Raw Deal (2 page)

A hand. Or a part of one, its forefinger still curled in the ring of a pistol. A thin trail of smoke rose from the barrel of the weapon. On another finger, a gold ring, twisted in some shape like vines. A thumb, still twitching. And where the rest should be—wrist, arm, elbow—there was nothing, nothing but a spray of red pepper berries and a splash of blood.

Coco pushed himself to his knees, shook his head groggily, listening to the sounds of
el jefe
crashing through the brush, of Edgar chasing after. He hauled himself up, felt his tender ear, but found no signs of blood. He found the big blade where it had fallen in the crook of a pepper root, took it up, and followed the sounds of the chase.

Coco found
el jefe
’s spoor soon enough, a fist-sized smear of blood in a sandy patch here, a swipe across a stand of cane there. He could hear harsh breathing, grunts of effort, muffled curses up ahead. He plowed through a marshy spot where the cane seemed stunted, found himself bathed in a stinging black cloud of mosquitoes. He slogged on, fighting the urge to chop at the insects with his blade, then heard a cry up ahead, followed by the splash of something heavy falling into water.

Coco hurried on through a last canebrake, emerged on the bank of a canal. Was it the same one they’d started from or another of the endless network that crisscrossed this steaming land? Impossible to tell. Coco had lost his sense of direction long ago.

What he could be sure of was this:
el jefe
was down there in the murky water, thrashing with one good hand, one awful stump, trying to drag himself up onto the muddy bank.

“I cannot swim,”
el jefe
called, but to whom it was not clear. “I cannot swim.”

Edgar stood above
el jefe
on the bank, his blade poised like a housewife with a broom, daring the mouse to take one step farther. Edgar grinned as Coco emerged from the canebrake.

“I’ll help him out,” Edgar said as
el jefe
levered his good arm onto the shore. The old man’s face was a mask of effort. He seemed strangely unaware of the spidery little man with the huge knife above him.

“I cannot swim,” he gasped, dragging himself forward on the mud.

“No matter,” Edgar said. He was about to strike when Coco’s blade took him in the back.

Edgar stiffened, gasped, lost his grip on his knife. He staggered at the edge of the bank for a moment, clawing weakly at his back, then fell over, into the water.

Coco watched him sink, did not flinch as Edgar’s sightless gaze passed over him. The last he saw of Edgar was the tiny birthmark, a doomed continent sinking with its stubbled globe.

Strange, Coco thought, how indifferent he was to Manrique’s death, how he’d come to despise Edgar. How for a moment he had regarded
el jefe
almost as a comrade. It was indeed a very strange world.

He turned back to
el jefe
then, feeling weary, feeling almost sad. The world turned and turned and sometimes things were upside down. Nevertheless…

He was about to do what had to be done when he realized it was already over.
El jefe
lay where he had dragged himself, half in, half out of the water. His old man’s eyes were closed as if in sleep, his lips parted, pressed into a shallow puddle of water.

Coco nudged him with the tip of his shoe, then again.
El jefe
, king of the sugar, Coco thought. You get what you get, but then someone else wants it, hires Coco, and see what happens.

Coco shook his head, made a sound that might have been a sigh. The world turns, he thought, and as luck would have it, he would go on turning with it. Clean this mess up now. Go back to Miami, tell this story. See what job comes next.

Strange. He pushed the old man lightly, almost gently, with his toe, and the body slid down the bank, out of sight.

Chapter 2

“‘The sleep of reason produces nightmares
.
’”
It was Janice’s voice, lilting, echoing in the stone-floored room.

“What’s that?” Deal said. They were in the largest room of a museum-cum-gallery of Latin-American art, a place he’d never heard of until a week ago. That was Miami for you. Live here a lifetime, it was still full of surprises.

He’d been studying the elaborate, other-era filigree work on the museum’s ceiling molding. The whole place, which had probably been some family’s mansion before taxes and upkeep drove them out, was full of touches like that. Where would you find subcontractors who could do work like that these days, he wondered. You couldn’t, of course, not at any price. It was hard enough finding subs who would work, period.

“Look at this, Deal.” She tugged at his arm. “Do you think it’s real?”

Deal turned his attention to the piece Janice was admiring, an engraving, it looked like, a fellow in knickers collapsed at an old-fashioned desk with his head in his arms. Bats and strange-looking owls flapped in the shadowy air above him.

She had been reading the title of the piece aloud. Deal gave her a smile. “You’re not imagining it. There’s a painting right there on the wall.”

Janice made a face. “Don’t be funny, Deal. It’s a Goya. I just wondered if it was
original
.” There was a leatherbound book inside a glass case nearby. The book lay open at a page bearing a reproduction of the same engraving on the wall.

Deal checked the book, then turned back to the engraving. He inspected the little brass plaque nailed to the engraving’s frame, then took a step back, cocking his head for a new angle. Finally he shook his head. “It’s not original,” he said with authority.

Janice glanced at him, curious.

He shrugged. “I feel like that every month when it’s time to pay the suppliers.”

“You’re awful,” she said. “We should have gone to the boat show.”

“No,” he said, making a grab for her. “This is a great building. I’m glad we came.”

She swatted his hand away. A matronly woman inspecting a massive abstract across the room glanced disapprovingly at them. “Stop it, Deal,” Janice whispered.

“What do you say we hide in this place?” he said, tagging close on her heels. He gestured at a massive bronze sculpture in the middle of the room, Adam and Eve with their backs to one another. “We’ll pretend to be statues. When everybody’s gone home, we’ll reenact the Fall on that bench over there.”

Janice tried to look stern, but her face was coloring. The matronly lady stiffened and turned back to her abstract.

“You’re going to get us thrown out,” Janice said. He could tell she was holding back her laughter.

You ever get married, make sure it’s to a woman with a sense of humor
, that’s what his father had told him. Given him that along with a bunch of other advice, most of which had turned out to be worthless, just like the construction business he had left, Deal thought. Still, one pearl of wisdom made up for a lot.

Janice stopped in front of a Picasso. “I can’t believe all these things are here,” she said. They had heard about the place from a friend, David Coetzee, who collected Latin-American paintings. “A hidden gem,” David had called it. “Right here on Brickell Avenue.”

And he was right, Deal thought. In a city without a proper museum, it was doubly surprising to find this collection, and nearly as surprising that few people seemed to know of it. They hadn’t seen a dozen others. He and Janice, along with the frigid matron, who’d fled the room, seemed to be the only visitors left, and if it hadn’t been for the rain that had kept him off the job that morning, there might have been only one person in the place.

As it was, Deal had taken a rare Saturday off and fulfilled the idle promise he’d made to Janice the night David had told them about the place. He’d been cranking hard on the job, a massive home in the Grove he was rebuilding for Terrence Terrell, the computer genius who’d brought major league baseball—the Manatees—to South Florida.

Although home-building had not been Deal’s major interest, the hurricane had changed all that. People had been desperate to put their lives back together, and Deal had come to find more satisfaction in that, less in throwing up storage warehouses and strip shopping centers.

Terrell had seen some of Deal’s work, the renovation of a home in Gables by the Sea that had taken the brunt of the storm surge, eight feet of Biscayne Bay right through the doors and windows. Although Deal had his reservations about working for such a legendary stickler, Terrell had badgered him until he’d finally relented. And he was glad he had. He and Terrell’s architects, a group Deal had worked with before, had free rein. No more project managers urging him to cut corners, find a way around the building codes. Terrell had money to burn. “Just tell me what you need to do the job right, John Deal. I plan to live here a long, long time.”

It had turned out to be a sweet deal, as he’d told Janice, who laughed when he’d said it. “
You’re
sweet,” she’d said, laughing until he figured it out.

Deal sidled up to Janice, put his arm around her waist. He’d been grinding on the job for far too long. Forgetting his own life. She was a warm island in the supercooled room. “Let’s not tell Terrell about this place,” he said. “He’d just buy everything, have it put in his new entryway.”

She smiled up at him, finally. “Are you going to behave?”

“Only if you want me to,” he said. She was silhouetted against a pair of French doors opening onto a tropical garden. The light cast soft shadows across her features, heightened the natural pout of her lips.

“What’s with you today? You never act like this.”

He shrugged. “I’ve decided I’ve been working too hard. I’ve been too serious. But that’s going to change. You’re looking at a new man. The new Deal.”

“Sure,” she said, rolling her eyes again.

“I love this place, really,” he said, pulling her closer. “I love
you
. And if you don’t want to do it here, let’s go get a room at the Mayfair. We’ll call Mrs. Suarez and tell her we had a dead battery, they had to send a tow truck from Homestead. It’d be the truth, if we had a dead battery.”

“We can’t afford a room at the Mayfair,” she said, twisting away from him.

“Okay, the Ramada,” he said. “The Motel Six. Any place where you’re not on call…”

“Deal…” she said, affecting exasperation. But she was still smiling. Their daughter, Isabel, was almost nine months old now, but she had resisted all attempts at closing down Mom’s milk bar, especially at bedtime. This was their first time alone since Isabel had been born.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “Great art affects me this way.”

“I thought maybe it was me,” she said. She turned away.

“Oh, it’s you all right,” he said, reaching for her. She tried to duck, but he got one finger in a belt loop. He hadn’t intended it, but as she spun around, he found his other hand against her breast. Her face flushed crimson. “Deal!” she said, but her voice was throaty.

“Make up your mind,” he said. He hadn’t moved his hand. Couldn’t, somehow. He felt light-headed. Sixteen again. “The bench over there, or the Mayfair.”

Her lips parted, her eyes beginning to focus on that place far, far away. Deal felt himself press closer. He could feel the heat of her stomach through his jeans. He remembered moments like this. From college? From high school? Times when it was impossible to distinguish between all the promise of life and his body’s mindless urge to pop.

Then again, maybe there wasn’t any difference. Didn’t seem so now. He bent to brush Janice’s forehead with his cheeks. Maybe the bench
was
a possibility, he was thinking, when the voice came echoing behind them.

“I must ask that you leave.” It was a man in a cream-colored suit, standing in the doorway.

Deal glanced over his shoulder, deadpan. “You’re not allowed to kiss in here?” He was still holding Janice.

The guy was unfazed—the elegant suit, the careful trim of his beard and hair, he must have practiced being fazeproof.

“We are closing now,” the man said. His voice was neutral, slightly accented. His gaze was averted. Deal suspected he spoke Spanish in the Castilian style.

“We must prepare for an opening this evening,” the man added.

“You have to close so you can open up again?” Deal said. He was wondering what it would take to get a rise out of the guy.

“You’ll have to excuse my husband,” Janice said. She’d extricated herself, was tugging at Deal’s arm. “You have some wonderful things here,” she added.

The man nodded. “The new exhibit opens Monday,” he said, ushering them out. “Come again.”

Deal tried to get a backward look at the guy, maybe come up with something else to say, but Janice had found the doorway, braced herself with one hand and levered him out into the bright sunshine with the other.

“This was a lot better than the boat show,” he called after her.

She was shaking her head, moving quickly across the courtyard. “And I had to sign our names to the guest book,” she said. She turned to glare at him, but it didn’t hold. Then they both began to laugh, peals of laughter that echoed across the lush courtyard and into the Florida sky.

Chapter 3

“Let me be certain I understand this,” Marielena Marquez said to the smiling young man. “You are going to broadcast the
weather
program from our opening?”

The young man nodded confidently. “Action Weather, we call it.”

Marielena shook her head, still trying to comprehend. They were standing near the fountain in the courtyard of her building, Galeria y Ediciones Catalan, while a bevy of technicians swarmed about, running cables, stationing lights and reflectors, even mounting a large blue screen that seemed suitable for projecting outdoor films near the entryway. One of the cables had snagged in the dwarf hibiscus she’d had set out last week, uprooting one of the rare plants, splitting another at the root. A large piece of carbon paper floated in the reflecting pond. There was a diet Coke can sitting in the lap of a bronze garden nymph. Someone had ground out a cigarette on the limestone paving.

She felt as if she had a summer cold coming on, but it might simply be the confusion she felt, this grinning idiot in front of her talking about ratings, a makeup woman toweling away his perspiration, patting his cheeks with powder. “This is an event of some artistic…some political significance,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. What was his name, anyway? Tad? Chad? He was tanned, fit, radiant with health and good cheer. He had bent down a bit so the makeup woman could reach him with an eyeliner pencil. “We do a lot of important stories. It used to be just fluff, neighborhood Christmas lights, the dog show, but now we’re doing quasi-hard news in the background, stuff with a
setting
, at least, weaving that in with the weather.”

He waved his hand in the direction of the building, her building, as if it were some stage set, some false front set up for his convenience. Built by Coral Gables developer George Merrick in 1927 out of solid coral rock. A mansion with barrel-tiled gables, massive overhangs, and walls two feet thick, where Paul Whiteman had once wintered, where a Du Pont cousin had kept a mistress for five years, where, it was rumored, Miami habitué Al Capone had bludgeoned a man with a leaden doorstop cast in the shape of an angel.

After World War II, a North Carolinian manufacturer of furniture had made it his second home. Facing great pressure from the import market, the furniture titan shot himself in the mansion’s attic, but his widow had stayed on until her death in 1980. The place had sat in probate, untended for nearly a decade, until Marielena discovered it and made it her own.

She had walked down that overgrown pathway where a Ford van with a satellite dish atop it was now blocking the way, had stepped into the forlorn courtyard, taken one look at the fountain, the shy nymph who seemed to bow with pleasure and gratitude at Marielena’s arrival…and had known immediately that this was the place where she would do her work.

For the past four years, she had set about making Galeria y Ediciones Catalan
the
center for the preservation and promotion of Hispanic-American art in the United States. Hers was an unusual, multifaceted approach: The building contained a modest museum where Marielena’s collection, and that of her deceased father, which contained several Picassos, two pieces by Miró, and even one Goya, were on permanent display.

She had added a gallery, where the works of contemporary Spanish and Latin-American artists were featured. And there was also the publishing arm, concerned not only with the production of elaborate coffee-table books but with works of scholarship and matters bearing on the world of Hispanic-American art as well.

Marielena was herself no artist, could not draw so much as a stick figure. Yet she knew what moved her, as she knew what fire was latent in the hearts of her ancestors, her people. And while her own family had been content to live upon the earnings of a fortune so old it had lost the scent of the pressed oils it was founded upon, she had made it her mission to do something, something of importance.

She had invested every cent of the remaining Marquez wealth in her enterprise. Although she had offended some, mostly local politicians who wouldn’t know the difference between a palette knife and a butter knife, she had succeeded in gaining the attention of the international art community for her efforts. This opening, for instance, was an event of great significance. And the book that she would soon publish, well,
that
would turn this community on its ear.

She sighed. On the eve of all this, she had been delivered into the hands of Chad, the Action Weatherman.

“A prophet without honor,” Marielena murmured.

“Say what?” the weatherman asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just philosophy.”

“Oh.” One of the weatherman’s eyes seemed to be focused on Marielena, while the one being worked on by the makeup artist canted off toward the bright evening sky, where a huge seabird, perhaps an osprey, drifted overhead.

Dive
, Marielena willed her thoughts toward the bird.
Carry this person away
.

“I spoke with your news director. He assured me that a reporter would come.…”

The weatherman pushed his makeup person aside, pulled the towel from the neck of his sports shirt. His good cheer had transformed into something more intense.

“Ms. Marquez, I
am
a reporter,” he said. “I covered the ouster of Commissioner Lender, the same night a tropical wave came through. The week we broke the January rainfall record, I was live from the courthouse with the weather. Who do you think was at that big pileup on Alligator Alley, hottest February third on record?”

She stared at him, speechless.
Madness
, she was thinking, for she had spent a lifetime among artists. She was searching for some reply when he noticed something behind her.

“Shit, look at those thunderheads,” Tad/Chad said abruptly. He turned to shout at the camera crew. “Let’s factor those clouds in.” One of the men nodded and the crew began shifting their cables.

Marielena glanced into the sky at the massive cumulus banks that were piling up over the Atlantic. Piling up so high that their tips reflected the last of the sunlight in a patchwork of pink and gold, their undersides a brawl of cobalt, gray, and purple. Sunsets that the Englishman Turner should have seen, she thought. Instead, there would be storm clouds by Chad, video replay at eleven. She sighed and bent to lift the now-gelatinous carbon sheet from the reflecting pool, then followed the director toward the X they’d chalked on the flagstones, the place where she and Chad would talk about art and politics.

***

“We’re going to be back with the weekend forecast in a minute, folks,” weatherman Chad said, “but first let’s have a look at some of this art we came to see.” He grinned and thrust his microphone in front of Marielena. “So, we’ve got a red one from Cuba and a blue one from Brazil, is that right?”

She forced herself to smile for the camera. The director had persuaded her to have a pair of smaller canvases brought out into the courtyard—“It’s a visual medium, sweetheart”—and as the assistants holding the pieces stepped forward, she cast a nervous glance at the looming thunderheads above.

In a second-story window of her building she saw Rafael Quintana, her chief editor, smiling down upon the scene. Handsome Rafael, the picture of confidence in his cream-colored suit. There was someone else in the room, another man, but his face was lost in the shadows. Rafael gave her a thumbs-up as she began to speak.

“Yes, this acrylic, the blue one…”—Good Lord, was she actually descending to his level?—“is an abstract by Antonio Real. It features some striking work with the rearrangement of perspective, and though you probably can’t see this on the camera, the textures are incredible—you can actually see the movement of the artist’s hand.”

“It’s really blue, folks, that much I can tell you.” Chad grinned. His thumb, apparently out of camera range, was jabbing urgently in the direction of the other canvas. “So tell us about the other one. We can almost see people here, can’t we?”

The camera moved in tight on the second canvas. It was a surrealistic oil by Sucrel, a young Cuban painter with the face and demeanor of an angel. The subject was a cane field, with stooped, painfully distorted laborers in the foreground, a line of field-clearing fires in the distance, an angry sunset refracting through a haze of smoke. In the sky above the fields, the smoke and the fiery light had somehow congealed into the specter of a huge jungle cat, leaping down upon the unsuspecting workers, its claws and fangs bared.

How ironic. This young painter subtly criticizes conditions in Cuba and yet draws the wrath of exiles living in America. Perhaps if Sucrel had given the beast the face of his country’s dictator…but she doubted anything would mollify those who were beyond reason.

“It is called ‘
A Tiger in Red Weather
’,” she said into the microphone, “after a poem by the American Wallace Stevens. Quite a powerful commentary on the exploitation of labor. Sucrel is perhaps the most interesting young painter in all of Cuba.”

The camera was back on her now and she straightened, lifting her chin to the eye of the lens. “We are very proud to be the first to show his work in this country.”

“That’s created a bit of controversy in our community, I understand.” Chad was still grinning, as if it was amusing.

She paused.

“Sucrel is a gifted artist who happens to come from Cuba,” she said. “His subjects speak of the beauty and the anguish of everyday life. They inspire us with their strength.” She tossed her hair, feeling her passion welling up inside her.

Sucrel himself stood at the gateway to the mansion, his doelike gaze upon her, the fierce-eyed, bearded Antonio Real at his side. It was they who should be before the cameras, she reminded herself, but neither artist spoke English and the museum director had scotched that idea in an instant.

“And yet,” she continued, “there are those who would deny us our access to Sucrel, who would not allow him to travel here, who would see this gallery closed rather than share the beauty and the passion of his work.” She glanced up to see Rafael’s reaction, but he had disappeared.

“Kind of like those great cigars,” Chad chimed in. “A darned shame we can’t get those anymore.”

Marielena felt the color draining from her face. She could only pray that the artists had not understood this moron. “I want to invite everyone to the Galeria Catalan this evening,” she said, fighting for composure. “Come to see these marvelous works and judge for yourselves what…”

And that was when it happened. She never got to finish her sentence, would never know, in fact, just what epithet she intended to hurl at the rock-skulled, heavy-jowled men who were out there watching, if they were watching, hating her every word, hating every molecule of her. The same men who had lobbied the State Department to deny Sucrel’s visa, who had pressured her bank to rescind her line of credit, who had called in the building inspectors time and again with spurious safety violation charges.

Her own countrymen, she thought, in the very moment she began to fall, but the worst of them, those so embittered by personal loss that they had become the very thing they hated most, so threatened even by art, so devoid of humanness that one of them had surely caused what was happening to her now.

In the first instant of the blast, her breath had left her. It was as if an invisible, searing hand had swept across the courtyard, hurling all of them away like so many skittles from a game board.

There were a few images of startling, slow-motion clarity: the weatherman, his grin vanished at last, soaring over her, flames trailing from the back of his shirt and trousers; the roof of the mansion exploding upward, the lovely red tiles fragmenting into shrapnel; a massive sabal palm lifting up into the heavens, then tottering, veering downward like a space missile gone awry.

Not sure any longer if she was hurtling upward or if the sky itself was rushing down to meet her, she watched as the shadow of the great tree grew and grew, enveloping her, its vast shade bringing a hint of ease to her burning body, the tree itself much closer now, finally turning the dusk to nightfall, and then there was darkness altogether.