Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (46 page)

When her guardian policeman pushed her out of the car she almost fell, and she knew then they really would hurt her. You are a coward, Renata, but you must not let them know. The one with the Thompson poked it into her back to hurry her along toward the grassy bank of El Laguito in the Country Club barrio. This is where they found Pelayo Cuervo Navarro after the Palace attack he had nothing to do with. But he was Batista’s longtime enemy and they put three bullets in his back, five in his chest and dumped him here at the edge of the lake.

A second car pulled up behind them and a man in white stepped out and came toward her as she stumbled toward the lake: Pedro Robles Montoya, infamous, Batista’s chief of naval intelligence, grown-up puffy boy bulging out of his white guayabera, white slacks, white shoes. Her guard pushed her to her knees, then into a sprawl, and dragged her to the lake. He ripped buttons off her blouse when he handled her and her skirt came up to her lap. She lay exposed, her face inches from the water. The guard grabbed her long black hair in his fist and twisted it once, then pushed her head into the water and held it under—forty, sixty seconds, then up.

“Who organized the attack on the president?” Robles asked.

She did not talk, spitting water, faking breathlessness. She was a serious swimmer, could hold her breath five minutes under water.

“I know nothing,” she finally said. “I am a museum guide, I am a student, I know nothing of the Palace attack.”

“You are in the Directorio.”

“No.”

“Who planned it?”

“I know none of those people.”

“Your lover, Diego San Román, died in the attack.”

“I hardly knew the man. I saw him in the museum, we talked of art. That’s all there was, talk of art.”

Robles nodded and the guard pushed her head under water, pulled her out, pushed her under again, out again, under yet again, confusing her breathing. He held her under more than a minute, turning her so she faced the sky. She came up truly gasping, they will drown me. Don’t be a coward, you are a swimmer, you know how to drown.

“We found guns under your bed, a Luger, a .38 automatic, political literature for the Directorio, the Communists, the Socialists, the Twenty-sixth of July. Which do you belong to?”

“That was research, a paper I was writing when the president closed the university.”

“The guns were research?”

“They were my cousin’s guns. He lived with us and he gave them to me when he was dying. They’ve been in my family since the Machado era.”

“Where are the survivors of the attack hiding?”

“I know none of them. I know nothing.”

“We go to the Buro,” Robles said.

The Buro was headquarters for the intelligence unit of the Cuban police force, a castlelike structure at Twenty-third Street and the Almendares River Bridge. Robles and the two guards drove her past the Buro’s dock on the river where a small motor launch was tethered.

“You are a pretty child,” Robles said, “and beauty sometimes protects its possessor. But not today. And you are a privileged child, but privilege has no meaning here, not today. No one of money or power or influence can deliver you out of my hands. You tell me what I want to know or you will feel pain. We will penetrate you, humiliate you, we will spoil your glories.” He pointed to the motor launch. “And if you do not talk we will take you out in that boat and cut you, and when you are bleeding properly we will deliver you to the sharks.”

They led her up many stairs into the castle, to a windowless room with rough concrete walls, a desk and a few chairs. The two guards hovered behind Robles.

“Who is in charge of the Directorio?”

“I know nothing of that,” she said.

“You are a liar.”

He punched her stomach and backhanded her face. She did not fall. Renata the martyr has the power to die for the revolution or live by talking to the fat fascist. It only takes a few names, you can name the dead.

“We know everything about your family, your work, your love affairs, your closeness to the rebels.”

“I am not a political person,” she said, and she moaned and covered her breasts with her arms. He shoved her against the concrete wall, damaging her back and her arm. She felt she was bleeding. He sat her on a chair and the guards held her arms and her head so she could not move. He took a leather tool pouch from a desk drawer and unfolded it. He lifted out a small, pointed iron rod with a wooden handle and he touched its tip to her left ear.

“Where are they hiding?”

“I don’t know any of them,” and she screamed this.

He inched the rod into her left ear, touching her eardrum.

“Who financed the attack?”

“I know nothing.”

He shoved the rod through her eardrum, and she screamed herself voiceless. He moved to her right ear and inserted the rod. She screamed on but with fading sound.

“Who is left alive to lead the organization?”

She opened her mouth but could make only the smallest of sounds, and she shook her head. He pushed the iron through her right eardrum and she slumped in the grip of the guards, undone. She closed her eyes and wept her pain. The guards pulled her to her feet and Robles ripped her blouse off one shoulder, revealing the necklace Narciso had given her—Changó’s tools and weapons.

“What is your religion?”

“Catholic.” It was not even a whisper.

“Then why do you wear the necklace of Changó?”

“A gift.”

“It is Santeria. You said you were a Catholic.”

She was crawling toward Babalu Aye, half a cinder block tied to her ankle with rope, and she was pulling the block as she slid on her back toward the church. A shirt covered her but her back was already bleeding, and Babalu was very far away.

Blood was streaming from both her ears. Robles grabbed her skirt at the waist and swiveled, pulling her in a circle, steadily ripping the skirt as he hurled her against another wall. The side of her head hit the concrete and her pain was dizzying. She fell, her skirt around her ankles. One of the guards kicked her in the ribs, then stepped over her and kicked her ribs on the other side.

She flagellated herself with a switch as she moved toward the church of San Lázaro with the crowd. Her back, her thighs, her buttocks bled from the whipping. Babalu! Brother of Changó! Babalu!

Robles pulled her skirt off, grabbed her panties and tried to rip them but he could not. He pulled them off her legs. The guards lifted her to her feet and held her against the wall. Robles poured water from a pitcher into a glass and put it to her lips. She swallowed, freshening the blood in her mouth. She was naked now, her bra askew. Robles put his hand between her legs. She looked into his face, blood coming from her nose, her head, her ears, her arms, her knees, her buttocks. She will have scars, a marked woman—she will gain status. While lying on the floor she had seen, under Robles’ guayabera, his holstered pistol and a beaded belt of Ogun, brother and sometime enemy of Changó.

“Ogun,” she said to Robles in a scratched voice, softly, very softly out of a broken throat. “You look to Ogun.”

The words stopped him. He withdrew his fingers from her, his face inches from hers. She chanted through broken lips:

“Ogun lord of iron, who lives in the knife,
Ogun god of war who slaughtered a village,
Ogun outcast butcher, who eats the dog.”

“You put Ogun’s iron into me,” she whispered to him. “You are killing me. But Changó will not let you do it. You will die before I do. My
babalawo
said when he gave me this necklace, show it to your enemy and if he hurts you, tell him Changó will plunge him into a long and thunderous death.”

Robles waved the guards off and backstepped away from her. Leaning against the wall she swayed her head, moving in a slow rhythm, the beginning of a dance. She wanted to dance as Floreal had danced at the wedding but the pain everywhere in her body would not allow it. This was her honeymoon, without Quinn, courted by the butcher in his stead. She swayed only her head, using Floreal’s cadence, and she chanted:

“Changó, who breathes fire at his enemy,
Changó, who owns all music,
Whose thunderstones burn down forests.”

She could feel the oozing sores of Babalu Aye. She remembered Padre Pio channeling the stigmata into his body. Robles did not move, his arm hanging by his thigh, his pistol pointed at the floor. She saw the developing fear in his stare. He is a believer. She took a small step toward him, then another. Then, with strength in her right hand she did not know she had, she reached under his shirt and grabbed the belt of Ogun and jerked it. Robles backed off from her touch and the broken belt came away in her hand, its black and green beads rolling across the floor.

“Ogun is useless,” she said. “Ogun is on the floor.”

She dropped the belt and more beads rolled.

“Ogun has the iron sword but Changó has lightning. Can you fight lightning with a sword?”

“You have the diabolical in you,” Robles said. She read his lips. She could not hear him.

“You are recognizing yourself,” she said.

He had raped her as an unconsummated bride, but she had seduced him. He was killing her but she had prayed him into her vagina, where Changó often dwells, where he has been lying in wait since the wedding.

And in that place Changó’s lightning had scorched the invader’s will and silenced his soul.

“Robles,” she said, “you will kill me no more.”

The music was cool, solid when Quinn entered the ballroom, the crowd poppin’ and tappin’, keeping together in time. Quinn counted at least five hundred people, at twenty a head that’s ten thousand, fifty percent for the room, food, and wine, so five big ones for Cody, nice, a middle-aged bunch, maybe a third of them black, some in tuxes and dinner gowns to tone things up for Cody. Cody was wearing his tux, white lapel carnation, playing so fine, drum and bass backup, doing “Poor Butterfly” in up tempo, not wild, can’t do those double-time breaks anymore, they punish his lungs; but his beat is there and why hasn’t the rest of the world recognized the originality of this man’s style the way Albany has? It certainly wasn’t his fingers, you can get by with eight, he said, but ten is where it’s at, and he always had ten, and some nights twelve. So what did he do wrong? Missed the subway and didn’t show up in time for the recording session with John Hammond, the record producer, was that really it? A born loser? Can’t stand prosperity? Doesn’t believe he’ll ever jump over the moon? He’s humming, zum-zum-za-zum, those lungs not failing that part of him, and he looks all right, thinner, goes with the territory, all gray and almost militarily upright, as if he took West Point posture lessons, and there’s that same tight mustache, same chin whiskers, same frowning down at the music he’s making, always his own toughest critic.

Quinn saw Renata sitting between Max and Martin Daugherty, Vivian with Pop, Matt not here, or Gloria. Quinn inhaled like a pigeon, puffed up his chest, pissed-off husband. She has fucked Max, surely. She knows how to thank a guy. She looks so gorgeous, exquisite, can’t blame Max for all that yearning. Now she’ll tell Quinn it meant nothing. When he caught up with her in Miami after her disappearance from the Holtzes she apologized for fucking Max but what could she do? He’d saved her life. She and Quinn were still in the honeymoon stage then, two weeks after the marriage, which had never been consummated because Fidel intervened. “I loved our wedding, Daniel, and our dancing with Changó and Oshun, and then Changó saving me from Robles. I’m still your virgin bride and Max means nothing, he helped me, but I’ll never be close to him again.” Quinn was then fourth in line for her prize, after Changó, Robles, and Max. A new form of virginity: I can give it to you wholesale.

“Martin,” Quinn said when he sat at the table, “where have you been, what brings you to the violent city?”

“I got bored out there in the deathbed city,” Martin said. “It’s nice to be comforted into the grave, but I’m not ready.”

“Glad to hear it. Where’s that big son of yours?”

“Over at police headquarters complaining about their methods, that’s what he does. You two had a big day, I hear.”

“We know how to have a good time,” Quinn said. “You know Cody?”

“I remember when he played down in Big Jimmy’s place, long time ago. Lot of talent. I didn’t follow him. I went in other directions. But that was good jazz down there.”

“I was only a kid. But I heard him. Never forgot him.”

“How’s your life at the newspaper?”

“They cut my throat tonight. I had a truly great story—a scam about assassinating the Mayor, which is really just a way of smearing the Brothers, and Roy in particular, and they wouldn’t print it.”

“I don’t know Roy,” Martin said.

“He’ll be here. Pop, are you all right?”

“As well as can be complimented under the circumstances.”

“Good. Vivian, I want to hear about your evening.”

“It was thrilling,” Vivian said. “Your father’s doing fine.”