head, as so many old men in Cuba did. The bright sun was still bright in the west on this late afternoon, and he watched couples walk arm in arm along the colorful boulevard. To the old man, Havana made him want to go back to a time when each day seemed slower and less compressed. Life was simpler then and the living was easier. Or at least that’s the way he remembered it.
He recalled days when he was one half of one of those happy couples. It didn’t seem so long ago. A lifetime? Recently, he had lost the woman he loved. He still mourned.
He was educated, this old man was. He had gone to university. He had read many languages, but mostly English and Spanish. He loved the great writers, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Twain, Dickens, Cervantes, Lorca, and the modern Afro-Cuban Nicolas Guillen.
He loved his writers, the novelists, the poets, and the historians in particular. In the waning time of his life, there was a line he couldn’t shake from Mark Twain’s work,
Well, the woman the old man had loved had departed. His Eve was gone and so was Eden. He sat for several hours on a bench along the waterfront as the daylight faded, watching the sea and the horizon. There was a tear in his eye. Even timelessness seemed to have a finite number of hours today. And always, his thoughts faded into the past more than the future. The old man moved to a nearby cafe where the owners knew him. He took a seat way in the back and slumped down in his wicker chair. He nodded and snoozed as the evening wound down, the cane leaning against him, the .22 caliber pistol in his left pocket.
The whole world left him alone.
FIFTY-ONE
There was an old Cuban named Gregorio Fuentes who lived in Cojimar for many years,” Paul said as the sun began to set over the outskirts of the town. They had just returned to the car and were beginning the final leg of their drive. “He was a fisherman and the first mate on Hemingway’s boat. Some people say he was the model for Santiago, the fisherman in
“You ever meet him?” Alex asked.
“About five years ago,” Paul said. “No photo though. I just thought that would be a bad idea, a picture of me in Cuba.”
“Probably,” Alex agreed.
Alex admired the way Paul could be a mass of amiable contradictions. He was disreputable and high-minded at the same time, thuggish, boorish, quick-witted, intellectually omnivorous, mobbed-up, and innocent. He was a devoted family man yet divorced and currently unattached, or so he said.
Alex laughed. “Your cultural references are all over the place. How do you know all this stuff?” she said.
“Same as you. I read a lot. I majored in American lit at Cornell and minored in history with a second minor in finance,” he said. “I spent five years there and was in an accelerated program that gave me a BA and a master’s. I liked college. No one knew the family links, so no one bothered me.”
“Cornell’s Ivy League. Must have been expensive,” she said.
“You got that right. Twenty-five grand a year. My old man had a million-dollar life-insurance policy when he got killed. He must have known what was coming someday, so he sought to provide. And provide, he did. Whatever else you thought of him, gangster, gambler, underworld guy – who knows what else? – he loved his families, both of them. And we loved him. He left us all well-off.”
Paul thought for a moment as he drove. Alex was not inclined to interrupt.
“I owe my dad,” he said. “To this day, I owe him a lot. He could have ignored us, left us in Cuba, or just walked. I can remember when it happened … when he was murdered. The last time I saw him was on a summer day in 1973. We’d just bought tickets to see the Mets at Shea Stadium. He had bought tickets from a scalper, some guy he knew from the racetrack. We had some real good seats just behind the Mets dugout. Next thing I knew, he had been shot to death.”
The distant light of Cojimar had now disappeared behind them. The road evened out.
“I had a lot of time alone as a kid,” Paul said. “I stayed inside a lot, out of places where I’d be vulnerable. Know what I mean? With my old man being connected and all. He was always afraid some enemy would strike the family. So I’d fill an afternoon by picking up a book.”
She smiled. “I used to do the same thing.”
They came to another town. The architecture ran the gamut, from old Victorian houses by the sea to blocks of sterile Soviet-style apartments from the 1970s. They took a turn and were on a narrow, bumpy, sandy road that led between huts with thatched roofs and huts of concrete and discarded wooden panels. Some of the huts had windows with no glass, entirely open to the elements. Alex looked at them and shuddered; the flies and mosquitoes must be fierce.
They accessed the main road. Traffic was minimal, mostly old cars and slow trucks, an occasional diesel bus spewing smoke. For the next hour the Toyota rambled past small farms and villages. For a long time they rode in silence. Alex glanced at the speedometer and noticed that it barely nudged above forty-five.
Eventually, the road rose onto a plateau. In the distance, to the left and the north, Alex could see the blue sea. The view to the south descended into rolling fields and dark foliage.
From time to time, they scanned the sky. No whirlybird. They were convinced no one was tailing them. Several minutes went by as Alex relaxed and gazed out the window. For a while, she sought to put her assignment and the pressing danger out of her mind and enjoy the view of part of the world she had never seen before.
“Tell me about Robert,” he said.
“Robert?” she asked, turning toward him.
“The man you were engaged to,” he said. “Is there another Robert?”
“No,” she said, looking back to the road. “There was just one. A wonderful man.” She gazed at Paul, waiting to see if he would direct his questions to any details. Nothing further came. “He was wonderful and I loved him,” she said. “Strong. Supportive. But romantic and capable of great tenderness. Understanding, fair-minded, and kind.” A mile of the old highway disappeared beneath the wheels of the Toyota before she spoke again. “Sometimes he and I seemed so close that I didn’t even think of him as another person. He was an extension of me, and I was an extension of him. Can you follow that?”
“Easily,” Paul answered.
“Part of me died that day in Ukraine … and remains dead. Like a window that’s been sealed shut,” she said. “I can see through it, I can admire what’s on the other side, but I can’t open it. What makes it worse, what makes it so much harder to accept, what keeps it so unsettled, was the suddenness of it. The arbitrariness of it. The jolting reality of how the end happened and how someone I loved was taken so far before his time.” She paused. “I know, I’m dwelling a bit. But you asked. And the wound is less than a year and a half old. It’s still there and hurting.”
“I understand. My father’s been gone for thirty-eight years,” Paul said. “I still miss him. If he came back and stood in front of me, I have no idea what I’d say to him. But I miss him. See, you know, that’s what lurks here between us, Alex. That’s what we have in common. Important people were taken away from us. Taken unfairly, taken by murderers, taken suddenly and violently.”
“You have a point,” she said. She directed the conversation back to Paul. “I don’t know how you got me going on this. I’ve never told anyone what I just told you.”
“I asked,” he said. “My question was as much about the man you lost as how you’re dealing with it. You answered both, which was what I was looking for.”
Behind them, the sun had long since fallen below the horizon. Deep evening approached. They stopped once to search the sky again, but saw no choppers. They stepped back into the car with great relief but rode the next half hour in silence, other than the tinny cackle of the radio.
Toward their destination, the highway wound through steep hills and pristine forests, coming down to the
