Where There's Smoke (3 page)

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Authors: Mel McKinney

BOOK: Where There's Smoke
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“AMIGO?” SILENCE. THEN some kind of rustling. Then a distant voice, a call.
“We need help in here! In the kitchen. Mr. Cameron has collapsed!”
“Amigo, you still there?” More silence. Then footsteps, close together, someone running, more than one.
Raul Salazar willed his pounding heart to quiet. He could not afford to miss a word.
Madre de Dios
! A fitting end to the roller-coaster ride of the past three weeks. The next few moments could lower the curtain on a play that had started almost ten years earlier, a play that had trapped him on a stage he could not afford to leave until Cornelius Gessleman's greed for Cuban cigars had come along.
He tried to picture the scene on the other end of the line: the gaunt congressman slumped on the floor; the family retainers gathered around, clucking helplessly; the old man swooping in, commanding, dominating. But, who knew? Maybe not.
He tried again, softly.
“Amigo?”
“WHO THE HELL IS THIS?”
The unmistakable bellow of Cornelius Gessleman ripped across three states in milliseconds. Raul winced and jerked the receiver from his ear. Cautiously, he brought it close again.
“Ahhh, Señor Gessleman. I was just telling your son-in-law the good news. Is he still there?”
“Good news? Who is this? What in hell are you talking about?”
Raul drew a deep breath. This was it:
El momento de la verdad
; Hemingway's frozen instant when the matador brought all things together as he plunged the
estoque
just over the bull's horn and shoved the slim killing sword home in quest of the instant kill.
“Señor Gessleman, this is Raul Salazar. The restaurant in Miami? You remember? Noches Cubanas? Where you and the congressman like to eat and smoke my fine cigars?”
More silence. Then Gessleman, in the distance:
“Is he conscious? Look at his eyes. Did he hit his head when he fell? My God! Look at him. He's white as a sheet!”
Then, booming through the receiver, “Salazar? Yes, yes, I remember you. What do you want? My son-in-law has passed out. We have a situation here. Is this important? Can't it wait?”
Willing himself to sound formidable, yet sympathetic, Raul replied, “Well, Señor Gessleman, some of it can wait and some of it cannot. We have the cigars. I need to discuss delivery arrangements with you. Delivery can perhaps
be postponed to suit your convenience, considering the circumstances. But payment, I am afraid, cannot wait.
“There were complications. I was telling this to Señor Cameron. Expensive complications. I will leave these matters for Señor Cameron to explain to you when he is able. It is best we do not discuss it further on the telephone. You will understand after you speak with Señor Cameron. I will expect you and Congressman Cameron as my guests at Noches Cubanas tomorrow evening at six. We will have a smoke together, no?
Buenas tardes
.”
Raul hung up, exhausted, but pleased. The
estoque
had struck true. Of that, he was certain.
 
“Clear out of here! All of you—NOW!”
For an eighty-six-year-old, Cornelius Gessleman possessed an amazing bark, in spite of the clouds of cigar smoke that had bathed his throat. He quickly scanned the shocked expressions circling the large kitchen.
The Baptist preacher shuffled uncomfortably at the entrance; Gessleman's fifty-one-year-old-wife, Maven, cowered behind the preacher; Margaret clutched her mother's arm, staring at her downed husband, his head nodding in semiconsciousness. The houseman and several staff who had sped to the kitchen clustered in a corner near the exit through the walk-in pantry.
“Go on—you heard me!” Gessleman shouted, dismissing everyone with an angry wave of his arms. “Wesley just can't handle politics sometimes. Now get out! I'll deal with this.”
 
Satisfied they were alone, Gessleman stood and snatched an empty pot from the center island. He shoved
it into one of the sinks, turned on the cold water full stream, and filled it. He dumped the water in an unceremonious gush over his struggling son-in-law, then called out. “Theodore! Come back here and help me get him into my study.”
 
Cornelius Gessleman was discovering something about himself he had always suspected but never admitted. He was capable of killing someone, slowly, with his bare hands. In fact, as he stared across the desk at his quaking son-in-law, he felt fifty years younger and bristled with the physical compulsion to do just that.
“You pathetic, quivering
moron
,” Gessleman whispered, aware that if his vocal cords engaged, the resultant thunder of rage would reveal their awful secret to the rest of the household, now disbursed throughout the mansion.
“You excuse for a brain. You imbecile. You scrawny, pompous piece of Boston
turd
.” Gessleman paused, struggling to avoid total eruption. Strange, he thought, despite the morbid circumstances, he felt a perverse enjoyment as he told the despised Yalie wimp what he had thought of him since day one.
Gessleman stopped, reflected, then went on, his tone calmed and conversational.
“So what you're telling me is that we—you and I, your stupidity, my money—are what killed the president of the United States, correct?”
Wesley Cameron's baleful look filtered through the fingers that had cradled his head ever since Gessleman and Theodore had half dragged him into his father-in-law's study. He nodded.
Gessleman continued. “And this Cuban cigar king, this Son of Castro, this Caribbean crackpot who talked you into committing my money to steal Kennedy's cigars, went ahead and killed him in Dallas just to create a diversion so they could break into the Kennedy place in Hyannisport?” A note of hysteria had edged in.
“That—that's what he told me—Dad.” Cameron stammered. “Oswald, Ruby, somehow all part of it. Not supposed to come out like it did.”
Then, forcing a weak smile, he added, “He said it was under control, all taken care of, that they were professionals.”
Gessleman blinked, still incredulous that his son-in-law had not put together the rest.
“Oh, I'm sure of that, Wesley.” Now Gessleman's voice climbed, in spite of himself. “Professional assassins and blackmailers who had the good luck to deal with a professional
idiot!”
Again, Gessleman forced his voice to a hiss. “Do you have any idea how much it is going to cost the man who financed the assassination of the president of the United States? We'll get an inkling of that tomorrow night, probably the first of many extortion sessions.”
The congressman looked up, questioning.
“Oh, that's right. You passed out before your good friend, Señor Salazar, brought up money. We are to be his ‘guests' tomorrow night in that cigar barn of a restaurant. I guarantee you, son, then we'll hear the rest. Those ‘professionals' of yours have put your skinny balls in a vice they won't stop closing. As for me, mine dried up years ago. All they can get out of me is money, vast quantities
of it. But from you—a broke but supposedly up-and-coming member of Congress—you'll be in somebody's pocket, besides mine, the rest of your life. I know Cubans. Mafia gangsters, all of them. Except Castro, of course. And for him, it's probably just a matter of time.”
Gessleman shook his head. “All for a bunch of lousy cigars.”
RAUL SALAZAR SETTLED into a meditative trance. Thick, blue smoke snaked aloft, spreading and probing, its rich color and aroma infiltrating time and space. Over a month earlier, when the seeds of the plan were sown, he had promised himself that his own private celebration toasting liberation of the Kennedy cigars would consist of quietly savoring one of the sumptuous Montecristo “A's” that had traveled from Cuba to Mexico with Rosa.
And now, ironically, a further celebration was taking shape, one that would have to await the outcome of his meeting with the congressman and the rich old patron.
Losing himself in the patterns swirling from the flawless ash of the Gran Corona, Raul almost wept at the good fortune beginning to encircle him. It had not always been so.
There is
, he thought,
a pattern of smoke binding all things. Human needs, hypocrisy, and greed gather in shifting
clouds, which surround and touch us all, engulfing some, drifting past others in wisps of fate and luck
.
As a boy, raised in Cuba's Vuelta Abajo, Raul had learned about tobacco and cigars in his grandfather's fields and small factory in Havana. In early October, Raul, his parents, and Grandfather Jennaro would push the tiny seeds into seedbeds. A few weeks later they delicately transplanted the sprouts to hand-cultivated fields. Then, for almost three months, Raul and Victor tended the plants daily as they grew. Often they worked through the night, under Jennaro's constant and crinkled scrutiny, weeding and picking away the pests drawn to the tender, succulent leaves.
By mid-February, hues of light green shimmered in the sun-drenched fields, and the Salazars began to harvest their crop. The pale, lower leaves were carefully sorted from those growing nearer the top, where the intense sunlight concentrated to produce fronds robust with flavor. After three more months of storing, grading, and sorting, they packed the surviving leaves into bundles to ferment and mellow. Jennaro Salazar once confided to his grandson that this, above all, set his cigars apart from the rest. Instead of the conventional double fermentation, the leaves of a Don Salazario were composted and aged through three cycles. Only then were they warehoused for three more years and finally hand rolled to be enjoyed by a select few.
While growing premium tobacco and crafting fine cigars filled Jennaro's life, it formed only a piece of Victor's. With each annual trek from their rural warehouse to the
Salazar Fabrica de Tabaco in Havana, Raul's father grew more attracted to the boisterous mix of that tumultuous city. When Prohibition drove thousands of thirsty Americans to take the short boat ride from Florida to visit their accommodating Cuban neighbors, Victor, then a widower, moved to Havana to oversee the Fabrica and open a nightclub.
Within two years Victor's Noches Cubanas had earned the favor of America's entertainment, political, and sports luminaries. Its success rested on one major difference between it and the Batista-run casinos: Gamblers at Noches Cubanas knew they were in an honest game. The suckers and tourists patronized the larger Batista-affiliated casinos, while the elite played in exclusive privacy at Noches Cubanas. The club had one other unique feature known only to true aficionados. There was no other place in Havana to purchase a Don Salazario cigar.
In 1935, Victor sent for his fourteen-year-old son to help manage Noches Cubanas and learn the casino business. In Havana Raul came to know
all
the brilliance of Cuba, a warped rainbow of Batista-led corruption, faintly tinged with the irrepressible honesty of a few like Victor Salazar.
In the eight years since the night the Bonafaccios had shoved him onto a Miami-bound plane, Raul had often reflected on the moment that had signaled the beginning of the end. In 1938, Batista began paving what would become a golden highway for the Mafia by inviting Meyer Lansky to run two casinos and a racetrack. The shrewd Jewish Godfather immediately recognized the need to
clean up Havana's gambling industry. Its crooked reputation was driving away the trade he wished to cultivate. Victor Salazar was honored by Lansky's overture to serve as a consultant in cleaning up Havana's casinos, and Lansky's message made sense: Havana's success as a gambling mecca would benefit all the casinos, including Noches Cubanas. By the end of the war that vision was realized. For Victor Salazar and Noches Cubanas, it lasted only seven years.
On a warm, spring morning in 1952, Lansky abruptly appeared at Noches Cubanas with the man he introduced as its new owner, Don Joseph Bonafaccio.
 
Letting the two-inch ash tumble softly into the bronze sombrero on his desk, Raul drew slow pleasure from the hand-rolled cigar, images of the past shaping themselves in the wisps and eddies ghosting the room.
When Raul and Victor Salazar smoked their good-bye that night on Havana's
malecón,
another good-bye remained unspoken. Rosa Salero, daughter of a tobacco warehouse worker, had teased and laughed with Raul throughout their youth. Their earthy, rural life in the Vuelta Abajo had bathed them in the rich innocence of an uncomplicated childhood. By the time Raul was summoned by Victor to come and live in Havana, he and Rosa had reached an understanding: Someday, they would marry.
While Raul navigated the currents of those seeking pleasure in Havana, Rosa studied nursing and watched the quiet struggle brewing between Batista's troops and the
men of the hills. When Raul returned to his hometown of San Luis in 1953 and formally proposed to Rosa, she demurred.
“My love,” she had told him, “I do not need to come to Havana to be happy with you. You must return to the country to be happy with me. There are people in the hills who will change Cuba. We, you and I, must join with them.”
Unwilling to leave his father to deal with Bonafaccio alone, Raul had chided her, calling her a “peasant romantic” and a “Rosa Hood.” Though she had bristled at his taunts, their love was strong and she had agreed to an engagement. “You will see,” she told him. “We will marry, but never in Batista's Cuba. Someday you will understand.”
Raul's forced exile tore him from Rosa, who was ultimately swept up in the revolutionary storm that finally cleansed Cuba of the playboy dictator and his Mafia friends.
Connecting in Miami with his father's old friend, Paulo, Raul established his own modest version of Noches Cubanas in Miami's Little Havana. Raul had pleaded with Rosa to join him in Florida, but by then, Rosa's heart harbored a second passion: revolution.
In February 1959, following the Mafia's chaotic exodus before the ebullient revolutionaries who stormed the casinos, Raul had read of Don Bonafaccio's quiet death at his upstate New York mansion. By then, the cement of change had set, fixing Raul to his restaurant and Rosa to her revolution. Her nursing skills, once used to patch Castro's guerrillas, were siphoned into the vacuum of Kennedy's
embargo. Rosa stayed in the highlands, ministering to the hundreds of children deprived of medical care and supplies by the political shroud draped over her island country.
 
This was all smoke of the past. Now, finally, the smoke rising from the Montecristo in his hand held the promise of the future. What had started as a simple, but outrageous, scheme to raise money for Rosa's clinic had become the key to restoring the life wrenched from him by the Bonafaccios—a way to return to Rosa and Cuba with glory.
 
The soft ring of the telephone intruded. The images faded and became mere whorls circling Raul's desk.
“Yes.”
“Raul. We have landed in Miami. We are on our way from the airport, okay?”
“Good, Jorge. Very good. We will have dinner, a celebration, yes?”
“Sí,
Raul. A celebration, most certainly.”
Raul hung up and dialed Paulo. He instructed him to set up the private dining room for five. Then he settled back to enjoy the rest of the Montecristo, still marveling at the way layers of circumstance could bind, like the leaves of a perfect cigar.
Two months earlier, when the congressman and his father-in-law had been at Noches Cubanas, Raul had presented them both with Juan Lopez Robustos. The short, pungent cigars had so pleased the old man that he had done a rare thing: he'd asked for another, and he'd had a second snifter of cognac. Raul had graciously responded,
not knowing then that he was planting seeds that were to bear such rich fruit.
The brandy and the heady smokes had opened a fissure in Gessleman, releasing poisons of anger and frustration that had been fermenting too long.
“Now, you take these, for instance,” Gessleman had said, waving the dark, podgy stub that was igniting the fuse of his personal powder keg. “I
always
used to have two boxes of these in my humidor. One of the best goddamned after-dinner cigars ever to come out of Cuba. Hard to get then. Impossible now, except for someone like you, of course,” he'd said, winking at Raul.
It had seemed to Raul that Gessleman and the congressman had regarded him as Castro's unofficial emissary in the United States. He had seen no reason to dispel the notion. Certainly, there had been no reason to educate them about his visit to Mexico City the previous month, when he and Rosa had refreshed their passion and she had delivered his first cigars to pierce the embargo.
“But now,” Gessleman had continued, his slurred voice rising, color tinging his cheeks, “Our
president
sits up there in Washington or Cape Cod or wherever that clan hangs out, puffing fine Cuban cigars like a frigg'n steam engine while I have to smuggle ‘em in!”
The congressman had looked around nervously. Placing his hand on his father-in-law's arm, he had started to whisper something when Gessleman exploded.
“It's true! I know it for a fact. I was up there for a hearing two weeks ago and had dinner with that snotty brother of his, Bobby. Cocky little squirt
gave
me one. Said, ‘Jack wants you to have this.'”
Raul had followed Gessleman's story with great interest. He, too, was incensed by Kennedy's action. The president's hypocrisy had been a slap in the face in light of the moronic policy now garroting his country, his business, and his life.
The success of Noches Cubanas had rested on its resplendent selection of Cuba's finest for its patrons. With Kennedy's embargo, Raul was forced to admit that the club's days were numbered. Raul had been pondering this when Gessleman's drunken rambling had snapped him back to the conversation.
“I tell you, nothing would give me greater pleasure than tweaking that cocky bastard where it hurts him most, right in his cigars. Like to mount me up an expedition and go liberate the sonsabitches. And it wouldn't be any screwed-up thing like that Bay of Pigs fiasco. Use professionals. Do it right. Yessir.”
By then Gessleman's glazed eyes and jumbled words demanded intervention. The congressman had stood and, with Raul's help, raised the old man from his chair.
“Person who could get those cigars'd be a real hero, he would. Make some money, too. Professionals, that's what it would take, professionals, prof …” Gessleman slumped into a stupor, and Raul helped the congressman get him to the waiting Chrysler Imperial.
After they were gone, Raul had sat at the bar, finishing his cognac and Juan Lopez. Gessleman was a rich, old fool. But rich, old fools ran much of the world, and this one had struck a nerve. He was to see Rosa in Mexico in two days. What a wonderful story to tell her!
 
 
When Raul returned from Mexico, Cornelius Gessleman's frustrated outburst had seeded more than a story. With Rosa's fervored challenge, it had spawned a plan.
Raul knew professionals. Hell, Miami teemed with professionals. Three days later he'd pitched the deal to the congressman. Two days after that, four dark-skinned men left Miami in a tarnished 1954 Chevrolet, headed for Cape Cod.
 
Again, the phone. It was Paulo.
“Your amigos are in the private room. A bar is set up.”
“Very good, Paulo.
Gracias
.”
Raul went to join his professionals in celebration.

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