Authors: Daniel Chavarria
Adios Muchachos (20 page)
Bos took the card with serious misgivings, inspecting it for a few seconds longer than would have been necessary for him to identify the all-too-well-known features on the driver’s license photo.
“It’s … it’s Hendryck Groote, president of the company I work for … Has anything happened to him?”
“I’m sorry to inform you that he was found dead just a short while ago at the bottom of a construction site …”
Bos closed his eyes in an effort to control the intense pain. He pressed the index and middle fingers of his hands to his temples and collapsed onto the couch.
2041 hours
Alicia was about to finish wiping off the interior of the rental with a moist cloth. Steering wheel, gearshift, switches, window frames … everything had to be absolutely clean. Outside the car, Victor was hosing down the tires. Just then, he heard his cell phone ringing and took it out of his belt pouch.
“Hello? Yes, Karl, it’s me. Any news?”
“How horrible! No, I can’t believe it.”
There followed a long silence in which Alicia strained to hear what Bos was saying, and Victor only managed to nod his head about a dozen times.
“Yes, I’ll be over immediately.”
He switched off the phone and turned to Alicia. “They found the body. It seems there were some kids playing at the bottom of the pit, and now the police want us to go down to the morgue to identify the body.”
“Is there anything pointing to us?” Alicia asked.
“No. Luckily for us, the kids didn’t even hear the car start.”
Raising her arms in the air, Alicia exclaimed, “Thank God! Hell, I’d like to get very drunk right now.”
“Please leave it for some other time,” Victor said. “Right now, while I go down to the morgue with Karl, I want you to take the car and leave it anywhere in Vedado. Then put on your chubby-American get-up and meet me at the Havana Libre bar. But just one drink, right?”
2115 hours
When the morgue attendant lifted the sheet covering the face, Victor and Bos nodded at the same time, sharing the same somber expression. His job done, the attendant dropped the sheet in its place and wheeled the corpse away on a stretcher.
A young man with three stars indicating that he was a first lieutenant said, “If you gentlemen feel up to it, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Victor was the first to reply: “I confess I’m not really in any condition to talk about this … This is terrible … Unless it’s very urgent.”
“I feel exactly the same way, Lieutenant …”
“No, I don’t think I have anything urgent to ask you,” the lieutenant said. “Can we get together tomorrow at nine?”
“Nine will be fine,” Bos answered, automatically assuming his position as senior company executive.
“Fine,” the lieutenant said, adding, “but in the meantime, I think you should know that this is not the only problem your company will be dealing with. Our missing persons department recently received a call from Mrs. Jan van Dongen advising us that she had heard no word from her husband since about noon today. Normally we would not be overly concerned about a twelve-hour disappearance, but under the circumstances—”
“I already knew about that,” Bos interrupted, “and it’s been gnawing at the back of my mind for hours now.
We’ve had no news of him all afternoon, and it’s really not like him at all.” “Well, sir,” the officer continued, “we ran a check, and it seems that your Mr. Jan van Dongen left Rancho Boyeros Airport at 4:30 this afternoon, bound for Mexico.” And taking a notebook from his pocket, “… aboard an air taxi flight he had reserved and paid for the day before yesterday on the company account.”
Victor looked at Bos in very genuine amazement.
2150 hours
In her chubby American persona, Alicia was honestly just beginning to consider asking for a third drink when Victor showed up, strung tighter than a violin string. He paid the bartender the price of a double VSOP plus a healthy tip, took Alicia by the arm, and led her to one of the tables in the far corner of the Cañitas Bar. There he stared through the high glass wall at the pool lights for a few seconds. Alicia knew better than to try to get him to speak before he was ready. When the drink arrived, he took a tiny sip and, with self-imposed calm, asked, “Where did you leave the car?”
“About three blocks from here … With the keys in the ignition. I imagine someone will steal it before the night is through. How did it go for you at the morgue?”
No response from Victor.
“I think I asked you a question. Would you mind answering me? Is everything all right?”
Still exercising immense self-control, Victor answered, “I don’t know yet, Alicia. That prick van Dongen and his fucking nose have left Cuba without telling anyone, not even his wife, if you can believe her.”
Alicia, beginning to vibrate in resonance with the alarm Victor was broadcasting, turned to look directly into his eyes. “So what do you make of it?”
“I don’t know …”
“Hey, listen, did you check the contents of the money bag? Are you sure it was really full of money?”
“That’s exactly what I was going to ask you. We were both fooling around with the damn rose and never got around to actually counting the money.”
“We didn’t have to,” Alicia protested. “You were there when they counted and packed it, weren’t you? Why should we have to check it? Do you think the Nose could have pulled a fast one on us?”
“I can’t imagine how,” Victor said, absorbed in his thoughts. “However I look at it, there doesn’t seem to be any way that he could have pulled a switch … But this mysterious departure has got me climbing the fucking wall.”
2226 hours
The Chevrolet had hardly arrived when Victor and Alicia were already rushing to the closet where they had hidden the bag with the four million dollars.
Victor hauled it out, slammed it on one of the tables, and began to fumble with the locks, while Alicia waited impatiently by his side. When the strapped bundles were again in view, all neatly arranged in rows, Victor took a deep breath, randomly picked up a bundle, placed his thumb on one end, and flipped through the bills.
“SONOVABITCH!!!” he screamed, ripping the band off the bundle and heaving a blizzard of blank paper into the air. Going through his broad repertoire of Canadian, Mexican, and Cuban expletives, he uselessly picked up and ripped open bundle after bundle, with the sinking realization that they were all as phony as the first.
Suddenly he stopped, placed both his hands on his hips, and turned to Alicia with a menacing expression. Walking slowly toward her, he raised his fingers to his temples and spoke again calmly. “I do not want to even begin to think that you and the Nose—” he said, but cut himself short, knitting his brow in deep thought. Then he turned and in two strides was beside the bag, examining the bundles that his initial fury had left intact.
“Of course!”
Arms in the air, kicking and cursing everything in sight, Victor stomped around the room shouting his favorite leitmotif in an ever-increasing crescendo: “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, the fucking son of a bitch …”
Alicia was obviously worried, but not at all impressed by Victor’s theatrics. “Would you please end this routine and tell me what’s going on?”
Victor stopped quite suddenly, but failed to react for a couple of seconds. Then, turning to Alicia and dropping his arms: “Forgive me. For a moment there, I thought you and your mother had somehow switched the bills.”
“Now you’ve really gone over the edge!” Alicia shouted. “When did we have the time?”
Victor picked up one of the bundles and showed Alicia the transparent plastic band. “Even if you had all the time in the world, these bands arrived in Cuba just a few days ago. They came all the way from a Dutch bank, via Venezuela, and there was no way in the world you could have gotten your hands on them. The bundles Karl Bos prepared in the office ran consecutively from 001 to 400; these bundles run from 401 to 800. This means that someone in the office made a duplicate set of bundles and managed to get a duplicate bag.”
Alicia stared at him coldly. “How am I supposed to know that you and the Nose didn’t get your heads together to cut me out of the picture? I’m warning you, Victor …”
Working around an elegant table set for three with their finest linen, silver, and China, a single spray of
Odontoglossum
orchids rising from a slim silver vase, Margarita and Alicia considered the events that had so unexpectedly derailed their plans for the immediate future. Wiping a smudge from a water goblet, Alicia checked it against the light and set it carefully in its place, while her mother tidied the silverware.
“Have you ruled out the possibility of Victor and the Nose having plotted to edge you out?” Margarita asked.
“Absolutely, Mother,” Alicia answered. “If they had been plotting from the beginning, what did they need me for? I would only have gotten in the way, and I might even have been a danger to them.”
“Maybe they weren’t in on it from the beginning, but then …” Margarita insisted.
“Forget it, Mother. I’ve been with Victor all the time. I’ve been watching him like a hawk, and there was absolutely nothing suspicious about his behavior. No, I’m certain it was the Nose all along. He screwed us both. The only thing we can do now is take our share of the forty thousand—”
“What forty thousand?” her mother asked.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Van Dongen actually had to use forty thousand in one-hundred-dollar bills to cover the top of each bundle. As I was saying, the only thing to do now is forget about Victor, Rieks, the four million, and everything else, and set a new course with Fernando—Argentina.”
Margarita had been considering the problem for some time and began to protest, “I don’t know, sweetheart. I’ve been thinking. I’m getting too old for this kind of adventure, and as long as you and Fernando can send me a few dollars a month, I think you’ll be happier and I can—”
“No, you don’t,” Alicia interrupted. “You’re not going to run out on me when I need you most. And I don’t care what Fernando thinks about it either. If it’s not him, then it’ll be someone else, but you’re not getting out of this that easily.”
The doorbell brought the conversation to an abrupt close. Margarita took the flowers from Fernando and welcomed him into their home. “Yes, sweetheart, come right in. We were just talking about you …”
Alicia saw Victor for the last time on November 20, a week after they got rid of Rieks’s body. Victor had called her to ask for the keys to the car.
She drove to the place where they agreed to meet, a small bar in Miramar hidden in a patio with a blue canopy of sky for a ceiling. When Alicia saw him sitting at the table, she felt a mix of melancholy and anger, but above all, she wanted to get away from him forever … and as soon as possible.
Victor invited her to have a drink at his table.
“No, thanks. I can’t.”
Alicia put the keys on the table, delicately, avoiding his eyes, then turned and walked away without another word. She was in her college student attire again, hair up in a pony tail with a red pom-pom bouncing around.
Victor watched her walk away. She waited a couple of seconds for a man to leave the bar, and asked if he was going her way. It turned out he was. Victor thought she might at least wave, but she didn’t even give him a cursory glance as she turned to climb on the motorcycle. He could not understand why he felt so alone. It appeared that destiny had been shooting crap against him with the usual loaded dice, meeting the right person in the wrong circumstances.
He called for another whiskey, a double, lit a cigarette, and sat back to engage in his favorite pastime these days … figuring out how van Dongen had managed to prepare the second bag and make the switch. To make a swap at the hotel, he would have needed an accomplice, someone like Carmen, for example, waiting for him with an identical bag …
Bullshit!
Van Dongen had not known that the drop would be at the Triton until Bos told him on the way down in the elevator. He could not have told anyone. The only other possibility was that van Dongen had hidden the second bag with the worthless bundles in his trunk beforehand. After all, he had had two days to prepare the ringer.
Victor recalled that he had watched when van Dongen lugged the bag into the trunk, and the trunk had been empty, though there was always the tire well under the floor … Yes … That was a definite possibility, but still …
A week of obsessive calculation had not gotten him any further than that. And in the final analysis, what could he do?
Recover the money? Impossible!
Plan revenge? Stupid! Only morons plot revenge.
No, Victor knew how to lose. After all, he certainly had plenty of experience at it.
Whoa! What are you doing? Feeling sorry for yourself? How about all the times you’ve won? The Nose was faster and got the drop on you? Well, he’s also taking the rap; so there’s no use getting angry. Getting angry only makes you lose control, like the Miura bulls in the ring; you attack the cape instead of the bastard behind it.
In the final analysis, he thought, it was Alicia’s snub that really bugged him. He never imagined it would hurt like this.