Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  He took the cap and looked inside it doubtfully, then mashed it down on his head, tugging the bill low over his eyes. “How do I look?” he asked her.

  “Like a Russian,” she said. She glanced toward the road where one of the massive buses wheezed over a rise and began to slow on its way toward the stop. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  Though they were among the first passengers on the dimly lit bus, both compartments were crammed by the time they’d reached the outskirts of the city. Yet somehow more and more people managed to squeeze on board at every stop.

  “Aquí,” she’d said to him finally, as the bus pulled up before a busy intersection. She’d pulled him through the crowd struggling to get on the bus, then on a dash across a busy street where smoking Fiats jockeyed with smoking Ladas and ancient Chevies and Fords, all of them outdone by scooters darting and whining like motorized wasps.

  Once across, she led them off the thoroughfare down a street between two tenements, then stopped to check behind them. Abruptly, she ducked into an unlit building entrance that reeked of a half-century’s decay, pulling him in after her. “Up,” she said, pointing at a staircase.

  Deal glanced at a set of elevator doors set into a rear wall of the gloomy entrance and turned back to her with a questioning expression. “Can’t we use that?”

  “It hasn’t worked in years,” she said, and led him to the stairs.

  Seven flights up, and at every landing the smell of decades grew one layer thicker: must and mildew and cooking and living and sweating and breathing, he thought, and no crispy air-conditioning to whisk all the evidence away. Meanwhile, Angelica undid two locks on an apartment door and took them inside.

  She’d showered first while he lay exhausted on a couch that he remembered vaguely as in the style of Danish Modern, a fad his mother had sniffed at in his youth. He’d noted idly that the listening device he had planted on his shoe last night was gone, probably scuffed off during that struggle over the jungle path. Maybe they were listening to the sounds of iguanas mating over in the Interests Section right now, he thought, as Angelica emerged from the bathroom in jeans and a bra, toweling her dark wet hair.

  When she noticed him staring, she’d shaken her head as if he were an addled child. She pointed at the bathroom. “Don’t waste time,” she said. “We cannot stay here long.”

  ***

  When he came out, he found her busy in the small kitchen that opened off the living area, pouring coffee into a pair of espresso cups that sat on a two-person table. There was a chunk of thick black bread there, along with a dish of butter and a jar of what looked like jam.

  “Feel any better?” she asked, surveying him. He nodded. “Thanks.”

  “I hope you like Cuban coffee,” she said.

  “I’m from Miami, remember?” He reached for one of the cups, but she put out a hand to stop him. Even her touch felt different, he thought, glancing at her hand, where it lay on his.

  “Please,” she said, “sit. For just a moment.”

  His eyes met hers briefly. She stared back, then seemed to realize her hand was still on his. She lifted her hand and glanced away.

  He glanced at the table again, noticing that a gold signet ring lay beside one of the cups. He sat down and lifted it between his fingers. “What is this?”

  It was a wasted question, though. Anyone would have known it by the tone of his voice. He was already certain what it was. He’d held it often enough as a boy, slipped it onto his own tiny fingers back and forth, back and forth in one of the idle bedtime games the two of them had invented.

  It had felt as heavy as lead on some giant planet then. And so it felt now. BMD still the initials cut into the flat gold face. The facets rounded a bit by time, perhaps, but no mistaking what they stood for: Barton Malory Deal. His father rarely acknowledged his ancient namesake, but he ought to have. If you were Barton Deal, why not call yourself after the man who’d invented the legend of Arthur?

  “Where did you get this?” Deal asked. He had slipped the ring onto his own finger without noticing. A perfect fit, some distant part of his brain announced.

  She stared back with an expression that suggested she wasn’t sure that she should tell. He could understand that, some part of him reasoned. He wasn’t certain he really wanted to know.

  He saw that there was a packet extended in her hand, the very envelope Victor had tossed to him in the farmhouse the night before, just as the shooting had started. There was a splash of something dark across its face now, along with smudges of what must be dirt.

  “Look inside it,” she said. “Please.”

  He took the package from her hand and undid the clasp, then reached inside. A set of photographs, he saw, as he withdrew his hand. He gave her another glance, then pushed his coffee cup aside and spread the images on the table before him.

  Four pictures, he saw. An old man in what looked like a jail cell. Curled asleep in a fetal position. Sitting with his head between his hands on the edge of a cot. Lifting food from a tin plate toward his mouth with his fingers. Sitting on the floor of his cell, staring up into the camera with an expression impossible to define.

  “So?” he said, looking up at her. His voice sounded dead in his own ears. He thought that a part of him might be closing down, refusing to recognize any more.

  “Look more closely,” she said.

  He turned back to the photos, fighting the certainty that was already seeping into his brain. You can build a concrete roof and make it two feet thick, the odd thought came; if the rain water sits up there long enough, it’s going to make its way down through anything.

  The shots were grainy, out of focus, poorly lit. And the man’s face was hidden or distorted in most of the shots. But the longer he stared at the photographs, the more impossible it was to deny the truth.

  “It’s my father,” he said at last, and stared up at her, his mind strobing through a thousand possibilities at once. He was exhausted, his brain already turned inside out. Whatever notion of reality he’d carried around with him prior to these last few days, that baseline measure had long ago disappeared.

  Was this woman friend or foe? Had he once made love to her, or was that all some crazy dream? Impossible to tell. He could have been staring at a sorceress, for all he knew.

  She said nothing. Simply stood and nodded in answer to his madman’s plaintive stare.

  “When were these taken?” he managed. He was already inventing impossible scenarios, none of which presented logical explanations. He’d seen his father’s body sprawled in his chair, had mumbled incoherent good-byes at grave-side years before. And yet…

  “Last week,” she said, her voice even.

  “Bullshit,” he said. He swept the photographs off the table, flinging the coffee cups with them. Cups and saucers shattered as he rose to snatch her by her shoulders.

  “Tell me the fucking truth,” he shouted. “Tell me what’s going on or I will kill you. I swear to God I will.”

  She stared back at him, making no effort to break his hold. This was a woman he’d seen ready to put a bullet in the first three men to cross her path, he reminded himself. “You’re going to attract attention,” she said to him calmly.

  “You’re goddamn right I am,” he said, shaking her again. “Tell me the truth.”

  “I am telling the truth,” she said, staring back at him. “It is your father in those pictures. They were taken last week, inside the Castillo Atares, the headquarters of the National Police here in Havana.”

  “My father is dead,” he told her, shaking his head as if to shed her words. “I saw his body. He blew his brains out with a shotgun in his own goddamned office…”

  He was still raging when he felt his hands slide away from her shoulders, felt his legs give under him, felt himself slump into the chair where he’d been sitting moments before. His hands were on his face now, trying to stanch the tears.

  He felt her hands cradling
his head gently as he wept, felt her pull him close. It was all crazy, he understood. It was impossible. It could not be true. He would wake up soon, and with any luck, he would find that the last dozen years of his life had been nothing but a dream.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “No, it wouldn’t be like John Deal to just take off without telling anybody,” Russell Straight was saying. He and Fuentes were alone in Deal’s room now.

  It hadn’t taken much to make that happen, Russell reflected. His own request hadn’t made much headway, but then Fuentes had turned up at the front desk behind him and a moment later they were on their way upstairs with a pair of bellhops bowing and scraping all the way. There’d been no sign of Deal inside, of course, and no note either.

  “Perhaps he has just gone for a stroll,” Fuentes offered.

  Russell shook his head. “You said eight-thirty, he would have been Johnny Deal on the spot, downstairs at eight twenty-eight. Even if he had to walk through hellfire. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

  Fuentes nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. Russell glanced around the sitting area again, wondering if he might have missed something, a note fallen to the floor maybe. He saw what looked like a quarter on the floor just inside the door, but when he bent to pick it up, he saw it was just a paper disk about that size. He picked the thing up, then turned it over, to find a wad of gum stuck on the other side of the paper disk. He was about to toss the thing away in disgust, when he realized there was something odd here. Way too light to be a wad of gum, for one thing. And there was a little tab sticking out from the paper side, to help to pull something loose.

  “What is it?” Fuentes asked. He’d been across the room, standing at the balcony and scanning the streets below.

  “Nothing,” Russell said, slipping the disk into his pocket. He glanced at the phone in the sitting room and thought for a moment. “You think we could find out if there were any calls in or out of here last night?”

  Fuentes’ expression suggested that Russell could not have underestimated him more. He picked up the phone and waited for a moment, then spoke in rapid-fire Spanish to whoever answered. There was a pause and then the sound of a voice on the other end. Fuentes listened for a moment, then hung up.

  “Mr. Deal attempted to call the United States twice earlier in the evening. Other than that, only one other call, from outside the hotel, shortly after midnight.”

  Russell nodded. While he had been otherwise engaged. He nodded at the phone. “They say where it came from?”

  Fuentes smiled. “We are in Cuba, my friend. Such technology is yet to arrive, although…”

  “Right,” Russell said, cutting him off. “That’s what we’re here to accomplish, right? Give you a running start and a couple of good weeks, everything in Havana will be up to speed.”

  Fuentes gave him a weary look, then glanced at his watch. “We have a bit of a drive before us. I hope Mr. Deal returns soon.”

  “That makes two of us,” Russell said. He reached back into his pocket and withdrew the card that his dancer friend had scrawled her number on.

  “How are you supposed to call out?” he said to Fuentes, noting that there was no dial on the phone.

  “Just speak the number,” he said. “They’ll dial it for you at the desk.”

  Russell nodded, reading off the number when a receptionist answered. After a moment and some odd ringing sounds, he heard the connection make, and, over the crackle of some industrial-strength Spanish, the sound of a male voice speaking in Spanish. “Hold on,” Russell called into the phone, then thrust the phone at Fuentes.

  “Ask if Delia is there,” he told Fuentes. “Say it’s me calling.”

  Fuentes did as he was told, then held the phone away. “He says there is no Delia.”

  Russell stared. “Ask if it’s the dance school. Where they give lessons.”

  Fuentes rattled off some more Spanish, then gave Russell a look. “It is, how would you call it, an animal-control center. They round up the strays.”

  “Maybe we got the wrong number,” Russell said, handing Fuentes the card. “You try.”

  Fuentes shrugged and broke the connection, then signaled the hotel receptionist and read off the number carefully. He listened for a moment, then hung up. “The same place,” he said to Russell. “With great barking.”

  “Fucking dog pound,” Russell said, snatching the card back from Fuentes. It was Delia’s careful script, all right. He’d watched her write the number down. If he ever needed a lesson…he recalled. How conveniently she’d come along. Maybe he’d already gotten his lesson.

  “Let me ask you something, Fuentes,” he said, giving the man a sharp look. “Just on the off chance and all.”

  “Of course,” Fuentes said.

  “All this meeting and greeting you have lined up for Deal over here. Say somebody found out about it, didn’t want it to happen.”

  Fuentes gave him a skeptical look. “And who do you think that would be?”

  Russell shrugged. “The government, for starters.”

  Fuentes smiled. “We have nothing to fear from the government. Who do you think greases the gears of this government, now that the Russians have gone?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Fuentes shook his head as if Russell were still back in fourth grade, struggling as hard as his brother Leon to get it. “There are arrangements everywhere, Mr. Straight, even in a so-called bastion of communism like Cuba. We make our contributions in the right places, and in turn our so-called enemies agree to look the other way at various times. We are permitted a certain latitude. Lines are drawn, boundaries are respected. It is the way of the world. But then I don’t have to tell you these things. You are obviously a man of experience.”

  “You’re talking about paying off the man.”

  “That is a simplified way to put it.”

  “And that’s why nobody’s going to fuss with us while we’re over here.”

  “That is one thing you can be sure of.”

  “You didn’t send a hot girl my way last night?”

  Fuentes raised his eyebrows. “I did not. Though such an encounter is not unusual in Havana.”

  “Spare me,” Russell said. He glanced at his own watch then. “But here’s one thing I’m pretty sure of. You better talk to whoever we were supposed to see this morning. Something tells me there’s going to be a delay.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “How long have you known him?” Deal asked her.

  She was behind the wheel of a battered Fiat now, inching forward through the maze of early-morning traffic that clogged the streets. A shower had passed while they were still inside the apartment, glazing the sooty roadways to glass and making the drive even more harrowing.

  “As long as I can remember,” she said. “I was an infant when my own father was killed. The first man I remember in my life was Barton Deal.”

  She cut a glance across the narrow seat. “I am sorry if this upsets you.”

  Deal shrugged. “I figured out pretty early on that my mother and father were married in name only. It seemed to be an accepted fact between them.”

  She gave him a speculative look. “That couldn’t have been pleasant for you.”

  He glanced out the window. “That was the way it was. So far as I could tell, most of their friends lived pretty much the same way.”

  There was silence then, underscored by the passing of a policeman on a motorcycle threading down the narrow passage between their lane and the curbside traffic. The cop gave the Fiat a glance as he passed, but if he noticed anything from behind his dark sunglasses aside from the attractive woman behind the wheel, it didn’t seem so. In a few seconds he was gone, twisting on through the clogged traffic and out of sight.

  Deal glanced over, his voice casual. “So, how hard was it for you to sleep with me?”

  She hit the brakes with that one, sending them into a slide that stopp
ed just short of an ancient pickup nearly stalled ahead. She dropped the Fiat into gear and gave him a dark look as they started forward again. “It was not my intention,” she said. Her tone was a quiet one, he thought.

  “What was your intention?” he said.

  “As I told you,” she said, her voice rising. “To be absolutely certain you knew nothing of your father’s existence, that there was nothing that might compromise our plans. Some worried that he had already compromised us with the likes of Fuentes and the others jockeying for power, that he would find some way to return to the United States. He was a rich man, after all. If it were true, who would be more likely to know about it than you. And when it was discovered that Antonio Fuentes was trying to contact you…”

  “You could have just called me and asked.”

  “It is easy for you to make light of such things,” she said. “You live in a different world.” She waved an arm at the smoking wave of traffic about them.

  It was like being caught in a traffic jam that had begun sometime before Elvis, he thought. That much he would have to concede. “How much of what we’re doing right now has to do with my old man’s money?”

  The look that crossed her face was dangerous. She yanked the wheel hard, cutting off a produce truck behind them, and slammed to a stop against the curb. “If you think that, then get out. Get out right now. Go back to the criminals who brought you here. They’re the ones who care about money, I can assure you.”

  Deal stared back. If her fury was an act, it was a good one, but then again, she had already proven what she was capable of in that regard. In any case, getting back to Fuentes was the last thing on his mind right now. The trucker behind them had begun to lie on his horn. “Drive on,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head angrily, her foot still on the brake. “I mean it,” she told him. “This is the time to leave, right now. Your father is no political man. You of all people should know that. When he came to Cuba, his money was a tool to buy him safe haven from a corrupt regime, nothing more. Over the years, he saw for himself the many wrongs compounded here, all the things my father and so many others had attempted to correct. He cared for me and my mother and my brother because he loved us, and finally he decided to aid our cause as well. For him to jeopardize his safety was an act of great courage and selflessness.”