began showing ads on the screen: nearby clubs and fleabags, a venereal disease clinic, aphrodisiacs sold at drugstores, contraceptives. Later, musicians took their seats in the pit and the last show began. Tatiana fascinated Rancaño; the top star was a beautiful natural redhead with a wonderful body. When the final curtain fell, the gambler felt like doing something he had never done before, so he went out to wait by the artists’ exit. Tatiana had come out accompanied by her tall, husky, handsome pimp. Smiling mischievously, Rancaño had cut into their path waving a fifty-peso bill. The pimp had seized the note, inspected it carefully, grinned, and transferred the woman to the acne-scarred client.
Around the corner, a flophouse advertised clean, air-conditioned rooms by the hour, and Rancaño took one. He found out that Tatiana was great onstage but lousy in bed; she didn’t even pretend to be having a good time. So, after three ejaculations he’d told the woman to get dressed and get out. At 2:10 A.M. she forced a parting smile at the naked man sprawled on the mattress. He had flipped her a quarter.
“What’s this for?” Tatiana had asked.
“Tip. You have the best body I’ve ever seen, but you fuck like a turtle—a frigid turtle at that.”
