Hawke: A Novel (5 page)

Of course he’d never dared to raise the subject with Hawke. For his friend’s sake, such gruesome memories were clearly better left unstirred. But the murders, Congreve knew, had occurred somewhere in these islands. Quite possibly in these very waters, in fact. He couldn’t help but wonder if something, a particular sight or a sound, might trigger Hawke’s memory.

Now, Hawke’s odd expression as he gazed out over the harbor set Ambrose to wondering. What if all Hawke’s deeply submerged memories started to surface sooner rather than later? Pop up, exploding to the surface like some ancient underwater buoys whose unseen tethers have finally rotted and suddenly snapped? And if that happened, where would it all lead?

For a moment, it looked as if Alex might say something more; but then his eyes flickered and blinked and it was all gone, flown from his face in an instant. Hawke smiled at his friend.

“I’ll tell you one thing true, Ambrose Congreve.”

“Yes?”

“Everything in this world happens in the blink of an eye. Never forget that.
Everything
.”

Gomez, bruised and bleeding, emerged from the gloom of the ancient and crumbling hospital with just two things on his mind. Sex. And murder. Not necessarily in that order, either.

At least the rain had stopped. The broad tiled steps of the Hospital Calixto García were steaming under the wicked sun. Christ. The light made him squint as he walked down the slippery wet steps to the palmy courtyard, which was full of old soldiers in wheelchairs who had just rolled outside the former military hospital for a little air. It wasn’t all that great out here, but it sure beat the hell out of
inside
.

He saw the neon glow of the tiny bar where he’d had breakfast across the Avenida de la Universidad. He could really use a couple of cold ones about now. Like, about twelve should do it.

“I’m not having a good day,” he said to some old broad who was staring at his bloody mouth as he went through the wrought-iron gates. “Okay with you?”

He walked out into the sweltering street beyond, cupping his hand to the side of his mouth. Hurt like hell.

Taxi? Not when you need one. Lots of Flying Pigeon Chinese bicycles, but very few cars. He’d heard gasoline rations were down to three liters a month. Most of the cars he saw had red tags. Government cars. Hard times in the old hometown, baby. After five minutes he started to walk in the direction of the
Malecón
that ringed the bay. At least he could get his bearings there. Figure out where the hell he was going.

After the stink of sick people, now he had the stink of the streets up his nose. It was like somebody whipped up a big batch of what, sugar cane juice, motor oil, and rotten mangos. Popped that pudding in the oven at five hundred. Yum, that does smell good.

Oh, and sprinkle with sweat. Lots of sweat. Had these people never heard of Ban Roll-on? And stir in some of the stinky perfume the little
jineteras
wore who followed him everywhere, that’d be good, too.

Hookers, they were everywhere, and cops, too, cracking down on the hookers. It was like cracking down on roaches. They were in the woodwork.

There were two kinds of cops, he’d found out the hard way. The “tourist cops” who were okay, merely a pain in the ass. But the other ones, the ones with the berets, the national police, they were definitely not okay. You even look at them funny they whack you with a baton or haul your ass to jail.

But even they couldn’t stop the
jineteras.
Talk about a kid in a candy store. He’d landed in hooker heaven. There were crowds of them outside his hotel, morning, noon, and night. There had been a bunch waiting when he came out of the little family-owned
paladar
where he’d had lunch the day before.

Christ. He couldn’t shake ’em. It was like, despite his
guayabera
and his chinos, he had “American Sailor” tattooed on his goddamn forehead. He wondered if this was how movie stars felt. Or Elvis. Not that he especially minded being chased by hookers everywhere he went. That was the only good part of this whole two-day pass. The bad part, the really bad part, had been the last two hours at his dying mother’s bedside listening to her scream.

She had cancer of the gut. Bad. Now, you would think that the quote unquote best hospital in Havana would have some kind of painkillers for her. Let her die with some kind of goddamn peace and dignity. He had certainly been wiring her doctor enough money under the table to take special care of her.

Pain management, they called it, every time he called the hospital to check on her. All they could do at this stage, one doctor had said to him. Pain management,
señor.

Yeah, well, that doctor had zoomed right to the top of Gomez’s personal shit list. A true chartbuster.

What had he given her for the pain today? Or yesterday? Or the whole last month as far as he could tell?
Nada.
Zippo. Not even one teensy little baby aspirin. No, the United States government had taken care of that department with their stupid embargo on food and medicine. Still, they had to do something for her.

Finally, he’d pitched a complete shitfit with the doctors and nurses. They told him it wasn’t their fault. Blamed it all on America. He’d nearly beat that doctor’s brains out before they all pulled him off the guy. Some gorilla orderly had whacked his head on the floor and split his lip. The coppery taste of blood was still in his mouth and he bent over and spit his bloody saliva in the gutter.

Jesus H. Christ, was that a tooth going down the drain? He felt around inside his mouth with his tongue. Yes indeedy, one tooth missing. Okay, now he was getting major league pissed off.

That’s why he was now on his way over to the Swiss embassy. Kick some serious butt. Open a big can of whupass on somebody. The head nurse said they had an American desk there. A desk? She said she meant there were some American officials there, even though it was the Swiss embassy.

Make sense? No, but what the hell. Nothing in Cuba made sense anymore. Anyway, he was going to go over there to find one of those little bureaucratic dipshits and rip his goddamn head off.

Murder. That was the ultimate pain management.

That was the plan. First, kick some ass. Next, go
get
some ass. He bought a tourist map and some condoms from a street vendor. He paid one dollar American (nobody took pesos, only greenbacks) and located the embassy on the map. Only eight blocks. He’d hotfoot it over there and pound a few more heads.

Problem was, he found out when he finally got there, the damn embassy was closed. He banged on the door for ten minutes before he realized it was Sunday. Weren’t embassies supposed to be open seven days a week? Like 7-Eleven? What if he had an emergency? Which, by the way, he did. He needed some medicine. He was an American citizen. Hell, he was military. U.S. friggin’ Navy.

Not that the Navy could give a rat’s ass, either. He’d spent the last three nights in the Guantánamo brig for breaking into the base dispensary at three in the morning. He’d copped some morphine and Dilaudid and was just easing out the jimmied back door when the MPs nailed him. The fact that he was stealing medicine for his dying mother didn’t even register.

Tell it to somebody who gives a shit, the MP who busted him had said.

He was sitting on the embassy steps drinking one of his little airplane Stolis and trying to figure out his next move when the weird chick appeared. Blond hair, cut short. Green eyes and big red lips and tits out to here. Christmas in July. Tank top and some kind of black spandex thing that stopped way above her knees. Yellow high heels. That clinched it.

He’d definitely died and gone to prostitute paradise.

The girl stopped and looked at him, lounging there on the steps of the Swiss embassy, Mr. Casual. Weird, but she looked familiar. She had these slanty Chinese eyes, but she didn’t look all that Chinese. Her skin was the color of one of those three-dollar mocha lattes at Starbucks.

Couldn’t tell if she was a working girl or not, more he looked at her. She had this gold collar thing around her neck that looked real. Had a little gold ring hanging down at the front. Hooker jewelry? Hell, they were all working girls, weren’t they? One way or another when you got right down to it, everybody and everything was for sale around here.

Amazingly enough, she climbed up the steps and banged on the door. He let her rap it a few times, then said, “It’s closed. Sunday.”

“What?” she said in English. All attitude this chick.

“You want a mink coat?”

She flipped him the finger and said something that didn’t sound too encouraging.

“How about we start with a big pitcher of sangria over at the Floridita?”

She stopped again, thought about it, turned around. She was checking him out. He yawned and stretched his legs out, cool as a Popsicle.

“Americano,
huh?”

“Home of the brave, baby.”

“Yeah, right, Ernesto Junior here wants to buy me sangria at El Floridita, Papa’s favorite saloon. You’re just another Hemingway sucker,
chico.”

“A who sucker?”

“Never mind. What happened to your lip?”

“You should see the other guy,” he said, liking how fast it came out.

“Yeah, that doctor. You broke his jaw. You’re the one who caused all that trouble at the hospital, right?”

He looked at her.

“You were there? I thought I’d seen you before.”

“My sister is head nurse there. She’s the one who told you about the embassy.”

“So you—like, what, followed me over here?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,
chico.
I had some business at the embassy, too—something to deliver for my brother.” She pulled a manila envelope out of her shoulder bag.

“Stick it under the door,” Gomez said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s full of money.”

“Oh,” he said, thinking, definitely not a working girl delivering cash to an embassy.

“So,
adios,”
she said, sticking the envelope back in her bag. He wondered how much money was in there. He could grab it and run. The
Malecón
was only a block away. He could melt into the crowds. Could she catch him wearing those bright yellow fuck-me shoes? I don’t think so.

“Hey, wait a minute, baby! Where you going?”

“Back to work.”

“You work on Sunday? Christ.”

“My brother has a club. I work there.”

“Yeah, what do you do?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Hey, that sounds good. Can I come?”

“It’s very exclusive. Members only.”

“I could join.”

She laughed so hard it pissed him off.

“You think I can’t afford it?”

“I know you can’t afford it. It’s the most expensive club in Havana. On the other hand—”

“What?”

“My brother might like you.”

“Why’s that?”

“He likes guys who like to beat the shit out of other guys. They’re always useful.”

Five seconds after she put two fingers in her mouth and blew the loudest whistle he’d ever heard, the biggest, blackest Chrysler Imperial on earth pulled up in front of the embassy. The driver, some muscleman in a black T-shirt, reached over and swung the door open for her. She hopped in the front, leaned over, and gave the guy a big kiss.

Gomez didn’t see her sliding over for him up front so he climbed in the back. The car was mint, like just off the showroom floor. Even had that smell.

“What year is this?” Gomez asked as the guy took off down the narrow street.

“Fifty-nine,” the guy said, and turned around and smiled at him. Big gold tooth up front.
“Está bueno, no?”

“This is my cousin Santos,” the chick said, squeezing the back of the guy’s neck. “Sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Gomez.”

“I’m Ling-Ling,” she said.

“Ling-Ling,” Gomez said, liking the sound of it. “You know how Chinese people name their kids?” he asked. “They throw all their silverware up in the air and name the kids after the sound it makes when it hits the floor. Ling-Ling, huh? Sounds like a salad fork.”

Nobody said another word until they pulled up in front of a big wooden gate set in a high pink wall. Gomez had been following their route on his map. They’d driven all along the
Malecón
with the Castillo del Morro on his far right, looking like an ocean liner entering the stormy harbor. Big rollers came in from the Atlantic, crashing over the seawall at Punta Brava, the spray misting the Chrysler’s windshield.

Now they were in the shady El Vedado section where all the big old houses were. Most of them built sometime before 1959
B
.
C
. Before Castro.

Gomez and the chick climbed out.

“Hasta mañana,”
her cousin said, slapping his meaty brown hand on the door a couple of times. Guy must have been wearing ten gold bracelets. Gomez watched the Imperial slide off into a tunnel of green branches hanging dark and heavy, brushing the top of the car as it slid away.

“Well, this is it,” Ling-Ling said, pushing a button in the wall and waving up at one of the video cameras.

“What’s the club called?” Gomez asked as the heavy doors started to swing inward.

“The Mao-Mao Club.”

They stepped through the gates, and Gomez said, “This isn’t a club, it’s a jungle.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? We have every kind of bird and animal. Even jaguars and leopards.”

“No kidding,” Gomez said, trying not to sound scared. He seemed to remember somebody getting eaten by a leopard in a movie.

After five minutes of ducking under trees and climbing over banyan roots that had buckled the old walkway, they came to another gate. This time, the gate swung open automatically into a courtyard and there was a little Chinese guy standing there in red silk pajamas. He had a silver tray in his hand with some kind of drink in a tall silver cup.