Fifty Grand

“We needed men in the exile community in Miami. A mass defection has always been the best way of inserting agents. Your father was well known, well liked. We knew he would go far. We arranged the whole thing. Your father was one of half a dozen agents on that boat. Of course we knew that as soon as they landed in America, they would all be given U.S. citizenship with only the briefest of background checks. And Juan’s record was clean. Ah, yes. I ran that operation personally. It was the last one I did before I retired. I was proud of it.”

“What did he do for you in America?”

“Oh, he got a job. He joined the right groups. He gave money to the right causes. He knew the right people. He was as popular in Miami as he was in Havana. We were grooming him. He could have gone far.”

“Could have gone?”

Raul blinks rapidly, sighs. “He met a woman, a younger woman.”

“Karen.”

“Karen, yes. She was at the University of Miami, studying for her teaching license, but she was from North Dakota. When she finished her degree she went back to North Dakota. He followed her. They got married. North Dakota is of no use to us. There are no Cubans in North Dakota. We had six good agents on that ferry. One died of AIDS. Two came back to Cuba. One ended up in an American prison for dealing cocaine. And one found Jesus Christ. Your father was the last one from that insertion. I did not want him to leave Miami. We ordered him not to leave Miami, but he went.”

“You must have more than one agent in America?”

Raúl laughs. “Dozens. But for me this was personal. This was my operation. This was my man. I told him to return to Miami or we would kill him. It was clumsy. We could have accommodated her… enough money will soothe most people… I made a mistake, I spooked him.”

Raúl looks out the window and holds up the empty coffeepot. Almost instantly, another one is brought, along with sweet cakes and dry black bread. Raúl offers me a cake but I decline.

“You should eat. After this interview who knows when your next meal will be, Officer Mercado,” Raúl says.

Sound advice. I eat the cake. And besides, I’m on the hook. I want to see where the story goes. “What happened next?”

“He disappeared. We lost him. Our hit teams could not find him, and after a while I called them off. My family is from Sevilla, and there they have a saying, ‘You hunt the wolf for a year and a day and then you must let him go.’ We put out the word that all was forgiven, but your father didn’t trust us. For five years he stayed hidden until he turned up dead in Colorado with a Mexican passport.”

I look at Raúl to gauge his reaction. “You were glad?”

“Glad? No. Not at all. But I was curious. A ratcatcher in Colorado? Perhaps that was the only job he could get. Perhaps he had lost none of his sense of humor. In a manner of speaking, that had been his job when he worked for me,” he says, his eyes narrowing at the half joke, the skin fold under his chin jiggling.

He coughs, clears his throat. “In any case, when your brother asked to travel to Colorado to bury your father, we let him go without making any difficulty. Your brother is a good reporter. When he brought back many documents and gave them to you, we knew you were going to go too. We knew you were going to find the man who killed him and that you were going to exact a child’s revenge.”

“I don’t think-” I begin, but Raúl puts his finger to his lips.

In Hemingway’s bedroom the girl is stirring.

Raúl appears startled. “Quickly, get up. If she sees you here there will be a holy row. These officers will take you back to your apartment.”

Warily, I get to my feet. “I’m free to go?”

“As a bird.”

I look at the tame parrots walking on the balcony rail. “You clip their wings.”

Raúl smiles. “Only the songbirds, Comrade Mercado. You’re not a songbird, are you?”

“No.”

A voice from the bedroom. “Raúl!”

“Coming. Just taking care of something!” Raúl shouts and leads me outside.

He leans on the black Chrysler and taps me on the shoulder.

“Big changes are coming, Mercado. Sooner than you would think.”

I raise an eyebrow. He points at Casa Hemingway. “All of this will be a luxury. They won’t allow me to sleep anywhere that isn’t reinforced against the Yankee bunker-buster bombs, despite my talk of cultural protections.”

I’m not following him.

He frowns. “You see, that’s why we have to take care of all of the unfinished business now. In a few months I will have bigger fish to fry.”

“Yes,” I say, still confused.

My obtuseness is starting to irritate him. He sighs and changes the subject. “What should we do with you now, Comrade Mercado?” he whispers.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to join the DGI?”

“No.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to go back to my old job.”

“Then go.”

Raúl signals the guards to bring the Lada.

“Comrade Castro, can I, may I ask you a question? Two questions?”

Raúl looks inside the house. “Quickly. Quickly. Estelle is very un-Cuban in her attitude to infidelity.”

“What do I tell Hector? I mean Captain Ramirez.”