She regarded him hopefully. “Maybe we can just do a drive-by-and-wave sort of thing.”
He laughed at that. “And Felipe accused me of being a dreamer. You don’t think I have the energy to do a radio broadcast, but you figure I can undergo an inspection by my relatives? Wait and see, amiga. An hour with Luis would have been child’s play by comparison.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
“Castro! I live for the day when I can spit on his grave,” Tío Pedro said angrily over the weeping of the three Huerta sisters in Tío Miguel’s living room several hours later. It was midmorning and the entire family had been gathered there all through the endless night of waiting.
When Michael and Molly had arrived at dawn, his mother had rushed from the house in her too-large, flowered housedress and matching hot-pink flats. Standing on tiptoe, she had kissed him soundly on both cheeks, then held him at arm’s length while she examined him visually from head to toe, clucking at every scratch. There were plenty to cluck over.
Rosa Conchita Huerta was a lovely, petite woman with curling black hair, whose lined face still showed the strain of the years she had stayed behind in Cuba after sending her son to be reared by her sisters in Miami. Her nut-brown eyes followed Michael avidly whenever he was in a room, as if even after all this time, she couldn’t make up for the years when he had been out of sight.
Rosa at fifty-five was the youngest of the sisters. Elena, Tío Pedro’s wife, was the middle sister. Her round, cheerful face bore none of the lines that kept her younger sister from being truly beautiful. She, too, dressed in bright, flattering colors, even though her figure was no longer girlish. She made no excuses for the fact that she dressed to please her adoring husband and that her abundant figure was the result of sampling too many of the excellent dishes they served in their Calle Ocho restaurant.
As for Pilar, the oldest of the Huerta sisters, even on happier occasions she tended to be dressed in somber fabrics and wore her luxuriant black hair pulled back into a well-tamed bun. Her thin, aristocratic face, usually so lovely in repose, had a pinched, haunted look this morning that made her look every one of her sixty-two years. She had managed a watery smile at the sight of Michael, but it was clear she was overcome with grief and worry. Her gaze was fixed on the door and each time it opened, a heartbreaking instant of hope flickered in her eyes, then died at the appearance of each new arrival who was not Miguel.
A half dozen or more of Michael’s cousins and as many neighbors were crowded into the minuscule living room. After so many hours on a muggy summer night, the air was stale. Even the chugging air conditioner in the window couldn’t seem to cool the room.
Worse from Molly’s perspective, the cramped space was filled with so many religious paintings and statues she felt as if she’d wandered into a church rectory. A half-dozen candles were lit in front of a cheap plaster statue of the La Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba. The candles, each emitting a different perfumed scent, added to the oppressive atmosphere.
Even after Michael had spoken quietly with his aunt for some time, Tía Pilar remained inconsolable, though Molly knew that Michael had kept the two worst-case scenarios to himself. He had told his aunt only that they had found the fishing boat and that his uncle had not been aboard. Molly, too, had tried to reassure the woman that Tío Miguel had no doubt joined another fishing party after his own boat broke down. Tía Pilar had accepted her consoling words with murmured gratitude, but the desolate expression in her eyes never wavered. With the arrival of each neighbor, whether from this Little Havana neighborhood just south of Calle Ocho or from her native Cuba, her grief erupted into heartrending sobs.
After a while, feeling like an intruder in the midst of such openly displayed anguish, Molly had asked to use the phone and gratefully left the cluster of women. In her own family, everyone had been taught to suffer in silence. There would have been no outpouring of grief and, as a result, little comfort offered, since no one ever knew how deeply anyone was affected by loss or illness. As uncomfortable as it made her, she envied Michael’s family the ability to let their emotions show. Still, she was glad to have a moment to herself.
The old-fashioned black phone sat on a wobbly table in the hallway, affording Molly little privacy. The sobbing of the women and the passionate arguing of the men provided convenient sound effects for her conversation with her boss. Vince Gates was not going to be overjoyed to be hearing from her two hours after she had been due to arrive at the office. Maybe the background hysteria would convince him that the emergency was real.
“Molly?” he said with an exaggerated air of amazement. “Molly DeWitt? Didn’t you used to work here?”
“I thought I still did.”
“Then why the hell aren’t you here?” he demanded irritably.
“Do you want the short version or the two-hour action-adventure version?”
“I’ll take the one that includes your estimated arrival time. I’ve got Jeannette meeting with a producer who showed up thinking he had an appointment with you.”
Molly swallowed hard. “Sorry. Jeannette will do just fine,” she reassured him, probably in vain. Vince refused to acknowledge that the Haitian-born clerk was thoroughly overqualified for her entry-level job. He was too worried that she was going to cast some voodoo spell over him, a concern that Jeannette herself did nothing to dispel. In fact, she thoroughly enjoyed taunting him in Creole, managing to inject an ominous note into the most innocuous of words.
“Vince, you know perfectly well Jeannette has worked with me on the last half-dozen projects. She probably knows as much as I do about what production companies need and what resources are available.”
“I suppose,” he conceded with obvious reluctance. “So when can we expect you?”
“Next week,” she blurted, figuring it was better to get the bad news over with in a hurry.
“No wonder you’re so anxious to tout Jeannette’s virtues,” he remarked dryly. “So what’s the story? Have you had major surgery over the weekend? Did you wrap your car around a tree?”
Molly noted he asked the questions with more sarcasm than concern. “Actually, Michael’s uncle’s boat blew up with Michael on board,” she retorted casually.
“Yeah, right.”
“It did. Don’t you ever read those papers that stack up on your desk? Try today’s front page. I’m sure Ted Ryan has a full account.”
She heard the rustle of paper, then Vince’s “Holy shit!”
“So, do I get the week off?”
“Is O’Hara okay?”
“Yes, but as you can tell from the commotion in the background, all is not well with the family. His uncle is missing.” She held the phone out for Vince’s benefit, allowing him to pick up on the upper decibels of hysteria. Satisfied that her point was made, she asked, “Get the picture?”
“Okay. O’Hara’s family is noticeably distraught,” he conceded. “Has something changed? Are you about to marry into this family?”
Did middle-of-the-night fantasies count? Probably not. “No,” she admitted.
“Then what does this have to do with you, besides the obvious, of course, that you can’t keep your nose out of trouble?”
“Let me explain the concept,” she said very slowly. “Michael has stuck by me during bad times. He has been a good friend.”
She ignored Vince’s sarcastic hrrmph and plowed on. “It’s my turn to return the favor. Besides, it’s about time you gave Jeannette a break. The only way you’ll do that is if I take off on an unscheduled vacation and she has to handle my appointments.”
“Maybe I’ll find out she’s even better than you. Then where will you be?”
“Sitting in clover with a work load that’s the size it’s supposed to be,” she retorted. “So what’s it going to be? Do I get the time off?”
“If I say no, what will you do?”
“Take off anyway, which means you’d probably have to fire me and then hunt for a replacement. Could t
ake weeks, maybe even months if I appeal the firing.” She obviously had picked up some negotiating skills while watching Michael go at it with Public Safety Director Lucas Petty earlier at the hospital. She had an advantage, though. Vince Gates was a pushover compared to Petty. He was also pragmatic. He wanted to be on a golf course, not fighting her in some personnel dispute. Granting an unscheduled week of leave was the pragmatic answer. She waited for him to figure that out. It didn’t take long.
“Okay, fine,” he said grudgingly. “As long as you’ll check in once a day in case there are any emergencies, I’ll okay the leave. Don’t get any ideas about next week, though.”
Molly didn’t even want to think about what would happen if they didn’t find Tío Miguel long before that. “Thanks, Vince. I owe you one.” It was not a balance of power she adored, but just this once there was no way around it.
When she’d hung up, she skirted the gathering of women and went to Michael’s side. She found him in the midst of a quieter but no less emotional exchange between him, his uncle, and the other men from the neighborhood.
“I tell Miguel again and again that all of the plotting and scheming is no good,” Tío Pedro said. “If the Bay of Pigs failed, what can one old man do?”
Molly knew a mention of the Bay of Pigs would stir the wrath of those who felt the United States had betrayed them, leaving a brigade of commandos to fight alone in a losing attack on Cuba. As expected there were immediate, passionate comments about the Cuban heroes of that 1961 attempt to reclaim their homeland and the Democratic politicians who had abandoned them. Only recently had she come to understand that more than anything else that moment in history had been responsible for turning the exile community into such passionate Republicans. Likewise, they had turned conservative because the more liberal Democrats frequently advocated a softer line with Castro.
When the reminiscences about the Bay of Pigs had run their course, Michael brought the conversation back to Miguel and the present. “Then he was still involved with that organization of the revolution or whatever it’s called?” he asked.
“Two, three nights a week he sat with them over coffee at this place or that, always moving as if Castro’s spies were following them,” Pedro said with an air of disbelief. “Saturdays he would wear these military fatigues and go to the Everglades. When I ask him for what, he tells me they are training for the revolution.”
“Didn’t he read the damned newspapers?” Michael said. “The Cuban soldiers are shooting down even those who go ashore in an attempt to rescue relatives. How could he think of going back?”
His uncle sighed. “He was heartsick,” Tío Pedro said. “He could not accept that the Cuba he left behind is no more. He dreamed of café Cubano and the white sand of Varadero beach. He saw Havana as it was when the wealthy, even from this country, came for the night life. He saw those who plotted these crazy missions as heroes of the next revolution.”
“The leader is still Orestes León Paredes?” Michael asked.
“Leader?” Pedro said with derision. “What kind of leader would play on the emotions of a bunch of old men? You do not see men of your generation joining the ranks of his organization, do you? No, it is only men like Miguel, whose souls live in torment for what was.”
Michael, usually so stoic and controlled, regarded his uncle with impatience. “He has been in America for more than thirty years. Why is he still clinging to the past?”
“Because he is Cuban,” Pedro replied as the old men surrounding him nodded in solemn agreement. “As are you and I and your mother and your aunts. We are exiles, not Americans. We have been blessed by this country, but it is not ours. We left ours not by choice, but from necessity.”
“Over thirty years,” Michael repeated angrily.
“A lifetime would not change the truth,” Pedro said with passion. “I might not believe that it is up to those of us here to force the changes that will make Cuba free again, but in my heart I am always Cuban.”
Molly listened to the exchange with the amazement of an Anglo who had wondered time and again at the exiles’ refusal to assimilate American ways. “When Castro is gone, will you go back?” she asked.
“On the first flight,” Pedro said with feeling. “And yet I know it will not be the same. Perhaps I won’t want to stay, but to see my homeland again? Like Miguel, I dream of it. There are cousins there I haven’t seen in all these years. My brothers are there and nieces and nephews.” His eyes took on a dreamy, faraway expression. “The breezes were cooler, the plantains sweeter, the lechón more tender.”
“Sí, sí,” the others murmured. “That is so.”
Only the nephews did not join in the chorus. They exchanged the jaded looks of children who have heard it all before time and time again.
“But you can no longer find a plantain or a pig to roast,” Michael retorted.
“Sí,” Pedro said wearily, ignoring the bitterness in his nephew’s voice. “It is the memories which are sweet, not the reality.”
“You’ve never been back to visit?” Molly asked.
“Never. It is a choice I made. Not one dollar of my money will go into that man’s pocket.” He shrugged ruefully. “Not that I would be allowed back. I am regarded as an enemy of the people because I fought Fidel, because I spoke out as a dissident. Had I not escaped, I would have spent the last years jailed as so many others have.”
“And Miguel?” Molly asked.
“He attempted to organize a coup. He was jailed, but made a daring escape. He was shot and left for dead. Another of the guerrillas rescued him and smuggled him aboard a boat that crossed the straits that same night. He arrived in Key West one month after my own arrival. I brought Elena with me. It was nearly a year before Pilar was able to join him. And many years after that before Michael’s mother came. As the youngest of the sisters, Rosa was reluctant to leave her mother. She came only after Paolina Huerta died.”
“But she sent Michael,” Molly said. Michael had once told Molly of the terror of his first days in a new country, sent to live with relatives he barely remembered without the mother he adored. He had been five years old, a baby, when he left Cuba aboard one of the famed Pedro Pan freedom flights. His aching sense of being abandoned had remained with him for years. Only after they were reunited did he begin to understand that his mother had sent him away out of love.
As if all of this rhapsodic talk of a land he’d all but forgotten irritated him, Michael stood up abruptly and crossed the room to his aunt’s side. Tía Pilar clasped his hand in hers and regarded him with a tear-streaked face. “Find him,” she pleaded.
“I will,” he promised.
His mother again stood on tiptoe and kissed him on both cheeks. “Do not take chances.”
“I cannot do my job without taking chances,” he told her, though a smile seemed to tug at his mouth at the start of an apparently familiar argument.
“And I cannot be a mother without warning you not to,” she replied.
She walked with him back to Molly. “Thank you for coming,” she said, her English precise and still reflecting her uneasiness with her second language.
“I’ll be praying for Tío Miguel’s safe return,” Molly told her. “Please tell Tía Pilar that.”
“She will be grateful. We all will.”
Outside the tiny pink stucco house with its neat white trim, the street was quiet. Bright splashes of fuchsia and purple Bougainvillaea gave the simple homes a needed touch of jaunty color. Only blocks away on Calle Ocho, Southwest Eighth Street, the Little Havana restaurants would be opening their doors for midday meals of grilled Cuban sandwiches, chunks of pork, black beans and rice, arroz con pollo and sweet, fried plantains. The sidewalk stands selling café Cubano would already be doing a brisk business. Only Tío Pedro’s restaurant would remain closed because of the family emergency.
“I’d like to make another stop before I take you home,” Michael said. “Do you mind?”
“Absolutely not.”
“He’s okay. He’s with his father. I called Hal from Sundays last night and asked him to keep Brian a few more days.”
Michael regarded her with surprise. “You don’t usually give your ex-husband that kind of concession.”
She returned his gaze evenly. “I wanted to be free to help you and your family, if you’ll let me. Brian will be fine with his dad for a few days. And I called Vince from your aunt’s,” she said. “I’m taking the week off.”
She saw the trouble brewing in Michael’s expressive eyes and sought to forestall it. “This isn’t open for debate.”
He hesitated, then finally slid his mirrored sunglasses into place and turned his attention back to the road. “Nobody’s arguing, amiga.”
Molly was wise enough not to reach for the ever-present calendar in her purse to note the date on which macho detective Michael O’Hara finally behaved in a perfectly reasonable manner.
CHAPTER
SIX
The old men playing dominoes in Máximo Gómez Park on the corner of Calle Ocho and Fifteenth Avenue barely glanced up when Michael and Molly approached with the thimble-size paper cups of potent, sweet café Cubano they’d bought across the street. Molly watched as the tiles clicked with the precision of years of play. She listened intently to the rapid-fire Spanish to see if she could detect whether the morning’s topic of conversation was the bombing of Miguel García’s boat or the more general and constant theme of Castro’s imminent downfall.
A portable radio blared the latest news from the most vitriolic of the Spanish-language stations. Molly recognized the histrionics of Luis Díaz-Nuñez. She couldn’t interpret half of what he said. This wasn’t proper, clearly enunciated Castilian Spanish. Rather, it all ran together in a way that only someone with a trained ear could separate into distinct words. Occasionally she was able to distinguish a name or an organization, but in general she caught only the fact that whatever he was reporting made him angry and probably ought to make anyone who wasn’t a traitor to the exile cause angry as well. Unfortunately for the newscaster, on this particular morning with this particular group of men, the outcome of their dominoes games took precedence over politics. Aside from an occasional halfhearted murmur of agreement, their attention was focused elsewhere.
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