by Paul Levine
The captain coaxed the Polonez from the dock and we chugged eastward. Gulls dipped and cawed and taunted us from their feathery heights. At first, I thought Soto was taking our precious cargo to a more remote site at the eastern end of the island. Las Tunas maybe. Then I watched the position of the sun off the port side. We were headed northeast, riding the Gulf Stream across the Straits of Florida. A strong southeasterly wind whipped up whitecaps in our path. Ninety miles due north was Key West, but our heading would take us east of the curving chain of islands. I stood on the deck in my jeans and Dolphins jersey, watching the whitecaps appear, build, and die. Overhead, four U.S. Air Force jets streaked in formation, heading back to Guantanamo.
Soto had disappeared into the hold, telling me to wait for him. The old freighter pitched gently through the small waves, the motion making me sleepy. A crewman offered me a can of guava juice and a piece of sugary pastry.
Half an hour passed before Soto reappeared and greeted me with a silent nod. We stood on deck, shoulder to shoulder, elbows leaning on the rail, watching the waves break, staring at the sea. Studying the great green depths quiets a man. We look into our species’ past, the beginning of life in the salty waters, and it stills us. The endless vista compels contemplation. Beneath the surface, the sea teems with life.
And danger.
And death.
Finally, I said, “If my bearings are right, Andros Island is off to our east.”
“ Si.”
“If we continue this heading, we’ll hit Grand Bahama Island tomorrow morning.”
“ Si.”
“We’re taking the art to the Bahamas?”
“No.”
Soto drew a Partagas from one of four pockets in his guayabera. He had trouble lighting it, so I helped out, cupping my hands around his, shielding the wind with my back. We stood that way a moment, huddled together, and he looked up, studying me intently. Did those dark eyes seem to soften for just a moment?
“Jacobo, have you lived a full life?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you have any regrets?”
Still, I looked at the sea.
Regrets.
Who hasn’t looked back and considered the road not taken? We’re not handed an itinerary when we start out. Most of us get where we’re going by accident. A kind word from a math teacher, and the student aims, knowingly or not, toward engineering. A thoughtless rebuke and the young violinist surrenders his dream.
If we’re lucky, we take a path where we can do some good along the way. My first career had little social utility, other than providing televised entertainment interrupted by sixty-second accolades to the glory of various beers, cars, and insurance companies. My second career has even less. Now, I’m one of the players in a game where justice is dispensed nearly as often as the Red Sea is parted.
Regrets.
I wish I’d been faster then, smarter now. I wish I could paint a picture or build a bridge. I wish there was a woman-just one-who had lasted. A best friend and only lover, a soulmate, not a cellmate.
After a moment, I said, “We all have our regrets.”
“Have you accomplished all you have wanted? Have you left your mark?”
“My name’s not in the NFL record book,” I told him, “and I doubt it will be in any history books.”
“Perhaps you are wrong.” But he said it in a whisper I barely heard above the droning of the diesels and the whine of the tropical wind.
D usk came quickly, and still we stood, side by side, as the sky deepened to a dark purple, and the light softened. The whitecaps were tinged with pink from the fading light. “You think I am misguided, a foolish, deformed old man living in the past,” Soto said.
I didn’t know if it was a question. “You’ve confused me. First I thought you were a rabid anticommunist, a right-wing nut like so many of the exilado s in Miami. Then, I find out you’re a charter member of the Fidel Castro fan club. Now, I don’t know what’s up your sleeve.”
“Nothing!” he exclaimed, pointing to his empty right sleeve flapping in the breeze.
It was a silly joke, and so out of character for the dour Cuban that it convulsed me. And then him. Maybe it had been the tension of the day. I didn’t know. We stood there together, sharing the moment of a Caribbean sunset, laughing into the wind. He was puffing a cigar now, its smoke whipping away.
I watched the setting sun, which appeared off the bow. “We’re angling to the west.”
“ Si.”
I tried to figure how many miles we had covered. If I kept this up, I was going to qualify for a Sea Scout badge. “We’re headed to Miami!”
Soto didn’t say a word.
“You pulled a double whammy. You’re taking the art to Miami. You’ve got Foley under house arrest or something. All that Castro-as-demigod was your cover. You’re recovering the money and the art. You’re still a CIA operative.”
Still, he was silent.
A strange bundle of emotions. Anger. I’d been double-crossed. The government had never meant to honor its deal with Foley, and I was part of the deception, even if I didn’t know it. But just a bit of exhilaration, too. A sense of awe at how slickly they’d done it, turned the tables on the biggest thief in history. To say nothing of his formerly ten-million-dollar lawyer.
“We are headed to Miami,” Soto said. “But if the rest of your theory is correct, if the U.S. recovers the money, why did Fidel assist us? Why do we have the use of Cuban troops and a Cuban crew, and why were we permitted to leave the island when Foley’s deal was to share the riches with the Castro government?”
I didn’t know. What was it Foley had said? That I was half right, as usual. “Maybe the State Department made a deal,” I guessed. “Castro gives up the money and the art, and the U.S. drops the trade embargo.”
“Politically infeasible,” Soto said. We stood quietly another moment, listening to the slappity-slap of the waves against the hull. “Think. You have come to know me. What is it I would do with the full consent of Fidel?”
“I can’t figure it out. If you’re returning the art-”
“I never said I was returning it.”
He saw I didn’t understand, so he motioned me to follow him. We circled the deck and took a ladder into the hold. Below deck, the steel bulkheads rattled with engine vibrations, and the air stank of sweat, grease, and fuel. Soto turned a wheel at a steel hatch, and we stepped into the cargo compartment. One of the crewmen, a skinny, olive-skinned man who hadn’t shaved this week, sat at the wooden table. What looked like an oversize car battery was at his feet, a simple electrical panel in front of him. On the deck was a spool of white wire. Or rather, half a spool. The rest was strung across the deck and around the steel containers that held an unfathomable fortune. The other end was connected to the battery, which, in turn, was connected to the electrical panel. The crewman had a shotgun in his lap.
I know what it was, but I couldn’t say it. Soto did me the favor. “Plastiques.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. He was right. I had come to know him.
I could make a revolutionary statement the world would never forget.
It hadn’t meant anything then, but it did now. The crewman shifted in his chair and cradled the shotgun. I listened to a pump below us and Soto’s breathing next to me.
“I was wrong,” I admitted. “I figured there were only three choices: Give the art to the Americans, to the Russians, or to Fidel. I never thought you’d destroy it. But for you, it really is a double whammy. Castro gets the two hundred million to buy bicycles and bread, and you get to make the greatest revolutionary statement of all time.”
“ Lo entiendes? So you understand?”
“Maybe not all of it. But it has something to do with destroying objects of bourgeois fascination. While the peasants were starving, the nobility had jewelers making diamond-studded clocks. Am I on the right track?”
“Yes, but that is
not all. With one fiery blast, I will show the world the value of its gilded objects. I will blow asunder the worthless canvas and meaningless gold. I will turn your silver chalices and precious pearls into shrapnel. I will take five hundred years of decadence and vanity and turn it to silt at the bottom of the sea. And the two of us will join it there.”
Oh.
Just then, scuttling a couple billion dollars in baubles and adornments didn’t seem that important. Losing the semiprecious hide of Jacob Lassiter, ballplayer-turned-barrister, was another matter.
Footsteps above us. Two crewmen clambered down the ladder and stepped into the hold. Swarthy, lean men in their twenties in jungle fatigues wearing sidearms. Soto spoke to them in Spanish, then turned to me. “They will protect you until we reach our destination,”
Protect me. Communists and fascists alike always have such a cute way of twisting words into their antonyms.
The four of us climbed back to the top deck in silence. On the deck, my two protectors maintained a polite distance of five yards. The nighttime breeze had turned cool, so why was I sweating? The air was thick with diesel fumes. Again, Soto and I stood at the rail. From overhead, suddenly, a whompeta-whompeta drew our eyes skyward. A helicopter, its searchlight aimed at us, scanned the freighter. From the bridge, a crewman was shouting in Spanish at Soto, who simply nodded. My bodyguards edged closer.
With the wind from the east and the copter approaching from the west, I hadn’t heard it until it was nearly above us. Descending now. My first thought: the Coast Guard to the rescue. Or maybe Army Special Forces, rappelling down on undulating ropes, armed with automatic weapons. Hey, I’d settle for a Miami Beach SWAT team. But it wasn’t the authorities. A private chopper. Lower now, I saw it clearly. Beige, rounded nose. I’d seen it before. It used to sit on the deck of Yagamata’s yacht.
The noise deafening now, the helicopter was just a few feet off the stern. I squinted my eyes against the blast of wind. When it touched down, a door to the passenger cabin opened and out stepped Matsuo Yagamata. He turned back toward the cabin. A hand reached out, and he grabbed it. The hand belonged to Lourdes Soto, who hopped gracefully onto the deck of the freighter. The two of them ducked under the whirling blade and walked toward us. A moment later, the engine revved, and the helicopter took off, veering to the west, and disappearing into the night.
Lourdes looked toward me and then directly at her father. She was wearing an all-white warm-up suit and running shoes. Her dark hair was windblown. Yagamata, short and chunky in a dark suit, looked tense. As he approached, he shot nervous glances at the armed crewmen. When Yagamata and Lourdes reached us, there was a brief moment of silence. Soto looked impassively at them both, then angrily shouted, “ Lourdes, no deberias estar aqui! ’”
“ Por que no? How else would I save you?”
Yagamata looked Soto squarely in the eyes. “Senor Soto, you have proved your point. You are a great patriot. But what you intend is a great waste of both human resources and irreplaceable objects of beauty.”
Soto turned to his daughter. “You should not have told him.”
“I did it to save you, Papi.”
It hit me then. Lourdes knew. She knew everything, including the fact I’d be on board.
Yagamata reached inside his suit coat and withdrew a black velvet pouch from a pocket. Loosening a drawstring, he poured something into his open palm. It looked like a thick gold chain. “Have you ever seen such magnificence?” he asked, holding it up in the light from the bridge.
The surprise from inside the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg. Yagamata’s favorite toy, the little gold train by Faberge. It sparkled in the glare of the deck lights, the intricate details of the engine and cars nearly surreal.
“What you have on board is several hundred thousand times what I hold in my hand. You must comprehend that!”
Soto nodded. “It makes my statement all the more significant. The treasure of the pigs destroyed.”
“The art belongs to the world!” Yagamata thundered.
Funny, Yagamata had acted as if it belonged to him.
Soto was expressionless. “What I have begun cannot be halted.”
“Spare the artwork,” Yagamata pleaded, gesturing toward the hold. “Spare yourself and the lives of your men.”
Yagamata replaced the train in the velvet pouch and slipped the pouch back into his suit pocket. His little game of show-and-tell didn’t seem to have the desired impact. “Individual lives are meaningless,” Soto said.
“I can broker the sale of the art,” Yagamata said. “You will have hundreds of millions more for your cause. Let me help you. “
“The money,” Soto said, “is important, but the principle even more so. The socialist revolution cannot be financed by the slavery of the masses. Your so-called works of art will die a death far more glorious than that of the peasants whose blood gave birth to such gluttony, such excess.”
Soto turned to Lourdes and said something in Spanish. Lourdes responded angrily. Her father spoke again, softly, apologetically, his eyes moist. He moved toward her to embrace, but she turned her back to him. Severo Soto walked away, pausing only to bark a command to a shotgun-toting crewman who stood straighter, his eyes Hashing from Yagamata to me and back again.
I went to Lourdes, who moved toward me and stepped close. “I didn’t come back just for Papi. I came back for you, too.’’
I put my arms around her. Our faces touched, and I caught the sweet scent of her hair, the fresh-scrubbed womanly essence of her skin. “Your father won’t do it now, will he? Not with you on board.’’
“There’s a lifeboat. It was intended for any of the crewmen who change their minds. They’re all handpicked disciples of Fidel and Che Guevara. They want to die for a glorious cause.”
There is a time for a man to be a man, and another time to look for a soft place to land. “Much room in that lifeboat?”
“Plenty, but Papi wants you en una pira funebre.”
My look told her I didn’t understand.
“ Como se dice en Ingles… on the funeral pyre. Papi says the revolutionary act is enhanced by destroying a symbol of the reactionary colonialists.”
“Me? I’ve never even voted Republican.”
“Papi wants to make the largest possible statement. That’s why we’re going to anchor off South Pointe Park, just a few hundred yards from the beach.”
“Why?”
“What’s tomorrow, Jake?”
“Sunday.”
“ Cuatro de julio, the Fourth of July. Papi wants to blow up the richest cache of art ever assembled during the celebration of what he calls your counterfeit freedom. It’s his poetic side. If he could, he’d like to have people singing ‘the rocket’s red glare’ when he pulls the switch.”
Bombs bursting in air, I said to myself.
U sually, at sea, I sleep the sleep of the innocent. Maybe it’s the gentle pitching, the faint whoosh of water against the hull. On the other hand, I sleep the same way in the woods or in a mountaintop cabin. So maybe it’s the sense of detachment, of being removed from the bustle of everyday life. So ordinarily, I am a two-hundred-twenty-six-pound slab of concrete in my bunk. Not tonight. I could have been worried that this was my last night on the planet Earth. And I was. But I also was sharing my bunk with a hundred-eighteen-pound lady who was lithe and warm and giving. We kissed and held each other, and I stroked the slopes and curves of her. We maneuvered into positions that stretched the cruciate ligaments of my bad knee, and she laughed when I fell with a thud to the deck. But she welcomed me back, and later, much later, I held and kissed and nuzzled her as the orange light of morning streaked through the porthole.
What would you eat for breakfast if you thought it was your last? Steak? Caviar and smoked salmon? I had huevos rancheros because that’s what was served in the small galley. Then Lourdes and I stood on the deck, watching the Florida Keys to our west. I recognized Big Pine, Bahia Honda, Molasses, and Fat Deer Key as we continued nor
theast in the Straits, keeping the Great Bahama Bank well to our east. It was a hot July day with wispy clouds on the horizon. It didn’t seem to matter if I got a touch of sunburn.
Lourdes and I were standing at the rail as we passed close to Sombrero Key where the earliest European to live in Florida made his home. Hernando d’Escalante Fontaneda was shipwrecked in the Keys around 1545 and spent the next two decades mapping the islands he called the Martires, or martyrs. He identified one Tequesta village called Guarugunbe, the place of weeping, and another, Cuchivaga, the place of suffering. Happy campers, those Tequestas. Soto would probably consider the Spaniards to have been plundering colonialists. And, of course, he would be right.
In the afternoon, Lourdes talked to her father, who stood sullenly on the bridge. When I tried to join them, a crewman waved a military. 45 under my nose and gave me the impression I wasn’t wanted near the controls. Through the glass, I watched Lourdes argue with her father, gesturing with both hands. He listened grimly, shaking his head, occasionally saying something I could not hear. Then he turned his back to her and spoke to the captain. She flung her arms in the air one last time, then rejoined me on the deck.
“I guess you didn’t convince him to give up his ideals and join the Hialeah Rotary,” I said.
“This isn’t funny. I pleaded for your life and his.”
“What did he say?”
“That his life wasn’t worth saving.” She looked away. “He asked if I loved you.”
“To which you responded…”
“I told him no…”
Until now, I had always appreciated candor in a woman.
“… But that I liked you, that you were a good man who was not his enemy. He said you are meaningless as an individual but important as a symbol.”
I watched a wad of sea grapes and other flotsam ride the midget waves into the hull of the freighter. I watched the water change color from bright turquoise to deep indigo as the depth changed along our route. I watched three dolphins jump in unison off the starboard side where motor yachts and oil tankers crisscrossed the Straits.
