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 Liberaclass="underline" ‘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.”
22 A HAIR IN THE GATE
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.
I read Jack’s photo obit in People en Espanol. Banned but readily available. Photographs of him at Cannes, in Darfur, at a Vegas party with Pitt and Clooney. His eyes staring at the camera, his body well positioned between bigger stars.
I looked at the pictures, I read the words.
Hollywood didn’t pause in its journey around the sun. It rolled along fine without him.
Dad didn’t get an obit anywhere.
Or did he?
A plaque somewhere in the Foreign Ministry, or on an anonymous wall in that big, windowless, Che-covered Lubyanka in the Plaza de la Revolución?
Maybe. I don’t know.
A week after the hit a DGI colonel came to see me. He was carrying a cardboard box and something wrapped in tissue paper. He put the box on my table and made me sign papers in triplicate saying that I’d received it.
The thing in tissue paper was my father’s pistol.
I put it in a drawer.
I let the box sit there until dark.
I flipped the switch and the lights came on.
I opened the lid.
Letters. More than a hundred, from Dad to me. Some of them contained money. Five hundred-dollar bills for a dress for my quince. Stories, poems, drawings, kisses for me and little Ricky. The last letters were from 2006. Dad was in Colorado. It was cold, he said. He had to be vague, because he knew the letters would be read by the DGI before being passed on to me, but he described the forest and the mountains, snow. He talked about books he’d read, and Karen, his girl. He knew that Internet use was strictly controlled but he had heard that the Ambos Mundos had a live webcam. He wondered if I could possibly go there at a certain time and wave into the camera. He would wait by his laptop. He would wait, night after night.