“This country cannot tell an oppressed people that they are not permitted to wage war on tyrants,” Bravo said stubbornly.
“You know the Cubans will shoot you if you're caught. And you better hope they find you first. The Justice Department is already involved. You know what Janet Reno will do. She doesn't fool around.”
“These are the same people, CIA, FBI, who gave us money and weapons to fight Castro. Now they say it is a crime.” Bravo threw up his hands. “I was not a criminal then! I am not now. I am a patriot!” He shook his fist. “We are at war, it does not end because somebody is taken into a courtroom. I have no fight with the United States. My fight is with Fidel.”
“This is loco,” I said, looking out to see where we were. I wanted to go back to my car. This was hopeless.
“Some day, Montero, you will learn what your father knew, that freedom is more than the lack of bars around you.
Si,
this is loco, so loco that if he still lived, he would stand with us.”
He said it like he believed it. Was he right? Was my father this deranged?
“Are you going to talk to the FBI?”
“Of course not. I am underground. They will not find me.”
Maybe I should just jump from this moving car now, I thought irritably, scanning traffic for undercover cars.
“You can't run around acting like a goddamn terrorist.”
“Why not?” he said angrily.
“First,” I said, “you are too old to run.”
He smiled ironically. “I am too old not to run. I have spent my life fighting for Cuba. The spark never dies. That is how I will die. I want to be buried in a free Cuba.”
He put his maimed and calloused hand over mine. “Our goal is to spark a rebellion among the Cuban people. That spark could be ignited by the words in Antonio's
diario.
We must find it before Reyes seizes it. If we can broadcast it to the peopleâ”
“My father's diary?”
“Si.” It is in the possession of a man named Armando Gutierrez. Reyes has his
criminales
searching for him now.”
“Reyes is an international businessman, he is politically connected, why would heâ?”
Bravo's ominous look cut me off, reminding me of the wild-eyed street preacher spouting doom and disaster.
He leaned forward. “If Gutierrez contacts you, you must contact me at once. Luisa is my liaison officer. Here is her number.” He shoved a scrap of paper at me and I stuffed it absently into my purse.
“How old is she? Shouldn't she be in school?”
Bravo ignored me, thinking aloud. “If the
diario
is lost, perhaps we could plant a bomb at the Morro lighthouse.
Si,
extinguish the beacon that has burned for four hundred years. Perhaps that is the spark that would ignite the Cuban people.”
“¡Si, comandante!”
the driver said enthusiastically.
“¡Explota el faro del Morro!”
I rolled my eyes.
“When it happens and the people take to the streets, we will be ready. Our mission is twofold,” Bravo said earnestly. “We will put an end to Fidel and prevent Juan Carlos Reyes from becoming Cuba's new dictator.”
There is no stopping this madness, I thought. Just when I thought this day could go no further downhill, it did.
“¡Comandante!”
We had just run an amber light on U.S. 1 in Coconut Grove. A beige late-model Ford Crown Vic occupied by two men jumped the red and was rapidly closing in on us.
“Eloy, ¿es el FBI?”
Bravo said.
“No sé.”
He shrugged.
Swell, I thought. How am I going to explain this to the FBI and to my bosses? I had told Gretchen I was going to lunch. I would have to display my press identification and explain to the agents that I was merely a reporter interviewing a newsmaker. I would have to involve Mark Seybold, the
News's
attorney. I should have known this was a mistake.
Instead of pulling over, Eloy floored it. The old Lincoln leaped forward. “Wait a minute!” I cried. “Pull over!”
“¡Rápido! rápido!
Step on it, Eloy!” Bravo said.
“¡Si, comandante!”
He spun the wheel, veering around a crowded jitney, as I looked over my shoulder in horror.
“You can't run from the FBI!”
“What if it is not the FBI?”
“Who else?”
“Castro agents or Reyes's men.”
“That's ridiculous!” I cried, groping for my seat belt and finding there was none. Now, I thought, the situation can't become any worse. I was wrong. Bravo pulled a .45-caliber semiautomatic out from under his guayabera. And Eloy came up with a sawed-off shotgun, looking over his shoulder as we overtook a lumbering school bus at high speed.
Will my mother be sorry I am dead? I wondered. Probably not. But Hal will, and maybe even Kendall McDonald. Gretchen won't. Lottie will.
“Look out!” I screamed. “School bus!”
Eloy steered around it, two wheels on the curb.
“That's it!” I screamed. “Stop the car! I'm getting out.”
Bravo and the driver ignored me, conversing in rapid-fire Spanish that I only picked up in parts. One thing was clear. They had no intention of stopping.
Taking both hands off the wheel, Eloy racked one into the chamber of his sawed-off. Bravo used his good hand to do the same with the automatic.
“You can't shoot at the FBI!” I screamed. My annoyance and anger had given way to true terror. The best I could hope for now was to wind up handcuffed, face down on the pavement with the barrel of an FBI semiautomatic Sig 226 to my head.
We hurtled south on U.S. 1. I watched frantically for a City of Miami patrol car. Only startled motorists standing on their brakes, leaning on their horns, and careening out of our way as we cut them off, ran red lights, and skidded through intersections. Broad daylight. Where are the cops? I glared at Bravo and Eloy, gritted my teeth, and held on. These were the same clowns who got my father killed. Now I was next.
“Don't worry,” Bravo said. “You are safe with me.” He opened a battered satchel at his feet, took out a box of shotgun shells, and tossed it into the front seat.
Traffic jammed ahead of us and Eloy took to the median, the big car mowing down plantings and young trees. Green fronds obscured the windshield. I prayed that a sprinkler head would puncture one of our tires. No such luck. The Crown Vic was gallomping over the median behind us, still in hot pursuit. Gaining, it swung around a line of traffic and came up alongside. I glimpsed the men in front, both wearing dark glasses.
The push-button window on the front passenger side rolled down and Eloy raised the sawed-off. “No! No! No!” I screamed, clamping my palms over my ears. The deafening blast created shock waves around me and I saw the huge front plate-glass window of an auto dealership disintegrate in slow motion. The car fishtailed all over the road as Eloy struggled for control. Why aren't they bleeding from the ears? I wondered. Their eardrums were probably already damaged from years of war games in the Everglades. The Crown Vic dropped back a car length but stayed right on our tail.
Oh no. A solid wall of traffic loomed ahead. Eloy swung into the parking lot of Coral Gables High School. “Not a school!” I cried. I could barely hear myself; my voice sounded as though I were under water. He skidded around the building into the big back lot. A driver's ed class was in progress. Rows of folding chairs occupied by about forty waiting teenagers. In the center seven or eight cars, two school kids to a car, maneuvered at slow speeds through lanes of orange traffic cones set up by an instructor.
“Look out!” I shrieked, ears still ringing, unable to hear myself. The Crown Vic spun out on a stretch of lawn behind us, then backed up and roared toward us. “Look out!”
We raced straight through the class in progress. The trainer cars scrambled, two collided. The instructor, several teens on foot, and the kids seated on the chairs all assumed it was a drive-by and instinctively hit the ground. Bodies flat, heads down, no running for cover, just as taught in their drive-by shooting drills.
We flew out the far side of the lot. Looking back I saw a folding chair bounce off the hood of the Crown Vic as it hurtled in reverse rather than try to navigate the obstacle course of kids flat on their stomachs all over the parking lot.
Eloy hit one of the quiet Gables residential streets, made several sharp turns, then slowed to a sedate speed. I eased down onto the floor, trembling, face in my hands. “Stop at the next corner and let me out,” I said.
“¿Qué?'
Bravo cupped his hand over his ear.
Would any of us ever hear normally again?
They insisted on taking me back to my car near Bayfront Park I would have preferred a bus, a cab, hitchhiking, or shoe leather. I would have happily crawled. But in the time it took to argue the point we were nearly there, with me scanning traffic for the cops. There had to be a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) for all of us by now. I expected roadblocks, choppers, patrol cars. There were none. Perhaps it was luck or some jurisdictional radio foul-up between the Gables and Miami.
Ears ringing, knees weak, I stepped out of the Lincoln onto sun-scorched Biscayne Boulevard. I wanted to drop to my knees and kiss the pavement in gratitude. It seemed so very long ago that we had left, yet by my watch it was less than twenty-five minutes.
Bravo said something before I slammed the door, looking furtively over my shoulder for police or the FBI. I couldn't hear what he said but it didn't matter. Had I answered, he couldn't have heard me.
I meticulously obeyed all the traffic laws as I drove carefully back to the office. My first reaction that morning had been to ignore my beeper. I was right. My hearing seemed to return a bit in the elevator.
Gretchen was waiting. “Have a good lunch?” She smiled sweetly. I liked the old Gretchen better, I thought. At least I knew where she stood.
“The FBI has been calling,” she said, scrutinizing my face. “What's wrong, Britt? Did something you ate disagree with you?”
They know. They saw. I'm dead. Oh shit, I thought. Cops and crooks can be reasoned with, but the FBI scares me.
The message was from Don Farmer, the local bureau spokesman who often called in official press releases. Should I brief Mark Seybold or wait to see exactly what the FBI wanted? Lawyers hate surprises, especially unpleasant ones, so I called Mark's number. He was out.
I dialed Jerry, the reporter who mans our police radios in a claustrophobic cubicle off the newsroom. A cacophony of scanners chorused in the background, and I listened while he finished questioning a Coast Guard spokesman about the search for an accountant who had called his wife on his cellular phone to say his ship-to-shore radio was dead and his sailboat was taking on water three miles offshore.
“What's going on, Jerry?”
“Not much,” he said. “Pretty quiet, in fact. Number cruncher lost at sea, a traffic dispute and chase on U.S. One, âbout an hour ago. Shots fired, sounded like it would turn into something but they ran right through a driver's ed class at Gables High and got away.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Nope. Sounds gang-related to me.”
I hung up weak with relief. Nobody hurt. No thanks to Jorge Bravo. I called Don Farmer.
“Got something for you, Britt.”
“Yeah?” I said suspiciously, determined to stay cool and admit as little as possible.
“You know Jorge Bravo, the AFC honcho.”
I squeezed my eyes closed, teeth on edge, stomach lurching. Why hadn't Mark Seybold been there when I called? “Yeah?”
“I'm sure you saw the press release he issued on that aquatic drive-by along the Cuban coast.”
“The firing on the Vista del Mar.”
“Right, well, we're about to execute a search warrant on Bravo's house. Thought you'd be interested.”
“Why?” I said shortly.
“Well”âhe sounded puzzledâ” they said you were working on the story.”
“Oh, I am.” My eyelid had begun to twitch. Lucky I hadn't chosen a life of crime. I could never pull off a successful caper, I thought.
“Just thought you'd want the tip. The agent-in-charge appreciated your story on that bank robber, the one whose children turned him in after you put his surveillance camera photo in the newspaper.”
“Thanks, Don. That's great.” My enthusiasm sounded weak and phony even to me.
“Okay, here's the location.” He repeated Bravo's address, which I dutifully wrote down. “The U.S. magistrate just signed the warrant, and agents from the terrorism task force will head out there in the next hour.”
“He in custody?” I asked casually.
“No. If he's there they'll bring him in for a statement, but there's no arrest warrant yet. His bond may be revoked first. They're looking for weapons, evidence of illegal activity, contraband, that kind of thing.
“If you go out there, with a photographer,” he added, “be cool, like some neighbor called it in to you.”
“Sure. Thanks, Don.”
“The FBI wants their picture taken when they toss Bravo's house,” I told Bobby Tubbs at the desk, “probably to deter other groups Bravo might inspire to go south for a bite out of Castro.”
The feds may just want to lure me away from the newsroom and the paper's lawyer, I worried, hoping Lottie was free. She was, and we rode together.
“Don't let on that we're familiar with the place,” I warned her. “And if Bravo shows up, the operative word is
duck?
I filled her in on what had happened, talking fast.
“Slow down.” She squinted sideways at me as she drove. “We better git you some water afore you overheat. If what don't kill you makes you strong, you must be the toughest woman in town. Now tell me about your breakfast date. Did you go
out
to breakfast with him or did you meet him for breakfast? Big difference.” She cut her eyes at me again.
I told her everythingâalmost. She was more interested in my romantic interlude than in my close encounters with death and/or arrest. Life-threatening occupational hazards are routine to Lottie. She has hiked through a jungle with Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, been caught in firefights in El Salvador, and dodged bullets in bombed-out Beirut.
“Great guns and little fishes, Britt. You mean we both have a personal life at the same time? Too bad you and Hal can't join us on the
Gettaway
in the morning.” She read my expression. “You'll really like Stosh when you get to know him.”
“It might be fun,” I conceded. “I do love to be out on the water.”
“You'd love the dancing and the gambling and the nightclub acts too.”
“But no way, not on such short notice. Hal is working, and I have the parents' meeting tomorrow night.”
“Just one favor, then. You're an early riser. Kin you drive me to the port to meet Stosh in the morning?”
“You're not going together?”
“He's working late tonight, preparing for some trial. The man is not an early riser. Always in trouble with some judge for being late. The ship sails at dawn. He's coming from south, I'm coming from the north. The port is in the middle. Imagine sailing into Government Cut at one
A.M
., beneath a blanket of stars and seeing the twinkling lights of the city, then disembarking from a romantic cruise and going home in separate cars. Puleeeze, Britt, you owe me one,” she pleaded. “And I want this to be perfect. He's so gorgeous, so red hot, so⦔
“Okay, okay, okay. What time do I pick you up?”
“Five,” she said, beaming.
“
A.M
.?”
A course.
“Oh man,” I whined. “Deal. On one condition. Hal is nervous about the inquest. We have to be there for moral support. You'll like him.”
A single Miami patrol car and several unmarked FBI vehicles, mostly white, a Dodge Aries or two, a few Chevrolet Caprices, were clustered on the gravel and in the street around Bravo's house. Much to my relief I saw no beige Crown Vic among them, or the old Lincoln. Half a dozen agents, four men and two women, from the terrorism task force were descending on the house. They wore jeans or cargo pants, sneakers, and blue baseball caps and raid jackets with FBI emblazoned on them in yellow letters. Two had gone to the back door. All had on the new bulletproof vests that fasten at the sides with Velcro and have handy pockets for shotgun shells. I remembered Bravo's words as I watched them. It is ironic that the federal government now targets exiles for doing exactly what it once trained, equipped, and encouraged them to do.
The case agent did not look surprised to see us, or perturbed as Lottie began shooting pictures. He was reading the warrant to Nerida, who stood submissively on the front porch in a simple cotton housedress. Resigned and stoic, she was shrugging her shoulders, as though saying she did not know the whereabouts of the
comandante.
She had been through this drill before. A few neighbors had begun to gather, idly watching.
As the agents brushed by her, we joined Nerida on the porch.
“No está
home.”
“Good,” I said. Her eyes agreed.
She stepped back inside to watch and we followed. Agents were opening closets, pushing up ceiling panels. Our eyes went immediately to the tarp in the corner. It was still there. One agent approached and lifted the canvas. I caught my breath as he yanked it back to expose what was hidden. Lottie fired off a picture.
Vacuum cleaners. Half a dozen, ranging from the basic no-frills model to a deluxe top-of-the-line carpet beautifier with an automatic cord winder and all the attachments. Canisters, uprights, power nozzle connectors, flexible hoses, and disposable filter bags.
“Mi esposo es vendedor de
vacuum cleaners,” Nerida told them.
I remembered what Reyes had said. Bravo did demonstrate and sell vacuum cleaners.
One of the agents peered suspiciously down a hollow aluminum wand. “You attach that to the hose, then plug it in,” Lottie said helpfully.
“I'll have to ask you ladies to step outside,” the case agent snapped.
They searched for forty-five minutes. Wherever Bravo had stashed his arsenal, it was not at home. One agent even crawled under the house. They found no weapons, but did carry out some papers in a cardboard box. They left Nerida, who did not seem upset, with a copy of the search warrant and an inventory of what they had seized: some old maps of Cuba, bills and telephone records, a personal telephone directory, and “an eleven by fourteen framed photograph of several armed men.” My father's picture.
The crowd of neighbors outside had grown. “
¡Cuba si, Castro no! ¡Viva Bravo!”
they were shouting.
The agents were not happy as they departed. I knew the drill necessary for the warrant. First they had taken a detailed description of the premises and exactly what they sought to the U.S. Attorney's office and requested an affidavit. The case agent who signed it then took the affidavit to a U.S. magistrate, who issued the warrant. Agents had photographed the premises and scoped out the house and surrounding neighborhood for factors like small children and vicious dogs. They had checked out the phone number and the types of doors and windows and outlined a plan. A final briefing took place in front of a blackboard with sketches of the house, yard, and adjacent streets. Each agent had read the entire warrant. Radio channels had been set up and the route to the nearest hospital noted in case something went wrong. Miami police had been contacted and asked to send a marked patrol unit. The officer who responded had been filled in immediately before the warrant was served.
A great deal of effort had been expended. The FBI probably was not going to like a newspaper picture of its elite terrorism task force clad in body armor and uncoveringâvacuum cleaners.
I called my Aunt Odalys later from the office, determined to carry out my threat to take her to a doctor if she was no better. No problem, Berta said, “No doctor. Hold on, she wants to talk to you.”
“Mi hijita.”
Her voice sounded weak. “The spirits in the caldron are weeping. They say that what you seek is gone forever.”
“What does the heck does that mean?”
“Only you know,
mi hijita.”
“My father's diary? The missing boys? Love? All hope of a raise, or a normal family life? Or my car out there in the
News
parking lot?” I was beginning to sound and feel hysterical.
“You will soon see,
mi hijita.”
Deliver me, I thought. Whatever they meant, I didn't like it one damn bit. “Gone forever” did not have a positive ring. Overtired and stressed out by the ups and downs of this day, I was already depressed. Hal had not called. Had I been seduced and abandoned? Bummer. Although I, myself, was a major player in that seduction, which was one of the reasons I was short on sleep. I had to get some rest if I was going to pick Lottie up at 5
A.M
.
I finished my story and went home, eager for a message from Hal, determined to eat something light and retire early. The heat hit me when I opened the door. The air conditioner was dead again. The Goldsteins were out. They had mentioned taking Seth down to Big Pine Key to visit a cousin. No message from Hal on my machine.
All I found in the freezer was a frozen cheesecake. As I stood in front of the open door, pressing it to my feverish brow, the telephone rang. I snatched it up, hoping for Hal's voice.
“Britt, you're home!”
I caught my breath at the unexpected sound of my mothers voice instead.
“I was hoping to catch you.”
“Yes?” Tears welled as I sank into my armchair, orphan no more, clutching the telephone expectantly, the melting cheesecake in my lap.
“At Neimans first thing in the morning!'' she said. “Gloria Vanderbilt jeans marked down to half price. The ad won't hit the papers until Wednesday. The cut is perfect for your long legs and narrow hips. You must get there early before your size is gone. It's smart to pick up two or three pair at that price. You can always dress them up with a nice shirt and a blazer.”
“Thanks.” I spoke the word awkwardly, as though conversing with a stranger. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“They have some nice pastel sweats, too. Marked down.”
“Uh, it's too hot to think about sweatshirts,” I said, moisture from the cheesecake pooling on my skirt and chilling my thighs.
“When it's cooler and you need them, they'll be full price,” she warned. “Just trying to help.”
Numbly, I thanked her again.
“Have to go now, dear,” she said happily, and hung up as though all was swell between us. I sat for a long rime, my hand still resting on the telephone, the cheesecake sodden in my lap, ignoring the TV weather and its color radar pictures of the storm far out at sea.