by Glen Carter
Jack radioed in for docking instructions, and thirty minutes later he motored into a narrow slip between a forty-two foot sailboat and a gleaming flybridge with a “for hire” sign. A deckhand stowed shiny brass fishing reels, while a partner swept a bloodied mop across her deck. The skipper barked at the one swinging the mop, spat on the deck and then with a scowl hefted himself onto the wharf and headed in the direction of a noisy bar at the end of the pier. The two deckhands exchanged a look, and then one of them gave their boss the finger. He grinned at Jack and jumped onto the wharf to take his lines. A moment later Scoundrel was expertly tied.
Marina Hemingway was a busy place. Forests of towering sailboat masts swayed on the wake of gleaming mega-yachts headed out for evening cruises. Palm-lined canals snaked their way past stucco homes and rentals. There was a large white hotel which was topped by a harbour light and a manned radio post. Farther away Jack saw the low-roofed houses of Sante Fe.
He’d had just about enough of Cuban uniforms when he saw the two immigration officers headed down the dock. There were perfunctory questions and a cursory examination of his vessel. Jack handed one of them his passport, and his tourist card. The guy reminded Jack of Che Guevara, that brooding pose that had long ago become an icon of the revolution. “How long Cuba?” Che asked.
Jack held up five fingers. “Cinco dias.” It sounded reasonable, maybe more, maybe less. It would depend.
“No drugs?” Che continued to ask the questions.
“No, senor.” Jack didn’t think he wanted to know about the Gravol or the painkillers he kept in the first aid kit.
“No weapons aboard. Si?”
“No weapons aboard.” Trick question.
The partner was becoming restless so the two of them went below, messed things up a bit, demanded to look in the bilge, and then stood there looking at all the electronics, trying to figure out what they did. They said something in Spanish that sounded like gringo boat, then handed back his passport and told Jack in bad English to stay out of trouble.
Jack was happy to see them leave.
The ride to Figuardo’s was like a trip back in time. The cab driver wore ten dollar Ray Ban knockoffs a full hour after sunset and was leaning against a 1959 Chevy outside the marina’s main gate. He picked at something inside the front of his shirt. “Transport?” he asked, showing two gold teeth like shiny vanguards.
Jack nodded, and a door was opened with flourish. The back seat springs had apparently surrendered decades ago. The vinyl was frayed and cracked, but mostly a tapestry of duct tape. Jack wondered how much he’d find under the hood, or plugging holes along the brake lines. There were no seat belts.
They drove for a while before the driver introduced himself as Edmundo. He told Jack he could supply anything he needed, including cheap cigars and young girls.
“No thanks,” Jack told him. “Figuardo’s.”
Fine antiques like the’59 Chevy came with no air conditioning and Jack was soon sticking to the seat. He rolled a window down and sniffed at a warm breeze that carried odours from the old city: sea air and cooking oil, wisps of exhaust and a hint of raw sewage. A potpourri of human consumption and waste as the antique motored beside the old sea wall, the only thing left which offered protection to a crumbling Havana.
“You came by boat?”
Jack realized Edmundo had said something. He looked for the rearview mirror but saw there wasn’t one. “Sorry.”
“Boat. Boat.” Edmundo turned his head and smiled. “Big American boat?”
“Thirty-two foot ketch,” Jack said. “Not too big.”
“Big enough. Lots of room for cargo. No?”
“No cargo.”
“No cargo?” Edmundo was doubtful. Conspiratorial. “My cousin works in a marina in Lauderdale. Likes to send me pictures of the pretty yacht girls sunning their beautiful bodies. He left with the others at Mariel. You know, like Scarface. One less mouth for the Maximum Leader to feed. Many less mouths. Off he goes.” Edmundo made a sweeping movement upwards. “Sick boy. Killed his momma, Ezabella. Now the good life. Cleaning shit from toilets on big American boats just like yours.”
Jack simply nodded. He stared out the window and thought about the Mariel boatlifts. More than a hundred thousand Cubans flushed out to sea, backing up like sewage along the Florida coast. A smart move on Castro’s part, shedding the revolution’s convicts and psychos.
The car drove into a maze of narrow one-way streets that crisscrossed Havana Viejo, past decrepit three- and four-storey apartment houses where old men with vacant rheumy eyes sat in doorways smoking cigarettes. In the distance the dome of the old Capitol Building rose into the sky.
Jack was about to relax when the cab suddenly swerved. Tires screeched, followed by a loud pop. In that first adrenalin-soaked second Jack thought, Gunshot. But Edmundo wasn’t gunning it to get out of there. Instead he was yelling at someone. Slowly Jack pulled himself straight and nervously looked over his shoulder, realizing what had actually occurred. He felt like an idiot.
A young boy was barefoot and crying and being yanked to the curb by his angry mother. Jack saw something dead in the middle of the street.
“Stop!” He shouted.
“Loco nino,” Edmundo shouted back.
“Stop!” Jack repeated, slapping the door.
The car slowed and finally stopped. Jack jumped out and began to walk towards the kid and whatever it was they had hit in the middle of the street.
Edmundo got out and shook his head. “Not good idea, Senor Ketch.”
“Wait here,” Jack said, tapping his wallet.
He walked closer, palms open in apology, eyeing the dead heap in the middle of the narrow street.
Jack finally realized what they had “killed.” He bent down to the sniffling boy and in slow deliberate Spanish he apologized.
The youngster looked at him like he was crazy. So did his mother.
Jack stepped forward until they were just a foot apart.
The women’s eyes challenged him. In a doorway Jack saw two bare-chested habaneros who had come to see what all the commotion was about. Their eyes flicked from the boy, to the women, and finally to Jack.
Everyone was waiting for something to happen.
“Lo siento,” Jack said to the woman this time. Reaching into his pants, he retrieved a handful of American dollars, held them out to her. A full minute passed. No one said anything.
Sweat rolled down Jack’s back. He knew what the soccer ball would have meant to the kid, but this might have been a mistake. The men watched him, fists balled.
Tentatively the woman stepped forward and took the money, stuffed it into her jeans.
“Gracias,” she said, a smile forming.
While the two habaneros walked slowly towards them, Jack turned and walked briskly back to the car.
Edmundo was already behind the wheel when he got back into the car.
“Let’s go,” Jack said.
“Mierda,” said Edmundo, like his mouth was full of it, and stomped on the gas.
FORTY-FOUR
Havana was a city locked in time, a washed-up show dancer stubbornly refusing to surrender her gaudy makeup. Once beautiful and charming, now beaten down and clinging to what she had once been.
Four centuries ago tons of gold glittered on Spanish galleons anchored in her harbour, safe in the protective embrace of El Morro Castle and El Castille de la Real Fuerza. Jack was hooked on the stories of buccaneers and plunder, which he read voraciously as a kid. Cuba had always been part of his fantasy.
Jack was learning the difference between a staysail and a jib when most kids his age were starting to read. When he was thirteen he bought a leaking day-sailor twice as old as him for a hundred dollars. It was nineteen feet long with a main sail that looked like a checkerboard. Shanks and Mulligan thought he was nuts. “Better put a bucket aboard her,” Mulligan said.
Caleb Doyle didn’t know where his son was for two days. The note Jack left was short on de
tails. Gone to Boston to see Aunt Muriel. His father was furious – spent sixteen hours in Parker Thom’s Cape Islander looking for his boy.
Jack wasn’t scared. He spent hours gazing at Orion’s belt and Capella, pulsing red, white, and green, learning the things his father couldn’t teach him, about being alone on the water, counting on no one but yourself. He followed the stars like waypoints towards his manhood, and ten hours into the journey he thought he was seeing things when the water’s black surface parted.
The sperm whale was close. So close a flip of its tail would have capsized his tiny boat. Jack swung away but the whale surfaced directly beneath him, and a second later the boat moved sideways – no longer a boat, just a piece of driftwood. The beast was blacker than the water could ever be, and Jack saw a huge eye staring up at him. The whale snorted moist air and like a black slab slowly fell away. Jack could still remember the smell, that salty mix of seaweed and warm blood. His heart had pumped pure adrenalin, a rush he would never forget. That, and later his father’s stinging hands.
It took the cab driver ten minutes to reach the street where Figuardo’s was. Edmundo took Jack’s money, and a five dollar tip, and sped away, leaving him standing on the sidewalk of a narrow street with barely enough room for two-way traffic. Spray-painted American classics shouldered their way up and down the street, belching clouds of blue smoke. The place was crawling with the night detritus of Old Havana. Bare-chested hucksters swaggered along the sidewalk, looking at Jack like he was lunch meat.
“Cheap cigars. You come look, OK?”
Jack shook his head. Stared at them until they passed and then stood there. He would have had no trouble imagining another decade were it not for the gaggle of transvestites loitering nearby. One of them spied him and sauntered over. Red sequins and black leather atop three-inch heels, hips swaying to some internal rhythm. “Don you worry about those bugarrons,” he said, looking Jack up and down. “What dey sell you don want.”
“I’m not buying,” Jack said, and reached down for his knapsack before turning his head in the direction of a string of bars, any of which could have been Figuardo’s.
More examination from the he-she. A whistle. Then three of his friends high-stepped forward. Excited about fresh meat. “You so lone-ly,” one of the newcomers said in a voice as baritone as James Earl Jones. Ridiculous looking at six feet in white spandex, and an Adam’s apple as big as a kiwi. Scuff marks on his white knees.
“Sorry girls.” Jack frowned. “But can you point me in the direction of Figuardo’s?”
“Such a waste,” the one in black leather said, a look of regret on his face as he pointed to a doorway just down the street.
Jack told them thanks, picked up his knapsack and walked away.
The bar’s name was carved in wood above a pair of expansive doors which were open to the sidewalk. The place was no more than thirty feet wide, but it ran deep into a cooler blackness where one could sit to seriously contemplate life without the distractions of noise and diesel fumes drifting in on hot muggy air.
There were a dozen places just like it that ran through old Havana. Relics from the old days that were slowly disintegrating like everything else here. In the fifties, places like the Tropicana were ripe with beautiful Cuban girls who satisfied the needs of American mobsters before Castro’s tanks rolled into Havana and the Mafia were politely told to leave.
Hemingway had walked these streets. At La Bodequita Del Medio near the grand old cathedral “Ernesto’s” famous ode to mojitos and daiquaries was displayed amid dusty rum bottles near the ceiling.
Jack walked into Figuardo’s and took a seat at the bar, ordered two fingers of Havana Club, straight up.
The bartender took his order and walked away.
Jack took a robusto out of his shirt pocket, struck a wooden match, and pulled on the cigar until it caught fire. He drove the first plume of earthy smoke into his sinuses, resonating nostalgically, like an old black and white movie featuring dancing girls with headdresses made of fruit.
The bartender brought his drink and placed it on a napkin in front of him.
“Gracias.” Jack said. “Dmitri Raspov, por favor?”
“Senor Doyle?” the waiter asked.
“Si.”
The waiter walked to a telephone at the end of the bar.
Everyone’s expecting me, Jack thought, unaware that the waiter had a photo of him next to the cash register. Raspov’s e-mail had been short and to the point. Where and when to meet, nothing more.
The walls were full of bric-a-brac, black and white photos of Havana’s better days. The Gypsy Kings were playing on a pair of Tanoy speakers hanging in the back of the long narrow room. The lyrics sounded raspy, and the baseline hissed like it was coming from inside a wet cardboard box. Needs duct tape, Jack thought. The rum was smooth. He swallowed twice and wondered who Raspov would be sending to fetch him.
Figuardo’s had a dozen tables, four more on a tiny sidewalk patio Jack had passed on his way in. About half of them were taken. Nearby a group of young dark-skinned men and women flirted outrageously with one another. Jack watched as a teenager mischievously cupped his hand beneath a girl’s rear end, and was slapped for it. An old Harley roared up and down the street. Its throaty roar rumbled through the bar, causing stacked high-ball glasses to jingle. A leggy girl wearing a short brightly coloured skirt clung to the back of the bike, jiggling.
The bartender watched Jack while rubbing sticky rum circles into a faded teak bar that smelled of disinfectant. Jack drove another cloud of cigar smoke towards the mirror over the bar and caught a glimpse of his tanned face, freshly scrubbed and shaven. He unconsciously wiped a strand of dark hair off his forehead. He needed a haircut, but decided overall he looked pretty good considering his shitty diet and the lack of exercise.
Jack finished three more shots of seven-year-old Havana Club and was feeling much better an hour later when a man took the stool next to his.
“Doyle?”
Jack had trouble taking in the size of him. “That’s me,” he managed to say.
The largest man Jack had ever seen stared back at him. “Time to go.”
A Zil limousine was parked outside. Jack guessed it had to be twenty years old with its torn wine-coloured leather seats and gaping holes where the car phone and bar fridge had once been. It was a relic of Soviet influence that had apparently survived the cannibals who hunted for spare parts all over Castro’s junkyard empire.
The lights of Havana faded behind them as they headed west along cracked pavement towards Mariel. They passed stands of palm trees and clusters of ramshackle hovels made of tin and wood. Split oil drums burned brightly in hues of orange and purple along the highway. It was usually the children who tended the fires, while their parents watched lazily from underneath patio roofs fashioned from bamboo and scavenged wood.
The shiny black car skirted high ocean cliffs beneath a full moon that hung like a halogen headlight in the sky.
It had been a long day, and Jack was enjoying the ride, actually thinking about pulling his shoes off. Raspov’s welcoming committee was an eye-catcher. Two men, both, as it turned out, extraordinarily large. Both had shaved heads as round and brown as sun-cooked chestnuts. Uri was driving. The one sitting in front next to him was Pavel, Uri’s brother.
Neither of them had spoken since Jack climbed into the back seat. Uri was humming, something patriotic-sounding with lots of base notes rumbling up his throat and around a cavernous mouth. He snapped his jaw to keep time. Pavel had slipped into a kind of standby mode, hunkered low like a predatory lizard of some kind, waiting for a big, fat, juicy bug to wander by. A quick meal at the end of a long sticky tongue. Uri and Pavel wore ridiculous getups. A pair of Brahma bulls in Hawaiian silk shirts, khaki shorts with thick-soled black shoes, which Jack decided were probably good for stomping people who owed them money, or poor unfortunates they just didn’t like. Jack didn’t know if they liked him, thought it might be important that they do.
Maybe a joke to break the ice.
Hey Pavel. Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Who cares? By the way, what’s the Russian mob doing in Cuba? What kind of work do you do for Raspov?
The air conditioning whispered like a dying man but neither brother bothered to open a window. Uri had briefly lowered his, but quickly closed it again when Pavel twisted his head towards his brother and hissed something in Russian that sounded to Jack like a warning.
A moment later Jack caught a whiff of something and looked over at Uri who had said something.
“Sorry.” Jack said.
“I said, how long you have known our friend Dmitri?”
“Since Gorbi.”
“Gorbi’s a bad man,” Uri said, “Dmitri doesn’t like him. Pavel doesn’t like him much either. Me, I don’t care.”
Pavel gave his brother a cursed stare. “You don’t care because you’re the son of a Chechen whore. Gorbachev’s a traitor.”
“A traitor to the motherland, eh Pavel?” Uri said in his thick Russian accent. “Doyle, you agree?”
“Didn’t come to talk about politics,” Jack replied, hoping it wouldn’t piss the monster off. Not with two Soviet patriots, he added to himself.
“This is smart American, Pavel,” Uri said to his brother. “I like him.”
“Raspov likes him.”
“Then we like him also.” He looked back at Jack, no whites visible in his eyes. “You will like us too, Doyle – when we’ve gotten drunk together – tasted some of Raspov’s women.”
“Whatever you say,” Jack said. “But politics is definitely out.”
“Even a good patriot such as Pavel likes whores, eh brother? You liked our mother, didn’t you?”
“Shut up, Uri. Drive. Don’t hum anymore. It makes me remember.”
Fifteen minutes later they turned right off the highway onto a narrow tree-lined dirt road. Uri wiped a handkerchief inside his shirt, somewhere in the vicinity of his left armpit, sniffed it for odour.
