A Deadly Shade of Gold (10 page)

"It's flawless."

"Oh boy. Hey, you follow me, okay?"

I followed his decrepit old Chev to a side street bar. The clientele was a hundred percent Cuban.

He was known there. I went to a table in a far corner. He had to stop and talk to half a dozen people. Finally he came to the table, a glass of milk in one hand, dark rum on the rocks in the other.

"How's the work going, Raoul?"

He shrugged. "They trust me more now. The estimates are close. They see me use a slide rule. It heartens them. Slowly, slowly they are letting me do a little designing. But it is strange, you know? They speak to me loudly, very distinctly. My God, that's why my father sent me to Choate before the University of Havana, to speak the language. It's going all right, Travis. I shouldn't bitch. But my chance of a license, the A.LA.? I wouldn't give you a Castro centavo for that, man.

Hell, we had a closed shop over there too, you know. An American architect coming in, the only way he could work was team up with one of us, and the commission double. Now I get it in the eye the same way. What's on your mind?"

"I want to know something about a man. Carlos Menterez y Cruzada."

Raoul stared at me. "Hijo de.... A long time since I heard that name. A son of a bitch, Travis. A murderous crafty son of a bitch. He is remembered. How long would he last in Miami? With luck, twelve minutes. Where is he?"

"I don't know. If I can find out more about him, maybe I can find him."

He leaned back. "I will tell you about that one. You have to understand how it was under Batista.

You people here have never understood. He was, for my father, for other successful men in Cuba, a fact of life. They all knew him. They walked on eggs. They walked with great care.

Circumspect. It is a question of honor. You are not such a great fool as to try to fight such power, neither do you get too close to a power which has a silent and secret side, sudden disappearances, quiet confiscations. What you do, you give him and the ones close to him no opening. How do businessmen survive under Salazar, Franco, any of them? I am not being an apologist for my class. Perhaps we should have done something sooner, before the communistas came in with their perversions of freedom. How could we tell? It was a fact of life. My father lived with it. Other men lived with it. Without too great a cloud on their selfrespect. The men who lived with it, such as my father, too many of their sons have died fighting what replaced the old evil. And more will die, Travis. Ah, Menterez was totally at home in that situation. Very important, Menterez. Import, export, warehousing, shipping. Big home, big grounds. His specialty my friend, was catching some man in a political indiscretion. Then he would say that only Carlos Menterez could give protection. Sell me just fifteen percent of your business for so many thousand pesos. Cheap. Then somehow would come litigation in corrupt courts, and finally Menterez and his cronies would own the entire business, with a suitable dummy ownership to cover the men in the government who had to have their share, of course. If a protest was too strenuous, the man might disappear. He was a barracuda, Travis. One little whiff of blood, and he would find a big meal. All honest men were afraid of him. He broke hearts and lives. No, he would not live long in this city. He got out in time, of course. But where did he go?

I heard one rumor he is in Switzerland, another that he is in Portugal."

"What about his personal life?"

"He had a wife, no children. A small silent woman, cowed by him I think. He was a womanizer.

Always several mistresses in Havana. Many times they were foolish American girls he would keep there for a time. Big cars. A personal bodyguard. Another house at Varadero. A big cruiser. Also, a personal taste for gold. Gold fittings in cars and home and boats, gold accessories for himself and his woman, art objects of gold. A vulgar man, my friend. A dangerous and vulgar man, a kind we breed too often in Latin America."

"Not just there. Everywhere."

"But old Cuba was a place where such an animal can thrive. And the heart of it, always, is the corruption of the courts. Where justice can be purchased, animals like Menterez grow fat, and the common people despair. Then come the communistas, my friend. Look at the constitution of Panama. The president appoints the governors of the provinces for life. He appoints the justices of the Supreme Court, for life. And those justices appoint the justices of the inferior courts, for life. Can you imagine a more fertile soil for corruption? But you are not here for a political lecture. What else can I tell you about Menterez? That he sucked the life out of one of my father's oldest friends? And my father could do nothing? That a woman died aboard his big boat under mysterious circumstances, and nothing was ever done about it? That celebrities from your country stayed at his house as his guests and thought him a fine charming man? That if he
Page 51

walked through that door, there would be a knife in his heart before he could take a second breath? They say you can't take it with you. Menterez screwed millions out of Cuba, and he took it with him. And sent plenty ahead. Good men were excessively polite to him. In a way that was... an insult to which he could not take offense. His invitations would result in effusive and flowery apologies for not being able to attend. Let me see. What else? Oh, yes. He was a hypochondriac. Gold pill boxes in every pocket, and one week at the Mayo Clinic every six months. They say he was terrified of losing his virility. One understands that he had more than his share. He is on several lists. Many people would be delighted to diminish his virility. If you find him. Travis, promise you will tell me where he is. It would not be the same name, of course."

"If I find him alive, I'll get word to you, Raoul. But my hunch is that he is dead."

"Why do you think that?"

"Some day when there is some kind of an end to the story, amigo, some day when your stomach can take the booze, we will sit around and get stoned and I will tell you all of it."

He nodded, accepting that. "It has to be private and personal wars for you, eh?"

"I can understand the little ones. The big ones confuse me."

After a silent moment he said, "I have never asked you this before. Maybe I shouldn't ask it now.

Haw close were you to coming on our little picnic at the Bay?"

"Very very close."

"I thought so. What stopped you?"

"A nervous little C.LA. man with glasses and a rule book."

"Then it was very close."

"It occurred to him that I wasn't a Cuban."

He grinned. "Do you remember when you became an honorary Cuban, my friend?"

"At Rancho Luna?"

"When the soldados made the lewd remark to your girl. The three of them there, standing by the sedan, waiting for the politico to finish his lunch. What a damn fool, Travis. Never, never will I forget it. You went smiling up to them and in that horrible kitchen Spanish, you asked that peasant idiot if you might examine his machine gun. You took it so gently and hit him under the chin with the stock, and in the same swing, chopped the other one behind the ear."

"And missed the third one, boy," I said, "and you powdered him just in time."

"And we ran like hell. And you were indignant because of all the people whistling. You didn't know it is a kind of applause there."

"I've never seen a pair of more terrified girls in my life."

"We comforted them, amigo mio," he said, and his smile was suddenly gone. "Yours was Teresa.

She married. They waited too long. They tried to come out by small boat. Seventeen of them in a twenty-two foot boat. The motor quit. They drifted six days in August; near the Keys. They were alive when they were found, and two of those died later. Teresa was one of the dead. Her husband lived. He went on our picnic, and he died there in the weeds and the swamp water."

"That makes my game with those soldiers sound pretty damned silly Raoul."

"It was silly, of course. Idiotic, suicidal and foolish. I treasure it. The girls adored you for it. All Havana talked and laughed about it for weeks. One indignant tourist, armed only with rum, and three of Batista's soldiers with Thompson submachine guns, all for the honor of a pretty Cuban girl." He shrugged and sighed. "What made us think that was the most savage and dangerous of all worlds? Now it seems almost pure, something on a stage, with comedy uniforms."

"Can you people work your way back to something easier to understand?"

His mouth had a sour curve. "It depends, I think, on how long and how hard we can laugh." He looked around, then touched my arm. "I am getting signals from old friends. Do you have anything else to ask? No? Excuse me then. Come to our house soon, Travis. Nita will use the long words. She is in a strange limbo now, where neither Cubans nor Yankees can understand her. But she has become quite a good cook."

By the time I reached the door, I looked back and saw Raoul hunched in fierce argument with men who all seemed to be speaking at once, in fierce low tones. God only knows how it will come out for them. All over the world are the fringe peoples, pushed out of their countries for varied reasons, each group thinking it the most hideous inequity since the world began, the most shameful oppression. In every tiny span of recorded history, the exiles have huddled and plotted, schemed and starved and died.

But perhaps it all used to be simpler to understand. Now the movements of nations have become like a huge slow solemn dance of the elephants, random power swaying in unpredictable directions, their movements obscured by a stifling rain of paper, pastel forms in octuplicate, programmed tapes, punch cards. Through this slow rain, in the shadowy patterns of the dance, scurry a half a billion bureaucrats, each squealing selfimportant orders. Beneath the wrinkled grey legs, ten thousand generals squat, playing with their war game toys. The billions of mankind sit in the huge gloomy reaches of the stands, staring without comprehension, awaiting the white blast that will char the dancers, end the act, and because tension and waiting can only be sustained so long, they make their own little games and charades in the stands, the charades of art, sex, money, power and random murder.

I went and sat in my old car of vulgar blue, and remembered the lovely, shy, mischievous face of Teresa, the night swim in a moonlight sea, the talk and the singing. I remembered her coming out of the sea in moonlight, combing her soaked hair back with her fingers, the phosphorescence twinkling around the wading thrust of her white thighs, seeing me waiting there, stopping, shielding herself for a moment with hands and arms, then lifting her chin and coming on toward me, boldly, making a single sound, deep in her throat, like a laugh. She loved her tropic sea and it had killed her dead, in the hot blazing days of August.

That's why they can never make it. They kill off the good ones. They gut their dreamers. Their drab stone discipline is a celebration of mediocrity. If we can restrain ourselves from killing off
Page 53

our own rebels, our doubters and dreamers, all in the name of making ourselves strong, then we can prevail. But if we use their methods, then any victory will be but the victory of one iron symbol over another, and mankind will have lost the battle whichever way it goes.

I drove north at a sedate pace, measuring the new reality of Carlos Menterez y Cruzada, collector of gold, of women, and of many kinds of pills. He seemed the type who would have a special talent for survival. Bombs kill their chauffeurs. They catch the last flights out. They change their money in the right places at a favorable rate the day before the currency collapses.

I was very tired. I went back to Bahia Mar. As I approached the Busted Flush, I heard sweet and cautious singing, and I found that it was coming from my topside sun deck. I stepped over the chain, went aboard, and climbed the ladderway. In the starlight and the random lights of the yacht basin, I saw Meyer with four of the little seasonal girls, all bundled in sweaters, sitting on the deck in a close circle, singing one of the old English rounds Meyer liked to teach them. They were always about maidens fair, deadly knaves, lonely death in the castle tower.

They ended on a sweet synchronous chord of girl voices and Meyer congratulated them extravagantly. "Excuse the invasion, my boy," Meyer said. "Junior here has a dull young man prowling around trying to create scenes. We're in hiding. This group is in very good voice.

Lassies, if any of you do not know him, this is the crude fellow who owns the boat. His name is McGee. Excuse me a moment. Practice that last one again, please."

He took me over to a far corner of the sun deck. Behind us, the girl voices were heartbreakingly sweet and clear.

"A man named Branks was here, looking for you, Travis. He had some questions."

"Such as?"

"Your habits, your livelihood. Rather a clever fellow, I suspect. He leaps on any nuance, any mild hesitation."

"What kind of billing did you give me?"

"Why should I lie to him? I said you are a beach bum, a reasonably pleasant companion, that you seem to make a living from small speculative ventures, that you seem to enjoy practically anything, in moderation, in accord with your somewhat quaint standards of behavior."

"You two had quite a chat."

"It took a philosophical turn, the role of man in modern society, the decay of morals, the new permissiveness, group standards versus inner values. He said he would try to get in touch tomorrow."

"Did he seem hostile?"

"Not at all. Not at all. Quite amiable, and curious. I can depart with my little flock now, or, if you feel festive, we can all go below, for an hour of song and discussion."

"I don't feel that festive."

"Can I offer you a flower from my little garden? The one facing us, the alto, with the perfectly straight strawberry blonde hair?"

"Meyer, this is not like you!"

"She is more than old enough to vote, and she met you the other day and was curious about you, and she is in a horrid emotional state, on the verge of scampering off to commit untidy indiscretions with bad companions. Better a devil I know than several she doesn't know. I cannot keep her in my little gaggle of sweet geese much longer. She is disaster prone, compelled by a bruised heart. Otherwise... I would not step so far out of character."