Telex From Cuba Read online

  “A native, sure. Of upstate New York. I picked it up on engineering jobs. This is what South America will do to a man,” he said with a laugh. “Ruin him.”

  Dinner was served, but served too late, after a certain high-water mark of alcohol consumption had been reached. It became an afterthought, a ritual lost in the general drift of drunkenness. The next day, Mrs. Lederer recalled vaguely that they’d been served starchy cubes of something or other, everything oil-drenched and stinking of garlic, and that she and Mr. Lederer had shared a table on the riverfront covered porch with the ambassador and Mr. and Mrs. Billings. Mrs. Lederer had asserted herself among them after being snubbed by the woman from French Guiana—the name was Fourier, she remembered too late. Mrs. Fourier hadn’t really snubbed her. She’d been perfectly polite, which made it worse. In the hazy recall of that drunken evening, Mrs. Lederer had a distinct image of herself, the ambassador, and Mrs. Billings dumping their “dinner” straight into the river when no one was looking. And she and Mr. Lederer, home from the party, eating midnight sandwiches at the kitchen table.

  Whatever was remembered or forgotten of that meal, in the excess of Mr. Carrington’s martinis, they all remembered the ugly scene between him and his wife.

  “Dinner theater” is how Marjorie Lederer later referred to the incident.

  The two of them had argued at the table, in front of everyone.

  Mrs. Carrington had stood up.

  Her husband tried to get her to sit back down. She wrenched away from him. “You humiliate me! Don’t you see that?”

  If Tip Carrington did see, he didn’t say. He didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sick of it,” she slurred. “Sick sick sick of it!”

  The servants had been in the process of bringing out coffee and dessert. Carrington tried to act casual. He dug in his pockets for a cigarette. “Who’s got a light? Lito, got a match?” he asked, mock-cheerful, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.

  Mr. Gonzalez, seated at the end of the table, leaned over to hand him a pack of matches.

  As Carrington stood to receive them, his wife slapped his face and sent the unlit cigarette flying.

  He bent down, calmly picked up the cigarette, and asked Lito Gonzalez again for a light.

  Everyone was quiet as he was handed the matches, took one out, struck it against the side of the matchbox, and lit his cigarette.

  “Okay, let’s liven things up. This is a party, right?” he said, exhaling smoke and waving the match to extinguish it. “Does anyone have a joke? Mr. Lederer, got a joke?”

  No one spoke.

  “No? No one’s got a joke? Okay I’ve got one,” Carrington said. “I have a joke. Here goes: Why is a Cuban wedding cake made of shit?”

  They all looked at him.

  “Because it keeps the flies off the bride.”

  Again there was quiet.

  “Ha…ha…ha. My husband, the comedian,” Blythe Carrington said. “It’s tasteless, right? And everyone’s heard that joke. But you people aren’t in on why my husband thinks it’s funny.” She looked around the table. “It’s only not funny to you ’cause you don’t get his sense of humor.”

  She stood up and walked heavily across the porch. Before she passed through the doors and into the lodge, she said something else. It was difficult to hear because she said it quietly and the river that ran under the porch rushed loudly, swollen from the recent rains. But Mrs. Mackey thought she heard correctly.

  “It’s only funny if you know my husband’s Cuban,” Blythe Carrington said. And with perfect ease, she opened the ill-fitting screen door that had been sticking all evening and slipped through, careful not to slam it behind her.

  9

  The ice was broken between them, but La Mazière still enjoyed sitting in the back of the Pam-Pam Room, observing her like she was a mysterious specimen, which in a way she had remained.

  He’d been in Havana three months now, since his arrival just after the March coup, studying her in his own calm fashion, from up close and from afar, biding his time, his instinct telling him she wasn’t just amusement and flesh, but might, just might, assist him in attracting ex-president Prio as a client. Although how, he wasn’t sure.

  His own contact to Prio—the same gentleman who had originally apprised La Mazière of the coup via telex from Havana to Paris—had promised “heavy business” for La Mazière, supplying weapons to the instigators of a new insurrection. But now this same contact was claiming the situation was hopeless.

  “It looks like there is no insurrection,” he said in hushed tones when they met one afternoon in the dark lobby bar of the Hotel Nacional, empty except for the little Indian man who was always there, despondently sipping his Harveys Bristol Cream, a deposed maharaja too absorbed in his own troubles to bother eavesdropping on anyone else’s. “The former president is really down in the dumps,” the contact said. “He’s just not motivated to fund an overthrow.” Even the newspapers had acknowledged Prio’s wilted morale. The morning after the coup, the headlines read PRIO QUITS, despite the fact that Prio was technically ousted.

  La Mazière had business to attend to in Ciudad Trujillo and was planning to depart the next day. Between Rafael Trujillo, leader and generalissimo of the Dominican Republic, and François Duvalier, a Haitian insurgent with presidential ambitions, La Mazière had a regular beat in the Caribbean. From Havana to Ciudad Trujillo to Port-au-Prince was about the shortest sequence of flights in the world. And maybe, when he returned, something in the Cuban situation would have shifted.

  He purchased his tickets at the Air Cubana office near his hotel and then went to the Tokio, taking up his regular station in the back of the Pam-Pam Room. As he was ordering a drink, a man who looked familiar entered the club, though La Mazière could not place him. He was tall, pale, and freckled, with a companion who couldn’t have been more than a teenager, with soft doe’s eyes and hair on his upper lip so pubescent it looked like cupcake crumbs. The taller one, La Mazière realized, was Fidel Castro, a trigger-happy politico who had made himself a public nuisance since Batista moved into the presidential palace. He and his younger companion—an obvious queer, La Mazière presumed—waited by the bar, awkwardly, as though they’d never been inside a place like the Tokio. It turned out they were waiting for Rachel K, who led them to a booth in the back of the room.

  La Mazière had seen Castro’s photograph in the news magazine Bohemia, which printed it alongside a letter Castro had drafted, as his own lawyer, to Cuba’s Urgency Court, in protest of the coup. It was such an inspired piece of political rhetoric that La Mazière had cut it from Bohemia with a pair of scissors. “I, Fidel Castro Ruz, resort to humble logic,” the letter began. “I pulse this terrible reality. And the logic tells me that if there exist courts, Batista should be charged. If he should not be charged, and continue as Master of State, Major General, President, Civil and Military Chief, Owner of Lives, Farms, Women, Cattle, and Whores, He Who Flicks Upon the Island His Droit de Cuissage, then there do not exist courts. Nor logic. I repeat: I pulse this terrible reality.”

  “I pulse this terrible reality” was peculiar language, almost sensual locution, and yet there was coherence. Castro had made “pulsing” a transitive act, to sense and to monitor, to take a pulse. On the same page as Castro’s letter, below it Bohemia had printed the court’s reply: “In response to the petition filed contesting the revolutionary coup resulting in General Batista’s presidency, the Urgency Court rules that Revolution is the source of law.” At which point Castro apparently gave up filing legal affidavits and began organizing public protests. During the largest of these, on the steps of the university, he fired several shots into the air and one at Batista’s secret service, who were across the street taking their demitasse. No one was hurt, but Castro became an instant enemy of the new regime.

  He and his teenage companion stayed in the booth with Rachel K for what seemed to La Mazière like quite a while. When the curtain finally opened, he watched the th
ree of them file out. Each shook Rachel K’s hand as though one had just sold the other a used car or a piece of real estate.

  “Formal handshakes among a gangster, faggot, and a variety dancer,” La Mazière said to her later that evening. “It’s certainly peculiar.”

  She was silent.

  “Or perhaps it isn’t peculiar. But you might be careful. What would Batista think?”

  “He’s not much of a thinker.”

  She explained that the Castros—the younger one was Fidel’s brother Raúl—had come to the club asking her to connect them to Prio.

  And would she?

  “I said he’s in Miami and wants to be left alone.”

  It vexed La Mazière that Fidel Castro should want anything to do with the former president. Castro was responsible for sending in the mole who photographed Prio’s Green Room cocaine exploits. After Prio was exposed and humiliated, Castro tried to bring impeachment charges against him.

  On the plane to Ciudad Trujillo the next morning, it occurred to La Mazière that Castro wanted to get to Prio for the same reason he did. Prio had money—this everyone knew, his only brave act before leaving having been to empty the coffers of the Cuban National Treasury. Castro had motivation and followers. He was likely plotting to try to overthrow Batista, just what La Mazière had hoped Prio would be doing, when he’d arrived from Paris in the first place.

  He would reapproach Prio upon his return to Havana, either through his contact, or better yet, through the girl, and let him know that his own lack of motivation was no longer a problem. Someone else was motivated. All Prio had to do was release the funds, and La Mazière would arrange the supply of weapons that this leftist gangster Castro and his followers, assuming they existed, would need to begin their campaign.

  It was an artful logic, putting together people who shared a common enemy. Or maybe it was a crude logic, but one to which La Mazière was attached. Artful or crude, these logics created demand on all sides, for large shipments of Tula Tukarovs and tea bags, of Camemberts and carbines.

  “What the hell are Camemberts?” President Trujillo asked him when they met later that day at the Dominican palace.

  A French cheese, Sir Benefactor, La Mazière resisted saying. “The tommy gun—you know, with a round magazine. Like a Camembert wheel.”

  Trujillo, it turned out, had been hoping to buy piranhas, to stock the Massacre River, which divided his country from Haiti. No Rhine, joining two cultures under the mystical reign of one great emperor, the Massacre River was the only reason the entire hunk of land had not gone up in flames.

  Trujillo was wearing a heavy crust of eye makeup, bordello-fringe epaulets drooping off his shoulders. On a previous occasion he’d received La Mazière dressed in a shako and white satin breeches. Breeches that must have been slightly too tight, because Trujillo kept tugging at the rise and shifting in his chair as he quizzed La Mazière for details on Napoleonic headgear. As if being French, La Mazière should know the difference between First and Second Empire officers’ bonnets. When in fact it was Trujillo who knew the difference among varieties of office bonnet in all their elaborate details, the questions having been merely a pretext to his own discourse on the subject.

  La Mazière suggested that instead of preoccupying himself with piranhas, he might consider a more direct action, such as cooperating with the insurgent doctor François Duvalier, who was attempting to overthrow Haiti’s president.

  “A Negro?” Trujillo asked, incredulous.

  “Naturally. He’s Haitian.”

  Trujillo shook his head. “Through the misfortune of history we are forced to live next to them. But maybe—” He closed his eyes and thought for a moment. A sun shaft poured into the room, sending starbursts from the gold buttons on the generalissimo’s coat. “Maybe I see your point, Mr. La Mazière. Either we play a role in the direction of their governance, or we abandon them to their instincts.”

  It was a successful trip all around, Trujillo buying weapons for Duvalier and his revolutionary movement, the Haitian president alerted to the danger—by La Mazière, who had more or less created this danger—and everyone scrambling to protect himself.

  While La Mazière was away, the Castro brothers had come back to the Tokio to see Rachel K, asking again to be put in touch with Prio. She’d agreed, she explained to La Mazière, and sent a telex to Miami. Prio’s response was just what she expected:

  WHAT IS POINT? STOP.

  “I think he’s depressed. He told me his house is a coffin. All he does is play canasta with the ancient retirees in his neighborhood.”

  “Perhaps you could send him another telex,” La Mazière said. “Tell him there’s someone who can provide real hope, a professional who can supply the weaponry he might be looking to buy if he ever wants to come home. Tell him that with proper support and guidance and the fervent efforts of this untutored gangster Fidel Castro, of whom we’re all suspicious—important to include that detail, to reassure him—he just might be able to eject Batista.”

  La Mazière expected her to take it in stride that he was involved in a violent and illegal business. He was right. She worded the telex just as he instructed and asked him nothing about his own role, supplying weaponry.

  A week later she received Prio’s response:

  HANDSOME CHANGED HEART. STOP. PUT ME IN TOUCH. STOP.

  10

  Miss Alfaro, the Nicaro schoolteacher, had a piano that Everly could have walked a quarter mile to play anytime she wanted. But she and Mrs. Stites both pretended it was out of necessity that Everly come by boat to Preston on Saturdays.

  After she played they ate lunch together, Mrs. Stites having arranged for the cook to prepare whatever Everly requested. She didn’t want to ask for anything special, but Mrs. Stites insisted. “Whatever you want, dear,” Mrs. Stites said. “Right, Annie? Annie is a wizard in the kitchen, and anything you want that we have, I promise, she can make it. And if we don’t have it, you let me know the week before, and I’ll be sure she orders it from the almacén.” Everly suspected the cook resented her and this game of preparing the lunches Everly thought up. Once, she asked for grilled cheese, and when it arrived open-face, Mrs. Stites detected Everly’s disappointment and sent the sandwiches back, after pressing Everly for how she wanted them cooked. “Fried in a pan?” Everly replied sheepishly.

  The cook was an enormous Jamaican woman who moaned as she ate her own meal, sitting in the kitchen after she finished serving Everly and Mrs. Stites. Either the cook was in pain, or what she was eating was so delicious that she had to express herself. One day the cook served a chocolate cake for dessert. Everly hated chocolate, and the cake almost made her retch, but she faked that she liked it and ate as much as she could, afraid that otherwise it would be sent back. Mrs. Stites got the impression that chocolate cake was Everly’s favorite and had the cook serve it every Saturday. Everly and Mrs. Stites would sit eating the powdery dreadful cake in silence, nothing but the sound of a grandfather clock’s tick. Mr. Stites was off on his company rounds. The two boys had Saturday engagements, boxing and tennis and golf lessons, or fishing excursions. Everly was Mrs. Stites’s Saturday engagement, but they didn’t have much to say to each other. Everly would leave worried that she hadn’t quite fulfilled whatever it was that daughterless Mrs. Stites wanted from her, though Mrs. Stites was perfectly nice, always gentle, soliciting Everly’s opinion on various matters as though she were an adult. “What do you think of this pattern, dear?” she’d ask, holding up a swatch of checked fabric that she was thinking of using to have new curtains made. “Should I go with that, or something more plain? I have this purple fabric as well.” “Maybe the purple,” Everly would venture, secretly thrilled but pretending it was normal that someone needed her opinion before making an important decision. “Then it’s settled,” Mrs. Stites would say, “the purple it is.”

  If K.C. showed up after lunch, Mrs. Stites suggested that he and Everly play together, but she sensed that K.C. didn’t want to p
lay with her. He was a boy, caught up in a boy’s world. One afternoon, he’d planned to go fishing with Hatch Allain and some of the other Preston boys. Mrs. Stites insisted that K.C. bring Everly along with them. Everly sat at the rear of the boat in a clammy orange life jacket, which neither Hatch nor any of the boys had to wear. K.C. dove over the side, laughing and splashing, swimming behind the boat. “Careful, now,” Hatch said when Everly leaned over in the damp and bulky life jacket to touch her fingers to the water. Hatch said there were sharks, and that the water was dangerous, too dangerous for a girl. They steered into a reef and the boys caught octopi, which looked like dripping wet ladies’ wigs.

  One afternoon, Mrs. Stites suggested that K.C. take Everly out on a popshot—a little open railroad car that you pumped with a hand lever. K.C., two of the Allain boys, and Everly piled on. One of them somehow put tar in Everly’s hair. She was walking up the path from the Nicaro dock, almost home, and realized that she’d been absentmindedly pulling at these mysterious sticky clots on the ends of her hair. Her mother and Flozilla washed the tar out with gasoline, and the parts they couldn’t clean, they cut out with scissors. Everly said that K.C. might have done it. “Why would that angel of a boy put tar in your hair?” her mother asked. No one was an angel. Except maybe Duffy, who walked around so softly spying on people that she practically floated on wings. All night Everly smelled the gasoline in her hair. Even while she was sleeping she smelled gasoline. “At least your hair’s not long,” her mother said. There had been a girl in Everly’s class in Oak Ridge with hair that fell to her waist. People said it was “fine,” meaning it was silky and delicate. The girl leaned over one of those automatic washing machines like Everly’s mother wanted to buy—round, like a drum. It was in the spin cycle, and the top had been removed. The spinner in the machine grabbed the girl’s hair and ripped it right off, along with her scalp.