Hostage in Havana

learn, to think, to reflect.

Nervous, Alex left her seat and paced with short steps, staying out of the way, but watching everything that transpired. Eventually, she heard a loud creak and knew that the lid had come off. She heard a low conversation in Spanish. Paul was leading it. Somehow, they loosened the lid and passed it upward. It clunked onto the ground next to the mounds of dirt. Then Enrique tossed Paul a canvas satchel, and Paul went back down into the grave. The diggers stood by, looking downward.

Paul was in the grave, working. She could only see him from the shoulders up.

Working? Robbing? Stealing? Defiling? Recovering? Whatever one wanted to call it. To Alex, he was down there for a long time, which was actually only about thirty seconds. Against her better judgment, against everything that she considered sacrosanct, Alex rose and walked to the open grave. She looked down into the hole as the torchlight swept its contents. Nothing she had ever experienced prepared her for what she saw.

The body that had rested there for five decades was preserved better than anyone could have imagined. The upper part of the skull was skeletal, but the dried flesh of the forehead was in perfect condition. The rest of the cadaver was well preserved also. Alex could see the contours of the head and face, the skeletal knees that had worn through the fabric of the funeral dress, the bones of the wrists and the hands. The nails on the hands shown as if the body had just had a manicure. Much of the rest of the burial clothing was intact. And Salvatore Guarneri’s feet were bare. He had been buried shoeless.

In the midst of this, Guarneri was balanced on the firm side of the casket. His hands were quickly working. He was reaching beneath the head of the corpse and removing the tightly bound stacks of currency. Alex had never seen anything like this in her life and hoped never to again. From the satchel that Enrique had provided, Paul had also pulled a pair of small pillows, sturdy ones, which he would use to replace the money.

Like a spectator transfixed by a traffic accident, Alex continued to stare until she couldn’t take any more and turned away. For a moment, she thought she would throw up. She drew two sharp breaths and suppressed the nausea.

The dark ballet in the grave was over within two minutes, with Paul making sure that he had everything that he was there to get. Alex walked back and looked down again, against her better instincts, but wanted to be a reliable witness. Then, with the pillows in place and the money secured in the satchel, Paul did something that surprised Alex even more. From one of his pockets, he pulled what appeared to be a Holy Card, the type of thing that Roman Catholics issue at their funerals. He tucked it into the remains of his late uncle’s jacket pocket. Then he turned. Alex and Enrique offered him a hand up. He accepted both.

“Back from the dead,” he muttered. “Who says it can’t be done?”

Alex turned, walked back to the memorial slab, and sat again.

Paul brushed the soil off his hands, then washed and disinfected them with rubbing alcohol. He held the valise, came back over to Alex, and sat down next to her. The diggers began to fill in the grave.

“You okay?” he said.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Stunned. Horrified. Revolted. Repelled. But not for the first time in my life and probably not the last. So I’m all right.”

“Quite a night,” he said.

“Quite a night,” she agreed.

The crew of diggers was efficient with the back end of their assignment. They filled the open grave within thirty minutes, tamped it down, and replanted turf on top so that it would not immediately appear to have been disturbed. They replaced the marker and steadied it. Then they replaced the low fence. To Alex’s amazement, Paul huddled everyone together. He tucked his pistol into his belt and led a short prayer for his deceased uncle’s soul. She was amazed at his apparent sincerity but wondered if he was doing it more for the conscious of his very Roman Catholic crew. There was no way to know.

They retraced their path to the iron gate that led to the back side of the burial grounds. While walking, Paul telephoned his contact to inform him that pickup time was at hand. When they came out of the cemetery, three vehicles were waiting: the red truck, the white Nissan with Paul’s driver inside, and the battered old Peugeot 404 that Alex recognized from the family home by the sea. Alex could see movement inside the French car but not much more.

Paul had an iron grip on the satchel.

“Paul, how much is in there?” she asked softly.

“More than I expected,” he said. “I did a vague count as I was packing it. Maybe eight hundred thousand dollars. There were more hundreds and fifties than anyone would have thought. All U.S. currency. Still legal tender.”

“Not a bad night’s work,” she said.

“Nope,” he said. “Not bad at all.” He motioned. “Come with me.” He walked to the Peugeot. There was just enough light for Alex to see. She recognized Thea, Paul’s cousin, as the driver. There were two young men in the car with her, one in the front seat, one in the back. They looked expectantly at Paul.

“Yo lo tengo,” he said to them.

The driver’s-side window was open. Paul handed the satchel to Thea. She pulled it in and set it at the feet of the young man next to her. The young man quickly covered it with a small blanket.

He sat close to her, so close that he appeared to be a friend or a fiance. He gave Alex a nod and a slight smile. Thea had a pistol on her lap and the two young men had rifles.

“Give Uncle Giovanni my love,” Paul said. “Alex and I have to leave the island quickly. We’ll be back when we can. It may take a few years, but I’ll be here again.”

Through the window, Paul embraced his cousin.

“Vaya con dios,” Thea said.

“Vaya con dios,” Paul answered.

Thea offered Alex an embrace as well. Alex accepted.

Then the Peugeot backed up, turned, and drove away.

“They’ll be safe with all that money?” Alex asked.

“They’re going to a friend’s home in Havana,” Paul said. “They’ll be safely indoors in three minutes.”

“So Uncle Johnny gets the money?” Alex asked.

“And his extended family,” Paul answered. “It’ll be spread around wisely. They deserve it. They spent their lives in this infernal place living under a Marxist regime. To them it’s a fortune. Things will thaw in the next few years, probably during an Obama second term, if there is one. The family will have some seed money to start over with. I pray to God that the next regime is kinder than the ones that have preceded it. God knows the Cuban people deserve better.”

“Agreed,” she said. They walked back to the white Nissan.

“Get in the car if you want,” Paul said to Alex. “I need to take care of the men. Then I’ll join you.”

Alex hesitated, then went back to the Nissan while Paul walked back to his crew. Warily, she opened the rear door but did not enter. She held one hand on her Walther, still wary of trouble. She checked the sky but saw no aircraft. She looked back at Paul. His faithful diggers huddled around him. Paul carefully withdrew an envelope from under his shirt and paid the men for their night’s work. It was the same envelope that she had seen in his belongings, she realized, the one with the stack of hundred dollar bills.

Alex watched him count out ten to each of them, and fifteen to the thug who drove the Nissan. It was a fortune in Cuba, a thousand dollars of hard currency. Paul thanked each man with a handshake and a hug. A voice inside Alex suggested that Paul might have been a distant Corleone relative, working the street, building his organization from the ground up, dispensing largesse.

The men looked ecstatic, thanking Paul with effusive smiles, bows, and hugs. Alex realized that Paul was buying loyalty and silence also. De tal palo, tel astilla: like father, like son. The apple rarely falls far from the tree.

With payday complete, the men piled into the truck, and the drivers returned to their wheels. Alex slid into the backseat of the Nissan behind the driver. Paul slid in across from her. Both engines started. The truck pulled away.

“Wait! Give him half a minute,” Paul said in Spanish to the driver. “Two cars together will look suspicious at this hour. We don’t want police.”