Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (47 page)

“I can tell. I thank you for seeing him through a difficult day.”

“It wasn’t difficult. He got a little cut, that’s all. We had a wonderful time. And it’s not over, is it?”

“Not that I can see. Where’s Gloria?” he asked Renata.

“She’s with Matt finding out about bail for Roy.”

“Bail for Roy? They weren’t giving him bail.”

“Somebody called Cody and said it was happening.”

“I asked Jake Hess to represent Roy and Tremont. He must’ve changed their minds.”

“Then you did a good thing,” Renata said. “And Max says he’ll put up Roy’s bail.”

“Ah, Max,” Quinn said, looking at him for the first time, “very generous.”

“I like that kid,” Max said.

“How was your interview with Alex?” Renata asked.

“Predictable, but some things got aired.”

“Did you talk to him about Gloria?”

“No. I didn’t want to listen to him lie about something so important.”

Quinn was bursting with the impulse to stand up and deliver a speech about the night they took away his story on Tremont. His publisher summarily declared history unpublishable, and the Mayor, who had orchestrated that history, affirmed that it had never happened. Tremont the assassin and Zuki the provocateur did not exist. It’s odd how the Pashas reverse themselves, Tremont free, Roy bailed, Renata released from her torture cell (with divine intervention).

Quinn just listened as Renata updated him on the situation with Max: now waiting for the okay to enter Cuba, and when he gets it he’ll leave for Canada, Gander. Complicated, but it’s being arranged. The amazing Renata, who never lost her taste or her talent for intrigue.

Quinn leaned toward Max and whispered, “Alfie may be in Cuba.”

“They let him in?” Max asked.

“That’s the hot rumor in Miami. What does that do to your getting in?”

“I’ll have to ask Renata’s
babalawo.
”

When Robles ended Renata’s torture he had asked her what she wanted. I want my mother, she said. If they let my mother come to the Buro they won’t kill me because she is a woman of means, of status, of influence. Robles had said influence doesn’t matter here, but it matters. Robles had the guards wash the blood off her body, her face, her ears, her hair. He gave her a policeman’s shirt out of the closet, small, it almost fit her, but nobody was her size on the police force. They put ice on her face where she had been cut and bruised to reduce the swelling, brushed her hair, then gave her a room with a cot to lie on until the morning. She feared they would kill her during the night. A woman came in and examined her and put drops in her ears and gave her water and pills and said, take three for your pain. Renata could not hear her voice. She accepted the pills but kept them in her hand. Pills might be poison, Diego had told her. I have no pain, she told the woman.

Robles was doing what Changó had told him to do. He ordered Renata’s room locked and he kept the key and stayed all night in an office next to the torture room. At sunrise they brought her breakfast and more ice and at nine her mother was allowed to see her in the office and take her home on her arm, with Robles offering deferential bows to Celia who thanked Colonel Robles for his kindness and walked Renata to the car.

Diego had warned her that the police are liars, so do not trust anything they say or do. In the car her mother was saying her father had booked her on a flight to New York, she would stay with her cousin and have all the money she needs. She would be off the island tomorrow. But Renata had other plans. She told her mother to use her connections to get her into the Haitian embassy where she would seek asylum, also the Brazilian and Ecuadoran embassies, for her father knew the Brazilian military people and the Ecuadoran ambassador was in love with her; so she would have three safe places to go. Her mother insisted New York was safest and Renata said yes, but I will never get there, do what I ask, Mama, or they will kill me, not all the police are as afraid of me as Robles is. They will be coming for me very soon.

When they arrived home her mother drew a bath for her and examined her wounds and put Furacin salve on all of them, and wept when she saw what that devil did to her ears. He made her a deaf person. She said she would call a doctor but Renata insisted they call everybody they knew with clout to get her into one of the embassies. She went up to her room and packed five kinds of medicine, her passport, two blouses, two skirts, her makeup and sundries in an overnight case, tiptoed down the back stairs and heard her father talking on the phone about the Brazilian embassy.

She went out the French doors and through the garden, past the bougainvillea to the bus stop on Fifth Avenue, trying not to look like herself, and waited six months for the bus. Then she climbed its two steps feeling great pain in her ribs, god knows how many are broken, and why hadn’t they pained her this way going up the stairs to her bedroom?

She shuffled toward the rear of the bus and put on a mantilla to hide her face and hair, and sat facing away from the window. She rode to Twenty-second Street and walked two blocks to the Haitian embassy, a two-story building at Twenty-second and Seventh Avenue where, she had heard two weeks ago, six rebels from Matanzas had found asylum. But now the corner was full of police cars and policemen were surrounding the embassy, something going on and she would not stay to find out what. She walked back to Fifth Avenue, every step a dagger in both her sides. She waited for a bus that would take her to the Brazilian embassy, which occupied suites in a nine-story office building on the corner of Infanta and Twenty-third at the Malecón. She told the guard she was the ambassador’s niece but at the entrance to the embassy’s suite she felt that she could not take another step. The door opened to her and she stared at a young man who looked like a diplomat in training. He welcomed her and gestured for her to enter. She tried to make the step across the threshhold but she could not move. She dropped her bag and swooned into the young man’s arms.

Had she gone to the Haitian embassy forty minutes earlier she would have met two of her friends who had taken part in the Palace attack, Carbó and Prieto, and Javier from the 26th, one of the killers of Quesada at the Montmartre. Two safe houses where the three might have gone had turned out to be under surveillance, pinpointed by captured rebels who had been tortured into revelation, and so the three went to where the six Matanzas revolutionaries had found a haven. The three had four pistols among them and refused to surrender any until they had received safe conduct. They sat in a first-floor room while the Haitian diplomats considered their future. Within less than an hour their arrival had reached the ears of the chief of the Cuban National Police, Rafael Salas Cañizares, who swiftly assembled a task force and alerted the news photographers who documented his front-page arrests, that he had found the gangsters who might have killed Quesada.

Salas marched his troops into the embassy, flouting the international convention that protects asylum seekers, slaughtered the Matanzas six and exchanged fire with the three newly arrived armed rebels, who all fell. One policeman was wounded. Salas, who could have served as a body double for Oliver Hardy, strode into the first-floor room and stood over the fallen trio, his lower belly and groin bulging under his trousers below the edge of his bullet-proof vest. Javier, dying on his back with a privileged vision of this exposure, slightly elevated his right hand, which still held a machine pistol and, with terminal energy, fired his last shot into the center of the puffcake. The police chief joined the fallen, lingered two days in a hospital, and died.

Within an hour of Renata’s arrival at the Brazilian embassy the Cuban police knew she had found asylum, but the international outcry against Salas’s contravention of protocol kept them from a second invasion. Renata announced to her soul that she would make a pilgrimage to Babalu Aye to thank him and his brother for their vigilance on her behalf.

Quinn had just been served his reheated chicken dinner when he saw Gloria threading her way across the DeWitt ballroom to report that Roy’s bail was the expected five thousand. Renata and Max left the table with her and walked toward the lobby where Quinn imagined Max in a shadowy corner counting off the five in cash and passing it to his daughter to liberate a young man whose intimacy with her helped liberate her into near suicide.

From a lobby phone Renata called her contact in New Jersey, Cuca, whom she’d known since childhood but never knew her politics, but who had worked for Fidel in Havana until she was marked, then fled to Miami where she raised money for Fidel; and after the revolution she stayed on with Fidel’s extended intelligence family. Cuca said it was a go for Renata’s unnamed friend. He drives to Plattsburgh and leaves his car where Avis can pick it up. He meets his driver and they go twenty miles to the ruins of Fort Montgomery in Rouses Point. Max walks north through a cattle pasture and thin woods, not half a mile, and he’s in Canada. His driver crosses the border on 9-B which turns into Canadian route 223 and meets Max north of the Customs House. They drive two days to Gander and Max pays the driver one thousand dollars, then flies to Havana.

“I can’t lug my suitcase through that,” Max said.

“Travel light, leave it here,” Renata said.

Max walked her out of lobby traffic, down an empty hallway.

“That bag is full of money,” he said. “It was insane to carry it all, but when I heard they’d raided Alfie and were looking for me, I was gone in ten minutes. Your contact may be getting me on the road, but this money could get me into Cuba. Fidel doesn’t do charity work.”

“If you give it to Fidel how will you live?”

“I’ll keep a few bucks. He wouldn’t want an
americano
on the dole down there.”

“Is this Alfie’s money?”

“I made it through him. But it’s mine.”

“How much money are you talking about?”

“Nine hundred thousand, plus. I didn’t have time to count it.”

“You carried that much money on an airplane?”

“I chartered a plane from Miami.”

“Max, what did you do to get such money?”

“I bought some weed with my own money and sold it to a few of Alfie’s clients. Alfie didn’t care. He deals in multiple millions.”

Renata shook her head. Who can believe such talk?

“Can I trust this driver of yours not to mug me?” Max said.

“I’d trust my contact with anything.”

“I don’t trust anybody when it’s money.”

“She doesn’t know you have money. Bury it, draw a map.”

“I know a dealer who buried three million and can’t remember where. Don’t trust anybody, not even yourself. Your calls to your contact were probably tapped.”

“We use pay phones. We know how to avoid the tap.”

“They tap pay phones.”

“The way we talk nobody knows what we mean. Put your money in a safe deposit box.”

“That’s about as safe as a mail box.” Max touched her shoulder. “Renata, I need you to hold this money for me.”

“You’re not serious. I can’t do that. I can’t.”

“Yes you can. You know how to protect it, where to hide it. I have no time, and it’s too risky to carry it. I think I came to Albany to put the money in your hands, and I didn’t know that until this minute. I’ll pay you well. How does fifty thousand sound? Consider it yours, right now. When I need the rest I’ll have someone pick it up. If anybody kills me all the money is yours, you’re a millionaire overnight. I worship you, Renata. I don’t trust anybody but I trust you with my life, and my fortune, if you think a million’s a fortune. You’re my primary beneficiary.”

“What about Gloria?”

“I’ll take good care of her. But she really doesn’t need my money. She has Esme.”

“You want to turn me into a drug dealer.”

“Nobody will link this money to drugs.”

“If they link it to you they will. How would I explain such cash?
Esto es ridículo,
Max,
ridículo
.”

“This is family. Your sister’s rich and I’m your brother-in-law, and we’ve been pushing money at each other for years. Esme will swear to that. Worst-case scenario you have to pay some taxes. But keep it hidden. You are smart, my love, very smart. You can do it.”

“I have to tell Quinn about this.”

“I can trust Quinn.”

“He doesn’t trust you.”

“That’s about you, not money.”

“He won’t let me do it.”

“Do it without him.”

“I could never do it alone. I’m not as smart as you think I am.”

“So you won’t do it?”

They walked back to the lobby and she stared toward the ballroom. She could hear the music, faintly. Quinn will go crazy. “I will ask him,” she told Max. I am a lunatic, yes? Yes. “Maybe we keep it until you are in Cuba, but then you send someone or I bury it and send you the map.”

“Perfect,” said Max.

“I’m not sure Quinn will think it is perfect.”

She left Max in the lobby and walked into the ballroom and sat beside her husband to persuade him to become a felon. Quinn heard the urgency in her voice and went with her toward the lobby but stopped short of Max.

“You can get ten years for this,” he said.