King of Cuba (27 page)

Víctor entered quietly and handed Goyo an envelope addressed to him in an old-fashioned script. It was from Adelina’s son, the tyrant’s namesake, now nearing retirement as an ophthalmologist. He’d enclosed a letter from his mother, writing from another century, a suicide note, hidden from him for almost seventy years.
There were two things Adelina wanted Goyo to know: first, that she loved him (ay, his singing, aching heart!) and had been a fool to leave him; second, that the tyrant may have seduced her but she’d never cared for him, not for a second. Goyo pressed the letter to his chest. His grief strained every muscle in his back and groin. The tyrant had seduced Adelina, stolen his one great love, disgracing her for any other. And Goyo’s own arrogance had prevented him from saving her. He folded and kissed the letter—a fragile, transparent blue—and slipped it into his wallet. Then he hobbled to the bathroom and began the day’s ablutions.

There were sixty-three people in El Comandante’s entourage, all on the same flight. Fernando had argued against this, fearing that a single act of sabotage could take out the island’s top brass. But if he was going down, the tyrant retorted, then every last bastard was going down with him. He regarded his fellow travelers. Many of the faces were unfamiliar to him, a new generation of bureaucrats and ass lickers. Not a true warrior among them. He squinted at an enormous negrito four rows back. His face was a beefy blue, his chin a shelf of bone. The man returned El Líder’s stare with a respectful nod. For all he knew, this giant could be anyone from the minister of health to the baritone chosen to sing Cuba’s national anthem at the United Nations.

El Comandante desultorily thumbed through his speech. He hated reading from scripts. Nothing was more boring than knowing exactly what he was going to say next. It was only after Fernando had shown him a video of himself rambling incoherently at a recent rally that he’d agreed to consider a few talking points. What he needed now was a nap; just a short nap and he would wake up on the razor’s edge again, his legendary memory intact.

The plane shuddered as it banked between stormy clouds. Even with the best mechanics on the planet, these old Russian planes held up poorly. They looked decent enough—spiffy with the island’s flag freshly painted on their tails—but the engines coughed like consumptives and frequently stalled in midair, causing precipitous drops that had a man chewing his own ass. El Comandante bit his tongue as the plane dropped a thousand feet. He focused on his toes to keep from throwing up. They were pinched in fancy Italian
shoes that sported brass buckles instead of laces. If he could, he’d trade them in for a solid pair of hooves.

El Conejo appeared at his side, his complexion tinged green. He hated flying, and suffered from motion sickness on even the shortest of flights.

“You look a mess, hombre.”

“Thank you for your concern, Jefe.” El Conejo pulled a perfumed handkerchief from his vest and dabbed at his perspiring hairline. “There are a few, eh, security matters I wish to discuss with you.”

“Who’s trying to kill me this time?”

“An old faction of Omega 7 is mobilizing for your visit.”

“Pathetic bastards. They haven’t done a goddamn thing since the seventies.”

“They’ve taken on younger recruits, expert marksmen, veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” The adviser, nostrils flaring, pressed the handkerchief to his cheek. He stared at his boss like a forlorn dog.

El Comandante was losing interest. “More security, right.” He tilted his seat back, shorthand for
This conversation is over and bring it up again at your peril.

The stewardess approached them in her snug carnelian uniform. She’d competed in the 2006 Miss Latin America pageant and came in second only to Miss Venezuela, who’d undergone head-to-toe plastic surgery. El Comandante wasn’t averse to a pair of inflated tits, but he hated how artificial they felt. Years ago, he’d ruptured a Mexican soap opera star’s rack during vigorous foreplay.

“Cafecitos, gentlemen?”

“You’re too generous,” the tyrant flirted.

The stewardess waited until he finished his espresso, then placed his cup on a silver tray. El Conejo’s eyes bulged from the
caffeine. Soon they’d be flying over Miami. El Líder was inclined to order the pilot to empty the latrines over his enemies’ liver-spotted heads. He adjusted the ventilation fan, which emitted the faint, unmistakable scent of borscht. It stoked his appetite for the lunch that everyone but him was getting—lechón with rice, beans, and fried plantains. He got a goddamn salad topped with two shriveled strips of chicken.

The pilot announced that they were flying through an electrical storm and everyone, including the stewardesses, needed to take their seats. When Mamá visited the tyrant during thunderstorms, she mostly complained about her inability to track down Papá in the afterlife. “He’s hiding from me,” she would grumble, adjusting her slack, ghostly breasts. “Probably shacked up with some cualquierita.” The despot had hated hearing about his parents’ marital problems when they were alive, much less so posthumously.

El Comandante plucked a loose thread from his sleeve. His uniform drooped on his shrinking frame. He’d had the waist taken in to the measurements of his youth, but he’d refused to have his pant legs recuffed, and so they dragged along the floor collecting dust. Fernando even had the nerve to suggest that his brother wear the same ridiculous elevator shoes that he sported. The tyrant still regretted allowing his tailor of thirty-six years to emigrate. After his departure, dozens of other tailors vied for the job, but none had a fraction of the talent of Amado Cantún.

A pinkish crane flew by his window. El Comandante followed its flight path until it vanished south. He wrenched his neck trying to see if anyone else had spotted the spindly bird. But everyone was in a postprandial stupor, with the exception of a sole workaholic hunched over his laptop. The tyrant racked his brain for any omens he may have received concerning cranes, but none came to mind.
A wise man in the Niger had once predicted for him “a fiery death in the skies.” Could this be the time? What none of the many auguries had foreseen was the brutal truth: his rage at a canicular old age.

 • • • 

In New York, the skies were drizzling and gray. El Comandante descended the ramp of the Soviet plane and was met by a sea of black umbrellas. He had the disconcerting feeling that he’d landed in the wrong city, in the former Eastern Bloc, perhaps, on a typically dreary day. Not until he had both feet on the tarmac did he smell the danger, unmistakable as carrion.

“Fernando!” he bleated like a lost boy.

“Aquí, hermano.” His brother raised his arm and waved him forward.

With a prearranged signal, four bodyguards in bulletproof vests surrounded El Líder and lifted him toward the terminal. A Caribbean steel drum band was in full swing. Die-hard leftists from around the region erupted into applause as he entered. The dashing revolutionary they’d all hoped to see was a decrepit viejito, but they were pleased to welcome him nonetheless. The tyrant inched forward, his mind empty of everything but the suspense of surviving another attempt on his life. This was the last real power left to him: to thwart his enemies to the bitter end.

As the crowd clamored for their hero, a hail of bullets shattered the huge terminal window. People shrieked, scattering and falling to the floor. Fernando’s men wrestled the assassin to the ground—some buzz-cut punk with crippled Spanish insulting El Líder at the top of his lungs. How the boy freed himself nobody knew, but he managed to jam a handgun into his mouth and blow out his
brains. The tyrant took a deep breath and turned his attention outside. A flock of cormorants had gathered in the skies like a jumble of ideograms, endlessly diving and lamenting in their old women’s voices. Then as if on cue, the birds screeched out to sea, toward the equator, to a distance measurable only by light.

The tyrant was unfazed by the attack, a lamentable occupational hazard. It might’ve meant something for someone to have killed him in his prime, but to knock him off when he was already at death’s door? What triumph could there be in that? Fernando was extremely agitated by the disruption. He never kept his cool in a crisis. The only time he ever felt in control was pointing a gun at the head of a bound and blindfolded man.

“Let’s walk up Fifth Avenue,” El Comandante suggested.

“That’s imp-p-possible,” his brother sputtered.

“It’s your job to make it possible.” He wanted to show these lily-livered leftists how a real leader behaved under fire.

On their procession uptown, someone procured a wheelchair for him, but the tyrant refused to occupy it, finding the strength
to walk on his own. The brush with death had invigorated him, recharged him to life’s purpose. As they made their way past astonished shoppers, not everyone recognized El Comandante. Had he changed so drastically? Some idiot shouted that Qaddafi’s ghost had come back to haunt Manhattan. Another brayed in a nasally accent: “What, that bastard’s still alive?” To which the despot contested: “Yes, and there is no greater victory.”

El Comandante stopped on the northeast corner of Forty-Ninth Street and ordered a hot dog with the works. Onlookers cheered when he took a bite dripping with sauerkraut, relish, onions, mustard, and ketchup. New Yorkers loved anyone who loved their hot dogs. Never mind the gastric repercussions, he couldn’t buy this kind of publicity. The image of the oldest living dictator eating a hot dog went viral and ended up on the front page of the next day’s
New York Post
with the headline
TYRANT WANTS THE WORKS
!!!

Next he demanded to be taken to the planetarium. A prickly Fernando and El Conejo flanked him in the backseat of the limousine. These two detested each other from way back. Neither uttered a word, but El Comandante sensed their displeasure with his impromptu street diplomacy. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he joked in between coughing fits. At the planetarium, he watched with great interest a film on the life cycle of stars. The tyrant sympathized with the supernovas, which, upon expiring, took entire galaxies with them. He was distraught to learn that the sun would burn out in five billion years. He, too, felt the life ebbing from him, as if it were trickling from some unknown hole. Why struggle so hard to have it all end in eternal nothingness?

After the movie, El Comandante paid a visit to the dinosaur hall. By then a motley group of municipal officials was trailing him, chatting inanely about baseball and hurricanes, as if these were Cuba’s only exports. He examined the remains of an
Apatosaurus
and an impressive skeletal reproduction of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
. Behind the beast hovered that Vásquez fellow, a wispy crown of smoke over his head. The tyrant’s knees buckled as he reached for his pistol. Around them, everything froze.