Fifty Grand (48 page)

“Why did you go to America, if not to kill the man who killed your father?” he asks in a quiet tone.

It’s not an unreasonable question. It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself. “For the same reason I joined the PNR. The truth. Do you remember the truth?”

“Don’t get smart with me, Officer Mercado. I could have you and your
captain and your brother and your mother thrown into a dungeon for fifty years. Your whole
solar
. Everyone you know.”

I look at my feet. Save yourself. Save yourself. You did it on the ice. Do it now. “I beg your pardon, Comrade Castro. I spoke hastily.”

He grunts. “Apology accepted, Comrade Mercado.”

A long silence.

The guards muttering. Someone warming up the car. Parrots and macaws screeching as they walk along the tree branches.

The question has been hanging here the whole time, but I can’t ask it. Not yet. Why are
you
so interested in my father, Comrade Raúl?

“Do you like Hemingway?” Raúl asks in a stern pedagogic voice.

“I haven’t read much. The Cuba novels in school.
The Island of Streams, The Old Man in the Sea
.”

“Islands in the Stream, The Old Man and the Sea,”
Raúl corrects.

“Of course.”

“For the chief it was always
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Hemingway wrote that book in the Ambos Mundos in Habana Vieja and he bought this very house with the first royalty payment. The book is about the necessity of killing one’s enemies. Killing without favor or malice or mercy. But you have killed, Comrade Mercado. Four men.”

The watery eyes boring into me.

“Four in a little over a week. How does that make you feel?”

“Sick.”

“I myself have never killed anyone.”

I can’t help but raise my eyebrows. He sees, grins. “But I have signed the warrants on many. I signed the warrant on your father at his trial in absentia.”

“I know.” And that’s the opening I want. Now is the time. “If I may ask, Comrade Raúl, why—”

“Your father worked for me. Juan Mercado was a DGI officer. G6.”

“He was a ticket taker on the bay ferry.”

Raúl smiles. “Wasn’t he, though? I’ll bet he met everyone in Havana at one point or another. He was with us right from the start. From boyhood. The early days.”

“Not once did he talk to us about the Revolution,” I say, my voice trembling, my composure going.

“No. He wouldn’t.”

“It’s not true.” Desperation. For all his faults, Dad was no rat.

Raúl regards me, lifts his cup, waits. There’s no point in saying anything. We both know he’s not lying.

“Why?” I manage.

“We needed men in the exile community in Miami. A mass defection has always been the best way of inserting agents. Your father was well known, well liked. We knew he would go far. We arranged the whole thing. Your father was one of half a dozen agents on that boat. Of course we knew that as soon as they landed in America, they would all be given U.S. citizenship with only the briefest of background checks. And Juan’s record was clean. Ah, yes. I ran that operation personally. It was the last one I did before I retired. I was proud of it.”

“What did he do for you in America?”

“Oh, he got a job. He joined the right groups. He gave money to the right causes. He knew the right people. He was as popular in Miami as he was in Havana. We were grooming him. He could have gone far.”

“Could have gone?”

Raul blinks rapidly, sighs. “He met a woman, a younger woman.”

“Karen.”

“Karen, yes. She was at the University of Miami, studying for her teaching license, but she was from North Dakota. When she finished her degree she went back to North Dakota. He followed her. They got married. North Dakota is of no use to us. There are no Cubans in North Dakota. We had six good agents on that ferry. One died of AIDS. Two came back to Cuba. One ended up in an American prison for dealing cocaine. And one found Jesus Christ. Your father was the last one from that insertion. I did not want him to leave Miami. We ordered him not to leave Miami, but he went.”

“You must have more than one agent in America?”

Raúl laughs. “Dozens. But for me this was personal. This was my operation. This was my man. I told him to return to Miami or we would kill him. It was clumsy. We could have accommodated her . . . enough money will soothe most people . . . I made a mistake, I spooked him.”

Raúl looks out the window and holds up the empty coffeepot. Almost instantly, another one is brought, along with sweet cakes and dry black bread. Raúl offers me a cake but I decline.

“You should eat. After this interview who knows when your next meal will be, Officer Mercado,” Raúl says.

Sound advice. I eat the cake. And besides, I’m on the hook. I want to see where the story goes. “What happened next?”

“He disappeared. We lost him. Our hit teams could not find him, and after a while I called them off. My family is from Sevilla, and there they have a saying, ‘You hunt the wolf for a year and a day and then you must let him go.’ We put out the word that all was forgiven, but your father didn’t trust us. For five years he stayed hidden until he turned up dead in Colorado with a Mexican passport.”

I look at Raúl to gauge his reaction. “You were glad?”

“Glad? No. Not at all. But I was curious. A ratcatcher in Colorado? Perhaps that was the only job he could get. Perhaps he had lost none of
his
sense of humor. In a manner of speaking, that had been his job when he worked for me,” he says, his eyes narrowing at the half joke, the skin fold under his chin jiggling.

He coughs, clears his throat. “In any case, when your brother asked to travel to Colorado to bury your father, we let him go without making any difficulty. Your brother is a good reporter. When he brought back many documents and gave them to you, we knew you were going to go too. We knew you were going to find the man who killed him and that you were going to exact a child’s revenge.”

“I don’t think—” I begin, but Raúl puts his finger to his lips.

In Hemingway’s bedroom the girl is stirring.

Raúl appears startled. “Quickly, get up. If she sees you here there will be a holy row. These officers will take you back to your apartment.”

Warily, I get to my feet. “I’m free to go?”

“As a bird.”

I look at the tame parrots walking on the balcony rail. “You clip their wings.”

Raúl smiles. “Only the songbirds, Comrade Mercado. You’re not a songbird, are you?”

“No.”

A voice from the bedroom. “Raúl!”

“Coming. Just taking care of something!” Raúl shouts and leads me outside.

He leans on the black Chrysler and taps me on the shoulder.

“Big changes are coming, Mercado. Sooner than you would think.”

I raise an eyebrow. He points at Casa Hemingway. “All of this will be a
luxury. They won’t allow me to sleep anywhere that isn’t reinforced against the Yankee bunker-buster bombs, despite my talk of cultural protections.”

I’m not following him.

He frowns. “You see, that’s why we have to take care of all of the unfinished business now. In a few months I will have bigger fish to fry.”

“Yes,” I say, still confused.

My obtuseness is starting to irritate him. He sighs and changes the subject. “What should we do with you now, Comrade Mercado?” he whispers.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to join the DGI?”

“No.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to go back to my old job.”

“Then go.”

Raúl signals the guards to bring the Lada.

“Comrade Castro, can I, may I ask
you
a question? Two questions?”

Raúl looks inside the house. “Quickly. Quickly. Estelle is very un-Cuban in her attitude to infidelity.”

“What do I tell Hector? I mean Captain Ramirez.”

“Tell him the truth. You spent a week in Mexico City. You saw the pyramids, you prayed at the shrine of the Virgin. Your second question?”

“Will I see Paco again?”

Raúl looks puzzled, but then he understands. “Paco. Paco? Oh, Francisco. Yes. I picked that name for him. There is an old joke that Hemingway was fond of. Do you wish to hear it? I will tell you: A father in Madrid puts an advertisement in
El Liberal:
‘Paco, meet me at Hotel Montana, noon today, all is forgiven—Father.’ The Civil Guard has to come to disperse the crowd of eight hundred Pacos who respond to the ad.”

“His name is not Francisco?”

“No.”

I should be angry but I’m not. I lied to him. He lied to me.

“And I doubt that you will see him again. He lives in Miami.”

Raúl offers me a hand.

I shake it.

“Good luck, Officer Mercado. I hope to never see your name in any future report that crosses my desk.”

“You won’t.”

“Now, go.”

The goons show me to the car.

They drive me into town and drop me on the Malecón.

I walk to O’Reilly.

Outside the
solar
there’s a dead dog on the porch, a border collie. Flies around her eyes. Belonged to the family on the top floor.

Up the stairs.

A note on my apartment door from the landlord. My room has been broken into while I was away. They changed the locks.

I go down to the basement and bang on the landlord’s door. He appears with a baseball bat. I give him an IOU for a five-dollar bill.

Up the four flights. New key in the new lock.

Yeah, broken into, and not by the DGI—they don’t let you know they’ve been. This place has been ransacked. Thugs. The TV gone, my twenty-kilo bag of rice gone, my clothes gone. Poetry books gone.

I sit on the edge of the bed and cry.

Hector was right.

What was it he told me that Pindar said?
The gods give us for every good thing two evil ones. Men who are children take this badly but the manly ones bear it, turning the brightness outward.

Yes. Something like that.

I sit there and cry myself out.

The sound of rats. The sea. Clanking camel buses. American radio.

I need a drink. The man down the hall makes moonshine in his bath. I knock on his door and buy a liter bottle for another IOU. I pour a cup. It burns. I go downstairs.

“Use your phone?” I ask the landlord.

I call Ricky. Oh, Ricky, I was so stupid. To think that I could outwit
them
. To think that I could do anything right.

“You’re alive,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I was so worried.”

“Don’t be.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I think so.”

A pause.

“I believe I’m being followed,” he says in a whisper, as if that will fool the DGI bug.

“No, that’s all over. You won’t see them again,” I assure him.

Another pause while he takes this in.

“You’re alive, big sister.”

“Yes. I’m alive. And that’s something.”

I
wasn’t there. Airtight alibi. I was working a case in the Vieja—a dead German tourist, a dead prostitute, a missing pimp. I wasn’t there. It was nothing to do with me. I read about it the next day. It made the Mexican papers.

Jack Tyrone had just left his Hollywood Hills home. It was very early. He was going to an audition. A good role. They wanted him to play the part of Felix in a James Bond movie. Not the biggest lick, but worldwide exposure. He was drunk. At six-thirty in the morning. Jack Tyrone had well-documented problems with alcohol. His car went off the road right outside his house. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. The windshield shredded his pretty face, the fall down the canyon broke his back. The car landed on top of him and caught fire.

Even for the DGI it was good.

They’d probably gotten into his house in the middle of the night. Drugged him, tortured him, injected alcohol through a vein in his foot, rolled him down the canyon.

They broke the car windshield from the inside and smeared his blood on the steering wheel. How they got the car on top of him isn’t much of a mystery. They brought a truck with a winch. They were careful. They didn’t want it to crush him, just pin him sufficiently so they could burn him alive.

That’s how they do things.

Dad was their man. He was retired, but he belonged to them. No one else had the right to terminate his existence. Officially the L.A. coroner’s office
said that death would have been instantaneous, but the coroner and I knew better. Minute for minute, life for life. The DGI looks after its own.

I should have seen it coming but I don’t speak their language. Hector would have taken Raúl’s hints but I didn’t get them. I’ll never get them. That’s not me.