Adios Muchachos (21 page)

1998
EPILOGUE

Despite their painstaking investigation of the case, the Cuban police were not able to find anything that could lead them to Hendryck’s kidnappers. The case lost much of its interest when the forensic specialists at the
Laboratorio de Criminalistica
proved beyond a doubt that Rieks had died from a single puncture wound to the rachis bulb caused by a fall on the ornamental iron work in his house. They also determined that the body had been kept frozen for several days.

Given the unexpected disappearance of one Dutch citizen, Jan van Dongen, and given that he was a relative of the deceased, it was assumed that, with his privileged knowledge of the workings of the company and the family, he had found the body and decided to capitalize on his cousin’s untimely demise. The case was turned over to INTERPOL, which had been on van Dongen’s trail ever since.

The changes Victor feared in the company took place with a vengeance. Groote International welched on the gentleman’s agreement it had entered into with Victor King, and Vincent Groote took great pleasure in informing him that his services would no longer be needed. But the gaunt face of poverty and starvation did not come to haunt him.

In one of those flips destiny is known to make, Victor’s life took a different turn. His long-sought financial independence still eluded him, but, hey, you can’t have it all.

Christina, Groote’s widow, heiress to a sizable income from the trust fund in her name and to ten million in petty cash, felt increasingly grateful to Victor for his unwavering solidarity and his concern for her well-being. In fact, during the days Christina spent in Cuba, Victor had managed to distract her mind from the tragedy on a number of occasions and had introduced her to the works of local artists in the form of a certain wooden satyr. Christina felt that she would need consolation for a long time and simply could not bear to leave Victor or the satyr behind when she returned to Amsterdam—where the three of them now live in unpretentious elegance.

Being an extremely intelligent woman of the world, Christina never considered the possibility of marriage. As with her deceased, she would live together with Victor in their modest mansion, a beautiful and unprejudiced couple who enjoyed the company of beautiful and unprejudiced friends, traveled a great deal, and participated in the intense cultural life of Europe.

To please her loving consolation, as well as to annoy the shit out of her favorite enemy, Vincent Groote, Christina got an authorization from the Cuban government to follow up on the original plan—with a much smaller investment—of submarine exploration. The company would never have the muscle of Groote International, but it did have everything Victor needed to indulge his passion for scuba diving and exploration. Victor insisted that the gold-laden Spanish galleon was just around the next reef, of which there were hundreds of miles worth around Cuba. Who knows, maybe some day he might just discover something and actually find fame and fortune.

So, the happiness that eluded him with the husband was now his with the widow, as a prize for his sincere devotion and consolation.

Everyone in the vicinity of Sanur, the sister of the sun, knew the eccentric and generous
Meesta Fred
, a German painter who for two years had been living in a small house amid rice paddies and rolling hills, within earshot of the waters of the ocean. In the last six months, he had been painting lake scenes under dramatic turquoise skies, and hoards of Australian tourists were buying them up faster than he could paint them. Some pieces even found their way to important galleries.

He also painted some nudes, always of mulatto women with generous breasts and nostalgic Asian eyes, set against the white-capped backdrop of the Pacific.

Fred no longer had the ridiculous profile of a three-toed anteater that he used to have when he was known as Jan van Dongen. Discovery by INTERPOL turned out to be a real and present danger to rival his fear of the operation—the mere thought of which left his heart racing and his lungs gasping for air. And since he had to go under the knife anyway, he decided to reinvent himself completely. Now he could make love without a mask; now he could play his flute (even when people were watching); now he could look at his shadow on the wall without a shudder.

Two years and one month after the unexpected departure of Jan van Dongen, Alfred Werner managed to get invited by the Wilfredo Lam Center to show some of his works at the Havana Biennial Art Exhibit. After carefully determining Carmen’s schedule and her shifts, he finally risked calling her at the hospital. It was December 7, a day that will live on in joy for both of them.

When Carmen was called to the phone, she immediately recognized his voice. Yes, she knew the voice; no, she couldn’t believe it; yes, she still loved him; no, there had been no one else; yes, she would follow him to the end of the earth …

They met secretly in one of the inexpensive private restaurants that had proliferated in Havana. Fred was afraid they might still be watching her, but Carmen told him that the police were convinced that there had been no kidnapping and no murder. She told him about the blood on the planter, the angle of the wound, everything.

That was when he told her the story of how grieved he had been over Rieks’s death, how he had realized that he would be out in the cold, how he had decided to turn the tables on that crook and his accomplice … So the Cuban police had definitely determined that it had been an accident? How wonderful that Rieks had not suffered … And so he told her about the two bags, the $40,000 in hundreds he used to camouflage the bundles of paper, the enlarged spare-tire well in the trunk, the heavy heart with which he had left her, hoping that she would not forget him, and the many identities he had assumed before becoming Alfred Werner and disappearing into the rice paddies and hills of Bali.

The little restaurant was on the back lawn of a house that gave onto one of the channels of the Marina Hemingway. He told Carmen that their place in Bali was very much like it, with a balmy breeze and the sunset filtering through the trees. And while he spoke to her in loving tones, he recalled the gentle lust of their love-making, the evening shadows of that crazy city he adored, the warmth of the rum, those thick sensuous lips, and the Asian eyes.

Carmen laughed when he told her that he was black and blue since he had spoken to her because he kept pinching himself to make sure it was not a dream. He laughed, and they held hands and looked into each other’s eyes.

Yes, that was probably the happiest day of their lives; no, they would never be alone again and they would spend the rest of their days in the South Pacific, loving each other, painting, and playing the flute.

Free of all doubts and whatever remnants of a bad conscience he might have had, Fred gave himself one last pinch just to see Carmen laugh.

The afternoon they got home to Bali, from a tiny greenish stone temple on the side of the road, the goddess Paravati offered a welcoming smile to Carmen. But, of course, she was no longer Carmen.

Carmen had left Cuba for Mexico, where she stayed for two weeks, just long enough to become Guadalupe, who left for Chile, where she passed the baton to Graciela, who traveled to Portugal, and from there to Nigeria, where Zaratu—“she who was born again” in the Yoruba language—became Mrs. Alfred Werner and left with destination unknown.

In their comfortable home, Zaratu spoke only English. It was terrible, but the sole language she knew well was a dialect spoken only by her tribe. Beside her on a broad hammock, Fred Werner took in a long, deep breath, smelling her, drinking her, and sipping the mellow rum he had flown in regularly from Spain.

Yes, his life certainly had taken a turn for the better … and it was about fucking time.

Alicia made a big mistake with Fernando, but being the kind of person who never gave up, she went right on fighting. Fernando, as it turned out, was neither an heir to a cattle fortune nor a brilliant financier, but a penniless pathological liar who set her up in a crummy apartment in a two-bit neighborhood that was positively indecent. When her mother asked her what she was going to do, she replied, “Mother, if you stay in a place like this for more than a few days, you get used to it and then you never get out.”

And like a person with a mission—which she was—Alicia stayed in the crummy apartment just three days, then took off to make her own destiny.

Thanks to her expert management of the money she had brought with her, she soon met and overwhelmed a certain Señor Gamboa, a patrician who realized when he met Alicia that he had been true to his wife, his family, and his class long enough—that it was time to be true to himself, as the poet said. Whatever time remained in his journey through life, he was going to travel first class.

Gamboa gave Alicia the deed to an elegant little apartment on Corrientes Street, a generous allowance, and something that the brilliant Alicia was going to parlay into a real jackpot: a standing invitation to an exclusive saddle club in San Isidro where she had recently introduced a new riding style that was becoming the latest sensation. She set her stirrups very high, and, instead of the classical ramrod dressage posture, her tropical genes produced a gyration of the buttocks that made people wonder what a regiment of galloping Caribbean Amazons might have looked like.

It was on one of her first days riding that she had a most curious accident. It seems that one of her stirrups came loose; she would have been thrown off the horse except for the immediate assistance of a certain gentleman in his fifties, owner of a chain of supermarkets and fifty thousand acres in the Santa Fe province.

When he esxscorted her home to the apartment on Corrientes, Margarita had just finished making an
olla
of Cuban-style paella, and her child’s savior simply had to taste it … plus a couple of daiquiris.

Señor Irigoyen returned the following day to inquire about Alicia’s leg. One of his men brought a new air conditioner to replace the one that had burnt out the day before, when he received his first class in the horizontal rumba. It took all the diplomacy he could muster to get the proud young lady to accept the gift. Alicia explained that, when she liked a man, she could make love to him as freely as the wind caresses the trees, and that although she was an immigrant and not at all rich, she did have her pride and her honor, and she did not accept gifts from men. Of course, since he insisted and, quite frankly, so he would not feel slighted, Alicia accepted the air conditioner.

The local gossip-mongers had it that Don Xavier Irigoyen of Santa Fe and Buenos Aires would finally be giving up the strict mourning he had kept for his deceased wife of thirty years to remake his life in the company of a young lady he had saved from injury. In fact, the man was wild about his new-found dance instructor, for after the horizontal rumba came the cha-cha and the mambo. They were saving the horizontal conga for after their marriage, which was to take place at the end of the year.

Yes, her perseverance finally paid off, and what she was unable to achieve with her pedaling in Havana, she more than made up for when she got into the saddle in Buenos Aires.