Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (9 page)

“And this is what you call love?” Quinn said.

“Cure my legs, Babalu. Don’t let my child die, Lázaro. Give a brain to my idiot son. Bring my wife back from the grave. Let me see daylight again. Cure my pox, my pain, my sores, my terror, my cancer, my nightmares. Give me back my breath, Babalu. Let me walk the world like you, Lázaro. Love will save us and remake us. Love will do what parents and doctors and spouses cannot do. Love will do it all if you take it into your soul and caress it. I wonder if I had true love with Diego. I look at you and think maybe we will have love, but maybe we are liars and neither of us knows love. In the church I asked San Lázaro how love lived in the heart of that man pulling the concrete block and he told me.”

“San Lázaro talked to you?”

“Yes. He said, your love can be the beggar on crutches with the dogs of love trying to heal your sickness, and still you will perish. Nobody can know what love means, or how it arrives or how it lasts, or even if it exists, because we are never free of doubt. Since I was fifteen I have practiced love and I am good at it. I create love by making it, by believing in it even when it doesn’t exist. Love can make love exist, but love cannot make itself last. All I can do is try to make love exist, and sometimes I succeed. That’s what I do.”

Narciso lived in the smallest house Quinn had seen on this road. Renata entered without knocking and Quinn followed her into a room with paintings of godly abstractions, masks, necklaces made with the Orishas’ colored beads, jars of kola nuts, cowrie shells, coconut fragments, icons dangling from the ceiling. Shelves were full of trinkets, cigar stubs and bits of paper that Quinn decided must be venerable trash. The room exuded ancient complexity, urging him to bow before its absurd mysteries.

Narciso, with an unlit cigar at the corner of his mouth, made an effort to rise from his wooden rocking chair and failed. He tried again, pulled himself into a standing crouch, shuffled with baby steps and trembling arms to greet Renata. His skin was a deep black, his hair tight to his head and totally white, most of his teeth absent, and he did indeed look ninety, or beyond. He glanced at Quinn and then said to Renata, “Who is this? He is carrying fire.”

Then, with sudden agility unimaginable in that worn body, he straightened his back and lifted over his head one of six necklaces he was wearing. He waved it in front of Renata and dropped it onto a table. The necklace was four feet in circumference and strung with sixteen oval-shaped, tortoise-shell disks.

“The fire,” he said, pointing to the disks.

“What are you saying?” Renata asked. “This is my friend, a writer. I wanted him to see San Lázaro.”

“He is a carrier,” Narciso said, and he spoke to Renata in a chant:

“He is carrying fire and fire does burn,
He is bearing fire and the ashes it makes,
The dead surround and claim him as their own,
He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.”

Renata’s face was blank and pale, but Quinn read her blankness as cogency, concealed under a mask of innocence.
She
was the carrier of the dead, all those dying rebels in the forefront of her memory. She was shamming for Narciso, passing her dead on to Quinn. He watched Narciso reading Renata, and he sensed the man really
might
be reading the thought of another, which Quinn did not want to believe. But it has been done, hasn’t it? Telepathy isn’t quite so disreputable anymore. Somebody might legitimize it any minute.

“What have you been doing?” Narciso asked Renata.

“Nothing at all,” she said, “nothing.”

Narciso threw the shells again and spoke in a language Quinn did not understand. Renata translated: “He says you are in danger and that you must avoid the murderers walking the streets.”

“Convey my thanks and say I’ll be cautious,” Quinn said. “Does he know which streets?”

“I give you this necklace as a shield,” Narciso said to Renata. He took from around his neck a silvery chain with miniature cast-iron tools and weapons—hammer, anvil, pick and shovel, bow and arrow, machete, two-bladed axe—and circled it around Renata’s neck. “Show these tools of the Orishas to your enemy and tell him if he harms you Changó will plunge him into a long and painful death.”

“Changó will help and we will fight,” Renata said in the rhythm of Narciso’s fire chant:

“Changó will protect me
And we will fire the days.”

“Changó is listening,” Narciso said.

“My friend needs Changó’s help,” Renata said. “I would give him my beads but I cannot get to where they are. Can you give Changó to my friend?”

Narciso stared at Quinn, who saw himself being scrutinized as a skeptic. Does Changó help skeptics? Why help you if you don’t believe in him? Narciso took another necklace of small red and white beads from around his neck, put them on Quinn and said, “He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.” Then with abrupt finality he waved them toward the door and shuffled back to his chair.

So the theme for today will continue to be the dead, not enough of them yet. When Quinn decided to come to Cuba and write about revolution in two centuries he accepted the likelihood of corpses, but at a distance; not in the air around him, not as mental transients. Renata was flummoxed not by death but by the death of what she thought was love. Fair enough. Quinn would not face such loss unless the relationship he was creating with her melted into sorrowful time. She is driven to track what was lost, follow where it leads; and Quinn silently signed on for the ride.

“You’re the one who wears the dead like Changó’s beads,” he said to her. “You sent me images of those corpses at the Palace and Narciso saw them, which I consider a boffo performance. I may have to start believing in something.”

“He says to get rid of the dead. I can’t.”

“They’ll leave when they’re ready.”

“I don’t want them to go. They’re with me for a reason.”

At a
farmacia
she called her mother who told her everybody was in nervous collapse because of her, her father was furious and hoped it had nothing to do with politics, the police wanted her to call them, and someone called twice but left only a number. Renata took the number and said, I am all right, Mama, and I will be home soon and I do not want to see the police because Changó told me this was not a good week for seeing police.

She called the number and recognized Aurelio and he said they must find Felipe Holtz and he knew how close Renata and Felipe were. Holtz, son of sugar baron Julio Holtz, was involved in a gun deal for the Directorio but it was aborted the day of the Palace attack. Holtz is the only one who knows the gun dealer and Aurelio has no one else to send, for all who survived the Palace are known, and traitors are riding with police looking for us all. Could Renata track down Holtz? Renata said she would.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Quinn asked. “They might kill you for revealing so much, and kill me for knowing it.”

“They will not kill you unless I tell them to.”

“Well that’s a comfort.”

She called the Holtz home in Santiago and talked to Natalia, her cousin, who said Felipe was in Mexico or Caracas, expected home next week. Renata didn’t believe her.

“If your friends are in such a hurry,” Quinn said, “I know somebody who might help.”

“You know somebody with guns?”

“I told you I was writing about that in Miami.”

“Who is this person?”

“Alfie Rivero. You ever hear of him?”

“Never. Can he be American intelligence?”

“Anybody can be American intelligence. Alfie’s Cuban from New York with a tie to the Trafficante mob in Tampa, which means he can get you any gun you can pay for. I dated his cousin and I met him with her. He’s the real thing.”

“Is he in Miami?”

“I saw him at the Nacional two days ago. He’s staying there.”

“He will talk to you about guns? He trusts you?”

“He won’t trust me, but I can ask a question for you. I wouldn’t do it for anyone else.”

“Will he take a woman seriously?”

“You’re an unlikely buyer, but you seem trustworthy. If you aren’t then you’re a brilliant actress and a serious liar. But don’t even think about lying to Alfie.”

Quinn drove to El Vedado where the Hotel Nacional had been standing in its eminence since it opened in 1930. It was one of the elite addresses in Havana and the walls of its bar were covered with photomontages of celebrated guests—Churchill, the Windsors, Spanish royalty, Chaplin, Garbo, Gable, John Wayne. Since 1946, when Batista returned to Havana from Florida with Meyer Lansky in tow, Havana and its major hotel had become mob-hospitable, and Lansky and his brother Jake now ran its casino, which was probably Alfie’s reason for staying there.

Quinn and Renata crossed the marble lobby under lofty ceilings and chandeliers and Renata said, “My father was shot here in 1933 in the civil war—after Machado’s exile. Many Americans in Havana took refuge here from anti-American mobs, and a thousand army officers retreated here to protest Batista taking over the army. Batista shelled the hotel all day and many officers died. When they surrendered many more were killed by mobs for being with Machado. My father was shot in the chest but did not die. Batista sent him to prison in the Castillo del Principe and for a week my mother thought he was dead.”

“Revolution haunts your family. I see where you get it,” Quinn said.

“My father would have a stroke if he knew what I was doing here.”

They went to the patio garden with its sculpted shrubbery and its long and beautiful lawn that rolled down toward the water. They took a table and watched two peacocks move imperially under the palms near the bottom of the garden. Beyond that you looked out at the Malecón, and then the sea.

“Order me a rum on ice. I’ll see if Alfie is around.”

Quinn knew from Alfie’s rap sheet that he’d been arrested twice on burglary charges that didn’t stick and had done ten months for a botched dope robbery. He had no convictions after that and when Quinn met him he heard his name linked to an armed excursion by two dozen young Cuban rebels full of invasion bravado who one day disappeared from Miami and turned up on Havana’s front pages, faces and chests caked with blood, eyes wide or shot away, lying alongside their rifles on a rocky beach like a fisherman’s catch, Batista’s catch.

Quinn found Alfie at the pool with a long-legged middle-aged blonde,
his
catch of the day, who was rubbing suntan oil on his deeply tanned back and shoulders. Quinn sent a note with a waiter and Alfie came over.

“A business matter, Alfie. You still selling avocados?”

“In season.”

“I’m not the one talking here, I’m just a writer.”

“You write about avocados.”

“Don’t trust me.”

“When did I ever trust you?”

“I have somebody who wants to talk.”

“I sometimes talk to people who talk.”

“Do we go someplace?”

“We are someplace. Where’s your man?”

“My man is a woman, out in the patio.”

“Bring her in. Has she got money?”

“I think so. And she’s in a hurry.”

“I’ll talk with her in the pool.”

“She doesn’t have a bathing suit.”

“Buy her one.”

Quinn went back to the patio but Renata was not at the table. Their drinks were there, untouched. She was not in the garden that the peacocks ruled. He found a waiter who had not seen her, took a swallow of his rum and left money for the drinks. She wasn’t in the lobby or by the public phones. At the front desk he asked about messages. None. He saw her coming from the far end of the lobby carrying a paper bag. She had followed him out to the pool and had seen him with Alfie. She read their lips about the bathing suit so she bought one at the boutique.

“Narciso reads minds and you read lips,” Quinn said. “There’s no privacy in Cuba.”

They went to the pool bar and Renata changed into her new suit, dove into the pool, and swam like a dolphin before pausing in neck-deep water. Alfie stepped into the shallow end and swam on his back until he bumped into her. They then discussed avocados.