The Cat King of Havana

by Tom Crosshill

  Oh. I’d managed to forget about Tania, this past hour. I sat down on the sofa, put aside my camera. “Yeah.”

  “Way to go, primo,” Yosvany said. “So, spill it. What’s she like?”

  “Well . . . her name’s Tania. She speaks great English and she wants to study computers—”

  “I didn’t ask for a biography. What’s she like?” Yosvany mimed curves in the air with his hands. “You know?”

  For a moment I wanted to tell him Tania was hot, the cutest girl in town, and that I slept with her. But only for a moment. “She’s nice. We had a good time.”

  “Tall or short? Thin, fat, curvy? A white girl?” Yosvany must have seen some reaction because he asked, “She’s black?”

  “What’s that matter?”

  “Just a little dark like me? Or really black? You don’t want to date someone really black.”

  I stared at Yosvany.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Most people would call you black where I come from,” I said. “Heck, they call me black sometimes, when they don’t call me Mexican.” I held up my arm in the light. “You really want to go around comparing pigmentation levels? Like, if someone’s darker than you they’re really black, but everyone else is okay?”

  Yosvany gave me a flat look. “What are you saying, primo?”

  “Doesn’t it seem stupid to you? Like, if you say that crap, then I can use the same argument against you. Anyone can—you’re giving them permission.”

  Yosvany shook his head dismissively. “You’re like Ana, full of this American bullshit. It’s different here in Cuba.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I found it strange that I’d recently been worried what Yosvany might think of me. Sure, there were things I admired about him, wanted to learn from him. The way he always seemed sure of himself. The easy way he had of talking to anyone and everyone, like starting a conversation with a stranger was as simple as saying hi. His dance skills, of course—and, well, even some of his girl skills. But for everything that he knew and understood, he really was clueless about so much else.

  Then again, that wasn’t so hard to understand. I’d adopted Yosvany’s attitudes with Tania not just because I’d been desperate to get with her, but also because I wanted to feel like a man, like someone Yosvany would approve of. If I’d had friends like him buzzing in my ear all my life . . .

  “You need to relax, primo.” Yosvany got up from his bed. “Put aside all those papers and go outside, enjoy yourself. Like I will right now, with my girlfriend.” The last couple of words sounded almost vindictive.

  For a while after he left I sat on the sofa, wondering. Go outside, he said. Enjoy yourself.

  Read less, Rachel had told me. Turn off your computer. Get off your ass.

  I was glad I’d taken Rachel’s advice. My life had gotten more fun. I’d seen more of the world, become a person even I found more interesting, though I didn’t like everything that I’d done along the way. But there was only so far I was willing to take this. I wasn’t about to stop reading or watching TV, or running the best damn cat video site on the internet.

  I enjoyed all those things. More, I learned from them. I learned things Yosvany never would if he spent all his days on the streets of Havana.

  So I stayed there in Yosvany’s room and took pictures of Ricardo’s poems. Later, when I was done—when thoughts of Maykel Valdes pressed down on me, alternating with images of Yosvany and Ana necking in her room—I played Monty Python and the Holy Grail on my laptop and allowed the Knights Who Say Ni to educate me on the value of shrubbery. And I had no regrets.

  chapter twenty-two

  LEAD AND FOLLOW

  The next morning Ana had dark circles under her eyes. I guessed neither of us had slept much. We headed out for Pablo’s after breakfast. The street outside Juanita’s was quiet, only a lone bicitaxi rattling along. We kept quiet too, walking side by side in silence.

  Pablo met us with zeal in his eyes. “Qué vuelta?” he greeted us. “Come in, let’s get to work!”

  He’d cleaned up the apartment. Every surface in the kitchen and the living room gleamed. The window was open to the street, letting in fresh air and ample sunlight. Pablo wore a new white T-shirt, basketball shorts, and rubber flip-flops—an unusually relaxed looked for him.

  “You’re competing in two weeks,” he told us. “Rodrigo wants to film an interview with me as your teacher. That means one thing.”

  I scratched my head. “You’ll be famous?”

  “We’d better get good,” Ana said.

  “We’ll practice four hours a day, six days a week,” Pablo said.

  “I suppose,” Ana said. “As long as I’m free in the afternoons to shoot my film.”

  “I’m not sure we can afford four hours of class a day,” I said.

  “I won’t charge you extra,” Pablo said. “This is a great opportunity for all of us.”

  Pablo, offering to help for free. This was the same man who needed money so bad, he’d begged us on his knees.

  A mysterious smile had crept onto Pablo’s lips. “You kids have no idea what’s waiting for you. Rodrigo’s preparing a real surprise.”

  After recent events, I wasn’t sure how I felt about surprises. But Pablo wasn’t about to tell.

  Four hours later, we wobbled downstairs on unsteady feet and ambled across Habana Vieja like retiree tourists taking in the sights. It was a pleasant kind of exhaustion. The sort that promised a dreamless afternoon nap once we got back, with no thoughts of Valdes to bother me.

  But a few blocks from home, Ana touched me on the shoulder. “Don’t look,” she said. “There’s a bicitaxi following us.”

  I woke up real fast. “You sure?”

  “It was parked across from your aunt’s place in the morning,” Ana said. “I remember the guy.”

  I stopped, crouched to tie a shoelace, and used the pause to look around. I saw the bicitaxi. The driver was a skinny young kid. He had a phone in his hand and seemed absorbed in it even as he pedaled down the street, like his texts were more important than traffic.

  His texts—or the phone’s camera, pointed at us.

  Maybe I wouldn’t be taking that nap after all.

  Over the next week we didn’t see that same bicitaxi again. Every time we emerged on the street I looked left and right to check who was near, but I saw no recurring faces, except for a few of Juanita’s neighbors now and then. Occasionally on the way to Pablo’s I’d have us walk all the way around a single block, a trick I’d read about for figuring out if you were being tailed. We spotted no one.

  “Maybe it was a coincidence,” I told Ana after one such walk.

  “Maybe,” she said. A few steps later, she glanced over her shoulder for the fifteenth time that morning.

  Every afternoon when I got back and locked Juanita’s steel door behind me, a shiver of relief went through me. Except I knew that I’d have to go out again before long.

  I forced myself to eat—everything tasted like cardboard, but I was doing too much exercise to skip meals. Then I lay on the sofa in Yosvany’s room and napped as long as I could. During what remained of the afternoon, I read books on my laptop to distract myself.

  Ana, though—every day she left for the street again right after lunch. She texted Yosvany to get the address for the interview of the day, got her camera bag and, every time, asked if I wanted to come.

  “We can’t let them intimidate us,” she said. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Tell that to my friend Ricardo, I wanted to say.

  I admired Ana’s energy and drive—and I had no intention whatsoever of going along with her. It wasn’t just the fear. Wherever she went on those afternoons, so did Yosvany. If I heard him introduce her to one more person as his girlfriend, I might throw up. He always did it with this grand sweep of his arm, as if saying—check her out, she’s my yuma.

  Juanita gave me sympathetic glances the first few days, then cornered me in the kitchen o
ne afternoon. “Relationships are hard,” she informed me. “There was this boy I liked when I was your age. His name was Alfredo, and he—”

  “Déjalo, mamá.” Yolanda stood in the kitchen door. “Rick will do fine without your advice.”

  I might have believed Yolanda wanted to protect my feelings, if not for how quickly she’d appeared when Juanita addressed me. She did her best not to leave me or Ana alone with her mother, as if we might inadvertently betray her secret. She stalked the apartment restlessly, hugging herself and gnawing her lips—I could only imagine what she felt inside.

  One day I ran into Rafaela in the hallway. “Did you meet Ricardo?” she asked me at once. “How is he?”

  I could tell she was hoping for a specific answer.

  “He’s a painter now,” I said.

  “Did he . . .” Rafaela drifted off. “Is he married?”

  “He lives alone,” I told her.

  Rafaela nodded. It was a heavy nod, sad but satisfied, like this was what she’d expected.

  And I realized my mother’s relationship with Ricardo was more than a memory to Rafaela. It was a romantic story of the tragic kind, of doomed lovers severed by fate, destined never to be happy again.

  I was tempted to tell her Mom had been happy in New York. I was tempted to say Mom and Ricardo had been kids taking dumb risks—that they should have known better. But I decided to let Rafaela believe the story she preferred.

  And really, maybe Mom had loved Ricardo all those long years. There was the coincidence of my name to consider, for one thing.

  The idea made me feel uneasy, disloyal to Dad, but that didn’t make it impossible. If there was one thing I’d learned on this trip, it was that love was a messy thing.

  I said that we didn’t see that bicitaxi again for a week. That’s true. The next time we saw it was eight days later, in the evening on our way to La Gruta.

  That afternoon Ana had gone all the way to Marianao for a shoot—a forty-minute trip. The dancers she was supposed to film hadn’t been there to meet her. Nor had Yosvany. He didn’t pick up the phone or answer her texts. She waited for an hour before coming back. Naturally she got caught in a downpour.

  When Ana walked in Juanita’s door, wet hair plastered to her skull, her outlook wasn’t sunny. Picture a winter’s day on the slopes of Mount Doom.

  “Maybe something came up,” I suggested, once she’d changed and sat drinking hot tea in the living room.

  The look she gave me cast aspersions on my intelligence. “Of course something came up.”

  “What I mean is, maybe it wasn’t his fault.” I wasn’t sure why I was defending Yosvany. “Maybe we should worry.”

  “Qué va.” Juanita passed through the living room, serene as a ship in harbor. “Yosvany’s always running off after some shiny new thing. You can’t count on that boy.”

  Which, judging from the tightening of her jaw, did approximately nothing to improve Ana’s mood. It amazed me that Juanita failed to realize what she sounded like.

  Or perhaps . . . perhaps Juanita knew exactly what she was saying.

  “We’re going dancing,” Ana announced then. “Without Yosvany.”

  So Ana and I ended up walking down San Lázaro that night. And we spotted that same bicitaxi crawling along behind us, the driver on the phone again.

  “Pinga,” Ana swore. She’d adapted a good deal of Yosvany’s vocabulary since I left for Trinidad. “Let’s go around the block.”

  We circled the block, not speaking at all, nor looking over our shoulders. But when we came to that same stretch of street once again, I glanced back.

  The bicitaxi was behind us.

  “Let’s take a cab,” I suggested.

  But Ana was no longer by my side. She ran at the bicitaxi with long, furious lopes. “Hey!” she called. “Oye, cabrón!”

  The driver started. He got up on the pedals, swung the wheel, turned the cab around with nimble ease. Ana was some thirty feet away, running hard. I thought she might catch up, but the guy accelerated fast, took off down the empty street like a rattling, clanging chariot.

  Ana ran on for a bit, then slowed to a halt, panting. Turned and walked back to me.

  I hadn’t moved all the while. My insides felt dried up, inert, fragile.

  “I wanted to see what would happen if I did that,” Ana said, grim and satisfied. “It turns out, nada.”

  A few hours later, we stood outside La Gruta on Calle 23, trying to hail a colectivo to go home. A Toyota with tinted windows and dark green government plates pulled up. The passenger window rolled down. Maykel Valdes looked up at us.

  chapter twenty-three

  HOSPITALITY

  “Get in the car.”

  Valdes’s voice came flat, quiet, almost lost in the din of traffic. His small, deep-set eyes watched us calmly. Not a hint of pleasantness this time, his expression a cool mask.

  His driver was a big man in a faded tan dress shirt. He stared ahead, beefy hands on the steering wheel. Under his armpit hung a compact black pistol in a leather shoulder holster.

  Ana and I glanced at each other. She was ready to sprint down the street.

  But sprint where? Twenty-Third was a commercial street, the heart of Havana’s nightlife, brightly lit and crawling with police at all hours. And the police wouldn’t be on our side.

  “Where are we going?” Ana asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  “Let me text my cousin.” I pulled out my phone. “So she doesn’t worry we’re late.”

  “Do what you like,” Valdes said.

  With numb fingers I stabbed at my cell. Valdes told us to get in car outside La Gruta. Don’t know what’s going on. I selected Yolanda’s number, hit send, waited for the delivery confirmation to pop up. Cuba’s cell network being what it was, it took a while.

  We got into the back of the Toyota. The driver put the car into gear and we pulled out into traffic.

  The car was relatively new, the brown leather seats clean of scuff marks and the seat belts functional, a rare thing in Cuba. The stench of cigarettes pervaded everything, though no one was smoking. The radio was tuned to Radio Rebelde, one of Cuba’s main stations. A woman talked about the visit of a group of Venezuelan social workers to the province of Matanzas. She spoke with the kind of enthusiasm most people reserved for their team winning the World Series.

  Valdes and the driver seemed content to let the radio do the talking. We did a U-turn and drove up Twenty-Third for a while, then took a left on Paseo. Heading toward the Plaza de la Revolución. I recalled vaguely that Fidel’s office was supposed to be somewhere around there.

  Except that before long the driver made a turn and another and another. We entered a warren of dark side streets. Low residential buildings floated by in the gloom. Only here and there a lone streetlamp illuminated a stretch of pavement.

  Something cold touched my wrist. I started, then realized it was Ana. We locked hands, her fingers clutching at me painfully hard.

  My phone rang, a shrill, insistent tone. I reached for it.

  “Leave it,” Valdes said.

  We drove on, while the phone rang and rang in my pocket, until at last it fell silent mid-ring.

  I could imagine Yolanda sitting at the kitchen table, her fingers pale around her phone. She could do nothing to help us. We were gone, as her friend Miranda was gone.

  We stopped at a well-lit intersection. There was a small café on one corner, a blue neon ice cream cone in the window. We parked across from the café, in front of a gray three-story building.

  That building . . . every single one of its narrow windows had sturdy metal bars across it. The entrance was an unmarked steel rectangle. It was the kind of place that might swallow you and never spit you back up.

  “Get out,” Valdes said.

  Ana still held my hand. A comforting feeling.

  Valdes stood beside us while the driver stayed in the car. For a while, he let us take in the view. Then he said, “When we bring peop
le here, they say they’re sorry. But it’s too late by then.”

  Ana and I said nothing. I had a feeling there was nothing we could say to make a difference, not with a man like Valdes. He had already decided what would happen here.

  “Let’s go,” Valdes said at last, and I steeled myself. But he turned away from the building. Crossed the street to the café on the corner.

  After a moment’s hesitation, we followed him inside.

  Four white tables, cold fluorescent lighting, white tile floor. Sugary bachata poured from a CD player. The air smelled of dishwater, not food.

  The only person in the café was the waitress, a bored-looking woman in her fifties. She stood over a glass-topped fridge with some six tubs of different-colored ice cream—a wide selection by Cuban standards. When she saw Valdes, she livened and smiled, though the expression never reached her eyes. “Good evening, Maykel. What can I get you?”

  Valdes gestured for the two of us to sit down. “A coffee for me. A scoop of vanilla for the girl, and mamey for Rick here. Isn’t that right?” he asked us, unsmiling.

  We stared at him. That was no accidental order. It’s what we got at El Naranjal on Obispo, most days after practice.

  Valdes sat down with us. “It’s good hospitality to know your guests’ preferences.”

  “Are we your guests?” Ana asked.

  “I’d like to say so,” Valdes said. “But good guests don’t go peeking about in your cupboards and stealing your silverware.”

  “I don’t know what you mean—” I began.

  “I thought maybe I didn’t need to spell things out,” Valdes said. “You’re not as intelligent as you appear. You were seen visiting Lisyani Blanco with your cousin Yolanda. We know you helped publish that video.”

  Neither of us said a word.

  “Let’s do a thought experiment,” Valdes said. “Let’s say I were to visit New York as a tourist and make a video of secret government operations. Let’s say I were to smuggle this video out to China and have a Chinese newspaper publish it against the interests of American national security. And let’s say I got caught by your FBI. What do you think would happen to me?” Valdes’s lips twitched up in a half smile. “Maybe they’d send me to Cuba, eh? To Guantánamo? Would I ever see my family again?”