Black Horizon (Jack Swyteck Novel)

by Grippando, James

  It sounded like paranoia, but Jack considered it. “That’s not easy to prove.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said it would be hard to prove.”

  Bianca’s face reddened. Jack saw a flurry of mixed emotions in her eyes, hurt and anger the most obvious.

  “Why is everyone so mean to me?”

  “You can’t look at it that way,” said Jack.

  “How else can I look at it? Even the judge hates me!”

  “Judge Carlyle got a little carried away. That sometimes happens when the media pays this much attention to a case. It’s nothing personal against you.”

  “That judge thinks I am a cold witch. Didn’t you hear the last question she asked?”

  “We weren’t prepared for it, but her question was a fair one. And at some point in the future, we are going to have to explain: Why no memorial service?”

  “Why no service?” she asked, her voice rising. “I’ll tell you why. Maybe I hope Rafael is still alive, okay? Did you ever think of that?”

  Jack hadn’t, and it embarrassed him.

  Her voice grew louder. “I know, I’m stupid, right? Everyone tells me I have to let go. I know what happened to those men who died in Deepwater Horizon. They . . . how do you say? Vaporizado.”

  “Vaporized.”

  Her voice shook, huge tears streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t want to think about those things. You understand? I don’t want to think about Rafael that way! So no memorial. Not yet. Is that a crime? Does that make me a bad wife?”

  “No.”

  “A liar?”

  “No,” said Jack.

  “Then why do you treat me like this?”

  “Bianca, I’m your lawyer. I have to ask questions.”

  “Bueno. And I am human. Some questions I should not have to answer.”

  Jack wasn’t sure if her distinction between lawyers and humans was intentional or a language thing. It didn’t seem to matter.

  She leaned in to the table, looking at him squarely in the face. “Why can’t you understand how I feel? You should understand, no?”

  “I’m trying.”

  She pushed away from the table. “I hate this!” she shouted. “I hate this lawsuit already!”

  In tears she hurried to the door and flung it open. A mob of reporters was right outside the jury room. They surged forward, blocking the doorway, calling her name, making it impossible for her to leave.

  “Get away!” she shouted.

  Jack stepped between his client and the mob, slammed the door, and locked it.

  Bianca fell more than leaned against the doorframe, emotionally overcome. Slowly, her back slid down the wall to the floor. She drew her knees to her chin and lowered her head, her body shaking with another wave of sadness.

  Jack wanted to console her, but there wasn’t much anyone could do. Something told him that this was Bianca’s first good cry since the news about Rafael had reached Key West. He sat on the floor beside her.

  “I’m sorry, Bianca. I am so, so sorry.”

  Chapter 15

  The drive back to Miami was five hours. Jack and Theo grabbed a mid-afternoon lunch in Little Havana.

  “I swear, I can’t win,” said Jack.

  They were at a picnic table outside a café on Eighth Street. Calle Ocho was once the heart of a small community of exiles, a place where old Cuban men could be found playing dominoes, smoking cigars, and speculating about the death of Castro and the end of communism. Some of the old men were still around, but anyone born after the Cuban Missile Crisis was more likely to be overheard talking about béisbol and their 401(k) than dictators and politics.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Theo.

  Jack was staring down at the sandwich on his plate. “Whenever I order a Cuban sin mostaza, the waitress looks at me like I’m an idiot and says a traditional Cubano doesn’t have mustard. But when I don’t say ‘without mustard,’ it comes with mustard.”

  “What’s wrong with mustard?”

  “I don’t like it on my Cuban sandwich.”

  “I can fix that.” He grabbed half of Jack’s sandwich and killed it in two bites.

  Resigned, Jack pushed his plate, offering up the other half.

  “You’re welcome,” Theo said, chewing.

  Jack ordered a café con leche—sin mostaza—and took it to go.

  It was a short walk around the corner to a tiny storefront office called Servicios de Andres. With traditional tiendas feeling the squeeze of El Walmart and La Target, service-oriented businesses were filling in the growing vacancies. The name on the plateglass window was ANDRES, but close inspection revealed faint traces of DULCES DE LANA, a neighborhood bakery.

  Jack was right on time for their three o’clock appointment. The door was locked, so he pushed the bell. An old man let them in, and when the door closed, there was barely enough room for three men to stand without invading one another’s personal space. Andres’ desk was shoved all the way up against the far wall. Two-thirds of the floor had been overtaken by dozens of cardboard boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling. Andres apologized for the clutter.

  “After thirty-eight years, my sister had to close her antique doll store. You want to buy an authentic Cuban muñeca?”

  Theo pulled a handmade treasure from one of the boxes. “How much?”

  Jack took the doll and put it back. “We’re not here to buy dolls. Andres, I’m sorry about your sister’s business, but I told my client I had a three o’clock appointment, so every second that goes by without a phone call from me is like Chinese water torture to her. What’s up with the marriage license?”

  Servicios de Andres didn’t look like much from the outside—even less on the inside—but the word on the calle was that Andres ran the most reliable service in Miami for the retrieval of vital documents from Cuba. Certificates of birth, death, or marriage were the most commonly requested. Andres boasted a 90 percent success rate. He never explained how he did it, and he never spoke with his clients on the phone. Face-to-face dealings only. Paranoia to some, but most folks didn’t second-guess an old man whose brother was tied to a tree in the Sierra Maestra Mountains and shot to death on the direct order of Fidel Castro.

  “You sure you don’t want to buy a doll?” asked Andres.

  “I’m sure,” said Jack.

  “Then I’m afraid your trip here has been wasted time.”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll buy a doll.”

  “Take this one,” said Andres. “Very special.”

  “Fine.” Jack gave him a twenty.

  “It’s two hundred dollars,” said Andres.

  “Two hundred!”

  “It is an antique,” said Theo. “And museum quality.”

  “What do think this is, Pawn Stars?”

  “I love that show.”

  “One-ninety-five,” said Andres. “Good price.”

  Jack had already paid five hundred dollars in advance. He hated shakedowns, but haggling wasn’t worth the effort. He peeled off the rest of the money, nearly emptying his wallet. “Can I see the marriage license now, please?”

  “I don’t have the license,” said Andres.

  “But I just bought a doll.”

  “You bought a very nice doll.”

  “It is a nice doll,” said Theo.

  “As compared to what, your inflatable? Look, Andres. You seem like a good guy. Your reputation is solid. Don’t play games with me.”

  “I’m being very fair with you, Mr. Swyteck. I’m losing money here, even with the doll.”

  “I paid you almost seven hundred bucks. How are you losing money?”

  “Truly, I want to help Miss Bianca. I see her face on the TV and it makes me cry. But her lawsuit . . . it’s not so popular with the Cuban government. I have worked every contact I have, every possible angle. I put in way more than seven hundred dollars. Not one person will help.”

  Jack read between the lines: no bribe was
big enough to induce the usually reliable sources to produce a copy of Bianca’s marriage license.

  “So that’s it? Brick wall, end of story?”

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could do more. But keep the doll, please. No one leaves Andres empty-handed.”

  Jack thanked him. Theo walked out with the doll, and Jack followed. Spanish-speaking men selling limes and bottled water trailed them along the sidewalk, but Jack was thinking through the unhappy phone call he needed to make to Bianca. He was still deep in thought as they reached the car. Jack got behind the wheel, and Theo placed the doll on the dashboard, front and center.

  “That’s blocking my view,” said Jack.

  Theo bent it at the waist and put it back in a seated position. The doll’s red shoes were facing them, heels out. Jack was about to push the doll aside when he noticed the handwriting on the sole of the right shoe. He took a closer look.

  “Josefina Fuentes,” he read aloud. Written on the other shoe was a street address in Havana.

  Theo chuckled. “Looks like la muñeca is trying to tell you something, Jack.”

  It seemed like the stuff of amateur spy novels, but Jack had seen quirkier things from men of Andres’ generation who truly believed that Cuban spies lurked around every corner of Little Havana.

  “I guess that’s worth the extra two hundred bucks,” said Jack.

  “So are we going to Cuba? We can hit the Copa.”

  “Copa Cabana?”

  “Sí. Hottest spot north of—”

  “I got it, I got it.” Like it or not, Jack would have an old Barry Manilow song playing in his head for the rest of the night.

  “Come on, let’s do it,” said Theo.

  “We are not going to Cuba.”

  “Why not?”

  Jack turned the key, and the ignition fired. “I’m going. Alone.”

  Chapter 16

  Jack flew to Havana through Nassau and landed at José Martí International Airport on Friday morning. The view across the runway, from his window seat, made him do a double take.

  “Are those crop dusters?” Jack asked the passenger next to him.

  Jack was pointing at six old open-cockpit biplanes lined up on the other runway. Any one of them looked barely capable of chasing down Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

  “Sí. The spill,” the man said, trying his best in English.

  Jack had thought that American media reports were overblown, but he was seeing it with his own eyes. An oil disaster that rivaled Deepwater Horizon, and the Cubans were spreading chemical dispersants with crop dusters that dated back to the Second World War.

  “God help us,” said Jack.

  The same embargo that prevented U.S. companies from drilling in the Cuban Basin and responding to the Scarborough 8 disaster also restricted the rights of American citizens to travel freely to Cuba. Under normal circumstances, it could have taken weeks or even months to plan Jack’s trip—time enough for oil to smother the entire Florida coastline. As it was, Jack landed before the spill had even reached Key West. Two years earlier, as a volunteer defense lawyer for a detainee in Guantánamo, Jack had completed the approval process for a general license from the U.S. Department of the Treasury to travel to Cuba. The license had nothing to do with his legal work. Jack was entitled to it because Abuela’s brother in Bejucal met the Treasury Department’s definition of a “close family relative” in Cuba. To justify the trip, all Jack had to do was visit him.

  After he visited Josefina Fuentes.

  “A donde va?” asked the cabdriver. Where to?

  The taxi was a midnight-blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, chrome bumpers glistening in the morning sun. In Miami, it would have been an antique seen only in parades. In Cuba, classic Buicks, Fords, and Chevys were everywhere—part of the island’s “frozen in time” charm to some, but a reminder that for over fifty years it was illegal to buy or sell an American car manufactured after the 1959 revolution.

  Jack gave him the address. “I think it’s near Chinatown.”

  A roll of the driver’s eyes told Jack that he was offering directions to a man who knew the streets of Havana as well as any middle-aged Cuban cabbie who had never left the island of his birth. Of course he knew it was near Chinatown.

  “How much?” Jack asked in Spanish. His last trip to Havana had taught him to get the price up front.

  “Twenty-five CUC.”

  CUC, the Cuban peso convertible, was used mainly by tourists. It was distinct from the peso cubano or moneda nacional, the currency in which the average Cuban was paid a salary of about $150 a month. One CUC was roughly equal to one U.S. dollar. Under U.S. law, Jack could spend a maximum of $179 per day. He did the math and was glad he’d already eaten breakfast.

  “Bueno,” said Jack.

  The twenty-minute ride into the city took Jack past a national park and the Havana Golf Club before the suburbs vanished and they hit urban traffic. One government building that Jack recognized from the photographs he’d studied was the towering Ministerio de Justicia. Seeing it from the cab served to remind him that even if Josefina wouldn’t talk to him, the trip to Cuba might still be productive. Even for church weddings, the only legally recognized proof of marriage was the civil license, and Jack’s to-do list included a visit to the Ministry of Justice, where he would personally follow up on the license that his experts in Miami had been unable to retrieve. Bianca had also given him the name of a friend who might have wedding photographs.

  The buildings got older and the streets got rougher as they continued into the city center. The stop-and-go over potholes was enough to convince Jack that the shock absorbers on the vintage Chevy were original. The ride in the back was about as comfortable as settling down onto a toilet bowl with no seat.

  “How much farther?” asked Jack.

  The driver just smiled.

  The cab had no A/C, so Jack watched the city blocks pass through an open window. The “Cuban influence” in Miami was undeniable, but to Jack, this piece of Cuba—Habana Centro—looked nothing like his hometown. Ornate nineteenth-century apartment buildings lined the wide Paseo de Martí, styles ranging from Moorish to neo-baroque. Most were crumbling, all needed paint, and many had dropped huge chunks of stucco and concrete from decades of neglect. Dogs yapped from balconies, and it was obvious that multiple families were living in each flat, but colored-glass windows and decorative azulejos (Moorish-style Spanish tiles) were signs of former wealth. The cab stopped on a narrow side street. Jack double-checked the number above the door, and it was definitely the address that Andres had written on the doll’s foot. But the sign on the door, painted in crude letters, read ESCUELA DE BOXEO. Jack couldn’t hide his confusion.

  “A boxing gym?”

  “Sí.”

  Jack reached for his wallet. “How much of the twenty-five CUC do you get to keep?”

  The driver shrugged. “No bastante.” Not enough.

  Jack tipped him ten CUC, and the note caught his eye. It bore the image of an electric power plant and boasted of Cuba’s Revolución Energética. The Energy Revolution.

  “I’m curious,” Jack tried to say in Spanish. “What do you think of the oil spill?”

  Again, the driver gave him only a shrug and a little smile. It was possible that Jack had mangled the question in Spanish, but more likely the driver didn’t want to talk about it to an American. Jack dropped it, thanked him for the ride, and climbed out of the cab. The door creaked like a wounded animal as it closed, and the tailpipe belched blue-gray smoke as the driver pulled away.

  Jack stepped onto the sidewalk across the street from the gym and took a minute to absorb the neighborhood. His gaze drifted toward a twelve-story landmark bearing the Gotham-like emblem of a large black bat atop the art deco tower. Any true Miamian who had ever enjoyed a Cuba Libre (rum and Coke) knew the story of the old Bacardi building, “donated” to the Cuban people when the family fled Cuba after the revolution.

  “Hey, dude.”

  Jack froze, n
ot sure he was hearing correctly. He turned, looked, and nearly fell over. “Theo?” he said, more an expression of shock than a question. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Theo removed his sunglasses. “What kind of welcome is that?”

  Jack checked over his shoulder, more out of instinct than any real concern about confidentiality. “You can’t travel to Cuba.”

  “Why not? You did.”

  “I’m legal. I have close family relatives here.”

  “Close family relatives my ass. There are card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan who speak better Spanish than you.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Same way thousands of Americans do every year. Through Cancún. The Cubans are totally cool about it. They don’t even stamp your passport at immigration.”

  “You’re breaking the law, Theo.”

  “Actually, I’ve already broken the law. So we might as well make the most of it. After all, dude—we are still on our honeymoon.”

  “This isn’t a joke. Don’t you remember how crazy things got when Jay-Z and Beyoncé went to Cuba? If they hadn’t been able to prove they had permission, they would have been prosecuted.”

  Theo laughed. “Maybe Jay-Z and me can rap about it. Come on, let’s check out this gym.”

  It was a can’t-beat-’em-join-’em situation, so Jack followed him across the street.

  La Escuela de Boxeo was in an old building that in another century had served as the carriage house and horse stables for the wealthy residents on the Paseo. The stable doors had been bricked over, and the lone entrance was a metal door halfway down the block. A pair of young fighters exited as Jack approached, and they held the door open for him and Theo.

  “Gracias, chicas,” said Theo.

  Jack let the door close and said, “You just called them girls.”

  “Those were girls, dumbshit.”

  Jack had been so on-mission, wrapped up in his thoughts, that he hadn’t noticed.