The Four Corners Of The Sky (31 page)

“And you still owe me a hundred,” the driver growled at Rook as he let them off at the hotel entrance, with a blast of funky rock from his radio and smoke from his muffler, both of which incensed a buff couple in a blue Jaguar
XKE
Roadster who had to wait behind the old cab for the parking valet.

Annie thought about karate-chopping the Cuban and taking the long revolver that he kept nudging at her from inside his knapsack. He was having trouble managing it with his guitar case anyhow. But she decided that doing so would only slow down her getting into her father’s room at Golden Days without involving the police. It was obvious that just as Rook couldn’t fly a kite, much less a plane, so he couldn’t kill a cockroach, much less a naval officer.

They walked together through the Hotel Dorado lobby and took the elevator up to her hotel room. There she felt to the back of the safe for the large emerald. She tossed it at him by its thin gold chain. It fell to the floor and Malpy bit Rook hard on the hand when he bent over to retrieve it.

“My hand!” he cried. It was bleeding. “I play guitar with that hand!”

Annie shrugged. “So why don’t you shoot the dog, you’re such a killer?”

The musician snatched a cloth napkin from an uncollected lunch tray to wrap around his wound. “I’m not necessarily going to kill you.”

“No kidding?”

She noticed a blink of messages on the room’s phone. “Excuse me.” Indecisively he shook the gun to stop her but it was evident he had no instinct for violence.

The first message was from Rook himself, left hours earlier, urging her to
“say nothing more!”
to Sgt. Daniel Hart of Miami Vice.

The other message was from that same Sergeant Hart, apologizing gruffly. He’d been dealing with Rook, then gotten called in by his division chief and, thanks to Annie, reamed out. He’d be in touch. Sit still.

She slammed down the desk phone. “Why is it my fault he got reamed out by his chief?”

“With cops, it’s always blame somebody else,” the young Cuban growled. “I’m taking that emerald now.”

“Fine by me.” She handed it to him.

Raffy studied the jewel appreciatively. “So give me the case.”

“Sure,” she said. “The combination lock on the handle is four numbers. I don’t know what they are. There’s also a long password my dad needs. Maybe two passwords. I’ll give you those for free.” She said them very quickly, knowing he couldn’t possibly remember them. “362484070N and 678STNX211. Maybe it’s a bank account, maybe it’s a computer code.”

Rook squeezed his eyes tight, puzzled but intrigued. “You didn’t make those numbers up?” She shook her head. “He said you could remember numbers like that! I wish I could remember Shakespeare that way. I can only keep a line or two in my head, not like your papa; till his illness, he could do whole scenes. Write those numbers down for me.”

“Nope.” Annie opened a jar of expensive peanuts from the minibar, offered him some. Malpy crawled out from under the bed to beg to be fed. “Do you know what the passwords are for?”

With an elongated shrug, Raffy tried both to claim and deny knowledge. “We need to talk to Jack. Let me use your phone.”

Maybe, thought Annie, her father hadn’t confided everything to Rafael Rook. Maybe the Cuban was not a partner but just a flopper, a street musician who made his living by rolling off the front fenders of slow moving cars, then pretending that he’d been struck down by drivers like Joyce Weimar, whom he would trick into paying him not to call the police. Annie knew about floppers; her father had said they were low down in the ranks of his profession of swindles and frauds. Floppers threw themselves in front of the cars of senior citizens who were terrified of losing their licenses and were thereby encouraged to “settle” with the scam artists right then and there to cover their minor injuries: A few hundred in cash should do it, the flopper would say, and the frightened drivers would pay off in order not to risk getting charged with some troublesome misdemeanor. It was the bottom-feeding floor of con work, her dad had said; it was “Slots Life” rather than high stakes.

Rook was helping himself to cashews as if he hadn’t eaten all day as he tried to reach his friend Chamayra at Golden Days; finally he left her a cryptic message to call back
ASAP
, telling her mysteriously that ‘the Coach’s daughter’ had a big present.

Annie studied him for a while. “You ever get hurt flopping?”

He admitted that once he’d broken his arm falling under a Land Rover. But usually it all worked out. He only flopped on women drivers, many of whom “to tell the truth, carry a quantity of cash Santo Trafficante wouldn’t be ashamed of. Mostly I look to see if they’re Jewish, because they’re the ones with my attitude, which is, you never can tell when and where outrageous fortune is going to sling a sea of arrows at your head. My papa’s papa, Simon Rook? His papa was Rabbi Rook from Amsterdam who was stung to death by wasps in Naples, Florida. Who could predict that? Grandpapa Simon was always looking for doom to strike him in an instant. And it did.”

“This was the man at the Bay of Pigs?”

“Yes.” Sadly, Raffy kissed his gold cross. “Face-down in wet sand. A teenager he went to Mexico—I think it was gunrunning, but the family never said—and he met those bastards Ché and Fidel there and went off with them to fight Batista. My grandpapa fell for revolution absolutely without reservations. He fought all the way into Havana. Then he fell in love with my
abuela
because she ran from the sidewalk and kissed him when he marched with the rebels into the city.” Raffy slid a much-worn photo of two women from his wallet; he pointed not at the slim middle-aged woman with glossy black hair and beautiful eyes but at an old little bent woman in a black scarf and a black dress, leaning on an orthopedic cane, letting the younger woman embrace her but begrudgingly. She did not at all resemble anyone who would push her way out into the street to kiss a strange soldier in a triumphal parade.

“That’s your grandmother?”

“Later in life. That’s my mother next to her. So, after Castro takes over, my grandpapa stays in Cuba and gets a big job in the
Departamento América
. The DGI. He marries my grandmama and they move in with her family, Ramirezes, gold- and silversmiths.”

She gave him back the old photo. “Simon Rook gave up his U.S. citizenship and became a Communist? So he was actually fighting the Bay of Pigs invasion?”

“Not exactly. Here’s the secret, which he never told even his own wife. Simon Rook was
CIA
from that very first trip to Mexico. His whole family was clueless for years. Then one day he disappeared. Vanished. My papa was young.” Annie felt a curious empathy with Rook. He saw her response and nodded at her. “Yes, it hurts a child. But I did the same to my poor mama. Left her and came to America with her brother Mano, the only one with the brains to see that the money had left Havana and moved to Miami.”

Raffy finished eating the entire jar of nuts. She suspected he’d had nothing else for lunch and while she didn’t mind giving him dinner as well, she didn’t want to sit here waiting to do so. “How long before this nurse is going to call?” she asked.

“Chamayra is a true beagle.” Raffy opened the minibar and removed a Coca-Cola. He carefully poured the soda into a glass. “Well, Annie, enterprises of great pitch and moment their currents turn awry. My grandpapa Simon left his son, my papa, a letter to be opened after his death that told the whole story. Papa showed the letter to me. My grandpapa admitted it; how the son-of-a-bitch
CIA
had recruited him. They rewired his head and he became a major player.”

She looked skeptical. “A major player?”

“God’s truth!” He kissed his cross. “My grandpapa knew Posada and Bosch and Chi Chi Quintero. He knew the guys who worked on Phoenix and Condor. That’s right!” Rook lowered his voice as if the room were bugged. “Simon Rook is in the Operation 40 photo with Feliz Rodriguez and Porter Goss but you can’t really see him because a waiter’s in front of his head. You heard of Brigada 2506?” Annie shook her head no. “You should read about it. Operation Zapata? Well, my grandpapa was one of the guys who sneaked the guns in on the
Barbara
and the
Houston.
But then comes April 17, he’s floating in the Bay of Pigs.”

Annie said she was sorry to hear it but wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with Jewish people carrying lots of cash on their persons.

Raffy drank his Coca-Cola in one long satisfied gurgle. “The point is my grandpapa Simon Rook carried five thousand dollars in a belt beneath his undershirt. For an emergency. I don’t know what else you’d want to call the Bay of Pigs. But I guess some bastard stole it off his dead body or it floated out to sea at Puerto Esperanza, one or the other, or maybe the funeral home guy got it because it sure wasn’t there when my papa went to see Grandpapa’s Simon’s body.”

Annie’s cell phone rang. As she reached for it, Raffy pointed the large revolver at her. “Don’t answer that phone unless it’s Chamayra.”

“Don’t point a gun at me!” Losing patience, Annie whacked him on the wrist, hitting the same hand that the little dog had bitten, knocking the gun loose. With a heartbroken groan, Rook writhed on the floor. She leaned over him. “As your pal Shakespeare would say, ‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.’” Picking up both his gun and the emerald, she checked his wrist. “It’s not broken.” She answered her phone.

It was Brad. He wanted her to know Hopper Jets had called him to confirm that the jet she’d “borrowed” had been safely returned. Also that in St. Louis the Hopper machinist was repairing the
King of the Sky
’s engine. Annie could leave the
King
there as long as she liked. Or Brad could arrange to have a Hopper pilot fly it home to Emerald for her.

“Thank you, Brad. I’ll take care of it but now I’ve got to go.”

Hang on. He was in Atlanta, enjoying barbeque with Mama Spring and Brandy and her kids, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Annie. How about if he flew to Miami tonight?

“Thanks, you’re sweet but I’m okay. Don’t come. I’ll have to call you back.”

“What’s that noise?” he asked suspiciously. “Somebody’s moaning.”

“It’s a friend of my dad’s. I had to take his gun away.”

“A, what the hell’s going on there? You always told me you didn’t care about your dad.”

Annie sighed. “Everybody ‘cares’ about their dads, even if they hate them. Give me a break. You and your mother still spend weekends watching home videos of you in the Swing-o-matic and do you really like her?”

“I love her to death.”

“Hmmm. Don’t come here but thank you. Bye.”

Hanging up on Brad, she knelt down beside the Cuban, who was now squeezing his hand against his chest. “All right, Raffy, I’ve had it. I’m going to Golden Days right now. Either with you, or with the cops.” She showed him the gun. “Use your head. How tough do you think a woman my size has to be to fly combat missions for the U.S. Navy? Tough enough to shoot you in the knee?” She moved the muzzle down the veins of his arm. “How about this same wrist my dog bit? Talk about the day the music died.”

He stared at her for a moment with his soft dark eyes. “Buchstabe…your dad’s checked in as Coach Ronny Buchstabe.”

Incredulous, she sat back on the rug. “My dad is calling himself ‘Ronny Buchstabe’?”

“You play the hand you’re dealt.”

Annie pulled the Cuban to his feet by his uninjured arm. “I’m going to change my clothes. If you leave here while I’m in the john, I’m going to make sure the Miami police arrest you. Not to quote the Bard—it’s my way or the highway.”

He nodded with a bow. “My friend Chamayra comes on duty in half an hour.”

“Raffy, ‘the readiness is all.’”

“Is that Shakespeare?”

“Sure is.”

“You had a good education.”

In the bathroom Annie dressed in her white Navy officer’s uniform, jacket and slacks. She smoothed the starched collar, tightened the tie. Returning to the bedroom, she took her father’s old leather flight jacket from the closet. Raffy sat in a chair leaning over a gleamy guitar, softly plucking the strings, singing in his rustle of a voice.

Si te contara lo que me hizo esa morena
Esa mujer que solo me hace suspirar
Con su cadera

Near him Malpy danced in circles on his back legs as if trying to learn the rumba. Annie stood in the doorway for a while, listening to him play. He was a good guitarist. “That’s very pretty,” she said when he finished.

He thought she meant the instrument, which he held up proudly. “It’s a beauty.” The guitar had rosewood sides, a mahogany top, and an ebony fret board. “This guitar,” he said with affection, “belonged to my grandmother. My mother’s mother. Her family was very traditional. She wanted to play guitar but they wouldn’t let her be a professional of course. Such were the times. On her deathbed, she gave the guitar to my cousin Rita. In prison with your papa, a bastard guard smashed my guitar to pieces and so my cousin Rita gave me this one. She said, ‘You are the musician. You take it.’” He sighed sadly. “I’m not so good.”

“You’re not bad at all. And your singing? I liked it.”

As Annie put out water for Malpy, Raffy strummed the guitar softly and sang,

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What’s to come is still unsure…

“Shakespeare. I can’t remember any more. Just don’t have the brain for it.”

“It’s lovely.” She picked up her cell phone and dropped it in her purse, then folded her father’s flight jacket over her arm. “Ready.”

He sighed, fitting the guitar back into its case. “‘The readiness is all.’”

T
he sun was setting and its glow lit up the lawn of Golden Days where a dozen elderly patients (gold suns embroidered on the pockets of their waffled bathrobes) sat slumped in wheelchairs on the lawn. They looked as if visitors, suddenly remembering more pressing engagements and rushing away, had abandoned them there.