Fifty Grand

I wait for the other shoe to drop. It drops.

“Why?”

“I killed the man who covered it up. I drowned him in a lake in Wyoming. I killed the police officer who helped him cover it up. I let Tyrone go. He was drunk. He didn’t even remember the accident. And afterward he did what they told him to do. He followed his lines, he played his part. He’s an actor. He’s not a… He’s not evil.” Raul’s face is twitching with anger as I continue my explanation. “I told him I’d be watching him. I told him that if he didn’t lead an extraordinary life, an exemplary life, that I’d be back. I’d be back to kill him then.”

Raul cocks his head, as if mercy is known to him only as a theoretical concept, not one that he’s seen in practice. “You killed the men who covered it up but you let Tyrone go?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t like the answer. His face reddens. He smacks his hand down hard on the kitchen table. The coffee cups jump. A goon looks in through the window.

“It wasn’t your call to make!” Raul shouts.

“I don’t-”

“Don’t speak! It wasn’t your call, Mercado. I sent you there. I sent you. I sent you to do a job for me! Juan Mercado belonged to us, not the Yankees! We… I made the decision to spare his life and someone else overruled me!”

In the black books, in the samizdats, they quote the Jesuit schoolmasters who taught the Castro boys. Fidel was wild, aggressive, a bad loser, a prodigy. Raul was the levelheaded one, unemotional, slow to anger. I always believed that but the books were wrong. Raul’s face is scarlet. He’s shaking. Spittle on his lips. His hands have become fists. He’s capable of anything. If he said the word one of those DGI men would take me outside to the jasmine trees and put a bullet in my head.

He stands and stares at me for so long that I begin to think he’s had a stroke. But then his yellow eyes glaze and he calms down.

“It wasn’t your call to make,” he mutters again.

Finally he sits, takes a sip of coffee, breathes.

“Why did you go to America, if not to kill the man who killed your father?” he asks in a quiet tone.

It’s not an unreasonable question. It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself. “For the same reason I joined the PNR. The truth. Do you remember the truth?”

“Don’t get smart with me, Officer Mercado. I could have you and your captain and your brother and your mother thrown into a dungeon for fifty years. Your whole solar. Everyone you know.”

I look at my feet. Save yourself. Save yourself. You did it on the ice. Do it now. “I beg your pardon, Comrade Castro. I spoke hastily.”

He grunts. “Apology accepted, Comrade Mercado.”

A long silence.

The guards muttering. Someone warming up the car. Parrots and macaws screeching as they walk along the tree branches.

The question has been hanging here the whole time, but I can’t ask it. Not yet. Why are you so interested in my father, Comrade Raul?

“Do you like Hemingway?” Raul asks in a stern pedagogic voice.

“I haven’t read much. The Cuba novels in school. The Island of Streams, The Old Man in the Sea.”

“Islands in the Stream, The Old Man and the Sea,” Raul corrects.

“Of course.”

“For the chief it was always For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway wrote that book in the Ambos Mundos in Habana Vieja and he bought this very house with the first royalty payment. The book is about the necessity of killing one’s enemies. Killing without favor or malice or mercy. But you have killed, Comrade Mercado. Four men.”

The watery eyes boring into me.

“Four in a little over a week. How does that make you feel?”

“Sick.”

“I myself have never killed anyone.”

I can’t help but raise my eyebrows. He sees, grins. “But I have signed the warrants on many. I signed the warrant on your father at his trial in absentia.”

“I know.” And that’s the opening I want. Now is the time. “If I may ask, Comrade Raul, why-”

“Your father worked for me. Juan Mercado was a DGI officer. G6.”

“He was a ticket taker on the bay ferry.”

Raul smiles. “Wasn’t he, though? I’ll bet he met everyone in Havana at one point or another. He was with us right from the start. From boyhood. The early days.”

“Not once did he talk to us about the Revolution,” I say, my voice trembling, my composure going.

“No. He wouldn’t.”

“It’s not true.” Desperation. For all his faults, Dad was no rat.

Raul regards me, lifts his cup, waits. There’s no point in saying anything. We both know he’s not lying.

“Why?” I manage.

“We needed men in the exile community in Miami. A mass defection has always been the best way of inserting agents. Your father was well known, well liked. We knew he would go far. We arranged the whole thing. Your father was one of half a dozen agents on that boat. Of course we knew that as soon as they landed in America, they would all be given U.S. citizenship with only the briefest of background checks. And Juan’s record was clean. Ah, yes. I ran that operation personally. It was the last one I did before I retired. I was proud of it.”

“What did he do for you in America?”

“Oh, he got a job. He joined the right groups. He gave money to the right causes. He knew the right people. He was as popular in Miami as he was in Havana. We were grooming him. He could have gone far.”

“Could have gone?”

Raul blinks rapidly, sighs. “He met a woman, a younger woman.”

“Karen.”

“Karen, yes. She was at the University of Miami, studying for her teaching license, but she was from North Dakota. When she finished her degree she went back to North Dakota. He followed her. They got married. North Dakota is of no use to us. There are no Cubans in North Dakota. We had six good agents on that ferry. One died of AIDS. Two came back to Cuba. One ended up in an American prison for dealing cocaine. And one found Jesus Christ. Your father was the last one from that insertion. I did not want him to leave Miami. We ordered him not to leave Miami, but he went.”

“You must have more than one agent in America?”

Raul laughs. “Dozens. But for me this was personal. This was my operation. This was my man. I told him to return to Miami or we would kill him. It was clumsy. We could have accommodated her… enough money will soothe most people… I made a mistake, I spooked him.”

Raul looks out the window and holds up the empty coffeepot. Almost instantly, another one is brought, along with sweet cakes and dry black bread. Raul offers me a cake but I decline.

“You should eat. After this interview who knows when your next meal will be, Officer Mercado,” Raul says.

Sound advice. I eat the cake. And besides, I’m on the hook. I want to see where the story goes. “What happened next?”

“He disappeared. We lost him. Our hit teams could not find him, and after a while I called them off. My family is from Sevilla, and there they have a saying, ‘You hunt the wolf for a year and a day and then you must let him go.’ We put out the word that all was forgiven, but your father didn’t trust us. For five years he stayed hidden until he turned up dead in Colorado with a Mexican passport.”

I look at Raul to gauge his reaction. “You were glad?”

“Glad? No. Not at all. But I was curious. A ratcatcher in Colorado? Perhaps that was the only job he could get. Perhaps he had lost none of his sense of humor. In a manner of speaking, that had been