Authors: Denise Kahn
“My son, although you remember my friend, you never really met him, so you now have been introduced to this person I consider my only other relative. This is Mario.”
“
The
Mario?”
Carlos nodded.
“I am honored,” Zeferino said.
“I have wanted to meet you for a long time. It is unfortunate that it has to be under such circumstances.”
“Yes, Mario knows,” Carlos said, answering his son’s questioning look. “I told him. I believe Mario has the means to help you.”
“I’m very grateful, sir,” Zeferino said.
“Call me uncle but never sir. Agreed?”
“Alright, Uncle Mario.”
“Good,” Mario said, cracking a knuckle. “Good.”
♫
MIAMI
CHAPTER 41
On the third day of Alejandro’s stay at the Miami Burn Center, Melina and Eleni left for Athens. They would make a special pilgrimage to light a candle in Tinos, a church known for its miracles by all Greeks. Davina was still deeply depressed and hardly talking, which was most distressing, but she was eating more. In any case, she would not be alone. Jacques and Monique were still living at the villa, and of course the police continued to guard the house around the clock.
Miami detectives and the FBI were battling the twin challenges of trying to find Simon Grady and trying to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of the international press without giving too much away and without looking ineffectual. In fact, there wasn’t much information to give. Nobody knew where Grady was. B.A. went back to work the streets but it was quiet. Grady, wherever he was, was alone. Sergeant Ernesto Martinez was following up on a hunch. It required a great deal of patience and finesse. The Spanish consul to Cuba, Alejandro del Valle, had complicated things because Martinez had broken a confidence, which was a serious breach. It wasn’t that he did not trust Jacques Lafitte. He trusted him alright, but he knew about secrets. They were bought and sold and bargained for every day in the streets by the police and the keepers of secrets. He knew that the older a secret was, the less its chances of remaining a secret.
True to their word, Jacques and Monique kept the secret of Alejandro’s rescue. They had no intention of breaking their promise, at least not until they saw Alejandro. He was half his original weight. His arms, legs, feet, and buttocks were wrapped in thick bandages. He was lying on his stomach on a special bed with pulleys that held out his limbs. Intravenous needles carried mixtures of fluids and medicines into his body.
He had begun to undergo skin grafting, primarily for his legs and hands, where the most severe damage was. His burning wounds were caused not from any flames but from the time he spent at sea on the raft. His face, perhaps because of the beard, was not affected but it showed his pain.
Jacques and Monique felt almost guilty being there secretly with Alejandro. Damn the Spanish Embassy, damn the Ambassador, to hell with them all! They had no right, nobody did, to keep a man’s existence a secret, especially not this tortured man. It was criminal not to tell Davina. She had to be told.
She must know
.
Jacques and Monique, wearing white smocks over their street clothes, were accompanied by one of the physicians. The doctor pushed a foot lever and Alejandro’s bed rose hydraulically with only the slightest vibration. Any other movement would have made him scream with the pain, despite the medication given to him.
“Alejandro,” the doctor said gently, “how are you feeling today?”
There was no answer.
“I know you’re feeling pretty lousy. I know it hurts. Two of your friends are here with me.”
Jacques reached over and lightly touched his shoulder. “Alejandro, it’s so good to see you,” he said, his eyes welling up. “We’ve missed you so much. Please talk to me, if you can. We’ve been so worried about you.”
The room was eerily silent, but then ever so slowly, tears began to stream down Alejandro’s cheeks. Jacques thought his heart would explode. He reached for his friend’s face and put his cheek next to the other man’s.
Monique kissed his other cheek. She put her hand on the now shaven face and gave him a radiant smile. “Hello, handsome,” she said. “Come on, smile. If you don’t, Jacques will faint like a lily right on this floor.”
Alejandro managed a smile, and then he cried some more.
“We should let him rest,” the doctor said, standing to leave. But neither Jacques nor Monique wanted to leave. They had just arrived!
“Alejandro, the doctor wants us to leave,” Jacques said evenly. “We don’t want to. Do you want us to leave?”
Alejandro finally spoke, although with difficulty. “Nnnooo.”
“You see, doctor,” Jacques said, jubilant, “he wants us to stay. Right, Alejandro?”
“Yesss,” Alejandro answered.
“Very well,” the doctor said, excusing himself.
Alejandro kept talking. “Da…vi…na,” he said. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what, Alejandro?”
“Don’t…tell…her.”
“Don’t tell her? Don’t tell her what?”
“Don’t tell… her… I’m alive.”
“But why not?” Jacques asked.
“No, no… please.”
“Alejandro, Davina is going through hell,” Monique said. “The doctors have given her medication for her depression. What she really needs is you, Alejandro. Just knowing you’re alive would help her.”
“No. No, not… yet.”
The doctor came back into the room and forced Jacques and Monique to leave their best man. “He is very weak,” the doctor said. “He needs to sleep and get his strength back.”
They kissed their friend goodbye.
“We’ll be back,” Monique said, “please reconsider your decision, Alejandro. Please think about it.”
“I will.”
♫
CHAPTER 42
Davina could not walk anywhere in the villa without memories of Alejandro. Each trinket, every chair, every cushion reminded her of him. They had bought the house when Alejandro was transferred to Havana, and they had furnished it together. It was their home, their niche, their nest, where they had loved each other. Her favorite photograph on the baby grand in the living room was of Alejandro and her father in their gray tails at Jacques and Monique’s wedding. They stared back at her with their blue eyes, her father’s a shade gray, Alejandro’s more violet. She slid her fingers across the glass and gently caressed the faces of the men she adored. And lost.
She opened the piano and stared at the black and white teeth smiling at her.
Touch us!
They pleaded.
Make us sing!
Davina caressed the keys. This was the first time she heard music since the Orange Bowl concert. She had refused to listen to the radio or play any music otherwise, but now she listened reflectively to the tone of a key and touched several other keys until she was playing a melody, one she had never before heard. It was a tender, melancholic music.
She went back over the same melody and added new tones. It was a song, she realized, and then she began to write down the notes. She had been at the piano for almost three hours when Monique and Jacques came in.
Seeing Davina at the piano made Monique remember the many times they had spent together composing, writing, and singing. She and Jacques were respectfully quiet, not wanting to disturb Davina. They watched her long graceful fingers masterfully dance on the keys. They did not break the silence until they left the living room.
“
C’est
magnifique,
” Jacques whispered to Monique.
“I agree. One of her best pieces.”
It was superb. It could be, could very well be a hit single, Jacques thought. The melody was about Alejandro, about Davina’s pain for him. That was clear. How they longed to tell her!
He’s alive!
They both ached with the agony of having this secret, a secret that would not be bought or sold or bargained over. It took their appetites. Monique said she could not go back into the living room because if she did, she was not at all sure she could keep Alejandro’s secret.
Davina continued playing into the night, working on that single composition. She was lost in it, hypnotized by this tender music. It described the man she loved, slow and gentle at first, like the beginning of their relationship, then powerful and vibrant like their love, and finally explosive, and then melancholic. He was there with her, sitting next to her on the bench with his arm around her shoulders, as she played their song. Yes, it was
their
song. She returned his smile, and when she finished playing the melody, he picked her up in his arms and whirled her around the room. They were so happy!
Davina looked at the picture again before she closed the cover over the keys. Tears silently slid down her cheeks. She laid her head down on the piano and fell asleep.
♫
CHAPTER 43
The Varig flight from Brazil landed ten minutes early at Miami International. As planned, Johnny Thornton was there waiting. Zeferino and his father, Mario and two other men, “old friends of the family,” Zeferino said, climbed into Johnny’s car and drove to Collins Avenue. Everything had been planned, although Johnny thought he was picking up only Zeferino from the airport, and Zeferino did not know that Johnny had planned a rendezvous with Jean.
A few weeks ago, Johnny Thornton was a boy, but he had grown in ways that he could not have imagined. Perhaps the shock of losing his sister had aged him. He felt distinctly mature and much wiser and, for the first time in his life, bitter. He was his own man. He knew exactly what he wanted. He would keep his promise to Gina to finish his studies, but not until after he did what he had to do. He had promised Zeferino when he left for Brazil that he would not do anything until he returned and they would do what they had to do together.
When Zeferino was in Brazil, Johnny began to search for Jean. Sergeant Ernesto Martinez told him she was working in a restaurant in Miami Beach, which is where he found her, and he managed to convince her that it was time to get on with life—that is, life without Simon Grady. He had already taken too much from them.
Jean had a deep mistrust of police. The police had arrested her because they took Grady’s word. They had believed him. It didn’t matter to the police that she had been beaten senseless. The cops would never find him. Jean wanted desperately to get on with her life. She promised Johnny that she would work with him and not try to get to Simon on her own. She would search her memory, try to remember a person, a place, something that would be the connection to Grady’s whereabouts. Then they could get to him together.
As Johnny parked behind Los Pollos, Zeferino wondered aloud what they were doing here.
“Jean works here,” Johnny said. “She’s got an idea.”
The men piled into a booth, and rather uncomfortably. Mario and his friends Diogo and Rafael, were hefty men. They wore dark pin-stripe suits and hats, the kind that had long been out of fashion in the States.
When Jean saw them, she almost tripped and spilled the glasses of water she was carrying on a tray. Johnny smiled her way and she nodded to him.
“Uncle Mario, Diogo and Rafael are here to help us,” Zeferino began, speaking directly to Johnny. “They are, well… professionals.”
Jean returned with coffee.
“Can you sit down?” Johnny asked her.
“Just for a minute.”
Zeferino thought she looked tired. Of course, the baby. He had forgotten. “How are you?” he asked her.
“Okay I guess.”
“Please sit,” Carlos da Cunha said to her.
“Thank you,” she said and looked at the dark somber faces of the Brazilians. She felt a shiver go up her spine. She lowered her voice. “The police are watching me. There’s always a guard somewhere watching me. Well, he’s guarding me. From Simon.”
Mario nodded to Diogo and Rafael. They had noticed the cop out front. They could smell him.
“She thinks she knows where Simon is,” Johnny whispered.
Jean shrugged. “Maybe. Simon lived with some Seminole Indians for a few months when he was a boy. It’s not easy to find the place. It’s in the Everglades. There’s nothing out there but swamp.”
“Jean, you’ve got to tell us how to get there,” Johnny said. “We can’t take you along with us. It’s too dangerous.”
Zeferino and Carlos da Cunha were translating for the other Brazilians, who agreed with Johnny. It was much too dangerous to risk taking Jean.
She knew, how well she knew what Simon Grady was capable of. She had no argument with them. But she could not give directions to that shack in the swamps. It had been too many years since she had been there. As it was, she would have to figure out the way as she went along, using whatever landmarks were still there to guide her.
“We don’t want anything to happen to you, Jean,” Zeferino said.
“It’s alright,” Mario said in Portuguese. “We won’t let anything happen to her.” He understood that Jean too needed this revenge, she needed closure, perhaps more than any of them. “Now,” he said, cracking a knuckle. “There is the matter of the policeman who guards her. Tomorrow she comes to work. Thirty minutes before the end of her shift, she takes off her apron and she leaves in different clothes.”
Zeferino translated this for Jean and Johnny.
“You,” Mario said, pointing to Johnny. “She leaves with you.”
And one more thing, Mario said, they wanted coffee not tea.
“This is coffee, Uncle Mario, American coffee. Try the Cuban coffee.”
♫