Naked Came the Manatee (1996)

by Elmore Leonard

  "St."

  "Let the bastard out!"

  "OK, OK." Hector grappled with the canister's vacuum lock until it surrendered with a burp. Cautiously, he opened the lid.

  "Take it out," Reyes commanded.

  Hector hesitated. By nature he was not a squeamish man, but...

  "Take it out!"

  Hector grabbed a gray mossy handful and lifted the staring head from the canister. He held it like a lantern, his arm outstretched toward the two captives. Mickey Schwartz's mouth turned to chalk. Lilia lowered her eyes.

  Juan Carjos Reyes was trembling with pleasure. "Senor Castro, how nice of you to join us! You're looking very jaunty this evening--wouldn't you agree, Miss Sands?"

  Without comment Lilia collapsed into Mickey Schwartz's arms. "Swell," he said with a grunt.

  Reyes produced a gold-plated cuticle scissors and snipped a thatch from the severed head. "Hector," he said, "keep an eye on our guests. I'll be in the galley."

  The DNA expert had been waiting three hours; a Harvard doctor, the best. "This is very exciting," Reyes said to himself, hurrying with the twin locks of hair out of the salon.

  Hector kept the Uzi trained on his captives as he refit the Castro head in its container. Mickey Schwartz arranged the unconscious Lilia on a leather sofa. He pointed at the canister. "That's him, isn't it? The real deal."

  "Shut up," said Hector, feeling creepy--Fidel's ugly face, everywhere he looked. He returned the canister to the red Gott cooler.

  The bodyguard with the pearl in his nose appeared in the salon with Fay and Britt. Firmly, he placed them on tall stools at the bar. The women still looked queasy.

  Mickey Schwartz said, "You missed quite a show."

  Promptly, Hector whacked him with the back of his hand. "I told you to shut up.".

  Mickey shut up. He felt the yacht begin to rock under a freshening northern breeze. The slap of the waves, grew louder against the hull.

  Britt cynically motioned toward the red cooler. "How's the head?"

  "What head?" said Hector with a wink. "Nothing but Snapples in there. Kiwi-flavored."

  Fay looked up. "Randy, what's going to happen to us?"

  Randy was the bodyguard with the nose stud. He furrowed his tan brow and blinked intently at Fay's question.

  "Randy doesn't know what's going to happen to us," Britt Montero said wearily. "Randy barely knows how to dress himself."

  Randy ambiguously clicked his teeth. Hector sighed.

  "Sweetheart, there's lots of things Randy knows how to do, and he'll show you one in particular if you don't shut your fat trap."

  Britt fell silent. Fay laid her head on the bar. Mickey Schwartz rubbed his jaw, and Lilia Sands stirred on the couch. Not a word was spoken for a long time, until Juan Carlos Reyes returned in an ebullient glow.

  The human head for which Marion McAlister Williams had been paid close to a million dollars, and for which she had eventually been murdered, belonged not to Fidel Castro but to one of his Cuban doubles, a man named Rigoberto Lopez.

  The purchaser of the head had been well aware it was not Castro's. The purchaser worked free-lance for the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency. His first name was Raymond; his last name was unknown, even to his own team.

  Raymond and his people had been given to understand that a serious problem threatened the administration's top-secret plan to replace the Cuban dictator. The scheme--dreamed up at the NSC, presented in Havana by former president Carter, and ultimately endorsed by the ailing Castro himself--had been to trick Castro's enemies into believing he was dead by using a fake head. In exchange for leaving Cuba, Fidel had been promised a safe and secret exile, the best c ncer specialists in the world, and a cash departure bonus equivalent to that paid to Baby Doc Duvalier, when he fled Haiti.

  Raymond had been informed that the Castro plan was in jeopardy, due to a surplus of bogus heads in Greater Miami. Raymond had also been told that the plan was so vital to national security that he was authorized to spend any sum of money to retrieve the extra heads before their existence became a public scandal.

  Therefore Raymond had no qualms about giving a million in taxpayer funds to an eccentric old bird in Coconut Grove. The head in her refrigerator had been picked up in its steel canister and transported by a Coast Guard Citation jet to Washington, D. C., where it had been placed in a locked freezer in the basement of the State Department.

  It was in no way Raymond's fault that the U. S. government had subsequently closed down because of a petty political squabble, or that a cost-conscious assistant undersecretary at the State Department had shut off electricity to the building's basement, or that the million-dollar head of Rigoberto Lopez was currently decomposing faster than your average wheel of cheap Brie.

  Meanwhile Raymond was at the Alexander on Miami Beach, in a suite once occupied by Keith Richards. Raymond was a happy man. The sun was bright, the sky was blue, and he was interviewing a hack actor named Brandon Dash and a skittish makeup artist named Ziff Bodine. And Raymond had become totally convinced that the other surplus Castro head was only a clever movie prop, and that it was now safely suppurating in the belly of a lemon shark at a club named Hell.

  Which left one remaining head--the important one, the correct one, the one with the notch in the ear. And that head, according to Raymond's contacts, was exactly where it was supposed to be.

  Raymond made a brief, smug phone call to Washington. The man in Washington then made a call to Havana. The man in Havana then telephoned Miami Beach: the Odyssey Motel. Room 105.

  Mike Weston grabbed it on the third ring. "What's the good news, compadre?"

  A short pause, then: "Everything's fine. We found your lost luggage. Where is Hector?"

  "On a seaplane flying home from Bimini."

  "It went well?" asked the voice from Havana.

  "Perfect. I expect him any minute," Weston said. "I'm already packing for Belize."

  "Don't go anywhere until you hear from us. Don't leave the room--you understand?"

  "Hey, you're the boss," Weston said.

  "You do understand? Stay right where you are."

  "I heard you the first time." Weston hung up the phone, stretched out on the starchy motel sheets, dialed up another porny film on Spectravision, and waited for Hector.

  That's where Franklin and Marlis found them later, their insides decorating the room.

  Aboard the Entrante Presidente, the captives were served lobster fritters and a tangy mango sorbet. Hunger overcame their pride and anxiety.

  Juan Carlos Reyes, who was in a celebratory mood, told them what would come next. "Of course you will not be killed, because there's no need. A small launch will take you from my yacht to the Big Game Club in Bimini. There you'll be met by Bahamian customs and immigration officers. For the next several days, you will have a most difficult time trying to return to Miami."

  Britt Montero started to speak, but the millionaire cut her off. "Miss Montero, don't ever think about calling in a story to your newspaper. Your cellular has already been disabled and your accommodations in Bimini, unfortunately, will be too rustic for telephone jacks."

  Britt said, "You'll never get away with it."

  "Oh, I will. Easily, in fact. By the time you get out, I'll be on my way to Havana."

  Angrily, Fay Leonard said, "You can't silence us."

  "Nor would I want to," said Juan Carlos Reyes. "Miss Leonard, I'll have my own version of these events, which will be substantiated by an esteemed scientist from Harvard, and also by Mr. Schwartz, if he still wishes to be paid for his services."

  Mickey hung his head.

  "My recollection," Reyes went on, "is that Miss Leonard and Miss Montero, having heard of my million-dollar offer for proof of Castro's death, greedily attempted to defraud me. They constructed a flimsy hoax involving a Castro impersonator and a delusional old woman, Miss Sands, in the hopes I'd fall for it--"

  "That's ridiculous!" Fay shouted.

  "Maybe, maybe not." Re
yes took a sip of rum. "Miss Montero, do your readers know how little your newspaper pays you? A million dollars would buy lots of cat food, no?"

  Britt chewed her lower lip, and thought of her callow young editors. Assuming her story would eventually get published, she wondered what she could possibly write about the severed heads that would make any sense.

  Juan Carlos Reyes rose. "Randy will take you to the launch." He bowed slightly toward Lilia. "I'm sorry your heart is broken, Miss Sands, but I'm not at all sorry your infamous lover is dead. My only regret is that I didn't kill him myself."

  "As if you could," Lilia said venomously. "Little cockroach that you are. Cowardly limp-noodled--"

  "Enough," Mickey Schwartz cut in.

  "--rotten little crook!"

  Juan Carlos Reyes wagged a mocking finger at Lilia Sands. "Now is that any way," he asked, "to address the next president of a free Cuba?"

  It was a good plan; a solid plan. A plan that would've worked, if only the real Fidel Castro had not been insulted, propositioned, and mugged in broad daylight on Miami Beach.

  The messy murders of the two men in room 105--that hadn't bothered Castro, for he'd known of it in advance. He even knew what the police still did not know: the victims' names (Hector Pupo and Mike Weston), and why they'd had to die (they were loud, careless, and knew too much).

  A security matter handled by experts who made it look amateurish--Fidel understood such things.

  However, the arrival of the perky cleanup crew had put him on edge. Castro was rattled by the knowledge that murders were so common in South Florida that swabbing up crime scenes was a full-time trade, and evidently a lucrative one.

  Franklin and Marlis, the workers who came to room 105, were too talky and inquisitive. They stared dubiously at Fidel's Korean-made toupee, and posed snoopy questions disguised as banter. Fidel, as usual, pretended not to understand English. It was all he could do not to retch during Franklin's graphic monologue about the effects of gastric acids on suede upholstery.

  Castro realized that if Franklin and Marlis somehow recognized him, they could with one well-placed phone call generate more business for themselves, and perhaps even the gratuity of a lifetime. Once Castro gave a subtle tug on his good earlobe, three stocky men in guayaberas materialized to escort the voluble cleaners off the premises. Meanwhile Fidel slipped into his room and changed into a bathing suit, an absurd vermilion slingshot which was (Cuban intelligence had assured him) the prevailing beachside attire of old, pallid, pudgy male tourists.

  The outfit worked too well, the swimsuit a beacon. Strolling alone on the sand, Fidel was scarcely a hundred yards from the motel when a gum-popping prostitute offered to "rock your world, Gramps," for fifty U. S. dollars. Her efforts at detaching his red thong were interrupted by a wiry ferret-eyed man who roughly knocked Castro down, stuck a pistol in his belly, and stripped off the gold Cartier wristwatch he'd received as a gift on a state visit to Paris.

  Fidel didn't recognize the robber, but he recognized the prison tattoos on the man's grimy knuckles. Combinado del Este! With amazement Castro realized he was being mugged by a thug that he himself had sprung from prison and put on a boat to Key West in 1980. The bleak beautiful irony made him cough up blood.

  Numbed by the morphine, Fidel felt more indignity than pain as the mugger ran away. Before the old man could rise to his knees, a red-haired urchin no older than six plucked the hairpiece from his scalp and dashed down the beach, shouting to his mother that he'd found a dead crow.

  Castro, feeling himself hoisted by the armpits, reasonably anticipated dismemberment or evisceration.

  "Easy," said the voice, which belonged to a motel security guard. The cheap badge on his shirt said "Joe Sereno." Fidel was grateful to see him.

  "You all right?" Sereno asked. "Man, you don't look so good."

  In perfect English, Castro gasped, "What is this craziness? These monsters?"

  "Just another day at the beach." Sereno smiled ruefully. "The problem, see, it started when they went to topless. The guys, old tourist guys like yourself, come down here to stare at the cuties. Am I right? The gangs, hookers, scumbags--they all know this. So they hang on this stretch, just waiting."

  Fidel morosely dusted the grit from his chest. Sereno gently led him back toward the Odyssey. "I mean, you're a criminal it's not such a bad deal. Get a tan. Enjoy the naked babes. Mug a few Germans and Canadians, and that's your day."

  "Why," rasped Castro, "aren't these terrible people in jail!"

  Joe Sereno burst out laughing. "Where you from, old-timer--Mars? Come on, let me take you back to your room."

  "Thank you, officer."

  "By the way, there's something I gotta ask."

  Fidel's jaws clenched. The security guy was eyeing him closer now, the way the cleaners had.

  "Your name," said Sereno, "it's not really Garcia, is it?"

  Less than two hours later, a chartered Gulfstream jet landed at the Opa-Locka airport, where it was met by a black Chevy Blazer. Four men got out and moved toward the plane. The tallest one walked slowly, as if in pain. The others could be seen helping him up the stairs. Minutes later, a station wagon arrived and a fifth person, a woman in a long gown, was led to the jet.

  The flight plan indicated the Gulfstream would be heading nonstop to Kingston, Jamaica. This was a fib. The destination was Havana. Fidel Castro was going home to die.

  Miami was too damn scary. The deal was off.

  The remaining severed head, the one Juan Carlos Reyes imagined would make him president of Cuba, belonged to another expendable Castro double, Jose Paz-Gutierrez.

  This fact was known to Castro himself, Cuban State Security, the CIA, and of course Lilia Sands, who--on numerous long-ago lonely nights, when Fidel was away--had slept with Jose Paz-Gutierrez at a farmhouse in Camagiiey. Of course she'd saved a lock of Jose's hair, as she did for all her lovers.

  No one was less surprised than Lilia when Reyes's DNA expert matched with.9999995 certainty the hair from Lilia's cigar box with the severed head in the red Gott cooler. Her secret glee at fooling the munchkin-sized millionaire was tempered by a pang of wistfulness, for of all the Castro doubles Lilia had slept with, Jose Paz-Gutierrez had been the best--the one whose embrace most reminded her of Fidelito himself, the one whose earlobe she had once chomped off in ecstasy, just as she had Fidel's.

  In fact, though Lilia wouldn't dare confess it, Jose Paz-Gutierrez definitely had Castro beat in one department, lovemaking-wise. The ardent Jose had a much longer... attention span, if you will. Lilia wondered if that's what had gotten him killed, as Castro's jealous streak was well known.

  So she had mixed feelings on this special Friday morning. Oh, she was glad to be back in Havana, holding Fidel's hand as a fussy gringo tried to restore the illusion of vitality--gluing on the frizzy beard, aligning a new toupee, ruddying the cheeks, powdering the shadows around the hollowing eyes.

  Still, Lilia took no joy in knowing that across the Florida Straits, the head of poor Jose Paz-Gutierrez soon would be boorishly displayed for all to see, like a taxidermied fish. Oh well, Lilia thought, it's all for the cause.

  As she stroked Fidel's arm, hairless from chemotherapy, she observed a pale stripe on his wrist.

  "Where is your watch?" she asked.

  "Miami," Castro said sullenly.

  "What happened?"

  "I got mugged," he said, grimacing at the memory, "by a Marielito. Go ahead and laugh."

  "I'm not laughing." Lilia turned, covered her mouth. "Honestly, Fidel, I'm not."

  The massive televised rally arranged at Miami's Torch of Friendship by Juan Carlos Reyes was not seen by:

  * Britt Montero and Fay Leonard, who were sharing bare cinder-block quarters at the South Bimini airfield, under the supervision of an armed Bahamas customs officer;

  * Mickey Schwartz, who was gambling away his ten-thousand-dollar payday on Paradise Island, where none of the cute croupiers seemed remotedly amused by his stand-up impressio
n of Howard Stern;

  * Jake Lassiter, who was in a Flagler Street hot tub with the lukewarm ex-wife of his ex-client John Deal;

  * John Deal, who was on Bird Road shopping for a red Testarossa to go with his black Bentley convertible;

  * Marlis and Franklin, who were literally mopping up after a fatal cocaine dispute at a FEMA trailer court in Homestead;

  * Joe Sereno, who was thanking a police review board for reinstating him, and promising to be more careful when arresting incontinent tourists;

  * and Jimmy Carter, who was in Havana for a rare public appearance and historic announcement by Fidel Castro.

  So absorbed in the pomp of his "preinauguration" was Juan Carlos Reyes that he remained unaware of events unfolding simultaneously in Cuba, unaware he was about to share a TV screen five stories high with the same man whose severed noggin he intended to unveil, unaware that local television stations were already receiving a live satellite feed from the presidential palace in Havana.

  So that at the climactic moment when Juan Carlos Reyes victoriously hoisted a bearded head for all America to see, a very similar but undead head emerged on a sun-bleached balcony in Cuba. There the real Castro announced a liberal new human rights policy that freed every political prisoner, including (not coincidentally) two of Lilia Sands's nephews.

  In Miami, the cheers at the Torch of Friendship ebbed into a confused mass murmuring as the crowd struggled to understand what they were seeing on the huge split screen. On one side was Reyes, waving the goggle-eyed head and proclaiming himself the harbinger of a new democracy in Cuba. On the other side, flanked by former president Carter, was a person who looked very much like Castro, and very much like he was still breathing.

  Juan Carlos Reyes sensed the audience was no longer enthralled by his oratory. He spun around and saw what they saw on the giant TV screen.

  "Noooooo!" The millionaire wheeled, bellowing into the thicket of microphones. "It's a trick! Can't you see, here is Castro!" He shook the head like a tambourine. "I can prove it, I can prove this is Fidel's head!"

  Reyes was handicapped by the fact that, despite his wealth and power, he was not very popular in the exile community. For many years, Cuban-Americans had endured his grandiose promises, vituperative politics, and heavy-handed fund-raising tactics. Now this: a phony Castro head! It was too much.