“Eighty-four people.”
“Eighty-four?” asked the interpreter in disbelief.
“Eighty-four,” whispered Ocho Sedano.
“What happened to the boat?”
“It sank.”
“And the people?”
“They went into the water … sharks.”
“Sharks?”
“Some people were swept over the side during a storm our first night at sea. Diego Coca shot the captain, some people died of thirst … Diego jumped into the sea. The children died of exhaustion and hunger, I think — it is really impossible to say. There was no food or water, only rain to drink. When the boat sank those who were left were eaten by sharks. If they didn’t drown. I hope Dora drowned.
“The old fisherman and I were spared …. Did you find him? The old fisherman? Did you see him in the ocean?” He clawed at Autrey James, who drew back out of reach.
“No,” the interpreter said. “You were the only one.”
They went away then, all of them, left him to eat the food and stare at the ceiling and think about the fact that he was alive and all the others were dead.
The others were dead. He was alive. What did that mean?
Was God crazy?
Why me?
He was thinking about that when someone came to put solution in his eyes again. This time the solution made him cry.
He sobbed for a minute or two, then his body gave out and he slept.
“Why did you not put the gold in a bank vault?”
Mercedes had asked this question of Fidel several years ago, when he first told her of the gold pesos. As she sat on her mother-in-law’s small porch completing her blouse, she remembered the question, and Fidel’s answer:
“If we kept the gold in a bank, the international bankers would have learned of it eventually, would have demanded that we post it as security for a loan. Then a hurricane would come or the bottom would drop out of the sugar market one year, and the gold would be gone.”
“But the gold does not help Cuba. Why own it?”
“The gold is ours,” he said obstinately. “When it is gone it is gone for all Cubans forever.”
“But you hid it, so it is gone now.”
“Oh, no. You and I know where it is. As long as it is hidden, it belongs to Cuba.”
She couldn’t shake him — he had the peasant’s love of the secret hoard, the instinctual drive to bury a can of money or hide it in a mattress, just in case. No matter how bad things got in the house, the money was always there, hidden, an asset that could be tapped to stave off starvation or disaster.
He said as much when he admitted, “In the middle of the night, when I am alone and the world is heavy on my shoulders, I remember we still have the gold.”
Fidel and Che Guevara hid it together, for Cuba. Guevara was killed in Bolivia and apparently took the secret to his grave. Fidel didn’t want to — he told the one person on this earth he trusted.
She wished she didn’t know this thing. As she worked on the last seam of the blouse, she thought about this great secret, about what she should do.
Mercedes Sedano had confided in no one, had written nothing down. With Fidel dead the gold was only one heartbeat away from being lost forever. She must do something, but what?
Fidel had been a knot of contradictions. She had argued with him — challenged the macho man himself — and he had admitted some of his failures, which was a rare moment for him. Not all of his errors, but some.
“I am the only communist in Cuba,” he said, laughing. “Becoming a communist was a mistake — of course I can never say that in public. We had to declare our independence from the American financiers and corporations. In the fullness of time it turned out that the Russian horse couldn’t run the race, which was unfortunate, but that didn’t mean we were wrong in the first place.” He shrugged.
He had the Latin’s ability to accept life’s vicissitudes as they came with courage and grace.
“The best thing about communism was the dictatorship. The economic twaddle meant nothing. Someone had to show the Cuban people they could stand on their own feet, that they didn’t need to sell their souls to the Americans or the Catholic Church.” He smiled again, made a gesture toward heaven. “The truth is we were too poor to afford the Church or the Americans.”
If Santana or Vargas tortured her, she would tell them about the gold. To suffer horribly and die for a secret that you thought illogical was worse than stupid — it would be a sin.
Did he ever wonder what she would do if she found herself in this situation?
She finished the last seam, shook out the blouse, and held it up so she could view it.
Had Fidel really trusted her to make the decision that was best for Cuba, or did he just think that she would keep her mouth shut?
For Maximo Sedano the question was simple and stark: Where was the gold?
Rumors had circulated for forty years, and not a flake had ever surfaced. Several men swore they had helped melt the coins into ingots in a smelter in the basement of the Ministry of Finance, but they never knew what happened to the ingots. Alejo Vargas had been running the secret police for twenty years and the Ministry of Interior for the last ten and probably hunting for the gold for at least nineteen, and he hadn’t found it. At least Maximo didn’t believe he had. In forty years no loose ends had unraveled … so there must have been no loose ends.
The conclusion Maximo drew from these facts was that only a very few people — Fidel, perhaps his brother Raúl, maybe Che — had known the secret in the first place. Today the secret might be known by a few people who had been close to them. In any event, there were no elderly workmen about who liked to run their mouth when they drank their rum — Vargas would have found anyone like that years ago.
So the gold wasn’t made into statues, poured like concrete into a floor or foundation, made into bricks and used to construct a state building, or transported to some flyspecked hovel and buried under the floor. No. If the gold had been hidden this way, someone involved in the labor would have talked during the last forty years.
If there were secret records waiting to be discovered or letters in bank vaults, Maximo would never discover them. All he had were his wits.
With Fidel dead and Alejo Vargas ascendant, Maximo was using his wits now, applying them as never before.
In search of inspiration, he walked the streets of Havana to the Museum of the Revolution.
Like so many revolutionaries who swashbuckled through the pages of human history, after his victory Fidel found it expedient to enshrine himself as the savior of the nation so that he might remain at the helm permanently. Of course, to properly do the job it was also necessary to build a monument to the venality and depravity of his enemies, because great heroes need worthy opponents. Amazingly, all this good, evil, and greatness fit neatly under one roof: the presidential palace that had been the residence of Fulgencio Batista.
Maximo walked quickly through the exhibits that detailed Batista’s corruption — what he sought would not be there.
He quickly found what he was looking for. Fidel the savior, “El Lider Maximo,” portraits, busts, memorabilia, candid and posed photographs, heroic paintings — all of this was enough to turn the stomach of anyone who had actually known the man, Maximo thought. Alas, Fidel had been very flawed clay: megalomaniacal, filled with a sense of his own magnificent destiny, boorish, opinionated, pigheaded, insufferable, prejudiced, loquacious to a fault, and, all too often, just plain wrong. What a tragedy that this self-annointed messiah was stranded in this third world backwater and never had the opportunity to save the species, which he could have done if only God had sent him to Moscow or Washington.