Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (16 page)

“Those guns of yours,” Felipe told Renata as they moved out of Santiago in his car, “we loaded them into a truck with fake floorboards that made room for them all. There were six Thompsons. Alfie found the truck. He knows how to get things.”

Holtz had been quietly supporting the Directorio with cash infusions until the previous week when two fourteen-year-olds he knew, neither with any connection to the rebels, were tortured and killed by police; and his outrage escalated. He flew to Havana and told his friend Aurelio he wanted to do more. Aurelio took him to a boat basin to meet a gun dealer, since Holtz had offered to buy guns. But neither money nor guns changed hands that day, the transaction aborted by a cruising police car. The transfer was to be the next day, but that afternoon the Palace attack was launched and Holtz went underground, surfacing only when he knew Aurelio had survived the attack; and by then Alfie, through Renata’s and Quinn’s intercession, had delivered the guns to Aurelio and Javier at the gas station.

When Renata mentioned yet more guns in the Sixteenth Street apartment that she and Diego had rented, Aurelio put Holtz together with Alfie to find a way to rescue them. Two nights later Fidel’s people were poised to bomb a major electrical grid; and if it succeeded, much of Havana would go dark, a propitious time for burglary. The weapons’ preliminary destination was an empty warehouse where they would be put on a commercial truck bound for Oriente. But then Holtz said to Aurelio and Alfie, if there are no guards at the Santa Fe landing field, and usually there are not, I could fly them to my father’s airstrip in Palma Soriano and Fidel’s people will unload them.

“So we put them on my plane and took off at dawn,” Holtz said to Quinn and Renata. “Four of Fidel’s peasants met us and took them. Fifteen minutes after our landing the army showed up to search the plane, but there was no contraband to be found.”

“Where is Alfie now?” Quinn asked.

“At the house,” Holtz said. “He’s waiting for us.”

On the road to the Holtz estate, going north out of Santiago, they faced a major army checkpoint with a
tanqueta
at the ready, a dozen armed soldiers at the barricade, and four cars ready to pursue any vehicle that would try to crash the barrier. Holtz told the soldiers that Renata was his cousin and Quinn her fiancé, and they were visiting at his home. The lieutenant recognized Holtz’s famous name and let them pass.

“These checkpoints are all over the Sierra Maestra,” Holtz said. “If we do go to see Fidel we must have a reason or they’ll turn us back.” Holtz said he’d brought one
americano
up to meet the rebels, presenting him as a businessman buying land from a defunct sugar mill.

“Can we go as a family, having a reunion?” Renata asked.

“I’d like something more specific. We have an
americano
here.”

“What if the reunion is a wedding?” Quinn asked.

“Whose?”

“Renata’s and mine. You and Alfie can be cousins in the wedding party. Do you want to get married, Renata?”

“Is this a proposal or just a way to fool the army?”

“One reason is as good as another for marrying you.”

“Do you mean a wedding in a church?” Holtz asked.

“That’s too complicated. Just have a
babalawo
do it.”

“You are crazy,” Renata said.

“Do
babalawos
do weddings?” Holtz asked.

“I never heard of it,” Renata said.

“
Babalawos
do everything,” Quinn said. “If I marry you I want a
babalawo
. They read minds, they predict futures, they heal your soul.”

“But they don’t do weddings,” she said.

“All right, we’ll get a priest too,” Quinn said.

“I like this,” Holtz said. “It’s oddball, which makes it real.”

“It will be real. All we need is a
babalawo
and a priest.”

“A crazy man wants to marry me,” Renata said.

Felipe’s sister Natalia, who had grown plump since Renata last saw her, she is eating for her pleasure instead of having sex, met them in the foyer, the only family member in the house, her parents en route to Mexico. Holtz took Quinn to find Alfie, and Natalia gushed over Renata looking so lovely, and why haven’t you called? Renata said I called three times for Felipe.

“Ah, but that is different,” Natalia said. “Who is this man Quinn?”

“I just met him,” Renata said. “He wants to marry me.”

“Another one?”

“Yes, another. What year did Margarita die? I was thinking of her,” Renata said.

“Of course you were,” Natalia said, “another marriage maniac. I don’t know the year but she lived too long—for her. I don’t want to die like she did.”

“You should worry about not living like she did,” Renata said.

Natalia went to the kitchen to have the cook prepare late lunch for the visitors and Renata roamed the parlors and dining room, loving to feel again the grandness of this house with all its historical elegance, although she now sees decline. It isn’t crumbling, just aging visibly, yet with grace and formidability—its baroque floor-to-ceiling mirrors, the Carrara marble on the floors, walls, and staircase; the chandelier with eighteen globes and uncountable strands of crystal beads, a creation of high elegance made in emulation of the one in the Captain-General’s Palace in Havana; and, in the music room, the grand piano on a small, elegant stage where the music of civilization, written in the old world, was performed in the new.

The house was called a palace when they built it in the 1850s, the Holtz Palace, and how it must have dazzled the elite society of Oriente. Celia grew up amid it all, coming here as an infant when the maddened Margarita stopped functioning as a mother and became the pure
enamorada
—who lived only for love with her secret second husband, her god-sent lover who was wilder at sex than her first husband, and who lived for the bed the way Margarita did.

The marriage secret was short-lived, and when it became gossip in Santiago the word flew to Spain and into the ear of the estate’s executor, who cut off Margarita’s inheritance and the child Celia’s as well. The catastrophe was compounded within weeks when Evelio, discovering that his wealthy new wife was penniless, left her and moved into a small house with a former housemaid from his father’s estate. The executor wrote Margarita that under the terms of Jaime’s will he could give her such support for residency as she might find in a convent, and if such a convent existed in Cuba, she would be free to seek it out. If not then she could return to Madrid and find residence in any of several convents. The child, in any case, will be cared for by the Holtz family in Santiago.

Getting married in order to see Fidel—this may be Quinn’s ultimate sacrifice. Fidel. What would Quinn ask him? Herbert Matthews had confirmed his survival, described him as a demigod, as an intellectual, nationalistic, anti-Yankee, anti-imperialistic, anti-communist revolutionary, a dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, a tough, charismatic hero fighting for a socialistic, democratic Cuba, who has polarized the majority of Cuban youth against Batista and seems invincible.

Can’t top that.

So talk to him about the how of what he did—how he made the La Plata attack and what it achieved. Or a longshot—the link between politics and gangsterism. Wasn’t he a gangster in his university days? That’s a new take on the revolutionary. And Arsenio, the rural gangster, collaborating with the connected Alfie to bring you these guns. Isn’t gangsterism just low-level political pragmatism? Machado with his gangster police—the deadly Porra; Prío as president giving jobs to two thousand gangsters to curb crime; Batista making the Italian mob his partners—likewise partnering with goons, the homegrown Tigers of Rolando Masferrer, your University classmate and now your enemy, Señor Castro—gangster then, gangster now. It’s all very tidy and of the moment, yes, and Fidel might be amused. But why would he talk about any of that? What would Hemingway ask him? Nothing about gangsters. He’d talk about Fidel’s gun. He’d ask about logistics, methods, attitudes, what he thinks about war, what was your first revolutionary act and did anybody die from it? Hemingway wouldn’t talk politics. He’d say if you put politics into the novel, and if the book lasts twenty years, you have to skip the politics when you read it.

Ah, so you are writing a novel about me, Mr. Quinn?

No, just tracking the hero the way my grandfather tracked Céspedes, and you qualify as heroic merely on the basis of your survival. How do you explain not dying in combat at the Moncada barracks? Or when they captured you there? Or when they had you in Batista’s jail? Or when as an invader you shipwrecked in a swamp? Or now, when you’re dodging aerial bombardment and being hunted by half the Cuban army? All this smacks of a scripted life for Fidel Castro—Achilles without the flawed heel.

Renata will love this idea: a new Orisha in control of the mountains, fated to defy death from every angle, too original to die. Originality is an ingenious form of defiance, don’t you think? Or do you have a simpler vision and consider yourself lucky? Was Céspedes lucky? He said his children were beggars, or on the cusp of prostitution. The Spaniards executed his rebel son by firing squad the same year his infant son starved to death among the fugitive Mambí. They got to the man himself in ’74 when his originality failed and he feared he was being eclipsed by his general, Máximo Gómez, and was deposed from the presidency in a leadership coup. He ran out of luck, or was it intuition, and he retreated alone to the mountains where the Spaniards caught up with him, and a Cuban volunteer with the Spaniards pulled the trigger.

But he is still the father of Cuba, El Padre de la Patria, is he not? Was he a chosen figure or did he imagine himself into existence? My grandfather came to Cuba on a bizarre and solitary quest to interview him for a New York newspaper and confirm he was alive—and he later wrote a book about it—
Going to See the Hero,
have you read it? I’ll send you a copy.

El Quin and the ex-slave, his name was Nicodemo, were moving toward a mountain they could not avoid climbing without exposure to a Spanish fort below. The horse would probably not make it but Nicodemo said they could try and he led the horse upward as they chopped brush to clear their way. Fifty yards up the horse fell twenty feet, rolling, snapping trees, ripping off its harness, rising up, falling and rolling again, you don’t see that every day, scattering El Quin’s belongings and his second pistol and ammunition. The horse righted itself, pushed downhill through the trees and ran onto the guinea-grass plain, gone forever, so long horse.

Nicodemo retrieved pistol and ammo and they rolled up the strewn clothing and carried it on their backs—slipping, falling, slashed by briars, crawling over boulders on all fours—emerging onto a mesa that was a relief from incline but opened them to the punishment of a scorching Cuban sun that could quickly crisp El Quin. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and put on his straw hat and they walked two more hours before seeing Mambí troops. The troops had halted next to a great brick tower, taller than any building Quinn had seen in Cuba outside of Havana and whose function he could not imagine; but he would learn that the tower was all that remained of a sugar mill burned by the rebels. It was topped off by the slaveholder’s crow’s nest where, from daybreak to nightfall, a lookout had watched 360 degrees of fields for trails being made in the high grass by runaway slaves who sometimes chanced death rather than live another day creating sugar for the Spanish swine.