Authors: Daniel Chavarria
Adios Muchachos (8 page)
“There’s a Mr. Polanco to see you, sir.”
“Thank you, Julia, please ask him to come in.”
Van Dongen looked at his watch.
Right!
He had asked Polanco to be there at one. Inexplicably, he had lost all track of the time.
Captain Polanco, a former officer of the
Policia Nacional Revolucionaria
, had been, until his retirement, Cuba’s liaison with INTERPOL headquarters in Paris. Now the high command of the National Revolutionary Police had authorized him to do his own modest investigation work for foreign nationals and corporations.
Two months earlier, when van Dongen had run his Financial Performance Evaluation Projection on the King Project, he had taken the initiative, without informing anyone, not even his boss, Hendryck Groote, of running a background check on their Mr. Victor King. He had no suspicions about him; in fact, he admired the man’s talent and had taken a liking to him from the very beginning. But when the King Project became the center of a nasty quarrel in the company ranks, Jan decided that he had best play the game with all the cards in his hands. The truth was that no one had any hard information on the man’s history. He had come into the company on the personal recommendation of Rieks, who found his lost-galleon project fascinating. That was fine for starters, but very soon this Victor King would be heading an operation worth hundreds of millions and not knowing anything about him could become a significant liability. It was not a question of mistrust or suspicion, only a matter of method, a mere prophylactic routine.
When Jan van Dongen asked his contacts in Amsterdam to supply him with a contact in Cuba to perform a delicate piece of investigation, he was referred to an official in the Paris office, who, in turn, recommended Captain Polanco, Ret., who subsequently agreed to do the job. Not wanting to run the risk of smearing Victor King’s name without reason, Polanco was only given a set of fingerprints and asked to find everything he could about the owner of those prints. He wasn’t even told that the person worked for the company. The official position was that the prints belonged to a prospective client and that the company wanted to make certain that he had no criminal record. Polanco understood what was expected of him; he accepted the retainer and asked no further questions.
That very morning Polanco had reported to van Dongen over the telephone: “The glass you gave me was a perfect match with a set they have in the Paris office—”
“Please come over as soon as you can,” van Dongen interrupted, not wanting to say anything more on an open telephone line. “Yes, I’ll be here all morning.”
That was bad news. Van Dongen’s icy exterior betrayed nothing, but his mind was racing. If this man was really a dangerous criminal, the King Project could be seriously compromised. It would be a terrible blow to Rieks’s grand plans to build a Caribbean empire and, in the worst-case scenario, would shoot the bottom out of Rieks’s position in the company—which did not bode well for anyone who had supported him against Vincent.
“I lifted the prints off the glass you gave me,” Polanco explained when he was face-to-face with van Dongen, “and sent them to a friend of mine who had no trouble putting a name on them. The man has an interesting record of which you will find a synopsis in my written report.”
Polanco removed a Manila envelope from his briefcase and handed a single typewritten sheet over to van Dongen:
“Do you read French?”
Van Dongen nodded, took the sheet, and read:
The prints you sent me in file, N§ 3324/Cu belong to a Henry A. Moore, Canadian, born in 1952. On December 18, 1974, at the age of twenty-two, Henry Moore single-handedly held up the National City Bank of New York office in Vera Cruz, Mexico, getting away with the equivalent of $87,000 US, which he invested in an underwater prospecting venture that fell through. On August 12, 1976, he robbed the National City Bank office in Cancún, taking $200,000, but was apprehended two weeks later. He was tried in April of 1977 and sentenced to seven years, of which he served sixty-two months in a local prison. For further information, see the complete microfiche file. Photograph attached.
Jan van Dongen looked at the picture. There could be no doubt. That was Victor King. The police haircut did not suit him and he was twenty years younger, but it was certainly King.
When Polanco left with his neatly folded fee and a considerable bonus for confidentiality, van Dongen sat back to analyze the situation and consider what dangers or opportunities it might pose.
He fixed his gaze on a charcoal of Carmen he had recently framed, and mumbled to himself as he often did: “So now you tell me the man’s name is really Henry Moore, that he’s an impostor and a bank robber. Who would have thought? Our own little Dillinger.”
“Shit!” he exclaimed.
And yet van Dongen did not accompany that expletive with a corresponding gesture of displeasure, fear, disgust. Quite the contrary. He pushed his chair back, slapped his knee, and smiled in utter satisfaction.
Alicia’s white convertible pulled into the parking area of a fancy open-air café. Victor was watching her from the terrace, smoking a cigar and toying with the ice in his Chivas. Alicia had already asked him to order her a mammey apple shake, which was ready and served in a tall “tulip” beer glass.
Alicia stepped out of the car and approached the table. She looked great, and she knew it. Her stride was confident and proud. She greeted Victor with a conventional peck, seated herself, picked up the shake, and took a long draught.
“Mmmm, thanks. I needed that. I have a slight hangover.”
Victor studied her, enjoying her beauty.
“I imagined you might. Last night was really something.”
As Alicia crossed her legs to the side of her seat and stirred the shake with the tip of her finger, Victor caressed her golden knee.
Alicia made herself comfortable.
“Leave that for some other time; let’s get down to business.”
Victor smiled and took a drag of his cigar. He searched the inside pocket of his jacket and, without saying a word, placed on the table before her a photograph of a very handsome mulatto man dressed in full African ritual regalia.
Alicia took the picture and made a sideways nod of approval: “Well, now, who is this?”
“His name is Cosme. We saw him dancing a few days ago and Elizabeth has taken a fancy to him.”
Without taking her eyes off the photograph, Alicia arched her eyebrows in admiration: “Damn, your Elizabeth has good taste. Where do I meet this piece of brown sugar and spice?”
“At the National Folk Ensemble.”
“I love dancers. They’re flexible and can twist into almost any shape …”
“Be careful, you can’t always bend everything.”
Alicia laughed, finished off her shake, put the picture away in her purse, and stood up.
“Leaving already?”
“Yes. I have a few things to do. When do you want the show with the mulatto?”
“If you could get him there Sunday evening it would be perfect.”
“That doesn’t give me much time. I’ll get on his ass this afternoon. If I hook him, I’ll give you a ring on your cell.”
“We’ll be ready at nine.”
She nodded, bent over for the goodbye peck, put on her dark glasses, and started off across the terrace, the summer sunlight projecting an X-ray of her generous thighs through her white skirt.
Watching her walk away in the blazing sunlight, a young waiter with a glass in his hand came to a sudden halt. The glass he was about to set before a customer also stopped halfway between the tray and the customer’s table. And there it stayed, frozen in time and space, until Alicia pulled away in the convertible and drove off around the first bend.
When the young man recovered, he looked at Victor and sighed with an air of absolute despondency.
Only then did the glass reach the table.
Sunday morning. In the elegant golf club in the suburban neighborhood of Capdevila, Victor was playing tennis. Confident, he hit his last serve, exchanged a threeshot volley, and scored. Game point! He approached the net, shook hands with his opponent, and made for the benches on the side of the court. He dried some of the perspiration off his face and neck with a towel and began putting his rackets and balls into his bag. When he finished, he left the court area and walked slowly down a red gravel path.
He opened his car door, dropped his rackets and gear into the back seat, removed a can of tonic from a miniature cooler, and took a long drink. As he was about to light a cigarette, he heard the crunch of tires on gravel and turned to see who it might be. To his immense surprise, he saw van Dongen getting out of a car with a broad smile across his face. The Nose was wearing a white turtleneck with white trousers and dark heelless loafers. In his hand he had a small leather bag.
“Do you play tennis, too? What a coincidence!”
“No coincidence. I came to see you.”
“Anything urgent?”
“Not urgent, but very serious.”
Victor studied him with mounting concern. “It must be very serious to need venting on a Sunday!”
“Why don’t we walk a little?”
Victor agreed, took the towel from around his neck and dropped it in the car, and then got in stride beside van Dongen, eager to find out what was up.
Van Dongen took the typed text of the report out of his little leather bag, unfolded the paper, and handed it to Victor. “I received that from INTERPOL a few days ago.”
At the mention of INTERPOL, a tremor passed through Victor’s body. He knit his brow and took a furtive look at van Dongen. He was growing paler by the second.
Finally, he lowered his eyes and read rapidly through the first page, scanned through the second, and gave the report back. “Yes! It’s all true,” Victor confirmed, standing tall and staring arrogantly at van Dongen. “I suppose you’re horrified.”
Van Dongen, looking at Victor, still smiling and nodding his head enigmatically, did not react for several moments.
“No, I’m not horrified. I was a bit of a cut-up when I was young, and I still think there’s more honor in a bank robber than in a bank president.”
This second shock was too much for Victor. He stopped cold in his tracks. The normally glib Mr. King could not find anything to say. Arrogance in the face of certain destruction was fairly easy, but this ray of hope completely undermined his bravado. All he managed to do was scratch his head and smile, although he would have been hard-pressed to explain what the hell he had to smile about.
Jan took a couple of steps and turned to look Victor in the face. Victor studied him from head to toe, his eyes wide open; he twisted his face into an expression intended to convey incredulity but only managed to reveal his fear and doubt. Van Dongen remained quiet, looking Victor serenely in the eyes. It was his game and he had no need to hurry.
Victor finally thought of something halfway coherent to say: “How is one to reconcile this confessed dislike for bankers with your relations with a super millionaire like Rieks?”
“Rieks saved me from madness and dishonor and I’m grateful to him. But that’s not what I came here to talk to you about, Victor.”
Reeling from the third shock in five minutes, Victor tried to say something, but it stuck in his throat. Finally, he shrugged and asked the question that was burning his chest: “I suppose that by this time the whole company knows everything about me.”
Jan took a few more steps and stood immobile, pensive a few seconds. Then he headed for one of the benches by the driveway, wiped off the leaves and twigs with his hand, and sat down. Victor stood upright before him, swallowed the rest of his tonic, and dropped the can behind some bushes.
“No one in Cuba knows anything about this, Victor. For the time being, not even INTERPOL knows that Henry Moore and Victor King are one and the same man. You and I are the only people in the world who know that.”
“Not Rieks?”
“Not Rieks!”
Victor spread his arms in total surrender: “What do you want from me, Jan?”
Van Dongen lowered his head as if the answer were lost somewhere among the dead leaves and gravel of the country road. Then he smiled and looked up into Victor’s eyes. “The main thing I want is for you to understand my position as right-hand man for Rieks, to whom I owe everything. Because, first of all, your past and your aliases don’t scare me at all. It’s obvious that the bank jobs were just a means to raise money to finance your underwater treasure quest. I can even admire a man with a passion, and finding sunken galleons is one hell of a passion, enough to drive a man a little crazy.”
Jan paused to take his cigarettes from his bag, then offered one to Victor. He lit both, noticing the intense trembling of Victor’s hands. “Besides, I’ve studied your project inside out, and not only does it appear to be feasible, I’m convinced that it’s going to be a poetic adventure, a hell of a lot of fun and very, very profitable for all concerned. This is something I would gladly devote my life to. I would be a happy man if I could just quit my present job and sign on as your assistant.”
Victor smiled, flattered, blushing. “What better assistant could I ask for?”
“I think that with the solid research we’ve had done on all this area—with the immense investment we’ve made in equipment and with the thousands of divers whose explorations you’re going to program using that equipment—there’s one hell of a good chance that we will come up with a couple of loaded galleons in no more than a couple of years. Your project stands to make hundreds of millions for the company, but it’s you who have to do it, you who will be at the computers. You will be the hub of everything, and finally, you will be the first to know. Now that … is my problem. Everything will be in your hands; so who’s to guarantee that, if you do find a galleon in the reef, you won’t decide to hide it or sell the information to some other party for a lump sum payoff instead of the generous, but relatively modest income you will be getting from the company?”
Victor tried to say something, but van Dongen stopped him: “Let me finish. Just sit and listen!”
Victor straddled the bench so that he could look at Jan, crossed his arms to steady his nerves, and settled down to listen.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass for the company or for the Groote family. I hate Vincent as much as he hates you. But I have a debt of gratitude with Rieks, and I will never betray his confidence, never.”
Jan kept silent a few seconds, looking into Victor’s eyes to try to fathom just how well he was understanding what he was being told.
“Now, I don’t think you’re playing dirty with Rieks. I really don’t, Vic, but that’s only what I
think
and I only bet on what I
know
. So this is why we’re here today. So that you can understand that if you cheat or betray Rieks, I will feel that I have betrayed him, I will feel guilty, and this time you won’t go to prison—I will have you killed.”
Victor let out a sigh of relief. Since the first mention of INTERPOL a few minutes ago, his visions had been of ruin, loss of a future he had carved out of adversity and practically had in his hands, a return to abject poverty, loss of a dream, and even the possibility of doing more time. Jan’s promise to have him killed sounded almost like a blessing, especially since he had no intention of doing anything that would get him murdered.
During the silence that followed Jan did not look at Victor, and, as he always did when people could see his grotesque profile, he began to scratch the space between his eyebrows with his middle finger to cover his promontory with his hand.
“I don’t know what to say, Jan,” Victor finally articulated without looking at him. “On the one hand, I am grateful to you for not revealing my dirty secret. On the other hand, you’re promising to have me killed. And I don’t understand why you haven’t shown those papers to Rieks.”
“That would hardly be advisable. Rieks has his limitations and he’s pusillanimous about certain things. Your past would drive him to eliminate you from the project and I cannot allow that to happen. The project must go forward. And I am convinced that you are the key man. Without you it would probably take off, but it wouldn’t fly.”
Victor again looked at his interlocutor, totally perplexed.