“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.”
“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 stopped 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.”
She had seemed formidable enough with a pistol in her hand, Deal thought. Right now she seemed downright scary. The blaring of horns from behind them, in the meantime, had become apocalyptic. “Please, Angelica,” he said. “Drive on.”
“You are certain?”
“I’m certain I don’t want that motorcycle cop to come back here,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
She flashed her gaze at him once more, then jammed the Fiat into gear. A good thing the trucker hadn’t made the mistake of climbing out of his cab to confront her, Deal was thinking as they rejoined the river of traffic.
They had gone through some of the explanation before, back at the apartment, talking quickly while she picked up broken crockery and he flipped through the short series of photographs, trying to convince himself that the impossible was indeed true. His father gone for thirteen years now, long presumed dead, turned up like the ghost of Robert Vesco and locked in a Cuban jail.
His suicide had been staged, Angelica had explained, though it had been some years before she had realized that not even Barton Deal’s family knew that he was still alive. He had done it to save their lives, she had learned. There were men who would have stopped at nothing if they had learned of Barton Deal’s existence. She’d never understood just why, only that Barton Deal had lived with the profound sadness of this truth. Of that much she was certain.
Even if most of what she’d told him had been manufactured for reasons impossible to fathom, Deal could not suppress the sense that at its core the story added up. The more he strained to re-create the events of the night he’d found his father’s body, the louder came an insistent voice from somewhere in the recesses of his brain.
“
Of course
,” the knowing voice intoned, “
the perfect Barton Deal exit. Business going south, marriage a sham, a government spook named Talbot Sams breathing down your neck and threatening to put you behind bars, or worse…Why not? Why not fake your own death and jump on board the Havana Express? Cut a sweet enough deal, so to speak, with El Comandante, you could live out your years in peace and tranquillity…minus any bothersome family, of course
.”
“I don’t suppose he ever talked about us,” Deal said, as she turned off the major thoroughfare at last, starting down a narrower, tree-shaded street.
“In time I learned things,” she said. “His heart was broken to be apart from you, that much I am certain of. He left the money, of course, but that was nothing compared to the guilt…”
Deal stifled a bitter laugh. “Money? My old man left us with a bare cupboard, sweetheart. I’ve been trying to dig DealCo out of that hole ever since.”
She turned, a look of surprise on her face. “I am sure of it. It was the one thing that he prided himself on, having left his family well provided for…”
“If you bought that, then he’s a better actor than you are,” Deal said. A flush came to her cheeks and she turned away, at the same time the all-knowing voice returned to insinuate itself into his thoughts:
“
And who is to say it wasn’t true? Who is to say that Talbot Sams didn’t help himself to that supposed pot of cash, Johnny-boy? Or, maybe your old man needed the help of one of his cronies on the force to stage that sudden exit. If there was someone like that involved, someone who knew about a cache of money that could never be claimed…Maybe that’s why you never got any wind of what happened, everything buried under the wake that stolen money leaves behind…
”
In any case, it was hardly the thing to dwell upon now. There were far larger issues looming before him.
“Look,” he said. “Let’s put aside my family problems. It’s been a hell of a night and day, that’s all.”
She gave him a look. “You’re not the only one who’s mourning, you know. At least your father is alive.”
It stopped him like a slap, the terrible image suddenly blooming again in his mind: her brother turning just as the heavy blade swung down, the awful sound that echoed through the trees…At least he’d been spared the knowledge of what had happened all these years. Angelica and her family had lived on the brink of calamity all that time and more. Despite everything, he could grant her that much.
She had turned the Fiat off the street they’d been traveling on, and he saw that they had emerged upon the far reaches of a parking lot that seemed to be transforming itself back into the field it had once surely been. Giant potholes dotted the gone-to-gray asphalt, and clumps of sawgrass erupted here and there like nightmare weeds. There were a few cars parked in the lot, but those seemed half a mile away.
In the even farther distance rose a featureless multistoried concrete building, with bulky rounded shoulders and narrow windows like slitted eyes, the thing looming over the flattened landscape like a giant fossilized slug. “What is it?” he asked her.
“The Hospital Nacional,” she said. “A gift from the Soviet Socialist Republics.”
“It seems in keeping,” he said. Just a glance at the place was enough to make you fall ill.
“He is in there,” she added. “That is where they have taken him. At the orders of the
comandante
himself. He believes your father may be feigning the injuries he received at the Marina Hemingway. At the very least, he is to have his faculties restored through the miracle of state-run medicine.”
Deal gave her a glance, then turned to stare out the grimy windshield in the direction of the distant place. “It’s not a prison hospital?”
She shook her head. “Were he still in the Castillo Atares, it would be a waste of time to even think of freeing him.”
He turned back to her and began to speak, not seeking answers so much as reciting what his reasonable self had come to. It seemed ludicrous even to apply such a concept as reason to the events of the past twenty-fours hours, of course; more sensible to dismiss it all as a drug-induced nightmare. But he’d seen half a dozen men die, had watched her brother’s head nearly hacked off before his eyes. There was some terrible truth buried in all this, and he would learn what it was; that much he had decided.
“Here’s what I think, Angelica, and you can spare me the histrionics, no matter how it sounds to you. The first thing is this. You already have it figured I didn’t know anything about my old man being alive. If you told me it was anybody else in the world in there—Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, JFK—I wouldn’t believe you, no matter how good you were. But Barton Deal, he’s another story altogether. It just might be possible. And maybe you’re even telling me the truth about how he got there, and about how selfless and other-directed you and everyone who works with you really are.”
He paused for a moment, something in him heartened by the fact that she’d simply sat and listened and hadn’t tried to interrupt. “But I also know this much. If my old man
was
on the way out of this country, he was doing it on his own terms, no double-crosses involved, and he would have made sure his money made it out before he did. No matter what he might have told you or anybody else about what he was giving to whom, he’d have seen to it there was only one person who could open the chute where the rat pellets and the coins fall out, and that would be him. So that has to color my thinking, no matter what you say.” He saw the color rising in her cheeks again, but he held up a hand to stop her from getting any ideas.
“On the other hand, here you come, telling me you want to give me my father back, so how can I not listen? How can I not find out if it’s true? How can I not run this thing out to the end?”
There was a silence then. It was steamy inside the car, he realized…no A/C in here either. He could see sweat collecting in the hollow above her breastbone, smell the tang of it, and his own sweat too. It reminded him of something, but he wasn’t going to let himself go any further than that.
“Are you finished?” she said, finally.
“For now,” he told her.
“Good,” she said. “Because all I want for him is to see him out—out of that place; out of this country; off to somewhere he can live his last days in peace and dignity. I love him as if he were my own father. I don’t care if you believe me or not. It does not matter.”
“You’re right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
He stared at her for a moment, her gaze boring back into his. It seemed as if the tiny car were humming, levitating just slightly off the ground. “When you fucked me,” he said, “was it like you were fucking him?”
She hit him hard with her fist, not a slap but a straight-out punch that caught him on the cheek and slid across the corner of his mouth. He saw it coming but he didn’t dodge the blow.
He felt his lips fatten, and blood begin to flow from the tear a tooth had made inside his cheek. The back of his head bounced off the glass of the passenger door so hard he was surprised it didn’t break.
On the rebound, he caught her with a backhand right—the heavy ring still on his finger there. Her head snapped sharply sideways.
She gasped, but she’d been expecting it—she’d had the pistol leveled at his gut, after all—but she hadn’t flinched either. When she turned to face him again, there was a trickle of blood leaking from one nostril.
He saw a quiver in the hand that held the pistol, but he was well past fear. He saw the hand go up and come his way, but there wasn’t the hint of a threat.
He felt the press of steel at the back of his neck as she pulled him down. He felt lips and teeth and salty slipperiness. He felt that the little car might have caught on fire.