Authors: Daniel Chavarria
Adios Muchachos (15 page)
The neat little bronze plaque on the door said
CIRUGIA MAXILO-FACIAL
—Cuban medical jargon for cosmetic surgery involving the bones of the face. A man with gray hair and a white coat was using a laser pointer to trace lines along the six-foot profile of Jan van Dongen projected on a screen hanging from the ceiling.
“And by making a forty-five-degree frontal incision along the anterior upper ridge of the nasal septum, we can easily give you a much flatter nose, probably similar to a boxer’s, something more along the lines of Jean Paul Belmondo.”
A few commands into the computer produced a front-and-side view of a strikingly forceful, Belmondesque version of van Dongen. “This nose, for example, would seem to go just right with the shape of your eyes and the overall oval of your face, without depriving you of character.”
Another click and van Dongen’s old face was back on the screen. “Because if go in and cut here, we eliminate the surplus flesh …”
As the doctor continued his explanation, van Dongen listened in a crescendo of horror. Finally he could stand it no longer and, throwing his hands against his ears, apologized to the doctor. “I’m sorry, doctor, but, please, stop. I’m very sorry but I start to feel faint just from listening to you …”
“That’s his problem,” Carmen explained. “He’s terrified of the operation.”
“I can assure you that you won’t feel a thing, not even after the anesthetic wears off.”
“It’s not fear of the pain, either. It’s the mere idea of having someone sawing away at a part of my anatomy. Just thinking about it makes me queasy.”
“Look at the way he’s sweating, Juanito,” Carmen told the doctor, wiping off Jan’s brow with a handkerchief.
“Well, I can see that; he’s pale as a sheet.” And to van Dongen: “Were you feeling dizzy?”
“Not dizzy … chills …”
“Let me tell you that I’ve had patients who have been willing to go through the most excruciating pain to avoid getting an IM shot of anesthetic. Personally, I don’t like to operate on people with phobias this strong because their fear is irrational and uncontrollable. We know of situations where even young healthy patients have suffered a heart attack on the operating table.”
“If I weren’t so terrified of the knife, I would have had this operation twenty-five years ago. When I was in my teens, my family tried to convince me, but it was stronger than me—”
“If that’s the case,” the doctor interrupted, rising to his feet and addressing Carmen, “there’s nothing to be done. Before going any further with your plans to have the operation, I would seriously advise you to take him to a psychiatrist who can help him come to grips with the whole idea of surgery. Maybe with the right treatment, perhaps deep hypnosis … I really don’t know. Perhaps with some professional counseling, he won’t be so terrified of the operation.”
Wearing a very short and very sexy sleeping gown, Alicia was drinking a tall glass of orange juice. She was leaning on the freezer that held Rieks’s body.
A white woman in her early fifties, wearing a maid’s cap and apron, was wiping the glass windowpanes above the kitchen sink. She stopped for a moment, hesitated, and addressed Alicia: “I hope I’m not stepping out of line, ma’am, but I noticed that the freezer was locked, and if I’ve done anything so you don’t trust me anymore, I’m sorry and …”
“Not at all,” Alicia commented, “but I’m glad you mentioned that because I almost forgot to tell you that Victor wanted me to give you something.” Alicia stepped into the living room and came back with two manila envelopes. “Here is your salary, your vacation advance, and a little bonus for both you and the gardener.”
The woman stared at Alicia open-mouthed, worried that it might be severance pay.
“Mr. King wants you to take your vacations as of tomorrow. I hope it doesn’t inconvenience you.”
“Well,” the maid said, measuring just how far she could go without jeopardizing her job, “I was planning on taking a vacation during the holiday season so I could be with my grandchildren and—”
“I’m sorry, but since I’m leaving for Varadero tonight and Mr. King will be on a business trip, he lent the house to some Italian friends who want complete privacy. And don’t worry about the holidays,” Alicia continued. “I’m certain that Mr. King will give you time off during the holidays.”
“Oh, thank you,” the woman repeated, not knowing whether to be happy or worried.
“Now, please leave the house in perfect order because these guests are very important business associates.”
“Yes ma’am. If there’s anything out of place when you come back, it won’t be my doing.”
Well
, the maid thought,
I guess I told her. Lots of privacy and no staff can only mean one thing … orgies. And it’ll take me a week to get the place in order
.
November 8, 1800 hours
Jan van Dongen put Karl Bos’s overnight bag into the back seat of Victor’s red Malibu and stepped into the car to wait for Bos to tip the redcap and get in. He asked Victor to race the engine a bit and turn the air conditioner up full blast with all the ducts blowing into the back seat. The guy who said “ice cold air” must have had a very personal definition of the term, he thought, wiping profuse perspiration from his brow.
A moment later, Karl Bos got into the car, sweating copiously and, strangely, sharing the same thought van Dongen had just had. After his quick visit to Amsterdam—the beautiful, chilly, rainy, foggy Amsterdam he loved—he was glad to see the endless dome of blue skies, but the heat was murder when you were not at the beach.
Somewhere ahead of them, cars were honking. Traffic was jammed and tempers were hotter than the atmosphere. Tourist busses, taxies, and hoards of people who had come to see someone off or receive friends and relatives. Tearful good-byes, joyous hellos, straw hats, shorts, T-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara, a quick slug of rum out of a bottle in a paper bag, kids with sodas and hot dogs …
Cubans are an amazing lot
, Bos thought.
Whenever anyone travels abroad or returns, their whole family, half their friends, and a quarter of the neighborhood turns out at the airport.
Victor finally pulled free of the airport traffic jam and turned to get on the brand-new expressway built to ferry tourists into Havana.
“How was your trip?” van Dongen asked.
“The family will pay with no questions asked,” Bos commented, answering van Dongen’s real, unspoken question.
“What about Rieks’s wife?” Victor asked, “What does she think?”
“She agreed. The whole family agrees, difficult as that may seem. The old lady was particularly forceful in insisting that under no circumstances were the police to be brought in, nor were we to do anything that might endanger Rieks. She, Vincent, and the family lawyer repeated several times that we were to accept the kidnappers’ conditions and pay whatever they asked.”
“I think we should ask them for a picture of Rieks holding the day’s newspaper. We have to make certain that he’s still alive.”
“No, Jan,” Bos replied sternly, “the Grootes have forbidden that. The money is really of no consequence to them. If anything were to happen to Rieks, his wife would get ten million from the insurance company, so this is not about money. The important thing is not to alarm the kidnappers. We want them to behave in a businesslike manner and not harm Rieks.”
“But asking for a picture is standard operating procedure. Any kidnapper knows that. And if they refuse, we do as they as ask and forget about it. But if they do send the picture, we’ll all be able to go through the rest of the motions with a lot more hope.”
Karl Bos pushed out his lower lip and looked up into the car’s gray ceiling. He was trying to think the idea through and finally come to a conclusion. He looked at his watch and asked Victor for his cell phone. A moment later, Bos was talking to his wife in Dutch, which she did not really understand—but since his
Papiamento
was even worse, they got along in Dutch. Next he talked to his secretary, this time in English, and asked her to set up a meeting with the Cuban engineers for the following morning.
Ten minutes later, the red car pulled up to a sprawling, one-story house in the Fontanar suburb of Havana. Bos’s wife was standing outside to welcome him as if he had been gone for a whole month.
“OK gentlemen, thank you very much. We meet in my office in two hours. Jan, make sure all the employees have left the building.”
November 8, 2100 hours
The meeting was attended by Karl Bos, Jan van Dongen, and Victor King—no secretaries, no assistants. The first point of order was to decide who would be the contact person with the kidnappers. Victor was quick to beg off. He alleged that he was still too depressed from what had happened. In fact, it had been just five days since he had managed to survive the attack. His forehead and wrists still bore the signs of his encounter. He was pale and he had lost weight.
Van Dongen volunteered and Karl Bos agreed.
Victor asked how they were going to solve the problem of the cash. That kind of money could invite a serious problem. At Bos’s suggestion, Vincent Groote had ordered Geert de Greiff, Managing Director of the Caracas office, to send the four million to Havana by messenger. De Greiff had promised to have the money in Havana by November 15.
Van Dongen again brought up the matter of asking the kidnappers for a photograph of Rieks with the day’s newspaper in his hands. Victor vehemently supported the idea and Bos wound up agreeing: “OK, it’s not a bad idea. If I can get the family to agree, we’ll go with it.”
November 8, 2300 hours
“What? Are you out of your fucking mind?” Alicia screamed when she heard that they wanted a picture and that Victor had supported the idea.
“What are we going to send them, a picture of the body, all stiff and made up like a black woman?”
“Take it easy, Alicia,” Victor urged. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
Alicia glared at Victor with a mix of rage and uncertainty.
“Tomorrow, when you phone Bos and he proposes taking the picture, you tell him that you have to talk it over with your partners. And don’t forget to ask who is going to deliver the money. He’ll tell you it’s van Dongen.”
Alicia scribbled more notes on her pad and made another gesture of disgust. “I don’t understand why you didn’t volunteer. Everything would have been easier if you were the one to take the money and just drop it off wherever we please.”
“Nothing doing! I don’t want anyone in the company to see me even look at that money.”
Victor stepped up to the freezer and tried to open it. “Did you lock this?”
“Maid.”
“Right! Give me the key.” Victor opened the freezer and began to rummage through the upper layer of food packages. “I don’t want to be associated with the money because I’m the only witness to the kidnapping and that’s enough for some skeptical bastards to start suspecting me.”
“Of what?”
“Of anything! Don’t you know how those bastards think? The closest person to the crime, even the person who reports it, is their first suspect. Besides, van Dongen is a cousin, a member of the family. He’s beyond reproach.”
Alicia was intrigued by Victor’s rummaging. “What are you doing in there? Leave the poor bastard alone!”
“We’ve got to defrost him, don’t we?”
Alicia stared at him, wondering what he was talking about.
“For the picture … we have to defrost him …”
“How are we—”
“We just put him out by the pool, like any normal person getting a tan, and …”
“Are you crazy? He’ll stink to high heaven. Every vulture in Cuba will be circling the house, and we’ll have the police in here in no time thinking we’re selling hot meat.”
“Well, it’s actually cold …”
“Spare me the jokes for now, please. Don’t you know that illegal slaughter of cattle and all that kind of stuff can get you about fifteen years?”
Alicia was on the verge of tears. Victor took her in his arms to comfort her. “Don’t get hysterical. As soon as he’s flexible, we set him up on a deck chair, take the picture, and, wham, back in the freezer.”
“Well, OK, but you do it. I don’t want to touch him,” she said with a shudder.
November 9, 0200 hours
An ass and a pair of legs about to lose contact with the floor—that was all you could see of Victor as he fished the last couple of lobsters out of the enormous freezer for Alicia to add to the pile of dripping packages stacked on the stainless steel sink counter.
“This is the last of it,” Victor exclaimed triumphantly, looking at Alicia and trying to warm his half-frozen hands in his armpits.
Alicia approached the freezer and sneaked a peek at Groote in his prayerful position of pious prostration. Coming up beside her, Victor reached in to try to move the body. Failing in his first attempt, he gave it a stronger shove and failed again.
“Sonovabitch!!!”
“What’s wrong?” Alicia asked.
“The sonovabitch is frozen to the bottom … but it’s my own fucking fault … I should’ve known this would happen … It always happens.”
“OK, OK,” Alicia soothed, taking command of the crisis situation, “all we have to do is pour warm water on the parts where he’s stuck and thaw him loose. We have to thaw him anyway, don’t we?”
Glad to let her take over, Victor stood back, moved over to the espresso maker, filled it, and waited for the …
What was it the slaves in Cuba used to call it? ‘The black nectar of the white gods’? Well, the black and white crap is pretty much passé now, but this is certainly the nectar of …
“Hey,” Alicia called, breaking Victor’s magic moment, “if I have to do everything by myself, I’m going to have to get seventy-five percent of the take. Here, use your mucho macho muscles to lift this pot out of the sink and put it on the stove.”
Victor turned to Alicia with a boyish, “what’d I do?” look of wounded innocence.
“It’s bad enough that this damn halogen crap is going to take all day now, but if you turn off on me, then we’re the ones in hot water,” she harangued.
With the pot issue safely in hand, Victor turned to the steps they had mapped out for the next few hours: “Have you calculated the weight of the money?”
“Not yet, but I brought over my mother’s spice scale and we can do it now.”
“Spice scale?” Victor asked, as they moved into the living room to give the stove time to heat the water.
“Yes. For a while there, my father was trying to duplicate certain sauces and dressings he had tasted in Indonesia, and the proportions were almost in goddamn nanograms,” she explained. “What I don’t have is a hundred-dollar bill.”
“We don’t need one,” Victor said. “They all weigh the same.”
Alicia took a small chest from one of the end tables and opened the top, revealing a minute analytical balance with tiny slivers of metal that served as weights.
“OK, give me all the bills you have so we can get some kind of critical mass here,” Victor said.
“My father warned me once that you have to use tweezers to handle the weights,” she warned.
“Screw the tweezers,” Victor protested, but wound up having to use them anyways because his fingers were too clumsy for the tiny slivers.
“So, ten bills weigh just about ten grams. That means a gram each. Great! The four million in hundreds is going to need 40,000 bills for the whole package to weigh forty kilograms, which means the valise with the money is going to weigh around eighty-eight pounds.”
“Eighty-eight pounds!” Alicia muttered with a worried look. “How am I supposed to lift that?”
“No problemo! With the gear I’m going to get, you could lift an elephant.”