The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  Quevedo cleared his throat. “We won’t take much of your time, Dr. Cantú. I presume the girl is inside. Did you wish to give us some background before we go in?”

  “Thank you for coming, compañeros. I would not have imposed on you for purely personal reasons. But this incident has broader implications. My niece disappeared nine days ago. She said she was taken prisoner by a foreigner. He held her until this morning, then tried to kill her. She will give you the details—about him and his attempt on her life. Not about what he did to her during the time she was with him. She does not want to talk about that.”

  “Dr. Cantú!” Gloria Muñoz said sharply. “You must see how inappropriate it would be for us to agree to limit our interrogation.”

  Celia’s eyes glittered in a way that gave Luis a chill. Oh God, he thought. This is going to be worse than I thought.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant, if there has been a misunderstanding. This is not an interrogation. My niece has been assaulted and wants to provide information about the man who did it. Not for her own sake but because he may still be in Cuba and may engage in similar acts of terrorism against other young girls.” Celia paused and gazed into the eyes of the ranking officer. “Perhaps you have a daughter yourself, Capitán? If so, you will understand why, when the child is already traumatized, I as her doctor could not allow her to be questioned in a way that might worsen her condition.”

  Luis could scarcely believe how adeptly Celia had used phrases like “the child,” “acts of terrorism,” and “a daughter yourself.” In fact, Quevedo had four daughters, although Celia would not have known that.

  At Quevedo’s nod of acquiescence, Celia walked ahead of them into the apartment. Liliana sat on the sofa wearing clean white shorts and a new blue T-shirt that Luis recognized as the one José had bought her in Varadero. She was cut, scratched, scraped, and bruised from head to foot. One eye had a particularly nasty cut above the eyebrow. Celia made introductions and motioned the two MININT officers to the rocking chairs. She sat down on the sofa next to Liliana. Luis brought a chair from the dining table and placed it to the side and back a little, where he could exercise his best skill: that of making himself invisible while observing everything that passed between the others.

  Celia said, “Compañeros, Liliana wants to tell you about this man, so that if he is still in Cuba, you might be able to find him.”

  Liliana said nothing.

  Quevedo took a notepad from the pocket of his khaki uniform. “Your aunt said you thought he was a foreigner. From what country?”

  Liliana took a deep breath. “He spoke Castellón with a lisp, the way people from Spain do, so I asked if he was from Spain. He said no, he was from Argentina. He said he was a colonel in the Argentine army. Or used to be. I’m not sure if he still is. He wore a uniform but it didn’t have anything like that on it.” She pointed to Quevedo’s insignia.

  “How old was he?” Quevedo asked.

  Liliana seemed perplexed. Then, looking carefully at Quevedo, she said, “Older than you. Quite a bit older. About your build, but more—” With her hands she described a large paunch. “Not fat exactly, but big. He was a big man.”

  “How did you meet him?” Muñoz asked, cutting her eyes at Celia as if to say, I know my business, and don’t you go interfering.

  Liliana looked at Muñoz, found her gaze unsympathetic, and shifted her eyes to Quevedo. “I was hitchhiking,” she said. “Going to visit some friends at Playa Jibacoa. He said that was where he was going too. And it was. To SuperClub Saturno.”

  Luis glanced at Quevedo and knew exactly what the man was thinking. This was not an abduction.

  “You went there with him?” Quevedo asked.

  Liliana’s expression became sullen but she answered the question. “He said they had Jet Skis, and if I wanted to walk down to the beach with him, he would show me how to ride one. He said he had to stop at his cabaña first to change into his swimsuit.”

  “So you went to his cabaña with him,” Muñoz concluded, pursing her pretty little mouth in a way that deepened the dimple in her chin.

  “I walked over there, yes. It was on the beach. The farthest one at the end. I said I would wait outside. I was just about to sit down on the porch when he grabbed me and pulled me inside.” As Liliana spoke, her voice rose. “And don’t ask me what happened because I already told Tía Celia I’m not going to talk about it!” She finished in a shriek of barely controlled hysteria that did not seem to Luis to be feigned.

  There was a silence, except for the sound of Quevedo’s pencil moving on his note pad. Luis could see the pad. Quevedo was not writing, but doodling. Luis wondered if his friend was visualizing one of his own daughters in that situation, testing it in his imagination for veracity.

  “Surely you had—” Muñoz began in an accusatory tone, but Quevedo cut her off.

  “So we won’t talk about what happened there. Just tell us how you got away.”

  “I didn’t get away—not exactly.” Liliana cast a fierce look at Muñoz. “How could I? There are guards all around the perimeter fence of that place. He was handing out money to everybody to keep them away. Maids, gardeners, everybody. That’s why the security guy at the gate let me in in the first place. He gave him money. The kitchen people, when they brought our meals, stopped way back at the other cottage, and he walked out to meet them. He told them to do that, so nobody came close to where I was.”

  Luis recalled the way the security guard at SuperClub Saturno had treated him when he went there to drop off a flyer. Unconsciously, he became less skeptical of Liliana’s story.

  “So how did you get away?” Quevedo asked again.

  “I was still asleep. Well, pretending to be asleep. He went out for a few minutes, and all of a sudden he was back. He jerked me out of bed and threw my clothes at me and—”

  “You were naked?” Muñoz asked, pen poised as if on the verge of writing down a significant detail.

  “Yes, I was naked!” Liliana screamed. “Stark naked for nine damned days! On the very first day when I smashed a bathroom window trying to get out he took my clothes and cut my throat and that’s the last I saw of them till he threw them in my face at whatever time it was this morning!”

  At the phrase cut my throat, four adults gasped simultaneously.

  “See?” Liliana threw back her head. “It was cut, wasn’t it, Tía Celia?”

  Celia laid trembling fingertips against the red line of a nearly healed cut across the girl’s throat. Her face had turned deathly pale. “Yes,” she said in a low voice. “Not a deep cut, but the skin was scored. Was it a knife?”

  Liliana slumped back against the sofa and shook her head. “A piece of the broken glass. He said if I tried to get away again he’d do it for real and lock me in a closet where I’d bleed to death before anybody found me.” She glared at Muñoz. “I guess you’d have been brave enough to try again. But I wasn’t.”

  Muñoz seemed unable to take her eyes off Liliana’s throat. Nor could Luis. The story was incredible; he would have said such things never happened in Cuba. But Liliana’s emotional outburst and that raw red line demolished his complacency.

  “After he gave you your clothes,” Quevedo prompted. “What happened?”

  “He threw his stuff in his bag and we left. Not through the lobby but the back way to the parking lot. He had his arm around me and told me to keep smiling. He said if I made one sound he’d kill me. Which he tried to do anyway.”

  Luis was watching Celia. She seemed as stunned as the rest of them. He guessed that at least some of what Liliana was telling them Celia had not heard before.

  “How?” Muñoz whispered the question.

  “He was driving along the Vía Blanca really fast. All of a sudden he reached across and opened the door on my side and gave me a push. I almost fell out. I just barely grabbed hold of the frame of the door, so I was sort of half in, half out. He pushed me again and when he did, the car swerved off the road. Then he put his foot up an
d kicked me. And I went out.”

  “What happened next?” Quevedo asked.

  Liliana looked at Celia. Celia laid a hand lightly on her knee, which Luis noted was swollen to twice its normal size. “There were witnesses,” Celia said. “A family in a vehicle some distance back. All five of them saw the car go off the road and saw Liliana fall out. When the driver didn’t stop, they did. She was conscious long enough to tell them that I was a doctor and asked to be brought home rather than to a hospital.”

  The room suddenly seemed quieter. Conversation continued, but the emotional crackle of skepticism had disappeared.

  Celia handed Quevedo a scrap of paper with a name written on it. “This is the family who witnessed it. They live in Santa Fe. The wife said they are listed in the telephone directory.”

  Quevedo was staring into space. “Nine days. If he was here on a two-week package he might have a few more days. I wonder what caused him to bolt?”

  Luis cleared his throat. The way the others turned to look at him showed that they had forgotten he was in the room. “I can speculate about that.”

  “Please do.” Quevedo’s serious eyes were perplexed.

  “I had some notices made from family photographs.” Luis swallowed hard and looked at Celia. “Do you have one to show them?”

  Celia reached for her briefcase at the end of the sofa, took out two flyers, and handed one to each MININT official.

  “Saturday I circulated them in Varadero. I also left one at SuperClub Saturno.” Luis could not bring himself to meet his friend’s eyes. The very fact that he had done this revealed what he thought Liliana was up to, and how close he was to the family.

  Quevedo frowned at the flyer. “That was four days ago. If she was at the resort then, why do you suppose the management failed to act on the information?”

  “There was something . . . obstructionist . . . in the manager’s attitude. So rather than ask him to share the information with his staff, I told him to post the notice. His said he would, but I got the distinct impression that he had no intention of doing so. Yesterday I had business at the thermonuclear generating plant in Santa Clara del Norte. It’s not much farther to SuperClub Saturno, so I decided to drive out and see if he had posted it. As I suspected, he had not.” Luis paused. “So I myself put up the notice and made it clear that there would be repercussions if it was taken down. This was yesterday evening. Around six.”

  Muñoz was studying the flyer. Liliana reached for it. Muñoz passed it to her, giving Liliana’s hand a squeeze. “You’re a very pretty girl,” she said in a low voice.

  “Not anymore,” Liliana mouthed back.

  “So the abductor might not have seen it last night,” Quevedo mused. “But may have seen it in the lobby this morning. That would have alarmed him.”

  “Possibly,” Luis agreed.

  Quevedo glanced down at the name, Ignacio Gómez, on the slip of paper Celia had given him. “Do you know these people?” he asked Celia.

  “No. I had no idea who they were when they brought Liliana in this morning.”

  “What time would this have been?”

  “I did not look at the clock. Late morning, I’d say.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police immediately?”

  Celia turned to stare at Liliana, causing all of them to do the same. Her face was badly swollen. The eye with the cut over it was on the verge of closing.

  “Capitán, if someone brought your daughter home in this condition, would your priority be medical attention or talking to the police?”

  “I take your point. So you attended her and—” Quevedo paused delicately. “Is there anything about her condition that we should know?”

  Celia gave Quevedo what Luis recognized as her let’s-just-drop-this-for-now look. “She is scheduled for tests tomorrow. I will forward you a copy of the results.”

  Quevedo cocked his head at Liliana with an expression that was almost, although not quite, a smile. “Young lady, can you draw?”

  Liliana gave him a puzzled look and shook her head. “Not really.”

  He handed her his pad and pencil. “Would you give it a try? See if you can give us the shape of the man’s face, or something?”

  Liliana poised pencil above paper. Hesitantly, she drew a squarish face with a squiggle of lines meant to represent a short haircut that was flat on top. She added eyes, without eyebrows. She glanced at Quevedo. “He had eyebrows but they were so light you’d hardly notice them.”

  The pencil dropped to the page again, and she drew in a small mouth, almost a woman’s mouth, Luis thought, which seemed ridiculous in the large square face. “I’m sorry, I can’t do noses,” Liliana said apologetically. “But that’s how his mouth was. Little. It seemed kind of silly at first, but later I saw how it really was.”

  “How it really was?”

  “Mean.” Liliana looked back at the sketch lying in her lap. “I don’t know how to make it like that. But that’s the shape.”

  “Is that the shape of his face too?” Muñoz asked.

  “Sort of. But he had jowls.” She held the pad out to Muñoz. “Can you do jowls?”

  Muñoz glanced at Quevedo. He nodded. She took the pencil and sketched jowls. “Like that?”

  “Yeah, but bigger,” Liliana affirmed. “It was weird because he had hardly any wrinkles on the front of his face, but these big floppy jowls on both sides.” She pointed to the picture. “Will you do the nose too? It was a big nose. Fat at the bottom.”

  Muñoz sketched in a slightly bulbous nose. “How’s that?”

  “Not exactly. But yeah, sort of like that.”

  “I don’t suppose he gave you a name?”

  “He said his troops back in Argentina called him ‘Colonel Boots.’ I thought about that—that’s the last thing I remember thinking—when his big old black boot came up and kicked me out of the car.”

  As Quevedo was writing Boots on his pad, Liliana leaned forward. “But I might know his real name. Mario Baaker, spelled with two A’s. I don’t know if that is his real name, but I did see it this morning when he was packing. It was on his bag.”

  “Excellent,” Quevedo said and added the name to his notes. He looked up at Liliana. “You have been very helpful, young lady. Can you think of anything else we should know?”

  Liliana shook her head and looked at Celia. “I have a terrible headache. And my knee hurts. I can’t remember much of anything right now.”

  Celia rose. Quevedo, Muñoz, and Luis did likewise. Quevedo wrote his name along with two numbers, tore off the page, and handed it to Celia. “The first is my office, the second my home. Feel free to call either place if anything else comes to mind.”

  “And the medical report? Where shall I send it?”

  “Tell the lab to call me with the results. If we need a copy, we can get it later.”

  He turned to Liliana who was still seated on the sofa. “There is no assurance that we can find him. But we will try.”

  Liliana struggled to her feet and held out her hand to Quevedo. “Gracias, Capitán.” Then she smiled shyly at Muñoz. “Gracias, Teniente.”

  Luis had not seen civil behaviour from Liliana in so long that he had forgotten she was capable of it. He was just thinking, Of course, she couldn’t be bothered to extend it to me, even though it was me who saved her ass, when, with a flicker of her eyes in his direction, she said, “Thanks for putting up that notice. Is it okay if I keep this one?”

  It was thin acknowledgment but that hardly mattered. When Luis felt Celia’s warm hand on his arm, heard the tremulousness in her voice as she thanked him, and looked into eyes brimming with gratitude, he needed nothing more.

  • • •

  The seriousness with which the MININT officials seemed to be taking the case further reassured him. “Hard to know what goes through the mind of a person like that,” Quevedo mused on the drive back. “If this guy is what he claimed to be, well, you know what they got away with in Argentina. Some of them just m
oved on to other countries and ran amok there. They are an arrogant lot.” Quevedo gave Luis an apologetic look. “You know chances of catching him are slim. If he thought she was likely to report the incident he probably caught the next available flight.”

  “Especially if he realized that others witnessed the incident,” Muñoz added. “Shall I contact the Habana and Varadero airports?”

  “Yes, do that. Right away.”

  No more was said until Luis rounded the Plaza de la Revolución and stopped in front of MININT headquarters. Luis thanked both officers and they shook hands all around. Waiting until Muñoz started into the building, Quevedo leaned toward Luis and spoke in a confidential tone. “Be assured, compañero, we will nail the bastard if we can.”

  • • •

  That evening Luis sat on the sofa listening to his mother humming in the kitchen. The room was semi-dark, illuminated only by a flickering candle Alma had lit before the statue of the Virgin in thanks for her prayers being answered. For the first time in weeks, Luis was happy. He thought of how Celia had looked in her hospital whites, how much he liked that image of the dedicated professional, which was what he knew her to be. What he would not give to see her day after day, coming home dressed like that, to him.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  CELIA had to urge Liliana forward as they approached the door of the hospital. “They won’t ask what happened,” Celia assured her. “When I made the appointment I told them I already had your case history. This will only be a physical examination. All they will ask is where it hurts.”

  “What will they do to me?” Liliana’s voice was thin with anxiety.

  It was not the question of an adult, who would have wanted to know only if the procedures to be faced would fix whatever was wrong. This was a child asking, “Are they going to hurt me more than I am already hurting?”