Fifty Grand (9 page)

“Hmmm, you might be right about that. Who’s this Jack Tyrone character?” I ask, skimming his conclusions.

“He’s the movie star I was talking about.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No, he’s an up-and-comer. I met him at the party, talked to him, also straight as they come, alas.”

“Ricky! You’ve got him down as a suspect!”

“Secondary suspect. I suppose someone might be covering for him but his alibi seems watertight. He was in L.A. at the time of the accident. He was ok, but, like I say, straight as the fucking gate. At least he didn’t try to get me to attend a Scientologist meeting like my charming new friend did the next morning.”

“What’s a Scientologist meeting?” I ask innocently.

“Oh, my God, sister. Don’t you read the Yuma magazines?”

Yuma was street slang for anything Yankee, and of course you could get the magazines but why anyone would pay hard currency for a copy of
People
or
Vogue
was beyond me.

“I need my money for things like food and electricity,” I say.

“Oh, boo hoo, the poor, starving public servant.”

“Shut up.”

He shakes his head as if I’m hopelessly uncool.

“Oh, speaking of Scientologists. One other thing I put in there at the end. The same night as the accident, one of them apparently crashed a golf cart on Pearl Street. I don’t think it’s anything to do with us but you might want to check it.”

I put the notes back in the folder and grin at him. “Well, I’m impressed, you’ve done really well here, Ricky.”

“I risked a lot.”

“I know.”

“I was proud of the photographs. Thought they might help.”

“Did you talk to Karen?”

He conceals his distaste in a comic pretense of distaste. “No. That little chore I will leave to you. If you go.”

“When I go.”

“Oh, the one thing I couldn’t get was the sheriff’s report. They told me I could file a Freedom of Information request—if I were a U.S. citizen.”

I look at him. “They said it like that?”

“Yeah, they said it like that.”

Ricky waves at a friend walking past the Ambos.

“Well, I guess I’m going too, then,” I say.

Ricky leans back in his chair. “Not necessarily, sweetie. We have an interests section at the Mexican consulate in Denver. Maybe we could do something through them,” he suggests.

“No, Ricky, my mind’s made up. I don’t want a snow job. I want to do it myself.”

“And of course you’re the only one who can do it, right?”

I note the sarcasm in his voice but I don’t want to make an issue out of it.

“I’ve decided, Ricky.”

He says nothing, blows a smoke ring, and waves hello to yet another friend.

I tap the folder. “Seriously, thank you for this.”

“You’re very welcome,” he replies and flutters his eyelashes.

A long silence.

This is always what it’s been like between us. What’s not said is just as important as the dialogue.

“So when are you thinking about popping off?” he asks, in English, his brows knitting.

“Soon. Next week. I’ve put in for a leave of absence.”

“Next week? I’ve got an article coming out in
El País
. Big break for me. I’m having a party.”

“And I would have been invited?”

“Of course. But you wouldn’t have come.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you feel out of place around my coke-snorting, bisexual, decadent contra-revolutionary pals.”

“Yeah, I wonder why. What’s the piece?”

“Feature article in the magazine on
the new Cuba
. All sorts of rumors coming down from the MININT.”

“
El País
. Dad would have been proud.”

“You think?” he asks dubiously.

“Of course, Ricky.”

He nods but doesn’t answer.

His face assumes a dark expression and he reaches his fingers across the table.

“Hands,” he says.

I put my hand in his.

He clears his throat.

“Oh no, Ricky, you’re not going to give me a lecture, are you?”

He ignores this crack and says what he’s going to say: “Listen, sweetie, I know you’re two years older than me but in some ways I’ve always felt that you were my little sister and I should be looking out for you,” he intones very seriously.

“Don’t do this, Ricky,” I say and wriggle my hand free from his grip.

He shrugs, reaches into his jacket pocket for another cigarillo, lights it, takes a puff. “Ok, sis, I’ll cut it short, but I’m going to say it and you’re going to listen. That way if anything happens to you, my conscience will be clear. I’m doing it for me, not you. What do you think?”

“Ok,” I mutter.

“All right, I’ll give you a précis of the big speech I was going to hit you with. Basically it’s this: There’s no point at all risking your life and your career for Dad. Dad didn’t give a fuck about us. Not one letter, not one dollar in all those years. Dad was a selfish bastard and although I’m sorry he’s dead, that’s about all I feel. We don’t owe him a thing. And furthermore, he probably
was
drunk that night, and although I’m upset that he went the way he went, it’s nothing to do with us.”

Ricky smiles grimly and takes a long draw on the cigarillo.

I can see his point of view, but it’s not mine.

“Who else is going to do anything about it?” I ask him.

“That’s not the issue.”

“What is the issue, Ricky?”

“The point is that this isn’t how grown-ups do things,” he says.

“How do grown-ups do things?” I say with a trace of anger. Sometimes his condescension is hard to take.

“Not like this. This is the way people behave in comic books or TV shows. It’s preposterous. It’s a throwback. It’s theatrical.”

“I’m theatrical?”

“Yes. You’re pretending. You’re acting. Look at you. You’re someone with a promising career, a cheap apartment, a new promotion. And you want to throw all that away? For what?”

“I’m not throwing anything away. I’m taking a week’s vacation, I’ve planned it all out in adv—”

“Planned what out? How dumb do you think they are in the DGI? If you don’t defect when you get there, if you really do come back, you’re going to be spending the next ten years in some plantation prison.”

“I told you. I’m not defecting. I’ll be back, I’ve got a plan all worked out.”

“Fuck the plan. The DGI, the DGSE, the Interior Ministry are always one step ahead. It took me all day to lose my tail in New York.”

“But you lost him.”

“Yeah, I did, I’ve done it before. You never have.”

“I’m a cop, I know when I’m being followed.”

“Ojalá,”
Ricky mumbles, looks at the stars, and shakes his head.

Another long silence.
Jiniteros
and
jiniteras
start filtering back into the street. The boy beggar resumes his perch. The piano player at the Ambos breaks into the “Moonlight Sonata.”

“What does Hector think about all this?” Ricky asks.

“I wouldn’t tell him. I don’t trust him. Why do you mention Hector?” I ask.

“You’re screwing him, aren’t you?” he says.

“Mother of God, what makes you think that?”

“Well, because he promoted you to detective and because you always talk about him.”

“I’m not screwing him. I got promoted because I’m good at my job, Ricky.”

Ricky orders another rum and Coke. He looks at his watch. Obviously I’m only the first of several appointments in his busy evening. I smile gently. “Look, Ricky, I know you’ve risked a lot, slipping out of Manhattan, going to Colorado, but I can take care of myself too.”

He nods slowly and sinks back into the chair. His shoulders slump as if all the life has been sucked out of him, as if I’ve just told him I’ve got terminal cancer. He starts to say something and stops. “You’ve never been out of Cuba,” he says.

“No, but I can speak English as well as you and I’m a damn fine cop.”

Before he can respond the beggar boy pulls at his arm. Really pushing his luck, this one.

“It’s your turn,” I tell Ricky.

Ricky reaches into his pocket and gives the kid a few pesos. The kid takes it to one of the
jiniteras
, who might be his mother.

Ricky looks at me, beams me that get-out-of-jail smile. “Ah, fuck it, it’s your decision, if you want to go, you go.”

“Thanks for the permission. Now let’s end this. You know I’ve made up my mind. And once it’s made, it’s made.”

“I like your outfit,” he says.

“Shut up. I didn’t want to look like a cop.”

“You don’t.”

The street has completely filled now. Whores back under the streetlamps, pimps playing craps against alley walls. A CDR man I know shooting dice with the pimps. Ricky finishes the cigarillo. “I suppose it should be me. The only son,” he says.

I hide the surprise on my face. “You’ve done enough,” I tell him.

“It should be the son. It’s my responsibility. I owe it to Mom, to you.”

I shuffle my chair next to him and put my arm around him. I kiss him on the cheek.

“No.”

He blinks, turns his head away. “It should be me,” he continues. “I thought about it when I was up there, but then—well, then I knew I wasn’t going to do anything.”

“You did what I asked you to do.”

He nods. “It wouldn’t be justice. It would be murder.”

“Maybe nobody has to die.”

A tour group of elderly Canadians comes up from the harbor and files solemnly into the Ambos Mundos. They walk through, buying neither a drink nor anything else. The piano player starts riffing on a song by Céline Dion, either to bring them back or perhaps as ironic commentary.

Ricky politely disengages my arm. “So how are you going to wangle the visa?” he asks.

“I’m telling Hector I’m interviewing for a master’s degree at UNAM in Mexico City. I am too.”

“Jesus Christ, when did you start planning that?”

“Three days after the funeral.”

Ricky laughs and takes my hand. “Oh, you’re good, Mercado, like I say, too good for the cops. You need an outlet. When was the last time you wrote a poem?”

“Are you kidding? When I was thirteen.”

He smiles. “You had talent. Your place is full of poetry books. You should start up again.”

“You need to be in love with somebody to write poems,” I tell him.

“That’s not true. Dad thought you were good.”

He is getting on my nerves again. “You wanna hear a poem?”

“Sure.”

“‘The singing bird is dead as dust, he won’t revive, alas, / so you can take that golden quill and shove it up your ass’—Heinrich Heine.”

Ricky laughs, shakes his head, looks at his watch, yawns. “Well, I suppose I better . . .” he says.

He stands and leaves a twenty-dollar bill on the table. I give it back to him.

“The police are paying for this one,” I tell him.

“Hey, you want to come with me? Yeah, you should come,” he says.

“Where to?” I ask suspiciously, imagining some sweaty basement Sodom and Gomorrah filled with rail-thin boys and army colonels with fat mustaches.

“To see Mom. I smuggled in American chocolate from Miami. Come on, she’ll be thrilled.”

“To see Mom?” I say, aghast.

“It won’t be that bad,” he says.

But of course it is.

Water leaking in her apartment. Buckets over the voodoo gods. The smell of incense and a backed-up toilet.

Ricky tells her all about Manhattan.

An isle of joy, he says. She doesn’t really understand. She brews herbal tea and casts the tarot. Makes predictions. Not a surprise when she mentions death. She always predicts death. We always ignore it. Laugh about it.

Death.

Oh God.

My eyes open.

Out into the hard blue night I gaze. Through the mountain and the desert. Through the tears. Tears for me. Tears into the black seat. My denim
shirt thick with tears. I picked this shirt because it looked sexless, like a drab uniform for a drab nonentity. For an invisible. The person who cleared your table or cleaned your toilet or mowed your lawn.

I hadn’t wanted to be noticed. But two miles into the United States I’m noticed. I’m nearly raped. And now I’ve killed two men. Unmade them as if they never were.

And there’s nothing I can do but wipe my tears.

My face pressed against glass. Yellow lines. Scrub. Incandescent creatures following the van. What do they want?

More blood.

The deaf lady talking to me.

She can see I’m crying.