When she was through, she came stealthily back to bed, lay silently beside me for perhaps ten minutes, and then set about gently awakening me. When she dropped off into sleep again, I could sense that it was a very deep sleep. I tested it by shaking her, speaking her name. She made querulous little sounds that faded into a small buzzing snore. Ten minutes later I flagged down a hurrying cab on Third Avenue, in the first grey of a tomcat dawn. At the Wharton, I got my key at the desk and went up and took a shower.
After the shower, I sat on the bed and went through the envelope of photographs I had taken from her purse as I left her apartment. I took out the five pictures of the statues which had definitely belonged to Carlos Menterez y Cruzada and stowed them in my suitcase. I printed her name and address on the outside of the envelope in square block letters. It is an old caution, and the only way any person can completely disguise their own handwriting. Merely hold the pencil as straight up and down as possible, use all capitals, and base them all on a square format, so that the O for example, becomes a square, and an A is a square with the base line missing and a line bisecting it horizontally. No handwriting expert can ever make a positive identification of printing done in that manner, because it bears no relation to your normal handwriting. After I awoke, I would get it sealed downstairs, buy the stamps and mail it.
I slid between the hotel sheets and turned out the bed lamp. There was a brighter morning grey at the windows. I tried to sort out the facts I had learned. Facts kept getting entangled with textural memories of the woman, so gaspingly ardent. The facts and the woman followed me down into sleep, where the little gold figures came alive and one of them, an East Indian one, a woman with six graceful arms, made tiny little cries and fastened herself to my leg like a huge spider, bared little golden teeth and sank them into the vein while I tried to kick her away.
Seven
I CAUGHT an early afternoon flight out of Kennedy, after phoning Nora from the terminal. She was waiting at the gate, and as I had just my hand luggage, we went directly to her little black car in the parking lot. It was a warm beautiful afternoon. She looked very trim and chic in a pale grey dress, a light yellow cardigan.
“You look better,” I told her.
“Shaj took charge,” she said. “It was a lovely afternoon, and I spent all of it in the side garden, soaking up the sun. I was beginning to look mealy. The sun exhausted me. I slept twelve hours, had my hair done this morning, and I had a drink while I was waiting for you, and I feel almost human for the first time in a long time. You didn’t find out anything, did you?”
“A little bit.”
“Really? What?” The sudden intensity gave her that hawk look, the dark eyes very fierce, the lips thinner, the nose predatory.
I drove out of the lot. When I was clear of the airport area, I said, “A rich Cuban, a buddy of Batista’s, collected the figurines. He bought five of them from the Borlika Galleries. By the best luck you can imagine, one of the five he bought was the one Sam showed me. That gave me the break, and I did a little gambling, and it opened up very nicely. Carlos Menterez y Cruzada. Businessman, age about fifty now if still living.”
“They told you all that? Why?”
“They got the impression I have the collection. Twenty-eight pieces. They don’t care how I got them. We agreed on a price. A hundred and thirtyseven thousand, five hundred. Cash. A very quiet deal.”
“Sam thought they were worth more.”
“They are, if you can sell them in the open. They’re worth less on a back street. Anything is. I don’t think Sam’s title was exactly airtight.”
“Did Sam steal them for Carlos Whosis?”
“That wasn’t quite Sam’s style.”
“I wouldn’t think so. Then how?”
“However he got them, Nora, it attracted the wrong kind of attention.”
“All right. So you know who used to own them, you think. Does that really mean very much?”
“When we get to the boat I’ll show you something.”
I fixed her a drink and left her in the lounge. I took my bag into the master stateroom, changed quickly to slacks and a sports shirt, and took the pictures out and handed them to her. “The one on top is the one Sam showed me. The other four are from the Menterez collection.”
She looked at them very carefully, lips compressed, frown lines between her heavy dark brows. She looked up at me. “They’re strange and terrible little things, aren’t they?”
“I keep wondering how many people have gotten killed over them. I saw a golden toad with ruby eyes in New York, two thousand years old. He looked as if he couldn’t count the men he’d watched die.”
She rapped the sheaf of cards against her knuckles. “This is something definite. This is real, Trav. I… don’t know much about all the conjecture and analysis and so on. But something I can hold and touch…”
I took them away from her and took them forward and put them in my safe. Any fifty-four foot boat has innumerable hiding places, and a houseboat has more than a cruiser. Once I turned a very accomplished thief loose aboard the Busted Flush. I gave him four hours to find my safe. He was a friend. I watched him work. He was very very good. When his time was up, he hadn’t even come close.
“What will you do with the pictures?” Nora asked when I returned to the lounge.
“I don’t know. They’re bluff cards. And they’ll come as a great shock to somebody.”
“What do we do next?”
“Find out a little bit more about Menterez.”
That evening, in Miami, it took me well over an hour to locate my friend, Raoul Tenero. He is nearly thirty and looks forty. He was just beginning his career as an architect in Havana when Castro took over. I met him at some parties in Havana preCastro. When he got out of Cuba, he looked me up. I introduced him to some people. He worked for a time, and then went back in and was captured at the Bay of Pigs. He was finally exchanged with the others. His pretty wife, Nita, had a vague idea of his schedule.I finally caught up with him in a youth center building, part of the park system.
It was one of their endless committee meetings, not on political action, not on invasion, but on how to fit their people into the Yankee culture, find the jobs, assist each other. It works. They have that unyielding, unending, remorseless pride. They are the objects of considerable resentment, as is only normal for the human animal when a big batch of people of a different heritage move in. But of all the ethnic groups in the Miami area, the Cubanos have the lowest crime rate.
I spotted him on the far side of the room in a small group of about nine men, chairs pulled into a circle. Raoul has the true Spanish look, the long chalky face, deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and elegant way of handling his body when he moves. He saw me and held his hand up, thumb and first finger a half inch apart in the universal Latin gesture of indicating just a little bit more time. Six or seven groups were in discussion. Some of them were very loud. I moved out into the night and leaned against the building and smoked a cigarette and watched the asphalt hiss of night traffic.
In about ten minutes he came out. “You all sewed up?” I asked him.
“No. I’m through in there. It’s a resettlement thing. Winston-Salem. Ten families. Fifty-eight people. I took time off and flew up there and talked to the people who’ve been working on it. Nice people, Travis. Now it’s all reassurance, prying them loose from here, from the Havana Annex. They think there’s eight feet of snow all winter in North Carolina.”
“I need some information and a drink.”
“I’ll watch you drink, Seсor. While I have milk.”
“Still messed up?”
He gave a mirthless laugh. “I gave my stomach for my country. Tried some rum a week ago. One drink. Broken glass would have been easier. That Havana Yacht Club cruise, it was hard on the inside man. How’d you find me? You see Nita?”