Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3)

by C I Dennis

  The driver dropped us in the center of Old Havana on a relatively quiet street in front of the Convento Santa Brigida, a mid-1800s structure that functioned partly as a home for the nuns who lived and worked there, but mostly as a “casa particular”, which operated under the Cuban system that allowed people to open their homes to tourists and make more than the $20-a-month official salary that most of the island’s inhabitants earned. The hostel was clean and tidy with a spacious interior courtyard, and the rooms were large although somewhat spare. I didn’t expect to find a Jacuzzi tub and a mini-bar in a convent bedroom, and I was fine with the monk-like simplicity. It was appropriate to my cover, and to my mood as well. I hadn’t come to Havana to guzzle daiquiris at the Tropicana, although that didn’t sound like a bad idea after having traveled all day.

  Someone knocked at my door, and I got up from the single bed to open it. Rose DiNapoli stood at the threshold, dressed in a floral print top with white linen pants and matching shoes. She had her curly black hair tied back and wore oval-shaped sunglasses, perched above her forehead. Any traces of the nun identity were gone.

  “About that Cuba Libre?” she said. “Or are you busy?”

  “I was praying,” I said. “But I think that my prayers have been answered.”

  She smiled. “We’re going to Lluvia de Oro. It’s only a few blocks from here.”

  Ms. DiNapoli led us down the stairs and onto the street. This part of Old Havana was a mix of offices, private homes, shops, and restaurants, and the streets were filled with the smells of spicy food, flowers, the nearby harbor, and exhaust fumes from the mufflers of the venerable, brightly-painted mid-century Fords, Buicks, and Chevrolets that predated the revolution. Our taxi from the airport had been a ‘52 Studebaker Commander that looked like it was pointing backward and had over 300,000 miles on it. I had forgotten how cavernous those old cars were, and how my brother, my sister, and I used to romp around in the back like drunken chimpanzees in the days before you had to wear seat belts.

  “How long have you known Patton?” Rose asked me as she steered us through the commotion, occasionally taking hold of my elbow. She seemed to know exactly where she was going.

  “About a year,” I said.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “The national ICE headquarters is in Vermont, outside of Burlington. I’m there a lot, and I read the papers back when you were shot.”

  “It was no big deal.”

  “Hell yes it was. You shouldn’t be alive.”

  People kept bowing and waving to me as we passed. Huh? Did I look like someone they knew? And then I realized that it was the clerical collar, and they were just being good Catholics and saying buenos dias to a passing priest. I wondered what they thought about the dark-haired babe who kept taking my arm.

  “I was lucky,” I said. “And I’ve had a great physical therapist.”

  “Patton told me why you’re here. What’s your strategy? How are you planning to find this guy?”

  “I’m not sure yet. How did you get involved in this?”

  “Patton called me when you said Cuba. I know it better than any of the others—my mother is Cuban, and I’ve visited a lot. I’m kind of in love with the place.”

  “I can see why,” I said. “So why is ICE after the Pimentels?”

  “Because Javier Pimentel bought a boat a couple of years ago in the Caymans. He bought it for cash, and some of the hundred-dollar bills were marked. By us. We traced them back to a laundering racket where we’d been trying to set up a sting, but we got screwed out of fifty grand in cash. Not one of our more successful operations.”

  “So you think that Pimentel was laundering money?”

  “We had him audited by the IRS last year, and the brother, too. They were squeaky clean. Like, too clean, and they had way too many toys, like the boat. But we kind of let it slide, and then I heard that the father and the other brother got killed.”

  “By pros, according to the locals.”

  “Yeah, I talked to your friend there in Vero, Bobby Bove. He said that you’ve been avoiding him, and to tell you to perform an unmentionable act on yourself.”

  “So what are you going to do now?”

  “You tell me,” she said. “I’m just the babysitter.”

  We were walking along the Calle Obispo in an area of stately buildings and hotels. Across the street was a Greek Revival structure that looked like the New York Stock Exchange, only smaller, and with an immense front door made of dark, highly-polished wood. At the top of a row of Corinthian columns the edifice’s name had been carved into stone:

  Ministerio de Finanzas y Precios.

  I stopped and took a long look. Someone from inside there had sent Segundo Pimentel a photograph of a boat. A boat that might have picked up a few million in cash.

  “Do your people ever track Javier’s yacht?”

  “We used to, a while ago. But he never puts in anywhere. Just in and out of Key West or up to Miami.”

  “He has a friend right over there.” I pointed across the street. “And last Sunday he dropped a big cooler full of something a few miles off the Cuban shoreline. It was picked up by a Pauk-class Corvette. Segundo had a digital photograph of the ship, and the file originated from here.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “There’s a Hemingway novel,” I said. “It’s called The Old Fart and the Sea. We old farts know where the big fish are.”

  “You don’t look so old,” Rose DiNapoli said. “In fact, you look kind of cute in that priest collar.” She smiled.

  “Hey, no flirting,” I said, smiling back. “Remember, I took vows. Plus I already have enough trouble at home.”

  “That wasn’t flirting. I was just being nice.”

  “Sorry. I’ve—kind of been under attack lately.”

  “Well you can relax then,” she said. “If I was going to flirt with you, you’d know it.”

  *

  The Cuba Libres at the Lluvia De Oro were good, and they got better with each one that we ordered. I drank the regular ones, made from Havana Club Blanco, Coca-Cola—from the fountain, not the bottle—and two halves of a fresh Key lime. The bartender admitted that he also had added a secret ingredient, which I suspected was some kind of hot sauce as the drink had a slight zing to it. Rose was drinking a variation called the Cubata, which used the darker Havana Club Especial—otherwise it was the same as mine.

  The woman could put them away. We talked shop while we drank: law enforcement, crazy things that had happened in our careers, the tribulations of dealing with bureaucrats, and even our favorite weapons and other hardware, as her training for customs had included that, and she knew her way around the basic cop gear. Three or four Cubatas and Cuba Libres into the evening we ordered some food that I can barely remember except that it was some kind of gumbo-ish mix of pork, chicken and beans, which would describe ninety percent of Cuban cuisine. It was tasty but forgettable, mostly because I was enjoying my time with Ms. DiNapoli so much that for once I wasn’t paying attention to the menu. It wasn’t that she was some kind of supermodel, because she wasn’t, just as I’m not some kind of muscle-mag beefcake. Sure, she was attractive, but she was a real person, and I liked her, and it was something of a relief to be with her after all of the anxiety that I’d experienced over Megan’s various maneuvers. It was deliciously relaxing to spend some time with a woman my own age who shared some common interests and had a brain and a sense of humor.

  “If we don’t stop drinking these, we’ll be in trouble,” she said, draining her glass. “You’ll have to sneak me back into the convent.”

  “That sounds like a Shakespeare play.”

  “Shakespeare would have loved Havana,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “There’s so much going on here,” Rose said. “It’s kind of a train wreck, but the people are so smart, and so proud. They still believe in the revolution, and it’s held them back in a way, but it has also kept them—uncorrupted? There’s n
o fast food, you can barely get Internet, and people don’t walk around shopping malls like morbidly obese zombies. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe Cuba should annex the United States,” she said. “Not the other way around.”

  “Too late,” I said. “We Americans are so sure that we’re right about everything.”

  “It should be mandatory that everyone in the U.S. does some kind of work overseas. It would open peoples’ eyes.”

  “We prefer to keep them shut.”

  “The whole U.S.A. is turning into one of those gigantic chicken farms,” Rose said. “We’re being fattened up for the slaughter.”

  “Jeez. This is getting depressing.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Maybe we should order another round.”

  “No way. I’d have to crawl back to the hotel, and these are my good pants.”

  She excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. I did some people-watching while she was gone. The restaurant was full, and the diners were a mix of gringo tourists in Hawaiian shirts and logo-emblazoned casual gear, along with the natives, who were dressed like the inhabitants of a sophisticated if warm European city. I took notice of two men at a corner table who were drinking from tall glasses like ours, and had a board game open on the table, set up between them. One of them was scowling, and I heard him say: “Doble”.

  Double? Backgammon.

  As I got up and walked over to them, they looked up from their game.

  “Padre?” one of them said. They wore tropical business clothes: expensive-looking guayabera shirts, dark trousers, and perfectly-shined leather shoes.

  “Hablo inglés?” I said, attempting some Spanish.

  “Yes, you do,” the one on the right said. He had a smooth forehead and ears that were too long for his face. The two men looked amused.

  “So you speak English then?” I said.

  “No, you do. You said: I speak English. Hablo inglés.”

  “I meant—”

  “We know what you meant,” the other one said. “No harm intended. Bienvenidos a Cuba. Welcome to Cuba.”

  “I was wondering—about your game,” I said. “I’d like to play someone.”

  “We’re about to leave,” Long Ears said. “So sorry.”

  “Maybe you know him. He calls himself Pescador.”

  The expressions on the two men’s faces changed suddenly, as if they’d just been informed that someone close to them had died.

  “We can’t help you, señor,” the other one said. “Lots of people in Havana.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Vaya con Dios.” I’d learned that one from a John Wayne movie.

  “Carajo,” Long Ears said, under his breath.

  I would have to look that up when I got back to the hotel.

  *

  Rose DiNapoli led me to the Malecón, a pedestrian thoroughfare that stretched along almost the entire coast of the city, wherever it hadn’t been bashed by recent hurricanes. Lovers and prostitutes, she said. That’s what you find on the Malecón at night. This is where you come when you want a kiss.

  I was pretty drunk at this point. Despite my pitcher-fest with Megan Rumsford and my overindulgence tonight I seldom drink to excess, and since my injury I have been even more careful to not overdo it—with my limp and my sometimes-slurred speech I could already be mistaken for one of those people who started tippling before lunchtime. But arriving in Cuba, and knowing that I could finally make some progress on the case, and the companionship of a fellow professional—who happened to be unexpectedly attractive—was having an effect on me like a gust of warm Caribbean air. We stopped at an area that overlooked the Castillo de San Salvador, a sixteenth-century fort that had once protected the Havana harbor from various invading nationalities and was now a tourist site.

  So, she wanted a kiss? What the hell, one more wouldn’t hurt. I was already going to be barbecuing in eternal damnation for the Megan fiasco. I took her arm, and she turned to face me. “Don’t get your hopes up,” I said. “I’m not much of a kisser.”

  She gave me a puzzled look. “Vince? I wasn’t talking about you and me.”

  What?

  Tanzi’s Tip #7: Your foot does not fit in your mouth. Believe me, I’ve tried.

  “Rose, I had no business saying that,” I said. “My life is a mess right now. I’m way off on reading the signals.”

  “I’m getting married in three weeks,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I might even go through with it, if he behaves himself.”

  “I’m sorry. About what I said, I mean.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I like you, and I’ll help you. We have some work to do if you’re going to find your friend.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said, and we turned back on the walkway in the direction of the hostel.

  It’s easy to get carried away in the tropics. The balmy nights seem to make it happen, which is why so many people leave their offices, their homes, and all of their obligations to escape to the sand, the sun, and the rum. That, plus I have always had a black belt in making an ass of myself, but as Rose had just said, I probably shouldn’t worry about it.

  But I did worry about it, because I suddenly didn’t want to go home.

  *

  We were passing the Plaza de Armas and were almost back to the convent when a small white Lada sedan with a big blue light on the roof pulled up and stopped in front of us. Two uniformed men in berets got out, and Rose grabbed me by the elbow. “I’ll handle this,” she said.

  “Documentos,” one of them said. I took my wallet from my back pocket and opened it, upside down, causing the entire contents to rain down onto the sidewalk.

  “Está bien borracho, este,” one of the cops said to the other. He turned to me and gestured. “Ven con nosotros, padre.”

  I looked to Rose. “They’re saying that you’re shitfaced, and they want you to get in the car,” she said. She talked to the two cops for a while in fluent Spanish, but they ended up putting me in the back seat and left her standing on the curb. We sped back in the direction of the waterfront, and the car slowed as we passed through the raised iron gate of a gigantic stone fortress surrounded by curtain walls, battlements, and corner towers. I wondered if I was being taken to meet Ivanhoe. A sign near the entry said Policía Nacional Revolucionária Comandancia General, which I took to mean: the cops.

  I was going to lockup, to sleep it off. Oh boy.

  Fifteen minutes later I was stripped down and was given a cavity search by one of the officers, which has never been my idea of a fun first date. They took my clothes, my shoes, and my phone, and put everything in a bag, leaving me in my underwear. I was smart enough to not say anything at all, and nobody questioned me, though I was pretty sure that none of them spoke English anyway. I ended up in a holding cell so bare and dank that I was already sobering up. The cell had a cot that squeaked, with a single, coarse blanket and no pillow. By the time that I was finally left alone, I was ready to wrap myself in it and attempt to get some sleep.

  Suddenly, going home didn’t seem so bad after all.

  WEDNESDAY

  Sometime after dawn a guard unlocked my cell and gave me the bag with my clothes. Nothing had been disturbed, and I checked the time on my phone: seven AM. Shortly afterward I was escorted out of the building, past the medieval-looking iron gate, and out into the already warm morning sun. I had worked up a pretty good hangover, and I found a peso stall on the street and ordered a coffee while I unfolded my map. The hostel wasn’t far away, and I decided to walk, although what I really wanted to do was to crawl into a real bed with a real pillow until the construction worker in my head turned off his jackhammer.

  The strong coffee helped, and I mingled on the streets with smartly-dressed business people and government workers as I navigated my way back to the convent. A few minutes later I was in my room attempting to wash away my sins of the night before in the primitiv
e-but-functional shower. I dressed in fresh clothes and went downstairs to the courtyard where a breakfast buffet had been laid out. Rose DiNapoli was seated at a table reading a Spanish-language newspaper. She was the only person in the courtyard except for one of the resident nuns who was scraping food off of plates into a plastic bin.

  “Where is everyone?”

  She put down the newspaper. “The tour guide took them out to El Rincón on the train. There’s a shrine out there. Kind of a mixture of Catholic and Santería. The people dress in sackcloth, and they crawl on their hands and knees and push rocks around with their foreheads.”

  “That’s about my speed right now.”

  “You OK? Did they hassle you?”

  “The accommodations were a little lacking,” I said. “So you didn’t want to go to the shrine?”

  “I told them that you and I were both sick. Food poisoning. They’re very strict about attending these things. We’re supposed to be in our rooms, recovering.”

  She had two figure-eight-shaped pastries on a plate in front of her. “What are those?”

  “Buñuelos,” she said. “Kind of like your fried dough, up in Vermont. Want one?”

  My stomach said no, but I was curious. I picked one up and took a bite. She was right—it was a lot like the fried dough that you could get from a booth at the Champlain Valley Fair, except sweeter, and with a hint of anise. “Saints above,” I said, as I finished it. “I believe I’ve just made a miraculous recovery from food poisoning.”

  “They’re pretty addictive,” she said. “That one would have been my tenth. There are more in the kitchen.”

  I sat at the table across from her. She looked like she had slept just fine, and her dark hair was tied back into a bun, exposing her neck. She wore a light-green shirt that matched her eyes. “You don’t look too bad, considering how much we drank,” I said.

  “I don’t get hangovers.”

  “Are you really getting married in three weeks?”

  She picked up her paper and pretended to read. “Maybe.”

  “Who’s the guy?”