1 Red Right Return

by John H. Cunningham

  53

  THE STREETS WERE FILLED with late risers. My mind spun like the bike’s wheels until I arrived at the gate of the Coast Guard station on Trumbo Road. When I asked to speak with a senior officer from the Mohawk the sentry curled his lip. I gave him my name—no recognition. But at the mention of Havana, and finally CNN, his eyes got wide.

  “Are you—”

  “Under orders, can’t talk about it.”

  He retreated into the security shack. I could see him on the phone, gesturing and glancing back at me. When he returned, he stood very straight and spoke clearly. “Ensign Frank Nardi’s the Officer of the Deck on the Mohawk. He’s in a briefing now but asked for you to call him at this number after fourteen hundred hours.”

  I restrained the urge to salute. The sentry stared after me, undoubtedly wondering if he’d just met a bona fide CIA operative. Back at the La Concha I locked my bike to the rack and was reminded of the chicken that had been leashed there a few days ago. Then I thought of the jar in Poquito’s office. And then Karen.

  She was at the front desk, and the image of her in the black mini-dress the other night was still fresh. She was helping a customer but caught my eyes as I dug into my backpack. She nodded toward one of the new paintings next to the counter and winked.

  Nice of her to rub it in.

  The customer left as I pulled her manuscript from my pack.

  “Reads like a bestseller, except your main character’s a real jerk,” I said.

  Her face soured. “You don’t understand, the protagonist needs to show growth—”

  “Save it, Karen. Your opinion of me was pretty clear.”

  She yanked the pages out of my hand. Her cheeks flushed beet red.

  “I should have never—I told you not to read it…oh, never mind.” In two long strides she was in the small office. She closed the door fast, but held it from slamming.

  54

  “NO MAN IS AN island.” These words begin Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, but they weren’t his. John Donne penned them in 1674 after being imprisoned for marrying an “improper” woman, was released, was twice a member of England’s parliament, was financially ruined, widowed, and ultimately ordained. It was the book where the heroine Pilar was immortalized, but I could find no clues related to HIS BOAT or Pilar in my father’s cipher.

  The week had been an eye-opening, cocoon-tearing and seclusion-ending experience. Unable to reach Currito, it was time to find the Stock Island Sancho myself. Would my crashing Enrique Jiminez go the same way it had for Truck with Salvo? I had to find answers. I started by reading the Key West Citizen’s website, catching up on the stories Barrett had mentioned. Then another idea overcame me.

  I Googled Thomas Jefferson.

  As a president, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the first Secretary of State, his name produced millions of hits. I added “codes” to the search string, which narrowed the field. His passion for encryption was well documented. Jefferson had invented something called a wheel cipher, used to protect foreign policy dispatches. It was a device that used a cylindrical bar, six inches long, with twenty-six disks, each containing all the letters of the alphabet. The wheel cipher was much more complicated then my father’s system.

  Jefferson was another dead end.

  Damn! The connection had seemed certain. Diplomacy and a Virginian. We used to laugh at Dad’s French accent. “Le premiere Virginiare.” I scrolled down the list from the last search, then hit ‘back,’ and scanned down again.

  Something caught my attention. It was a word in italics. Vigenère?

  Was it Virginia misspelled? The word surfed my brain waves. Le premiere Vigenère began as a haunting whisper and built to a steady beat in my head.

  The article said Jefferson had selected the Vigenère cipher to protect communications with the Lewis and Clark expedition.

  What I found next made my heart skip…a sea of letters.

  When the phone rang I jumped.

  I expected it to be Currito Salazar, or the blackmailers, and was surprised to hear Ray Floyd’s voice panting on the other end.

  “Buck, you won’t believe this—I can’t believe—hold on.” He pulled the phone away from his mouth, and I could hear yelling in the distance.

  “Call the police, not the FBI!” Ray’s sharp voice made me flinch. I sat down. “You need to get over here! This is seriously fucked up.”

  “What are you talking about?” “Betty, man, Betty!”

  I sucked in a shallow breath. “What’s wrong with—”

  “Remember when you asked me to look her over, after you got back from Cuba?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I was giving her a rundown, started with the starboard engine, fuel tank, magneto—”

  I bit my knuckle. “Ray! What the hell’s wrong?”

  “I’m looking around, and everything seems fine, and then I get on top of the wing, and what I see freaks me out—I mean, I fell right off the damn plane.”

  “There’s a bomb on cylinder four of Betty’s port engine!”

  I jumped to my feet. “Did you say bomb?”

  “A grenade, rigged to some sort of balloon-looking thing—hold on.” He held the phone away, but I heard him yell: "Get the SWAT team, or bomb squad, or whatever the hell they have on this island.”

  I imagined pandemonium at the airport.

  “Ray, I’ll be right there. Ray?”

  I ran around the apartment looking for my keys.

  A bomb on my port engine?

  Could it have been planted in—Sanchez! That bastard! Or, what about Salvo, or Quasimodo?

  Betty’s port engine had been a magnet for flying fish, hoodoo candles, and now a grenade. Why hadn’t it exploded? And why did someone want me dead? The phone rang, and I realized the message light was blinking. I feared Ray was calling back to say Betty was toast.

  “What!?”

  “Fuck you too.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “You ready or what?” Currito Salazar.

  “Listen—”

  “He’s willing to see you, but it’s got to be right now. I’m parked illegally on Duval, so hurry up.”

  “I can’t, Curro, not now.”

  “You what? Listen, cuz, this guy don’t exactly grant audiences every day, you know what I’m saying? Especially with all this shit going down. You don’t post now, forget about it.”

  Shit! “All right, I’m coming.”

  He hung up, pissed. The police probably wouldn’t let me near Betty anyway. I stared at the phone and saw the message light blinking. After a couple of charter inquiries came an icy voice that stopped me cold.

  “You should have listened to us. Now you’ll be sorry.” The strong Cuban accent led me to conclude it was Clinton. Did they plant the bomb? Or was my ledger on the way to the police? Or was I going to be boiled?

  I flew down the stairs three at a time, my flip-flops slapped loudly on the landings. I flung the door open and sprinted through the lobby spreading a wake of people jumping out of my way.

  Currito’s blue Caddie was visible through the glass door, along with a cop on a bicycle pointing to a no parking sign. I dove in the passenger door and surprised them both. Currito hit the gas and left the patrolman standing in the road with his mouth open.

  “Go hassle a drunk, cracker!” Currito yelled at his rear-view mirror.

  I rubbed the sweat off my face with the front of my shirt.

  “Damn, cuz, you don’t look too good, eh?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” I said.

  “Well, pull yourself together, this guy don’t mess around. If he thinks you’re a flake we’ll be out the door.”

  With the air fouled by two decades of Parliament cigarettes, the antiquated air conditioner labored to keep the interior cool if not fresh. Bubbles in the window tinting made the view surreal, distorting reality with a hallucinogenic twist.

  “Or if he thinks you’re a threat—”<
br />
  “There’s a freaking bomb on my plane!”

  “What?” The car swerved, nearly sending a moped through a T-shirt shop window. “Damn, cuz.” Currito’s rheumy-eyes peered above his sunglasses as he flung his hand, its thumb and fingers slapping resoundingly together. “You CIA, or what?”

  His question released a sudden laugh that took all my wits not to melt into hysterics. The harder I shook, the more serious Currito’s expression became. He pulled off North Roosevelt into the Publix parking lot and sat there staring at me until I got myself under control.

  “You all right, Bubba?”

  “Is this it?”

  “We ain’t going anywhere until you pull your shit together.”

  I held up my hand. “I’m fine, Curro, don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you.”

  “Shit, boy, take a breath.” He pushed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. I stifled another fit of hysterics, and worried that maybe I was coming apart at the seams.

  We left Key West heading north on A1A. Cars sped past us, and Currito cruised steadily at 40 miles per hour in a 55 zone. We passed the first wave of Stock Island’s shabby retail strips and turned right, but my mind was centered on what would be happening at the airport.

  We turned onto a dark street. Dirty trailers pressed close to the curb, and dried, brown palm fronds hung over them. I tried to refocus my brain onto the present when Currito pulled into a gravel drive where an ancient Ford Bronco was nestled amongst the bushes.

  “All right, cuz, you ready?”

  Two dark men emerged from the shadows. Each of them held machetes.

  “You owe me, brother.” Currito rolled down his window. “He’s expecting us.”

  One of the men waved his machete toward the trailer. The gravity of the meeting hit me. What if Enrique was Bush or Clinton?

  We got out and walked to the cinderblock steps that led up to the front door. Volkswagen-sized palmetto bugs scurried away like sentries guarding the castle. There was an intricate painting of a black eyeball amidst swirling red and orange paint on the aluminum wall next to the door. A shiver passed through me. The door opened. I couldn’t see anyone but heard a low, steady drumbeat.

  It was the exact the same rhythm I’d heard in Salvo’s studio in Cayo Hueso.

  55

  I COULDN’T KEEP MY eyes off the colorful paintings that covered the walls of Enrique’s double-wide. Whimsical figures floated on brilliant backgrounds that gave life to the otherwise dark interior. I flashed back to Cayo Hueso, outside Salvo’s studio, and recalled his all-encompassing murals. In the corner of the trailer was an altar that contained wooden animals, a glass of amber liquid, a Snickers bar, and what appeared to be plastic doll limbs.

  A muted television showing a lusty soap opera scene drew our host’s eyes from us to the screen. If this was the nerve center for the Santero assaults, then their battlefield commander sought guidance from even stranger sources than his occult religion. Somehow, Currito had negotiated the visitation smack in the middle of The Young and the Restless.

  My second visit to a Sancho could not have been more different then the first. There was no cloaked figure darting around the shadows, no entranced woman gyrating on the floor, no replicas of my airplane foreshadowing my demise. The drumbeat, however, thumped steadily from a stereo in the corner.

  “So you’re the dude got thrown out of Cuba?” Enrique said.

  “For being outside a government warehouse,” I said. “And for rescuing a friend from Salvo’s studio.”

  His eyes remained fixed on a silent argument on the screen. “Lucky you got out.”

  Currito sat next to me on the nappy, lime-colored love seat. The Stock Island Sancho was reclined spread-eagle on a faded green Barcalounger. The man was huge, not in height but girth: three hundred pounds packed onto a 5’9”ish frame, tucked miraculously into yellow polyester coaching shorts. He was much larger than the two blackmailers. The soles of his feet were bright pink, in contrast with his asphalt black skin. Empty liter bottles of Dr. Pepper surrounded his chair.

  “The Bondsman says you’re connected to Redeemer. What do you want?”

  “To know why the hell I’ve been targeted.”

  He held up his remote control, snuffed the television, and swung the recliner forward in one swift motion. He landed with a trailer-rattling thud. Surprise pushed me into the back of the loveseat against Currito.

  “Come on.”

  Currito and I exchanged glances, then followed him into the next room. My impression of Enrique changed once there. Soap operas and spent junk food containers were replaced with shelves of books, a more serious altar, several larger paintings, and enough white candles to light Duval Street.

  “Redeemer needs to back off,” Enrique said.

  I checked the ground. “Carpet—”

  “Messing with my people, throwing them to the sharks and shit.”

  “Where’s your big—”

  “You listening to me? We’re not going to sit around and get our asses kicked, especially by a jack-off like Manny Gutierrez.”

  “Gutierrez thinks it’s all your doing.”

  “He’s pissed off ‘cause I wouldn’t hook him up with a brother who has some Santero art, a sweet Wilfredo Lam.”

  “Willy and I have been bombarded with chickens, and what about doves?”

  “Why would we do that? Willy Peebles don’t bother me, least up till now. He wants to send people to Cuba, that’s his business. And before those newspaper articles and CNN, I’d never heard of you.”

  “Then why the intimidation?” I said. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail in Redeemer’s window, I’ve been robbed, threatened, people are dead, and all because of Willy’s little mission?”

  “I don’t give a shit about their mission! And Santeria may dominate in Cuba, but it don’t explain everything they do. Until you fuck with them, then anything goes.”

  “Would Salvo think Willy’s mission was a threat?”

  “A handful of do-gooders are mice nuts to him.”

  “What would Salvo be sending to a government warehouse? Portraits of Orishas? Biological weapons?”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Maybe a nuke or two.” Enrique looked at Currito as if to question whether I was crazy. Currito lifted his shoulders, unsure.

  I pointed to Enrique’s altar. “Why do you put that stuff on there? The Snickers bar, that drink…?” My airplane?

  “Offerings to the Orishas.”

  “Like candles in a Catholic church, or is one of them going to eat that candy bar?”

  “They’re symbols. Sometimes people place pictures there, or things they’re worried about for consideration.”

  “Symbols, huh? Like a blood-coated dove or a fricasseed cat?”

  Enrique pressed his lips tight and leaned in my direction. “Ebó’s used to heal sickness or help solve a problem. An animal sacrificed to gain strength is eaten by the worshipper, unless it was to fight illness.”

  “All those good chickens go to waste?”

  “Would you eat cancer cut out of your body? No. Why? It’s infected flesh. The animals are taken wherever the Orisha directs.”

  “Like the front steps of a church, or stuffed into my flight bag?”

  Currito groaned next to me.

  “He who takes fire into their hands, cannot wait.”

  “What’s that, a riddle? Another code I’m supposed to figure out?”

  “Believe it or not, our religion’s peaceful. We don’t cast spells, hex people or make sacrifices to hurt others. And we don’t perform ebó on cats and dogs.”

  “Unless someone fucks with you, right? Then all bets are off?” I reached into my backpack. “I assume this isn’t a good luck charm?” The sight of the clay figurine with protruding nails caused Enrique’s eyes to widen.

  “Where’s your big cauldron?” I said. “Salvo’s had a human skull—”

  “Endoki!” He sat heavily into the chair. “Was there dirt on the floor?”
/>   “Fresh from Transylvania,” I said.

  “That explains it, Palo Mayombe, black magic.”

  “Oh, shit,” Curro said.

  “What are you, Glenda the Good Witch?”

  “Did you see any sticks nearby?”

  The image of Salvo’s back room returned. After I described its contents, Enrique let out a deep sigh.

  “Brujerea. Witchcraft. Salvo must be a Palero. What you found was his prenda.”

  Prenda? Hadn’t Sanchez used that word? “Sorry, I didn’t bring my English / Mumbo-Jumbo dictionary.”

  “Palero’s a Palo priest. Prenda is what you called the cauldron, and the dirt on the floor was from a cemetery. What about his Nikisi—that’s their form of Orishas—did you see any other symbols or items on the altar?”

  I tried to picture the dark room. “There were some animal horns.”

  Enrique bit his lip. “Siete Rayos.”

  “Oh shit. He’s like Chango,” Currito said.

  “Of course, Mr. Happy,” I said.

  “Not exactly Chango, but close. Palo is—”

  “Palo, Prenda, Nikisi, it’s all gobbledygook, Santeria double-talk I don’t—”

  “No! Palo is not Santeria. It’s different, but combined with Santeria, or used by a Santero, it can only be endoki. That statue means you’ve been hexed.”

  “Gosh, and things were going so well,” I said.

  “Dark spirits.” Currito shivered.

  “When Santeros are desperate they sometimes use a Palero. Their methods are more direct,” Enrique said.

  “Maybe I should find one. I’m sure as hell getting nowhere on my own.” I turned to Currito. “Dark spirits?”