He wasn’t sure how his old man had felt about his work. By the time Deal had been old enough to wonder about such things, Barton Deal had already ascended far beyond the plane of sharing his innermost feelings with his only son. It simply wasn’t the sort of conversation that larger-than-life figures carried on. His old man had a million aphorisms, of course:
Build ’em to last, boy. Never soap your nails. Measure twice, cut once. Pound and pray
.
Maybe he had loved his work at one point. But as for what was going through his father’s mind—the last years of his life, at least—Deal had little clue.
Just because your old man built things for slimeballs doesn’t make him a bad person
, Vernon Driscoll had told him once. Wouldn’t it be nice to think so.
He shook off the thoughts and checked his watch to see that it was almost six. He’d have to hurry out to the site if he wanted to catch the crew supervisors before they went home. But he’d asked Russell to give him a call if there were any significant developments, and chances were they’d already be gone. If the boss was off the job, who’d be fool enough to stick around late?
He tossed the calculations file onto a stack that threatened to topple and stood up to stretch. Maybe he ought to reconsider Angie Marsh’s offer, he thought, glancing at the various piles that mounded his desk. Either that or convince Bernice to come down from Miami for a week to get things in order.
He walked into the outer office, stealing a glance at the locked stairwell door. He felt a little twinge of shame, locking a pretty girl out of his office. She was just a person come to see a man about a job, he told himself. He’d sleep on the notion, see how her “proposition” sounded in the morning, he thought, then went out the door, shaking his head at the lurid thoughts that had leaped instantaneously into his mind.
He was a couple of steps down the outdoor staircase, still preoccupied with his unruly thoughts, when he saw the figures poised at the landing below. Deal stopped, his hand on the rough-grained railing, trying to reconcile the image of the two men staring up at him with any version of Key West life he was familiar with.
The man in the lead was silver-haired and tall, wearing a dark silk three-piece suit and a maroon tie. He stared up at Deal from behind a pair of stylish, tiny-lensed designer sunglasses, his chin tilted high as if to improve his aim. Behind him was a shaved-headed man who made Russell Straight look small, a portion of his bulk hidden beneath a loose-draped guayabera shirt.
“Mr. Deal?” the man in the suit asked, his voice as smooth as a radio announcer’s.
“That’s me,” Deal said, still poised at the top of the stairs. He glanced out at the street where a Town Car with smoked windows was angled carelessly at the curb.
“How glad I am that we’ve caught you,” the man said in a tone that affected great relief.
“I’m afraid you didn’t,” Deal said. “I’ve got a job to check on. I’m already late.”
The man in the suit didn’t budge. “Would that be the Villas project, Mr. Deal? The property Franklin Stone had acquired out near the Salt Ponds?”
Deal hesitated, glancing at his watch again. “If there’s something I could help you with, maybe we could talk out there. I’d like to catch a couple of my men…”
“Perhaps we can save you a bit of trouble, then,” the man said, a smile spreading under his blanked-out eyes. “We’ve just come from Villas Cayo Hueso, you see. And as Tomás here will verify, there wasn’t a soul to be found, save for your watchman.”
“Eddie?” Deal said. He wasn’t so much surprised that everyone else was gone as he was that Eddie Hayduke had actually shown up on time.
“He did not provide us with his name,” the silver-haired man said. “But he did give us this address.”
Deal glanced again at the Town Car. “Are you down here from Miami?”
The question brought what seemed like a glare from Tomás, but the man in the suit gave a nod that was somewhere between acquiescence and denial. “We have in fact passed through Miami,” he said.
Something occurred to Deal then. “You stopped by my offices up there, yesterday. Spoke to my bookkeeper.”
It seemed to please the man. “Indeed we did, Mr. Deal. I’ve been quite anxious to talk to you. I have a most interesting proposition, you see. And you are the very man I need.”
“I didn’t get your name,” Deal said.
“No, you did not,” the man agreed, smiling once again. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers softly. Tomás reached into a pocket of his guayabera and produced—rather deftly for a man his size, Deal thought—what appeared to be a business card. The man in the suit received the card over his shoulder without a backward glance, then extended it between his first two fingers toward Deal. A theatrical gesture, Deal thought, but he appreciated good theater as much as the next person.
“My name is Fuentes,” the silver-haired man said, in his confident baritone. “Antonio Fuentes. And I have come a great distance to speak with you.”
Deal descended the staircase far enough to take the card from the outstretched fingers. He glanced at the bodyguard, then more closely at Fuentes. His old man had been a great fan of the black-and-white gangster movies of the forties and fifties. Here was Cesar Romero in the flesh, he thought, unflappableness incarnate.
He examined the card Fuentes had handed him—no phone number, no address, no company affiliation, simply the name in a bold, flowing script. Deal gave Fuentes a questioning look, and the man made a placating gesture with his hands.
“Please, Mr. Deal,” he said, indicating the office door behind him. “If I could simply have a few moments of your time. It is my earnest intention to make you a wealthy man.”
Deal had to stifle a smile at the outrageousness of it, but then again, how often did people show up at his offices offering to make him rich? His old man had probably had characters like Fuentes standing in line on a daily basis, but he was more accustomed to strip-mall developers beating him up for fifty cents off the square foot. He had another look at the cut of Fuentes’ suit, then turned and headed for his door. “All right, Mr. Fuentes, you can come on up.”
***
“How much do you know about Cuba, Mr. Deal?” Fuentes was sitting in one of the battered wicker cabriolets that had apparently served the former occupant of the offices as side chairs, his fingers tented over the plume of his dark red tie. He still wore his sunglasses, an affectation that Deal found annoying.
Deal glanced at Tomás, who remained standing, hovering at his boss’ shoulder. He was about to answer Fuentes when something dawned on him. “Do you wear your glasses for a reason, Mr. Fuentes?”
Fuentes offered his saturnine smile. “Are you asking if I am blind?” He raised a finger to the side of his glasses, continuing before Deal could answer. “It is an unusual condition which makes my eyes extremely sensitive to light. In the sunlight, it is very difficult for me. Even here in this room, it seems quite bright.”
Deal glanced about the office. He’d switched off his desk lamp on his way out earlier, leaving only the late-afternoon light reflecting through the single window on his left. Another half hour, they’d be sitting in the dark. “I’m sorry,” Deal said.
Fuentes waved it away. “It’s disconcerting, speaking to a man when you cannot see his eyes. I quite understand.”
“You were asking me about Cuba,” Deal said, trying to get them back on track. “What about it?”
“I was simply curious,” Fuentes said. “How much you know, the level of your interest.”
“I’ve lived in South Florida all my life,” Deal said. “It’d be pretty difficult not to know a little bit about the place.”
“Have you ever traveled there?”
Deal shook his head. “It’s not all that easy. Are you trying to sell tickets, Mr. Fuentes?”
Fuentes laughed softly, but Tomás’ face stayed stony. Deal found himself wondering if the bodyguard spoke English. He looked rather Teutonic, but he’d been fooled that way before. “I am not a travel agent, I assure you,” Fuentes said. “I was simply curious.”
“My old man used to go down to Havana before the revolution,” Deal said. “He had a boat he liked to take there a couple of times a year.”
“And you never went along?”
“I was in diapers,” Deal said. “Besides, he was going down there to raise hell.”
Fuentes nodded. “Havana was a good place for that, back then.”
“So I hear,” Deal said. “I’m sure there’s a point to all this.”
“Would you call yourself an impatient man, Mr. Deal?”
“I’m anxious to get rich, that’s all.”
Fuentes seemed pleased with that. “Havana was once a magnificent city,” he said. “Is
still
a magnificent city,” he corrected himself, “though it is crumbling as we speak.”
Deal nodded. He’d heard the sentiment often enough from architects and others. “Are you Cuban?” he asked Fuentes.
Fuentes offered his smile before he answered. “I prefer to call myself a citizen of the world, Mr. Deal. But I do have a great interest in the country, and in its potential. That is what I have come to talk with you about.”
Deal stared. “Are you sure you haven’t got me confused with someone else?”
“Quite sure, Mr. Deal,” Fuentes said, he shifted in his chair, leaning forward as if giving in to Deal’s impatience. “You see, great changes are impending in this country to the south. Ninety miles from where we sit. Closer by half than to Miami.”
“And it might as well be a thousand miles,” Deal said.
“For now,” Fuentes said, dismissively. “But these political impediments that seem so monumental at present will soon disintegrate into nothingness. Think back a few years. One day the Berlin Wall was standing, the next day Coca-Cola was flowing outside the Kremlin.”
“The situation is hardly the same,” Deal said. “There are plenty of Cubans in Florida who aren’t exactly ready to buddy up with Castro.”
It brought another dismissive wave from Fuentes. “Soon Castro will be gone,” he said, “and with him will go the fuel that fires the political theatrics you refer to. There is a tide of dollars coming that will sweep all that away forever.”
“That’s a rather cynical position, Mr. Fuentes.”
“I would rather call it optimism, Mr. Deal.”
“I seem to remember a lot of people thinking they’d get rich once the Berlin Wall came down,” Deal said. “But they forgot nobody had any money to buy all the Cokes and Levi’s we were going to sell over there.”
“Which brings us to the reason I’ve come to talk with you, Mr. Deal. I am not here to talk to you about trade. I’m here to talk about infrastructure.”
Deal shook his head. “Then maybe you ought to get to it.”
“You’re a builder,” Fuentes said. “And an intelligent man. I should have thought you’d have pieced it together by now.”
“My grades were never that good,” Deal said. “Why don’t you help me out?”
“It’s why I asked if you had ever visited Havana,” Fuentes told him. “If you had, you would realize the scope of the work to which I refer. As one gauge, consider that the United Nations presently sponsors a multinational effort to restore certain of the most important structures in Old Havana. The entire budget of this enterprise is less than twenty million dollars annually. You have a practiced eye, Mr. Deal. If you were to survey Habana Vieja and the Malecón for yourself, you would see that twenty
billion
would scarcely scratch the surface.”
Some of Fuentes’ reserve had left him now, and his voice had risen to something resembling urgency. “Fifty years of neglect, Mr. Deal. Try to imagine Venice or Florence transported to the tropics and left for fifty years without a single coat of paint, a tightened screw, a roof tile replaced. The scope of the work to be done in restoration alone is enormous. And that does not take into account the amount of new construction that is inevitable: hotels, convention centers, marinas, state-of-the-art port and transportation facilities…”
“Who’s going to pay for all this?” Deal asked.
“This is not Bulgaria we’re talking about. People
want
to travel to Cuba, just as your own father did. Americans will flock there again by the hundreds of thousands, once the obstacles have been cleared and the amenities they seek are in place, and never mind any misguided rabble-rousers who don’t wish to join the parade. The politicians who manipulate them now for profit will be the very ones reaping the rewards of a revitalized Cuba.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out, Mr. Fuentes. I still don’t see where I come in.”
Fuentes paused and sat back in his chair, regarding Deal over his retented fingers as if he were a parent calculating how to handle a troublesome child. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said after a moment. “The truth is that you are convenient.”
“I’m sorry?”
Fuentes leaned forward again. “You come highly recommended to us,” he said.
“Us?” Deal said. He didn’t imagine that Fuentes was talking about him and Tomás. He held up the card bearing Fuentes’ name. “Just who the hell
is
us, anyway?”
Fuentes held up a hand meant to calm him. “I represent a group of businessmen, an international consortium with significant ties to interests in the United States as well, who have positioned themselves to be of aid as Cuba struggles to rebuild itself. Not everyone there—and I include some in the present government—is inimical to the prospect of increased foreign development, not even the involvement of individuals from your own country.”
“Dollars have a way of making friends,” Deal said.
“
Exactamente
,” Fuentes said. If he had heard any irony in Deal’s tone, he gave no sign of it.
“I’m a builder, Mr. Fuentes, not a politician. And the last time I checked, American companies weren’t permitted to do business in Havana or anywhere else in Cuba. When and if that changes, I’d be happy to talk to you and your partners, whoever they are, about the various possibilities, but right now, I think that we’re both wasting our time.”
“I assure you that we are not,” Fuentes said. He reached inside his suit coat and withdrew an envelope, then laid it on Deal’s desk. Deal eyed it suspiciously. Blank, no addressee, no return address, the same cream-colored linen stock as the card Fuentes had handed him.
“What’s that?” Deal said.
“Consider it a retainer,” Fuentes said.
“For what?” Deal asked.
“For your services as a consultant.”
“What if I’m not interested?”
“Why don’t you open it before deciding?”
Deal gave Fuentes a look, then picked up the envelope, untucked the flap. Folded inside a sheet of thick stationery bearing Fuentes’ name he found a cashier’s check, made out to John Deal, drawn on a bank in the Cayman Islands. Deal checked the figures, then glanced back at Fuentes.
“You must have made a typo,” he said. “My bookkeeper just did the same thing.”
Fuentes smiled. “The amount is correct, I assure you.”
Deal looked at the check again, just to make sure. “Why would you want to offer me a million dollars, Mr. Fuentes?” Deal’s gaze traveled to Tomás as he spoke. The expression on the bodyguard’s face suggested he shared the same sentiment. So much for questioning his grasp of English, Deal thought.
Fuentes made the dismissive gesture with his hands again. “It’s simply a first installment. I told you it was my intention to make you a wealthy man.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Deal said, tossing the envelope back on the desk. “I’d be interested to know who sent you here and exactly what services you think I can provide that are worth that kind of money.”
“I’ll be frank with you,” Fuentes said, and for the first time his tone seemed sincere. “I’m here to take advantage of your pedigree. As you point out, you are not a political animal. Of the half-dozen builders of your rank in South Florida, you’re the only person who wouldn’t have thrown me out of his office the moment I broached the subject and the location of our undertaking. For another, your reputation is impeccable. In fact, it precedes you with our friends inside the ministries to the south. You may not have been aware of it, but your father had many influential friends in Cuba. And not all of them departed during the general Diaspora.”