Perez seemed subdued when he sat down. He looked at Hartmann but said nothing at first. He reached for a polystyrene cup and filled it with water from a jug on the trolley. He drank slowly as if quenching his thirst, and then he set the cup down on the table and leaned back in his chair.
‘It is different now,’ he said. ‘You live this life, you do these things, and it is only when you talk about them that you feel anything at all. I have never spoken of these things before, and now I am hearing them I am beginning to understand that there were so many choices, so many directions I could have taken.’
‘Is it not the same with all of us?’ Hartmann asked, thinking at once of his own brother, of Carol and Jess.
Perez smiled. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘I think I am tired. I think I am old and tired, and I will be relieved when this comes to an end.’
‘We could end it now,’ Hartmann said. ‘You could tell us where you have hidden Catherine Ducane, and then you would have all the time in the world to confess.’
Perez laughed. ‘Confess? Is that what you think I am doing here, Mr Hartmann? You think I have come to confess to you like a priest?’ He shook his head. ‘I am not the penitent one, Mr Hartmann. I have not come here to tell the world of my own sins, but to tell of the sins of others.’
Hartmann frowned. ‘I don’t understand, Mr Perez.’
‘You will, Mr Hartmann, you will. But everything will come in its own time.’
‘But will you give us no indication of how much time we have?’
‘You have as much time as I am prepared to give you,’ Perez replied.
‘That is all you will say?’
‘It is.’
‘You understand the importance of this girl’s life?’
Perez smiled. ‘It is all leverage, Mr Hartmann. If I had taken a New Orleans restaurant waitress then you and I would not be sitting here in this room. I know who Catherine Ducane is. I have not done this without thought or planning-’
Perez fell silent.
Hartmann looked up.
‘She is not somewhere where she will easily be found, Mr Hartmann. She will be found when I decide to have her found. Where she is she will not be heard even if she screams continuously at the top of her voice. And if she does that she will only wear herself out and shorten her own lifespan. The road is long, Mr Hartmann, and she is already at the very end of it. We play this game the way I wish it to be played. We follow my rules… and perhaps, just perhaps, the Ducane girl might see daylight again.’
Perez paused for a moment, and then he looked up and smiled. ‘So we shall continue, eh?’
Hartmann nodded, and closed the door once again.
THIRTEEN
Miami is a noise: a perpetual thundering noise trapped against the coast of Florida between Biscayne Bay and Hialeah; beneath it Coral Gables, above it Fort Lauderdale; everywhere the smell of the everglades – rank, swollen and fetid in summer, cracked and featureless and unforgiving in winter.
Miami is a promise and an automatic betrayal; a catastrophe by the sea; perched there upon a finger of land that points accusingly at something that is altogether not to blame. And never was. And never will be.
Miami is a punctuation mark of dirt on a peninsula of misfortune; an appendage.
And now – of all places – my home.
Cuba was behind me, and with it the trials and tribulations of a land that still wrestled with its own conscience. 1960 folded up behind us, and looking back I saw events that somehow scarred a people’s history, Castro vacillating indecisively between the promise of a dollar-rich hedonistic west and the validation of political ideology presented by the USSR. Castro seized US-owned properties and made further agreements with communist governments. He agreed to buy Soviet oil, even as John Fitzgerald Kennedy assumed the presidency of the United States in January of 1961 and sanctioned the cessation of diplomatic relations with Cuba. On 16 April 1961 Fidel Castro Ruz declared Cuba a socialist state. Three days later, backed by CIA funding and US military support, one thousand three hundred Cuban exiles invaded Cuba at a southern coastal region called the Bay of Pigs. Khrushchev promised Castro all necessary aid. The United States government incorrectly assumed the invasion would inspire the people of Cuba to rise up and seize power from Castro, to instigate a coup d’etat, but they assumed wrong. The Cuban populace supported Castro without question. The invaders were captured, and each of them was sentenced to thirty years in jail.
The United States, in its continued infinite wisdom, went on pouring the nation’s hard-earned dollars into military support for South Vietnam.
In February of ’62 Kennedy imposed a full trade embargo on Cuba. Two months later Castro offered to ransom one thousand, one hundred and seventy-nine of the Bay of Pigs invaders for sixty-two million dollars. Kennedy sent the Marines into Laos. Sonny Liston K.O.’d Floyd Patterson in two minutes and six seconds.
October brought the discovery that Castro was permitting the Soviets to establish long-range missile launch sites in Cuba, ninety miles from the American mainland. A blockade of Cuba was instigated that Jack Kennedy had every intention of maintaining until Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. Castro announced his commitment to a Marxist-Leninist ethos; he nationalized industry, confiscated property owned by non-Cuban nationals, collectivized agriculture and enacted policies designed to benefit the common man. Many of the middle classes fled Cuba and established a large anti-Castro community in Miami itself.
On 28 October, after thirteen days during which the entire world dared not to blink, Khrushchev announced that all missile-launching sites on the island would be dismantled and returned to the USSR. On 2 November Kennedy lifted the Cuban blockade.
In December, the United States paid a fifty-three-million-dollar ransom and the Bay of Pigs invaders were freed.
I watched the events of those months unfold from a house in downtown Miami. I was twenty-five years old by the time the world exhaled once more, and though I had paid attention to these things it was as if they were merely moments of radio interference interrupting the soundtrack of my life.
And this
By the time I arrived it was March of 1962. January had seen the death of Lucky Luciano, a man whose name I heard quoted more times than perhaps any other. In some small way his death had played a part in Don Ceriano’s return to the United States, for there were ‘family matters’ to attend to that seemed pressing and urgent. His return was met with great enthusiasm, and those who were there to greet him as we arrived at a palatial three- story house in downtown Miami seemed to ask nothing of me. I was taken in without question, and on the two or three occasions Don Ceriano was asked about me he merely said, ‘This is my friend Ernesto. Ernesto has taken care of some things for me, some very important things, and his loyalty is beyond question.’ This seemed enough, for I was given a room in that house, a house where I would live with Don Ceriano and members of his family for a little more than six years. Don Ceriano let me keep the car, the Mercury Cruiser that had once belonged to Pietro Silvino, and money was available whenever I needed it. I felt at once part of this family, but yet so much an outsider. I did not feel afraid, only perhaps a little overawed by the people that I met, the seeming magnitude of their personalities, and I tried my best to be a part of whatever I had been inducted into. Once again it was merely a matter of self-preservation and survival. I had left Cuba, I had come to America; I possessed nothing but those things afforded me by Don Ceriano and his people. I had made a bed perhaps, and it was not difficult to lie in it.
