Adrian McKinty - Fifty Grand

Paco was too tired to complain. I was hypnotized by Jack’s car.

Esteban drove back to the motel and showed us to our room. Clean, small double with two beds, a shower, and a heater that you had to feed with quarters.

Beat as we were, we were too pumped and hungry to go to bed just yet and we found ourselves in the second-floor communal kitchen.

“Beer?” Paco asked and passed me a Corona.

I knocked it back in one and he cracked me another.

“What’s there to eat around here?” he asked.

“Let me see,” I said.

I opened up cupboards. An embarrassment of riches. Cilantro, chives, tomato, onion, garlic, peas, lettuce, peppers, and a fridge full of meat and cheese and beer. Like the house of a Party member.

I found that I wanted to cook for him, this kid, this man. I wanted to provide, the way you couldn’t in Havana.

“Put some rice on,” I told him. “And look for tortillas.”

While he did that I chopped an onion, mashed the garlic, diced a jalapeño, and fried them in olive oil. I threw in some cooked chicken and chicken stock and when they had all gotten to know one another for a while I slid in chopped tomato and minced cilantro and let them cook. When the chicken was brown I added a can of black beans and a can of red beans and let it reduce while the rice finished. Finally, I took a couple of tortillas and placed them in the oven.

“Man, this is good. What do you call this?” Paco asked.

“Havana chicken stew.”

“Havana?”

“Oh, I mean, just a regular chicken stew, that’s all it is.”

“Well, it’s good.”

It was good. The ingredients were fresh and plentiful and we were famished. It made me feel good. This was how life was supposed to be. Not scrimping and saving and fighting over scraps.

We ate by the window and looked out at the street. No cars, no snow, just trees and vague distant lights on the highway. We talked. He told me about Nicaragua. He’d been orphaned early, begged in Managua, ran off to the jungle to be a soldier, drifted to Guatemala and then Mexico.

I made up lies about Yucatán, bringing in things from Santiago and Havana. Paco nodded and was so kid sincere it made me feel terrible.

For dessert we had more beer and I ate the orange, the kiwifruit, the banana, and an apple. I couldn’t figure out the kiwi and Paco had to show me how to prepare it. He took the skin off with slender cuts and sliced the inside into five pieces. It was delicious. All the fruit was delicious and it made me hate the Party bureaucrats who deprived us of fruit so that it could be exported for foreign currency or turned into juice or made available only in the off-limits beach hotels.

One more beer and we staggered to our room and before I even hit the pillow I was gone, gone, gone.

Gone to the dream island.

A city in free fall.

A country in free fall.

Every one of us on deathwatch, waiting out the Beard and his brother’s final days.

Tick-fucking-tock.

Hector says (in whispers), After Fidel and Raúl, le deluge . The successors will end up like Mussolini-upside down on a meat hook in the Plaza de la Revolución, if there’s any justice. Which there isn’t.

Calle Gervasio to San Rafael. Walking. Everyone walks in Cuba. You need to be in the Party or have at least a thousand in greenback kiss money to get a car. Early. So early it’s late. High on brown-tar heroin, the whores don’t care that I’m a woman or that I look like a cop. They raise their skirts to show pussy lovingly injected with antibiotics or mercury sublimate by our world-beating physicians.

“Qué bola , asere ? ” they ask.

“Nada.”

“ Qué bola , asere ?”

“ Nada .”

“We swing with you, white chick. We’ll show you tricks to impress your boyfriend.”

I’m in no mood. Finger and thumb together, “ No mas , bitches. No mas .”

In this part of town the hookers are all black and mulatto teenagers, the kind patronized by German and Canadian sex tourists whose fat white asses are also here in abundance. Go to bed, Hans, some pimp will knife you for that watch of yours. That watch will get him to Miami.

San Rafael all the way to Espada.

People thinning out. No plump anglos. Kids sleeping in doorways. An old man on a bicycle.

Past the Beard’s hospital. Party members, diplomats, and tourists only. “The best hospital in Latin America.” Yeah, right. Half the night staff probably outside soliciting blow jobs.

Espada to San Lázaro.

The police station.

A few lights on. Shutters closed. Couple of Mexican Beetles and a midnight blue ’57 Chevy parked outside.

Sergeant Menendez urinating into a storm drain.

Sees me. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

Play it cool. Buddy-buddy.

“I heard that in Regla a guy pissing in the bay had his dick bitten off by an alligator,” I say.

He laughs. “I heard that too.”

He grins and strokes his mustache.

I smile back, flirty with the DGI pig. “I heard you got a lot to lose, Menendez.”

Blushes. “Word gets around,” he replies.

“It’s just what I heard.”

Again flirty, not that I ever would in a million years. No one would unless they had a thing for cadaverous bastards with pockmarked skin, greasy hair, and a vibe that would creep out an exorcist.

He leers but it’s not really for me. I’m way too old for him. Hector says he goes for schoolgirls. Hector says the PNR had a file on him for child rape, but it was mysteriously pulled. Hector says a lot of stuff, but this I believe.

“No, really, what are you pissing in the street for?” I ask.

“Plumbing’s out.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

“Not in the ladies’ room, too?”

Another laugh. There is no ladies’ room. The whores piss in a bucket in the communal cell and the secretaries go next door to the Planning Ministry. Since Helena González retired, I’ve been the only female police officer in the place.

“What are you doing here so early?” he wonders again.

Persistent little fuck.

Careful now. Tightrope walk. Menendez is the DGI chivato for the Interior Ministry, an informer, but almost certainly a low-ranking DGI officer himself. Thinks he’s smart, but I know and Hector knows and so do half a dozen others-everyone who lets him win at poker.

I smile. “Oh, you know me, anything to get ahead, catching up on some currency fraud cases,” I tell him.

He nods and spits out the stub of his cigarette. His eyes check me out. I’m wearing a white blouse with the top button undone. Blouse, black pants, black Czech shoes. No jewelry, short crop. Cop from a mile away. He looks down the shirt and back up at my eyes.

“Trying to get ahead. I heard you put in for a leave of absence. That won’t help your career,” he says.

Christ. How did he hear that already?

Flirty, young, bubbly: “You’ll see, Menendez. I’m studying criminology. I’m hoping to do an M.A. at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico,” I say with a hint of pretend pride.

“Never heard of it,” he says sourly.

“It’s the oldest university in the western hemisphere. One of the biggest, too. And when I get the M.A. they’ll make me a sergeant for sure. You better watch out when I’m in charge of you.”

And for icing I add a little laugh, a little girlish laugh. Oh, Menendez, cabrón , am I not so cute to have such big dreams? Oh, Sergeant Menendez, aren’t you moved by my naïveté. Doesn’t it make you laugh to see how little I know about how things work in the Policía Nacional de la Revolución.