North of Havana Read online

  I wanted to explain why I was so reluctant; why it would be so dangerous for me to return to Havana. Instead, I said, “Isn’t there an American Embassy or something there? I could wire you the money.”

  “No embassy, just an American Interest Section. I already checked. A couple of people who work out of the Swiss Embassy; acted like they could care less. Said I ought to be arrested, an American breaking the law by coming to Cuba.”

  I had attended a reception once at the Swiss Embassy, out east of Havana near Miramar; could picture it: big colonial house with wrought-iron gates, banyan trees dropping red berries on the shaded sidewalks; part of Embassy Row.

  I said, “I’ll get the money to you, Tomlinson.”

  “When? When can you get here?”

  Today was Friday. I did so little banking I wasn’t certain if banks were open or not on Saturday. I said, “Soon as I can. Friday next week at the latest.”

  “Shit! That long?”

  “I’ll do my best—but I want you to answer this: Does the girl know where you keep your money?”

  “Julia? Sure. We’re staying in the same room. Not that she’s around much. Every day she disappears, comes back late.”

  “Does she say where she goes?”

  “Nope, and I’m not the type to press.”

  “Do me a favor and move your money. Don’t tell her where.”

  “But why, man?”

  I said, “Because I think it’s the smart thing to do. Think back: Once you got to Cay Sal, did she begin to act strange; maybe a little distant?”

  “Well… matter of fact, she did. Actually canceled bedroom privileges. Not that she’d given me bedroom privileges to begin with, man, but I had high hopes. I don’t have to tell you that out there on the high seas, what a downer it is to have your crew tell you the nookie lamp is not gonna be lit. How’d you know?”

  I repeated, “Move your money.”

  Tomlinson said, “Okay, okay—but you’re not helping this damn paranoia I’ve been fighting.” Then in a frailer voice, he said, “I mean it, Doc. I’m scared and I keep getting these absolutely killer headaches. Get down here ‘cause I can’t take much more.”

  I said, “I can tell.”

  Dewey said, “Did you hear what I said?”

  I looked up and said, “Huh?”

  She was sitting beside me on the armrest of the reading chair, arms folded, studying me. “For the last few minutes, it’s like you were in a coma. Didn’t hear a word I was saying.”

  “Yeah… well…”

  “You want me to leave?”

  I looked up again and said, “Huh?”

  She put her hands on my shoulders, gave me a little shake and pressed her face nose-to-nose with mine: gray-blue eyes becoming huge. “What the hell’s the problem? Tomlinson’s in trouble, that’s all you told me. What kind of trouble?”

  I stood and went to the little ship’s refrigerator; rummaged around until I found a beer. Popped it open and began to pace slowly around the room. Then I spent the next few minutes telling her what had happened, sorting it out in my own mind.

  When I had finished, she said, “If he’s that scared, why doesn’t he leave his boat and fly home? What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s his boat. The only home he’s had for fifteen, maybe twenty years.”

  “But if he’s that scared—”

  “I know what you’re saying. If Tomlinson were rational, yeah, maybe that’s exactly what he’d do. Cut his losses. But he’s never been rational. And on the phone just now, he sounded… lost. Like some misguided teenager who’s close to being out of control.”

  “You need to help him, Doc.”

  “I know. That’s what I’ve been thinking about—how?”

  “If it’s the money you’re worried about. I’ve made some pretty good investments—”

  “No, I’ve got it. I’ll have to wait until the bank opens.”

  “Why can’t you send it down? Or have somebody take it for you?”

  “We’re not allowed to take or spend money there. Americans, I mean. We can go to Cuba—that’s legal. But you have to go penniless and come back penniless. It’s part of the embargo. Department of Treasury.”

  “You have any Canadian friends?”

  “Yeah, but none who know how to deal with Tomlinson. If we pay the money and they still refuse to hand over his boat—that’s a real possibility—then Tomlinson may well slip over the edge.”

  “It’s got to be you, then.”

  “That’s what I keep coming back to.”

  Dewey said, “So let’s hop the next plane to Havana,” giving it a let’s-turn-it-into-an-adventure inflection. “My calendar’s open, buddy.”

  “If I go, I’m going alone.”

  “Bullshit. My life’s in what you’d call a transitional period. A little adventure is just what I need.”

  “No way, Dewey. You’re very good at what you do, but going down there, carrying money to a place like that, it’s serious. You don’t know anything about it.”

  “You do? The hermit biologist talking. Like you’re an expert.”

  I let it pass; said nothing.

  She said, “What you’re forgetting is that Tomlinson’s a friend of mine, too. You book a seat, I’ll book a seat on the same flight. I don’t need your permission.”

  What I wanted to tell her I couldn’t tell her. So I said, “I’m going to bed. I need to think about it.”

  5

  By most definitions it was a nightmare, but to me it was simply a sleeping revisitation of a thing I had done, a thing that I loathed—accurate in terms of its sounds, its terror—but it had been so long since I had suffered the dream that I awoke sweating, fighting the urge to cry out, desperate to fling a nonexistent weapon from my hand.…

  Over too many nights past, before the dream began to fade with the weight of years, I’d learned to handle it more stoically.

  Now it was two a.m. and I couldn’t make my brain shut down.

  I lay upon the foam-rubber mattress of the sleeper couch tossing and turning, aware that Dewey was just on the other side of the clothes locker, a few yards away, in my bed.

  Tried to take my mind off the dream by replaying bits and pieces of our conversation, chastising myself for being so damn firm about it:

  “You sleep there, Dewey, I’m sleeping here.”

  “What? There’s something wrong with just holding each other?”

  “There’s more to it than that. Don’t play games.”

  “I’m done playing games. That’s what this is about.”

  “I know, I know, you’re looking for a man to father your child. That’s a lot to take for granted.”

  “Think back, buster. I never asked you.”

  “Fine. We can talk about it in the morning.”

  “Fine!”

  Now I checked the phosphorescent numerals of my watch again. Only seven minutes since I’d last checked it…

  Threw back the soft wool Navy blanket, pulled on a pair of running shorts, and tippy-toed out the door.

  Blustery night with winter stars. Not quite cold enough for breath to condense, but cold enough to shock the skin and maybe help quiet my brain. I stood on the porch looking out across the bay. Watched mullet stir green arcs through the water; heard a night heron squawk. Listened to waves slap at the pilings of my house—a boat-hull sound without rhythm, without order.

  Down shore, through the mangroves, the marina was still. I could see the bait tank illuminated by mercury lights… a wedge of yard with coconut palms… the broad window of the marina office and the silhouettes of boats. On the guardrails of one boat, Japanese lanterns were swinging in the wind. They painted the black harbor with yellow streaks. I could hear the fast metronome gonging of a halyard slapping against an aluminum mast. A hollow, hollow winter sound…

  Something about the rhyt
hm of that sound—the cadence of careful gunshots?—brought to my mind’s eye the Kodalith vision of a person’s head materializing through a rain forest gloom, the head becoming larger, more distinct, as I hunted quietly through the trees, moving nearer; my right hand raising, coming up into firing position when I was close enough… then of the head vanishing in a cloud of iridescent mist—

  The damn dream again…

  I had to get my mind on other things, so I forced my thoughts to consider Tomlinson and his situation.

  Southward beyond the marina, beyond the high palms and rolling surf, lay Cuba. I wondered if Tomlinson was awake, standing out on the balcony of the Hotel Nacional, looking up at the same sky, the same stars, too worried to sleep.

  I checked my watch again and reconsidered calling Jimmy Gardenas despite the hour. No… Even retired Key West fishing guides are the early-to-bed types.

  I’d call Jimmy at his shop in the morning. Try to catch him first thing.

  But I couldn’t sleep. No way. So I stood there looking at the sky, thinking about what I would ask Jimmy.

  There were elements of Tomlinson’s story about Julia DeGlorio that troubled me. A twenty-something-year-old woman—good-looking, by Tomlinson’s description—picks him up at a restaurant and talks him into taking her to Cay Sal. She, the daughter of Cuban exiles with a very, very unusual name.

  Tomlinson has his charms; women love the man, there was no arguing that. Women of all sizes and ages and of varying sensibilities were drawn to him and trusted him—with good reason. Tomlinson exudes a kind of serene and nonjudgmental acceptance that women treasure. It is not an exaggeration to say that if Tomlinson said yes to all the women who wanted to mother him and coddle him and also share his bed, the man would never have to spend a night alone aboard his boat.

  Still… this wasn’t a normal Tomlinson. He had been drunk and drugged and ranting—again, by his own description. Also, this wasn’t just any woman. She was Cuban-American; came, presumably, from the more strictly moraled society that the hyphenated prefix implies. Yet she convinced him—a stranger—to sail her to a bank of lonely uninhabited islands just off the Cuban coast?

  It was an unlikely scenario. That’s why it bothered me.

  I could hear Tomlinson saying, “I had the hangover from Planet Zoltare.”

  Yes, he had regressed; had returned to some of his old destructive ways. But the man was a sailor in the same way that others are commercial pilots or physicians. He took his craft very seriously. Would he really allow himself to drink heavily before attempting a night crossing of the Florida Straits?

  It is a quality of mine that is not attractive. There was a time in my life when I was suspicious by profession. Now I am suspicious by nature. When data does not fit comfortably into a likely chain of events, I reassemble the data into a worst-case scenario. It is my way of establishing the parameters of possibility.

  Here was one possibility: The woman used all the means at her disposal to lure Tomlinson close to Cuba. Once in Cay Sal, she withdrew those favors, then drugged him so she could sail his boat into Cuban waters.

  Could she have a reason for doing so? There were numerous plausible reasons. Was it possible that she did it? Yes, it was possible. But was it likely?

  No.

  In all probability, Julia DeGlorio was just one more casualty of the Florida Keys; a woman who’d gone to Key West looking for adventure and found, in Tomlinson, a man who happened to have a boat and was willing to take her along as crew.

  But I wanted to call Jimmy; talk about it. There were other people I wanted to contact, too, and not just to discuss Julia DeGlorio. The way I saw it, there were only two ways to get Tomlinson out of Cuba. I could contact my local congressmen, contact the media, and make a political issue out of it, or I could go there myself and try to buy him out.

  No getting around it—the second option was the most practical option.

  If Tomlinson’s predicament was approached through public channels, the Cuban government would do what it had done before—claim their people had caught Tomlinson with drugs aboard, then ransom him to our own government while wringing him dry of political juice.

  That would mean months in Cuba… and he wouldn’t spend them in the Hotel Nacional, either. It would mean prison. Maybe at the State Security Villa Marista complex in Havana, but more likely the much larger, dirtier, and more dangerous Combinado del Este—the gray-walled fortress where they kept the death-row people; the dangerous dissidents who had made the mistake of voicing their disapproval of Castro.

  The thought of that turned my stomach. Tomlinson locked away in some crypt-sized cell… as frail as he was, as sick and confused as he had become… he wouldn’t last a month.

  So I would have to go.…

  It was a stunning thing to acknowledge: Yeah, I’m going to do it; I’m going back to Cuba.…

  Just making the decision, though, stirred an old energy in me. It awakened all the night-raider cognitive patterns that I had packed and put away long ago. A kind of attack mentality that I found both galvanizing and disturbing because it stirred in me an unsettling doubt about the life I had so carefully built.

  If I’m living the way I want, why is it I miss elements of the life I had?

  I looked at the stars, looked deep into the dark water and allowed the question to dissipate. I had more important things to think about… many things to do and information that needed to be assembled before I left for Cuba in, what, three days? Maybe four.

  It was possible that the exchange would be easy to make. I’d fly down, give the man in charge ten thousand cash, put Julia DeGlorio on a plane, then sail back with Tomlinson.

  Nothing to it…

  But it was also possible that things wouldn’t go smoothly. What would I do if they took the money and refused to release No Más? How should I react if some bureaucrat with a long memory connected me with my past work in Cuba?

  The potential for trouble was very real. There were contingencies that I had to anticipate.

  When setting out to attack a mountain, smart climbers do their homework first; set up the safety lines and establish all possible means of escape.

  I had a lot to do in a very short time.…

  6

  On the phone, Jimmy Gardenas, former flats guide and now owner of Key West’s top fly tackle shop, said to me, “Julia DeGlorio? The night I saw Tomlinson, there was nobody by that name at our table.”

  It was Saturday, nearly five p.m. On the desk in front of me was a pad of paper on which I had written, in a vertical line, the words:

  BANK

  SKIFF

  HOUSE

  FLIGHT

  HORSESHOE

  JIMMY

  ARMANDO

  GEN. RIVERA (PILAR?)

  All brief memory goads relating to things I wanted to get done before Monday.

  Already, I had placed neat little checks beside every word except for the last three names.

  Now I picked up a pencil and placed another checkmark as I said to Jimmy, “You sure? Tomlinson said he was at your table when he met her. I got the impression you were all—”

  “Nope, I would’a remembered,” Jimmy said. “No woman by that name. But Tomlinson was really drunk. He could have imagined it. I think he was imagining a lot of things that night. I doubt if he remembers much of what went on.”

  “He sailed to Cay Sal with her, now they’re in Cuba. He’s not imagining that.”

  “But where he met her,” Jimmy said. “That’s what I’m saying. You probably don’t want to hear this, but I think he was more than drunk that night. I think he was on something. The way he was talking—saying crazy biblical stuff—I think maybe he was doing some kind of hallucinogenic.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I tried to get him to go home with me. You know, look after him till he settled down. I don’t know him very well, but he
never seemed like the self-destructive type. Until the restaurant that night.”

  I said, “A Cuban-American woman, probably late twenties. Attractive…” I tried to remember what Tomlinson had said about her; made some plausible deductions from that. “She would be unmarried, articulate, well-read, not much money, and probably not from the Keys. Maybe down there trying to meet people.”

  Jimmy said, “Cubano in her twenties?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? There was somebody like that. I know who you’re talking about—”

  “Yeah, Julia—”

  “No, her name’s not Julia whatever-you-said. Her name’s Rita Santoya. ‘Least, that’s what she told me. She came into the tackle shop that afternoon—during Fantasy Fest?—and said she’d been given my name, maybe I could help her. What she wanted was the names of boat people who might be headed for Cuba, willing to let her go along as crew.”

  I said, “That’s the one.”

  * * *

  Jimmy Gardenas said, “In the Cuban-American community, that name still carries a lot of weight—Santoya. The Santoya family controlled most of the sugar production in La Habana Province. Unbelievable wealth, like royalty down there. And damn good people, too, from what I’ve heard. Of course, they lost it all when Castro took over. So I told her to come by the restaurant that night and I’d introduce her to some guys who might be able to help. I’ve been so Americanized,” Jimmy added, “it’s hard for people to believe that I’m Cuban, too. I try to keep up on things; help when I can.”

  “Maybe she used the name Santoya to impress you,” I said.

  “I don’t think so. She knew the family history too well. It’s quite a family. Back in the forties and fifties, when things were about as corrupt as they could get, there were these two rich brothers. Ask any Cuban, they’ll know the story. There was Eduardo Santoya and Angel Santoya. Eduardo… this girl we’re talking about said Eduardo was her grandfather… well, Eduardo, he was the one who spent a ton of the family’s money to help found a political party… I can’t remember the name of it… but this party was devoted to administrative honesty, that kind of thing. Doing good stuff… national reforms.”