King of Cuba (25 page)

At 7:00 a.m. Víctor Ticona knocked on his door, regular as a rooster. He set out Goyo’s breakfast in silence—sliced papaya, multigrain toast, café con leche. Goyo dictated the day’s tasks, which included purchasing black support hose and spying on the Turks for any breaches of kitchen regulations (Goyo was compiling
evidence to evict them). The taciturn Andean could be provoked to garrulousness only with regard to his hated in-laws, whom he blamed for turning his wife against him. Occasionally, Goyo joined in with complaints about Luisa’s family, who’d chosen to remain in Cuba and had devoted their lives to fleecing him at every turn.

Goyo inspected the contents of his closet and chose his linen suit and two-toned shoes. Back in the day, his ensemble would’ve been regarded not as foppishness but as a stylish gentleman’s summer wear. After checking his appearance in the foyer mirror, Goyo adjusted his Panama hat, then swung open the front door. The dust hung thick in the corridor. He extracted a handkerchief from his breast pocket and covered his mouth. Esposito had been charging Goyo triple his initial estimates, certain that he wouldn’t risk switching contractors in midconstruction. Now the elevator was broken, too. With Víctor’s help, Goyo gingerly descended the three flights of stairs.

“I’ll be back by noon,” Goyo said. “I’m counting on you, Víctor. We need to evict those Turks one way or another.”

“A sus órdenes, Jefe.”

Goyo hailed a cab (he rarely drove in New York anymore, keeping his Cadillac safely stored in a midtown garage) and asked the driver, a Haitian, judging by his name—Henri Jean-Baptiste Dorcelus—to take him to the Brooklyn shipyards in Red Hook. In Havana, he and his brothers had grown up with chauffeurs. When they got old enough to drive, they borrowed the family Cadillacs and cruised them up and down the seawall, flirting with the pretty girls. Back then piropos were high art, not like the coarse come-ons of today. The challenge was finding the perfect balance between worshipful and provocative. Too crude, and the ladies wouldn’t give you the time of day. Too proper, and they stifled a yawn. The best flirtations were respectful but had a seductive edge. For example,
if a woman had a florid backside and a tiny waist, one might say: Mujer de guitarrón es un viento de ciclón.

The taxi coasted across the Brooklyn Bridge. To the south gleamed the East River, emptying into the widening expanse of sea. What was the point of sending satellites into space, Goyo thought, when the greatest wilderness on the planet lurked at the edges of its shores? If he were young again, he might become an oceanographer like that French underwater explorer from the sixties who nobody remembered anymore. Goyo rapped on the glass partition dividing him from the taxi driver.

“Have you heard of Jacques Rosteau?” Goyo asked.

“Mais oui,
”
Henri said, surprised. “He was my great-uncle on my mother’s side.”

“How’s that?” Goyo leaned forward.

“He fell in love with Maman’s youngest aunt. She was his companion for many years. In Paris, they lived. In a grand apartment on the Rue Bonaparte.”

“Is she still alive?”

“She drowned herself in La Seine after Jacques died.” Henri shook his head.

Goyo was convinced that the world’s greatest love stories remained hidden behind scrims of propriety.

Henri swerved from the bridge onto Tillary Street, driving through downtown Brooklyn and its newly gentrified neighborhoods toward the abandoned shipyards. With Goyo’s guidance, he pulled up to a chain-link fence that partially hid a building with a battered tin roof, exposed pipes, and tangles of rusted wiring. Once this had been the crown jewel in Papá’s archipelago of offices throughout the Americas—Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Panama City, Veracruz. All this from a boy who’d herded sheep in the mountains of Galicia. Papá liked to recount the time he’d fattened one of his sick sheep with bloating grasses and sold it for top dollar at the
farmers’ market. His lesson: to strike a bargain with the Devil himself in pursuit of a profit.

Goyo recalled a visit to these Brooklyn offices when he was twelve and en route to the Jesuit boarding school in Canada. It was a September during World War II, and his father was nattily dressed, his gold pocket watch linked by a fine chain to his belt loop. Behind him, a rose-throated Cuban parrot preened its feathers in a bamboo cage. Papá’s executive secretary was a dead ringer for the Italian starlet Assia Noris, with her perfect brows and lush, wavy hair. Goyo watched as the secretary touched his father’s wrist, delicately, as if she were brushing away crumbs. Nothing was ever said, of course, but Goyo grew up to become, like Papá, a chronic philanderer.

In 1961, as panic over the Revolution skyrocketed, the Herrera ships were transporting people along with their usual cargo of sugar, tobacco, and coffee. The going rate for a spot on a northbound ship: three thousand dollars per man, woman, and child. Passengers accused Papá of extortion, but later, after his suicide, Goyo received dozens of letters from exiles claiming that Arturo Herrera had saved their lives. On that last voyage from Havana, Goyo was cheek by jowl with Cuba’s elite like so many peasants on an immigrant ship. The socialites hid their jewels in unmentionable places, and their impudent children wore three and four outfits at once. These days, a reverse flow of goods trickled into the island via returning exiles bearing aspirin, tires, panty hose, and cheap Chinese sandals for their relatives.

Goyo wondered how many of those same exiles had taken their lives after the catastrophe of the Revolution. His father had lived for the promise of return but soon became a man with no country, a homeless man. He killed himself one Sunday afternoon when Goyo was due for supper. Papá had left a simple meal on the kitchen table: a Spanish omelet with a side of still-steaming white
rice, a salad cooling in the refrigerator. Goyo imagined his father slipping his 1927 Detective Special, the one he’d had inlaid with a mother-of-pearl handle, into his mouth; imagined him, unflinching, as he pulled the trigger.

Across the river, the lower Manhattan skyline brooded. It’d never looked right to Goyo since 9/11. The towering twin ghosts still hovered there like gigantic phantom limbs. He’d been uptown when the planes hit, lingering, dry-mouthed, in the luscious Carla Stracci’s bed after a night of drinking champagne and smoking pot (it was the one and only time he’d tried it) and nursing a splitting headache. None of his family was in town: Luisa was in Miami, Alina on a photo assignment in the Serengeti, and Goyito in a Jacksonville county jail for petty larceny—all safe, thank goodness.

The driver leaned against the hood of his taxi, smoking a cigarette. Goyo was inclined to join him with the cigar in his pocket but decided against it. Everything had its time, its place, its appropriate level of reverence. It was too early in the day for his puro. The traffic back to the city was bumper-to-bumper. Men and women bound for Wall Street trekked across the Brooklyn Bridge. Goyo was glad that he hadn’t spent his life slaving away at a big corporation. He’d been a slave all right, but to the demands of his own business.

On an impulse, Goyo had the driver stop at a Korean fruit stand on Thirty-Seventh Street and bought a bouquet of lilies for Carla. Then he instructed the driver to drop him off at the United Nations, where his ex-lover still worked as secretary to the Italian delegation. Goyo was anxious to see her, longed to bury his head in her magnificent breasts. The Russian security guard, a hulking vestige from the Cold War, was on duty as usual at the north entrance for visitors. Poor Yuri’s face looked like badly baked bread: lumpy cheeks, sagging chin, a crusty, split upper lip. Over the nearly three decades that they’d been friends, the Russian had proved an invaluable resource
to Goyo, briefing him on potential paramours and arranging catering opportunities in exchange for roast-beef-and-horseradish sandwiches and multiple quarts of borscht.

Today, the Russian inspected the lilies with a conspiratorial smile. “You are inspiration to mankind, Comrade Herrera,” he said, gargling his
r
’s. As usual, he waved Goyo into the United Nations without the security protocol required of visitors.

“Is she in today?” Goyo asked, bypassing the metal detector. At one time, he was probably better known at the UN than its transient secretaries-general. With a nod, he promised Yuri a care package that very afternoon.

The General Assembly building was undergoing renovations. All of New York, it seemed, was on the brink of collapse. Goyo circumvented the construction zones and found his way to the Italian offices. At the reception desk, in all her glorious curves, sat La Carla in a tight cashmere sweater. (Not even that bombshell Vilmita could hold a candle to her.) Coño, he would walk on coals for this woman! Goyo stopped in his tracks, seized by a nervous spasm of sneezing that made his ex-lover laugh out loud. Whatever awkwardness may have existed between them (the affair hadn’t ended well, rife with recriminations and flying crockery) dissipated. Sheepishly, he handed her the flowers.

“Eh, you are allergic to the lilies,” Carla purred, patting his cheek. She offered him a tissue and made him blow his nose like a schoolboy. Then she reached inside a cabinet for a crystal vase. An imposing diamond gleamed on her ring finger.

“You’re married?” Goyo asked stupidly.

In response, she held up a silver-framed photograph of a disturbingly muscular man in a military uniform, one trouser leg pinned neatly to thigh level. The astonishment must’ve shown on Goyo’s face because Carla put a hand on her hip and said, a touch defensively, “He’s a war hero.”

“From where?”

“Bosnia.”

Goyo coughed into his fist. He struggled not to think of her husband’s stump; like a blunt hand, he imagined, lacking articulation. “You are happy then?”

“Only animals are happy,” Carla snapped, her voice dropping an octave.

Goyo recalled the night at boarding school when the first-floor boys had procured a hooker—one for nine of them—at the cut-rate price of ten dollars per customer. She, too, had been missing a leg.

Carla produced an espresso from the sleek cappuccino machine behind her desk. Goyo wanted to say that he missed her skin, her scent; that he’d often wondered in the days following 9/11 whether he’d made a mistake staying with his wife.

“Luisa is dead,” he said.

“Yuri told me. My condolences.”

Since when had that Russian become such a chatterbox? Goyo drank his espresso and watched Carla watching him before he dared take a peek at her cleavage. Her breasts were perfect, majestically situated on her torso. He should’ve come better prepared to win her back.

A group of men in guayaberas walked down the hall speaking Cuban-accented Spanish. Goyo looked quizzically at Carla. Every nerve in his body fired up.

“Tomorrow, at noon,” Carla said.

“Damn it.” Goyo wasn’t expecting the tyrant until next week. There’d been nothing about this change of plans from those idiots at Hijodeputa.com.

“When he went to Harlem many years ago, i negri loved him,” Carla said, but Goyo wasn’t listening. “I negri . . . they loved him.”

Goyo descended into his blackest soul, stirring up from its
bottom the residue of his scoured life, of the lives of thousands of his fellow exiles. His blood roiled anew at the thought of El Comandante extolling the virtues of his last-gasp regime at the UN.

“Querida, I need to ask you a favor,” Goyo began, slipping his pistol from its holster and eyeing her spotless desk. He needed a safe place to keep the Glock until tomorrow. Security quadrupled when a controversial leader like El Comandante visited. Goyo couldn’t risk not getting the weapon through security, even with his Russian friend on duty. He knew by the expression on Carla’s face that she would comply. She would comply, Goyo knew, because despite her one-legged husband, she still loved him.

There was no time to waste. The tyrant was coming to his very door, to ridicule by his unrepentant presence everyone he’d so brutally driven away. Bueno, let the bastard come. Goyo was ready.

I lie awake at night worrying that they’re going to screw me. This is my big shot and I don’t want to blow it. Finally, I have something they want. “They” meaning the world beyond this fucking island, the golden goose—Hollywood itself. I’m just one writer, vulnerable against those sharks. Yes, I have an agent in Spain, but we’re talking major cifra here, and when that’s at stake I could be sold out with a sneeze. It’s neocolonialism all over again. I haven’t written a damn word from all the stress. Detective Harry Morales is my invention. If I play this right, he could become the next Sherlock Holmes, or James Bond; my family set up for generations. I need to hang tough, hold my ground. Nobody gives it to me up the ass. Nobody.

—Manolo Goytisolo, detective novelist