Soul Kiss

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Maybe we could do a blood test,” I said. “They’re always doing that on TV.”

  “Oh, like I’m going to go up to Egidio and ask him for some blood. The guy’s so old and dried up he probably only has a couple of pints in his whole body.”

  We were both giggling when Angus finished his phone call. A couple of minutes later, Roly came into the conference room. “We’ve got to figure out what to do with you guys tonight. I have two choices. I can keep you in protective custody at the county jail, or I can put you up in a motel around the corner.”

  He paused. “But I can’t put you in the motel if I’m worried you’re going to try and run away again. Can I trust you?”

  “I don’t have anywhere to go,” Daniel said.

  “And he wouldn’t go anywhere without me, and I’m not leaving,” I said. “But all our stuff is at Egidio’s. Can’t we just go back there?” Not that I was looking forward to that uncomfortable sofa bed again, but I did want to have clean clothes for the next day and have my own things around me.

  “Angus can drive you down there and bring you back,” Roly said.

  I looked at Daniel. “All right by me.”

  Angus said, “No problem. I already cancelled the date I had for tonight.” That made me feel bad. He had to borrow Roly’s minivan because his own car was too tiny for all of us to fit. Egidio sat up front with Angus.

  On the drive down to Egidio’s Angus told us all about the training he had gone through to become an FBI agent. It sounded very cool. “You have women agents, don’t you?” I asked, leaning forward.

  He turned his head sideways. “Sure. Lots of them. You interested?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds like something I could do. I mean, after college and all.”

  As I mentioned college I realized I still hadn’t told Daniel I had applied to Penn on his behalf. So much had happened since then it felt like a whole other lifetime. I sat back against the seat. Daniel was staring out the window, and I had no idea what he was thinking.

  At Egidio’s, the sofa bed was still pulled out. “You slept out here, Melissa?” Angus asked, as I started packing stuff back into my bag. “Doesn’t look very comfortable.”

  “It was okay,” Daniel said.

  Angus looked from Daniel to me, and I blushed. I had the feeling he knew exactly what we had done the night before. Fortunately he didn’t say anything.

  Egidio came out of his bedroom with a funny little rolling suitcase, and then Angus drove us back to the motel. It was dark by then, yet traffic was still heavy on the highway. I kept looking at the cars and vans and trucks that passed us, wondering who was in them and where they were going. I wished I was back home in Pennsylvania, my mom or dad driving us somewhere. When I closed my eyes I could almost feel like I was back there.

  In the motel parking lot, Angus pulled up by registration and turned the car off. He twisted around to the backseat and said, “So. One room for Melissa, one for Daniel and Egidio?”

  “I want to be with Melissa,” Daniel said.

  Angus shook his head. “Sorry, the FBI is not in the business of promoting underage sex. And from what I heard of Melissa’s mom on the phone, I wouldn’t want her to find out I let you guys stay in the same room.”

  So he did know what we did at Egidio’s. Oh God, what if he told my parents?

  Daniel started arguing with him, but Angus was firm. He pulled a business card out of his pocket and wrote on the back. “Here’s my cell number,” he said, handing it to me. “You need anything, you call me and I’ll get you help ASAP.”

  “You’re not staying with us?”

  “You need me to?”

  I had to admit I had felt a lot better having the FBI all around us, especially once we figured out that it might be Cuban secret service agents after us. I looked at Daniel and took his hand.

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” Daniel said. “I think it would make us both feel better.”

  Angus turned the minivan on again. “All right. Let’s take another little ride, though. I’m going to need clean clothes for tomorrow.”

  Discoveries

  I had mixed feelings that I couldn’t sleep with Daniel, but I figured it was good that we both had some time after what we had done the night before. And I was happy to be in a comfortable bed again, after our night on the train and then at Egidio’s. I called my parents and told them I was fine, then turned over on my side, luxuriating in the thick pillow. I fell asleep almost immediately and didn’t wake up until I heard a knocking on my bedroom door. I looked at the clock and saw it was almost eight.

  I answered the door in my nightgown. Angus was standing there in a starched white shirt and red tie. “We found Daniel’s mother,” he said. “You should get dressed and come downstairs to the restaurant.”

  “You found her? Is she okay?”

  “She’s alive. That’s what’s important.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. But I showered quickly and pulled on my last clean clothes, a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Then I went down to the restaurant in the motel’s lobby. Daniel and Egidio were sitting at a round table in the corner drinking orange juice. They both had plates heaped with food in front of them.

  “There’s a buffet,” Daniel said. “It’s amazing.”

  “What’s up with your mom?”

  “Angus only said she was alive. He wouldn’t tell me anything more.”

  I turned to Egidio. “And you don’t know anything else?”

  “I am not of the FBI. I only know what they tell me.”

  I pulled out a chair and sat down next to him. “How come you’re so tight with the FBI, anyway?”

  “Melissa,” Daniel said.

  “No, is a good question. But first, you eat.” Egidio motioned toward the buffet.

  I hurried through the line, loading a plate with pineapple, mango, melon, bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and a few other things I didn’t recognize but smelled good.

  When I got back to the table, Egidio said, “You have heard of the Bay of Pigs?”

  Daniel and I looked at each other. “Some kind of battle in the Cuban revolution, I think,” he said.

  “Not exactly.” He sighed. “When I finish high school in La Habana, I am very lucky to have a cousin in Miami who sponsor me to come here to college. For two years, I live in his house and go to school. Then there is big revolution in my country, and Fidel Castro come to power.”

  Egidio sat up straighter in his chair, and I could see that he was probably a lot stronger than he appeared at first. “My cousin, he joins a group called Brigade 2506, a group of Cuban exiles who plan to invade Cuba at a place called La Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. The plan is that these exiles will come in by sea, supported by the US, and take back the country from the dictator. My cousin, he asks me to join. What can I say? I owe everything to him.”

  “What happened?” Daniel asked.

  “Is a big disaster. The US does not support the invasion, and many honorable men are killed, including my cousin. I was taken to prison with many others.”

  “That’s terrible!” I put down my fork with a clatter. The food was really good—but I wanted to hear Egidio’s story.

  “Yes, Melissa, was very bad,” Egidio said. “Then I am lucky, because the United States pays much money to Castro for release of the prisoners, and we come back here to Miami. There is big ceremony in the Orange Bowl, even with el Presidente Kennedy.”

  “Wow. Did you become an FBI agent then?” I asked.

  Egidio shook his head. “I am never an agent. There is no money for me to finish my education, so I go to work at a machine shop. A man who works there, he introduce me to an agent from the FBI. Sometimes I hear information I think he can use, so I tell him.”

  “That’s Roly?” Daniel asked.

  “Ah, no, Rolando is so young! He is maybe third or fourth agent I know.”

  Just then Roly and Angus walked in, and Daniel jumped up. “How is she? How’s my mom
?”

  “She’s getting better.” Roly motioned Daniel back to his chair and he and Angus sat down with us. “I put out some feelers and this morning I got a hit. An unidentified Hispanic woman was found unconscious in Chicago two days ago. She’s been in intensive care since then.”

  Daniel squeezed my hand. I could see he was about to cry.

  “Last night she regained consciousness, and she was able to give her name to the hospital personnel,” Roly said.

  “Chicago?” Daniel asked. “What was she doing there?”

  “We’ve sent an agent to the hospital to talk to her. We hope to have some answers in an hour or two.”

  Roly went back to the FBI office, and Angus said, “This is good news. You guys should be really happy.”

  “How is it good news that my mom is in the hospital?” Daniel demanded.

  “Because she’s not dead, Daniel,” I said. “And now the FBI can talk to her and find out what’s going on.”

  We sat there while Angus ate his breakfast and Egidio dawdled over another cafecito. Daniel and I were both antsy, and I wanted to pick up the cup and drain it down his throat so we could get moving.

  Angus’s cell rang as he was paying the bill. He turned his head away and talked for a minute. When he hung up, he said, “Let’s go to the office.”

  “What?” Daniel asked. “Did they talk to my mom.”

  Angus put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “Roly will tell you everything. He’s the agent in charge of this operation. I’m just helping out.”

  The four of us squeezed into Angus’s Mini Cooper. Fortunately the FBI office was just around the corner from the motel. Ahead of us was a big, complicated interchange on I-95, and for a minute I wanted Angus to get on the highway and head north, driving us back home. But I took a deep breath and squeezed next to Daniel in the tiny backseat, hoping everything would be figured out soon.

  As we walked through the parking lot of the FBI building, I called my mom again. I told her we were fine, that they had found Daniel’s mom, that everything would be over soon. The sun was so bright I had to squint to see the phone screen. Or maybe I was crying. It was hard to tell.

  “I’m still so worried about you, Melissa,” she said.

  “I know, Mom, and I’m sorry I’m making you crazy.” As I said, “I love you,” I heard my voice crack.

  Roly met us in the conference room. I wondered if we were ever going to see any more of the FBI office, which seemed very busy now that the weekend was over. “An agent spoke to your mother this morning,” he said to Daniel, when he was sitting across from us. “She told us about running from Castro’s agents for years, always hiding.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “Last week, some men came to your apartment while you were out, Daniel. She realized that they were after you, and she managed to get away from them. She took off, trying to distract them and make them think you were with her. They followed her, and caught up with her in Chicago.”

  “What happened?”

  “She doesn’t remember. The last thing she can recall is being in a train station in Chicago, then waking up in the hospital.”

  “But she’s okay?”

  “She has some serious injuries, but she’s recovering. There’s a police guard stationed outside her room now to make sure no one can hurt her again.”

  “I want to go there.”

  Roly shook his head. “That’s not a good idea. She nearly sacrificed herself to keep these men away from you, Daniel. They may still be watching her, hoping you’ll show up.”

  “Do you know how they found her?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No idea yet. Did you do anything unusual in the last couple of weeks, Daniel? Anything that might have drawn attention to you?”

  “I applied for a driver’s license. Could that be it?”

  “Could be. It’s possible they had someone monitoring license requests.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Oh my God,” I said. “The SATs.”

  Roly looked at me.

  “I made Daniel take the SATs. He got a perfect score too. Suppose they were checking those tests for genius kids.” I started to cry. “Oh, Daniel, I’m so sorry!”

  Daniel put his arm around me, and I leaned my head against his shoulder.

  “We don’t know how they found Daniel,” Roly said. “So don’t get upset, Melissa. They could have been scouring apartment leases or utility bills or who knows what else.”

  “Why are they going to so much trouble over Daniel?” I asked. “I mean, he’s smart, he’s a genius. But there must be other smart people in Cuba.”

  “It’s not just Daniel. His mother told us there were a lot of other women who took the same shots she did, back in Cuba. There could be dozens of kids out there like Daniel. If the government can get hold of them, they can brag about starting a super smart population. And then force every woman to have the same shots, and who knows where that would lead?”

  Roly stood up. “I’ve got more work to do. You guys sit tight.”

  “Can’t we help you?” I asked.

  “You can help us best by just staying here and not causing Angus any trouble.”

  “You don’t get it. We’re smart, right? Yesterday you saw us prove that. Give us stuff to read. Maybe we can find connections you haven’t.”

  “I want to help you find these men who hurt my mother,” Daniel said. “It’s the only way she and I can ever really be free.”

  “They have a point, Roly,” Angus said. “I’ve seen the way they can digest and understand material. At least let them try something.”

  “You know I can’t just give out access,” Roly said. “You need top secret clearance to read some of those documents.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “You already know everything about us, Roly,” I said. “And you’ve got us locked up here. What can we do?”

  Roly wavered. Finally he said, “We’ll start with declassified documents. See what you can figure out from them.”

  Angus set us both up with laptops in the conference room, and started giving us materials to read. Another agent brought us hoagies for lunch, though he called them sub sandwiches. As we were finishing, washing them down with more of that pineapple soda Daniel liked, Angus came in with a cell phone. “You want to talk to your mom, Daniel?”

  He jumped up and grabbed the phone. “Mami?” He launched into a torrent of Spanish. I couldn’t translate the words, but I understood what he was saying all the same. I walked over to the other side of the room and called my mom’s cell phone.

  I went right to voice mail. Figures. She was probably showing a client a house or something. But I needed to talk to somebody about finding Daniel’s mom, so I called my dad’s office.

  “Richard Torani.”

  “It’s me. Daniel’s mom showed up in a hospital in Chicago.”

  “Chicago? How did she get there?”

  “We don’t know yet. She got hurt, but the doctors say she’s going to get better.” I looked across the room to where Daniel was still talking to his mom. I was so happy for him. And I kind of missed my own mom, too.

  “We’re worried about you, Melissa,” my father said. “We don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “I’m fine, Dad. I mean, honestly, could I be anywhere safer right now?”

  He couldn’t argue with that. I told him I loved him and Mom and even Robbie, and hung up. By then Daniel had finished his call, and he and I went back to the laptops again.

  It was the slowest, most tedious thing I’ve ever done. The documents they had us reading were endless details of peoples’ backgrounds and movements. But we both kept on going. Around three o’clock Daniel looked up. “Have you got a guy named Francisco Sanchez?”

  “I have at least four of them.”

  “There’s one who’s a self-employed computer consultant.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I remember him. From Atlanta.”

  “He went to Washington last March.” He swiv
eled his laptop around to show me. “Mario Garcia was there too, at the same time.”

  “The bookstore clerk from San Francisco?”

  “Yup.” He pointed at a digital receipt from a coffee shop on Pennsylvania Avenue. “Both of them have receipts at the same time, in the same coffee shop.”

  “And the White House is on Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe they were planning a bombing or something.”

  “Let’s see if we can put them together anywhere else.”

  We spent the next two hours focused on the two of them. By the time Angus came in to ask us if we wanted dinner, we had put Garcia and Sanchez together three different times, in different cities. And we had found that Francisco Sanchez got around; he was connected to two other men we had files on.

  “Can we show you something, Angus?” Daniel asked. I had been playing secretary, creating an Excel spreadsheet that listed all our connections. Angus pulled a chair between us and we pointed out what we had found.

  “You picked these things out of all that data?” he asked.

  “I know it’s not much,” Daniel said. “But we’re new at this, and we’re really trying.”

  Angus shook his head. “There’s nothing to apologize for. We’ve had agents looking at this data for months, and they haven’t come up with what you guys found in a couple of hours.” He stood up. “Wait here. Roly has to see this.”

  When he brought Roly back, we showed him our spreadsheet. He, too, was amazed.

  “It’s mostly Daniel,” I said. “He’s the one who made the most connections. I was just his sounding board.”

  “No, you found stuff too,” Daniel said.

  Roly said, “Let me at that, Melissa,” and I handed him the laptop. “I’m going to send this stuff to my own account. And then I’m going to make a few phone calls.”

  He typed for a minute, then handed the computer back to me. “Get these guys some dinner, Angus,” he said. “We’re going to be here for a while.”

  I took advantage of the break to call home again. This time my mom answered. “It’s really cool,” I burbled. “They gave us all this data to read, and Daniel and I made some connections nobody else had been able to see.”