Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

“How the hell did she get a plasma TV? I thought the whole country was starving to death.”

“Her nephew Victor, my cousin, works for Air Cubana. They can bring back anything. In Cuba you have to know people,” Eddie explained.

Eddie embraced his mother. “ Madre, ” he said softly.

“ Mi nino hermoso! ” she wailed, and burst into tears. They stood like that for a moment and then she pushed Eddie away and slapped him lightly across his broadly smiling tearstained face. “ Whay no han visitado a su madre en tan largo tiempo? ”

Holliday didn’t need a translation. Teo Fidelio noticed nothing. Eddie’s mother turned to Holliday.

“Y que es su amigo?”

Eddie made the introductions. His mother answered in excellent English.

“You are a doctor?” Anna Margarita Alfonso asked.

“Se trata de un apodo, Mama,” explained Eddie.

“You were a soldier? You look like you were a soldier,” she said, eyeing him carefully, especially the eye patch and the new slash of gray above the scar on his temple.

“I was.” He nodded.

“An American?”

“Yes.” He nodded again, glancing at Eddie.

“You come here to fight Fidel?”

“He is my friend, Mother. He has saved my life more than once.”

“Tranquillo, nino,” the old woman said, admonishing her son. She turned back to Holliday. “You come here to fight Fidel?”

“I came here to find Eddie’s brother, Domingo.”

“Aye, Domingo!” wailed the woman, and launched into another bout of tears. She slumped down on an old overstuffed couch against the wall full of pictures and dropped her head into her hands. Eddie sat down beside her and put a comforting arm around her shoulder.

“Mama, Mama, we will find him,” he soothed.

“Your brother was a fool!”

Teo Fidelio broke wind, lit another cigarette and switched to channel 6. America’s Got Talent.

“Why was he a fool, Mama?”

“Because he thought working for them would protect him when…the Comandante died.”

“Who is them , Mama?”

“The people who run this country, Edimburgo. The people who have always run the country. Fidel was one, Raul another, and Domingo thought they’d let him join if he worked for them. When the end came we would all be protected.”

“Who, Mama? You must tell us who these people are if we are to find Domingo.”

“The families.”

“What families?” Eddie urged, exasperated.

“The old families. The families going back to Diego Velazquez de Cuellar. The Ten Families.”

“How do you know all this, Mama?”

“Because when I was a girl I did the laundry in the house of Ramon Grau and many other wealthy families in Havana. A black laundry girl was invisible. I saw and heard a great many things and I remembered. The Ten Families might have different names now, but they still rule Cuba with an iron fist.”

“The Knights of the Brotherhood of Christ,” whispered Holliday. “The Spanish Templars!”

Eddie’s mother made a hissing sound and waggled her long, gnarled fingers in some strange ritual motion, then quickly crossed herself on both chest and forehead. “There is no Christ in these people-they go to La Templete to make their three circles around the ceiba tree. They are devils!”

“Ceiba tree?” Holliday asked.

“I will explain later,” said the Cuban. The old lady looked as though she was going to have a fit. Eddie laid a calming hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Mama, tranquillo, tranquillo. …” He turned to Holliday. “It is like your friend in Toronto said, Doc. Fidel’s family were named Vazquez. They came from Lancara in Galicia. Galicia borders Portugal. They were sailors and conquistadores.”

“ Si. ” The old woman nodded. “The devils met at La Templete. Domingo thought they would protect us. The fool, the fool!” she wailed again.

“What happened?” Eddie asked.

“I do not know,” said Eddie’s mother, weeping openly. Teo Fidelio appeared not to notice. He lit yet another cigarette and sighed a huge cloud of smoke toward the plasma TV. Eddie’s mother wiped her tears away on her apron and spoke again. “I only know that Domingo said if there was any trouble you were to go and see Leonid.”

“Leonid?” Holliday asked.

“Leonid Maximenko,” said Eddie. “Which means my brother is in very bad trouble.”

Leonid Maximenko lived in Atares, a barrio, or slum, on the western edge of a low hill that overlooked the southeastern end of Havana Harbor. The barrio was named for the stone fort that still stood on the summit of the hill. The bottom of the hill was skirted by the multiple tracks and switch points of the Christina Railway Station.

The barrio itself was enclosed by Avenue de Mexico Cristina on the east, Arroyo Atares on the north, Avenue de Maximo Gomez on the west and Calzada de Infanta to the south. Fifty square blocks or so encompassed some of the poorest and most wretched people of Havana; it was not a district often mentioned in any of the guidebooks.

Maximenko lived on Calle Fernandina, roughly in the center of the area. The residence was a barabacoa , a word originally meaning grill or barbecue , but in the barrios it meant a two- or three-story building subdivided with extra wooden floors and rooms that are invisible from the street. Maximenko’s room was on the top floor of a crumbling building reached by a narrow set of stairs that wound its way upward, past a dark shared toilet with no cover and a pile of torn pieces of newspaper on a bench beside it and an open area that was clearly some kind of communal kitchen. Smoke from a makeshift brick stove and oven went up through a series of rusted stovepipes directly through a rough-sawn hole in the wooden floor, presumably venting outdoors. Several older women were cooking simultaneously while a gaggle of crying, laughing children dressed in scraps of clothing milled around their skirts playing some kind of game. In one corner of the room an old iron bed had been set up with a thin mattress and was occupied by an elderly man in a grayish diaper and nothing else. His eyes were the blind white of cataracts and the right side of his face sagged like putty.

Eddie and Holliday kept climbing.

“ Viva la revolucion, ” snorted Eddie.

“I thought Fidel made sure everyone was equal in his great society.”

“Some of us were more equal than others,” said Eddie.

“Where do they come from?”

“They’ve always been here, mi colonel ,” sighed Eddie.

Maximenko’s room had bare walls, the plaster rotted down to the stone and mortar that had made up the outer shell of the building for two hundred years. The floor was covered in small, cracked and broken diamond-shaped ceramic tiles that were a faded turquoise color. There were four pieces of furniture in the room, a bed like the one on the floor below, a sagging couch with no feet, a wooden card table that held a green-labeled half-empty bottle of Santero Aguardiente, a cloudy plastic drinking glass, a package of Populars, a book of matches and a tin ashtray. Beside the table was an ancient-looking Victorian cracked green leather chair that looked as if it might have belonged in a men’s club a hundred years ago. There was a small window at the far end of the room that looked out on a courtyard crisscrossed with hanging lines of laundry.

Sprawled in the chair, asleep and snoring, his head thrown back and his mouth open, was a large man in his late sixties with the ruddy complexion of a heavy drinker, presumably Maximenko. He was wearing a pair of filthy cotton pants, a stained and equally filthy guayabera and a pair of bright pink rubber flip-flops. His toenails were crusted and thick as horns and his feet were dark with grime. His hair, what Holliday could see of it, was long, stringy and gray. Bad hygiene or not, the man had a barrel chest, bulging biceps and huge ham hands that looked as though he could have cracked walnuts with them. Once upon a time Maximenko had been a powerful man.