Fifty Grand

by Adrian McKinty

  “I’ll leave you at the summit and you can work your way downhill,” Esteban muttered.

  We drove past huge houses that got bigger as we got closer to the top of the mountain. When we were almost at the peak Esteban pulled the Range Rover into a turnout marked VIEWPOINT on a small green sign. He turned to us and gave Angela a key chain with various house keys on it. Each was attached to a piece of card with a number on it.

  “Angela, you’ll be with María today, show her the ropes. Show her where the cleaning supplies are in each house and don’t forget the alarm boxes.” Esteban turned his gaze on me. “You know what an alarm system is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Each house has an alarm, which we disable when we enter and enable again when we leave. It’s very simple. Understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. I’d never been in a house with a burglar alarm before but I got the concept. It would require a consistent electricity supply and a prompt police response, two things Havana lacked.

  “Angela, make sure you show her which clients need the full treatment and which ones only get a surface clean. There’s no point in wasting time on clients who won’t appreciate what we’ve done,” Esteban said.

  “Of course,” Angela muttered.

  “Ok, both of you out of the car, I want to show María something.”

  Esteban was a big man, and in my experience big men take longer to recover from an injury. He was still breathing hard and rubbing his arm as he led us away from the car toward a gap in the trees.

  He forced a smile. “Ok, María, here we are. This is where you’ll be working in the mornings. You can see the whole mountain from here. Below us is the Watson residence. Big movie producer. He has his own staff but I’ve been in there. Dealt him coke. Delivered it personally. That house on top of the hill with all the lights and the fence—Tom Cruise.”

  “The Tom Cruise?” I asked.

  “The Tom Cruise. Lives here about half the year when he’s not filming. I think his sister lives there year-round.”

  “I get to clean Tom Cruise’s house?”

  “No, no. He has his own staff. As I was saying, we only get the lesser lights. Not the Watsons and the Cruises of this world. But you might see some famous people. It’s important not to react in any way. They hate that. You’ve got to pretend that you’re not there at all. That you’re invisible. Never make eye contact with any of the clients and never talk to them unless spoken to first. Understand?”

  “Sí, Don Esteban.”

  “Good.”

  Esteban took another few seconds to get his breath back. “I suppose you’re wondering about what happened this morning with the sheriff?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly. Angela said nothing.

  “The thing is, I’m an American citizen,” he muttered with a smoldering sense of outrage.

  I nodded.

  “An American citizen, and if that bastard tries to come into my house I’ll shoot him with my rifle. Shoot him. And they can’t do a thing. Cop or not. War hero or not. Without a warrant, the law’s on my side.”

  Esteban sat down on a flat, red boulder. He dabbed his forehead.

  “Do you want us to go?” Angela asked.

  “No. No. Let María get her bearings. Look around you, María.”

  I observed the mountains and the forests. Layer after layer of them stretching west for fifty kilometers.

  I tried to feel something.

  After all, this was it. The place where my father died.

  I tried to force an emotion: anger, regret, sadness—nothing came.

  “What do you think, María?” Esteban asked.

  “Pretty country,” I said.

  “All this was Mexico once. A hundred and fifty years ago. Mexico. Our home. Stolen by the Yankees and they don’t even know it. They don’t even know their history. We invited them to our land and then when we told them they couldn’t have slaves they turned on us. Like a changeling in the house of your mother. Like an ungrateful dog.”

  His face was pink. He was sweating. For a moment I wondered if he was having a heart attack. Tears welled up in his eyes. “Mexico. All the way to the Pacific. That cabrón. That fucking son of a whore,” he muttered.

  He started to cry.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Angela whispered.

  We left him.

  I said goodbye but he didn’t seem to hear.

  We walked past Watson’s huge mansion and entered the first house on the route. Angela put the key in the lock and showed me how to disable the alarm system.

  This house only needed a quick dust and vacuum.

  As did the next.

  I was expecting palatial residences but they weren’t grotesque. About the same size as those of high-ranking Party officials in Vedado but not in such disrepair and most with epic views over the mountains.

  The job seemed simple. The first three homes were empty and not a problem to clean. A dead mouse in a sink was the only bit of excitement. The next was occupied by an actress who was in her basement running on a treadmill the whole time we were there. We put away her clothes, ran her dishwasher, cleaned her living space, rearranged the diet shakes and cigarette cartons in her gigantic refrigerator.

  The next house, however, was the one I’d been in the night before. The retro-future place with all the curves. Minimalist furniture, a low leather sofa, uncomfortable high-angled chairs, stainless steel light fittings, an ebony living room table. Huge windows facing the Old Boulder Road to the east and the Rockies to the west. It looked better in daylight. Angela showed me how to get in and how to disable the burglar alarm. The code was still the default 9999. Jack Tyrone was in the kitchen reading a newspaper. He had a box of Frosted Flakes in front of him and a french press filled with what I could tell from the hall was overroasted coffee. There was a new bowl of fruit on the breakfast bar. More kiwis to steal.

  I scoped Jack in the daylight. Ricky’s notes and his party anecdote flashed in my head. Suspect 2A, Youkilis’s employer, 31, born Denver, Colorado, Hollywood actor, pretty good alibi for the night of the accident—he was sixteen hundred kilometers away in Los Angeles—but I wouldn’t rule him out until I’d spoken to him.

  “Do we say good morning?” I whispered to Angela.

  She shook her head. We took off our coats, found the cleaning supplies, and began work. I dusted, she vacuumed.

  “Maaling, lallies,” Jack said with a full mouth, attempting to carry his newspaper, coffee, and cereal bowl into the living room without a major accident.

  “Good morning, Señor Tyrone,” Angela said.

  He looked better than when I’d encountered him last night. In fact, more than better, very handsome indeed if you went for pale, blond, athletic, American. And to my surprise I found that I went for ’em in spades. “Those corn-fed western boys,” Ricky once said, and I could see what he meant. Jack’s complexion was pale, but even preshower he radiated health and strength. His body was chiseled and his jaw downy but not weak. His hair was tousled attractively and his blue eyes were the color of the marlin-filled sea off Santiago, rather than last night’s muddy Havana Bay. The blue eyes now were smiling at us. “Might have a job, ladies, Paul knocked a bottle of wine on the Persian. They tried to clean it last night and I fucking Pledged it and Oxy-ed it this morning but it’s still there.”

  We looked at the stain. Jack’s efforts had produced a yellow chemical burn. The rug was ruined.

  While Angela explained the catastrophe I took the vacuum upstairs. I had to spend twenty minutes picking clothes and food items off the floor before I could begin cleaning.

  I hadn’t been up here last night, but this was obviously where Tyrone’s personality fully expressed itself. There were movie posters on the wall and film stills. Apparently he was something of a rising star, but I hadn’t heard of him prior to Ricky’s report. I had seen one or two of the films he’d been in but Jack’s presence had not made an impression. From the stills I saw that he’d appeared in Mr. and
Mrs. Smith with Brad Pitt and Mission Impossible 3 with Tom Cruise, but obviously in such small roles that his name hadn’t gotten on the posters.

  In his bedroom he had headshots of himself, several awards, and a gigantic signed and framed picture of a man and his double in a tacky-looking space uniform.

  I examined the awards.

  LATO Best Newcomer 1999, Sundance Best New Talent 1998, Sho West Up and Comer Award 2000.

  There was nothing recent, and this made me wonder if his career was quite as hot as it had been.

  In the upstairs bathroom there were mirrors everywhere and enough hair care product to have started a salon. Even Party wives in Havana didn’t spend this much time on their coiffure.

  I was sniffing something called Plum Island Soap Company skin cream with appreciation when he suddenly appeared behind me in the mirror.

  He was grinning. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of that Carly Simon song, aren’t you?”

  “Excuse me,” I said, quickly putting the lid back on the cream.

  “Carly Simon . . . the Warren Beatty song. Ok, you’re drawing a blank, before your time, I guess, don’t worry about it. Uhm, what’s your name?”

  “María.”

  “‘María, I just met a girl called María,’ ” he sang in a thin baritone. It was a song I didn’t know, but I smiled encouragingly.

  “I haven’t seen you before, when did you start?” he asked.

  “I was here last night,” I said.

  “Oh, God, you were? Saw me at my worst. Sorry about that. Honestly, I’m not that big of an asshole.”

  “No, you were very polite to me,” I said.

  “I was? Huh. Well, of course I was. Mind if I just brush my teeth? Paul’s coming in a minute.”

  He began brushing his teeth while I made the bed.

  “What do you think of the old abode?” he asked, foaming at the mouth.

  “Very nice.”

  “Yeah, I like it. Live here a lot of the year, ski season. L.A. the rest. That explains the headshots. Want to be clear about that. I’m not a nutcase. I mean, you never know. Veronica Lake in the coffee shop. Natalie Portman walking down the street.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  He noticed my bafflement, spat, and rubbed a towel on his face.

  “The headshots. On the wall. I rent this house out when I’m filming. You don’t know who’ll be staying here. Casting agents, whatever. Hence the headshots. It’s all contacts. That’s all it is. Talent is about five percent of it.”

  “Sí. Contacts. You meeting me, for example. My cousin is Salma Hayek, she’s looking for a costar,” I said.

  His eyes widened, but before I could further extend the fib I broke into a smile. When he saw that I was kidding, he laughed out loud. A pleasant, infectious laugh that filled the room.

  “Oooh, good one. I’m going to have to watch out for you, I can tell. Where are you from?”

  “Yucatán.”

  “The Yucatán, uh, that’s down somewhere, uhm, in the Central American area, I think, right?”

  “Geography is not your strong suit,” I said.

  “Wow, you’re totally unimpressed by me. Refreshing. I had a maid in L.A. who sold my pubes on eBay.”

  I didn’t know the words pubes or eBay but I could tell from the creases around his eyes that he was being funny, so I gave him a smile.

  “She got a hundred bucks. Not a lot, and I put in two fake bids to get the price up.” He leaned against the wall and shook his head. “It’s a crazy business. Crazy. I could tell you stories. I won’t, though, I know that guy you work for, uh, the one with the beard, keeps you on a pretty tight schedule.”

  “Esteban.”

  “Yeah, Esteban, Paul says he can get us just about anything we . . . well, never mind that. Have you time for one quick story?”

  “Sí, señor.”

  “Jack, please.”

  “Sí, Señor Jack.”

  “Just Jack, but anyway, so I’m on MI3 with Cruise. Two-page role. Probably doesn’t remember me. Been here a year now and not one invite to the fucking house, excuse my French. Fucking Kidman’s been there more than I have and she and Katie are like matter and antimatter . . . Lost my train of . . . Oh, yeah, so the grips tell me on MI3 that he has a special shredder in his trailer that vaporizes everything, burns everything to a crisp, you know, so no one can go through his garbage and sell it on the Net. What do you think of that? Paranoid, huh?” Jack said. His face fell. “Not much of a story, actually, was it?”

  “It was a good story. Tom Cruise is very famous,” I said in slightly more broken English than I was capable of. Better if he underestimated me a little.

  Jack sighed and looked unhappy.

  Below us the front doorbell rang. “That’ll be the brains of the operation. I better go,” he said. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “You too, señor,” I said.

  I finished cleaning and when I went downstairs Paul was in the hall impatiently waiting for Jack. The man from last night. Paul Youkilis. Again Ricky’s file: 39, born in Austin, Texas, Ivy League, Jack’s manager and fixer, no known alibi for the night of the accident, hence suspect #1 or #2.

  He was wearing a bright red shirt, yellow tinted glasses, black shorts, and flip-flops. He seemed dressed for a beach in Havana rather than a mountain town in Colorado. For some reason this sartorial choice filled me with annoyance.

  “And who are you?” he asked, like Jack, failing to remember as far back as ten hours ago.

  “María, I’m new. I work for Esteban.”

  “New. I don’t like new,” Paul said.

  Jack appeared, also in shorts and carrying a racket of some kind.

  “All set?” Jack said.

  Paul sighed. “I hate fucking squash. When are we going to get to go skiing? Isn’t this supposed to be Colorado? Where’s the fucking snow?”

  Jack laughed. “Skiing? Skiing, you say? Nobody under forty goes skiing anymore, you old man.” He turned to me. “Ever been snowboarding, María? It’s the bomb.”

  “No, señor.”

  Jack punched Youkilis on the shoulder. “Anyway, it’s your fuckup, dude. Cruise makes his own snow. Get us invited to his house and we can ski all fucking day.”

  “I’m trying man, I’m trying,” Paul said.

  “Try harder. David Beckham’s coming for the weekend and he’s like huge all over Europe and Asia. I was just telling María here what big buddies me and Mr. Cruise are. Don’t show me up, brother.”

  Paul examined me again. “When did you start working for Esteban?”

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  “Yesterday?” Paul muttered.

  “Yeah, didn’t you read today’s paper, Paul? Looks like our old buddy Esteban is going to have a lot of new people on his staff,” Jack said.

  “What are you talking about?” Paul asked.

  “Fairview Post. María here very cleverly escaped the net,” Jack said, winking at me.

  “I have no idea what you’re blathering about,” Paul muttered.

  “As per fucking usual,” Jack muttered. He waved, blew kisses at Angela and me, and led Paul outside.

  When they were gone, Angela called me over. “María, can you keep a secret?” she asked.

  “Let me guess, you’re in love with Señor Jack,” I replied.

  “With Señor Tyrone? No. A thousand times no, he’s skinny and has all those mirrors. Didn’t you see that he has pictures of himself on his bedroom wall? He’s crazy.”

  “Ok, what’s the secret?”

  “I wanted to tell you before, but I wanted to see if I could trust you.”

  And because I did such a good job vacuuming carpets you reckon you can? I thought but didn’t say.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “When we get back to the motel tonight, we’re clearing out of here for Los Angeles. Victor has bought a Volkswagen bus and we’re driving to L.A. We’ve had enough of Esteban ch
eating us, paying us nothing, and now with the federales breathing down our necks, it’s time to go. We can get good jobs in L.A. Better jobs. And we won’t have to work for that fat thief.”

  Ahh, so that’s what all the furtive looks were about.

  “Who’s going?” I asked.

  “Myself, Anna, Luisa, Victor, Josefina. We can take you if you want to come,” Angela said.

  “To L.A.?”

  “Sí, we can just disappear. Victor has cousins out there. He can get us Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, good jobs. And no Esteban.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “There’s no need. You haven’t even seen winter here yet. In January and February we have to walk up this hill in the snow and ice. L.A. doesn’t have snow.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I reiterated.

  “No, no, no, we need a decision now.”

  “Then it’s a no.”

  She stared at me and shook her head. “Let me call Luisa and tell her you’re coming. You won’t be sorry.”

  “No. Don’t. Look, Angela, I don’t want to move so soon. We only just got here and I have a lot of things to do,” I said.

  The words were out before I could call them back.

  “What things?” she asked.

  I knew I had to change tack immediately.

  “Nothing. Forget it. Look, the person you should ask is Francisco. He’ll go with you, especially if you tell him that he’ll make more money.”

  “You and Francisco are not together?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then I will ask him.”

  “Do that.”

  Angela’s lips narrowed and she went back to the trash bags and I picked up the cleaning spray. Through the living room window I watched Jack and Paul reverse out of the driveway.

  Things to do, I thought.

  Things to do.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE GARAGE

  W

  hen I was thirteen I won a poetry competition—the Dr. Ernesto Guevara Young Poets’ Prize. The competition was open to all children under the age of sixteen, though really it was open only to the children of Party members. The prize was a trip to St. Petersburg to study composition at the Pushkin School. My poem wasn’t very good, it was about the harbor lights on Havana Bay watching themselves on a still January night. I imagined all the events the harbor had seen over the last five hundred years and wrote about them. The metaphors were weak, the images childish, and the good bits were echoes from José Martí and García Lorca. It was a bad poem but my father knew how to play the game. He changed my title from “Night Harbor” to “Time Can Be Either Particle or Wave” and threw in a line about quantum physics. It was the early 1990s. Things were changing in Cuba. We were ending our ties with Russia, America had a new president, and for a brief while all things seemed possible. It wasn’t quite our Prague Spring but it was something. The judges read my poem and lapped it up. I won the prize and at a big ceremony in the Teatro Karl Marx I got a medal from Vilma Espín—Mrs. Raúl Castro.