I learned, contrary to what I had expected, that the people who dealt with Mendoza and Fitch were not only the fat cats and the power brokers of the exile community. They were, for the most part, middle-class Cubans with modest accounts who were trying to inch their way up the American ladder.
I learned that there was nothing to pin on Jaime Figueroa. I tapped the man every day for a week, and found nothing. After the first couple of taps I spoke to Pablo Obregón about it. Pablo was the ace I was replacing, and he had stayed on for a two-week transition period, filling me in on office routine, and introducing me to the heavy players on the Delta account. When I asked him about Figueroa, he made a face of disgust.
"A waste of time," he said. "I've been into his head for a year now, and I haven't found a thing. If he's a thief, then I'm the bishop of Santiago."
"But Chavez said…"
"Look, I got the same pep talk before I came here." He spoke in Chavez's icy voice. "Get me the proof and I'll put that thief up against the wall." His voice returned to normal. "It just isn't there, believe me. If the man is stealing, he isn't thinking about it, and that's next to impossible."
"I don't get it. Chavez is so sure."
Pablo shrugged. "Chavez gets what Chavez wants. Keep working on it. You'll waste a lot of time, just as I did, but maybe you'll get lucky."
"Any other advice? What about the Tau account?"
He frowned. "The less you have to do with that, the better. Just make sure that the money gets there. Nine percent of the Delta take gets transferred there on the twentieth of every month, rain or shine, no excuses accepted. If you're one day late, you'll hear from Samantha."
"Who's that?"
"Samantha Curbelo. She's in charge of the Tau account in Geneva."
"One of us?"
"No, she's a normal, but don't underestimate her. Don't mess with her, and don't ever cross her. She's a tiger, that one, and she's close to Chavez." He held up two fingers pressed together. "That close."
"Besides being a tiger, what's she like?"
"I've never met her, but from what I hear…" Pablo kissed his fingers. "But private property, you understand? Strictly for Chavez."
"I'll remember that."
"But you didn't," said Snake.
"Hey, who's telling this story?"
"Come on, cut to the chase, I can see what's coming. Your trouble is, you're trying to be too dramatic. It's obvious."
"What is?"
"What you're getting at. You tell me that Chavez was stealing, and you tell me that he was joined at the hip with this Samantha woman, so he had to be stealing from the Tau account, and she was in it with him. Right?"
Out of the darkness came a reluctant, "Yeah, that's about the way it was."
"How did you find out?"
"How else? I tapped her."
"I thought she was in Geneva."
"She was, but she had to come to Miami once, and I tapped her then."
With a hint of laughter in her voice, Snake asked, "Was she standing up at the time?"
"Not exactly."
"Were you?"
"Not exactly."
"I figured."
"Well, you know how it is."
"Sure I do. You and your passionate nature. So you tapped her in bed."
"Yes."
"And that's how you got into the thievery business."
"No. You're not as smart as you think you are. It wasn't like that at all."
I had been at Mendoza and Fitch for three months when Samantha flew into Miami to give me new instructions on the Tau account. I had been dealing with her in Geneva by telephone, telex, and fax, regularly diverting nine percent of the Delta take to Tau, but the new word was that Chavez wanted the split increased to eleven. This was the sort of instruction that had to be given face-to-face, and so she came to Miami to give it to me personally. She was supposed to stay for only a day, but one thing led to another, she stayed for three, and by the time she left I had the whole story straight from her head.
Chavez was using the Tau account as his personal retirement fund.
Figueroa was clean, a diversion to keep me occupied.
Why, then, risk putting a sensitive in at Mendoza and Fitch? Because Fidel had to have his Miami gossip, and only an ace could get it for him.
I got this all in one tap from Samantha, which tells you something about the way people think, or don't think, about sensitives. I mean, here is a serving officer of the DGI who should know what an ace can do, and yet she walks right into my range and lets me pick her brains. Go figure it out, maybe they don't have any brains to pick. It's as if they don't want to believe that we can do these things.
But we can, and I did, and once I knew what the score was, I had to decide what to do about it. My first instinct was to blow the whistle on Chavez by going straight to the top. You see, I was sure that Fidel knew nothing about what was going on, and that if he ever found out it would be Chavez up against the wall for sure. Yes, perhaps it's a sign of my political naiveté that I still thought of Fidel as the revolutionary purist, the idealist who would never tolerate corruption in any form, but that's the way I felt. And I'll tell you something else. I still feel that way. I'm out of it now, I don't care anymore, but I prefer to think that Fidel, over all these years, has never compromised his principles.
But how I felt then was unimportant, because I knew that there was no way that someone like me could ever get to the Maximum Leader. Chavez had too many friends in the highest of places, and I would have been blocked before I got started. No, if I blew the whistle the only thing I would accomplish was my own destruction. I was sure of it, and so, in the end, I did nothing. Not very valiant, I know. I had been passionately committed to nailing Figueroa when there was no risk to me involved, but I retreated from the thought of going up against Chavez. Retreated, hell, I caved in completely. The man scared me out of my wits. I wasn't very pleased with myself, but that's what I did. Nothing. On the twentieth of every month I continued to forward eleven percent of the Delta trading profit to the Tau account in Geneva, and I tried very hard not to think about it.
But life at Mendoza and Fitch went on, and since I no longer had to concentrate on tapping Figueroa, I was able to devote my time to my monthly gossip reports, and, more important, to the nuts and bolts of my daily work as a broker and financial consultant. I took pleasure in the work. It was, after all, what I had been trained for, and I enjoyed working with most of my clients: not the heavy hitters, but the average investors who were urgently trying to build for the future. Many of them were older people, and the future they were building was not for themselves, but for their children and grandchildren. There was a clique of them that hung around the office every day watching the Quotrón, drinking strong, sweet Cuban coffee, and bragging about their adventures in the market the way younger men might have bragged about women. They were a good bunch of guys, about a dozen in all, and I got to know them well. In time I learned all about them, their work, their families, and where they had come from in Cuba. They were all so much older than I was, but they accepted me, not only as a broker, but as a friend. My cover story was that I had come over with the marielitos in 1980, and since most of them had been out of Cuba for twenty-five years, I was sort of a tie to the homeland for them. I'd like to think that after a while they looked upon me as something close to family. I certainly felt that way about them, which is why I tried to steer their investment programs into safe and conservative channels. But these were old men in a hurry to build, and, being Cuban, they were born gamblers. Their tastes in investments ran to the exotic, to the daring, and there were times when they came close to driving me crazy with the chances they took. Most of them were involved in a program of sophisticated, but risky, option plays that had done very nicely for them so far. They were making money, all right, but it wasn't the smartest strategy for people of that age. I tried to tell them that, but they wouldn't listen. The Dow was up over 2700, more than eight hundred points for the year, and they were on a roll. They were betting on the continued rise, and the way things were going they figured that they couldn't lose. I kept warning them to watch for a correction, but they didn't hear me. All they could hear was the jingle. They never had it so good.