you call us dead people?”
“Because we Runiya are alive in this world. We are inside it, and the plants and animals, stones and sky and stars, sun and moon, are our friends and relatives. That’s what it means to be alive. A fish is alive and a bird, too. But you are outside the world, looking in on it as the ghosts do, and making mischief and destruction, like ghosts do. Therefore we say you are dead like they are. Also, when a person is alive, they carry their death behind them, there”-and here the Indian pointed over Cooksey’s left shoulder-“and this is one way we tell a live person from a ghost. But you carry your deaths inside you all the time, so you can have the power of death over all things. So we call you dead people.”
“I see,” said Cooksey, “and very good sense it makes, too. Now tell me this: you came a long way from your home to stop us dead people from killing your forest. So I have heard from my friends. Tell me, how do you think you will stop them?”
So Moie told the story of what he had learned from Father Perrin after he was killed, and as for how he would stop it, he knew he could not. Just one man could not stop such a thing, and he was not a fool to think it. But Jaguar had promised him that if he brought him to the land of the dead, then Jaguar would stop it.
“And how will he do that?”
Moie made a peculiar gesture using his hands and his head that was easily interpretable as a shrug. “We say: we can ask Jaguar what will happen, and ask him what we should do, but we never ask him how he will do what he does. And if he told us we would not understand.”
“That’s probably wise,” said Cooksey, and then they spoke of many things, Cooksey answering many of the questions Moie had about the land of the dead, until, observing an increasingly impatient Jenny, he added in English, “Well, I think the thing to do is return to the property for a bite of lunch, and then we might venture to discuss how we can help our friend here. Drive on, Jennifer.”
At about this time, some miles to the north, three men were seated at a white-clothed and silver-set table in a small executive dining room on the thirtieth floor of the Panamerica Bancorp Building. All three were of the same background, Cubans and the sons of the families who had ruled that island for generations before the revolution of 1959. They had left Cuba as young men (and not floating on rafts either) and had prospered in the United States. In purely financial terms, they were vastly richer than their forebears, yet they harbored, along with most of the rest of their class and generation, a sense of grievance. Their American contemporaries, with whom they did business and played golf, were men of power, but they had never owned a country absolutely and owned all the people in it. Their power was not of that sweetest kind. These Cubans had been able, with the acquiescence of America, to transfer much of their culture to South Florida, which they ran as a kind of fief, the unalterable principle of which was that no one could ever become president of the United States who would normalize relations with the Monster across the Straits of Florida. They were confident, sensual, intelligent, unimaginative, industrious gentlemen, and if they shared a fear, it was that they would never get to dance on Fidel’s grave.
And now another more instant fear: the man who had called this meeting, Antonio Fuentes, had been murdered the previous night, for they had contacts in the police and knew the truth about the full horror of the crime. Cayo Delgado Garza, the host of the luncheon meeting, and the chairman of the eponymous Bancorp, had wanted to cancel it, out of respect, but the other two had insisted that it go forward. These were Juan X. Fernandez Calderon, called Yoiyo, the most vigorous of the three, a developer and financier, and Felipe Guerra Ibanez, who owned a large trading concern. They were all dressed in expensive dark-colored suits and quiet ties; Garza and Ibanez had pins of fraternal organizations in their lapels, in place of which Calderon wore an enamel American flag. They all had immaculately trimmed heads of hair, light brown in the case of Calderon, silver on the other two. They had soft manicured hands, on the wrists of which hung inherited gold watches. Garza was paunchy, Ibanez thin, Calderon still trim and athletic. He played tennis and golf frequently and kept a yacht; unlike the others, he had blue eyes.
A silent brown waiter in a white jacket with shiny buttons served drinks and vanished. They drank the liquor in grateful drafts and spoke feelingly of the dead Fuentes. The waiter returned. Another round of drinks and the lunch ordered, and now they turned to business. Garza asked Calderon, “So…Yoiyo: what do we make of this?”
An eloquent shrug. “I’m just as baffled as you. Who would kill Tony? As far as I know he didn’t have an enemy in the world. And to tear him up like that! It makes no sense.”
“It does if someone is trying to frighten us,” said Garza quietly. Calderon stared at him for a second and then shot a look at Ibanez, who indicated by the subtlest possible expression that this was something worth considering. It was clear to Calderon that they had discussed the matter without him, and he felt a jab of anger. But the three men had been doing business together profitably for years. They knew one another well, at least in the way of business.
“What, you’re suggesting that this had something to do with Consuela?”
“He was the chairman, the public face, to the extent it has a public face,” replied Garza. “And there was that incident the other afternoon, the reason why Tony wanted to meet.”
“That’s insane, Cayo. Some little bird-watcher is not going to chop up a man to make a point.”
“He had a South American Indian with him,” said Ibanez.
“So he had an Indian, for which, by the way we only have the evidence of that dumb secretary and the dumber security guards. How many South American Indians have they seen? I mean, think about it for a minute! A man bursts into a business office, yells a lot of propaganda, gets tossed out, and then what? He goes to the businessman’s home and murders him and chops him into pieces and tries to make it look like some kind of tiger did it? It’s preposterous.”
“They knew about Consuela and the Puxto,” said Garza. “Maybe that makes it a shade less preposterous.”
This appeared to take some of the bluster out of Calderon. He nodded and drank his Laphroaig. “Yes,” he said, “that’s troubling. They shouldn’t have known about the Puxto. But it’s still stupid to connect the two events without more information. The two things may be unrelated.”
“Do you think that’s likely, Yoiyo?” asked Ibanez gently. Calderon looked straight into the seamed turtle face and said, “Why not? Look, what was it, eight or nine years ago? That nigger maniac chopped Teresa Vargas into pieces, and that was connected to nothing at all. Some insane cult, whatever…so this could be the same, the cat prints. It’s Miami, these things happen. You never think it’s going to happen to someone you know, but now it does. It happened to the Vargas girl, and now it happened to Fuentes. That’s one possibility. The next possibility is it was political. Tony gave money to the resistance, he was quiet about it but it wasn’t a secret. We all do, yes? So maybe it was that.”
“You think Fidel sent an agent to kill Antonio Fuentes?” asked Garza, incredulous.
“Of course not. I’m just laying out the logical possibilities. So, next, we have, yes, something connected with the Consuela deal. Something out of Colombia. Why? Everything is arranged at that end and has been for months. So we don’t know, and frankly, I’d find it hard to believe. As a matter of fact, it feels like a maniac again to me. Maybe that nigger left disciples, only this time he’s going after men and not pregnant girls.”
“But you’ll check out the Colombian angle, won’t you?” said Ibanez. Again Calderon saw that look between the two of them. Consuela had been his deal, and the message here was that if there was any mess associated with it, it was his to clean up. He got a quarter, no, now a third, of the profits but had all the work to do. A certain resentment here, but if things had to be done he would rather do them himself than leave it to this pair of viejos. He took, however, a considerable time before responding, to show he was not their errand boy. “Of course,” he said then, “I’ll be glad to, Felipe.”
The rest of the lunch passed pleasantly enough, in discussions of other matters of business, local politics, and their various interests. After lunch, Calderon called his driver on the cell phone and found his white Lincoln waiting for him when he reached the street. He was driven back to his firm’s headquarters, housed in a new mirrored glass cube on Andalusia in Coral Gables. His private office was furnished in mahogany, leather, and worn old Persian carpets, all expensive, understated, and chosen by an interior decorator not often employed by Cuban businessmen. Calderon did not want to be associated with that sort of Cuban at all, the people who had run little shops in Havana and were now magnates in America. Cursileria was the word for the style of such people, vulgar and ostentatious.
He was efficiently rude to his staff, and after some scurrying and scraping, he conducted a meeting about a golf course and resort condo development he had begun near Naples, on the west coast of the state. It was the
