Hot Schemes (10 page)

“Molly DeWitt,” she said, trying not to recoil from his powerful grip or his intense, distrustful scrutiny. “I’m sorry for disturbing your meeting. I hadn’t realized you had dogs.”

“Their purpose is better served if they take people by surprise,” he said dryly.

“I’m sure.”

“You would like to join us, perhaps?”

Michael gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. “Our meeting is concluded, wouldn’t you say, Señor Paredes?”

A flash of anger darkened the older man’s eyes, but was hurriedly replaced by a jovial expression. He bowed again to Molly. “Perhaps another time, señorita. I will look forward to it.”

“Perhaps.” There was something in his voice that made Molly feel as if he’d just made an indecent pass at her, though his actual words and expression couldn’t have been more innocuous. She gathered Michael had heard that sleazy note as well since he looked as if he wanted to throttle the man.

Molly didn’t relax until they were out of the neighborhood. Michael’s stony silence didn’t help.

“What did he tell you?” she asked finally.

“You mean besides the forty-five-minute recruitment pitch?”

“He wants you to join the organization?”

“He suggested I would be a traitor to my heritage if I did not.”

“Did you sign up?”

Michael scowled at her. “No,
amiga
, I did not sign up. His is a fool’s mission.”

“He obviously does not feel that way. Nor did Tío Miguel.”

“More’s the pity.”

“Did he tell you anything about your uncle?”

“He praised him as a valiant hero. He said he cannot imagine what has become of him, that there was no secret invasion planned for Sunday. He denied that anyone connected with his organization might have wanted to harm Miguel.”

“How does he explain the disappearance?”

“A mishap at sea.”

Molly regarded him incredulously. “And the bomb?”

“It is beyond his comprehension,” Michael said dryly.

“I’ll bet. He’s a cold, calculating man.”

“Except when he looks at you. Obviously, you stir the hot-blooded passion in him.”

Molly glanced at his set jaw. “Surely you are not jealous of him?”

“Men like Paredes can have a certain charismatic charm,
amiga
. That is how they command so many followers.”

She shrugged. “I don’t see it.”

“Good.”

•   •   •

When Molly and Michael arrived at Tamiami Airport after an amazingly quick trip down the Turnpike given the rush-hour conditions, they found not just the pilots who had been searching the waters between Cuba and the Florida Keys that day, but a growing crowd of Cubans, U.S. Immigration officials, and reporters.

Huddled in front of a half-dozen microphones inside a hangar were two young teenage boys who seemed stunned by all the attention. In low voices, they told of their ordeal at sea. Their stories were repeated in English by a translator who stood beside them.

“For months we scoured the countryside in search of old inner tubes and scraps of lumber,” Ricardo Rodríguez said. He was painfully thin, his skin parched by the sun. The man who’d introduced him had given his age as sixteen. “It was our dream to come to America, where there is food and work.”

“How long were you at sea?” a reporter asked.

“Six days we fought the currents. The waves washed our water and food overboard on the fourth day,” the same boy said.

“There were sharks,” his companion, Tony Suárez, added. He appeared to be shy, or perhaps he was just terribly shaken. His voice was barely above a whisper. “They came to our raft. I thought for sure we were going to die. Our friend Tomás …” His voice faltered.

“There was another boy with you?” a reporter asked, his voice unexpectedly thick with emotion.

The two nodded. “He went crazy. The sun. No water. It made him
loco
. He dove into the sea. He said he wished to swim home.”

“When was that?”

“An hour, perhaps two, before we heard the plane,” the boy said, his own voice quivering. “If only he had waited …”

“Where were they when you found them?” a reporter asked the two pilots standing behind the boys.

“Miles from land. Perhaps in another day or two, perhaps longer, they might have drifted ashore who knows where along the coast. By then, without water or food …” He shrugged. “Their fate would have been no better than their friend’s.”

Molly glanced at Michael and saw that the color had drained out of his face. Because of those damnable sunglasses, she couldn’t gauge the turmoil in his expressive eyes. His tightened jaw, however, was telling enough. She wasn’t certain whether his reaction of horror had to do with these courageous boys who had survived thanks to some whim of timing and luck that had brought them into the view of the rescuers or whether he was thinking of his uncle, who might still be drifting on the same treacherous seas.

When the press conference ended a short time later, Michael went to one of the Immigration officials and introduced himself.

“How many are there like this?”

“You mean teens arriving alone?”

Michael nodded.

“I’d say one in eight of every new arrival is between fourteen and twenty-one,” he said matter-of-factly. Clearly such statistics were commonplace to him, but Molly was stunned.

“Dear heaven,” she whispered.

Michael glanced at the two boys. “What will happen to them now? Do they have relatives here who will take them in?”

“They claim to have an uncle here, but we haven’t been able to locate him. They will go to a halfway house designed for the teenagers who have come alone from Cuba. It is already overcrowded, but they’ll make room. The boys will be able to stay there until they acclimate and find work.”

He regarded Michael soberly. “It won’t be easy for them. They come here so filled with hope, and then they discover that even in Miami, where the Cuban culture has been maintained in so many ways, they are homesick. Worse, they’re surrounded by so many material goods and foods for the first time in their lives, and they don’t have the money to buy what they want. In some ways, for many of them that is worse than not having it available in the first place.”

“So they start to steal,” Michael guessed, his gaze pinned on the two youngsters who were being treated as heroes by the gathering of Cubans who’d heard of the rescue. Their presence confirmed what José López had explained earlier, word of mouth in the exile community was swift.

“Or they try to go back to Cuba,” the Immigration officer told them.

His expression bleak, Michael walked to the front of the hangar. He introduced himself to the teenagers, who were beginning to show signs of exhaustion. Molly stood beside him as he spoke to them quietly in Spanish. He took his business cards from his pocket and gave one to each of them. As he talked, their eyes never left his face as if they were experiencing the same intangible bond that had drawn Michael to them. They nodded solemnly as they listened.

At last he grinned and shook their hands. Shy smiles broke across their thin faces, lighting their eyes. Then Michael turned abruptly and walked out of the hangar.

When Molly found him, he was standing in the shade of an overhang, the tarmac around them radiating the late-afternoon heat. His expression looked haunted.

“Michael?”

He reached for her hand and pulled her close, resting his chin atop her head. “I can’t imagine it,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be so desperate at their age that I would risk crossing the sea on a bunch of goddamned tires and pieces of lumber.”

“You told them you’d help them, didn’t you?”

“I will do what I can. Tío Pedro is always looking for willing workers at the restaurant. And I can see that they have clothing and a few of the things that boys need to feel as if they belong.”

“If what the man from Immigration said is true, there are many more like them. You can’t help them all.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps not, but I can do something for these two. I can do it in honor of Tío Miguel. It is what he would want.”

“Aside from the two boys, we saw only an empty raft today,” pilot Ricardo Bienes told Michael when they went back inside the hangar where the jubilant crowd was still celebrating the rescue of the two teenagers. “I am sorry.”

“You are certain the raft was not my uncle’s?”

Bienes gestured toward the front of the room, where the makeshift contraption was on display. Molly shuddered as she took a really good look at it for the first time. Even though the boys had described their own similar raft, the sight of those inner tubes and scraps of lumber made her heart ache at the desperation involved in assembling such a craft. It looked pitifully inadequate for crossing any water wider or rougher than a pond. Obviously Michael hadn’t even glanced at it or he would never have asked the question.

“As you can see for yourself, it was crudely made,” Bienes said. “It is definitely not the sort your uncle would have had on board his boat. It would appear that whoever was aboard this flimsy vessel perished at sea, unless they were rescued earlier by a passing boat.”

“How often does that happen?” Molly asked as Michael continued to study the raft with obvious dismay.

“Often enough. Even the
Britannia
, the Queen of England’s yacht, has picked up a Cuban rafter trying to reach America. Freighters, cruise ships, fishing boats …” The pilot shrugged. “Most anyone will rescue those fleeing Cuba, if they see them. Who could leave a human being aboard a raft such as this on the open seas?”

Once assured that there could be no mistaking this particular raft for his uncle’s, Michael lost interest in it and the more general statistics. “You will look for my uncle again tomorrow?”

Bienes shook his head. “I understand your situation, but that is not possible. We are volunteers, my friend. Tomorrow we must work. We go out only three days a week, taking turns so that jobs are not jeopardized.”

“Please,” Michael implored.

The stark emotion on his face and in his voice was raw and vulnerable. It was a dramatic contrast to his usual stoic silences and unreadable expressions. Molly wanted to reach out to him, but knew he wouldn’t thank her for the gesture. He’d view it as an acknowledgment of a weakness.

“I will make a donation for your time, something to pay for fuel for other flights,” he added.

Before Bienes could respond, a second pilot, Jorge Martinez, joined them. He gave Michael’s shoulder the reassuring squeeze that Molly hadn’t dared.

“Do not worry. We will make arrangements to have someone in the air tomorrow,” he promised. At Bienes’s surprised expression, he added, “Miguel and Pilar were very good to me and my family when we arrived here. I owe this to him.”

“I could take one plane up myself,” Michael suggested. “I’m licensed.”

“That is not necessary,” Martinez said. “Others will volunteer, I am sure,” he added with a pointed look at his colleague.

Bienes sighed. “I suppose one more day of missed work will not matter.”

“Who would fire you, eh?” Martinez asked him. “You are your own boss.”

“And when I am not there, nothing gets done,” Bienes countered with a rueful expression. “But under these circumstances, I suppose that does not matter.”

“God will reward you for your good deeds,” Martinez assured him.

“Perhaps some of my clients will pay their bills, then, yes?”

“For that you need a collection agency, not divine intervention.”

“What do you do?” Molly asked Bienes.

“I am an attorney.”

“A very well-paid attorney,” Martinez added. “Do not let him stir your pity, señorita. He will not wind up in the poorhouse because of one extra day off. Besides, he loves any excuse to fly that fancy new plane of his, a plane paid for by the very clients he would have you believe are deadbeats.”

“I think what you’re doing is wonderful,” Molly told both men. “Not many would dedicate themselves to such exhausting searches, especially when the results are so often tragic.”

“But there are days like today,” Martinez reminded her, “when our efforts are rewarded. It is these moments we cherish. It is what we owe to those who remained behind in Cuba and now can fight no more, to those who desperately seek to escape the suffering.”

“When did you come to the United States?” Molly asked him. “During the freedom flights in the sixties?”

“No. Much later. It was Miguel who rescued us.” He glanced at Michael. “You did not know that, did you, my friend? Your uncle brought his fishing boat to Mariel in the days of the boatlift in 1980. He brought us here at the request of my wife’s brother. He took nothing for his time and trouble. As I said before, my family owes Miguel García.”

From the distance of a college campus, Molly had read hundreds of similar stories at the tumultuous time of the boat lift. Every available seaworthy vessel and some, perhaps, that were not, made trip after trip to Mariel to bring back those who wished to flee the island, along with those Castro himself deemed unfit to stay, including prisoners and the mentally ill. One hundred twenty-five thousand in all.

But now, for the first time, looking into Jorge Martinez’s eyes and seeing the gratitude reflected there, she understood the powerful ties binding those who had gone through that particular Cuban exile experience. He clasped Michael’s hand.

“We will do this search for Miguel,” he said. “You will be more valuable here, conducting your investigation.” He patted his pocket. “I have your beeper number. You will know the minute we find him.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Trust me, my friend. If Miguel is on the seas, we will find him. I make that promise to you.”

•   •   •

When they left the airstrip in southwest Dade, Molly debated insisting on going home to Key Biscayne to shower and change, but decided that would give Michael a perfect excuse for dumping her there. Instead, she persuaded him to make a quick stop at Dadeland Mall, where she bought two pairs of lightweight slacks, a couple of T-shirts, and a few other necessities. She was back at the car, where Michael was making phone calls, in the promised twenty minutes.