Suspicion of Rage (37 page)

Bookhouser aimed his camera. Anthony kept walking.

He heard Bookhouser say, "We erect crosses and we leave beads and flowers. The afterlife. How badly we want it."

 

The wall of the cemetery ran alongside a narrow sidewalk. Sections of iron fence interrupted the long stretches of concrete and white, bas-relief crosses. Anthony had left his car across the street in a line of them at the curb. Trees cast heavy shade, and the side streets angled past low apartment buildings. He saw no one standing nearby, but as he was reaching for his keys, he heard car doors opening. Two men got out of a car ahead of his. One leaped out of the driver's side; the other hurried around the rear bumper. They wore sunglasses, and their shirts hung over their trousers. If they were armed, the guns would be on their belts.

Muscles tensing, Anthony shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. Another car door slammed. A third man came from the other direction. It was useless to run, even if he'd had the chance. One of them was a muscular black guy in his late twenties; the other was a little older, a
trigueño,
white with a touch of
café
in his blood.

The younger man said, "Anthony Quintana?"
 

"Who the hell are you?"
 

"Get in."

His partner opened the rear door of their car. Small brown model, no markings, typical of undercover police.

The third man followed close behind. The
negro
had a hand on Anthony's upper arm. He limped. Anthony registered this fact, and as they shoved him into the backseat, he wondered who they were. State Security wouldn't use a man with a bad leg.

The
trigueño
drove. The
negro
sat in the backseat. He took out a cell phone and told someone they were on their way. The car did a tight U-turn and. headed east.

"Where are we going?"

The pair of sunglasses in the seat next to him turned slightly, but the man behind them said nothing. A young guy, mid-twenties, a smooth brown face. Big arms. A scar across his knuckles. They drove down the hill past the university, then farther into the old part of the city. The dome of the Capitol drew nearer.

Anthony was not surprised when he began to see Chinese characters on the buildings. The car slowed in a river of pedestrians, bicycle taxis, and exhaust fumes and went under some wooden scaffolding. The driver turned onto an even narrower street rutted with potholes. The car stopped. Doors opened.

When they told him to get out, Anthony looked up and saw the bright green shutters of Abdel Garcia's apartment.

 

This time, the shutters and the windows were closed. The darkness of the room was relieved by a floor lamp. The light glowed on the gold silk fringe and painted large yellow circles on the floor and ceiling. Everything else was the same, the red upholstery and carved wood and lingering smell of sandalwood.

The general stood by the opening to the kitchen as one of his thugs put a hand between Anthony's shoulder blades and shoved him inside the apartment. The heavy door closed, and Abdel Garcia crossed the room, his steps silent on the oriental rug. Cigarette smoke trailed behind him. He carried the ashtray in his other hand. Not a sound entered the room from the street below.

It might have been the quick walk up four flights of steps that made it hard to breathe Anthony drew in some air, then said, "You're in uniform. Did you remember to punch out at the office?"

The light from the floor lamp was doing strange things to Garcia's uneven bone structure. He smiled slightly and paused his cigarette at his lips. "Please, sit down. I have a favor to ask you."

"I've already done you a favor." Anthony pivoted as the general walked over to his little table by the window. "Tell me. Who shot Omar Céspedes last night?"

"Who knows? Washington is a dangerous city. There's a lot of crime in your country." The general settled into a chair and crossed his thin legs. He crushed out his cigarette and put the ashtray on the table. Anthony saw that the black enameled vase held a fresh arrangement of flowers. "Do you have ancestors in the Colón Cemetery, Mr. Quintana?"

"Yes. My grandfather's family, the Pedrosas. I drop in to say hello when I'm in town. What do you want, general? I don't like being followed."

Garcia lifted the flap on his uniform shirt and took out a small tape recorder. He pressed a button, and Anthony heard someone speaking. After a second he recognized the voice: his own.

—Céspedes is talking about Juraguá. He says you want to finish construction as soon as possible. You need the energy, and you believe the United States is in no position to object. With world attention diverted—

Garcia stopped the tape and slid the recorder back into his pocket. "You don't want this tape to show up in Miami, so please listen and do not interrupt. For many years, Ramiro Vega and I have been friends and fellow officers. I have tried to contact Vega for two days, but he won't talk to me. This is not only rude, it is insubordinate. I could have him arrested. But I don't. For the sake of that friendship, I will be patient. I could cause him harm, but I'd rather not. I admire Vega. And his wife. Your sister, no? Marta. And their children. Paula. Giovany. Janelle."

He took his handkerchief from his side pocket. He refolded it and dabbed at his mouth. "A lovely family. For many years I felt a part of it. No longer. This is not a complaint. It's how life is. People are loyal, and then you feel the blade sliding into your heart."

The room was overheated, and sweat ran down Anthony's back. He said, "Tell me what you want."

The small black eyes lifted slowly. "Some information ... a collection of lies. Vega knows what it is. He will give it to you, and you will deliver it to me. I will tell you where. If he refuses, I will have him arrested and charged with treason. My duty would require me to ask that he be executed. You will give him this message ... and my regrets. It isn't easy for me, because I am fond of his family. Tell him that. Ask him to think about who will suffer. My pain, his pain. That's not so much. We are men. What about his wife? His children. If he went to prison... if he were executed ... what would happen to them?"

Abdel Garcia's thin body appeared to be floating, and his face was a mask of old ivory. A trick of light, of perspective.

"What is it?" Anthony asked. "This information you want."

"Vega knows. You get it for me, Quintana. I trust you. Get it for me."

 

 

 

 

31

 

 

A long porch went across the front of the veterans' home, and afternoon sunlight brightened the flowers in clay pots on the stone railing. The old men watched from their chairs. Gail gave the taxi driver an extra ten dollars and told him to wait.

She had come to pick up her father-in-law for dinner. No one else could do it. Marta and Irene were still out shopping, and Anthony hadn't come back yet. Cobo had gone who-knew-where. So Gail had called Marta on her cell phone and said she'd take care of it, not to worry. Gail didn't want Luis to sit there wondering if he'd been forgotten.

What a lie,
she said to herself, scanning the shady yard and crumbling stone columns. She hadn't come for Luis, though soon enough she would be helping him into the taxi, telling the driver to take them back to Miramar.

She had come because of Yolanda.

Not to talk. No, they would talk tonight at the meeting. They would chit-chat about their kids and politics and how terribly brave it was to open a library in a dictatorship. For now, Gail just wanted to walk through Yolanda Cabrera's magnetic field and watch the needle swing.
Did she sleep with Anthony or not?
No, that wasn't it either. What Gail really wanted was to push Yolanda into a chair and make her answer the question. But Yolanda, being noble and good, might tell her the truth, Gail would rather hear a lie she could believe in. Anthony could do it so well. He would just drop certain untidy pieces of his life into a box and throw it away. If he didn't have to think about it anymore, it didn't exist.

There was a flaw in that reasoning: Mario. He did exist.

Gail had played with the idea of being good. If Anthony and Yolanda still loved each other as they had as children, if culture and language, and now blood, fated them to be together, wasn't it wrong to stand between them? Gail did not think she could be that unselfish. She doubted if Yolanda's husband could either.

Crossing the street, Gail kept her eyes on the cracks in the pavement. She would find Luis and get the hell out of here.

It didn't matter what Anthony had done twenty years ago. Maybe Mario wasn't his son. If Yolanda denied it, Gail would only have succeeded in making an ass of herself And Anthony would go off like a rocket.
You went behind my back! Why don't you call me a liar to my face?

Gail's mother had once told her, somewhere during a pitcher of martinis, that Gail's father had not been faithful. Irene had overlooked a lot of it. Had to. By the time she found out about yet
another
little indiscretion, it was in the past, so what good would it do, dredging it up? No good at all except to ruin the fragile truce they'd reestablished after she had taken him back.
Darling, sometimes a woman just has to pretend it never happened.

Gail went up the steps to the porch. The row of rocking chairs came to a stop.

"Hello," she said.
"Buenas tardes. Yo soy..."
She had forgotten the word for daughter-in-law.
"Soy la ... esposa de ... el hijo de Luis Quintana."
The wife of the son. Is he here?
"¿Está aquí?"

A
man with a Yankees ball cap, and a back as bent as his cane, shuffled over and kissed her hand. The others laughed and told her to watch out, he was a devil. He opened the screen door for her, and they went inside. Painted tiles brightened the floor with stylized flowers of red and green, and two staircases with wrought-iron balustrades curved to an upper hall. One of the staircases had some missing steps and a rope across it.

He pulled her by the wrist to a door framed in carved mahogany, gone gray from age. There was a cardboard sign: OFICINA. The old man knocked, then rapped with his cane.

Gail said, "No. Upstairs." She pointed. "Señor Quintana is upstairs—"

The office door swung open, and Yolanda Cabrera appeared in a white smock and a blue bandana. She seemed slightly out of breath. When she saw Gail, she smiled. "Hello!"

Gail took a step forward, still out of range for a kiss of greeting. "How are you, Yolanda? It's nice to see you again. I'm here for Anthony's father. Everyone else is busy, so I volunteered."

"I think that he is taking a nap. Do you want me to tell him you are here?"

"Yes, if you would." Gail turned and thanked the man who had brought her inside, then said to Yolanda, "I'll just wait on the porch."

But Yolanda took her by the elbow. "Gail, are you in a big hurry?" She glanced at the door closing behind the old man, then said, "I have to make some copies. It will take five minutes. Can you help me?"

"Well... I suppose so."

She followed Yolanda through the outer office, then into a smaller room whose ornate plaster molding hinted at a history as a music room or library. Its current function was more practical. Molded chairs faced a large wooden desk, on which sat a computer and ledgers and paperwork. Filing cabinets took up one wall. Opposite, Fidel Castro in his green uniform smiled placidly at a poster of Monet's water lilies. Under them was a copy machine on a stand. Pieces of paper formed a semicircle on the floor.

Yolanda went over to look through the uncurtained window. "I pay the manager ten cents each to let me make copies. I bring my own paper and leave the money in the drawer. If I do it when he isn't here, he can say he didn't know."

She showed Gail what had to be done. Unstaple this, make twenty copies, staple, put with the copies already on the floor. And twenty copies of this other page.

"It's lucky you came! A supervisor from the Ministry of Health is on her way," Yolanda lifted the cover, laid a sheet on the glass, and pressed a button. "She is not so nice about it."

"Should we do this? Are we going to get in trouble?"

"Not if we hurry." A strand of silver hair moved across Yolanda's cheek as she worked. She wore no makeup, and forty-four years had sketched lines on her forehead.

Gail took the copies and laid them on the stacks. Yolanda opened and closed the lid as the copier hummed and clanked, and the light moved slowly from one side of the glass to the other. "You should have a Kinko's in Havana," Gail said.

"What is that?"

"It's a place where, you do this about fifty times faster. What are you copying?"

"It's for the meeting at our house tonight, lists of all the independent journalists and libraries in Cuba and all the opposition groups."

"Oh, my God. Is this legal?"

Yolanda laughed. "Yes. What is not legal is to make copies on this machine."

Gail ran out of staples, and Yolanda went to the desk and found more in the top drawer. She got back in time to whisk out one sheet and put in another. "We used to have a copy machine, but they took it when José was arrested."

"They took your copier?"

"They took everything. Our computer. Our books. Letters from my parents. Photographs of the family. A certifícate from Mario's school when he won a prize for music. I will never know why they took that." Yolanda ran to help Gail lay the stacks on the desk to be stapled. "It's changing. Not much, but a little. We don't think they will arrest José again. There are too many of us now, too many groups." Yolanda turned off the machine.

Adrenaline was pumping through Gail's body, and her hands moved effortlessly. Collate, staple. Collate, staple. Yolanda found another stapler, and soon they were in a race, laughing and tossing the finished sets into a pile.

With the last one, Gail said, "Are we finished? Is that it?"

"Yes. The angels are watching us." Yolanda ran across the room for her purse and calculated aloud in Spanish as she took money out of her wallet. She grabbed an envelope and stuffed some bills and coins into it. Licking the envelope, she walked to the window again.