Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

And would she?

“I said he’s in Miami and wants to be left alone.”

It vexed La Mazière that Fidel Castro should want anything to do with the former president. Castro was responsible for sending in the mole who photographed Prio’s Green Room cocaine exploits. After Prio was exposed and humiliated, Castro tried to bring impeachment charges against him.

On the plane to Ciudad Trujillo the next morning, it occurred to La Mazière that Castro wanted to get to Prio for the same reason he did. Prio had money — this everyone knew, his only brave act before leaving having been to empty the coffers of the Cuban National Treasury. Castro had motivation and followers. He was likely plotting to try to overthrow Batista, just what La Mazière had hoped Prio would be doing, when he’d arrived from Paris in the first place.

He would reapproach Prio upon his return to Havana, either through his contact, or better yet, through the girl, and let him know that his own lack of motivation was no longer a problem. Someone else was motivated. All Prio had to do was release the funds, and La Mazière would arrange the supply of weapons that this leftist gangster Castro and his followers, assuming they existed, would need to begin their campaign.

It was an artful logic, putting together people who shared a common enemy. Or maybe it was a crude logic, but one to which La Mazière was attached. Artful or crude, these logics created demand on all sides, for large shipments of Tula Tukarovs and tea bags, of Camemberts and carbines.

“What the hell are Camemberts?” President Trujillo asked him when they met later that day at the Dominican palace.

A French cheese, Sir Benefactor, La Mazière resisted saying. “The tommy gun — you know, with a round magazine. Like a Camembert wheel.”

Trujillo, it turned out, had been hoping to buy piranhas, to stock the Massacre River, which divided his country from Haiti. No Rhine, joining two cultures under the mystical reign of one great emperor, the Massacre River was the only reason the entire hunk of land had not gone up in flames.

Trujillo was wearing a heavy crust of eye makeup, bordello-fringe epaulets drooping off his shoulders. On a previous occasion he’d received La Mazière dressed in a shako and white satin breeches. Breeches that must have been slightly too tight, because Trujillo kept tugging at the rise and shifting in his chair as he quizzed La Mazière for details on Napoleonic headgear. As if being French, La Mazière should know the difference between First and Second Empire officers’ bonnets. When in fact it was Trujillo who knew the difference among varieties of office bonnet in all their elaborate details, the questions having been merely a pretext to his own discourse on the subject.

La Mazière suggested that instead of preoccupying himself with piranhas, he might consider a more direct action, such as cooperating with the insurgent doctor François Duvalier, who was attempting to overthrow Haiti’s president.

“A Negro?” Trujillo asked, incredulous.

“Naturally. He’s Haitian.”

Trujillo shook his head. “Through the misfortune of history we are forced to live next to them. But maybe—” He closed his eyes and thought for a moment. A sun shaft poured into the room, sending starbursts from the gold buttons on the generalissimo’s coat. “Maybe I see your point, Mr. La Mazière. Either we play a role in the direction of their governance, or we abandon them to their instincts.”

It was a successful trip all around, Trujillo buying weapons for Duvalier and his revolutionary movement, the Haitian president alerted to the danger — by La Mazière, who had more or less created this danger — and everyone scrambling to protect himself.

While La Mazière was away, the Castro brothers had come back to the Tokio to see Rachel K, asking again to be put in touch with Prio. She’d agreed, she explained to La Mazière, and sent a telex to Miami. Prio’s response was just what she expected:

WHAT IS POINT? STOP.

“I think he’s depressed. He told me his house is a coffin. All he does is play canasta with the ancient retirees in his neighborhood.”

“Perhaps you could send him another telex,” La Mazière said. “Tell him there’s someone who can provide real hope, a professional who can supply the weaponry he might be looking to buy if he ever wants to come home. Tell him that with proper support and guidance and the fervent efforts of this untutored gangster Fidel Castro, of whom we’re all suspicious —important to include that detail, to reassure him — he just might be able to eject Batista.”

La Mazière expected her to take it in stride that he was involved in a violent and illegal business. He was right. She worded the telex just as he instructed and asked him nothing about his own role, supplying weaponry.

A week later she received Prio’s response:

HANDSOME CHANGED HEART. STOP. PUT ME IN TOUCH. STOP.

Miss Alfaro, the Nicaro schoolteacher, had a piano that Everly could have walked a quarter mile to play anytime she wanted. But she and Mrs. Stites both pretended it was out of necessity that Everly come by boat to Preston on Saturdays.

After she played they ate lunch together, Mrs. Stites having arranged for the cook to prepare whatever Everly requested. She didn’t want to ask for anything special, but Mrs. Stites insisted. “Whatever you want, dear,” Mrs. Stites said. “Right, Annie? Annie is a wizard in the kitchen, and anything you want that we have, I promise, she can make it. And if we don’t have it, you let me know the week before, and I’ll be sure she orders it from the almacén.” Everly suspected the cook resented her and this game of preparing the lunches Everly thought up. Once, she asked for grilled cheese, and when it arrived open-face, Mrs. Stites detected Everly’s disappointment and sent the sandwiches back, after pressing Everly for how she wanted them cooked. “Fried in a pan?” Everly replied sheepishly.

The cook was an enormous Jamaican woman who moaned as she ate her own meal, sitting in the kitchen after she finished serving Everly and Mrs. Stites. Either the cook was in pain, or what she was eating was so delicious that she had to express herself. One day the cook served a chocolate cake for dessert. Everly hated chocolate, and the cake almost made her retch, but she faked that she liked it and ate as much as she could, afraid that otherwise it would be sent back. Mrs. Stites got the impression that chocolate cake was Everly’s favorite and had the cook serve it every Saturday. Everly and Mrs. Stites would sit eating the powdery dreadful cake in silence, nothing but the sound of a grandfather clock’s tick. Mr. Stites was off on his company rounds. The two boys had Saturday engagements, boxing and tennis and golf lessons, or fishing excursions. Everly was Mrs. Stites’s Saturday engagement, but they didn’t have much to say to each other. Everly would leave worried that she hadn’t quite fulfilled whatever it was that daughterless Mrs. Stites wanted from her, though Mrs. Stites was perfectly nice, always gentle, soliciting Everly’s opinion on various matters as though she were an adult. “What do you think of this pattern, dear?” she’d ask, holding up a swatch of checked fabric that she was thinking of using to have new curtains made. “Should I go with that, or something more plain? I have this purple fabric as well.” “Maybe the purple,” Everly would venture, secretly thrilled but pretending it was normal that someone needed her opinion before making an important decision. “Then it’s settled,” Mrs. Stites would say, “the purple it is.”

If K.C. showed up after lunch, Mrs. Stites suggested that he and Everly play together, but she sensed that K.C. didn’t want to play with her. He was a boy, caught up in a boy’s world. One afternoon, he’d planned to go fishing with Hatch Allain and some of the other Preston boys. Mrs. Stites insisted that K.C. bring Everly along with them. Everly sat at the rear of the boat in a clammy orange life jacket, which neither Hatch nor any of the boys had to wear. K.C. dove over the side, laughing and splashing, swimming behind the boat. “Careful, now,” Hatch said when Everly leaned over in the damp and bulky life jacket to touch her fingers to the water. Hatch said there were sharks, and that the water was dangerous, too dangerous for a girl. They steered into a reef and the boys caught octopi, which looked like dripping wet ladies’ wigs.