Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3)

by C I Dennis

  “We work together. He’s in the Plantation office with me, near Fort Lauderdale. He’s a lot younger than I am.” She wrinkled her nose like a six-year-old might.

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “No,” she said. “He’s just—very serious and ambitious. Hard core, if you know what I mean. Shaves his head, works out a lot, big into martial arts.”

  “A guy’s guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re getting cold feet?”

  Rose DiNapoli looked up from her paper with an assessing glare. “You hardly know me, Vince.”

  “Have you been married before?”

  “No.”

  “And so you’re getting cold feet.”

  “Go get us some more of these,” she said, handing me the empty plate.

  I rose up from the table just as a man entered the courtyard, wearing tinted glasses and dressed in a dark suit. He came over to us, and addressed me in slightly accented English. “Mr. Tanzi?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please come with me,” he said. “I have a car outside.”

  “And where are we going?” The man didn’t look like a cop, and I hoped that I wasn’t headed back to my dank cell.

  “To the Ministry. My employer will see you there.”

  “Who is your employer?”

  “Her name is Maria Inés Calderón. She is the Minister of Finance and Prices, and she is a vice president-elect. She will assume the office next week. Come with me.”

  “I need to freshen up first,” I said, and I walked up the stairs toward my room. I could hardly contain my excitement—I was making real progress now. I was about to meet with a Cuban bigwig, who might lead me to Pescador, who might in turn lead me to Lilian Arguelles, wherever she was hidden.

  I quickly used the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and then unzipped a pocket of my suitcase where I had stashed a few things. One of them was very small, and had made the trip through customs in Ms. DiNapoli’s bra. I slipped it in my pocket, and unhooked my phone from the charger, pocketing it also. Ready or not, here I come.

  The man was waiting outside next to a shiny black Geely CK, a Chinese import that looked like the bastard child of a Mercedes and a Honda Civic. I got in on the passenger side, and neither of us spoke. My hangover had disappeared, and it wasn’t because of the coffee and the buñuelos.

  It was because I was finally getting close.

  *

  I had to cool my heels in the huge, echoing reception hall of the Ministerio de Finanzas for over an hour until a young woman in a Business Barbie outfit like Javier Pimentel’s secretary came to fetch me and lead me to yet another waiting area, up a long flight of marble-clad stairs. The Cuban government hadn’t spared any expense in the construction of this building back in the day, when sugar was king and the money had flowed. Today, this was the place that set the prices for everything, and in a socialist economy that would be equivalent of a partnership at Goldman Sachs. Whoever was pulling the strings here would wield a lot of power. I was looking forward to meeting Ms. Maria Inés Calderón, and I wondered if there was such a thing as a One Percent in Cuba. The whole idea of the revolution had been to eliminate that, but plutocrats were like cockroaches, and no matter how much poison you scattered around, they tended to sneak back in when you weren’t looking.

  My heel-cooling time left me with some room to think about things, and I realized that Barbara and Royal had hardly crossed my mind since I had boarded the plane in Miami. I had left somewhat of a mess behind. I was doing my best right now to help Roberto—getting his mother back was of primary importance. I felt a little guilty about forgetting about my family, but when I’m on a case everything else seems to fade away.

  Royal would be fine with his mother—I liked to think that I played a big role in his life, but that wasn’t the way it was with a nursing baby, and I figured that our relationship would expand as he got older.

  Barbara would be at her sister’s. That was probably good for a couple of days, max. Vicki was a controlling, clueless shrew; I could barely tolerate her, and even Barbara got burned out after a day or so. The sisters had grown up poor, neglected, and abused, and one of them had risen above the misery while the other one still wallowed in it. Even when you got kicked in the teeth, you still had choices, but some people were simply unable to make them.

  Barbara might even be back home by now. She might be thinking about what she had done, and about this Angelo guy, and whether that was what she wanted in life, or if she could accept my admittedly flawed love. I felt a little strange pondering my wife’s infidelities given my own behavior over the past week, but I still felt like I was holding the higher ground, and it was a lonely place. I would need to do a better job of talking with her about it when I got home—we had a baby to care for, and when that’s the case, mom and dad can’t just toss a relationship like ours into the trash like a soiled Huggie. Not that some people don’t, but I didn’t want to be one of them.

  A cinnamon-haired woman of about fifty came around the corner of the reception area, not smiling. She wore a gray business suit with a purple satin blouse underneath, just enough color to be womanly, and her mottled skin showed the signs of too many years on the beach. On her feet were a pair of black Manolo Blahnik flats that I recognized because Barbara owned the knock-offs, and they were her favorites. These were probably the real thing.

  “Maria Calderón,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Vince Tanzi,” I said. She had a politician’s grip: firm and fast.

  “This way,” she said, and she led me into an office that held a small rainforest’s worth of dark mahogany furniture and was adorned with polished brass fixtures and paintings of hunting scenes.

  “How are you enjoying Havana?” she asked. Her accent was one hundred percent American, as if she lived in the same Vero Beach neighborhood as mine.

  “It’s a beautiful city,” I said. She motioned me to an upholstered chair in front of her desk, and I sat. “Nicer than I expected.”

  “You yumas think that we’re going down the tubes,” she said. “Meanwhile, our kids have better math scores than anywhere in the U.S.A.” She took a seat in a high-backed leather chair behind the desk and let go of a sigh.

  “Yumas?”

  “Gringos,” she said. “But it has a more negative connotation.”

  “You didn’t grow up here.”

  “Hialeah. I went to Bryn Mawr, and then MIT Economics, and then I repatriated myself, to the great disapproval of my parents.”

  “And now you’re going to be the vice president?”

  “One of them died,” she said. “We have five vice presidents in Cuba.”

  “Just in case you ever run out of Castros.”

  “That will be a sad day,” she said. “The man is like your George Washington, Lincoln and Kennedy to us, in one person.”

  “So—why am I here?” I said. “I didn’t seem to have a choice.”

  “Well, let’s see.” She picked up a page from her desk and looked at it while she spoke. “You’re not a priest, although you are a Catholic. So you’re here on false pretenses.”

  “And the Finance Ministry is worried about that?”

  Ms. Calderón scowled. “The Ministry worries about a lot of things. Like why you are in the company of an ICE agent. And why you were bothering two citizens in a restaurant last night.”

  So they knew about Rose. Bad. And, whomever I’d asked about playing backgammon with Señor Pescador had also raised an alert. Good.

  “I’d be grateful for an introduction,” I said.

  “An introduction?” She looked off-balance, and I decided to make my move.

  “Pescador,” I said. “He plays backgammon. I’d like a game.”

  Maria Inés Calderón knitted her fingers together on the surface of the desk. “Do you really play backgammon?”

  “It’s all in the doubling,” I said. I met her glance and held it.

  “I am Pescado
r,” she said. “And now, I need to know how you know that name.”

  What? Pescador was a man, I was sure of it. Or maybe I had just assumed that? Damn. I needed to backpedal, fast.

  Or, I could fast-forward. This might be the opening that I was looking for. I decided to double the bet.

  “I’m here to negotiate,” I said. “I represent the Pimentel family, and they want to settle this.”

  The finance minister said nothing. Instead, she got up from her chair and crossed over to the window that looked out on the busy street below. I waited, knowing that if I said anything more I might blow it. When you are negotiating you have to know when to shut up.

  “It’s still sixty million,” she finally said. “No negotiation, no write-offs.”

  “And Lilian?” I said. That was risky, but I desperately needed to get somewhere.

  “Nothing is going to happen until I see the money,” she said. “You can tell Javier that he has until the weekend. And you are flying out this evening. Don’t come back.”

  I began to cough, violently, and Ms. Calderón gave me a worried look. “Water,” I managed to say, between my increasingly dramatic coughs. It sounded like I was about to die, and she rushed out of the room.

  I retrieved the tiny device that Roberto had given me from my pocket and plugged it into an empty USB slot on the back of a computer that straddled the side of the Minister’s mahogany desk. Then, I removed my phone from my pocket and stuffed it into the folds of the slipcovered chair that I was sitting on, just before she entered the room again with a mug full of water. I began gasping again and accepted the water, which “cured” me after a few sips.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t miss your flight,” she said. “And you can tell Javier that he’s a stupid palestino, and if he tries to fuck me on this I’ll kill him.”

  Whoa. Not only did I have another choice Spanish word to look up, but I also knew that I had just gazed into the eyes of the person who was responsible for Lilian Arguelles’ captivity.

  Fuck you too, lady. You might think that I’m just some errand boy, but if you’re holding Roberto’s mother somewhere, then you shouldn’t worry about Javier Pimentel. You should worry about me.

  *

  The dark-suited guy dropped me off at the hostel, and I looked around for Rose but she wasn’t there. No matter—I found one of the English-speaking resident sisters and got directions to the nearest Internet access point. Roberto would be in school, but he watched his phone, and I was eager to get a message to him and get the ball rolling. I had been taken by surprise when Maria Calderón had told me that she was Pescador. But I had been able to switch gears quickly, and had set the bait, according to Roberto’s instructions. Now, like a good fisherman, I had to wait. We would see who was the real pescador here.

  The Nauta office had a line out the door, and I waited for forty-five minutes to send my three-word message to Roberto. “I miss you,” I typed, after forking over the equivalent of five dollars and signing a form pledging that none of my web activity would hurt the State. I had to cross my fingers on that one. “I miss you too,” Roberto sent back, via the Gmail account that we had set up for the occasion.

  Meaning: Message received. The game was on.

  *

  When I got back to the convent, a nun knocked on my door and handed me an envelope. It held a boarding pass and a stamped departure tax receipt. My flight left at five in the afternoon, and I would have to change planes in Cancun and get into Miami shortly before midnight.

  “My friend?” I asked the nun, hoping that she spoke English. “Has she come back?”

  The young nun hesitated, and then spoke. “They told us not to say,” she said. “But you are a man of God.”

  No I wasn’t, but I nodded. “Where is she?”

  “Policía,” she said. “She was very upset. Big fight. They had to use—how you call?” She held out her wrists.

  “Handcuffs?” I said, and the sister nodded. The cops had taken Rose DiNapoli away in cuffs? I had been wondering if they were going to deport her along with me, seeing how Ms. Calderón had known that she was with ICE. They might be sweating her right now in some dark cellar back at the police castle. I also wondered how much training a customs enforcement agent was given for a situation like that, where they might be interrogated in a not-so-friendly country, and my overactive imagination began to conjure up various torture devices, but this was the twenty-first century, and those things weren’t supposed to happen anymore; all the bad stuff ended up on the Internet within minutes, and governments couldn’t get away with that kind of crap. The Internet had made the world smaller and more transparent; it was harder to operate in the dark.

  But Cuba had the distinction of having the worst Internet service in the western hemisphere. It was scarce, slow, expensive, and they monitored everything. So if the police wanted to beat up on Rose DiNapoli, a U.S. customs agent, no one might ever know.

  *

  A twenty-minute taxi ride later I was back on the Malecón in front of the U.S. Interests Section building, a concrete-and-glass architectural abortion that made the wonky Russian Embassy appear tasteful by comparison. If we ever really wanted to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, we would need to start by knocking it down and putting up something that didn’t look like a seven-story cheese grater. Since the U.S. had no ambassador in Cuba, the Interests Section functioned as a de facto embassy, and I figured that it would be the best place to get some fast help.

  “Fast” is not a word that is well known in diplomatic circles. Despite my pleas to whoever would listen, I had been there for almost an hour before I was granted an audience with a deputy-deputy-assistant-somebody who looked like he had just graduated from high school and didn’t know how to tie his necktie properly. He had called me “dude” twice now, and I was about to smack him, but instead I demanded to see his superior. He left me waiting in his office while he went to find his boss, or maybe, to get a security guard and throw me out. Either way, I was ready to unload on somebody. A U.S. agent had been snatched off of the street, and no one seemed to give a shit.

  Eventually I was ushered into the slightly more spacious office of someone named “Tim”, who was a couple of years older and pay grades higher than the first one, but no more helpful.

  “We’re not going to intervene in a police matter,” he told me from behind a well-worn veneer desk. “I’m sure that they’ll sort it out. This isn’t the Cold War.”

  “They cuffed her,” I said. “I was a cop. You don’t handcuff people unless there’s trouble.”

  “They do what they want,” Tim said. “We don’t have any clout with the Cubans. They ignore us. They enjoy thumbing their noses at us.”

  “Who’s your boss?” I said.

  “This is as high as you go,” he said. “Look, we’d help if we could, OK?”

  “Can you call the States directly from here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to make a phone call.”

  “Mr. Tanzi, I’ve—”

  I slammed my fist down hard on the cheap desk, making his phone and a row of framed family photographs jump. “That’s enough!” I yelled, and he drew back. I was expecting a security guard to rush into the room any second, but nothing happened. “You need to call Robert Patton, head of the Border Patrol in the Burlington, Vermont office. Look him up and call him. I’ll wait.”

  The bureaucrat’s hand was visibly shaking as he searched on his computer to find Patton’s information. He found it, dialed the phone, and handed me the receiver. Fortunately, Patton was there.

  “It’s Vince,” I said.

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “The so-called U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Rose DiNapoli got taken out of our hotel by the police a couple of hours ago, and everybody in this place has their head up their ass.”

  “They won’t do anything?”

  “No,” I said. “They say they can’t.”

>   “Bullshit,” Patton said. “Are you with somebody right now?”

  “I’m in the office of a fellow who introduced himself as Tim.”

  “Put me on speakerphone,” Patton said. Which was kind of like saying: Here, take this match and throw it in that barrel of gasoline.

  I listened in admiration as Robert Patton ripped my junior diplomat friend a new one, threatening him with angry calls from the State Department, reassignment to Antarctica, and an imminent F-35 air strike if he didn’t toe the line, and fast. When he was done, Tim hung up the phone and turned to me.

  “So what do you suggest we do?”

  “Whatever it takes,” I said. “I’ll be waiting for her at the hotel.”

  *

  I had the cab driver drop me at the Nauta office and waited in line again to send another five-dollar, three-word email to Roberto. Actually this time I didn’t even have to send a message, because when I signed into Gmail, I saw that he had already left one. Good fishing today, he had written. That was all that I needed to know.

  Unless my diplomat friends had worked at lightning speed, I figured that I had enough time to complete the next step of my Roberto-mission, and I put myself through various scenarios as I walked to the Ministry of Finance building, only to find that it was cerrado hasta las 14 hras., which I took to mean closed for lunch. I hadn’t had anything to eat since the morning’s buñuelo-fest with Rose Di Napoli, and my stomach was growling. I turned the corner and found a street vendor selling pizza hawaiana from a cart, which was a small ham-and-pineapple pizza that you folded and ate like a taco. I was about to order another one when I saw a woman approaching the side door of the Ministry building and recognized her—she was the Business, or rather, Bureaucrat Barbie who had led me to Maria Calderón’s waiting area. I jogged toward her as quickly as I could.

  “Mi phono,” I said. “Es losto, en el office-o de la señora.” I had practiced that line about a hundred times, and hoped that I might be understood.

  “Excuse me? Your what?” The young woman’s English was perfect, with a slight hint of Valley Girl.

  “My cellphone,” I said. “I left it in Ms. Calderón’s office. Is she in?”