“Who is in charge of the Directorio?”
“I know nothing of that,” she said.
“You are a liar.”
He punched her stomach and backhanded her face. She did not fall. Renata the martyr has the power to die for the revolution or live by talking to the fat fascist. It only takes a few names, you can name the dead.
“We know everything about your family, your work, your love affairs, your closeness to the rebels.”
“I am not a political person,” she said, and she moaned and covered her breasts with her arms. He shoved her against the concrete wall, damaging her back and her arm. She felt she was bleeding. He sat her on a chair and the guards held her arms and her head so she could not move. He took a leather tool pouch from a desk drawer and unfolded it. He lifted out a small, pointed iron rod with a wooden handle and he touched its tip to her left ear.
“Where are they hiding?”
“I don’t know any of them,” and she screamed this.
He inched the rod into her left ear, touching her eardrum.
“Who financed the attack?”
“I know nothing.”
He shoved the rod through her eardrum, and she screamed herself voiceless. He moved to her right ear and inserted the rod. She screamed on but with fading sound.
“Who is left alive to lead the organization?”
She opened her mouth but could make only the smallest of sounds, and she shook her head. He pushed the iron through her right eardrum and she slumped in the grip of the guards, undone. She closed her eyes and wept her pain. The guards pulled her to her feet and Robles ripped her blouse off one shoulder, revealing the necklace Narciso had given her—Changó’s tools and weapons.
“What is your religion?”
“Catholic.” It was not even a whisper.
“Then why do you wear the necklace of Changó?”
“A gift.”
“It is Santeria. You said you were a Catholic.”
She was crawling toward Babalu Aye, half a cinder block tied to her ankle with rope, and she was pulling the block as she slid on her back toward the church. A shirt covered her but her back was already bleeding, and Babalu was very far away.
Blood was streaming from both her ears. Robles grabbed her skirt at the waist and swiveled, pulling her in a circle, steadily ripping the skirt as he hurled her against another wall. The side of her head hit the concrete and her pain was dizzying. She fell, her skirt around her ankles. One of the guards kicked her in the ribs, then stepped over her and kicked her ribs on the other side.
She flagellated herself with a switch as she moved toward the church of San Lázaro with the crowd. Her back, her thighs, her buttocks bled from the whipping. Babalu! Brother of Changó! Babalu!
Robles pulled her skirt off, grabbed her panties and tried to rip them but he could not. He pulled them off her legs. The guards lifted her to her feet and held her against the wall. Robles poured water from a pitcher into a glass and put it to her lips. She swallowed, freshening the blood in her mouth. She was naked now, her bra askew. Robles put his hand between her legs. She looked into his face, blood coming from her nose, her head, her ears, her arms, her knees, her buttocks. She will have scars, a marked woman—she will gain status. While lying on the floor she had seen, under Robles’ guayabera, his holstered pistol and a beaded belt of Ogun, brother and sometime enemy of Changó.
“Ogun,” she said to Robles in a scratched voice, softly, very softly out of a broken throat. “You look to Ogun.”
The words stopped him. He withdrew his fingers from her, his face inches from hers. She chanted through broken lips:“Ogun lord of iron, who lives in the knife,
Ogun god of war who slaughtered a village,
Ogun outcast butcher, who eats the dog.”
“You put Ogun’s iron into me,” she whispered to him. “You are killing me. But Changó will not let you do it. You will die before I do. My babalawo said when he gave me this necklace, show it to your enemy and if he hurts you, tell him Changó will plunge him into a long and thunderous death.”
Robles waved the guards off and backstepped away from her. Leaning against the wall she swayed her head, moving in a slow rhythm, the beginning of a dance. She wanted to dance as Floreal had danced at the wedding but the pain everywhere in her body would not allow it. This was her honeymoon, without Quinn, courted by the butcher in his stead. She swayed only her head, using Floreal’s cadence, and she chanted:“Changó, who breathes fire at his enemy,
Changó, who owns all music,
Whose thunderstones burn down forests.”
She could feel the oozing sores of Babalu Aye. She remembered Padre Pio channeling the stigmata into his body. Robles did not move, his arm hanging by his thigh, his pistol pointed at the floor. She saw the developing fear in his stare. He is a believer. She took a small step toward him, then another. Then, with strength in her right hand she did not know she had, she reached under his shirt and grabbed the belt of Ogun and jerked it. Robles backed off from her touch and the broken belt came away in her hand, its black and green beads rolling across the floor.
“Ogun is useless,” she said. “Ogun is on the floor.”
She dropped the belt and more beads rolled.
“Ogun has the iron sword but Changó has lightning. Can you fight lightning with a sword?”
“You have the diabolical in you,” Robles said. She read his lips. She could not hear him.
“You are recognizing yourself,” she said.
He had raped her as an unconsummated bride, but she had seduced him. He was killing her but she had prayed him into her vagina, where Changó often dwells, where he has been lying in wait since the wedding.
And in that place Changó’s lightning had scorched the invader’s will and silenced his soul.
“Robles,” she said, “you will kill me no more.”
The music was cool, solid when Quinn entered the ballroom, the crowd poppin’ and tappin’, keeping together in time. Quinn counted at least five hundred people, at twenty a head that’s ten thousand, fifty percent for the room, food, and wine, so five big ones for Cody, nice, a middle-aged bunch, maybe a third of them black, some in tuxes and dinner gowns to tone things up for Cody. Cody was wearing his tux, white lapel carnation, playing so fine, drum and bass backup, doing “Poor Butterfly” in up tempo, not wild, can’t do those double-time breaks anymore, they punish his lungs; but his beat is there and why hasn’t the rest of the world recognized the originality of this man’s style the way Albany has? It certainly wasn’t his fingers, you can get by with eight, he said, but ten is where it’s at, and he always had ten, and some nights twelve. So what did he do wrong? Missed the subway and didn’t show up in time for the recording session with John Hammond, the record producer, was that really it? A born loser? Can’t stand prosperity? Doesn’t believe he’ll ever jump over the moon? He’s humming, zum-zum-za-zum, those lungs not failing that part of him, and he looks all right, thinner, goes with the territory, all gray and almost militarily upright, as if he took West Point posture lessons, and there’s that same tight mustache, same chin whiskers, same frowning down at the music he’s making, always his own toughest critic.
Quinn saw Renata sitting between Max and Martin Daugherty, Vivian with Pop, Matt not here, or Gloria. Quinn inhaled like a pigeon, puffed up his chest, pissed-off husband. She has fucked Max, surely. She knows how to thank a guy. She looks so gorgeous, exquisite, can’t blame Max for all that yearning. Now she’ll tell Quinn it meant nothing. When he caught up with her in Miami after her disappearance from the Holtzes she apologized for fucking Max but what could she do? He’d saved her life. She and Quinn were still in the honeymoon stage then, two weeks after the marriage, which had never been consummated because Fidel intervened. “I loved our wedding, Daniel, and our dancing with Changó and Oshun, and then Changó saving me from Robles. I’m still your virgin bride and Max means nothing, he helped me, but I’ll never be close to him again.” Quinn was then fourth in line
for her prize, after Changó, Robles, and Max. A new form of virginity: I can give it to you wholesale.
“Martin,” Quinn said when he sat at the table, “where have you been, what brings you to the violent city?”
“I got bored out there in the deathbed city,” Martin said. “It’s nice to be comforted into the grave, but I’m not ready.”
“Glad to hear it. Where’s that big son of yours?”
“Over at police headquarters complaining about their methods, that’s what he does. You two had a big day, I hear.”
“We know how to have a good time,” Quinn said. “You know Cody?”
“I remember when he played down in Big Jimmy’s place, long time ago. Lot of talent. I didn’t follow him. I went in other directions. But that was good jazz down there.”
“I was only a kid. But I heard him. Never forgot him.”
“How’s your life at the newspaper?”
“They cut my throat tonight. I had a truly great story—a scam about assassinating the Mayor, which is really just a way of smearing the Brothers, and Roy in particular, and they wouldn’t print it.”
“I don’t know Roy,” Martin said.
“He’ll be here. Pop, are you all right?”
“As well as can be complimented under the circumstances.”
“Good. Vivian, I want to hear about your evening.”
“It was thrilling,” Vivian said. “Your father’s doing fine.”
“I can tell. I thank you for seeing him through a difficult day.”
“It wasn’t difficult. He got a little cut, that’s all. We had a wonderful time. And it’s not over, is it?”
“Not that I can see. Where’s Gloria?” he asked Renata.
“She’s with Matt finding out about bail for Roy.”
“Bail for Roy? They weren’t giving him bail.”
“Somebody called Cody and said it was happening.”
“I asked Jake Hess to represent Roy and Tremont. He must’ve changed their minds.”
“Then you did a good thing,” Renata said. “And Max says he’ll put up Roy’s bail.”
“Ah, Max,” Quinn said, looking at him for the first time, “very generous.”
“I like that kid,” Max said.
“How was your interview with Alex?” Renata asked.
“Predictable, but some things got aired.”
“Did you talk to him about Gloria?”
“No. I didn’t want to listen to him lie about something so important.”
Quinn was bursting with the impulse to stand up and deliver a speech about the night they took away his story on Tremont. His publisher summarily declared history unpublishable, and the Mayor, who had orchestrated that history, affirmed that it had never happened. Tremont the assassin and Zuki the provocateur did not exist. It’s odd how the Pashas reverse themselves, Tremont free, Roy bailed, Renata released from her torture cell (with divine intervention).
Quinn just listened as Renata updated him on the situation with Max: now waiting for the okay to enter Cuba, and when he gets it he’ll leave for Canada, Gander. Complicated, but it’s being arranged. The amazing Renata, who never lost her taste or her talent for intrigue.
Quinn leaned toward Max and whispered, “Alfie may be in Cuba.”
“They let him in?” Max asked.
“That’s the hot rumor in Miami. What does that do to your getting in?”
“I’ll have to ask Renata’s babalawo.”
When Robles ended Renata’s torture he had asked her what she wanted. I want my mother, she said. If they let my mother come to the Buro they won’t kill me because she is a woman of means, of status, of influence. Robles had said influence doesn’t matter here, but it matters. Robles had the guards wash the blood off her body, her face, her ears, her hair. He gave her a policeman’s shirt out of the closet, small, it almost fit her, but nobody was her size on the police force. They put ice on her face where she had been cut and bruised to reduce the swelling, brushed her hair, then gave her a room with a cot to lie on until the morning. She feared they would kill her during the night. A woman came in and examined her and put drops in her ears and gave her water and pills and said, take three for your pain. Renata could not hear her voice. She accepted the pills but kept them in her hand. Pills might be poison, Diego had told her. I have no pain, she told the woman.
Robles was doing what Changó had told him to do. He ordered Renata’s room locked and he kept the key and stayed all night in an office next to the torture room. At sunrise they brought her breakfast and more ice and at nine her mother was allowed to see her in the office and take her home on her arm, with Robles offering deferential bows to Celia who thanked Colonel Robles for his kindness and walked Renata to the car.
Diego had warned her that the police are liars, so do not trust anything they say or do. In the car her mother was saying her father had booked her on a flight to New York, she would stay with her cousin and have all the money she needs. She would be off the island tomorrow. But Renata had other plans. She told her mother to use her connections to get her into the Haitian embassy where she would seek asylum, also the Brazilian and Ecuadoran embassies, for her father knew the Brazilian military people and the Ecuadoran ambassador was in love with her; so she would have three safe places to go. Her mother insisted New York was safest and Renata said yes, but I will never get there, do what I ask, Mama, or they will kill me, not all the police are as afraid of me as Robles is. They will be coming for me very soon.
When they arrived home her mother drew a bath for her and examined her wounds and put Furacin salve on all of them, and wept when she saw what that devil did to her ears. He made her a deaf person. She said she would call a doctor but Renata insisted they call everybody they knew with clout to get her into one of the embassies. She went up to her room and packed five kinds of medicine, her passport, two blouses, two skirts, her makeup and sundries in an overnight case, tiptoed down the back stairs and heard her father talking on the phone about the Brazilian embassy.
She went out the French doors and through the garden, past the bougainvillea to the bus stop on Fifth Avenue, trying not to look like herself, and waited six months for the bus. Then she climbed its two steps feeling great pain in her ribs, god knows how many are broken, and why hadn’t they pained her this way going up the stairs to her bedroom?
She shuffled toward the rear of the bus and put on a mantilla to hide her face and hair, and sat facing away from the window. She rode to Twenty-second Street and walked two blocks to the Haitian embassy, a two-story building at Twenty-second and Seventh Avenue where, she had heard two weeks ago, six rebels from Matanzas had found asylum. But now the corner was full of police cars and policemen were surrounding the embassy, something going on and she would not stay to find out what. She walked back to Fifth Avenue, every step a dagger in both her sides. She waited for a bus that would take her to the Brazilian embassy, which occupied suites in a nine-story office building on the corner of Infanta and Twenty-third at the Malecón. She told the guard she was the ambassador’s niece but at the entrance to the embassy’s suite she felt that she could not take another step. The door opened to her and she stared at a young man who looked like a diplomat in training. He welcomed her and gestured for her to enter. She tried to make the step across the threshhold but she could not move. She dropped her bag and swooned into the young man’s arms.
Had she gone to the Haitian embassy forty minutes earlier she would have met two of her friends who had taken part in the Palace attack, Carbó and Prieto, and Javier from the 26th, one of the killers of Quesada at the Montmartre. Two safe houses where the three might have gone had turned out to be under surveillance, pinpointed by captured rebels who had been tortured into revelation, and so the three went to where the six Matanzas revolutionaries had found a haven. The three had four pistols among them and refused to surrender any until they had received safe conduct. They sat in a first-floor room while the Haitian diplomats considered their fu
ture. Within less than an hour their arrival had reached the ears of the chief of the Cuban National Police, Rafael Salas Cañizares, who swiftly assembled a task force and alerted the news photographers who documented his front-page arrests, that he had found the gangsters who might have killed Quesada.
Salas marched his troops into the embassy, flouting the international convention that protects asylum seekers, slaughtered the Matanzas six and exchanged fire with the three newly arrived armed rebels, who all fell. One policeman was wounded. Salas, who could have served as a body double for Oliver Hardy, strode into the first-floor room and stood over the fallen trio, his lower belly and groin bulging under his trousers below the edge of his bullet-proof vest. Javier, dying on his back with a privileged vision of this exposure, slightly elevated his right hand, which still held a machine pistol and, with terminal energy, fired his last shot into the center of the puffcake. The police chief joined the fallen, lingered two days in a hospital, and died.
Within an hour of Renata’s arrival at the Brazilian embassy the Cuban police knew she had found asylum, but the international outcry against Salas’s contravention of protocol kept them from a second invasion. Renata announced to her soul that she would make a pilgrimage to Babalu Aye to thank him and his brother for their vigilance on her behalf.
Quinn had just been served his reheated chicken dinner when he saw Gloria threading her way across the DeWitt ballroom to report that Roy’s bail was the expected five thousand. Renata and Max left the table with her and walked toward the lobby where Quinn imagined Max in a shadowy corner counting off the five in cash and passing it to his daughter to liberate a young man whose intimacy with her helped liberate her into near suicide.
From a lobby phone Renata called her contact in New Jersey, Cuca, whom she’d known since childhood but never knew her politics, but who had worked for Fidel in Havana until she was marked, then fled to Miami where she raised money for Fidel; and after the revolution she stayed on with Fidel’s extended intelligence family. Cuca said it was a go for Renata’s unnamed friend. He drives to Plattsburgh and leaves his car where Avis can pick it up. He meets his driver and they go twenty miles to the ruins of Fort Montgomery in Rouses Point. Max walks north through a cattle pasture and thin woods, not half a mile, and he’s in Canada. His driver crosses the border on 9-B which turns into Canadian route 223 and meets Max north of the Customs House. They drive two days to Gander and Max pays the driver one thousand dollars, then flies to Havana.