Paul Levine - False Dawn

“What you have on board is several hundred thousand times what I hold in my hand. You must comprehend that!”

Soto nodded. “It makes my statement all the more significant. The treasure of the pigs destroyed.”

“The art belongs to the world!” Yagamata thundered.

Funny, Yagamata had acted as if it belonged to him.

Soto was expressionless. “What I have begun cannot be halted.”

“Spare the artwork,” Yagamata pleaded, gesturing toward the hold. “Spare yourself and the lives of your men.”

Yagamata replaced the train in the velvet pouch and slipped the pouch back into his suit pocket. His little game of show-and-tell didn’t seem to have the desired impact. “Individual lives are meaningless,” Soto said.

“I can broker the sale of the art,” Yagamata said. “You will have hundreds of millions more for your cause. Let me help you. “

“The money,” Soto said, “is important, but the principle even more so. The socialist revolution cannot be financed by the slavery of the masses. Your so-called works of art will die a death far more glorious than that of the peasants whose blood gave birth to such gluttony, such excess.”

Soto turned to Lourdes and said something in Spanish. Lourdes responded angrily. Her father spoke again, softly, apologetically, his eyes moist. He moved toward her to embrace, but she turned her back to him. Severo Soto walked away, pausing only to bark a command to a shotgun-toting crewman who stood straighter, his eyes Hashing from Yagamata to me and back again.

I went to Lourdes, who moved toward me and stepped close. “I didn’t come back just for Papi. I came back for you, too.’’

I put my arms around her. Our faces touched, and I caught the sweet scent of her hair, the fresh-scrubbed womanly essence of her skin. “Your father won’t do it now, will he? Not with you on board.’’

“There’s a lifeboat. It was intended for any of the crewmen who change their minds. They’re all handpicked disciples of Fidel and Che Guevara. They want to die for a glorious cause.”

There is a time for a man to be a man, and another time to look for a soft place to land. “Much room in that lifeboat?”

“Plenty, but Papi wants you en una pira funebre.”

My look told her I didn’t understand.

“ Como se dice en Ingles… on the funeral pyre. Papi says the revolutionary act is enhanced by destroying a symbol of the reactionary colonialists.”

“Me? I’ve never even voted Republican.”

“Papi wants to make the largest possible statement. That’s why we’re going to anchor off South Pointe Park, just a few hundred yards from the beach.”

“Why?”

“What’s tomorrow, Jake?”

“Sunday.”

“ Cuatro de julio, the Fourth of July. Papi wants to blow up the richest cache of art ever assembled during the celebration of what he calls your counterfeit freedom. It’s his poetic side. If he could, he’d like to have people singing ‘the rocket’s red glare’ when he pulls the switch.”

Bombs bursting in air, I said to myself.

U sually, at sea, I sleep the sleep of the innocent. Maybe it’s the gentle pitching, the faint whoosh of water against the hull. On the other hand, I sleep the same way in the woods or in a mountaintop cabin. So maybe it’s the sense of detachment, of being removed from the bustle of everyday life. So ordinarily, I am a two-hundred-twenty-six-pound slab of concrete in my bunk. Not tonight. I could have been worried that this was my last night on the planet Earth. And I was. But I also was sharing my bunk with a hundred-eighteen-pound lady who was lithe and warm and giving. We kissed and held each other, and I stroked the slopes and curves of her. We maneuvered into positions that stretched the cruciate ligaments of my bad knee, and she laughed when I fell with a thud to the deck. But she welcomed me back, and later, much later, I held and kissed and nuzzled her as the orange light of morning streaked through the porthole.

What would you eat for breakfast if you thought it was your last? Steak? Caviar and smoked salmon? I had huevos rancheros because that’s what was served in the small galley. Then Lourdes and I stood on the deck, watching the Florida Keys to our west. I recognized Big Pine, Bahia Honda, Molasses, and Fat Deer Key as we continued northeast in the Straits, keeping the Great Bahama Bank well to our east. It was a hot July day with wispy clouds on the horizon. It didn’t seem to matter if I got a touch of sunburn.

Lourdes and I were standing at the rail as we passed close to Sombrero Key where the earliest European to live in Florida made his home. Hernando d’Escalante Fontaneda was shipwrecked in the Keys around 1545 and spent the next two decades mapping the islands he called the Martires, or martyrs. He identified one Tequesta village called Guarugunbe, the place of weeping, and another, Cuchivaga, the place of suffering. Happy campers, those Tequestas. Soto would probably consider the Spaniards to have been plundering colonialists. And, of course, he would be right.

In the afternoon, Lourdes talked to her father, who stood sullenly on the bridge. When I tried to join them, a crewman waved a military. 45 under my nose and gave me the impression I wasn’t wanted near the controls. Through the glass, I watched Lourdes argue with her father, gesturing with both hands. He listened grimly, shaking his head, occasionally saying something I could not hear. Then he turned his back to her and spoke to the captain. She flung her arms in the air one last time, then rejoined me on the deck.

“I guess you didn’t convince him to give up his ideals and join the Hialeah Rotary,” I said.

“This isn’t funny. I pleaded for your life and his.”

“What did he say?”

“That his life wasn’t worth saving.” She looked away. “He asked if I loved you.”

“To which you responded…”

“I told him no…”

Until now, I had always appreciated candor in a woman.

“… But that I liked you, that you were a good man who was not his enemy. He said you are meaningless as an individual but important as a symbol.”

I watched a wad of sea grapes and other flotsam ride the midget waves into the hull of the freighter. I watched the water change color from bright turquoise to deep indigo as the depth changed along our route. I watched three dolphins jump in unison off the starboard side where motor yachts and oil tankers crisscrossed the Straits.

I allowed myself some heroic imaginings. If life were a B-movie, I would break a mirror and, holding it to the sun, bounce messages to a Coast Guard cutter just waiting to rescue a few billion dollars in art and a halfway honest lawyer. But I didn’t know Morse code. Or I would dive off the side and swim to shore. Maybe two or three miles, nothing to it, except a couple of jellyfish stings. But my protectors would gun me down before I hit the water. Or I could overpower Soto and hold him hostage. But he would order his crew to blow us all up. That’s what he was going to do anyway, right? But what about Lourdes? Wouldn’t he want to save her? Maybe, but what had Soto said? Individual lives are meaningless.

“Jake, I’m sorry. I really am.”

Maybe it was the wind, but Lourdes had tears in her eyes. “It’s not your fault,” I told her.

“Not just about this. About ever getting involved with Yagamata and Foley. I did things…”

She let it hang there. So I helped her out. “You did what your father asked you to do.”

“Yes, he had this planned all along, I’m sure, that somehow he would help Fidel. So Papi asked me to provide him with information while I worked for Yagamata. And when the operation was threatened, when it appeared we would be stopped inside Russia…”