It was the last day of his vacation. Zapata decided to treat himself to one final day on the ocean. Maybe this time he would catch a good fish for dinner.
He went down to the water’s edge. At the end of the rickety little pier poking into the bay were the two children, clinging to each other desperately, as if the wind of a hurricane were trying to tear them apart.
A middle-aged white woman in baggy Bermuda shorts and a garish flower-splashed tunic walked out to the end of the pier and stood behind the children. Her head was shaded from the sun by a straw hat that declared on its crown, “Havana Olé!”
“Hey, kiddos!” the woman shouted in a jolly American accent. “Let me take your picture with my new camera. You’re both so cute.”
The children did not respond.
“Come on, don’t play so hard to get.”
The children did not turn around.
“What’s wrong, kids? Cat got your tongue?”
No response.
“Oh, I get it.” The woman dug a hand into the pocket of her baggy shorts. “You cute seals aren’t going to perform unless you get paid for it.” She pulled a coin from her pocket. “Here goes, kids.” She tossed the coin over the children’s heads and it splashed into the water.
The children did not move.
“Hey!” The woman was irritated. “That was two bits American! That’s more than your daddy makes in a day.”
The children remained silent.
“Have it your way,” the woman snapped. “I’m not diving in after small change.” She stomped off the pier.
The children remained motionless. Finally, they turned around, tears falling from their eyes.
Zapata suddenly had an intuition. “Jesus,” he hissed, and ran back to the bungalows.
He raced into the patio with its pathetic palm. The door to his bungalow was closed, but the door to the one next door was wide open and sun was streaming in.
He could see into the front room. There was some cheap bamboo furniture and a faded maritime poster on the wall. A few children’s items were scattered about, a sandal, a straw donkey, a plastic beach bucket.
Zapata knocked on the side of the door but got no response. He knocked again. Still no answer.
He stepped into the room, careful not to move too fast. What if his intuition was wrong? He would look like a fool. What if the mother suddenly appeared? How could he explain? Worse, what if the guy from last night appeared? Zapata knew about this kind of crew-cut ex-military American. They had fought in the jungles during the last World War. They had climbed over the bodies of their dead buddies with flamethrowers to burn Japanese soldiers out of hidden caves carved into coral rock. Zapata could imagine the guy shouting from the back bedroom, then stalking up the hallway out of the darkness. He would be naked, with only his dog tags dangling on a chain around his neck, a flamethrower gripped in his hands, and with a deep whoosh the orange flame would leap out, searing off Zapata’s flesh.
Zapata took out his police identification badge and held it before him, as if it were an asbestos shield to protect him from the fury of hell as he headed down the hallway.
“Humberto Zapata, Havana police!”
No response.
He walked to the end of the hallway. The bedroom door was open. He cautiously peered in.
He was relieved to find no one. The bed was unmade. A few suitcases containing neatly folded clothes lay open on the floor.
The sound of running water came from behind the closed bathroom door.
“Excuse me,” Zapata spoke softly. “Havana police. Don’t be alarmed.”
The water kept running. A slow, steady hiss.
He knocked lightly. “Pardon me, I came to tell you that your children are down by the pier. They’re very upset. Perhaps you should attend to them?”
He put his ear to the door. Water continued to hiss.
He tried the doorknob, expecting it to be locked, but it clicked open in his hand.
He could see the sink, its faucet running water. He pushed the door open further.
Across white floor tile was a bathtub with a plastic curtain hanging in front of it.
“Don’t be alarmed. Havana police.”
No sound from the other side of the curtain.
Zapata placed his hand on the edge of the curtain and gently pulled it back.
What he saw was a sea of red.
Floating in the red sea was the woman in the red dress, adrift in her own blood. Her throat had been slit and a straight razor lay resting on her breasts. Zapata knew from the pallor of her face that she had been dead for hours.
The intuition he’d had when he saw the devastation in the eyes of the children at the end of the pier was right.
Zapata swung around. Where was that white son of a bitch that had killed the children’s mother?
He yanked his gun from its holster under his jacket. He leveled the gun before him and walked back out into the hall.
Zapata remembered the night before, the man against the palm, his pants around his ankles, his muscular arms supporting the weight of the woman in the red dress as she wrapped her legs around his waist.
Zapata checked the closets. He looked under the beds. The tough guy wasn’t hiding inside. Zapata went outside and stood on the cracked, sunbaked cement of the patio. Oh, God, he thought, the kids might have seen the murder. If so, they were the only eyewitnesses. The guy might come back to shut them up.
Zapata ran to the pier. The children still sat at the end of it, clinging to each other.
What could he possibly say to them? To comfort them, to win their confidence? He cleared his throat.
“You’ve been sitting out here for a very long time. Would you like to get out of the sun? Maybe come to the restaurant for some churros and a Coke?”
The children didn’t turn around.
“I’m a policeman. Don’t be frightened.”
Without a word the children stood up, never letting go of each other’s hand. Then, in a flash, they dove together into the water and disappeared beneath the surface.
Zapata hurried to the end of the pier. The children didn’t come up.
He ripped off his jacket, unhooked his holstered gun and dove in.
He swam deep into the blue. How could they have gone down so far so fast? He kept swimming, his lungs beginning to burn. Then he saw them. Their legs and arms were intertwined to form one creature huddled at the bottom of the sea, sucking water into their open mouths to fill their lungs.
Zapata grabbed them both by the hair and yanked, swimming up with their already limp bodies. He broke the surface of the water, gasping for air, pulling the children with him to shore.
He lay on his stomach, coughing up water with the children. He heard a rough voice from above.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Zapata looked up.
It was the tough American. His big fist clutched the neck of a rum bottle as if it were a club.
Zapata thought of his gun on the pier, too far away. He was helpless.
The man fell to his knees and gathered the children up in his arms.
“I’m police,” Zapata said. “Havana police.”
“I don’t give a fuck if you’re the Texas Rangers,” the man snarled. “What are you doing to my kids?”
Zapata had to think fast. This guy was the father. What if he was innocent?
“Your wife,” Zapata said, his throat raw from coughing water.
“What about her? She’s none of your business.”
“In the bungalow. The children—”
The man’s bloodshot eyes suddenly registered comprehension. “Goddamn! Don’t tell me!” He let go of the children and ran to his bungalow.
Even as far away from the beach as the bungalow was, from inside could be heard the agonized howl of the man, who had come upon his wife with her throat slit by his own razor.
If the man was the killer, Zapata thought, he was also the world’s greatest ac
tor. Then again, maybe the man had been so drunk the night before that he had no memory of what he’d done.
Hearing the bloodcurdling cries, the children suddenly clung to Zapata as if he were still swimming with them in the depths of the sea.
The howling brought the whole village to life. People, including the police, came running from every direction.
Zapata quickly took charge. He was from Havana, he knew how to handle a crisis of this magnitude.
He ordered photographs to be taken of the victim and the bungalow’s interior. He had everything dusted for fingerprints. Then he had the bungalow roped off against the morbid curiosity of the locals, some of whom had even tried climbing through the windows.
Zapata attempted to interview the stricken father, but the man gave him knife-throwing scowls. Zapata wanted to separate the man from the children. What if he was the murderer? But there was no proof. It could be a suicide as well as a murder. Zapata had to let the family be.
That night, after the photographers and fingerprint dusters were gone, after the ambulance had come and the woman’s blood-soaked body had been raised from its sea of red, wrapped in a rubber sheet and driven away, Zapata returned to the deserted bungalow. He went through all the closets and dresser drawers. In one of the suitcases he found a note twisted up in a pair of ripped, child-size cotton underpants. It read: “I will kill your black magnolia.”
Zapata thought of himself as a good policeman who could make connections and beat down doubts to get to simple deductions. How curious it was that the note had used the word magnolia. It was as if someone had read his mind when he saw the young girl on the pier, glistening in her wet underwear, and he recalled the poetic line: “Nobody understood the perfume of your belly’s dark magnolia.”
Was it just a coincidence? Zapata didn’t believe in coincidence. He was determined to unravel this mystery.
The morning after Zapata found the note, he jerked awake from a deep sleep on the floor of the death bungalow with the magnolia note in his hand. He stared up at the ceiling fan. The monotonous whir of the blades was not what had awakened him. He heard the patter of rain striking the wooden window shutters outside. The raindrops were fat and tropical, whacking the wood with juicy splats. But that was not the sound that had awakened him either. There was another sound, a rhythmic slapping in the distance. He pushed himself up from the floor. The thought crossed his mind that he should have found a way to hold the father for suspicion of murder last night. The guy had probably taken the children and was halfway back to the United States by now. Zapata would never see them again. Good-bye to the mystery of the dark magnolia.
Zapata stepped outside the bungalow into the warm rain. What was the sound that had awakened him? It wouldn’t stop. He walked toward the beach. The sound grew more insistent.
When Zapata came into view of the pier where the children usually were he stopped in surprise. They were there, standing stiffly, clothed only in their white cotton underpants. The fat drops of rain hit their exposed skin. Their heads had been shorn of hair. The white boy’s black hair was gone, the black girl’s white hair was gone, shaved clean. Behind them was their father. The man’s muscled arms rose in the air and his big hands came down onto the children’s heads, slapping their smooth skulls as if they were a pair of bongo drums.
Zapata couldn’t intervene; the children weren’t being hurt. The whole tableau seemed to be some kind of ritual. The nearly naked children standing in the rain looking out to sea as their father tried to communicate with his dead wife, using the only medium he thought she could hear. The sound of drumming traveled to the gray smudged horizon, where the water of the ocean met the water of the pouring heavens.
Zapata stood transfixed, carried away by the incessant rhythm. He listened to the percussive bongo beat, deep into it: if dark magnolia had a sound, this was it. But Zapata’s mind didn’t stop there. He thought of something that being a cop had already taught him. A wife would not normally harm herself if her husband cheated with another woman. But a hysterical wife might kill herself if her husband was cheating with his own daughter.
Zapata listened to the rhythm in the rain.
Pedro and Paulo were pissed off. They had stood out in the sun guarding a corpse in the trunk of the Plymouth and had never even been offered a beer. Now, on the drive back to Havana, they were sullen. What could the Captain and Bongo have had to talk about that was so important it kept them in La Terraza for so long?
Pedro wanted some rumba action to put him in a better mood. “Can I turn on the radio, Captain?”
“No.”
“But, Captain, maybe some Beny Moré?”
“Yeah,” Paulo chimed in. “Beny might even cheer up the stiff in the trunk.”
Pedro and Paulo laughed in unison at the joke.
Seated in the backseat with Bongo, Zapata said nothing, which meant there would be no music. He was brooding about bigger issues. He felt that he alone knew the truth of life, the bribes from all sides, the triple-dealing and backstabbing. He had a pain in his heart for the country that he loved so much. There was a party going on, but on the edges of everyday life dark forces were gathering to stop the party and turn it into a wake. There had been a jailbreak the night before, two revolutionaries had shot their way out of prison. Sooner or later they would be caught and brought into the Blue Mansion, and then dumped in the Pineapple Field. But there would be others after these two, that was the real problem. Cut off two heads and five more popped up. He knew that the bombs going off at night in the city were not going to stop. A dog is never rid of fleas.
He didn’t want the radio on because even on the airwaves there were little rumor bombs. The government did a good job of censoring out what the public didn’t need to hear, but the government also slipped in rumors they wanted spread. A recent one was that Fidel Castro hadn’t been on the leaky boat that chugged over from Mexico and landed a pathetic invasion force of eighty-two men. Most of the sons of bitches had been stuck in a swamp, cut off from food and supplies, and killed by government troops. The rumor had it that the great revolutionary had stayed behind in Mexico with a whore; this was based on a signed confession from a captured rebel. But Zapata knew confessions weren’t worth the paper they were written on. Confessions could be beaten out of a man, or pulled out of him with his tongue. True lies. In fact, President Batista announced that Castro had been killed in the swamp after deserting his men. Lying truth. Zapata’s own informants, those he pulled the truth from by letting them keep their tongues, said Castro was alive, and that there were enough hidden arms on the island for the rebels to fight a protracted war. Who was the cat and who was the mouse in this game?
Zapata spoke in his hoarse whisper. “Okay.”
“Okay what, Captain?” Pedro asked.
“Okay for Beny Moré.”
“Thanks a million, Captain.” Pedro flicked on the radio and a silken stream of music wafted through the car.
“It’s not Beny,” Pedro said, hoping Zapata wouldn’t make him turn it off.
“Leave it,” Zapata answered. “It’s María Teresa Vera.”
Of all the songs to be playing, of all the little radio bombs that could be going off, none of them could have affected Zapata more than this one, a personal one, the song “Twenty Years.” The song exploded in his heart like tiny pieces of memory shrapnel.
Pedro and Paulo in the front seat felt better now. At least they had music, even if it was woman’s stuff; I lost my love and he’s never coming back stuff.
“Say, Captain,” Pedro asked with newfound enthusiasm, “do you want us to swing by and dump the stiff in the Pineapple Field?”
“I already told you, no.” Zapata spoke low and even. “It’s not that kind of situation. It isn’t political. I want this one taken to the morgue. I want a full autopsy.”
“You’re not going to get a full autopsy”—Paulo scratched the stubble of his beard as he smirked—“because there’s only half a man left.”
&
nbsp; Zapata didn’t smile or answer, which meant Paulo had better be quiet. Paulo started humming to the tune on the radio. It was distracting Zapata.
“Paulo.”
“Yes, my Captain?”
“Keep your mouth shut.”
The growl of the American engine mixed with the lament of the habanera on the radio:
What’s the point of loving you
if you no longer love me?
We shouldn’t dwell on a love forgotten.
Twenty years ago Zapata had seen his dark magnolia in the rain.
Now I’m history.
I can’t come to terms with it.
Like a piece of the soul
wrenched heartlessly away.
María Teresa’s plaintive words were sharp blades slashing across Zapata’s face. He was bleeding from humiliation when she added the final cut:
If only we could make all our dreams
come true, you would love me like you did
twenty years ago.
Had it really been twenty years? Zapata thought that he still looked the same. The only thing different was that he dyed his hair and mustache black now. It wasn’t that he was trying to hide his age, it was more that he was paying homage to how he had looked twenty years before. Time had stopped for him then. He didn’t want to be a graying guy looking backward. He wanted to be forever who he was at that moment when he first saw her. So what if people didn’t think the color of his hair looked natural? His intention was pure.
Always at the end of “Twenty Years,” as its music trailed away, Zapata felt a hand rise up and grasp his heart in its fist. He wasn’t a softy; he didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. How could he, since his heart was clenched in a fist that pulled him into the grave? He kept his feelings buried, out of sight. But always at the end of the song he added his own verse, one that he had scribbled down two decades before:
Dear darling of death,
darts of memory pierce
my tongue as startled swallows
swoop over my grave.
King Bongo Page 9
