Adrian McKinty - Fifty Grand

“His name is not Francisco?”

“No.”

I should be angry but I’m not. I lied to him. He lied to me.

“And I doubt that you will see him again. He lives in Miami.”

Raúl offers me a hand.

I shake it.

“Good luck, Officer Mercado. I hope to never see your name in any future report that crosses my desk.”

“You won’t.”

“Now, go.”

The goons show me to the car.

They drive me into town and drop me on the Malecón.

I walk to O’Reilly.

Outside the solar there’s a dead dog on the porch, a border collie. Flies around her eyes. Belonged to the family on the top floor.

Up the stairs.

A note on my apartment door from the landlord. My room has been broken into while I was away. They changed the locks.

I go down to the basement and bang on the landlord’s door. He appears with a baseball bat. I give him an IOU for a five-dollar bill.

Up the four flights. New key in the new lock.

Yeah, broken into, and not by the DGI-they don’t let you know they’ve been. This place has been ransacked. Thugs. The TV gone, my twenty-kilo bag of rice gone, my clothes gone. Poetry books gone.

I sit on the edge of the bed and cry.

Hector was right.

What was it he told me that Pindar said? The gods give us for every good thing two evil ones. Men who are children take this badly but the manly ones bear it, turning the brightness outward.

Yes. Something like that.

I sit there and cry myself out.

The sound of rats. The sea. Clanking camel buses. American radio.

I need a drink. The man down the hall makes moonshine in his bath. I knock on his door and buy a liter bottle for another IOU. I pour a cup. It burns. I go downstairs.

“Use your phone?” I ask the landlord.

I call Ricky. Oh, Ricky, I was so stupid. To think that I could outwit them . To think that I could do anything right.

“You’re alive,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I was so worried.”

“Don’t be.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I think so.”

A pause.

“I believe I’m being followed,” he says in a whisper, as if that will fool the DGI bug.

“No, that’s all over. You won’t see them again,” I assure him.

Another pause while he takes this in.

“You’re alive, big sister.”

“Yes. I’m alive. And that’s something.”

I wasn’t there. Airtight alibi. I was working a case in the Vieja-a dead German tourist, a dead prostitute, a missing pimp. I wasn’t there. It was nothing to do with me. I read about it the next day. It made the Mexican papers.

Jack Tyrone had just left his Hollywood Hills home. It was very early. He was going to an audition. A good role. They wanted him to play the part of Felix in a James Bond movie. Not the biggest lick, but worldwide exposure. He was drunk. At six-thirty in the morning. Jack Tyrone had well-documented problems with alcohol. His car went off the road right outside his house. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. The windshield shredded his pretty face, the fall down the canyon broke his back. The car landed on top of him and caught fire.

Even for the DGI it was good.

They’d probably gotten into his house in the middle of the night. Drugged him, tortured him, injected alcohol through a vein in his foot, rolled him down the canyon.

They broke the car windshield from the inside and smeared his blood on the steering wheel. How they got the car on top of him isn’t much of a mystery. They brought a truck with a winch. They were careful. They didn’t want it to crush him, just pin him sufficiently so they could burn him alive.

That’s how they do things.

Dad was their man. He was retired, but he belonged to them. No one else had the right to terminate his existence. Officially the L.A. coroner’s office said that death would have been instantaneous, but the coroner and I knew better. Minute for minute, life for life. The DGI looks after its own.

I should have seen it coming but I don’t speak their language. Hector would have taken Raúl’s hints but I didn’t get them. I’ll never get them. That’s not me.

I read Jack’s photo obit in People en Espanol . Banned but readily available. Photographs of him at Cannes, in Darfur, at a Vegas party with Pitt and Clooney. His eyes staring at the camera, his body well positioned between bigger stars.

I looked at the pictures, I read the words.

Hollywood didn’t pause in its journey around the sun. It rolled along fine without him.

Dad didn’t get an obit anywhere.

Or did he?

A plaque somewhere in the Foreign Ministry, or on an anonymous wall in that big, windowless, Che-covered Lubyanka in the Plaza de la Revolución?

Maybe. I don’t know.

A week after the hit a DGI colonel came to see me. He was carrying a cardboard box and something wrapped in tissue paper. He put the box on my table and made me sign papers in triplicate saying that I’d received it.

The thing in tissue paper was my father’s pistol.

I put it in a drawer.

I let the box sit there until dark.

I flipped the switch and the lights came on.

I opened the lid.

Letters. More than a hundred, from Dad to me. Some of them contained money. Five hundred-dollar bills for a dress for my quince . Stories, poems, drawings, kisses for me and little Ricky. The last letters were from 2006. Dad was in Colorado. It was cold, he said. He had to be vague, because he knew the letters would be read by the DGI before being passed on to me, but he described the forest and the mountains, snow. He talked about books he’d read, and Karen, his girl. He knew that Internet use was strictly controlled but he had heard that the Ambos Mundos had a live webcam. He wondered if I could possibly go there at a certain time and wave into the camera. He would wait by his laptop. He would wait, night after night.

Of course-tears.

Tears all night and into the morning and the next day.

Oh, Papi.

It’s going to come. The end of days. Even for you, Jefe, Little Jefe, even for you.

I read the letters, showed them to Ricky and Mom.

I took a sick day. Then I went back to work. The autopsy. The German Embassy. Reports. I began a letter to Francisco, and on the Prado I ran into Felipe, the waiter/baby killer I had arrested the night Ricky returned with his notes. He grinned at me, unable to quite place where we had met before…

Sleep.

Wake.

So go the days.

The Malecón at dusk. The castle before me, the faded grandeur of crumbling hotels, boy jockeys along the seawall, fire belching from the oil refinery in the bay.

The lights on the water are fishing boats and perhaps, beyond the horizon, American yachts in the Dry Tortugas.

I walk on the Malecón and I see the future.

Cell phones, personal computers. The end of ration cards, the end of ID papers, the end of summary arrest. And what happens to the policeman then?

I walk on the Malecón and I see the past. I know you now, Papa. I know your real name. That secret part you concealed from us. You went and you didn’t take us with you. You lied. That was your job, but still, you lied.

I missed you.

I missed you my whole life.

I walk on the Malecón and I see the present. No one sleeps. Everyone sleeps. The police, the beachcombers, the pretty boys and their teenage pimps.

Oh, Havana.

City of hungry doctors.

City of beautiful whores.

City of dead dreams.

I’m tired of you.

I want to be the sea.

I want to spirit myself away. Under the moon, across the starlit waves, with my arms spread out, with fresh-cut flowers in my hair.