The Four Corners Of The Sky (38 page)

Making a quick 180-degree turn over Raffy’s protests, she looked for Hart along the side streets but didn’t see him or the white van anywhere. She phoned the number in her cell phone for the detective and when he didn’t answer, she left him a message: she didn’t know what was going on and she really needed to talk to him. She apologized for tripping him in the Golden Days lobby but she’d thought he was a, well, a criminal. She didn’t know why he hadn’t gotten in touch with her. She would make any reasonable deal that would keep her dad out of jail, including giving her dad up to the police. Call her back as quickly as possible.

Raffy pounded the dashboard. “Why are you turning your papa in to Hart?”

“He needs medical attention! Golden Days is a joke!” She squeezed her fist around the pink flamingos on the Cuban’s shirt, pulling him toward her while she drove. “Raffy, we’re going to the Dorado. We’re going to sit down, sort this whole thing out, and fix it. You, my dad, the Queen of the Sea! Start now with Daniel Hart. Why’s he after you?”

The thin young man held up his hands, shrugging dramatically. “Better to be brief than tedious.”

Annie forced herself to slow down. “Couldn’t agree with you more.”

“That
s.o.b.
Hart has a passionate fixation on your papa and me.
Shtup es in toches,”
he called over the seat back as if Hart were still behind them. “For years. I can’t say why.”

“Oh, yes, you can.” She shook him. “You’re going to sit still and talk.”

“Today’s not good. I’ve got a final today. Extension class. Composition. Education is the key to human happiness.”

She gestured at his bandaged wrist. “In your case, I’m the key to human happiness. We’re got a problem here; we’re going to solve it!” Driving with one hand, she grabbed his rayon shirt with its three fuchsia flamingos. It ripped.

“Oh, gracias, gracias, my favorite shirt! I played ‘Chan Chan’ with Company Segundo in this shirt on the stage of the Hotel Nacional!”

“I don’t give a shit. All I want is my mother’s name!”

He stroked the flamingos. “I don’t know a thing about your mother! Except, wait a minute, I asked your papa once, when he was boasting about you. He said a name…wait, wait. Kay Denim.”

“Denim?”

“No, Denham. Kay Denham.”

She hadn’t expected a real answer and wasn’t sure it was one. “He said my mother’s name was Kay Denham? Why should I believe that?”

Raffy made a face. “Why shouldn’t you?” His soulful eyes met hers and she decided he knew no more than he was telling her. “But to be honest, Annie, your mother? You should let her go. When I left Cuba, I said to my own mother, I was headed here to Miami with Uncle Mano, I said, ‘Come too, Mama! Hop in the boat.’ She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t leave her homeland. I had to give her up. That’s life, more or less.” Raffy leaned over to pat Annie on the shoulder.

Appalled, she asked if his mother was right there in the water with him when he left in the boat?

“No no! I was speaking in—oh, what is it?—synecdoche.” He shook his head. “My mama is still in Havana, still in the family business. Silversmiths to the finest people, not that of course we aren’t all equal brothers and sisters at present thanks to that son-of-a-bitch Castro. She lives with my big brother, who’s turned her against me. When you fly us to Cuba, I’m bringing my mother a wonderful gift, due entirely to Jack. And then she’ll see that I am not nothing.”

At a stoplight, she studied his nervous face. “We’re just going to talk, Raffy. Don’t worry. And I’ll even buy you a drink.”

He looked sadly out the car window. “Gracias
,
no. I’m eight months into my recovery. Alcohol was once a personal problem of mine.”

“Just goes to show you. Problems get solved.”

Under the big Miami moon, Annie walked her dog around the Hotel Dorado pool gardens. Raffy had to hurry to keep up as they trotted along the bougainvillea-banked path. Back in the lobby, she handed him Malpy. “Okay. Now talk to me about this Cuban bank where my dad says these jewels are.”

His story was inevitably a long one, punctuated with quotes, but what she distilled was that there was a secured account at a branch of the Banco Central in old Havana near the Plaza de Armas. Jack Peregrine had been renting a bank drawer there for years under a foreign passport. Only Jack or his designated heir would be allowed to open it. Moreover, to do so they would need not only proof of personal identity but knowledge of two passwords. Annie knew those passwords. Annie could fly a small plane. So for both reasons, with Jack incapacitated, they needed Annie to go to the bank for them and it was unfortunately in Havana.

She asked, “And inside this bank drawer?”

The four biggest emeralds from the crown of
La Reina Coronado del Mar
, each one worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus a 135-carat ruby worth many times that much.

Annie scoffed. “And these alleged jewels actually belong to…?”

“Jack,” Raffy insisted with conviction. “But getting hold of them?”

They moved to the bar and found a table by a window that looked out to the ocean. Annie neatly set her phone and her Blackberry down beside her.

Raffy looked around carefully. “Jack is sadly, well, and so am I, temporarily
paisano non grato
with a number of people living in Miami and, well, also in Cuba.”

“Let me guess. That number of people includes the Miami police, as well as the glitzy couple in the Mercedes outside Golden Days, correct?”

“There’s also the
PNR
.
Policía Nacional Revolucionaria
. Cuban police?” Raffy offered her a placating smile. “Also, the police in some other American cities where…Jack honestly does not like to be closed up in a cell.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t have gone in for a life of crime.”

“It’s more a philosophical point of view.” Raffy sipped at his soda. “I didn’t mind jail so much; it’s a quiet place to think things over. ‘I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world and vice versa.’[__] That was one of the speeches your dad tried to teach me.
Richard the Fifth,
I believe.”

Annie nodded. “
Richard the Second
.” She hesitated. “Maybe
Third
.”

She knew Raffy was not exaggerating her father’s fear of imprisonment; Sam had told her of his being punished by being locked in a closet. She remembered how he had always left doors of rented rooms wide open whenever he could; he’d kept bathroom doors open as they slept, with the lights on.

“Raffy, have you ever,” she asked, “actually seen this so-called ‘Queen of the Sea’?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I never saw the Empire State Building either. Or for that matter, Jesus the Savior Christ that my mother was always telling my padre to believe in, which he did not, not that he went to synagogue either. How about a mojito for you? All you drink is water.”

“Water’s good for you. Sit still, I’ll be right back.”

Leaving Raffy in the bar, she took Malpy upstairs to her room and waited till the maid left after turning down her sheets and putting chocolates on her pillows. The maid had turned on the television. After Annie collected the metal case, she clicked through channels on the TV remote, searching for news headlines. She paused at an old black and white movie. To her surprise it was Rosalind Russell in
Flight for Freedom
, the movie her dad had quoted to her when he’d called from St. Louis. Rosalind appeared to be having serious engine trouble as she flew a secret mission over a foggy Pacific.

When Annie returned to the bar, Raffy was there talking to the piano player. He hurried to her when he saw the stainless steel courier case. His large brown eyes widened. “
La Reina?
”

Annie laughed at his excitement. “My dad is a con man. Since you are also a con man, surely you know that the Queen of the Sea does not exist.”

Raffy’s glowing eyes scanned the gleaming case as she placed it on the bar table. His fingers stretched for the handle.

She slid the case away from him. “Look at yourself! My dad gets everybody all excited about something and then because they’re searching for it, they believe it’s real! It’s a swindle. It’s the big con. It’s like…like a Florida land deal.”

The Cuban smiled, his large dark eyes dreamy. He told her to look out the windows of the Dorado at the glamorous skyscraper skyline of Miami. “What is that out there? It’s a Florida land deal…” He pulled from his pocket a worn dirty folded piece of Xeroxed paper and smoothed it out on top of the metal case. On the paper was a drawing of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and handwritten beneath the figure, “
La Reina Coronada del Mar.”
Crabbed scribbles in Spanish covered the margins. Raffy translated them for her.

Como la madre de tierra del Inca, Pachamama, ella usó un amplio cabo.
Like the Inca earth mother, Pachamama, she wore a broad cape.
El cabo era oro.
The cape was gold, studded with precious sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and a small quantity of diamonds.
Su corona del oro sostuvo siete esmeraldas rectangulares grandes
. Her gold crown held seven large rectangular emeralds, each one of them on a gold rod sprayed out like a sun burst. On her breast there was a silver door; inside it, a star ruby.
El bebé Jesu
sat in the crook of her arm; Christ was silver and had
ojos azules del zafiro
. Eyes of silver and sapphire.

Raffy returned the frayed drawing reverently to his pocket. He said it was a copy of a page of a letter that the Spanish Hidalgo Don Carlos de Tormes had sent to his wife, a letter in a museum in Seville. It told how Don Carlos would be setting sail from the New World and would bring this statue of the Virgin Mary to the pious Philip II as a token of his gratitude to God (and king) for all the silver and gold he’d dug out of Peruvian land that (for some reason) belonged to Spain.

“But the ship sank. Like so many. A hundred billion dollars lying on the ocean floor.” Raffy’s glittering eyes fixed on the case. “This is true not just because Castro says so. It is absolutely a fact. The Spanish shipped $100 billion in treasure safely over the ocean but another $100 billion sank in sight of my homeland. Excuse me—” Raffy waved to the piano player who was taking a break. “That’s Juan, my cousin on the Ramirez side. Many musicians. He’s the one fixed things up with a guy he knows so this guy just went over for me to the Hyatt in West Palm and explained to Feliz Diaz why I wasn’t there with the statue. He told Diaz how he’d seen two plain-clothes
PNR
collar me in the Hyatt parking garage and grab the case I was carrying and hustle me into their car. He told Diaz he heard these two guys saying how they’d already picked up Jack Peregrine in South Beach and they were hi-jacking us both back to Havana and it wouldn’t be for a vacation either.” Raffy pointed at his thin chest. “I made that story up myself. Diaz believed it.”

“Let’s hope.” Annie said that Raffy appeared to have a lot of relatives and friends.

“It’s an island,” he said. “Cuba. A beautiful one. Everybody knows their family and neighbors.”

She noted that Sergeant Hart had told her that this so-called sunken treasure,
La Reina
, belonged to the Cuban people. Why shouldn’t Raffy agree?

Raffy waved expressive fingers at her like an arpeggio. “Even if that
s.o.b.
Hart says it, it’s a possible point. And better the people of Cuba should have the money than the Catholic Church, which is after
La Reina
too in a serious manner. In my opinion Jesus was not a capitalist and this
s.o.b.
Miami archdiocese that wants the Queen already owns more Miami real estate than the mob owns, which is saying something.” He sighed. “But the Queen is Jack’s and mine. And yours. Greed pulls me one way, my country the other.”

“Raffy, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You want to see what’s in here?”

“‘The rest is silence.’”

She spun the numbered casters on the combination lock above the handle. “There’s probably nothing in this case.”

He looked nervously around the bar. “Too many people in here.”

She arched her Claudette Colbert eyebrow at the slender man. “Too many for what?”

“Let’s go out by the pool.” With the case under his arm, Raffy held the door for her. “My cousin Juan? His brother is the branch manager of the bank in Havana. Where we need to go. So, as soon as we get to Cuba—” He stopped talking and waited until a couple in bathrobes left their deck chairs and shuffled back inside in their big terry-cloth slippers. There was no one else at the pool.

“Raffy, you and Dad don’t seem to be getting the picture. For a long time now, Americans can’t fly private planes into Cuba or even go to Cuba.”

He gestured for her to take a seat at a poolside table, under a deco light in the shape of a palm tree. “Not true. Your papa and I did it for years. I have family on the coast there. They’re a help, being of the philosophy, as Avon’s great son would say, ‘What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.’” He claimed that Annie’s father had often piloted the hydroplane into Cuba at dusk, landing at a place where a relative of Raffy’s was the harbormaster, near Puerto Esperanza in the Archipiélago de los Colorados. Raffy himself had such a fear of planes that he had stayed in Key West in charge of “communications” with his relations.

Annie was rattled; these details sounded real to her.

The Cuban leaned over the shiny locked stainless steel case, carefully sliding the numbers on the four lock dials one by one. He hadn’t sufficiently angled the lid to hide the combination from her.

“2-5-0-6,” she read aloud. “Ah, the Brigada.”

He glanced over at her, surprised. “So you know the Brigada?
Bahía des Cochinos?
Bay of Pigs?”

“Yes, but that’s all I know. I know they called it ‘2506.’ I don’t know why it’s 2506.”

He told her that 2506 was the number of the first training casualty of the exiles who had gone in with the
CIA
to invade Castro’s Cuba. They had amplified their numbers by starting with “2500” rather than “one,” so it had actually been the number six invader who had first died at the Bay des Cochinos. He added, “And the word is ‘fish,’ not ‘pigs,’ so it was really the Bay of Fishes, though
cochinos
is also the word for pigs. Jack let me pick the numbers for this combination and I picked 2506 for my grandpapa Simon Rook. He spoke ten languages.” He sighed and tapped the case. “And for what? He washed up on the Cuban shore, like
La Reina
.”