Adios Muchachos (13 page)

“You’ve got to hit me with this.”

Alicia cringed.

“And make sure you hit me in the right place. If you hit the bridge of my nose with that, you could kill me.”

Alicia cocked her bat and closed her eyes in mid-swing, but still hit the mark reasonably well. Victor’s skin began to turn black and blue almost immediately, and a glorious bump rose above his eye.

Victor stripped a piece of electrical wire. When he finished, Alicia rolled up his gloves a little and wrapped the thin copper wire around his wrists in a figure eight, making it as tight as she could with her fingers and then twisting the ends into a pigtail with a pair of pliers. He could hardly stand the pain, but he tugged on the wire binding trying to get loose. The telltale signs of the struggle appeared on his skin in the form of a bracelet of hematomas, with a few specks of blood here and there.

“Quick, cut me loose; I’m about to lose my left hand.”

Alicia cut the wires and examined his wrists. “That’s pretty convincing! Maybe you overdid it.”

“Maybe I did, but no harm done. And besides, the bloodier, the better.”

Victor turned his eyes away from his aching wrists and studied the list of things to do, checking off a couple of items. “OK, we’re almost done.”

“I’m starving to death,” Alicia moaned. “I’m going to whip up some ham and eggs. Want some?”

“No, thanks. I’m going to get dressed.”

A few minutes later, he returned wearing black jeans, boat shoes with no socks, and a light-green denim shirt. He was still intently studying his list of tasks.

Alicia came up to him, wiping some egg off her chin, and inspected his wrists again. The swelling on his forehead was convincing enough, but the black and blue ring around the base of his hands looked very bad.

“Does it hurt much?”

“Not now, but when I was trying to pull them apart, I almost shit. Forget it!” And mumbling more to himself than to Alicia, “Let’s see, what do we have now … Ah, yes, now we have to go out to the fire and make sure that everything has burned completely.”

Alicia went back to her list, opened her bag, and put away the piece of denim they had cut from the jeans.

In the meantime, Victor was out at the barbeque pit going through the ashes. Using the tiny rake they used to till the soil in the planters, he searched for zippers, buttons, rivets, and other pieces that might not burn. Satisfied that there was nothing incriminating left, he spread the ashes out randomly and arranged a few pieces of fresh firewood. Sprinkling the rest of the starter fluid on the wood, he lit the fire and started putting all the tools away in the utility room as the great blue flame roared almost invisibly in the brilliance of the Cuban winter sun.

Alicia studied Elizabeth’s collection of wigs and chose a blond one with long straight hair reminiscent of the ’60s. She put on a yellowish linen sack about two sizes too big, boltless and with tassels reaching from the knees to almost her ankles. A pair of mirrored wraparound glasses and the transfiguration was done.

Victor stuffed some money into his jeans pockets and went into the bathroom to get a role of surgical tape. He handed the tape to Alicia, along with a piece of paper with the names of some medicines scribbled in black ink.

“And remember to rattle them off by heart and destroy the paper.”

Both of them checked their lists, crossed out the things they had already done, and got ready to move. Before leaving, Victor went to the refrigerator and took a can of orangeade.

Through the communicating door, Victor went into Rieks’s garage, started up the Volvo, and set a course for the Vedado section of Havana. Alicia took off in the convertible.

Half an hour later, the two cars pulled up about half a block away from the old Camilo Cienfuegos Hospital. Alicia got out of the car, enabled the alarm, clicked the door locks, and stepped lightly up the stoop leading to a pharmacy that accepted US dollars. She bought the drugs Victor had instructed, and, coming out to the sidewalk again, slid into Rieks’s Volvo instead of her own car. Victor had slipped to the side, leaving the driver’s seat free for her.

Heading toward Miramar through the ocean spray along the Malecón seawall drive, Victor took a couple of swigs from his orangeade to swallow 350 milligrams of acetylsalicylic acid and fifty milligrams of dextroamphetamine sulfate. As they came out of the tunnel onto Fifth Avenue, Victor was already feeling the allergic reaction.

Fifteen minutes later, Alicia stopped at a shopping center and, in her shapeless blonde persona, entered a store to buy some needles, thread, and a large bandana. She emerged about ten minutes later, got behind the wheel, and started to sew.

Looking up at Victor, she asked him how he felt.

“My ears are burning; my heart is racing; I’m beginning to itch all over. But otherwise, I’m just fine,” he commented in a light mood that belied the terrible impression he gave her. His cheeks were beginning to swell with red splotches, and the lump on his forehead was quite impressive.

“You really look like you were hit by a truck,” Alicia remarked, following his lead.

Victor smiled, making it worse.

Alicia sewed the narrower end of the piece of pants, turning it into a hangman’s hood. She slipped it over Victor’s head, to see if it fit, and leaned back playfully, like a painter trying to get the proper perspective.

“Yes, that’s fine … And it covers your neck, so you won’t need a tie.”

“That was my main concern—which tie to wear,” he retorted, and they both enjoyed a much-needed chuckle.

“OK, that’s enough of that! Final control.”

They took a last look at their respective things-to-do lists.

“The only things I have to do now are the wire, the tape, the hood, and the gloves, and I’ve got everything right here in my purse.”

“Check it!”

Alicia checked the contents of her purse and nodded. “It’s all here, just like I said.”

“OK, don’t start getting touchy with me. Good luck!”

They shook hands formally and smiled—Alicia with a tinge of fear tugging at the corners of her mouth; Victor with a grotesque, swollen grimace that suggested the advanced stages of rigor mortis.

Taking care not to travel the same route more than once—to avoid anyone noticing the big Volvo—they doubled back a few blocks, turned up on Tenth, and stopped by the park across from the Cira Garcia Clinic to get as much of Victor’s make-up in order before actually reaching the drop-off point.

Victor had wanted to be “discovered” on some lonely road near Siboney, but Alicia convinced him that he might have to wait much too long for someone to “discover” him. So they decided on the wooded area bordering the Almendares River, where no more than five minutes would go by before someone noticed him.

Alicia tied his wrists with wire again, but behind his back and not so tight this time. She then took the twoinch surgical tape from her purse and wrapped two loops, covering his mouth and around the back of his head. Ripping off two more strips of tape, she covered his eyes and slipped the hood completely over his head.

“Fine, you’re all set. Turn around so I can take the gloves off you … OK, now slide down into the seat so no one will see you.”

On the floor, Victor was invisible to anyone standing more than a yard from the car. As Alicia whipped around the light on Forty-first Avenue, she heard Victor grunt. “How are you doing down there?”

Hearing his muffled reply, sounding a little like “ou irty itch,” she turned right into the area known as El Bosque de la Habana.

“We’re there. As soon as I’m certain that no one can see us, I’ll say ‘GO,’ and you scramble out the door and into the woods.”

“… ow … a … muff … amble … itch?”

She opened her window to hear if any cars were coming and let the Volvo creep along in drive. Coming into a tight curve where they were relatively hidden from cars coming from either direction, Alicia leaned over, opened the door and whispered, “GO!”

Victor stumbled out of the car, tripped immediately on some vines, and barely heard Alicia wishing him luck as she drove away in the direction of Nuevo Vedado. He promptly bashed his head on a tree.
Sonovabitch
, he thought,
that wasn’t in the fucking script.

He managed to get to his knees and was waiting there, genuinely stunned, trying to get his bearings, when he heard a car somewhere behind him. He turned, but the driver either missed him or did not care to get involved.

“You filthy son of a whore,” he muffled through the tape and hood, just in case.

A second later, he heard the unmistakable screech of breaks and the whine of a gearbox slammed into reverse.

“Holy shit, what’s this … ?”

The driver approached Victor and removed the hood, but upon seeing the taped mouth and eyelids and the splotchy swollen face, he got scared.

“Mother of God, protect me …”

Launching into a monologue intended to comfort Victor as much as to reassure himself, the man ripped the tape from Victor’s eyelids and mouth and helped him into a seated position.

“Just look at that! The animals! Sonovabitch! But don’t you worry, mister; you’re all right now. Hold on, let me get my tools to cut these wires. They don’t seem to have done too much permanent damage, but those wrists look bad. Thank God you’re alive. There, there, I’ll get you to a hospital in no time. Were you robbed?”

Victor did not answer. Script indications notwithstanding, he was still reeling from the encounter with the tree.

“Here, let me help you up,” the driver said, slipping his hands under Victor’s armpits.

According to plan, Victor let out a short scream and fell to one knee, gasping for air, as though he had several broken ribs. “Thank you … friend … some bastards … attacked me.”

Victor’s savior turned his eyes toward heaven. “My God, what is happening in this country? This is unheard of.”

The man helped Victor to the car. “Get in; get in, we’ll be at the hospital in a minute.”

“No,” Victor protested, “that won’t be necessary. I have a doctor friend who lives on Forty-fifth Street, next to the old zoo.”

Carmen was looking at a bunch of pictures spread out on the dining room table. Jan van Dongen was beside her, smoking and drinking a cup of
Lapsang Souchong
.

“Wow, why were you so skinny?” Carmen reached for the picture with the unmistakable van Dongen profile, standing at an easel in some public place. His clothes were lamentable and his hair was long and greasy-looking.

“That was at the
Place de la Contrescarpe
, in Paris, some twenty years ago. I would set up my easel anywhere, do a few quick portraits of tourists, and guzzle the money down as fast as I got it.”

“Why were you drinking so much?”

“I was a complete failure at my calling, which was to be an artist, and my political ideals had gone down the drain,” he explained, showing her another picture she had left on the table. “That was in May of 1968, when we faced off with the gendarmes in the Latin Quarter …”

“And who’s that with you?”

“That’s my third strike.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, my failed painting career was strike one; the demise of my political ideals was strike two; and this … this was my daughter’s mother, who lived with me for fifteen years and left me for another man … That was the beginning of the end for me.”

“You couldn’t get over her?”

“It isn’t that simple. My greatest suffering was because of the baby. I really gave up hope and I could barely feed her with the painting I did on the streets. That went on for a few years, and in 1985, I wound up in a hospital with a full-fledged case of
delirium tremens
. It was then that Rieks came and stayed with me for three days. I would never have recovered without him.”

“I never thought millionaires could have noble feelings,” Carmen remarked.

“Rieks is all heart. On that occasion he took me with him, back to Curaçao, where he was working, and set me up in a small
landhuis
near Fort Nassau with all the paint and canvases I could want.”

“Did you paint anything great?”

“Whatever art I may have had in me was gone, but it was fun for a while and it helped me get over everything else. Rieks used to visit me at least once a week, to bring food, he said, but actually to see if I was drinking.”

“He didn’t trust you?”

“His mistrust flattered me. It made me feel wanted.”

“Well, he’s your cousin, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but Vincent is my cousin as well, and he detests me, as does most of the family … They’re ashamed of my nose, and they will never forgive me for my political doings as a young man. They still call me ‘The Communist.’ ”

Carmen stood up mockingly, arms akimbo, head to one side. “Don’t tell me you were a communist!”

“Never! As a child, I was an anarchist, and later I became a Trotskyite …”

“So what’s the difference? … No, forget it; I don’t care … Why was Rieks so protective of you?”

“Maybe because many years before that I was able to help him when he was about to hit rock bottom.”

Carmen took his hand and looked at him tenderly.